Hilobrow

Hilo Manifesto (03): Lowbrow

Joshua Glenn — Wed, 31 Dec 1969 16:00:00 +0000

Lowbrow is the second of four heimlich dispositions. Though it's the secondary term in our matrix, Lowbrow is constitutive of our primary term. That is to say, Highbrow isn't our matrix's "normal" or "natural" term, nor is Lowbrow defined by being everything that Highbrow is not. This is not to suggest that we'd reverse the valorization of our primary and secondary terms; we seek merely to destabilize the oppositional framework. Highbrow and Lowbrow are not antithetical relations of paradigmatic opposition, but instead contrasting ones; neither makes any sense without the other. Despite its position in our matrix's supposedly "negative" position, there is much that is positive about Lowbrow. The theologian and the inventor, the redskin craftsman or artist, and the more pious of our intellectuals are Lowbrow's ideal types. Piety, in Virgil's sense of the word — devotion and loyalty to your family or tribe, your homeland or society, the forms and norms of your religion — is what makes the lowbrow tick. The lowbrow is unapologetically partial, even biased, though not necessarily parochial or chauvinistic; he may be sophisticated, cosmopolitan, tolerant, yet still insist that there exists a universally known, accepted, and venerated consensus of truth and beauty. In this, the lowbrow is no less Apollonian than the highbrow. Lowbrow is a heroic, noble disposition that prizes the best that has been said and thought in the world — particularly when those things are in the past. Lowbrow prizes faith, tradition, and authority — somewhat more so than Highbrow, and less so than Anti-Highbrow. In this regard, Highbrow and Lowbrow correspond to Matthew Arnold's Hellenism/Hebraism dichotomy: "The uppermost idea with Hellenism is to see things as they really are; the uppermost idea with Hebraism is conduct and obedience." Lowbrow is not irrational, however; lowbrows emphasize the importance of family and community, of stability, of satisfying work and religious belief not only through appeals to emotion, but through solid demonstrations and convincing arguments. The above ought not to suggest that Lowbrow is never countercultural, and never fights the power. Lowbrow is an empathetic, as opposed to sympathetic disposition. When President Obama announced that he was seeking a Supreme Court Justice nominee who'd demonstrated the quality of "understanding and identifying with people's hopes and struggles, as an essential ingredient for arriving at just decisions and outcomes," he was articulating a lowbrow credo: the lowbrow doesn't merely pity society’s weakest members, he imaginatively enters into the experience of others, feels their pain. (Empathy is not unphilosophical; in fact, inverting the term's usual etymology, Levinas once called philosophy "the wisdom of love.") So the lowbrow tirelessly works to ameliorate the flaws of classic liberalism and modern capitalism — for example, via church-sponsored activism of various sorts, the most famous of which is the Civil Rights Movement. In its earliest form, Lowbrow favored a theologically conceived and ordered monarchy; today, lowbrows humbly ask God to bless America, while demanding that America live up to the ideals enshrined in its Constitution. From Edmund Burke (who, Wordsworth would note, “Declares the vital power of social ties/Endeared by Custom; and with high disdain,/Exploding upstart Theory, insists/Upon the allegiance to which men are born) to Richard John Neuhaus, the lowbrow is a traditionalist, not a fundamentalist. The lowbrow is every bit as resistant to romanticism, and incapable of fanaticism, as the highbrow. The ongoing contest of faith and incredulity is not, therefore, a struggle between Lowbrow and Highbrow dispositions; the lowbrow will either seek to accommodate Scripture to the authority of experimental science, or stay mum. "Lowbrows need highbrows and honor them just as much as highbrows need lowbrows and honor them," insists Virginia Woolf. Yes! Whenever the lowbrow Dalai Lama meets with highbrow MIT scholars and scientists, we realize this is true. Though we question overly simplistic associations of Highbrow/Lowbrow with certain taken-for-granted dichotomies (e.g., reason/emotion, male/female, true/false, mature/immature), particularly since in our culture the second term in such pairings is inevitably considered "lower," or less worthy, our matrix reads Highbrow as a disposition related to cognition and autonomy, and Lowbrow as one related to other qualities that make us human, e.g., the moral and religious faculties, and the possibility for receptivity to human kindness and affection. It is impossible for a person to be entirely highbrow or lowbrow, while remaining fully human; however, it would be wrong to regard someone deficient in one or the other area is inhuman. Woolf describes the lowbrow as "a man of thoroughbred vitality who rides his body in pursuit of a living at a gallop across life." The lowbrow is no pitiable drudge, drone, or slacker, but an altogether admirable doer and maker. He is a crafter, who creates what Hannah Arendt calls a "second nature of things" — i.e., those structures and artifacts without which the only life that we recognize as human would not be possible. Despite what the fake authenticity industry would have us believe, lowbrow's creations aren't homely and rude: if anything, a lowbrow craftsman or artist emphasizes an artifact's or artwork's form at the expense of its content. Therefore, to be "against interpretation," in Susan Sontag's phrase, is not to be anti-intellectual, but lowbrow. Lowbrow is also about fun: excited goings-on, gaiety, sport, drollery. Lowbrow directors, actors, and cartoonists are eccentric and singular; their oddities and failures are charming. Lowbrow comedy — Buster Keaton, Charlie Chaplin, Laurel and Hardy, the Three Stooges, Jacques Tati — reassures us that fixed, universal categories and certainty will forever be stymied and sometimes K.O.’ed (”BIFF! BANG!”) by difference and anomaly. Most importantly, lowbrow art and entertainment doesn't amuse, which is to say: it doesn't put us into a stupefied trance. It delights. Lowbrow's enemy is Anti-Lowbrow; it's dismissive of Nobrow and ambivalent about Anti-Highbrow. Highbrow isn't Lowbrow's enemy; they're mutually respectful, and affectionately condescending to one another. The relationship of Lowbrow and Anti-Highbrow is a complementary but uneasy one, much like relationships between reformers and hard-liners within the same authoritarian bloc are. [NEW METAPHOR Playing the good cop to Anti-Highbrow's bad cop benefits Lowbrow; but whenever Anti-Highbrow goes rogue (to continue an imperfect metaphor), Lowbrow pays a price.]

One more way of looking at Apollo

Matthew Battles — Wed, 31 Dec 1969 16:00:00 +0000

THE MID 20th CENTURY: perhaps the richest spawning ground for conspiracy theories in history. Area 51, JFK, the Holocaust... even amid such august company, the Fake Apollo mythology is the core of the canon. http://www.badastronomy.com/bad/tv/foxapollo.html

Frappucino Solo

Matthew Battles — Wed, 31 Dec 1969 16:00:00 +0000

Hermenaut mourns the demise of Joe , Starbucks's attempt to use the commercial creativity and corporate efficiencies of the new economy to revitalize that worn-out institution, the literary magazine. It has come to the attention of Hermenaut's investigative team that, as Joe neared its end, Starbucks executives briefly flirted with the notion of turning it into an academic journal, with Stanley "There's No Such Thing as Free Speech" Fish as its editor. Rummaging through the piles of new acquisitions in Harvard's Widener Library recently, librarian Matthew Battles found the page proofs from what would have been the first issue of a bold venture. We reprint Fish's introductory editorial salvo below.—eds. It goes without saying that we academics hate Starbucks. Why we hate it is just as obvious: because it's about us. Starbucks gives the untrained and unwashed the opportunity to savor dark, flavorful coffees while heatedly discussing (or at least thinking about discussing) all the Big Issues. And that's something we academics don't want to share. And for that reason, we're quite careful to make sure we can't be seen as potential Starbucks customers. Witness the coffee pot, stained and insouciant, sitting in nearly every tattered faculty common room in the country, its foul brew souring defiantly on the hot plate as the seminar perks away in a decaffeinated stupor. It's too bad, really. For Starbucks offers so much for the contemplative academic, so much chemical, but also intellectual, stimulation. As I assume the editorship of Joe, then, the time to reflect on the possibility of a rapprochement between Starbucks and academic culture manifests itself as opportunity. Toward that end, let's take Starbucks' latest and most compelling invention, the Frappucino. The ad for the Frappucino is itself a marvel, deceptive in its simplicity: it's just a blown-up image of the drink itself, gloriously haloed and photoshopped. But how it towers there, how it glistens, the dark coffee arrayed among gobs of milkfat that seem to jitter with a caffeine-addled Brownian motion! In the ad, the Frappucino looks less like a deliquescent confection than brain matter itself. Its pate of whipped cream chastely tonsured with a ribbon of chocolate sauce, the drink seems not merely to beckon, but to think. We're compelled to confront Frappucino (from within our system of conditional subjectivities) as a friend in potentia. In each Frappucino, that is to say, we encounter an Other, a subjectivity, a Thou who cries out to be understood. The whole thing sweats with the cool power of its thought. But Frappucino certainly doesn't think about the social history of coffee, nor its human ecology. The oppression and environmental devastation wrought by the production of coffee, cream, and sugar; the ozone depletion of refrigeration systems; or the dubious nutritional value that sweet'n'frothy coffee drinks offer the consumer—these things are not disclosed to Frappucino, for they have to do with its origins, its nature and ontology; these things are as occluded from the view of Frappucino as our own origins are from ourselves. So what, exactly, could Frappucino be thinking? There's a whole discourse swirled into this beverage. This radical emancipation is interdisciplinary (in a good way), synthesizing all the contradictory energies of the post-Enlightenment. Frappucino's roots lie in the Enlightenment, and its frilly tendrils bask in the tropical heat of the colonial encounter. Here we have the savor of coffee—mysterious, seductive, it's the culinary embodiment of that Hobbesian state of nature which is nasty, brutish, and short; yet we have also the sweetness of sugar embodying the Rousseauistic notion of the Noble Savage, refined and concentrated from the raw, brute cane in a process mirroring the civilizing tendency of colonialism itself; and, finally, we have cream, the fruit of the pastoral, its silky, unblemished surface reminiscent of the skin of milkmaids saved from the marring pox by Dr. Jenner's benevolent prick, the Vaccine. And the whole thing is energized and frothed into system by the techno-miracle of refrigeration: it's the cooling action of Freon, ultimately, that liberates the subjectivity of Frappucino, that bodies forth its soul. The term cappucino, it's worth remembering, derives from the Italian word for the creamy-brown peaked hood worn by the Capuchin monastic order. Founded by a Franciscan monk who felt that his order had strayed too far from the rigorous austerity of the Friar of Assisi, the Capuchins emphasize hardship and poverty over all; the order distinguished itself in tireless ministrations to victims of Europe's many plagues, and they were as important to the Counter-Reformation as the Jesuits were, consolidating the rule of the Church among peasants while the Jesuits became confessors to the elite. Is it merely ironic that a drink of such voluptuous, velvety delight should share a name with a monastic order whose asceticism is legendary? Or does etymology point us in another direction: to the realization that there is a Coffee Way, a kind of monastic submission to the rule of caffeine addiction, the willingness to risk, no, to force oneself to face the prospect of burgeoning cholesterol levels? The inclusion, in Frappucino, of the French word frappé only serves to drive this home; for though in its most relevant sense frappé merely means chilled, its derivation is from frapper, to hit, to beat, to strike—which would seem to encode the severity of monastic self-flagellation even more deeply in the beverage. We're sliding into dangerous territory here—for as Nietzsche teaches, the religico-legal mandate of self-hatred always threatens to normativize slave behavior. The Capuchins knew this, of course; they proffered the peasants an empowering, reflective spiritual paradigm instead, customized, as it were, to the serf's newly discovered individual soul. Like the hardy Capuchins pursuing their vocation among the peasantry, then, Frappucino makes manifest the subversive potential of coffee—for the Frappucino comes in many sizes and flavors, of course; Starbucks presents the emancipated consumer with a whole cohort of beverages to suit her own individual inclinations. And isn't this the same subversive energy that Bach fretted about in his Coffee Cantata, after all, in which the seductive delights of the coffee house turn a chaste mädchen's attention decisively from the legitimating, albeit ultimately restrictive, bonds of marriage. How many variations on this story are playing out among Starbucks customers at this very moment? How many of these young coffee addicts have liberated themselves from the strictures of a bourgeois upbringing by their addiction to caffeine, by the consumable bohemia on offer at Starbucks? * * * * Here we find a tiny green post-it note with the Starbuck's mermaid logo in the left-hand corner, with the note "this paragraph not for publication" scrawled in a bold hand—M.B. Watching a Starbucks coffee consultant as he measures and titrates, sifts and pours, following the scientistic script that will lead inevitably to Frappucino, I realize that this is less a culinary experience than a pharmacological one—and while it is entirely licit and approved, I can't help feeling it's a bit transgressive after all. Starbucks (and this is just why academics hate it) makes its pitch to the Romantic I in each of us—that sophisticated, world-weary aesthete who demands an experience that is radically individual, a kind of gourmet solipsism that says, I am at home in this sad, darkling world of my own creation. And yet what I witness in the making of my Frappucino is not the stuff of individual experience: it's rather an isolated node in a vast, distributed system of mass production. As the Starbucks associate hits her marks, checks all the relevant boxes on the side of my cup, I can't help feeling let down, out of the loop, insufficiently incorporated into this vast scheme. For it's only now that I realize that I don't know how to order Frappucino properly; and that my own Tall Mocha Frappucino has arrived without the noble dome of whipped cream I had hoped for. * * * * Drinking as thinking: in Spinozan terms, what registers as drinking in the world of men is actually a mode of thought in the world of Frappucino. With each percussive slurp in my world, the machinery of cool contemplation clash and align in that other. Frappucino's soluble synapses contract and compute, the arrangements of caffeine and milkfat and cocoa and H2O shift, calculate, spin endless complexity out of the essential simplicity, the finitude that is Frappucino. And what is Frappucino thinking? It's not contemplating Hobbes or Rousseau, nor hair shirts, nor the play of counterpoint; Frappucino is thinking me. With my every slurp, Frappucino thinks me into being. In the heart of Frappucino drinking I have the vision of the energies of coffee itself liberated. It's like Milton's vision of the fires of hell: "Yet from those flames no light,/but rather darkness visible." I am with Lucifer in the midst of his great Fall: From morn To noon he fell, from noon to dewy eve,— A summer's day; and with the setting sun Dropp'd from the Zenith like a falling star. And then—just like that—it's gone, the caffeine sparkling through me like quarks in a bubble chamber, leaving meteoroidal trails as it dissipates. Serotin re-uptake begins to slow and congeal; I'll come down soon; all this will cease. I realize that in the past, I have participated in this process of academico-legalistic judgment myself, that I have disdained Starbucks, that even now I long to be recognized as an academic superstar of the very sort that customers come to Starbucks in order to imagine being themselves. I'm chastened and reflective—refreshed, even. Just as the ads told me I would be. The question, then, is how to make this experience normative. How do we ensure that everyone, academic or otherwise, learns to benefit from the intellectual refreshment Frappucino offers? Well, that's the job of Joe, of course. And it's my job, now, too.

What's so Liberal about the Liberal Arts?

Matthew Battles — Wed, 31 Dec 1969 16:00:00 +0000

focus: Mark Slouka's piece in the 9/09 Harper's; counterpoint, "The New Liberal Arts" "the liberal arts" is one of the most ancient memes in western civilization What are they? A set of subjects, topics engaged in books, somehow dependent upon books for their survival (hence the liberal). Contra Slouka, they in no way secure desirable political ends. Barzun on the humanities' insufficiency for securing justice, decency, kindness in men and women. Machiavelli as the arch example of this fact. As noun, they're a meme, and superior memes are adaptable to various ends. Bodies of knowledge; systems for maintaining those bodies. Atavistic, nostalgic for an age in which oral language was the only means for transmission of crucial knowledge, and later for an age in which books were costly, difficult to produce, and rare. Do we now need a new set of liberal arts? Their maintenance was atavistic long before the decline perceived by modern nostalgists—even in the 17th century they were in important ways obsolete. True to their survivor disposition, though, they continued to thrive by making their very obsolescence tasty to the minds that host them... in this way perhaps becoming domesticated? What would feral liberal arts look like? What's the latter-day equivalent of grammar, rhetoric, logic, geometry, mathematics, music, astronomy? As styles of thought—systems for maintaining the homeostasis of certain bodies of knowledge—what are their analogues? The new liberal arts? This finally: they also do carry the note of liberty. The liberal arts were the means to joining the community as a free citizen. What's necessary for one to gain similar entry now? Not to the means of prosperity, but to the much more precious and difficult work of freedom? Note that I'm close to agreeing with Slouka on the question of purposes here. But the answer is the new liberal arts again.

Hilo Manifesto (06): Unbrow

Joshua Glenn — Wed, 31 Dec 1969 16:00:00 +0000

Mencken called them the "booboisie" — a segment of the general public composed of uneducated, uncultured persons. Van Wyck Brooks called it Lowbrow. What Emerson calls Man Doing. The businessman who shows regard only for exertions of mechanical skill? who scorns abstractions? High Middlebrow a distillation of the capitalist environment from which it came: its culture is that smug, pecuniary "pseudo-culture" of the American bourgeoisie. High Middlebrow complains of anti-intellectualism -- disavowal of rationaity and learning, impatience with abstract thought and preference for practical know-how. Complains of populist hostility to elitist reformers, academics, policy experts. If Hofstadter thought anti-intellectualism didn't yield readily to definition, perhaps it's because our meta-terms didn't exist yet?

Hilo Manifesto (09): Nobrow

Joshua Glenn — Wed, 31 Dec 1969 16:00:00 +0000

Lionel Trilling's distinction between the cognate ideals of Sincerity (noble acquiescence to social forms and norms) and Authenticity (romantic repudiation of same) is helpful; the former ideal is adhered to by the four heimlich dispositions, the latter ideal is unheimlich. High and Low Middlebrow, Nobrow, and Hilobrow must come to grips with the vexed question of authenticity. 10. Neutral When Woolf writes that the Battle of the Brows lies "not between highbrow and lowbrow, but between highbrows and lowbrows joined together in blood brotherhood against the bloodless and pernicious pest who comes between," she's correct! But unlike Brooks, who confessed that he couldn't quite characterize Highbrow/Lowbrow's perplexing, alluring, aggravating "between," Woolf mistakenly situates the snob there, then compounds her error by saddling him with the moniker "middlebrow." Middlebrows, as we'll demonstrate, are snobbish... but they're also motivated by less obnoxious considerations. Samuel Beckett. In 1941-45, while hiding from the Nazis with the French Resistance, he wrote the novel "Watt," in which the departing servant Erskine monologues on three types of laughter: "Of all the laughs that strictly speaking are not laughs, but modes of ululation, only three I think need detain us, I mean the bitter, the hollow, and the mirthless. ... The bitter laugh laughs at that which is not good, it is the ethical laugh. The hollow laugh laughs at that which is not true, it is the intellectual laugh. Not good! Not true! Well well. But the mirthless laugh is the dianoetic laugh, down the snout -- Haw! -- so. It is the laugh of laughs, the risus purus, the laugh laughing at the laugh, the beholding, the saluting of the highest joke, in a word the laugh that laughs -- silence please -- at that which is unhappy." Call it: Nobrow. It's neither Snobbery nor Reverse Snobbery. In fact, it smugly refuses to make value judgments; if it's opposed to anything, it's "snark." Nobrow's tone is neither serious nor seriously ironic, but instead an admixture of earnestness and quirk that many find titillating. Ugh! Luckily, this void has been spelunked by the likes of George W.S. Trow, John Seabrook, and the editors of n+1. Max Weber -- where does he fit? The hilo complex metatheme, I think -- have you read his "Science as a Vocation" essay? I should've thought of it earlier, as it explores the question of how a scientist -- an intellectual, a professor -- can have faith. And what (middlebrow) mistakes he must avoid. He excoriates cobbled-together spiritual practices ("they play at decorating a sort of domestic chapel with small sacred images from all over the world, or they produce surrogates through all sorts of psychic experiences to which they ascribe the dignity of mystic holiness") and soft ideologies ("feeble relative value judgments")... the term New Age isn't used, but he's describing it. The fate of the times is disenchantment, and a man must face up to that, he says. "To the person who cannot bear the fate of the times like a man, . . . the arms of the old churches are opened widely and compassionately for him. After all, they do not make it hard for him. It is true that one way or another he has to bring his “intellectual sacrifice” – that is inevitable. But if he can really do that, we shall not rebuke him. For an intellectual sacrifice in favor of an unconditional religious devotion is ethically quite a different matter than the evasion of the plain duty of intellectual integrity which sets in if one remains in the academy but there offers feeble relative value judgments." Paul Fussell's "category X." From his book Class: A Guide Through the American Status System. Claimed that Xs flocked to cities in search of "art," "writing," and "creative work," ideally without a supervisor. They disregarded authority dressed down on every occasion, ddrank no-name liquor because they were not credulous victims of advertising. A "classless class," an "unmonied aristocracy" -- there have been plenty of these since the 1830s. Prize innovation and self-fulfilment, not bourgeois values like industry, sobriety, moderation, self-discipline, and avoidance of debt. But all too easy for Xs to become bourgeois bohemians. Or what Richard Florida calls the creative class. Aflluent hipdom. Fussell said they had nothing to lose, they were free and unfearful (unpossessable, in Baudelaire's sense). But now they have more to lose than anyone else. *** Lost Generation was Nobrow. Cowley's book is a Nobrow analysis. *** Nobrow, the fifth disposition to appear in early modernity, rejects Highbrow and Lowbrow alike. Nobrow, as we know it today, is descended from an early modern disposition which considers itself above it all. In its earliest form, Nobrow favors anarchism or libertarianism (which Irving Howe once called the anarchism of the rich) above all other forms of government. Nobrow rejects all forms of authority. It is neither revolutionary nor reformist, however; in practice, it tends to be quietistic. A note on Epicureans, or free spirits. The free spirit can be anti-lowbrow or nobrow. Free spirit esteems "esprit." Free spirit is intellectually and sexually free. Freethinker. Elegant talker who disdains war, politics, and religion — seeks distinction through a combination of philosophical grasp, irreverent writing and refined pleasure seeking. Saint-Evremond was a free spirit. Nietzsche early on was looking for free spirits of this variety, until he became embittered. For the freethinker, good and bad are purely relative concepts and ethics must be built on the premise that no absolute morality exists. What a clusterfuck! The wanton and the will to power, the tisk-tisk-tisk and the come-hither; robots and whores, patriarchs and professors. They prompt a world-denying refusal, a cultural quietism. In the midst of the flux and nonsense, a powerful urge arises to say neither/nor! It is an angelic impulse, a wish to escape, to rise above it all. This neither-nor space is the haunt of the hipster, the nihilist, cheese and soft ideology; it's the realm of Vermont, of stuff white people like, of knowledge workers whose work consists of anesthetized cognitive routines. In place of a thorougbred disposition, it yearns for the zennish no-mind of the wild animal. Capital comes in the form of the trust fund; it's ideal? Whatever Doesn't Suck. This is the nobrow estate. Nobrow is thoroughbred Is there no alternative, then, to the twinborn happy ending delineated above, High and Low Middlebrow? Ask Samuel Beckett, who rejected not merely happy endings but all endings. In 1941-45, while hiding from the Nazis, Beckett wrote "Watt," in which the servant Erskine philosophizes about three types of unhumorous laughter. "The bitter laugh laughs at that which is not good, it is the ethical laugh. The hollow laugh laughs at that which is not true, it is the intellectual laugh. Not good! Not true! Well well. But the mirthless laugh is the dianoetic laugh, down the snout — Haw! — so. It is the laugh of laughs, the risus purus, the laugh laughing at the laugh, the beholding, the saluting of the highest joke, in a word the laugh that laughs — silence please — at that which is unhappy." Right! The ethical Anti-Highbrow laughs bitterly at High Middlebrow, which is irreligious yet pious; and the intellectual Anti-Lowbrow laughs hollowly at Low Middlebrow, whose cobbled-together spirituality is bogus. Whence the mirthless laugh? Call it: Nobrow. Hipsters, who during the 20th century took a neutral position in the unhappy Highbrow vs. Lowbrow struggle, are nobrows; so are nihilists, American Buddhists, and lifestyle anarchists. Nobrows are neither snobbish nor reverse-snobbish; they refuse to make value judgments, and reject "snark." Neither utopian nor dystopian, nobrows eschew middlebrow accomodationism in favor of what they call "subversion." Haw! What, we mocked n+1 for having a forum on The Hipster, and now we're having one, too? But that makes sense. We feel uneasy about even discussing this topic, yet we're fascinated by it. That's because the hipster occupies a position on our shared cultural network that is uncanny, in the psychological sense. Matthew Battles and I have been trying to articulate this uncanny mode -- in but not of the world, neither left-wing nor right-wing, religious nor atheist, Apollonian nor Dionysian. It's a neither/nor position, and that makes it attractive; it's intransigent, a rebuke to the bourgeois both/and (i.e., have your cake and eat it). Ed recalls that one aspect of being a hipster was being "nonjudgmental" -- a less charitable way of putting it is "above it all." Carl quotes Russell Smith claims the hipster lacks interest in any cause or intellectual issue; I think this is true -- they don't even espouse what Max Weber called "feeble relative value judgments" -- what Baudrillard called "soft ideologies" like antiracism or environmentalism. Not that they're racist, or want the environment to be polluted; they're just disengaged. But why demonize hipsters for their disengagement? Angels, as well as demons, are above it all. I think Carl is onto something important when he writes: "At its best the hipster is the new Dandy, the semi-subversive who overloads the system by over-subscribing to it (conspicuously consuming) and yet undermines it by seeming as if the real source of their cooperation is that they can’t take the system seriously enough to bother to oppose it." Disengagement is, as Carl notes, a political statement of sorts -- a rejection of an entire social, cultural, economic, political system, a refusal to take any position within the system; it can even be a noble, courageous stance. And like Carl points out, this meme -- the demonic disengaged hipster -- has been with us for a while. Carl points to the "jukebox boys" of the 1950s; I'd say this meme has been active at least since the 1850s. When the black-clad Baudelaire (the voice of a generation of bousingos and dandies) was criticized by Sainte-Beueve as inhabiting "a pavilion of his own, highly ornamented and artificial... at the extreme point of the Kamtschatka of Romanticism," wasn't S-B saying "Look at this Fucking Hipster"? Carl says the hipster serves as "the negative exaggeration of one’s own apathy," which is certainly true... but I wonder if it's more complicated, too. Apathy doesn't spark the uncanny sensation -- I wonder if it's ambivalence, being pulled in several directions simultaneously and therefore paralyzed -- that's at work? In the '60s, Adorno was often accused of apathy and "resignation" -- but his response was that it was the politically engaged who were wasting their lives. He has a funny line in his essay "Resignation" about how the guerrilla protester throwing a brick through a bank window is being a go-getter, just like capitalism demands. I was struck, when I read Lukacs's criticism of Adorno's "Negative Dialectics," how closely it paralleled Sainte-Beuve's criticism of Baudelaire: Adorno, Lukacs writes, had taken up residence in the "Grand Hotel Abyss," which he called "a beautiful hotel, equipped with every comfort, on the edge of a void." Baudelaire, Adorno, and -- if not each individual hipster, at least the Hipster meme -- occupy this uncanny position. They are dandies, aesthetics-obsessed peacocks, who've exiled themselves and made a spectacle of themselves at the same time. They reject and renounce everything, and this is attractive. Call it Nobrow. Yet it's difficult to respect their disengaged mode of irony; the glib, air-quote irony that capitalism digs. On the other hand, it's difficult to respect the anti-ironic earnestness of those who castigate the hipster; Carl's right to say that such responses "reek of a paranoid craving for a restoration of social order." Didn't mean to suggest that Baudelaire or Adorno's irony was disengaged; or that any individual hipster's irony is disengaged. B and A were, I'd argue, closer to hilobrow than nobrow. What I meant to say is that disengaged irony is a dominant mode of humor in advanced capitalist societies, and we tend to associate it with the hipster/nobrow figure. Which is one reason we're outraged by the hipster and want to put her down, negate her allure, even as we find her charming and cool. I suppose this explains the simultaneous Dave Eggers worship/backlash phenomenon we witnessed in the '90s, too... Like Carl, finally, I don't want to defend the hipster. But I do want to understand Nobrow, the uncanny position occupied formerly by Baudelaire, later by jukebox boys, later by Adorno, currently by the hipster. Nobrow is so close to something really admirable, a way of life and mode of action that I could loyally subscribe to. (As you already know, this vaguely glimpsed way of life and mode of action is HILOBROW.) PS: I recently finished (quiet) HCer Simon Critchley's "Infinitely Demanding," in which Simon keeps returning to something like Nobrow, as articulated by psychologists and philosophers. Simon is fascinated by this self-exiled, vaguely amused part of the self that Freud identified as the non-hostile super-ego; an uncanny part of the self which, I'd suggest, is our inner hipster (or inner Baudelaire, if you prefer), forever making our earnest, anti-hipster ego uncomfortable, angry, craving for a restoration of psychic order. Which makes me think of Erik's "diamond solitaire." "It’s tough to describe what this new I felt like without leaning on mystic rhetoric, which I really don't want to do because it sounds like bullshit, and my experience was anything but bullshit to me. One thing is for sure: there was nothing particularly human in it. It felt like a being, but it had no attributes I can really name other than awareness and perception. It felt like diamond, like hard serenity, a clear and crystalline meta-mind that was both individual and, in some ungrokkable, transpersonal way, collective. And ever so slightly amused." http://www.realitysandwich.com/diamond_solitaire_washing_beets_god Sorry for the long post. As you can tell, I've been worrying at this set of questions for a long time.

Hilo Manifesto (08): Low Middlebrow

Joshua Glenn — Wed, 31 Dec 1969 16:00:00 +0000

Not Utopian Socialism, though. The dialectic is middlebrow. The best of both worlds. All the benefits of capitalism PLUS social equality! 8-9. Negative deixis If High Middlebrow is a synthesis of Highbrow and Anti-Lowbrow, then the synthesis of Lowbrow and Anti-Highbrow is Low Middlebrow. The former is an exalted, solemn happy ending to the Highbrow vs. Lowbrow drama of 20th-century culture, while the latter is another kind of happy ending: a tear-jerker. How low is Low Middlebrow? It's lower than Tina Brown's New Yorker, or even Charlton Heston narrating The Giants of Philosophy audiobooks. While High Middlebrow instructs us in the properly reverential attitude to have toward highbrow culture, Low Middlebrow mostly ignores highbrow culture altogether. Low-middlebrow novels are literary but not too difficult, and contain overt messages of well-being. If anti-lowbrows scorn religion, stifle emotion, and deny inspiration, then the ersatz substitutes for these phenomena — respectively, spirituality, sentimentality, and uplift — touted by low middlebrows on daytime television shows make them actually froth at the mouth. Woolf, a highbrow, described low-middlebrow culture as "this mixture of geniality and sentiment stuck together with a sticky slime of calves–foot jelly." Low Middlebrow is Oprah's Book Club, Real Simple Magazine, and the Sundance Channel. What are the politics of Low Middlebrow? Like High Middlebrow, LM is suffused with light but no shadows. An unthreatened and unthreatening view of the universe and man's place within it. Critics of Low Middlebrow are out there, somewhere, but they're even less influential than were High Middlebrow's opponents. For one thing, critics in every medium today tend not to be Highbrows, or even High Middlebrows; instead, they're Low Middlebrows. (Curtis White, author of "The Middle Mind," which ought to be read if only for its attack on NPR's Terry Gross, is an exception.) Besides, since the end of the Cold War we've been encouraged to believe that another world is not possible; the events of 9/11 were interpreted as further evidence of this. As Churchill said of democracy, and as New York Times and Wall Street Journal editorialists agree about the capitalist economic system, Low Middlebrow is the worst disposition or habit of mind... except for all the others that have been tried. Or so, as noted, we've been encouraged to believe. But don't believe it! There are alternatives to Highbrow, Lowbrow, Snobbery, Reverse Snobbery, and also to High and Low Middlebrow. *** Newspaper astrology. Rubbing rough edges off lowbrow accelerates at mdcentury. Saturday Evening Post. Hardy Boys Disneyfication of everything -- esp. fairy tales and books like Mary Poppins Mickey Rooney Kitsch Reader's Digest Collectibles Yoga -- sentimentalization of ascetism New Age sentimentalizes Low Middlebrow gets revenge on Anti-Lowbrow by sentimentalizing. *** There exists yet another soothing synthesis, another bourgeois win-win. Like High Middlebrow, Low Middlebrow emerged triumphantly during the Cold War and has gone from success to success ever since. Lowbrow doesn't preach, it cajoles; its mien isn't paternal but sisterly and motherly, or sometimes (as in the case of Walt Disney, the top low middlebrow until Oprah came along) avuncular. Whereas High Middlebrow renders highbrow and avant-garde cultural products tedious by suggesting that they're good for us, Low Middlebrow also hastens to the light, eschews the dark and mysterious. It smooths the rough edges off lowbrow mythologies and beliefs, and cleans up its seedy pursuits. The result? Eschewing lowbrow tradition and anti-highbrow authenticity, Low Middlebrow gives us Fake Authenticity, a phony substitute for both. Attempting to synthesize Passion and the Hysterical, Low Middlebrow offers us the Sentimental; and instead of Religion or Credulity, it asks us to settle for Spirituality. Just as Lowbrows reach for their revolvers when High Middlebrows prate about Validity or Tastefulness, Sentimentality and Spirituality make Highbrows see red. The "Battle of the Brows," writes Woolf, lies "not between highbrow and lowbrow, but between highbrows and lowbrows joined together in blood brotherhood against the bloodless and pernicious pest who comes between" — the Low Middlebrow, that is, whose cultural output is "a mixture of geniality and sentiment stuck together with a sticky slime of calves–foot jelly." Low Middlebrow's mode is fatalistic-hopeful, its means astrological and angelic. In a 1918 speech, Max Weber insisted that "the fate of the times" is disenchantment, and urged those tempted by proto-New Age spirituality and soft ideologies to recall that "the arms of the old churches are opened widely and compassionately for him." Another German highbrow, T.W. Adorno, complained in the late 1940s that Americans have been so taken in by the calculating cuteness, pseudo-eccentricity, and advertised individuality of low-middlebrow popular culture that we "call for Mickey Rooney in preference to the tragic Garbo, for Donald Duck instead of Betty Boop." Before Macdonald took on Masscult and Midcult, and before the pejorative "Disneyfied" was coined, Adorno here distinguished between homemade, eccentric lowbrow culture (charming) and the low-middlebrow culture industry's commodified, quaint, cutesy output (creepy). Like High Middlebrow, Low Middlebrow is neo-utopian. Particularly in its neoconservative mode, High Middlebrow doesn't believe that people can change, so it aims to reinvent social forms and norms accordingly; Low Middlebrow, though, doesn't believe that the social forms and norms can be changed. So it aims to render people more adaptable to their situations. Low Middlebrow's message is one of uplift, well-being, living in the moment. Low Middlebrow is obsessed with the occult, miracles, magic: the supernatural. Why? Writing about the Los Angeles Times's astrology column, Adorno noted that such forums inevitably advise that "freedom consists of the individual's taking upon himself voluntarily what is inevitable anyway." sharing -- facebook, etc. -- prized as top virtue. try creating a secret society sometime using social netowrking media. Middlebrow politics are issue politics -- evangelicals on right, politics of meaning on left. They conflate community of ends and community of means. Who will say of NPR what Woolf once said: "If the B.B.C. stood for anything but the Betwixt and Between Company they would use their control of the air not to stir strife between brothers, but to broadcast the fact that highbrows and lowbrows must band together to exterminate a pest which is the bane of all thinking and living." Who, today, is afraid of Virginia Woolf? No one. When Tom Wolfe or David Brooks mock "radical chic" or "bourgeois bohemians," they're purporting to ventriloquize on behalf of the inarticulate low middlebrow. Yet we listen to these class clowns, while critics of Low Middlebrow are even less well-known than Adorno and Macdonald. (Have you heard of Curtis White?) Just how lowbrow is low-middlebrow culture? Lower than Tina Brown's New Yorker, or even Charlton Heston narrating The Giants of Philosophy audiobooks. Low Middlebrow is Oprah's Book Club, Real Simple Magazine, New Age, yoga. Dilbert as low middlebrow avatar. Mystery Science Theater 3000 as exemplar of low-middlebrow effort to render the lowbrow quirky. Contemporary Fake Authenticity: pre-weathered leather jackets, mud-spattered SUVs, tables made of old barn doors What are the contemporary politics of Low Middlebrow? DID WE GET LOW MIDDLEBROW POLITICS CONFUSED WITH LOWBROW? WHAT ARE POLITICS OF NASCAR DADS AND SOCCER MOMS?

Hilo Manifesto (07): High Middlebrow

Joshua Glenn — Wed, 31 Dec 1969 16:00:00 +0000

We arrive now at our matrix's four meta-dispositions — two of which are unheimlich (uncanny), and two of which are gemütlich (cozy). High Middlebrow is the first of two gemütlich meta-dispositions; it synthesizes Highbrow and Anti-Lowbrow. Semioticians would call this position on Hilobrow.com's matrix the "positive deixis" — but we needn't concern ourselves with that terminology. Contrary to what you've been led to believe, Middlebrow does not synthesize Highbrow and Lowbrow. High Middlebrow synthesizes Highbrow and Anti-Lowbrow, while Low Middlebrow synthesizes Lowbrow and Anti-Highbrow. Middlebrow is parasitical upon the four heimlich dispositions; it takes from each of these what it requires to survive and propagate itself. Whence came this alien, this freeloader and bloodsucker, this uncanniest of visitors? The first high middlebrow was Jean-Jacques Rousseau — a highbrow insofar as he stressed the existence of a Creator and First Mover, but an anti-lowbrow in his sweeping rejection of tradition and authority, and his (illiberal?) egalitarianism. Rousseau's famous claim that there is a basic duality in man's nature, two divergent principles — one raising him to the pursuit of eternal truths; the other dragging him downwards within himself, rendering him a slave to his passions — captures a definitive aspect of High Middlebrow. It is a semi-idealistic, semi-cynical disposition; high middlebrows are, necessarily, good politicians. In a semi-idealistic, semi-cynical effort to synthesize highbrow "truth" and anti-lowbrow "accuracy," High Middlebrow offers validity: the (convincing) quality of being supported by objective facts or accepted authority. Synthesizing highbrow's rather abstract notion of "beauty" and anti-lowbrow's aristocratic, sometimes ascetic "elegance," High Middlebrow offers a win-win compromise: tastefulness. When Santayana describes "the Genteel tradition," in his 1911 essay on that topic, as a blend of despiritualized Calvinism and transcendentalism, he's attempting to describe High Middlebrow. The intense emotionality of Rousseau's deism set this pioneering high middlebrow apart from highbrows and anti-lowbrows alike. His acceptance of the argument of intelligent design and his explicit attribution of a spiritual (though not religious) value to the beauty of nature anticipates the attitudes of nineteenth-century Romanticism towards nature and religion. Via Wordsworth and Kant, Rousseau influenced Emerson, Thoreau, and other New England Transcendentalists. Thoreau, though more suburban and gemütlich than his admirers care to admit, remains an uncanny figure; Emerson, however, is a 19th-century avatar of High Middlebrow. His argument, e.g., in the 1837 "American Scholar" essay, that culture is a corrective to the shallowness and commercialism of daily life, is a high-middlebrow one. To their credit, Rousseau, Emerson, and other high middlebrows are fiercely anti-totalitarian. High Middlebrow prides itself on being a post-ideological disposition. However, after World War II, High Middlebrow would all too easily become the dominant discourse of a new peril: neototalitarianism. High middlebrows like Francis Fukuyama — who studied with high middlebrow Allan Bloom — insisted that the end of the Cold War may signal "the end of history as such: that is, the end point of mankind's ideological evolution and the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government." But we're getting ahead of ourselves. High Middlebrow as we currently know it emerged in the Seventies (1974-83); it is very much a post-Sixties phenomenon. One major strand of High Middlebrow emerged from a group of New York intellectuals, including Irving Kristol, Daniel Bell, Seymour Martin Lipset, and Nathan Glazer — many of whom vigorously opposed the Stalinist regime and despised the counterculture of the Sixties. (Kristol described himself as a "liberal mugged by reality"; that's high-middlebrow.) A second main line of development of High Middlebrow was strongly influenced by the work of Leo Strauss, whose students include Robert Bork, Paul Wolfowitz, Alan Keyes, William Bennett, William Kristol, Allan Bloom, John Podhoretz, and the novelist Saul Bellow. Other high middlebrows: Lewis Libby, Norman Podhoretz, Daniel Pipes, Charles Krauthammer, Richard Perle, Robert Kagan, Christopher Hitchens, Stephen Schwartz, and Elliott Abrams. High Middlebrow believes that democracy can and should be installed by the United States around the world, even in Muslim countries such as Iraq, Iran, and Saudi Arabia. High middlebrows hold an idealistic belief in social progress and the universality of human rights, coupled with anti-Communism. They hold the view that there is a universal desire to live in a technologically advanced and prosperous society and liberal democracy is one of the byproducts of such modernization. High Middlebrow virtually dictated the foreign policy of President George W. Bush, and especially the Iraq War. Anti-Highbrow dislikes High Middlebrow intensely — partly because High Middlebrow tends to minimize or overlook the significance of religious beliefs in conflicts and policies. **** NOTES Writing, in 1960, about the triumph of Masscult (mass-produced, yet tasteful cultural products) and Midcult (the fetishizing and debasing of High Culture), Dwight Macdonald railed against "a narcotized acceptance of Masscult-Midcult and of the commodities it sells as a substitute for the unsettling and predictable (hence unsalable) joy, tragedy, wit, change, originality and beauty of real life." Culture is political, and narcotized acceptance sounded good to the CIA, which during the Cold War funded many High Middlebrow productions. n the midcentury, in the years just before and after the infamous 1952 Partisan Review symposium that heralded a postwar and post-ideological era, a new disposition emerged. One that idealistically forces an artificial synthesis while cynically riding the internal tensions. Call it: High Middlebrow. Not that Mortimer Adler's fifty-volume set of Great Books of the Western World, say, was a CIA scheme. In fact, High Middlebrow is the fulfillment of the fondest visions of America's "new radicals," as Christopher Lasch has named Brooks's generation of reformers. Radical politics were diverted into culture: The poor, as the old radical Emma Goldman quipped about the new radical Jane Addams, were taught to eat with a fork. If you argued, as did Macdonald, that a personal, particulate aesthetic experience was the last redoubt of individualism in an increasingly neo-totalitarian social order, and that therefore NBC's "Music Appreciation Hour" was sinister and abhorrent, you were dismissed as an out-of-touch elitist, a mandarin. But dismissed by whom? CIA-funded high-middlebrow intellectuals, that's who! Their names are familiar to us today as the progenitors of neoconservatism, a post-ideological ideology for chastened utopians ("liberals mugged by reality") turned neo-utopian pragmatists. While generally supportive of free markets, the neoconservative is willing to interfere for overriding social purposes. He supports unilateral action and preemptive strikes, though for the purpose of realizing highbrow ideals (democracy, human rights) abroad. In sum, he's a synthesis of the sympathetic highbrow and the anti-lowbrow superman. Following the collapse of the Soviet Union, and more recently the unpopular military action in Iraq, the movement has lost its way. But its publications and institutions are well-funded and deeply entrenched in the Beltway; they'll be back. High Middlebrow is still very much with us. In the mid-1980s liberal, technocratic High Middlebrows answered the challenge of neoconservatism with another post-ideological ideology: neoliberalism. Neoliberalism is more than a set of economic policies imposed by the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank. It is a crypto-fanatical, neo-utopian disposition, one that applies market metaphors to everything (e.g., nations, cities, even individuals are encouraged to behave like companies: "You, Inc."); preaches that the market is a guide for all action (e.g., Wikipedia, crowdsourcing, and Malcolm Gladwell's oeuvre); and not so subtly suggests that each of us (individuals, cities, even nations) make ourselves useful, operational... or else disappear. We write this manifesto at a moment of economic crisis, and from Buffett to Obama we hear High Middlebrow's mantra: "Whatever Works, Is Good." compassionate conservatism -- sympathy is all about CRUEL TO BE KIND As for highmid now, I want to say that as it strengthened its hold in policy circles, its cultural products entered a decadent phase. The people you see if you ever go to the symphony or Boston theatregoers are highmid if they're anything--every performance gets a standing ovation. (The highbrows go to the open rehearsals; the opera is another last haunt for highbrows). I need to think about how crowdsourcing and wikipedia fit highmid. Definitely Gladwell's there, and Gopnik--the whole meritocratic apotheosis of the liberal arts. Highmid makes a ritual of the liberal arts; lowmid turns "management" and "marketing" as topics worthy of higher education's imprimatur. Postwar, Jacques Barzun on the June 11, 1956 Time Magazine cover. America's intellectual and cultural infrastucture develops at a rapid pace. Partisan Review 1952 symposium devoted to intellectual "reaffirmation and rediscovery of America." By midcentury, thanks to the institutionalized hustling of bourgeois taste, e.g., NBC's "Music Appreciation Hour" and Mortimer Adler's Great Books Program, the fondest wishes of Brooks and other "new radicals" (as Christopher Lasch would describe them) up to and including Trilling and Jacques Barzun, were realized. The poor had been taught, as the old radical Emma Goldman once quipped about Jane Addams, to eat with a fork. If you argued, as did intransigent critics like T.W. Adorno and Dwight Macdonald, that a personal, particulate aesthetic experience (i.e., reading quality literature in eccentric editions upon which you've stumbled in a used bookshop, instead of subscribing to the Quality Book of the Month Club) was the last redoubt of individualism in an increasingly neo-totalitarian American social order, you were labeled a "mandarin," or — worse — sardonically applauded by middlebrows for your "quirky" opinions. The cultural is political, insisted Adorno and Macdonald, whose own politics were closer to anarchism than anything else. The CIA felt the same way, and during the Cold War funded High Middlebrow cultural productions of every sort; one suspects that they played a role in that era's resurgent Battle of the Brows. For example, in a much-discussed 1949 Harper's magazine feature titled "Highbrow, Lowbrow, Middlebrow," Russell Lynes deftly inverted Adorno and Macdonald's crypto-political argument against High Middlebrow by glibly speculating that "if we ever have intellectual totalitarianism, it may well be the lowbrows and the highbrows who will run things, and the middlebrows who will be exiled in boxcars to a collecting point probably in the vicinity of Independence, Missouri." High Middlebrows were guilty only of aiding new Americans to become upwardly mobile, declaimed Lynes's pseudo-populist manifesto. And their critics were kinda like... Nazis! This is the disarming tack that High Middlebrow — which favors "third way," supposedly post-ideological ideologies like neoliberalism and neoconservatism; and whose anti-utopian intellectuals are simultaneously cynical and idealistic — has taken ever since.

Hilo Manifesto (01): Intro

Joshua Glenn — Wed, 31 Dec 1969 16:00:00 +0000

"My idea is that every specific body strives to become master over all space and to extend its force ( — its will to power:) and to thrust back all that resists its extension. But it continually encounters similar efforts on the parts of other bodies and ends by coming to an arrangement ("union") with those of them that are sufficiently related to it: they then conspire for power. And the process goes on—." — Friedrich Nietzsche

As in space, so among the dispositions. Our system can be criticized as easily leading to reductionist and programmatic decodings. Worse, some theorists use the Greimas square as little more than an objective-looking framework which gives the appearance of coherence and grand theory to loose argument and highly subjective opinions. We have corrected for these possibilities, in part, by contextualized, historicized readings of the dispositions. The semiotic square is designed to be both a conceptual network and a visual representation of this network, usually depicted in the form of a "square" (which actually looks like a rectangle!). Courtés defines it as the visual representation of the logical structure of an opposition (cf. Courtés, 1991, 152). 1. Intro By the first decades of the 20th century, European and American intellectuals were no longer willing to choose between Enlightenment and Reason, on the one hand, and Wisdom and Tradition, on the other. Or, to adopt the pejorative slang terms preferred by Van Wyck Brooks and Virginia Woolf, they were no longer willing to choose between Highbrow and Lowbrow. Like the bourgeois they were, these anti-bourgeois thinkers and writers wanted everything both ways. That's why studying 20th-century culture is akin to reading a novel, or watching a movie, that confronts us with a debilitating rift between two rival dispositions, and then works through one faulty solution or unacceptable hypothesis after another... until finally arriving at what we're encouraged to accept as a natural, inevitable, permanent happy ending. The rival dispositions? Highbrow and Lowbrow. The unacceptable hypotheses? Various manifestations of Anti-Lowbrow (e.g., Positivism, Atheism, Snobbery) and Anti-Highbrow (e.g., Fundamentalism, Romanticism, Reverse Snobbery). The win-win solution to this riddle? Alas: Middlebrow. *** At the beginning of the twentieth century, Modernity gathered its energies for a Danse Macabre. Harried and driven not only by events but by the public intellectuals who'd recently replaced the nineteenth century's "men of letters," everything from consumption and production to cultural life and sociability steadily grew more complex, more ramified. The angel of history gawked and stammered as estates, beliefs, qualities, ideals, and dispositions held in balance by centuries of cultural evolution were thrown into conflict. Amid the clash and tumult, voices arose urging revolution or refusal, concord or synthesis — placatory and pleading voices, voices of disconnection and exultation. From the ruin and wreckage of this Babel sprung Postmodernity. During the second half of the twentieth century, along with Modernity's bathwater (a utopian nostalgia for the harmonious and organic integration of every aspect of the lifeworld), Postmodernity threw out the baby (utopianism itself, not to mention affect). The three-centuries-old Enlightenment metanarrative, in which an argonaut of knowledge, in quest of a universal good, risks everything as he voyages across the abyss of ignorance and superstition, was challenged and partially rewritten by persuasive advocates of a Counter-Enlightenment, for whom totalizing metanarratives are proto- or toto-totalitarian, and the only permissible ideal is a sensitivity to differences and an ability to tolerate the incommensurable. It became impossible to decide between the two movements! And, as might have been expected, this ongoing clash of titans created an opportunity for a third, supposedly non-ideological movement to assume a leadership role. Call it Neoliberalism. The Hilobrow Movement proposes to chart a new course, one every bit as heroic and thrilling as the (mostly) outmoded Modernity/Enlightenment metanarrative, while every bit as dissensual and incredulous as the (mostly) exhausted Postmodernity/Counter-Enlightenment insurgency. The Hilobrow Movement finds much to praise and criticize in both of these well-intentioned predecessors; as for Neoliberalism, we abhor it. This Manifesto is a complex map of our position. Why "Hilobrow," you ask? Yes, we're aware that the late-nineteenth-/early-twentieth-century slang terms "highbrow" and "lowbrow" were not neutral in their origins. We reject not only phrenology and racial typology but also the less offensive hierarchical connotations of the cultural "high" and "low." For us, neither "highbrow" nor "lowbrow" is a pejorative, and one is not inherently superior to the other. The exaggerated antithesis between art and life, the worthy and the unworthy, that fueled the so-called Battle of the Brows is alien to our sensibilities; yet we continue to make judgments. So why did we adopt the browspeak of bygone intellectuals and journalists? Because it tickles our fancy — because, that is, we find it charming. As you'll discover, we've interpreted these rival dispositions — "highbrow" and "lowbrow" — not merely in their cultural, but in their often carefully obscured political and economic modes. With fierce determination and sometimes intuitive reasoning, we've traced the logical conjunctions and disjunctions related to these dispositions, until arriving finally at the topology revealed in this manifesto. This is not the end of our quest, but the beginning. After years of underpaid and overtaxing hermeneutical effort, we have a map. And now, though we're footsore and homesick, we're determined to follow it. Join us! *** In the first decades of the twentieth century, Modernity gathered its energies for a Danse Macabre. Consumption, production, cultural life, political experience, sociability, all became more complex, more ramified. The angel of history gawked and stammered as estates, beliefs, qualities, ideals, and dispositions held in balance by centuries of cultural evolution were thrown into conflict. In the clash and tumult, voices arose urging revolution or refusal, concord or synthesis — placatory voices, pleading voices, voices of disconnection and voices of exultation. What are we to make, today, of this twentieth-century Babel? Not to worry. Once we've mapped the logical conjunctions and disjunctions relating to two rival dispositions — Highbrow and Lowbrow, to deploy the slangy pejoratives reclaimed by Van Wyck Brooks and Virginia Woolf — it will become possible, for the first time, to analyze the ways in which the shadow of twentieth-century ideas and ideologies occlude our perception of contemporary cultural, political, and economic modes. Only then will we Argonauts boldly navigate the present, avoiding its Scyllas and Charybdises. To the chart room, then! As you'll discover, we've rejected the Highbrow-Lowbrow binary opposition in favor of a more bewildering yet enlightening chart. (Or perhaps it's a full mesh topology?) In doing so, we've identified eight predominant dispositions, in which particular cultural, political, and economic ideals and ideologies are tightly if not always logically braided. That's right, friends. We've cracked the western world's operating code, traced the deep structure of the quotidian itself! The Hilobrow Project begins... now. *** During the early modern era, the triumph of the "mechanical philosophy" meant the end of the animistic conception of the universe which had constituted the basic rationale for magical thinking. Popular belief in demons, angels, and magic suddenly began to wane, and — in the West — seemingly natural, inevitable, and eternal social orders whose legitimacy was based on faith, tradition, and authority found themselves challenged, almost overnight, by philosophical reason. A wholly new kind of public sphere for debate, exchange of ideas, and opinion-forming emerged — as Habermas notes in Structural Transformation.

After 1650 tension between a thoroughgoing philosophical Naturalism, scorning belief in magic and the demonic, as part of a broader conceptual attack on authority, tradition, and Revelation, and, on the other side, both a moderate and a more fundamentalist, conservative stance, was everywhere evident in western and central Europe. Traditionalists were reinforced by ecclesiastical authority, religious tradition, and folklore, men of the moderate Enlightenment by Cartesian, Malebranchiste, empiricist, and Newtonian mechanistic philosophy. (Israel, 376)

The unprecedented intellectual turmoil — sometimes called the Crisis of the European Mind — which commenced in the mid-17th century, with the rise of Cartesianism and the subsequent spread of "mechanical philosophy" or the "mechanistic worldview," an upheaval which heralded the onset of the Enlightenment proper in the closing years of the century, was marked by five rival and complementary dispositions, to use Bourdieu's term. Highbrow, Lowbrow, Anti-Lowbrow, Anti-Highbrow, and Nobrow struggled to determine what kind of belief-system should prevail in the West's politics, social order, and institutions — not to mention in high culture and, no less, in popular attitudes. The Highbrow-Lowbrow split was an urban phenomenon. The chief breeding ground of Highbrow, Anti-Lowbrow, and Nobrow ideas during the early modern era were large, internationally orientated, dynamic cities with high levels of immigration from a wide area: Amsterdam, The Hague, London, Paris, Venice, Naples, Berlin, Vienna, Copenhagen, Hamburg. A freer, more flexible intellectual framework was nurtured in an urban milieu characterized by exceptional fluidity of social relations. This forum of public opinion formation was generated by the new erudite journals, "universal" libraries (cf. Battles), literary clubs, lexicons, and encyclopedias, not to mention newspapers, gentlemen's magazines, tea- and coffee-houses, and in the 18th century, Masonic lodges. (In Vienna, an Argonaut Folly of sorts formed around Prince Eugene of Savoy.) The style of this early modern public sphere was a cross between the aristocratic and the commercial — its concern with polite sociability between men (and some women) of contrasting backgrounds, and a predilection for conversation urbane, cosmopolitan, and unencumbered with pedantic erudition (especially esteemed in the new arena were clear, concise, readily grasped proofs, stripped of the pedantry and academic terminology and jargon of traditional scholarly discourse), arose from the advent of new associations and locations with no fixed rules of access — e.g., tea and coffee shops. Outsiders: Aristocrats who became philosophes were apt to be detached in some significant way from the traditional culture and outlook of the nobility. They rubbed shoulders with non-noble scholars, writers, and publishers, as well as professionals, pseudo-gentry, and bourgeois gentilhommes. Cartesianism predates the five central dispositions of early modernity. Cartesianism provided a matrix capable not just of accommodating, but also inseparably blending, both a proto-highbrow stream and a proto-anti-lowbrow stream. Descartes' system swayed some of the most acute thinkers and scientists of the age — including Locke in England, Leibniz in Germany, and Vico in Naples, all of whom formidably criticized their great precursor and also presented imposing new philosophical systems of their own (which sapped confidence in Cartesianism). For all their criticism, the philosophes of the 18th century will venerate Descartes' philosophical enterprise as marking the true beginning of "modernity" and "enlightenment" in men's ideas. They saw Descartes as the first to seek to change the general way of thinking. His followers were intent on revolutionizing not just philosophy but also physics, astronomy, medicine, and in some respects even Bible criticism and theology. Celsius and Linnaeus were Cartesians. Spinoza was a follower and critic of Descartes. For Descartes, motion is external to matter and introduced into the material world by God. Malebranche, Leibniz, and Locke follow Descartes in arguing that there is motion, or motive force, external to matter. Until Galileo's insights had been universalized by Descartes to produce the new rigorously mechanistic worlview, the indispensable conceptual apparatus — mathematical rationality as the sole and exclusive criterion of truth — remained lacking. Spinoza then ushered in modernity by joining up, and integrating in a powerfully coherent system, recent insights with concepts that had reverberated disparately and incoherently for millennia. Spinoza imparted order, cohesion, and formal logic to what in effect was a fundamentally new view of man, God, and the universe rooted in philosophy, nurtured by scientific thought, and capable of producing a revolutionary ideology. The Enlightenment encapsulated a four-way conflict between three strains of Highbrow moderates (Newtonians, neo-Cartesians, Leibnitio-Wolffians) and Anti-Lowbrow radicals (Spinozists). Together, these strains demolished the ideas, beliefs, and loyalties on which rested the ancien régime. * The social and religious ideas of the Levellers and Diggers — with their democratic, and sometimes communistic, inclinations — may have served as a source for the Radical Enlightenment. * Blaise Pascal an example of someone of someone deeply anguished by the Highbrow/Lowbrow split. The "God" of the Cartesians, objected their opponents, was no longer the true God who governs and conserves the universe, and intervenes in human affairs, but some abstract "principle."

Hilo Manifesto (10): Hilobrow

admin — Thu, 19 Feb 2009 18:59:39 +0000

11-12. Complex Our final meta-term is situated in the most perplexing, alluring, aggravating "between" anywhere on our matrix: it's betwixt S1 and S2, Highbrow and Lowbrow. If Nobrow is self-righteously neither/nor, this space is ambivalently, awkwardly both/and. It's the "between" that Brooks tried and failed to limn... failed, we've argued, because Woolf hadn't yet redefined Highbrow and Lowbrow. Woolf, for her part, was repelled by the very idea of a "between" that sought to mediate between, or even (shudder) synthesize Highbrow and Lowbrow. Though she was wrong to call this space "middlebrow" (Middlebrow occupies two other, different "betweens"), Woolf really was onto something. And that's this: Dialectical synthesis, the ur-bourgeois promise that you can have your cake and eat it, is middlebrow by nature. That said, the Highbrow-and-Lowbrow-combining meta-term about which we're speculating is not a synthesis! Instead, it's a negative dialectic without synthesis, a dynamic tension! What to call this uncanniest of dispositions? We've coined a term that is, we hope, fittingly eccentric. Call it: Hilobrow. Argonaut Folly goes here. *** In the midst of the confused and contradictory dispositions, nobrow's quietism is seductive. But all that is healthy and right about the deep-sprung estates of the high and low is lost. Fortunately, there is another disposition, which holds high and low neither in syntesis nor negation but dynamic tension. Its good are share & share alike, found in the Commons and transhumance. Its approach to matter and energy partakes of the Appolonian and the Dionysian, which puts it in the hands of the Trickster, the border-crosser. It's the haunt of Negative Capability: Truth is Beauty and Beauty, Truth. In science, its avatars include Goethe and Athaniasius KIrcher. If nobrow's stance towards the thoroughbred dispositions is a fantasy of the wild, here we are in the realm of the feral. This is the estate of the engaged ironist, the beautifully broken: the hilobrow. Hilobrow is thoroughbred Anti-Lowbrow complements Highbrow, while High Middlebrow synthesizes the two. Anti-Highbrow complements Lowbrow, while Low Middlebrow synthesizes the two. Because it's fiercely anti-dialectical, and therefore repellent to bourgeois middlebrows, Nobrow occupies an uncanny position on our matrix. It's attractive to Highbrows and Lowbrows, Anti-Highbrows and Anti-Lowbrows alike; however, it's an adolescent, sophomoric phase through which they have already passed. All too often, Nobrow's supposedly ironic temperament masks the numb vacuity of the emotionally damaged. When the cast of John Waters' 1998 movie, Pecker, toast the "death of irony," they're bidding Nobrow, not irony, farewell. For irony — or "engaged irony," if you prefer — is a temperament that is Apollonian and Dionysian. What to call this uncanniest of dispositions, this dynamic tension, this negative-dialectical position that rejects both Middlebrow's syntheses and Nobrow's monastic refusal to participate in the Highbrow vs. Lowbrow struggle known as life? We've coined a term. Call it: Hilobrow. Hilobrow posits a stance, detached, calm, and free, from which the Highbrow vs. Lowbrow opposition as a whole and its attendant terms can be perceived and judged. The hilobrow laughs neither bitterly, nor hollowly, nor mirthlessly; based on a higher and more encompassing sense of absurdity, he sees the opposition itself as absurd; his irony is a cosmic perspective. From the Hilobrow perspective, Enlightenment and Reason correct Wisdom and Tradition, while Wisdom and Tradition enlighten the Enlightenment. Forteans and 'pataphysicians are hilobrows; so are Dadaists, post-punks, and tricksters. But this is not to suggest that, say, Billionaires for Bush are hilobrow! Hilobrow politics are eccentric, uncategorizable, even unpalatable. With Hakim Bey, Hilobrow affirms that "in sleep we dream of only two forms of government — anarchy & monarchy. Primordial root consciousness understands no politics & never plays fair. A democratic dream? A socialist dream? Impossible." The hilobrow is an alien, an "angel with an asshole" (to borrow a phrase from Ernest Becker), a Man Who Fell to Earth. Like Baudelaire's albatross, the very qualities that make her superhuman — e.g., her sympathy is tempered by empathy, her empathy by sympathy; she runs hot and cold, never lukewarm — make the hilobrow inhuman. Possible early hilobrows: Bruno, Swedenborg. interdependence, helping one another succeed, connective thinking, webs and networks, holism, unlearning and uplearning, meaning from creativity and other non-material modes, collaboration, anticipation and ambiguity, integration of reason and mystery, dialogue, choices The Museum of Bad Art (MOBA), located in a secure bunker deep beneath the Dedham Community Theatre (Dedham is a suburb of Boston), celebrates and analyzes Bad Art, which curator Michael Frank defines as an artwork that was "created by someone who was seriously attempting to make an artistic statement — one that has gone horribly awry in either its concept or execution." There is no room in MOBA for the work of young children, paintings on black velvet and other commercially produced works, paint-by-numbers works, or paintings cranked out for tourists. No matter how bad or good these sorts of thing may be, they weren't intended to make an artistic statement.

This painting, however, was:

Ronan the Pug, by Erin Rothgeb, MOBA catalog #333 A perfectly good word for the paintings on display at MOBA is "kitsch," defined as: cultural products intended to be high quality, but seriously flawed in conception or taste. But wait — in the 1990s, we were told constantly that we should laugh at kitsch. Does MOBA intend for museum visitors to laugh at its collection? Yes and no. There are four possible reactions to MOBA's collection: 1) You think they stink, and you can't understand why anyone would bother hanging them on a gallery wall. Stop reading this now, highbrow. You're beyond help. 2) Perhaps you think MOBA's watercolor painting of a queen holding what appears to be a chocolate chip cookie (but was probably intended to be some royal sigil) is pretty good. You're wrong — it's not a good painting. But at least you haven't lost the capacity to feel. Bravo, lowbrow!

Queen of the Chocolate Chip, by Christian, MOBA catalog #180 3) You ironically (sarcastically, to be precise) pretend to enjoy the paintings, because you fancy yourself a hipster. In fact, your so-called hipness is nothing but the numb vacuity of the emotionally disabled. Hepcat, you're a nobrow. 4) You're able to feel an emotional connection with paintings like these despite recognizing that they're not "good" art. Susan Sontag called the ability to love something and simultaneously enjoy its flaws — laugh at it, even — a camp sensibility.

Camp taste identifies with what it is enjoying. People who share this sensibility are not laughing at the thing they label as 'a camp,' they're enjoying it. Camp is a tender feeling.

The camp sensibility is a manifestation of engaged irony. (When the cast of John Waters's 1998 movie Pecker toast the "death of irony," they're toasting the death of middlebrow sarcastic hipsterism.) The engaged ironist is a hilobrow.

The Book Is a Weapon (1)

HILOBROW — Fri, 20 Feb 2009 00:12:45 +0000

In the game Clue there's a library, but no little plastic book to use as a murder weapon. What's up with that? Should be able to do in Col. Mustard, in the Library, with the Book. *** First in an occasional series.

Death in the Library

Joshua Glenn — Fri, 20 Feb 2009 04:15:44 +0000

Are We Alone - SETI Institute Science Radio

Matthew Battles — Tue, 24 Feb 2009 04:07:33 +0000

Among the radio transmissions winging its way to other galaxies from Earth is "Are We Alone," a program hosted by Seth Shostak of the SETI (Search for Extra-Terrestrial Life) Project. Recent topics include "The Emergence of Intelligence," "Life's Unfriendliest Element," and "Releasing the Inner You." Broadcast on a number of public radio stations, "Are We Alone" is also available on iTunes and in pulsar-free zones of the Andromeda galaxy. Reviewing Shostak's new book Confessions of An Alien Hunter, Paul DiFilippo writes, "At the core of SETI is something as numinous as the Grail, which only faith has yet made conceivable." SETI: it's a HILOBROW religion for our time! Are We Alone - SETI Institute Science Radio.

seti-cook

Matthew Battles — Tue, 24 Feb 2009 04:10:10 +0000

We are Iron Man! A hilobrow literary mystery.

Joshua Glenn — Tue, 24 Feb 2009 10:55:47 +0000

A version of the following item originally appeared at Brainiac (4/2/08).

WHO IS IRON MAN?

In the final seconds of the latest trailer for Iron Man, which stars Robert Downey Jr. and opens soon in a theater near you, the movie's armored protagonist dodges a shell fired by a Taliban-esque tank, launches a wrist rocket, then stalks away without bothering to watch the fireworks. The musical soundtrack to this awesome heavy-metal spectacle? Naturally, it's the instantly recognizable guitar riff and thundering bass drum intro from Black Sabbath's anthem, "Iron Man." Marvel Comics introduced Tony Stark in the March 1963 issue of Tales of Suspense. Stark is a brilliant, wealthy inventor of high-tech weaponry who, while doing some field testing with US military advisers in South Vietnam, gets critically wounded by a booby-trap and is forced into the service of Wong-Chu, a "red guerrilla tyrant." Making do with low-tech materials, and with the help of a captured Vietnamese physicist, Stark inters himself in a gadget-laden suit of iron armor whose electrified chestplate keeps his shrapnel-damaged heart beating. Barely able to operate his new legs, Stark nevertheless confronts his nemesis: "Have you never seen an iron man before?" he taunts. Wong-Chu (a stand-in for Ho Chi Minh, not to mention the Viet Minh insurgency in South Vietnam generally) stammers, "You — you are not human! You are machine!" Pow! The "metallic hulk who once was Anthony Stark,” as the comic's scriptwriter, Larry Lieber, has Stark put it in the origin story's final panel, knocks Asian communism for a loop.

In 1968, the year that Marvel's Iron Man finally got his own comic book, the US Department of Defense announced that some 24,000 troops would be sent back to Vietnam for involuntary second terms. That same year, Steppenwolf's hit song "Born to Be Wild" introduced rock fans to the phrase "heavy metal." Two years later, the trailblazing British heavy metal act Black Sabbath unleashed "Iron Man" — a six-minute-long rock opera about an unfortunate soul who was "turned to steel" while singlehandedly attempting to alter the disastrous "future of mankind" — on the world. The song's title was suggested by frontman Ozzy Osbourne; it was written by Sabbath bassist/lyricist Geezer Butler, who tended to draw heavily upon "his fascination with religion, science fiction, fantasy and horror, and musings on the darker side of human nature that posed a constant threat of global annihilation," according to Wikipedia.

Despite getting little airplay, Sabbath's antiwar album Paranoid reached No. 1 in England, and No. 12 in the United States. "Iron Man," the album's fourth track, is hailed today as one of the greatest and most influential heavy metal tunes of all time. So... does the song have something to do with the superhero? Many metalheads claim that it does; others insist that it doesn't. For example, see the user-generated content at the website Songfacts: "Do you want to know what this song is really about? It's about Iron Man... as in the comic book character... get the very first issue... the parallels are obvious." — Eric, Rockford, IL. vs. "The comic Iron Man is a super hero. The song is about a guy that ends up killing the human race because they don't listen to him or help him after he sees the end of the world and is turned to iron. Listen to the damn song!!!" — Chris, Sacramento, CA. My own theory is that Black Sabbath's enduringly awesome song is a mashup of at least two sources: one is highbrow, the other lowbrow. The song's awesomeness, in other words, is a product of its hilobrow inspiration.

LOWBROW

Theme from the 1990s "Iron Man" cartoon

I know you have doubts, readers. Go ahead and ask your questions. Q: Was the Sabbath song inspired by the comic book? A: Marvel Comics would certainly like us to think so. For the past decade and a half at least, they've been hinting that when Ozzy growls, "I AM IRON MAN!" at the beginning of the song, he's ventriloquizing Tony Stark. For example: While the theme to the 1966-67 Iron Man TV cartoon was oddly upbeat for a show about a handicapped victim of the US military action in Vietnam ("Tony Stark makes you feel/he's a cool exec with a heart of steel"), the theme song of the 1994-96 cartoon repeats Ozzy's phrase ("I AM IRON MAN!") over and over again. Although the cheesy electric guitar stylings of the latter theme aren't much like the Sabbath song, the impressionable young viewer is supposed to connect the dots between Iron Man, the superhero, and "Iron Man," the song.

Theme from the 1960s "Iron Man" cartoon

As I've already mentioned, the new Iron Man movie features the actual Black Sabbath song — along with a dozen other heavy metal classics — on its soundtrack. (In a time-warping twist, readers of The Invincible Iron Man: Extremis, a 2005-06 reboot of the comic, were told that Stark received his wound during the post-9/11 invasion of Afghanistan — and that the inspiration for the armor came from his favorite Sabbath song.) Q: OK, so Marvel Comics has tried assiduously for years to establish a subconscious association between their character and the greatest heavy metal song ever. But are there any textual clues in the song itself? A: By my count, there are at least three. 1. In the song, the couplet "Can he walk at all/Or if he moves will he fall" might refer to the moment in Iron Man's origin story where Stark falls upon first donning his armor. 2. The sing-song, childish lyrics remind us of Wong-Chu’s pidgin English.

3. The final verse — "Heavy boots of lead/Fills his victims full of dread/Running as fast as they can/Iron Man lives again!" reminds us of the teaser from Iron Man's origin story: "Watch his awesome approach! Listen to his ponderous footsteps as he lumbers closer... closer.... For today you are destined to encounter — the invincible Iron Man!"

Q: Were British rockers in the late 1960s reading American superhero comics? A: Yes. One thinks immediately of Donovan singing about Green Lantern in his chart-topping "Sunshine Superman," for example; and also of the fraught use of the comic book Superman's Pal, Jimmy Olsen in the Beatles' movie, Help!. The comics can be spotted atop Paul's moviehouse organ, propped up where the sheet music ought to be. Q: Yeah, but these are DC comics. Were British rockers into Marvel? A: Yes. On Wings' 1975 album, Venus and Mars, Paul sings a silly love song that features the X-Men's enemy, Magneto, as well as not one but two of Iron Man's armor-clad opponents: Titanium Man and the Crimson Dynamo. Q: OK, but was Iron Man — the superhero — popular in England in the late 1960s? A: Yes. Here's the cover of a book I picked up in Brighton (England) earlier this year:

Q: Iron Man is a science fiction comic. Were British rockers into science fiction? A: David Bowie. Q: OK, but was Geezer into science fiction? A: A 1997 album by Geezer Butler's band G/Z/R contains a Geezer-penned song titled "Among the Cybermen." In an interview, Butler said, "The original chorus was 'Doctor Who lies dead among the Cybermen.' [It's] about the final battle of Dr. Who, but was supposed to be symbolic of the end of childhood. I changed it because I thought it sounded a bit silly. Most of the album is about growing up in the era of Sixties television, and its influence on me." Q: OK, but was Geezer into comic books? G/Z/R's debut album, Plastic Planet, features the song "Detective 27," which is about Batman; Detective Comics #27 was Batman's first appearance. Q: OK, but did British rockers dig science fiction about iron men? A: See below.

INTERLUDE

Spend enough time on heavy metal message boards and you'll encounter all sorts of metaphorical interpretations of Sabbath's "Iron Man." It's about Jesus (in order to save mankind, the word became flesh/a man's flesh turned to steel); it's about blue-collar labor in a postindustrial society. It's a Frankenstein parable about the irrational rage that follows social rejection. It's about a high-school kid who gets bullied and snaps; it's about a drug user who slips into a comatose state; it's about a ghost; it's about a soldier who returns from Vietnam with PTSD only to be reviled by American peaceniks. It's a retelling of a legend about cursed armor that a knight can't remove; or it's about the invincible Green Knight that Sir Gawain fights. It's a Weberian parable about the iron cage of capitalism. One Brainiac reader suggested: "Tony Iommi — the great guitarist in Sabbath — lost the tips of two fingers in a steel factory accident. He then had to play the guitar with metal finger caps (which added to his distinctive tone). Is Tony Iommi in fact the Iron Man? Given that Sabbath grew up and worked in the highly industrial Midlands, the song could also just be a reflection of the steel works and foundries where they came from."

If Geezer was a science fiction fan, mightn't the song be influenced by a sci-fi movie? In The Day the Earth Stood Still, for example, an inscrutable metal robot threatens to destroy the Earth if we don't change our violent ways. Paul Wegener's 1920 silent horror film, Der Golem, wie er in die Welt kam), gives us a giant clay creature whose mission is to protect the Jews of Prague; instead, the creature rebels and wreaks deadly havoc. Premiere Magazine's film critic Glenn Kenny suggests that the song reminds him of Herschell Gordon Lewis's 1965 movie, Monster A-Go-Go, in which a returning-from-space astronaut appears to have mutated into a large, radioactive, humanoid monster. Sure — there were other lowbrow influences, maybe. Though none so important as the comic book, as I've already argued... and as I'll demonstrate conclusively after we take a look at the song's highbrow influence.

HIGHBROW

It has been suggested by some metalhead exegetes that Geezer's primary inspiration for "Iron Man" was a 1968 British children's book by Ted Hughes. Now, this is a promising angle! After all, when James Parker wrote about Hughes for the Boston Globe's Ideas section in 2003, he said:

To read Ted Hughes as a young person was pure heavy metal. The humped strength of his lines, the brain-jamming immediacy of his images, the darkness of his concerns: There was nothing else like it.

Hughes's The Iron Man: A Children's Story in Five Nights (published in the US, to avoid confusion with the superhero, as The Iron Giant) concerns a metallic giant who arrives in England out of nowhere. The Iron Giant, a 1999 animated film, is loosely based on the Hughes book; so is a 1989 Pete Townshend rock opera. The Sabbath couplet "Can he walk at all/Or if he moves will he fall" springs to mind when one reads the story's first installment, "The Coming of the Iron Giant."

He swayed forward on the brink of the high cliff. And his right foot, his enormous right foot, lifted — up, out, into space, and the Iron Giant stepped forward, off the cliff, into nothingness. CRRRAAAASSSSSSH!

"Can he see or is he blind?" Having been smashed to bits, the Iron Giant cannot reassemble itself until its hand locates its eye. See below:

The Iron Giant is buried alive by farmers, because he's been destroying their property. He's tempted into the trap by a farmer's son, Hogarth. See below: Hogarth repents of his role in the scheme, and when the Iron Giant digs himself out of the grave, Hogarth leads him to a junkyard, where he can live peacefully. Later, the Iron Giant saves the planet from a "black flying horror," an immense "space-bat-angel-dragon" that demands to be fed living creatures. Turns out that the alien is actually "star-spirit," who normally sings — thus helping to create the music of the spheres. But "listening to the battle shouts and the war cries of the earth — I got excited; I wanted to join in." Having defeated the star-spirit in a contest, the Iron Giant commands him to fly around the earth, singing, every night. This has a wonderful effect: "The singing got inside everybody and made them as peaceful as starry space and blissfully above their earlier little squabbles." World peace ensues. Why did Hughes write the book? He later said that he wanted to comfort his children after the suicide of their mother, Sylvia Plath. Hughes described The Iron Man as an "imaginative strategy for dealing with neurosis" — that is to say, he wanted to tell children a story in which the horrors of the adult world (war, runaway technology, environmental disaster) can be mastered thanks to a child's natural wisdom. Q: We've established that Geezer, like other British rockers of the late '60s, was a fan of lowbrow sci-fi and American superhero comics. But were British rockers of the period into highbrow children's fantasy literature? A: Yes. John Lennon aped Lewis Carroll; Pink Floyd named their first album after a chapter of Kenneth Grahame's The Wind in the Willows; and Led Zeppelin laced their lyrics with references to Tolkien's Lord of the Rings. True, Hughes's book wasn't a time-honored classic, in 1968, but the timing of its publication is spot-on. Many plot details of Sabbath's "Iron Man" look like references to the comic book. I've already made note of a couple of "Iron Man" lyrics that look like references to Hughes's The Iron Man. Here's more: The cryptic setup for "Iron Man" — "Is he alive or dead/Has he thoughts within his head" — don't refer to the comic book; but they might certainly be inspired by Hughes's tale of a metal creature whose origins and purpose are never explained. ("Where had he come from? Nobody knows. How was he made? Nobody knows.") Also, when Ozzie sings, "Now the time is here/For Iron Man to spread fear/Vengeance from the grave/Kills the people he once saved," this is precisely what readers expect will happen once the Iron Giant digs his way out of the grave. (SPOILER: It doesn't.) Of course, Stark also comes back from the brink of death: "The machine is keeping me alive! ALIVE!"

INTERLUDE

Sabbath's Geezer Butler has claimed that "Iron Man" is a dystopian "science fiction story" that he dreamed up after seeing "a lot of things in the news about pollution and nuclear war." In Martin Popoff's 2006 Black Sabbath biography, Doom Let Loose, Geezer says:

The title was from a comic book, Iron Man; [but] it was an ecological theme. We were all very environmental at the time, and it was about this entity that turns into metal and is incapacitated at the end, just lying there. He can't talk at the end of it, but he has this knowledge that can save the earth from catastrophe.... I was into English comics but not really American comics. I think Ozzy just came up with the title "Iron Man." When we were writing that song, Ozzy just threw in a line about Iron Man... I didn't really know about the comic at the time, though."

This interview would seem to indicate that "Iron Man" was influenced neither by the comic book (except for the title) nor by Hughes's story! But I don't buy it. Geezer is either fibbing (to avoid being sued for copyright infringement; to avoid being called a plagiarist) or he's confused. The song's themes — the entire Earth imperiled by war, or some other man-made planetary apocalypse (e.g., technological, environmental); a man who has seen this apocalyptic future but cannot communicate his vision to others; a man filled with a desire for revenge (but on who?); a man paralyzed, as though trapped in an invisible iron prison — were cobbled together primarily from Iron Man's origin story and Ted Hughes's heady children's book. The question is: Why?

HILOBROW

Because Sabbath's "Iron Man" is an antiwar song, that's why. During the Vietnam War era, and again today, those of us who aren't off fighting in a senseless war — and who recognize that it's a senseless war — gain cold comfort from the shrill middlebrow arguments we find in liberal magazines and on op-ed pages. But Black Sabbath’s "Iron Man" is cathartic. It forces listeners to experience man's inhumanity to man, to experience for a moment what it's like to be crippled and deformed by, say, explosive ordnance. Or by the everyday indignities, injustices, and absurdities of contemporary life. This is what heavy metal is all about. Metallica's popular antiwar song, "One," was inspired by Dalton Trumbo's 1939 novel, Johnny Got His Gun, whose narrator is a soldier whose limbs and face have been blown off. Like Stan Lee's Tony Stark, Trumbo's Johnny is a living casualty of military violence. Like Hughes's Iron Giant, Johnny is a terrifying sight; war and violence have transformed him into an alien and a freak, one who's paralyzed, helpless — he's unable to communicate the terrible lesson he's learned, about the futility of war, its unheroic anti-glory.

Why didn't they want him? Why were they shutting the lid of the coffin against him? Why didn't they want him to speak? Why didn't they want him to be seen? Why didn't they want him to be free? ... If the war was over then all the dead had been buried and all the prisoners had been released. Why shouldn't he be released too? Why not unless they figured him as one of the dead and if that was true why didn't they kill him why didn't they put a stop to his suffering? Why should he be a prisoner? He had committed no crime. What right had they to keep him? What possible reason could they have to be so inhuman to him? Why? why? why? And then suddenly he saw. He had a vision of himself as a new kind of Christ as a man who carries within himself all the seeds of a new order of things. He was the new messiah of the battlefields saying to people as I am so shall you be. For he had seen the future he had tasted it and now he was living it. He had seen the airplanes flying in the sky he had seen the skies of the future filled with them black with them and now he saw the horror beneath.... That was it he had it he understood it now he had told them his secret and in denying him they had told him theirs. He was the future he was a perfect picture of the future and they were afraid to let anyone see what the future was like. Already they were looking ahead they were figuring the future and somewhere in the future they saw war. To fight that war they would need men and if men saw the future they wouldn't fight. So they were masking the future they were keeping the future a soft quiet deadly secret.

Trumbo's Johnny has "traveled time/For the future of mankind." Not literally, but metaphorically: He has seen the future; what's worse, having been mangled and crippled by war, he's become the future. Now, "Nobody wants him/He just stares at the world/Planning his vengeance/That he will soon unfold." What is his vengeance? The same vengeance that Ted Hughes's Iron Man wreaks: not destruction, but peace.

They knew that if all the little people all the little guys saw the future they would begin to ask questions. They would ask questions and they would find answers and they would say to the guys who wanted them to fight they would say you lying thieving sons-of-bitches we won't fight we won't be dead we will live we are the world we are the future and we will not let you butcher us no matter what you say no matter what speeches you make no matter what slogans you write.... If you make a war if there are guns to be aimed if there are bullets to be fired if there are men to be killed they will not be us. They will not be us the guys who grow wheat and turn it into food the guys who make clothes and paper and houses and tiles the guys who build dams and power plants and string the long moaning high tension wires the guys who crack crude oil down into a dozen different parts who make light globes and sewing machines and shovels and automobiles and airplanes and tanks and guns oh no it will not be us who die. It will be you.

This is the very essence of heavy metal. And here we discover what highbrow and lowbrow have in common: Rage, helplessness, despair, iron(y). Middlebrow is about the tidy dialectical synthesis, having your cake and eating it too, the win-win situation. Middlebrow is about optimism, progress, solutions. Anyone who desires nothing so much as to prevent humankind from tearing itself to pieces, but who feels paralyzed, helpless, tongue-tied — and therefore full of inarticulate rage, perhaps even a desire for revenge, not on humankind generally but on Trumbo's masters of war — is an Iron Man. We're all Iron Men.

Iron Giant illustration

Joshua Glenn — Tue, 24 Feb 2009 14:12:08 +0000

The Iron Giant falls into a trap

Joshua Glenn — Tue, 24 Feb 2009 14:16:46 +0000

johnnygothisgun

Joshua Glenn — Tue, 24 Feb 2009 16:54:21 +0000

pug

Joshua Glenn — Thu, 26 Feb 2009 01:05:46 +0000

queen

Joshua Glenn — Thu, 26 Feb 2009 01:09:29 +0000

Double Exposure (1)

Matthew Battles — Thu, 26 Feb 2009 10:25:31 +0000

This is the first in a series of posts seeking access to the dominant discourse's secrets via holographic scrutiny of two or more fraught images.

Among the photos making the social-media rounds in the aftermath of the Turkish Airlines crash in Amsterdam yesterday was this haunting image:

It was posted on Twitter by @Serguei with a caption (in French): "It" has returned, in the mist of Amsterdam." Earlier in the day the picture had appeared in a Tweet by @ankedesign, an artist and blogger in The Hague, with the caption "Oh noes! She was there!"

Who? Where else has she been?

Despite an extensive search, HILOBROW found no other images of this fey creature at disasters. But a social media confrere tells us that the picture is a manifestation of disaster girl.

Others have pointed us to similar scenes:

These images remind me of the Cottingley Fairies, "spirit photographs" made by two English girls in 1917, in which they depicted themselves in the company of little people:

Their photographs convinced Arthur Conan Doyle that fairies were real, waiting for us to believe in them so that they could bring happiness to the modern world. Despite his tireless efforts on their behalf, however, most remained incredulous, and Doyle was widely pilloried as a doddering fool.

Elfbairns, changelings, gnomes, and gremlins: are they among us, wreaking revenge?

3309601237_8c27b4671e

Matthew Battles — Thu, 26 Feb 2009 13:20:07 +0000

28288881

Matthew Battles — Thu, 26 Feb 2009 13:29:36 +0000

cottingley_fairies_1

Matthew Battles — Thu, 26 Feb 2009 14:19:54 +0000

Monogrammed Death

Matthew Battles — Thu, 26 Feb 2009 22:54:39 +0000

We'd like to think the L and the B signify Low Brow. But they more likely represent the initials of engraver M. Lucas Brunn, who made this memento mori in Germany around 1600. From the great Flickr stream Kinzertorium, which collects early modern images of monsters, martyrs, and mayhem.

Calligraphy Lesson

Matthew Battles — Fri, 27 Feb 2009 02:02:48 +0000

Wong Fei Hung (played by the great Kwan Tak Hing) gives Master Ko a writing lesson. From The Magnificent Butcher (1979), directed by Sammo Hung.

harry_houdini_portrait

Matthew Battles — Sat, 28 Feb 2009 00:14:40 +0000

houdini_as_ghostbuster_performance_poster

Matthew Battles — Sat, 28 Feb 2009 00:15:40 +0000

405px-harryhoudini-1899

Matthew Battles — Sat, 28 Feb 2009 00:16:54 +0000

Houdini's Lament

Matthew Battles — Sat, 28 Feb 2009 00:20:27 +0000

Harry Houdini was not only the storied illusionist of memory; in his time he was famous as a debunker of mediums and psychics and as a prolific author as well. In his book The Miracle-Mongers and Their Methods, Houdini explored the tricks and secrets of fire artists, strongmen, and freaks.

Much has been written about the feats of miracle-mongers, and not a little in the way of explaining them. Chaucer was by no means the first to turn shrewd eyes upon wonder- workers and show the clay feet of these popular idols. And since his time innumerable marvels, held to be supernatural, have been exposed for the tricks they were. Yet to-day, if a mystifier lack the ingenuity to invent a new and startling stunt, he can safely fall back upon a trick that has been the favorite of pressagents the world over in all ages. He can imitate the Hindoo fakir who, having thrown a rope high into the air, has a boy climb it until he is lost to view. He can even have the feat photographed. The camera will click; nothing will appear on the developed film; and this, the performer will glibly explain, proves" that the whole company of onlookers was hypnotized! And he can be certain of a very profitable following to defend and advertise him.

So I do not feel that I need to apologize for adding another volume to the shelves of works dealing with the marvels of the miracle- mongers. My business has given me an intimate knowledge of stage illusions, together with many years of experience among show people of all types. My familiarity with the former, and what I have learned of the psychology of the latter, has placed me at a certain advantage in uncovering the natural explanation of feats that to the ignorant have seemed supernatural. And even if my readers are too well informed to be interested in my descriptions of the methods of the various performers who have seemed to me worthy of attention in these pages, I hope they will find some amusement in following the fortunes and misfortunes of all manner of strange folk who once bewildered the wise men of their day. If I have accomplished that much, I shall feel amply repaid for my labor.

Later in Miracle Mongers, Houdini argues that fire conjurers and other magic-makers—those who are true artists, and not merely on the make—suffer no damage to their practice if their secrets are exposed.

THE yellow thread of exposure seems to be inextricably woven into all fabrics whose strength is secrecy, and experience proves that it is much easier to become fireproof than to become exposure proof. It is still an open question, however, as to what extent exposure really injures a performer. Exposure of the secrets of the fire-eaters, for instance, dates back almost to the beginning of the art itself. The priests were exposed, Richardson was exposed, Powell was exposed and so on down the line; but the business continued to prosper, the really clever performers drew quite fashionable audiences for a long time, and it was probably the demand for a higher form of entertainment, resulting from a refinement of the public taste, rather than the result of the many exposures, that finally relegated the Fire- eaters to the haunts of the proletariat.

How the early priests came into possession of these secrets does not appear, and if there were ever any records of this kind the Church would hardly allow them to become public. That they used practically the same system which has been adopted by all their followers is amply proved by the fact that after trial by ordeal had been abolished Albertus Magnus, De Mirabilibus Mundi, at the end of his book De Secretis Mulierum, Amstelod, 1702, made public the underlying principles of heat-resistance; namely, the use of certain compounds which render the exposed parts to a more or less extent impervious to heat. Many different formulas have been discovered which accomplish the purpose, but the principle remains unchanged. The formula set down by Albertus Magnus was probably the first ever made public...

At the end, however, Houdini laments the passing of the dime museums in which the last of these artisans practiced their craft, predicting the end of the intimate illusionist in a time of media sensation and disenchantment.

Strong people, whether tricksters or genuine athletes, or both, we shall probably have always with us. But with the gradual refinement of the public taste, the demand for such exhibitions as fire-eating, sword-swallowing, glass-chewing, and the whole répertoire of the so-called Human Ostrich, steadily declined, and I recall only one engagement of a performer of this type at a first-class theater in this country during the present generation, and that date was not played.

There was still a considerable demand for these people in the dime museums, until the enormous increase in the number of such houses created a demand for freaks that was far in excess of the supply, and many houses were obliged to close because no freaks were obtainable, even at the enormous increase in salaries then in vogue. The small price of admission, and the fact that feature curios like Laloo or the Tocci Twins drew down seven or eight hundred dollars a week, show that these houses catered to a multitude of people; and not a few of the leading managers of to-day's vaudeville, owe their start in life to the dime museum....

The dime museum is but a memory now, and in three generations it will, in all probability, be utterly forgotten. A few of the acts had sufficient intrinsic worth to follow the managers into vaudeville, but these have no part in this chronicle, which has been written rather to commemorate some forms of entertainment over which oblivion threatens to stretch her darkening wings.

Houdini's lament reminds us of the warning sounded by his contemporary James Frazer at the end of The Golden Bough, his monumental study of the primeval source of interwoven strands of tale, riddle, and superstition in Western culture. In the end, he recognizes that science has made his discoveries possible. And yet as Houdini seemed to learn in his own troubled advocacy of reason, the pursuit of "truth" may not satisfy:

Greater things will come of that pursuit, though we may not enjoy them. Brighter stars will rise on some voyager of the future—some great Ulysses of the realms of thought—than shine on us. The dreams of magic may one day be the waking realities of science. But a dark shadow lies athwart the far end of this fair prospect. For however vast the increase of knowledge and of power which the future may have in store for man, he can scarcely hope to stay the sweep of those great forces which seem to be making silently but relentlessly for the destruction of all this starry universe in which our earth swims as a speck or mote.... Yet the philosopher who trembles at the idea of such distant catastrophes may console himself by reflecting that these gloomy apprehensions ... are only part of that unsubstantial world which thought has conjured up out of the void.... They, like much so much that to common eyes seems solid, may melt into air, into thin air.

Tom Sharpe's Wilt

Joshua Glenn — Sat, 28 Feb 2009 00:24:01 +0000

Do what thou Wilt

Joshua Glenn — Sat, 28 Feb 2009 00:25:14 +0000

This morning I read Tom Sharpe's 1976 campus novel, Wilt, because an AbeBooks survey of British readers named it one of the 10 funniest books ever. I was convalescing, and therefore receptive to inspiration. There's a moment near the end of Wilt when, having being grilled by the police for 72 hours because they suspect that he's killed his wife, Eva, Wilt (the nebbishy academic protag) has a self-overcoming, values-revaluing, universe-reconsidering breakthrough.

All the encumbrances of possessions, habits, salary and status, all the social conformities, the niceties of estimation of himself and other people which he and Eva had acquired, all these had gone. And whatever happened he would never again succumb to the siren calls of self-effacement.... The race was not to the swift after all, it was the the indefatigably inconsequential and life was random, anarchic, and chaotic. Rules were made to be broken and the man with the grasshopper mind was one jump ahead of all the others.

Aha! As I recall, you'll find a similar breakthrough in several of the funniest British and American novels: Catch-22, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, Lucky Jim, perhaps even Bridget Jones's Diary. Call it a hilobrow secular religion, smuggled past the censors since midcentury in the form of comic novels.

Zhan Ziqian's turtle

Joshua Glenn — Sat, 28 Feb 2009 00:36:55 +0000

Turtle style

Joshua Glenn — Sat, 28 Feb 2009 00:46:40 +0000

The ironist stands above herself and the universe and looks quizzically at the scene. She's a turtle bravely sticking her neck out.

Turtle by Zhan Ziqian

Against the charge that the ironist “has a purely aesthetic attitude towards life,” Randolph Bourne insists (in "The Life of Irony," a 1913 Atlantic Monthly essay) that

The ironist is ironical not because he does not care, but because he cares too much.... The kind of aesthetic irony that Pater and Omar display is a paralyzed, half-seeing, half-caring reflection on life — a tame, domesticated irony with its wings cut, an irony that furnishes a justification and a command to inaction. It is the result not of exquisitely refined feelings, but of social anaesthesia.

We've been encouraged to think of irony as a defensive sensibility. In fact, the ironist is MORE, not less, vulnerable than the rest of us.

zhan-ziqian-turtle1

Joshua Glenn — Sat, 28 Feb 2009 00:55:34 +0000

zhan-ziqian-turtle500

Joshua Glenn — Sat, 28 Feb 2009 00:56:32 +0000

ethanlipton

Joshua Glenn — Mon, 02 Mar 2009 16:59:47 +0000

New York Mag recognizes hilobrow talent

Joshua Glenn — Mon, 02 Mar 2009 17:36:42 +0000

... every once in a while. In the magazine's annual Best of New York issue, Ethan Lipton And His Orchestra were named Best Lounge Act. Hilobrow — one of whom named the video for EL&HO's "Hit It" Best Video of the Year, back in '07 — applauds this decision. Here's the video:

cupkittens

Matthew Battles — Mon, 02 Mar 2009 18:34:39 +0000

cupkittens1

Matthew Battles — Mon, 02 Mar 2009 18:35:23 +0000

Re-Enchanting the Meme

Matthew Battles — Mon, 02 Mar 2009 18:40:22 +0000

Julian Dibbell, anthropologist of the tribes of technology, has written an entertaining and useful consideration of kittens. Specifically, he's writing about the viral video Kittens Inspired by Kittens, in which a young girl re-enchants the LOLcats meme with her voiceover captions of pictures of cute felines (in the process feloniously pirating Kittens, a LOLcat-inspired coffeetable book). In his blog post, Dibbell writes about the discomfort videos like this engender in us—a discomfort, he argues, that arises from the sense of taboo-breaking that seems an inherent quality of online experience. In place of "taboo," however, Dibbell suggests "propriety":

The word has an obvious relevance to discussions of children online (in which the closely and etymologically related notion of the “inappropriate” is constantly deployed). But it shares etymological roots with “property” as well — both words deriving from the Latin proprius, meaning variously “one’s own,” “peculiar,” “permanent,” “characteristic” — and I believe that it could only improve the discussion of online “intellectual property” if that oppressively legalistic conceptual abomination were trashed entirely and replaced by a more humane, more ethical conception of intellectual propriety, of words and ideas bound meaningfully but never exclusively to the individuals who generate them. The word fits even in discussing the cultural problematic of memes, which seem to have an alien, viral life of their own and to disrupt, with their productivity-draining invasiveness, our sense of the proper relationship between work and leisure.

We've accomodated ourselves to the notion of ideas and stories as "property" to such an extent that their repurposing gives us the heebie-jeebies. Dibbell reminds us that before creative acts and thing were property, they were the work of gods and spirits. In this light the concept of the "meme," although quite useful for understanding remix culture, represents the original work of creative genius in tarnished and diminished form. Perhaps it's time to re-enchant the meme, and give the "alien, viral life" of ideas its full measure of liberating, challenging power.

431px-victory-garden

Matthew Battles — Mon, 02 Mar 2009 20:46:26 +0000

wallace_stevens_sitting

Matthew Battles — Tue, 03 Mar 2009 17:48:55 +0000

The Animated Poets Society

Matthew Battles — Tue, 03 Mar 2009 17:50:29 +0000

YouTube channel of the week: poetryanimations, where portraits and photographs of the likes of Baudelaire, Dickinson, and Tennyson are moved to recite their works, often in the poets' own voices. My attention was captured by Wallace Stevens, impassive as a bullfrog, reading his "No Ideas But In Things". The animations are the work of Jim Clark, a videographer and sound recordist based in London. Clark mars his work with too-frequent copyright declarations in bold type. But as a selection of online hilobrow curiosa, his short movies are worth a look.

Woolf in 1923

Joshua Glenn — Wed, 04 Mar 2009 12:56:51 +0000

Woolf contra Middlebrow

Joshua Glenn — Wed, 04 Mar 2009 12:57:34 +0000

To THE EDITOR OF THE "NEW STATESMAN" [October 1932, unsent] Sir, Will you allow me to draw your attention to the fact that in a review of a book by me (October ) your reviewer omitted to use the word Highbrow? The review, save for that omission, gave me so much pleasure that I am driven to ask you, at the risk of appearing unduly egotistical, whether your reviewer, a man of obvious intelligence, intended to deny my claim to that title? I say "claim," for surely I may claim that title when a great critic, who is also a great novelist, a rare and enviable combination, always calls me a highbrow when he condescends to notice my work in a great newspaper; and, further, always finds space to inform not only myself, who know it already, but the whole British Empire, who hang on his words, that I live in Bloomsbury? Is your critic unaware of that fact too? Or does he, for all his intelligence, maintain that it is unnecessary in reviewing a book to add the postal address of the writer? His answer to these questions, though of real value to me, is of no possible interest to the public at large. Of that I am well aware. But since larger issues are involved, since the Battle of the Brows troubles, I am told, the evening air, since the finest minds of our age have lately been engaged in debating, not without that passion which befits a noble cause, what a highbrow is and what a lowbrow, which is better and which is worse, may I take this opportunity to express my opinion and at the same time draw attention to certain aspects of the question which seem to me to have been unfortunately overlooked? Now there can be no two opinions as to what a highbrow is. He is the man or woman of thoroughbred intelligence who rides his mind at a gallop across country in pursuit of an idea. That is why I have always been so proud to be called highbrow. That is why, if I could be more of a highbrow I would. I honour and respect highbrows. Some of my relations have been highbrows; and some, but by no means all, of my friends. To be a highbrow, a complete and representative highbrow, a highbrow like Shakespeare, Dickens, Byron, Shelley, Keats, Charlotte Bronte, Scott, Jane Austen, Flaubert, Hardy or Henry James — to name a few highbrows from the same profession chosen at random — is of course beyond the wildest dreams of my imagination. And, though I would cheerfully lay myself down in the dust and kiss the print of their feet, no person of sense will deny that this passionate preoccupation of theirs — riding across country in pursuit of ideas — often leads to disaster. Undoubtedly, they come fearful croppers. Take Shelley — what a mess he made of his life! And Byron, getting into bed with first one woman and then with another and dying in the mud at Missolonghi. Look at Keats, loving poetry and Fanny Brawne so intemperately that he pined and died of consumption at the age of twenty–six. Charlotte Bronte again — I have been assured on good authority that Charlotte Bronte was, with the possible exception of Emily, the worst governess in the British Isles. Then there was Scott — he went bankrupt, and left, together with a few magnificent novels, one house, Abbotsford, which is perhaps the ugliest in the whole Empire. But surely these instances are enough — I need not further labour the point that highbrows, for some reason or another, are wholly incapable of dealing successfully with what is called real life. That is why, and here I come to a point that is often surprisingly ignored, they honour so wholeheartedly and depend so completely upon those who are called lowbrows. By a lowbrow is meant of course a man or a woman of thoroughbred vitality who rides his body in pursuit of a living at a gallop across life. That is why I honour and respect lowbrows — and I have never known a highbrow who did not. In so far as I am a highbrow (and my imperfections in that line are well known to me) I love lowbrows; I study them; I always sit next the conductor in an omnibus and try to get him to tell me what it is like — being a conductor. In whatever company I am I always try to know what it is like — being a conductor, being a woman with ten children and thirty–five shillings a week, being a stockbroker, being an admiral, being a bank clerk, being a dressmaker, being a duchess, being a miner, being a cook, being a prostitute. All that lowbrows do is of surpassing interest and wonder to me, because, in so far as I am a highbrow, I cannot do things myself. This brings me to another point which is also surprisingly overlooked. Lowbrows need highbrows and honour them just as much as highbrows need lowbrows and honour them. This too is not a matter that requires much demonstration. You have only to stroll along the Strand on a wet winter’s night and watch the crowds lining up to get into the movies. These lowbrows are waiting, after the day’s work, in the rain, sometimes for hours, to get into the cheap seats and sit in hot theatres in order to see what their lives look like. Since they are lowbrows, engaged magnificently and adventurously in riding full tilt from one end of life to the other in pursuit of a living, they cannot see themselves doing it. Yet nothing interests them more. Nothing matters to them more. It is one of the prime necessities of life to them — to be shown what life looks like. And the highbrows, of course, are the only people who can show them. Since they are the only people who do not do things, they are the only people who can see things being done. This is so — and so it is I am certain; nevertheless we are told — the air buzzes with it by night, the press booms with it by day, the very donkeys in the fields do nothing but bray it, the very curs in the streets do nothing but bark it — "Highbrows hate lowbrows! Lowbrows hate highbrows!" — when highbrows need lowbrows, when lowbrows need highbrows, when they cannot exist apart, when one is the complement and other side of the other! How has such a lie come into existence? Who has set this malicious gossip afloat? There can be no doubt about that either. It is the doing of the middlebrows. They are the people, I confess, that I seldom regard with entire cordiality. They are the go–betweens; they are the busy–bodies who run from one to the other with their tittle tattle and make all the mischief — the middlebrows, I repeat. But what, you may ask, is a middlebrow? And that, to tell the truth, is no easy question to answer. They are neither one thing nor the other. They are not highbrows, whose brows are high; nor lowbrows, whose brows are low. Their brows are betwixt and between. They do not live in Bloomsbury which is on high ground; nor in Chelsea, which is on low ground. Since they must live somewhere presumably, they live perhaps in South Kensington, which is betwixt and between. The middlebrow is the man, or woman, of middlebred intelligence who ambles and saunters now on this side of the hedge, now on that, in pursuit of no single object, neither art itself nor life itself, but both mixed indistinguishably, and rather nastily, with money, fame, power, or prestige. The middlebrow curries favour with both sides equally. He goes to the lowbrows and tells them that while he is not quite one of them, he is almost their friend. Next moment he rings up the highbrows and asks them with equal geniality whether he may not come to tea. Now there are highbrows — I myself have known duchesses who were highbrows, also charwomen, and they have both told me with that vigour of language which so often unites the aristocracy with the working classes, that they would rather sit in the coal cellar, together, than in the drawing–room with middlebrows and pour out tea. I have myself been asked — but may I, for the sake of brevity, cast this scene which is only partly fictitious, into the form of fiction? — I myself, then, have been asked to come and "see" them — how strange a passion theirs is for being "seen"! They ring me up, therefore, at about eleven in the morning, and ask me to come to tea. I go to my wardrobe and consider, rather lugubriously, what is the right thing to wear? We highbrows may be smart, or we may be shabby; but we never have the right thing to wear. I proceed to ask next: What is the right thing to say? Which is the right knife to use? What is the right book to praise? All these are things I do not know for myself. We highbrows read what we like and do what we like and praise what we like. We also know what we dislike — for example, thin bread and butter tea. The difficulty of eating thin bread and butter in white kid gloves has always seemed to me one of life’s more insuperable problems. Then I dislike bound volumes of the classics behind plate glass. Then I distrust people who call both Shakespeare and Wordsworth equally "Bill" — it is a habit moreover that leads to confusion. And in the matter of clothes, I like people either to dress very well; or to dress very badly; I dislike the correct thing in clothes. Then there is the question of games. Being a highbrow I do not play them. But I love watching people play who have a passion for games. These middlebrows pat balls about; they poke their bats and muff their catches at cricket. And when poor Middlebrow mounts on horseback and that animal breaks into a canter, to me there is no sadder sight in all Rotten Row. To put it in a nutshell (in order to get on with the story) that tea party was not wholly a success, nor altogether a failure; for Middlebrow, who writes, following me to the door, clapped me briskly on the back, and said "I'm sending you my book!" (Or did he call it "stuff?") And his book comes — sure enough, though called, so symbolically, KEEPAWAY, [Keepaway is the name of a preparation used to distract the male dog from the female at certain seasons] it comes. And I read a page here, and I read a page there (I am breakfasting, as usual, in bed). And it is not well written; nor is it badly written. It is not proper, nor is it improper — in short it is betwixt and between. Now if there is any sort of book for which I have, perhaps, an imperfect sympathy, it is the betwixt and between. And so, though I suffer from the gout of a morning — but if one's ancestors for two or three centuries have tumbled into bed dead drunk one has deserved a touch of that malady — I rise. I dress. I proceed weakly to the window. I take that book in my swollen right hand and toss it gently over the hedge into the field. The hungry sheep — did I remember to say that this part of the story takes place in the country? — the hungry sheep look up but are not fed. But to have done with fiction and its tendency to lapse into poetry — I will now report a perfectly prosaic conversation in words of one syllable. I often ask my friends the lowbrows, over our muffins and honey, why it is that while we, the highbrows, never buy a middlebrow book, or go to a middlebrow lecture, or read, unless we are paid for doing so, a middlebrow review, they, on the contrary, take these middlebrow activities so seriously? Why, I ask (not of course on the wireless), are you so damnably modest? Do you think that a description of your lives, as they are, is too sordid and too mean to be beautiful? Is that why you prefer the middlebrow version of what they have the impudence to call real humanity? — this mixture of geniality and sentiment stuck together with a sticky slime of calves–foot jelly? The truth, if you would only believe it, is much more beautiful than any lie. Then again, I continue, how can you let the middlebrows teach you how to write? — you, who write so beautifully when you write naturally, that I would give both my hands to write as you do — for which reason I never attempt it, but do my best to learn the art of writing as a highbrow should. And again, I press on, brandishing a muffin on the point of a tea spoon, how dare the middlebrows teach you how to read — Shakespeare for instance? All you have to do is to read him. The Cambridge edition is both good and cheap. If you find HAMLET difficult, ask him to tea. He is a highbrow. Ask Ophelia to meet him. She is a lowbrow. Talk to them, as you talk to me, and you will know more about Shakespeare than all the middlebrows in the world can teach you — I do not think, by the way, from certain phrases that Shakespeare liked middlebrows, or Pope either. To all this the lowbrows reply — but I cannot imitate their style of talking — that they consider themselves to be common people without education. It is very kind of the middlebrows to try to teach them culture. And after all, the lowbrows continue, middlebrows, like other people, have to make money. There must be money in teaching and in writing books about Shakespeare. We all have to earn our livings nowadays, my friends the lowbrows remind me. I quite agree. Even those of us whose Aunts came a cropper riding in India and left them an annual income of four hundred and fifty pounds, now reduced, thanks to the war and other luxuries, to little more than two hundred odd, even we have to do that. And we do it, too, by writing about anybody who seems amusing — enough has been written about Shakespeare — Shakespeare hardly pays. We highbrows, I agree, have to earn our livings; but when we have earned enough to live on, then we live. When the middlebrows, on the contrary, have earned enough to live on, they go on earning enough to buy — what are the things that middlebrows always buy? Queen Anne furniture (faked, but none the less expensive); first editions of dead writers, always the worst; pictures, or reproductions from pictures, by dead painters; houses in what is called "the Georgian style" — but never anything new, never a picture by a living painter, or a chair by a living carpenter, or books by living writers, for to buy living art requires living taste. And, as that kind of art and that kind of taste are what middlebrows call "highbrow," "Bloomsbury," poor middlebrow spends vast sums on sham antiques, and has to keep at it scribbling away, year in, year out, while we highbrows ring each other up, and are off for a day's jaunt into the country. That is the worst of course of living in a set — one likes being with one's friends. Have I then made my point clear, sir, that the true battle in my opinion lies not between highbrow and lowbrow, but between highbrows and lowbrows joined together in blood brotherhood against the bloodless and pernicious pest who comes between? If the B.B.C. stood for anything but the Betwixt and Between Company they would use their control of the air not to stir strife between brothers, but to broadcast the fact that highbrows and lowbrows must band together to exterminate a pest which is the bane of all thinking and living. It may be, to quote from your advertisement columns, that "terrifically sensitive" lady novelists overestimate the dampness and dinginess of this fungoid growth. But all I can say is that when, lapsing into that stream which people call, so oddly, consciousness, and gathering wool from the sheep that have been mentioned above, I ramble round my garden in the suburbs, middlebrow seems to me to be everywhere. "What’s that?" I cry. "Middlebrow on the cabbages? Middlebrow infecting that poor old sheep? And what about the moon?" I look up and, behold, the moon is under eclipse. "Middlebrow at it again!" I exclaim. "Middlebrow obscuring, dulling, tarnishing and coarsening even the silver edge of Heaven’s own scythe." (I "draw near to poetry," see advt.) And then my thoughts, as Freud assures us thoughts will do, rush (Middlebrow’s saunter and simper, out of respect for the Censor) to sex, and I ask of the sea–gulls who are crying on desolate sea sands and of the farm hands who are coming home rather drunk to their wives, what will become of us, men and women, if Middlwbrow has his way with us, and there is only a middle sex but no husbands or wives? The next remark I address with the utmost humility to the Prime Minister. "What, sir," I demand, "will be the fate of the British Empire and of our Dominions Across the Seas if Middlebrows prevail? Will you not, sir, read a pronouncement of an authoritative nature from Broadcasting House?" Such are the thoughts, such are the fancies that visit "cultured invalidish ladies with private means" (see advt.) when they stroll in their suburban gardens and look at the cabbages and at the red brick villas that have been built by middlebrows so that middlebrows may look at the view. Such are the thoughts "at once gay and tragic and deeply feminine" (see advt.) of one who has not yet "been driven out of Bloomsbury" (advt. again), a place where lowbrows and highbrows live happily together on equal terms and priests are not, nor priestesses, and, to be quite frank, the adjective "priestly" is neither often heard nor held in high esteem. Such are the thoughts of one who will stay in Bloomsbury until the Duke of Bedford, rightly concerned for the respectability of his squares, raises the rent so high that Bloomsbury is safe for middlebrows to live in. Then she will leave. May I conclude, as I began, by thanking your reviewer for his very courteous and interesting review, but may I tell him that though he did not, for reasons best known to himself, call me a highbrow, there is no name in the world that I prefer? I ask nothing better than that all reviewers, for ever, and everywhere, should call me a highbrow. I will do my best to oblige them. If they like to add Bloomsbury, W.C.1, that is the correct postal address, and my telephone number is in the Directory. But if your reviewer, or any other reviewer, dares hint that I live in South Kensington, I will sue him for libel. If any human being, man, woman, dog, cat or half–crushed worm dares call me "middlebrow" I will take my pen and stab him, dead. Yours etc., Virginia Woolf.

Hi-Lo Foods

Joshua Glenn — Thu, 05 Mar 2009 02:34:01 +0000

Hi-Lo

Joshua Glenn — Thu, 05 Mar 2009 02:35:23 +0000

Hi-Lo Foods is a Jamaica Plain, Mass., supermarket whose sign we've always found inspirational.

steinberg_middlebrow

Joshua Glenn — Thu, 05 Mar 2009 13:23:09 +0000

steinberg_middlebrow

Joshua Glenn — Thu, 05 Mar 2009 13:24:02 +0000

Russell Lynes defends Middlebrow...

Joshua Glenn — Thu, 05 Mar 2009 13:53:13 +0000

in a 1949 Harper's Magazine essay [subscribers only] titled "Highbrow, Lowbrow, Middlebrow." Illustration by Saul Steinberg, below. Lynes, who was an editor at Harper's at the time, claims to be anti-snobbery, which is fine. But he's also anti-intellectual:

Our heroes now are not the Carnegies or the Morgans but the intellectuals — the atomic scientists, the cultural historians, the writers, the commentators, the thinkers of global thoughts who, we assume for lack of another faith, know better than anyone else how we should cope with what we call with new resonance our national destiny. What we want are oracles, and the best substitutes we can find are the intellectuals.... What we are headed for is a sort of social structure in which the highbrows are the elite, the middlebrows are the bourgeoisie, and the lowbrows are hoi polloi.

Having launched this dubious metaphor — in which America is not a republic but a crypto-aristocracy run by affected, effeminate, out-of-it, not-as-clever-as-they-think highbrows who manipulate the lumpen lowbrows — Lynes goes so far as to suggest that the virtuous, value-creating middlebrows are liberal capitalism's only bulwark against these frauds. Which is why highbrows despise them.

The middlebrows are influential today, but neither the highbrows nor the lowbrows like them; and if we ever have intellectual totalitarianism, it may well be the lowbrows and the highbrows who will run things, and the middlebrows who will be exiled in boxcars to a collecting point probably in the vicinity of Independence, Missouri.

Writing an article in 1949 that compares one group of Americans to Nazis, and another to their Jewish victims, strikes us as extraordinary. There's more:

The fact that nowadays everyone has access to culture through schools and colleges, through the press, radio, and museums, disturbs [the highbrow] deeply; for it tends to blur the distinctions between those who are serious and those who are frivolous.... Such an elite would like to see the middlebrow eliminated, for it regards him as the undesirable element in our, and anybody else's, culture.

And this:

The highbrows would like, of course, to eliminate the middlebrows and devise a society that would approximate an intellectual feudal system in which the lowbrows do the work and create folk arts, and the highbrows do the thinking and create fine arts. All middlebrows, presumably, would have their radios taken away, be suspended from society until they had agreed to give up their subscriptions to the Book-of-the-Month, turned their color reproductions over to a Commission for the Dissolution of Middlebrow Taste, and renounced their affiliation with all educational and other cultural institutions whatsoever. They would be taxed for the support of all writers, artists, musicians, critics, and critics-of-criticism whose production could be certified "serious" — said writers, artists, musicians, and critics to be selected by representatives of qualified magazines with circulations of not more than five thousand copies. Middlebrows, both upper and lower, who persisted in 'devaluating the precious, infecting the healthy, corrupting the honest, and stultifying the wise' would be disposed of forthwith.

Lynes, whose satirical tone made his argument impervious to criticism ("I was just kidding!"), was obviously on the CIA's cultural-Cold-War payroll. In this Harper's essay we see the rhetoric of the dominant discourse (which seeks to make the established state of things — i.e., liberal capitalism — seem permanent, natural, and inevitable) operating at its most effective. An impressive performance!

Kindle

Joshua Glenn — Thu, 05 Mar 2009 14:50:17 +0000

Hilobrows are emotional, yes; sentimental, (mostly) no. Which means that although we may worship, we try not to fetishize. Or scapegoat, which is the negative form of fetishization. Which brings us to Kindle, and the book. We dig books and brick-and-mortar bookstores as we've known them, and hope they'll stick around. But we don't buy into the Kindle- and Amazon-inspired alarmism about the Death of Book Culture. Yesterday, at his new website, our friend Richard Nash, recently departed editor of Soft Skull Press, expressed a contrarian opinion.

The book isn’t in trouble, it’s that everyone who takes some of the money that a consumer pays for an author’s content need to re-justify their share and not assume that because they used to get that % they still in fact deserve that %. And I sense too many people hiding behind the notion that this has something to do with grandiose cultural notions about the life and death of the book rather than more quotidien concerns about the vision and competence of individuals populating this business.

Also, a brilliant library-ologist of our acquaintance wrote today on the Atlantic Monthly's website that

Changes in their outward form — from scribal artifact to assembly-line product to networked device — have historically been the means by which books, and the knowledge and culture they transmit, become more widely and equitably distributed, enriching human society.

Our culture of letters is not in great shape; it's true; but don't make the Kindle your scapegoat.

kindleblogshot_540x360

Joshua Glenn — Thu, 05 Mar 2009 18:47:01 +0000

hi-los250

Matthew Battles — Fri, 06 Mar 2009 02:40:22 +0000

The Empire of Hilo

Matthew Battles — Fri, 06 Mar 2009 02:58:33 +0000

The hilo grip on culture may be esoteric, but it's intimate and comprehensive. It's a storied jazz combo from the mid-twentieth century—featuring Grammy winner Gene Puerling! It's a high-concept, low-budget film festival ( with a cute trailer). It's sweet, sweet weather. It's vintage design. But it's also Danica Lo in the New York Post—for sure! It's a cool math game for kids, even if its Flash doesn't work. It's open Wednesday through Sunday 8 PM – 2 AM in the warehouse district. Backwards, it's a boss band. In Omaha, it's poker. You know it's carb-smart. And nothing says "hi-lo" like the phrase "straight to video." Hilo is everywhere. But Hilobrow? We have work to do.

The Bibliophallic Urge

Matthew Battles — Tue, 10 Mar 2009 12:27:00 +0000

Hardcore anti-legend and bibliophile Glenn Danzig talks about his library, which seems to be located in a grotto bathed in the glow of bioluminescent aquatic creatures. His bookishness calls to mind Jorge Luis Borges, who described a universal library that partakes of the infernal:

Man, the imperfect librarian, may be the product of chance or of malevolent demiurgi; the universe, with its elegant endowment of shelves, of enigmatical volumes, of inexhaustible stairways for the traveler and latrines for the seated librarian, can only be the work of a god. To perceive the distance between the divine and the human, it is enough to compare these crude wavering symbols which my fallible hand scrawls on the cover of a book, with the organic characters inside: punctual, delicate, perfectly black, inimitably symmetrical.

Video brought to our attention by Mike McGonigal of Yeti; image of Davis from the blog The National Evil.

danzig

Matthew Battles — Tue, 10 Mar 2009 12:36:14 +0000

1120917189_0869

Joshua Glenn — Tue, 10 Mar 2009 12:56:20 +0000

arf

Joshua Glenn — Tue, 10 Mar 2009 13:03:10 +0000

Say it ain't so, Yoe!

Joshua Glenn — Tue, 10 Mar 2009 13:17:33 +0000

Craig Yoe's most recent Arf book (published by Fantagraphics) may be his last. In a March 6 email to those of us who've reviewed previous installments of his brilliant series of attractive and engaging books exploring (with a scholar's thoroughness and a fanboy's passion) "the unholy marriage of [highbrow] art and [lowbrow] comics," Yoe writes:

The latest, and probably last, Arf, titled Comic Arf, came out. I teamed up R. Crumb, Art Spiegelman, Patrick McDonnell, Al Jaffee, Gary Panter, Johnny Ryan, Bil Keane, Jules Feiffer, Jaime Hernandez, Mike Mignola, Mark Beyer, Denis Kitchen, Ivan Brunetti, R.O. Blechman, Matt Groening, Bill Griffith, Sergio Aragones, Kaz, Hunt Emerson, Jooste Swarte, Mark Newgarden, R. Sikoryak, Richard Sala, Sam Henderson, Seymour Chwast, Charles Barsotti, Mort Walker, Mark Beyer, Johnny Ryan and Kim Deitch with the genius cartoonist Milt Gross. Comic Arf was my best Arf attempt yet. It was ignored.... I have no plans to do more Arfs — who needs the aggravation?

Say it ain't so, Yoe!The world needs more Arf. Support Yoe's hilobrow cultural archaeology by purchasing the following recent titles: COMIC ARF | BOODY | SECRET IDENTITY: THE FETISH ART OF SUPERMAN'S CO-CREATOR JOE SHUSTER

***

The following item was published in The Boston Globe's Ideas section (as part of the weekly "Examined Life" feature), on July 10, 2005. POP ARTISTS Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein weren't the first painters to appreciate the visual style of comics: It seems that Salvador Dali tried his hand at drawing comics as early as 1916, when he was 12. Dali's comics are just one of the revelations in Modern Arf: Artists and Models (Fantagraphics), the first installment in a planned series of books, edited by cartoonist and designer Craig Yoe, that will explore the myriad ways in which high art and lowbrow comic books and strips have overlapped so far. The ''Artists and Models" number, for example, treats us to a wide selection of one-panel gags about artists' models, including a 1954 Picasso sketch of a monkey painting a nude; an eye-popping mini-monograph on the influence of Cubism on Jack Kirby (The Fantastic Four, X-Men, Captain America); and a history of the gap-toothed, red-headed ''What, Me Worry?" kid who, though made famous in the '50s as Alfred E. Neuman, the mascot of Mad, had appeared on novelty postcards since 1890. ''I hate to tell this to The Boston Globe, but 'The Kid' probably started as a cartoonist's stereotype of an Irish idiot boy," Yoe, an obsessive collector of comics ephemera, says via e-mail from his home in Peekskill, N.Y. And why did he decide to do these books? ''I've always appreciated the sensibilities of taboo-breaking and irreverence that modernist artists bring to their medium," Yoe explains. ''I appreciate it when cartoonists have that kind of attitude, too."

800px-lotus_flower

Matthew Battles — Tue, 10 Mar 2009 17:03:14 +0000

800px-lotus_flower1

Matthew Battles — Tue, 10 Mar 2009 17:03:35 +0000

http://www.google.com/imgres?imgurl=http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/6e/Lotus_flower.JPG&imgrefurl=http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Lotus_flower.JPG&h=960&w=1280&sz=588&tbnid=Qzd_W0KajETzsM::&tbnh=113&tbnw=150&prev=/images%3Fq%3Dlotus%2Bflower%2Bcreative%2Bcommons%2Bphoto&usg=__kVEWv5Wy5LaOCu7ur8d7wQJVEjg=&ei=ppy2ScuvJ4rGtgfkt7SoCQ&sa=X&oi=image_result&resnum=1&ct=image&cd=1

Four Reasons Why Unsustainability Is Totally Awesome

Matthew Battles — Tue, 10 Mar 2009 17:05:09 +0000

[caption id="attachment_228" align="alignleft" width="150" caption="photograph by Jamil"]photograph by Jamil" title="800px-lotus_flower1" width="150" height="150" class="size-thumbnail wp-image-228" />[/caption] 1. Life is suffering; 2. The cause of suffering is craving; 3. The end of suffering is possible; 4. The way to suffering is found through right view, right intention, right speech, right action, right livelihood, right effort, right mindfulness, and right concentration.

From the Hilobrow Library

Joshua Glenn — Tue, 10 Mar 2009 17:25:28 +0000

putnam-jacobsen-duffield1917

Joshua Glenn — Tue, 10 Mar 2009 21:23:54 +0000

surveyweb1

Joshua Glenn — Wed, 11 Mar 2009 14:43:38 +0000

hockey_mask

Matthew Battles — Wed, 11 Mar 2009 15:38:52 +0000

Parker and the Slashers

Matthew Battles — Wed, 11 Mar 2009 15:41:22 +0000

Atlantic correspondent James Parker is the hilobrow critic par excellence. Whether reviewing a biography of G. K. Chesterton or musing on the meaning of slasher films (as he does in the forthcoming issue of the Atlantic Monthly), Parker's criticism takes humankind—the needy, striving, but sometimes transcendant self with its long shadow of hungers and longings—as the measure of the work. Middlebrow critics will tell you that slasher films chart civilization's collective decay. But Parker reminds us that long before Jason, we had Grendel; before Beowulf there was the Bible's Cain. "Civilizational collapse, the rending of the established order, has always been part of the slasher’s brief," Parker writes. "Getting slashed is human, all too human." In a video commentary at the Atlantic's web site, Parker discusses the give-and-take that makes the slasher film a kind of ritual:

schreck

Matthew Battles — Thu, 12 Mar 2009 17:13:38 +0000

Bloodsucking Middlebrow Critics

Matthew Battles — Thu, 12 Mar 2009 17:51:45 +0000

National Geographic News reports that the skull of a plague victim unearthed near Venice exhibits an unmistakable hallmark of treatment for vampirism. The woman's mouth was forced open by a brick—a measure that prevented her from spreading the plague by chewing her burial shrouds, the alleged modus operandi of pestilential vampires. The unfortunate woman's remains shed light on the terror of the plague in medieval Venice; more interestingly, they testify to a fear of the undead that is ubiquitous and normative in human history. So when New Yorker critic Joan Acocella writes that vampires "are merely symbols of the real-life sociopolitical horrors facing the late Victorians," we get miffed. Middlebrow criticism like this has it exactly backwards. Middlebrow critics suck the blood of the work of art, draining its life-force, leaving it dessicated and dead; the hilobrow critic celebrates the work and the risk ventured in its making. The sociopolitical horrors that surround us, after all, access ancient stirrings. In the late nineteenth century, someone of Bram Stoker's cohort might have gotten exercised over Eastern European emigrants and emancipated women; today, we fret over rapacious hedge-fund managers, Rush Limbaugh, and ghost neighborhoods of foreclosed and abandoned homes. But these things aren't "symbolized"; they are the symbols. And works of art are the ritual practices designed to connect them—and us—to the wells of the unconscious. When we say that hilobrow reenchants the meme, this is what we mean.

1984

Joshua Glenn — Sat, 14 Mar 2009 00:23:51 +0000

We [heart] highbrow books with lowbrow covers

Joshua Glenn — Sat, 14 Mar 2009 00:25:45 +0000

brave

Joshua Glenn — Sat, 14 Mar 2009 00:28:42 +0000

31-1

Matthew Battles — Sat, 14 Mar 2009 21:31:54 +0000

monroe1

Joshua Glenn — Sun, 15 Mar 2009 00:25:26 +0000

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Joshua Glenn — Sun, 15 Mar 2009 00:26:23 +0000

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Joshua Glenn — Sun, 15 Mar 2009 00:32:34 +0000

mariltn-ulysses-1954

Joshua Glenn — Sun, 15 Mar 2009 00:33:36 +0000

Hilobrow Pinup

Joshua Glenn — Sun, 15 Mar 2009 00:37:38 +0000

Long Island, Summer of 1954 — what's that hardcover book that Marilyn is reading? Daphne du Maurier's Mary Anne? Irving Stone's Love is Eternal? Can't... quite... make it out. Can we zoom in, please? Oh!

murger500

Joshua Glenn — Mon, 16 Mar 2009 16:26:57 +0000

sartre500

Joshua Glenn — Mon, 16 Mar 2009 16:27:00 +0000

zola500

Joshua Glenn — Mon, 16 Mar 2009 16:27:04 +0000

Hilobrow Cover Art (2)

Joshua Glenn — Mon, 16 Mar 2009 16:33:31 +0000

lonelyhearts

Joshua Glenn — Mon, 16 Mar 2009 18:58:33 +0000

lonelyhearts500

Joshua Glenn — Mon, 16 Mar 2009 18:59:47 +0000

great-gatsby-sm

Joshua Glenn — Mon, 16 Mar 2009 19:02:13 +0000

sanctuary

Joshua Glenn — Mon, 16 Mar 2009 19:02:15 +0000

Hilobrow Cover Art (3)

Joshua Glenn — Mon, 16 Mar 2009 19:03:46 +0000

batman-522

Matthew Battles — Tue, 17 Mar 2009 11:51:52 +0000

Zarathustra vs. the Muck-Encrusted Mockery of a Man!

Joshua Glenn — Tue, 17 Mar 2009 11:55:55 +0000

Forget middlebrow Jane Austen zombies. Hilobrow's research department has just discovered a literary mashup written by none other than Friedrich Nietzsche!

And Zarathustra went thoughtfully on, further and lower down, through forests and past moory bottoms; as it happeneth, however, to every one who meditateth upon hard matters, he trod thereby unawares upon a humanoid plant. And lo, there spurted into his face all at once a cry of pain, and two curses and twenty bad invectives, so that in his fright he raised his stick and also struck the trodden one. And thereupon the sitting one got up, and pulled his naked arm out of the swamp. For at first he had lain outstretched on the ground, hidden and indiscernible, like those who lie in wait for swamp-game. "But whatever art thou about!" called out Zarathustra in alarm. "Once I was an alchemist named Alec, of Holland, working night and day on spagyric, an herbal bio-restorative formula that might make forests out of deserts," gurgled the creature. "Fermenting, distilling, and extracting mineral components from the ash of swamp plants, I failed to notice the agents of my rivals, Mr. E, who caused my laboratory to explode. Drenched in salt--" "--The principle of fixity and incombustibility," Zarathustra murmured-- "--aye, and mercury--" "--the principle of fusibility and volatility," said Zarathustra-- "--and, what's worse, sulfur--" "--the principle of inflammability," Zarathustra did not fail to note-- "--I staggered forth into this swamp," gargled the thing of the swamp. "The chemicals, and forces within the bog, mutated me into--" "--a muck-encrusted mockery of a man!" Thus spake Zarathustra.

ALSO: John Holbo's school of literary criticism, the New Skrullicism | More on the New Skrullicism | Pazzo Books' appeal for classic-lit mashups of all kinds

1-1-1

Joshua Glenn — Tue, 17 Mar 2009 13:38:24 +0000

sth23d

Joshua Glenn — Tue, 17 Mar 2009 13:39:29 +0000

cgi-woman-the-uncanny-valley

Matthew Battles — Wed, 18 Mar 2009 13:00:11 +0000

Uncanny Valley Girls

Matthew Battles — Wed, 18 Mar 2009 13:04:36 +0000

The concept of the Uncanny Valley was proposed by Japanese roboticist Masahiro Mori, author of Buddha in the Machine (in which Mori asserts that a robot can achieve enlightenment). Mori noted the revulsion many observers feel for imperfectly realistic facsimiles of human beings. His "Uncanny Valley" describes a dip which he argued would be found in a graph of any observer's emotions as a robot or other humanoid simulacrum approached lifelikeness. The concept of the uncanny valley has been influential in robotics, but there is little evidence that the effect exists. While robots designed in the West have veered away from human likeness toward bauplanen inspired by nonhuman mammals, insects, and even fish, androids produced by Asia's thriving robotics industry seem to leap right into the deepest shadows of the uncanny valley. In Asia, robots flirt, serve drinks, and haul farmers around in handcarts as their designers nudge ever close to perfect anthropomorphic verisimilitude. The most recent example of this trend in Asian robotics is HRP-4C, a robot fashion model out of Japan's National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology. Freud described the uncanny as a feeling caused by any repetition that threatens the integrity we associate with selfhood. Déjà vu, trick mirror effects, coincidences and synchronicities and appearances of pattern amidst random phenomena--all of these we may lend a strange, haunted flavor to otherwise-normal circumstances. To Freud, such feelings betrayed the ego's discomfort with the existence of its shadowy aspect, the id. The German word for the uncanny, unheimlich or "un-home-ness," describes the sense of dislocation or alienation of such instances. To Freud, unheimlich was a universal. But the uncanny valley may be not a neurological but a cultural effect. Although proposed by a Japanese researcher, it may be tied to Western prohibitions against creating human likenesses dating back to ancient times--proscriptions that are particularly strong among the Western monotheisms. From the taboo on idolatry to the Golem legend to Frankenstein, Western culture frequently bespeaks a fear of the doppelgänger or double. This isn't to say that uncanny effects don't exist--quite the opposite. The uncanny is a profound aspect of human cognition. But Asian robot designers show us that we can learn to live with it. Perhaps robot designers in Japan, China, and Korea tend to lack some of the hang-ups of their counterparts in the West. In 2007, researchers tested for the uncanny valley effect by exposing observers to digitally-composed faces "morphed" by stages from nonhuman to near-human likeness. The observers did not report uncanny feelings from imperfect simulacra--unless those simulacra also included notable abnormalities like drastically out of scale eyes or other features. Notably, the observers in the study were students at Tokyo University.

charms

Matthew Battles — Fri, 20 Mar 2009 20:41:37 +0000

murder2copy

Matthew Battles — Fri, 20 Mar 2009 20:42:04 +0000

asme gemelle 2002

Matthew Battles — Fri, 20 Mar 2009 20:42:38 +0000

charms

Matthew Battles — Fri, 20 Mar 2009 20:44:06 +0000

murder

Matthew Battles — Fri, 20 Mar 2009 20:45:29 +0000

condivisioni

Matthew Battles — Fri, 20 Mar 2009 21:01:30 +0000

Abject Dreaming: The Art of Herbert Pfostl and Roberto Kusterle

Matthew Battles — Fri, 20 Mar 2009 21:03:37 +0000

Herbert Pfostl is an artist we'd like to know more about. His work combines found images and text with figural notions of animals and herbs, half-finished rubbings, and archetypal blots and smudges. Pfostl's drawings and mixed-media works invoke a library dear to hilobrow--Blake and Dickinson, Benjamin and Bataille. But Pfostl reads them with stained fingers. Like the great Czech animator Jan Svankmajer, Pfostl makes highbrow art with dirty fingers. Images like these may be found at Pfostl's blog, where they are accompanied with the quotations that inspire and animate them. Pfostl's book To Die No More is a compendium of quotations and images in the same vein. Although Italian photographer Roberto Kunsterle's medium and methods differ, his enigmatic monochromes are similarly compounded of dreams, abjection, and mythomania. In her essay "The Pornographic Imagination," Susan Sontag calls the obscene "a primal notion of human consciousness, (not merely) the backwash of a sick society’s aversion to the body." These artists remind us that hilobrow is not nobrow; it's not an easy way out. Abjection, horror, humiliation, obsession—these are aspects of consciousness that middlebrow tries to domesticate. But they are universal; they will have their art.

cheap-o-records-p129-by-tim-bean

Matthew Battles — Mon, 23 Mar 2009 14:17:37 +0000

Infinite Jest, the Photo Tour

Matthew Battles — Mon, 23 Mar 2009 14:20:33 +0000

[caption id="attachment_408" align="aligncenter" width="150" caption="Cheapo Records. Photo by Tim Bean"][/caption]Flickr user Tim Bean created a photographic tour of Boston locations mentioned in the novel Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace (1962-2008). Bean's photos are annotated and geo-tagged for reference. We're looking for other great examples of taggable, mashable photographic annotations of books we love. Readers, let us know what you find.

73666_145x80_generated__75lvgi76o0qjwppw3b11lw

Matthew Battles — Mon, 23 Mar 2009 19:43:28 +0000

Ecstatic Science

Matthew Battles — Mon, 23 Mar 2009 19:46:39 +0000

Here's a quick post pointing to Hulu's Cosmos channel, where Carl Sagan's entire groundbreaking PBS series may be streamed for free. Sagan's series introduced a generation to a universe that was both comprehensible and mystical--an ecstasy of rationalism. We're looking forward to diving back into the strangely wonder-filled universe of Carl Sagan. Thanks to Jason Kottke for spotting and blogging this.

Ada Lovelace. etched altoids tin. Hieronymus Isambard von Slatt 2009

Matthew Battles — Tue, 24 Mar 2009 15:16:14 +0000

Ada Lovelace & the Fire of Making

Matthew Battles — Tue, 24 Mar 2009 15:34:47 +0000

Steampunk artist and impresario Hieronymus Isambard von Slatt has joined the ranks of good people observing Ada Lovelace Day. See how he makes his Altoids tin etching of an Ada Lovelace portrait here. Ada Lovelace (1815-1852), the only legitimate child of Lord Byron, is remembered for championing Charles Babbage's "analytical engine," a mechanical forerunner of the computer. Ada Lovelace Day is a web-driven effort to celebrate women who make amazing things. Lots of bloggers, programmers, and engineers are being celebrated around the internet. Hilobrow wants to celebrate the work of the Flaming Lotus Girls, a San Francisco-based art collective that builds astonishing fire-belching kinetic sculptures. The Flaming Lotus Girls show that the energies of burning, forging, and making belong to us all.

Action Figure Smackdown!

Matthew Battles — Thu, 26 Mar 2009 12:37:45 +0000

We're happy that French-Canadian animator Patrick Boivin likes to play with toys. Ever wonder who'd win a Bruce Lee/Iron Man action figure smackdown? Ah, but things aren't so simple as that--not by half.

default

Matthew Battles — Thu, 26 Mar 2009 12:39:53 +0000

3392402827_852c4b3fe1_s

Matthew Battles — Sat, 28 Mar 2009 21:17:44 +0000

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Matthew Battles — Sat, 28 Mar 2009 21:20:47 +0000

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Matthew Battles — Sat, 28 Mar 2009 21:28:08 +0000

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Matthew Battles — Sat, 28 Mar 2009 21:30:12 +0000

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Matthew Battles — Sat, 28 Mar 2009 21:33:11 +0000

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Matthew Battles — Sat, 28 Mar 2009 21:34:45 +0000

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Matthew Battles — Sat, 28 Mar 2009 21:35:26 +0000

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Matthew Battles — Sat, 28 Mar 2009 21:43:32 +0000

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Matthew Battles — Sat, 28 Mar 2009 21:47:40 +0000

The Ether Dome

Matthew Battles — Sun, 29 Mar 2009 03:36:55 +0000

Today, at long last, I saw the Ether Dome. It's not a fan remix of a Mad Max movie, nor is it a fancifully named head shop. One of Boston's most neglected historic sites, the Ether Dome is the surgical theatre at Massachusetts General Hospital where the first demonstration of the use of ether in a medical procedure took place. It's also a small gem of a conference hall in the heart of the Bulfinch building, a nineteenth-century granite pile buried deep within the leviathan that is Mass General today. And finally, it's a bit of a wunderkammer as well, complete with a mummy and historic surgical implements in glass cases. Although the room is on the National Register of Historic Places, it's also a busy medical department's working conference room. Visiting it means a furtive, self-guided tour of the back offices of the anesthesiology department, where biohazard warnings loom, superannuated equipment stands parked in fluorescent stillness, and lockers stand in desultory files along the walls. The Ether Dome was gloomy when I entered--the room was empty and unused on a Saturday morning. Pale ranks of seats rose in shadow to the rim of the dome; up high, a bit of light leaked trough the cupola windows. Behind a little slatted door I found a control panel which allowed me to raise the window shades and open a louvered skylight, giving a soft glow to the surroundings. The cupola's vault copper-clad vault shone overhead. Directly beneath it, I stood on the Ether Dome's "stage," a wooden floor at the base of a fan of terraces where narrow-backed seats stand in prim order. There's a podium with a computer monitor; used regularly for professional conferences, the Ether Dome is tricked out with other amphitheatrical appurtenances such as stage lighting and an automatic projection screen. But at house right stood a glass cabinet with an ancient skeleton suspended within to watch the empty theater... ...while at the rear stands another case holding a mummy given to the hospital as an anatomy specimen: Alone in the Ether Dome, I fiddled with the lights and the shades for awhile, making the room glow now cool, now amber. I climbed the steep stairs to the topmost tier, where I sat for a time, the louvered sunlight ascribing its slow arc. I stared at the large oil painting at the head of the room, which depicts the ether demonstration of 1846: < ...and I suddenly realized what a show it must have been. The theatricality of it; the quiddity and Q.E.D. dazzle of it! Surrounded by glowering medicos, the wide-eyed patient submits to vapors emitted by the glass globe of Dr. William Morton, a Boston dentist. As physicians watch from the tiers, the surgeon works swiftly to excise a growth from the now-insensible patient's neck. Bearded shamans in black wool; blood and white linen; medicine as performance art in the clement light of the Ether Dome.

kittygenovese

Matthew Battles — Mon, 30 Mar 2009 13:56:24 +0000

Don't Be a Bystander: Remembering Kitty Genovese

Matthew Battles — Mon, 30 Mar 2009 14:07:47 +0000

[caption id="attachment_468" align="alignleft" width="216" caption="Kitty Genovese"][/caption]Winston Moseley's brutal murder of Kitty Genovese in the small hours of March 13, 1964 remains one of the most riveting stories in the annals of crime. In a famous New York Times story about the murder, Martin Gansberg reported that thirty-eight witnesses had watched from their window on that cold night in the Queens neighborhood of Kew Gardens without intervening on Ms. Genovese's behalf. Genovese's murder became the classic case of apathy and alienation in urban life, spurring reform of police alert procedures, spurring psychological research, and inspiring the Neighborhood Watch program. The story of the murder has thrived in television, film, and literature as well. In Alan Moore and Dave Gibbon's Watchmen, the character Walter Kovacs is compelled to become Rorschach by the murder. "I knew what people were, then," he tells his psychologist, "behind all the evasions, all the self-deception." Kovacs, who works in the garment industry, fashions his Rorschach mask from a dress ordered by Ms. Genovese before her murder. But recent work by a local historian casts doubt on the lore of the case. Joseph De May, a maritime lawyer and longtime Kew Gardens resident has analyzed the case in paralyzing detail. He concludes that Winston Moseley's savagery was witnessed by far fewer than the thirty-eight onlookers instanced in the Times story (which served as the basis of The Thirty-Eight Witnesses by legendary Times city editor A. M. Rosenthal), and the lack of response was likely due to faulty phone systems in the NYPD rather than the apathy of Queens residents. De May has interviewed surviving witnesses, pored over maps and diagrams, and analyzed court testimony and police reports; he presents his case in exhaustive detail here. Winston Moseley received a death sentence, later reduced to life in prison. He took part in the riots at Attica in 1971. Denied parole in 2008, he remains incarcerated. Born in New York, Kitty Genovese remained in the city when her mother moved the family to Connecticut after witnessing a murder in 1954. She was survived by her partner Mary Ann Zielonko, who shared her Kew Gardens apartment. Her murder was a brutal act, senseless and unprovoked. The meaning of the tale, however, may be more complicated than once supposed. But one thing is certain: when it comes to history, Joseph De May is no bystander. He gets involved.

bowles500

Joshua Glenn — Tue, 31 Mar 2009 15:43:12 +0000

himes2-500

Joshua Glenn — Tue, 31 Mar 2009 15:43:42 +0000

feartremble500

Joshua Glenn — Tue, 31 Mar 2009 15:44:32 +0000

Hilobrow Cover Art (4)

Joshua Glenn — Tue, 31 Mar 2009 15:45:53 +0000

lewis1

Joshua Glenn — Thu, 02 Apr 2009 00:19:47 +0000

pkd

Joshua Glenn — Thu, 02 Apr 2009 00:19:51 +0000

poe1

Joshua Glenn — Thu, 02 Apr 2009 00:19:54 +0000

They're huge in France

Joshua Glenn — Thu, 02 Apr 2009 01:45:18 +0000

What do Edgar Allan Poe, Philip K. Dick, and Jerry Lewis have in common? These hilobrow pioneers were scorned, or ignored—while at their height of their powers—by middlebrow American intellectuals and critics. But they were hailed as geniuses by French intellectuals and critics. The French dig hilobrow. Q.E.D. Poe was a weirdo: morbid, hysterical, politically incorrect. He hated the commonsensical, progressive-minded bourgeoisie—particularly the middlebrow literary types headquartered in Boston—and they returned the sentiment. No wonder that Baudelaire, a pioneer of literary modernism, and Poe's great champion in France, saw him as a kindred spirit. Mallarmé and Valéry followed Baudelaire's lead, and "edgarpoe" became a Symbolist saint. His adoption by French intellectuals and critics has long puzzled those Americans who think of Poe as a writer of occult horror and detective stories, which—no matter how well-written—are by definition lowbrow. This is not the place to set the record straight, however; it's more important to point out that we latter-day hilobrows find the very same things attractive about Poe that the French did then. Valéry would write about Poe's influence on Baudelaire: "Poe was opening up a way, teaching a very strict and alluring doctrine, in which a kind of mathematics and a kind of mysticism become one." Yes! Another great hilobrow, Alfred Jarry, would give this doctrine a name: 'pataphysics. More on this topic another time. Thanks in part to the admirable efforts of Jonathan Lethem, Philip K. Dick has been adopted, in recent years, by middlebrows. Here's Adam Gopnik, the ultimate middlebrow, writing in The New Yorker in 2007:

The trouble is that, much as one would like to place Dick above or alongside Pynchon and Vonnegut—or, for that matter, Chesterton or Tolkien—as a poet of the fantastic parable he was a pretty bad writer. Though his imagination is at least the equal of theirs, he had, as he ruefully knew, a hack's habits, too, and he never really got over them. ... That’s probably why Dick's reputation as a serious writer, like Poe's, has always been higher in France, where the sentences aren't read as they were written.

Another middlebrow stratagem is revealed here: Because middlebrows like all edges smoothed, all surfaces shined, they tell themselves that the prickly, eccentric, sometimes even bad prose of a Poe or a Dick can only be praised by someone reading it in a beautiful translation. No, that's not why Dick's reputation was higher in France! It's because the French not only admired Dick's ideas, their sensibilities hadn't (yet) been blunted by Hollywood's high production values. Much like eccentric French slow-foodists who actually enjoy finding wormholes in their apples, French intellectuals and critics are able to enjoy the hack qualities of Dick's prose without fetishizing or ignoring them. As PKD fan Jean Baudrillard says of the first-order simulacrum (to use Baudrillard's own phildickian example: the clumsy robot, as opposed to the slickly produced, and therefore uncanny and terrifying android), it's charming. Middlebrows still can't decide whether France's embrace of Jerry Lewis is funny or aggravating. It gets under their skin; hence all the anxious jokes about it. Here's Cecil Adams:

[Lewis biographer Shawn] Levy conjectures that French audiences took to Lewis in part because he exemplified the French notion of the auteur—the individual, typically the director, who imposes his artistic vision on the production, which Lewis definitely did. But it's probably equally true that the French, despite or maybe because of their devotion to art (you know, pushing the envelope and all that), were also suckers for low comedy. One recalls the legendary French stage performer Le Petomane, aka the Fartiste.

Adams would have us believe that Lewis fans must either be snobby highbrows (e.g., the auteurist, whom middlebrows love to mock) or lowbrow "suckers" who love fart gags. This is a typical middlebrow stratagem: When confronted with a cultural production that makes you uncomfortable, something that challenges your complacently transgressive hipster worldview, brand it as wacky—auteurists are wacky; so is Le Pétomane—and then you can dismiss it with an untroubled conscience. Readers, don't be bamboozled. The French hailed Lewis not for one reason or the other, but both. PS: Our friend Chris Fujiwara is writing a book on Lewis; read this excerpt. *** 'Pataphysical, charming in its eccentricity and imperfection, simultaneously visionary and fart-ilarious: This is hilobrow.

bowles2

Joshua Glenn — Thu, 02 Apr 2009 17:08:21 +0000

bowles

Joshua Glenn — Thu, 02 Apr 2009 17:08:50 +0000

bowles21

Joshua Glenn — Thu, 02 Apr 2009 17:10:13 +0000

bowles1

Joshua Glenn — Thu, 02 Apr 2009 17:10:42 +0000

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celine

Joshua Glenn — Thu, 02 Apr 2009 17:11:20 +0000

delillo

Joshua Glenn — Thu, 02 Apr 2009 17:11:24 +0000

dickens

Joshua Glenn — Thu, 02 Apr 2009 17:11:47 +0000

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Joshua Glenn — Thu, 02 Apr 2009 17:11:51 +0000

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Joshua Glenn — Thu, 02 Apr 2009 17:12:16 +0000

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Joshua Glenn — Thu, 02 Apr 2009 17:12:19 +0000

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Joshua Glenn — Thu, 02 Apr 2009 17:12:20 +0000

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Joshua Glenn — Thu, 02 Apr 2009 17:12:21 +0000

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Joshua Glenn — Thu, 02 Apr 2009 17:12:23 +0000

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Joshua Glenn — Thu, 02 Apr 2009 17:12:30 +0000

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Joshua Glenn — Thu, 02 Apr 2009 17:12:39 +0000

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Joshua Glenn — Thu, 02 Apr 2009 17:13:13 +0000

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Joshua Glenn — Thu, 02 Apr 2009 17:13:31 +0000

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Joshua Glenn — Thu, 02 Apr 2009 17:13:34 +0000

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Joshua Glenn — Thu, 02 Apr 2009 17:13:38 +0000

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Joshua Glenn — Thu, 02 Apr 2009 17:13:40 +0000

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Joshua Glenn — Thu, 02 Apr 2009 20:30:53 +0000

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Joshua Glenn — Thu, 02 Apr 2009 20:31:56 +0000

Hilobrow pinups (2)

Joshua Glenn — Thu, 02 Apr 2009 20:32:37 +0000

Some of our ideas about hilobrow found their first expression elsewhere. Here's an item that was published—in a slightly different version—at the blog Brainiac on 10/24/06. The October issue of Elle Magazine was an eye-opener. From a feature on "New York's Loveliest New Locals," we learn that model Marie Steiss, 20, most recently seen in Givenchy's "Ange ou Demon" perfume ads, is not only a former finance major, and a skateboarder (!), but "the doe-eyed daughter of politically beleaguered French Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin" (!!). Marie Steiss 20-year-old hilobrows interested in chatting up Marie, take note: She tells Elle that she browses New York's Strand Bookstore for 18th-century poetry, and skates at parks in Brooklyn and at Chelsea Piers. Elsewhere in the same story, we read that Italian knitwear heiress/fashion ambassador Margherita Missoni, 23, now a budding actress in New York, "started out pursuing something far more serious: philosophy." It seems that Margherita was a philosophy major at the University of Milan until her mother, Angela, the force behind the Missoni label, persuaded her to quit and go to acting school instead. Margherita Missoni Do you know what branch of philosophy MM was studying? Please drop us a line! We want to study up, in case we ever meet her.

celine500

Joshua Glenn — Fri, 03 Apr 2009 14:44:00 +0000

mccarthy500

Joshua Glenn — Fri, 03 Apr 2009 14:48:55 +0000

Hilobrow Cover Art (5)

Joshua Glenn — Fri, 03 Apr 2009 14:53:51 +0000

theupset_cover

Matthew Battles — Fri, 03 Apr 2009 15:54:50 +0000

theupset_cover

Matthew Battles — Fri, 03 Apr 2009 16:01:38 +0000

theupset_press_p034-035

Matthew Battles — Fri, 03 Apr 2009 16:24:38 +0000

theupset_press_p034-0351

Matthew Battles — Fri, 03 Apr 2009 17:02:49 +0000

biskup

Matthew Battles — Fri, 03 Apr 2009 17:05:45 +0000

caesar

Matthew Battles — Fri, 03 Apr 2009 17:49:03 +0000

caesar1

Matthew Battles — Fri, 03 Apr 2009 17:49:58 +0000

kozyndan

Matthew Battles — Fri, 03 Apr 2009 17:57:44 +0000

rostarr

Matthew Battles — Fri, 03 Apr 2009 18:29:57 +0000

rostarr

Matthew Battles — Fri, 03 Apr 2009 18:30:57 +0000

The Upset: Hilo for Your Coffee Table

Matthew Battles — Fri, 03 Apr 2009 18:36:41 +0000

Much contemporary art prides itself on posing questions. But too often the questions are rehearsed, and the answers prompt only tepid flickers of sensation. Works that engage the imagination in a total fashion—that acknowledge obsession, desire, and mortal terror—more often may be found in religion, in pornography, in schlock, and in sports spectacles of the most violent and glamorously degrading sort. Or so goes the middlebrow party line. But there are artists working at a high pitch of sophistication and technique who also make a total commitment to imagination. They're stalked by various labels: lowbrow, street, goth, underground. Many learned their lessons in color and form by doing graffiti, design, and illustration, by working in skate shops, tattoo parlors, or other worlds removed from the gallery and museum context of mainstream art. The work of many of these artists is gathered in the book The Upset, a ravishing omnibus published by Gestalten. In a couple of senses, the subtitle of The Upset—"Young Contemporary Art"—is a misnomer. Many of these artists have been working for years; some, like John Currin, have enjoyed a tenure as gallery darlings. At a deeper level, however, much of the work here seems primordial, as old as making. Southern California artist Tim Biskup works in acrylics, spray paint, and gold leaf applied to wooden panels. His paintings evoke cartoons, folk art, and the febrile visions of Hieronymus Bosch. [caption id="attachment_557" align="aligncenter" width="300" caption="Tim Biskup, The Golden Plague, 2004"]The Golden Plague, 2004" title="biskup" width="300" height="134" class="size-medium wp-image-557" />[/caption] Ray Caesar's uncanny paintings spring from a world of "etiquette, craft, and meticulous care," the manners of a wallflower who "is really the queen of the entire evening." In his work, the ornament and excess of Watteau meets classic cars and superhero longings. [caption id="attachment_566" align="aligncenter" width="210" caption="Ray Caesar, Sleeping by Day, 2004"]Sleeping by Day, 2004" title="caesar1" width="210" height="300" class="size-medium wp-image-566" />[/caption] Korean-born artist Rostarr works in many media; his paintings in The Upset evoke graffiti, architecture, and calligraphies of Asia and the Near East. [caption id="attachment_575" align="aligncenter" width="215" caption="Rostarr, Siamese Antichrist, mixed media (2006)"] Siamese Antichrist, mixed media (2006)" title="rostarr" width="215" height="300" class="size-medium wp-image-575" />[/caption] Like others featured in The Upset, these are post-countercultural artists; they know that the mainstream long ago co-opted the revolutionary energies of the twentieth-century's avant-gardes. Aware of their marginality, they're sincere, obsessed believers. Their art doesn't negate or cancel out the high and the low; it doesn't reach for the petty catharsis of submerged tendencies. It thrives instead in the flux, the arc of energy that springs up where engagement and irony meet. That's what makes The Upset a hilobrow coffee table treat.

Hilobrow Cover Art (6)

Joshua Glenn — Sun, 05 Apr 2009 20:50:19 +0000

kiting-morteratsch-10

Matthew Battles — Mon, 06 Apr 2009 14:15:52 +0000

The Highbrow Kite

Matthew Battles — Mon, 06 Apr 2009 14:37:58 +0000

[caption id="attachment_605" align="alignleft" width="300" caption="Horvath kite over Switzerland\'s Morteratsch Glacier"]Horvath kite over Switzerland's Morteratsch Glacier" title="kiting-morteratsch-10" width="300" height="200" class="size-medium wp-image-605" />[/caption]Thomas Horvath's kites are like every kite you've ever seen, and like no kite you've ever seen. They're what kites dream of when they lie sleeping in a tangle of string at the bottom of the closet. Horvath uses biomimicry, high-tech materials, and structural principles inspired by Buckminster Fuller to create his deceptively simple kites. In low wind they come alive, floating at the end of slack string, then darting suddenly skyward or spinning lazily to a soft landing. The video below shows a Horvath kite in an astonishing, even eerie exploration of flight. As you'll see at his web site, Horvath's creations are highbrow kites—and they come with a highbrow price tag. But in true creative commons fashion, he also offers complete instructions for would-be builders of such elegant fliers, and will sell you the carbon-fiber tubes and space-age icarex fabric he deploys in his designs. On a windy Spring day, the possibilities make us giddy.

amis-k-drink

Joshua Glenn — Mon, 06 Apr 2009 15:42:33 +0000

amis-kingsley

Joshua Glenn — Mon, 06 Apr 2009 15:42:39 +0000

amis-kingsley2

Joshua Glenn — Mon, 06 Apr 2009 15:42:44 +0000

amis-lucky

Joshua Glenn — Mon, 06 Apr 2009 15:42:54 +0000

aurelius-tk

Joshua Glenn — Mon, 06 Apr 2009 15:43:02 +0000

aurelius

Joshua Glenn — Mon, 06 Apr 2009 15:43:15 +0000

baudelaire-1855

Joshua Glenn — Mon, 06 Apr 2009 15:43:28 +0000

baudelaire1

Joshua Glenn — Mon, 06 Apr 2009 15:43:34 +0000

baudelaire2-1863

Joshua Glenn — Mon, 06 Apr 2009 15:43:44 +0000

baudelaire4

Joshua Glenn — Mon, 06 Apr 2009 15:43:56 +0000

beckett-1

Joshua Glenn — Mon, 06 Apr 2009 15:44:05 +0000

beckett-2

Joshua Glenn — Mon, 06 Apr 2009 15:44:17 +0000

beckett-portait

Joshua Glenn — Mon, 06 Apr 2009 15:44:27 +0000

beckett

Joshua Glenn — Mon, 06 Apr 2009 15:44:43 +0000

chaplin-skates

Joshua Glenn — Mon, 06 Apr 2009 15:45:07 +0000

chaplin

Joshua Glenn — Mon, 06 Apr 2009 15:45:24 +0000

clowes1

Joshua Glenn — Mon, 06 Apr 2009 15:45:31 +0000

clowes2

Joshua Glenn — Mon, 06 Apr 2009 15:45:40 +0000

clowes3

Joshua Glenn — Mon, 06 Apr 2009 15:45:49 +0000

corman-caveman-poster

Joshua Glenn — Mon, 06 Apr 2009 15:46:06 +0000

corman-tomb-poster

Joshua Glenn — Mon, 06 Apr 2009 15:46:41 +0000

house_of_usher_1960_poster_01-1

Joshua Glenn — Mon, 06 Apr 2009 15:46:53 +0000

corman-xray-poster

Joshua Glenn — Mon, 06 Apr 2009 15:47:07 +0000

curry-rocky

Joshua Glenn — Mon, 06 Apr 2009 15:47:15 +0000

curry-rocky2

Joshua Glenn — Mon, 06 Apr 2009 15:47:35 +0000

davinci-vitruvian

Joshua Glenn — Mon, 06 Apr 2009 15:47:45 +0000

davinci

Joshua Glenn — Mon, 06 Apr 2009 15:47:58 +0000

delany-2

Joshua Glenn — Mon, 06 Apr 2009 15:48:07 +0000

delany

Joshua Glenn — Mon, 06 Apr 2009 15:48:22 +0000

donleavy1

Joshua Glenn — Mon, 06 Apr 2009 15:48:33 +0000

duchamp-ernst-chess1968

Joshua Glenn — Mon, 06 Apr 2009 15:48:42 +0000

ernst-blessed-virgin-chastises

Joshua Glenn — Mon, 06 Apr 2009 15:48:56 +0000

ernst-boxwood-chess-1944

Joshua Glenn — Mon, 06 Apr 2009 15:49:12 +0000

ernst-celebes

Joshua Glenn — Mon, 06 Apr 2009 15:49:25 +0000

ernst-dorothea-tanning-chess

Joshua Glenn — Mon, 06 Apr 2009 15:49:32 +0000

ernst-oedipus

Joshua Glenn — Mon, 06 Apr 2009 15:49:40 +0000

ernst-ubu-imperator

Joshua Glenn — Mon, 06 Apr 2009 15:49:56 +0000

ernst-vox-angelica

Joshua Glenn — Mon, 06 Apr 2009 15:50:24 +0000

glover1

Joshua Glenn — Mon, 06 Apr 2009 15:50:56 +0000

guinness-fatherbrown

Joshua Glenn — Mon, 06 Apr 2009 15:51:43 +0000

guinness

Joshua Glenn — Mon, 06 Apr 2009 15:53:01 +0000

hancock-empyrean

Joshua Glenn — Mon, 06 Apr 2009 15:53:08 +0000

hancock-headhunters

Joshua Glenn — Mon, 06 Apr 2009 15:53:15 +0000

hasek-svejk

Joshua Glenn — Mon, 06 Apr 2009 15:53:25 +0000

FO00082993

Joshua Glenn — Mon, 06 Apr 2009 15:53:35 +0000

Jaroslav Haek, spisovatel - v dobì, kdy pùsobil v redakci èasopisu Èechoslovan (dýmka, lulka) -

hobbes

Joshua Glenn — Mon, 06 Apr 2009 15:53:42 +0000

hoeber

Joshua Glenn — Mon, 06 Apr 2009 15:53:58 +0000

hoeber2

Joshua Glenn — Mon, 06 Apr 2009 15:54:07 +0000

hoeber3

Joshua Glenn — Mon, 06 Apr 2009 15:54:19 +0000

lasser-bananas

Joshua Glenn — Mon, 06 Apr 2009 15:54:30 +0000

lasser-hartman

Joshua Glenn — Mon, 06 Apr 2009 15:54:34 +0000

laureamont-maldoror

Joshua Glenn — Mon, 06 Apr 2009 15:54:39 +0000

lautreamont

Joshua Glenn — Mon, 06 Apr 2009 15:54:43 +0000

letterman-hilton

Joshua Glenn — Mon, 06 Apr 2009 15:54:47 +0000

letterman2

Joshua Glenn — Mon, 06 Apr 2009 15:54:53 +0000

marlon_brando

Joshua Glenn — Mon, 06 Apr 2009 15:55:00 +0000

miro-carnival-harlequin

Joshua Glenn — Mon, 06 Apr 2009 15:55:08 +0000

miro-chiffres-et-constellations

Joshua Glenn — Mon, 06 Apr 2009 15:55:16 +0000

miro-hand-catching-bird

Joshua Glenn — Mon, 06 Apr 2009 15:55:21 +0000

miro-horse-pipe-redflower

Joshua Glenn — Mon, 06 Apr 2009 15:55:28 +0000

miro-singing-fish

Joshua Glenn — Mon, 06 Apr 2009 15:55:35 +0000

nabokov-1

Joshua Glenn — Mon, 06 Apr 2009 15:55:40 +0000

nabokov-lolita1

Joshua Glenn — Mon, 06 Apr 2009 15:55:46 +0000

nabokov-time-1969

Joshua Glenn — Mon, 06 Apr 2009 15:55:53 +0000

obrien-et

Joshua Glenn — Mon, 06 Apr 2009 15:56:02 +0000

obrien-rolling

Joshua Glenn — Mon, 06 Apr 2009 15:56:12 +0000

shakespeare-cobbe

Joshua Glenn — Mon, 06 Apr 2009 15:56:18 +0000

NPG 1, William Shakespeare

Joshua Glenn — Mon, 06 Apr 2009 15:56:25 +0000

attributed to John Taylor,painting,circa 1610

solanas

Joshua Glenn — Mon, 06 Apr 2009 15:56:39 +0000

U1595163

Joshua Glenn — Mon, 06 Apr 2009 15:56:45 +0000

sydow-seventh-seal

Joshua Glenn — Mon, 06 Apr 2009 15:56:50 +0000

tarkovsky-stalker

Joshua Glenn — Mon, 06 Apr 2009 15:56:57 +0000

tarkovsky

Joshua Glenn — Mon, 06 Apr 2009 15:57:06 +0000

tzara

Joshua Glenn — Mon, 06 Apr 2009 15:57:16 +0000

vontrier

Joshua Glenn — Mon, 06 Apr 2009 15:57:25 +0000

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Joshua Glenn — Mon, 06 Apr 2009 15:57:37 +0000

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Joshua Glenn — Mon, 06 Apr 2009 15:57:46 +0000

waters

Joshua Glenn — Mon, 06 Apr 2009 15:57:57 +0000

waters3

Joshua Glenn — Mon, 06 Apr 2009 15:58:07 +0000

westwood-2

Joshua Glenn — Mon, 06 Apr 2009 15:58:20 +0000

westwood

Joshua Glenn — Mon, 06 Apr 2009 15:58:34 +0000

zola

Joshua Glenn — Mon, 06 Apr 2009 15:58:45 +0000

HILO Heroes, April

HILOBROW — Tue, 07 Apr 2009 11:47:08 +0000

Happy birthday to some of our high-, low-, no-, and hilobrow heroes. All hilo birthdays. ***

Abraham Maslow (HI: life's work); Jimmy Cliff (LO: life's work); Samuel R. Delany (HILO: life's work); Method Man (LO: life's work)
Ron "Horshack" Palillo (LO: Welcome Back, Kotter); Buddy Ebsen (LO: The Beverly Hillbillies); Max Ernst (HILO: life's work); Camille Paglia (HILO: life's work); Émile Zola (HILO? a test case)
Jennie Garth (LO: Beverly Hills, 90210); Eddie Murphy (LO: life's work); Jane Goodall (HI: life's work); Marlon Brando (HILO?: a test case)
Muddy Waters (LO: life's work); Marguerite Duras (HI: life's work); Comte de Lautréamont (HILO: Les Chants de Maldoror); Andrei Tarkovsky (HILO: life's work)
Agnetha Fältskog (LO: ABBA); Frank Gorshin (LO: life's work); Roger Corman (LO: life's work); Bette Davis (LO: life's work); Spencer Tracy (LO: life's work); Thomas Hobbes (HI: life's work)
Paul Rudd (LO: life's work), Merle Haggard (LO: life's work)
Jackie Chan (LO: life's work); James Garner (LO: life's work); Billie Holiday (LO: life's work); Donald Barthelme (HILO: life's work)

Shecky Greene (LO: life's work); John Fante (HILO: life's work); Vivienne Westwood (HILO: life's work); Edmund Husserl (HI: life's work)
Hugh Hefner (LO: life's work); Charles Baudelaire (HILO: life's work); Valerie Solanas (HILO: life's work)
Max Von Sydow (HILO: The Seventh Seal, Wild Strawberries, The Exorcist, Flash Gordon, Conan the Barbarian, Strange Brew)
Louise Lasser (HILO: Bananas, Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman)
Shannen Doherty (LO: life's work); Herbie Hancock (HILO: life's work); Tiny Tim (LO: life's work); David Letterman (HILO?: test case)
Don Adams (LO: life's work); Samuel Beckett (HILO: life's work); Jacques Lacan (HI: life's work)

Sarah Michelle Gellar (LO: life's work); Loretta Lynn (LO: life's work); Daniel Clowes (HILO: life's work); Fredric Jameson (HI: life's work)
Seth Rogen (LO, but — uh-oh — heading towards MIDDLE: life's work); Da Vinci (HILO: life's work)
Merce Cunningham (HI: life's work); Charlie Chaplin (HILO?: another test case); Tristan Tzara (HILO: life's work)
Posh Spice (LO: life's work)
Conan O'Brien (HILO?: test case); Kathy Acker (HILO: life's work)
Tim Curry (HILO: Rocky Horror Picture Show)

Harold Lloyd (LO: life's work); Joan Miró (HILO: life's work)
Iggy Pop (LO, despite Jarmusch-ification: life's work)
Aaron Spelling (LO: life's work), Eddie Albert (LO: life's work); Henry Fielding (HILO?: test case); John Waters (HILO: life's work); Immanuel Kant (HI: life's work)
Lee Majors (LO: life's work); Roy Orbison (LO: life's work); Vladimir Nabokov (HILO: life's work); Shakespeare (HILO: life's work); J.P. Donleavy (HILO: life's work); George Steiner (HI: life's work)
Willem de Kooning (HI: life's work)
Björn Ulvaeus (LO: ABBA); Ella Fitzgerald (LO: life's work)

Carol Burnett (LO: life's work); Wittgenstein (HI: life's work); Marcus Aurelius (HILO: life's work)
Ace Frehley (LO: life's work); Jack Klugman (LO: The Odd Couple)
Ann-Margret (LO: life's work), Terry Pratchett (LO: life's work)
Jerry Seinfeld (LO: Seinfeld); Hasil Adkins (LO: life's work)
Willie Nelson (LO: life's work); Jaroslav Hašek (HILO: The Good Soldier Švejk); Al Lewis (LO: life's work); Larry Niven (LO: life's work); Lars von Trier (HILO?: test case)

aurelius-500

Joshua Glenn — Tue, 07 Apr 2009 15:25:40 +0000

aurelius-5001

Joshua Glenn — Tue, 07 Apr 2009 16:07:26 +0000

HILO pinups (3)

Joshua Glenn — Wed, 08 Apr 2009 12:23:06 +0000

Happy Birthday, Vivienne Westwood! MORE HILO BIRTHDAYS THIS MONTH

lastiko

Joshua Glenn — Fri, 10 Apr 2009 11:51:05 +0000

Hilo design: L'Astiko

Joshua Glenn — Fri, 10 Apr 2009 11:52:28 +0000

We learned about this chair — it's called L'Astiko — from the current issue of Wallpaper. It's a chic lounger in the midcentury style, but the seat is woven from rubber inner tubes. This experiment in luxe upcycling was created by Due Studio in San Salvador. We'd like to visit.

seagsontag

Matthew Battles — Fri, 10 Apr 2009 14:45:41 +0000

seagsontag

Matthew Battles — Fri, 10 Apr 2009 14:48:33 +0000

Highbrow Skyscraper, Lowbrow Plaza

Matthew Battles — Fri, 10 Apr 2009 15:31:53 +0000

Susan Sontag pays a visit to the Seagram Building ("gleaming like a switchblade") to interview architect Philip Johnson. Embedded here with thanks to Joanne McNeil, who posted this at her terrific blog Tomorrow Museum. Sontag's visit to the Seagram Building reminded us of another video that captures the way people tame the alienating majesty of its plaza. (Note on nomenclature: "to tame" is hilobrow; "to domesticate" is middlebrow. Taming is something done with a whip and a chair, pistol on hip.) This excerpt comes from the film The Social Life of Small Urban Spaces, adapted from a book of the same name by William H. Whyte (author of The Organization Man). Thanks for this clip goes to Jason Kottke for finding and posting.

Double Exposure (2)

Joshua Glenn — Mon, 13 Apr 2009 11:47:00 +0000

Speaking of brows. You know Cadbury's 2009 viral ad, "Eyebrows"? The one in which two children — peculiarly self-composed, knowing, mysterious, alien-like children — wiggle their eyebrows to the beat of Freestyle Express's "Don't Stop The Rock"? It was viewed 4 million times on YouTube in its first three weeks, so chances are that you do know it. Well... check this out: From April 2009 issue of Travel & Leisure Magazine The pinched noses and flaring nostrils, the slightly fascistic hairstyles, the pursed lips and superioristic gazes, the transparent glasses, the buttoned-upness... all the same! Even the chins! Not to mention the expressive eyebrows. The Dolce & Gabbana models are... adult versions of the Cadbury kids. Or rather, they're the Cadbury kids grown up. Or rather... the Cadbury kids are adult children, and the D&G models are child-adults. Or... no, the mind reels. What's going on? Are they aliens? (This might explain the magical eyebrows, and also the not-lovers but more-than-siblings vibe.) Has Madison Ave. discovered time travel? More importantly: What signs and signifiers have been put into play, in these ads, and to what ends? We demand answers. This is the second in a series of posts reviving the ancient practice of extispicy — i.e., divining the outlines of our invisible prison (formerly known as Fate) via a close study of anomalies in animal entrails. Only instead of sheep livers and cow lungs, we're using magazine ads and other middlebrow media images.

cadbury-eyebrows2-500

Joshua Glenn — Mon, 13 Apr 2009 15:39:17 +0000

cadbury-eyebrows3-500

Joshua Glenn — Mon, 13 Apr 2009 15:39:18 +0000

dg-travelleisure-april09-500

Joshua Glenn — Mon, 13 Apr 2009 15:39:20 +0000

cb2

Matthew Battles — Tue, 14 Apr 2009 14:41:57 +0000

cb21

Matthew Battles — Tue, 14 Apr 2009 14:42:46 +0000

My Robot Overlords Are Cuter Than Yours

Matthew Battles — Tue, 14 Apr 2009 18:33:57 +0000

CB2 has one job: to win your heart. With its silicone skin, its bark-like cooing calls, and its lurching, needy gestures, the robot stimulates people to reach out in caring supplication, just as evolution has conditioned us to do with infants. The brainchild of Osaka University's Hiroshi Ishiguro (the genius behind the uncanny/sexy fembot Actroid), CB2 appeared in 2007. Since then, Ishiguro and colleagues have been developing its software to respond to social cues with greater sophistication. The prospect of ever-more-invincible warbots has lately been the subject of intense coverage, largely thanks to P. W. Singer's scary/fascinating book Wired for War. But as we've discussed elsewhere, it's likely that cute robots, not implacable Decepticons, one day will be our overlords. Like the designers of cartoon characters, roboticists have discovered that they can win our hearts by emulating infant humans. CB2 (pronounced "see bee squared") reminds us that babies are not only sweet but also, well, creepy; it's their palsied defenselessness as much as their cute features that compel us to serve their needs. Although the video below appeared at the time of CB2's initial release, it remains the best visual demonstration of the robot's uncanny appeal. Ishiguro is hardly the only person to have recognized the power of robot powerlessness. Kacie Kinzer, a student in NYU's Interactive Telecommunications Program, has created a series of rudimentary cardboard-bodied "robots"—in reality simple, self-propelled toys—which she outfits with little flags pleading for assistance. As her Tweenbots convince passers-by to aid them on their journeys across Washington Square Park, they demonstrate that our own conscience is an important feature in any robot's "software." Once it has engaged our emotions, even a cardboard-clad plaything can compel us to do its bidding. Of course, not only defenseless infants provoke our sympathy. As Japanese performance artist Momoyo Torimitsu demonstrates in the clip below, even a pathetic robot salaryman can provoke strong reactions in passers-by: the Uncanny Valley meets the Bystander Effect. Why do the uncanny and the infantile seem so closely linked in our experience of robots? The uncanny robot is an image of the thingness of oneself—self sans self-control. The infant's lack of self-control is likewise a reminder of limits—a reminder moreover that we emerge out of limits. There is about them both the whiff of our abjection.

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Matthew Battles — Thu, 16 Apr 2009 18:40:50 +0000

THOMAS DOYLE: Crucibles of Hazard

Matthew Battles — Thu, 16 Apr 2009 18:48:25 +0000

The art of Thomas Doyle is at once inviting and unsettling. Miniature tableaux under glass, his pieces have the quirky, lilliputian charm of the model railroad, the dollhouse, and the museum diorama. But upon further inspection they unfold into dramas of loss and estrangement. The works image "the remnants of things past—whether major, transformational experiences, or the quieter moments that resonate loudly throughout a life," the artist writes. "In much the way the mind recalls events through the fog of time, the works distort reality through a warped and dreamlike lens." Thomas Doyle lives and works in Brooklyn. His work will be on view at the NextArt Fair in Chicago from April 30 to May 4.

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Matthew Battles — Thu, 16 Apr 2009 21:59:11 +0000

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Matthew Battles — Fri, 17 Apr 2009 14:44:43 +0000

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Matthew Battles — Fri, 17 Apr 2009 14:45:34 +0000

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Matthew Battles — Fri, 17 Apr 2009 19:08:30 +0000

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Matthew Battles — Fri, 17 Apr 2009 20:17:37 +0000

THE SKY, CRACKED

James Parker — Fri, 17 Apr 2009 20:24:41 +0000

IT'S TOO HEAVY METAL to be available online, but the cover story of the new Revolver is a killer. Atlanta’s Mastodon have just released their masterpiece, Crack The Skye, and the band’s dense mythological Jethro-Tull-with-plasma-cannons gobbledygook is alarmingly humanized by the piece’s revelations that

a) guitarist/screamer Brett Hinds is an irascible warlock who gets in all sorts of fights and wrote Crack The Skye’s riffs while laid up with an aggro-induced head injury, in a state of traumatic euphoria. I mean, you can just hear that, somehow...

b) the Skye of the title is Skye Dailor, sister of Mastodon’s octopoidally proficient drummer Brann Dailor. Skye committed suicide in the ‘90s, subsequent to which their mother was institutionalized—as was Dailor himself, for a time. All of this is present in the album somewhere, maintains Dailor, strained through its metal-psychedelic tropes—astral travel and the murder of Rasputin and God-knows-what. (Is that what he said? I read the interview at a magazine rack.) Totally metal, at any rate—getting at the personal via the impersonally monstrous, the domestic via the operatic, the quiet via the very very loud.

Best line from the whole thing (and this I do remember): “MASTODON IS OUR RELIGION!”

—JAMES PARKER

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Matthew Battles — Fri, 17 Apr 2009 20:46:47 +0000

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Matthew Battles — Fri, 17 Apr 2009 20:48:12 +0000

Of Coral, Crochet, & the Hyperbolic Sublime

Matthew Battles — Fri, 17 Apr 2009 21:02:11 +0000

MARGARET and CHRISTINE WERTHEIM are crocheting a coral reef, and they're eager for help. The sisters direct the Institute for Figuring in Los Angeles, which supports lectures, publications, and projects that explore the "figurative ecology" of nature and the human imagination. One nexus in that web of figuring is something topologists call hyperbolic space—the mathematics of enfolded and embedded surfaces. For millions of years, living forms have evolved iterations of hyperbolic space; its swoops and involutions are the signature of brain coral, kelp fronds, and the mantles of pelagic jellies. But to mathematicians, who long sought ways to model hyperbolic space, its complications seemed beyond reckoning. The problem seemed insoluble—until Cornell mathematician Daina Taimima put the crafts she learned as a girl growing up in Latvia to use. Taimima used crochet to crack the hyperbolic code; her students now learn not only the methods of transformations in n-dimensions, but the algorithms of knit-one-pearl-two as well. Inspired by Taimima's whimsical and rigorous handiworks, the Wertheims found a way to combine artful science, women's craft, and environmental activism. In 2005 they put out the call for crocheters to contribute to a crochet version of Australia's Great Barrier Reef. The world's largest structure made by living organisms, the Great Barrier Reef is visible from space. But climate change and pollution threaten it and coral ecosystems everywhere. With more than a thousand contributions to date, the Wertheims' woolen reef is a tribute to the complex evolved beauty of life on Earth, and to the timeless genius of craftwork as well. Like its biological counterpart, the project continues to grow and change; the sisters and their collaborators are knitting with discarded plastic to illustrate to impact of trash on the oceans of the world. The crochet reef debuted at the Andy Warhol Museum in 2007; since then, it has been exhibited across the country and on two continents, and soon it will go on display at the Smithsonian's Natural History Museum (the first art project ever to be exhibited there). Perhaps the crochet reefs never will be visible from space. But there's still room for them to grow—and the Wertheims still welcome contributors to the project. To read about it, and for many photographs of wondrous craftwork reefs, visit the Institute For Figuring. UPDATE: Margaret Wertheim spoke about the Crochet Coral Reef at this year's TED conference, and the video is now available: Photos above from the following, from top to bottom: detail from Bleached Reef; Large Scale Anemone with Brain Coral Head; detail from The Bleached Reef, photo by Aaron and Cassandra Ott

I'M HEAVY, & YOU'RE NOT MY BROTHER

James Parker — Fri, 17 Apr 2009 21:04:50 +0000

[gallery]

UNMENTIONED IN MOST biographies of the great C. S. Lewis is just how much of a fucker he was, as an Oxford don, to the young John Betjeman. “Heavy” Lewis, as he was known to his students, met Betjeman in 1925, when the latter pranced into his study at Magdalen College expecting to be taught English Literature. They seem to have disliked each other on sight—not surprisingly, perhaps, Betjeman being a frivolous and undeveloped aesthete, and Lewis a Northern Irish log of a man, shoving Beowulf down everybody’s throat—but the power was all on Lewis’s side, and when Betjeman failed a crucial exam and asked for his help, he put the boot in. “I take it we understand each other very well,” he wrote, in a poisonously quotable letter (found in A. N. Wilson’s Betjeman: A Life). “You called the tune of irony from the first time you met me, and I have never heard you speak of any serious subject without a snigger. It would, therefore, be odd if you expected to find gushing fountains of emotional sympathy from me whenever you chose to change the tune.” The gifted, tender-hearted, forgiveably silly Betjeman ended up getting kicked out of Oxford, to his lasting humiliation. He was still writing, and not posting, aggrieved letters to Lewis eight years later.

Lewis, to be fair, was only 27 at the time, and had not yet converted to Christianity—after which, it is generally agreed, he became an altogether mellower Fellow. But still...

—JAMES PARKER

aerocycle

Matthew Battles — Wed, 22 Apr 2009 04:29:09 +0000

High-Altitude Hilobrow

Matthew Battles — Wed, 22 Apr 2009 13:43:18 +0000

MELDING 'PATAPHYSICS and popular mechanics, Proust and power tools, Dada and do-it-yourself, Eric Kraft is a hilobrow novelist par excellence. With the publication of his latest novel, Flying Home, Kraft's cracked mythology is arguably complete (Flying Home completes the trilogy Flying—but many extracanonical stories branch off the main stem, charted in a host of picaresque novellas). "If you were to pick up a hitchhiking Jorge Luis Borges and Robert Pirsig," I write in a review of Flying in the BN Review, "or listen as Thomas Pynchon recited Ulysses from memory over longnecks on J. D. Salinger's tab, you might catch the flavor of Eric Kraft's work." Flying concerns the exploits of Peter Leroy of Babbington, Long Island, who as a teenager builds an flying motorcyle, pilots it on a transcontinental voyage, and spends the rest of his life sorting out the consequences. In honor of Peter's craft, The Spirit of Babbington, we've embedded a video of a real-life counterpart: the SportCopter 2. It's a gyroplane—its rotor acts as a wing, using aerodynamic principles known to Leonardo Da Vinci. It's the color of Snoopy's doghouse, and the closest thing I know to a flying motorcycle. Here's to Eric Kraft—and to hilo aviation!

Wild Things

Matthew Battles — Fri, 24 Apr 2009 17:51:00 +0000

WHY DO WE go to the woods, where the wild things are? Because it's where the wild things are. Lars von Trier's forthcoming film ANTICHRIST will debut at Cannes this May. Von Trier may be hilobrow material, although the gravity of his reception has dragged him perilously close to middlebrow zones. If the trailer of ANTICHRIST is any indication, von Trier may finally be locked in a high-middlebrow-darling trajectory—or perhaps he's reached escape velocity. Willem Dafoe and Charlotte Gainsbourg star as a couple who grieve their dead child by retreating to a vacation home in the woods, where the beasties within come crawling out. "Nature," says Gainsbourg's character, "is Satan's church."
Lars von Trier's Antichrist - Official Trailer from Zentropa on Vimeo. One suspects the forest becomes a trite symbol of a remote evil only once we no longer have to struggle in the woods for the stuff of our survival. Like the mountains, material comfort renders them sublime and terrible. Before that stage is reached—for most of human history—the edge of the woods is a more permeable boundary, and the shadows of the trees hold dangers that are both more intimate and more likely to come to fruition. If Voltaire was right about tending our own gardens, maybe we have to let our interior forests grow a bit rank as well. Maurice Sendak's Where the Wilds Things are remains one of the great figurings of the woods that live within us. And guess what? Now it's going to be a movie, too, directed by Spike Jonze: I once accompanied Maurice Sendak on a visit to Harvard's Houghton Library, where he came to look at books illustrated by the great Randolph Caldecott (1846–1886). At the end of one story, Caldecott's plate showed a lost boy sleeping in a clearing in the woods while various wild creatures—badgers and foxes, rabbits and deer—peer at him out of the gloom. The caption read, "and the animals came to watch over him." "Yes," Sendak purred as he regarded the image. "Or maybe they were just feeling hungry."

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Matthew Battles — Fri, 24 Apr 2009 17:54:50 +0000

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Matthew Battles — Wed, 29 Apr 2009 03:40:54 +0000

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Matthew Battles — Wed, 29 Apr 2009 03:47:50 +0000

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Matthew Battles — Wed, 29 Apr 2009 13:29:01 +0000

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Matthew Battles — Wed, 29 Apr 2009 13:29:04 +0000

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Matthew Battles — Wed, 29 Apr 2009 13:35:48 +0000

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Matthew Battles — Wed, 29 Apr 2009 13:37:29 +0000

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Matthew Battles — Wed, 29 Apr 2009 13:37:54 +0000

GERD ARNTZ: TYPE & ISOTYPE

Matthew Battles — Wed, 29 Apr 2009 14:29:58 +0000

BORN IN 1900, German artist Gerd Arntz designed a pattern language for life in the twentieth century. His prints and designs were intended to further the purposes of a socialist world even as they dreamt it into being. A protege of Otto Neurath, Arntz labored in the febrile utopia of interwar Vienna before immigrating to the Netherlands to escape the rising tide of fascism. His central work in that time was the elaboration of some four thousand iconographic symbols depicting the activities, desires, labors, and lures of modern life. He called these figures Isotypes, a freeform acronym for "International System of Typographic Education." He hoped they could be used to disambiguate the specialized rituals of bureacracy; they survive today as stark and indelible reminders of a disorienting century. Arntz developed over four thousand isotypes, many consisting of syntactical variations on a theme. The generic pawn-like figure for man, decorated with various icons inscribed within its bulk, could stand for a baker, a teacher, an engineer, or a scribe. But even if the outline of many figures was the same, each variation required its own handmade linocut. It's as if the symmetry and interchangeability of industry furnished Arntz a visual grammar, an idiom for communicating with the enlightened masses, long before it could provide him with a means of production. The iconographic grammar Arntz created to effect the enlightenment of the masses persists now in debased idioms; our symbols wink and lure, beguile and correct, discipline and punish. The future into which Arntz shone his art was a fraught one; the only options it offered the thinking person were sundered hope or turgid obedience. It seems to us as if Arntz looked into this future and said, Yes—and.... Arntz pursued a tragic vision of clarity, perhaps noble, but certainly impossible. Today, the quotidian totems that flicker on our desktops and stand erect on airport stantions are the minor spirits of a softly coercive magisterium, a world of long queues and capthchas and telephonic labyrinths. It's a world that leaves many chilled and ennervated, defeated and domesticated. But looking at Arntz's art, we see a thoroughbred intelligence at work—ironic and engaged, tragic in its abandoned wisdom, luminous in its effects—and catch a glimpse of another disposition. [gallery] Arntz's life and works are richly documented in an online exhibition created by the design firm Ontwerpwerk and realized with the cooperation of the Municipal Museum of the Hague (which holds the Arntz Archive) and the artist's son, Peter. Arntz's collaborations with Neurath, his own charmingly engagé prints and other works, and some six hundred of the isotypes are presented there in stark Modernist splendor; it's a site that repays many visits. Images of Isotypes by Gerd Arntz, 1930s, and Isotype with linocut (photo by Max Bruinsma), above, appear courtesy of the Archive Gemeentemuseum The Hague, The Netherlands.

TO THE MOON!

Matthew Battles — Fri, 01 May 2009 11:01:22 +0000

[caption id="attachment_1154" align="aligncenter" width="150" caption="Everyone knows the Moon's made of cheese..."]Everyone knows the Moon's made of cheese..." title="le_voyage_dans_la_lune" width="150" height="150" class="size-thumbnail wp-image-1154" />[/caption] FREELANCERS, GIVE UP your paltry hopes of making a killing by cooking up a killer iPhone app. The Google Lunar X Prize — $30 million to the first private enterprise that lands a rover on the Moon — is just lying there waiting to be claimed. It's time to boot up Moon 2.0! Gawk at the team of attractive yuppies in their sexy start-up office running a lunar mission totally from their iPhones! Check out the crowds of hopeful humans of every race and creed cheering them on! Chuckle as the plucky rover with WALL-E eyes discovers the site of the first Apollo landing! Moon 2.0 is right in suggesting that the first lunar program failed. In retrospect, Apollo looks likes a breathtaking clusterfuck of bureaucracy applied to the energies of discovery. The Google Lunar X Prize, by contrast, channels the intuition of authors from C. S. Lewis to Robert Heinlein who envisioned space travel as the work not of governments, but of wild-eyed master builders out of Ayn Rand's wet dreams. But it's worth mentioning that "Moon 1.0" also may have failed because the Moon turned out to be a desolate rock with nothing to recommend it. Oh, it's fabulous for howling at and for regulating the tides; it makes a marvelous divinity, and has furnished the Earth with limitless spectacle for more than four billion years. But is the Moon the key to solving global warming? On the way to answering that question, untold carbon credits surely will be expended by well-capitalized X Prize competitors jetting between TED and Davos. Since the Google Lunar X Prize was announced in 2007, one venture, Odyssey Moon of San Jose, CA, has completed registration. Among other projects, they hope to land a mini-greenhouse on the Moon. That's a long way from the febrile designs suggested in the Moon 2.0 video, like mining lunar silicon to make solar panels. But hang on—is the Moon really humanity's last desperate hope for silicon? Besides the Sahara, the Negev, and The Empty Quarter, I mean. Ultimately, of course, the Moon might be the best home for all the server farms Google will need once we're all living on Google Earth 2.0.

le_voyage_dans_la_lune

Matthew Battles — Fri, 01 May 2009 14:43:59 +0000

HILO Heroes, May 1-2

HILOBROW — Fri, 01 May 2009 15:52:39 +0000

In the Hilobrow galaxy, there are many stars. We're frantically mapping constellations of our favorite hilobrows; and we ooh and ahh with delight as highbrows and lowbrows flash across the atmosphere. As for darkly brilliant nobrows, we can detect them by studying their influence (benign? malign?) upon other heavenly bodies. As for high middlebrows and low middlebrows, they're the vector-graphics asteroids and we're the little tiny spaceship blasting away at them doggedly, resignedly, forever. Happy birthday to the following high-, low-, no-, and hilobrow heroes. Click here to see more HILO birthdays. MAY 1 Terry Southern Wes Anderson Joseph Heller Calamity Jane Joanna Lumley (right) Ignazio Silone Pierre Teilhard de Chardin MAY 2 Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson Jerome K. Jerome Athanasius Kircher's "Selenic Shadowdial" E.E. "Doc" Smith Link Wray

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Joshua Glenn — Fri, 01 May 2009 19:25:23 +0000

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Joshua Glenn — Fri, 01 May 2009 19:26:21 +0000

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Joshua Glenn — Fri, 01 May 2009 19:26:53 +0000

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Joshua Glenn — Fri, 01 May 2009 19:28:28 +0000

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Joshua Glenn — Fri, 01 May 2009 19:32:17 +0000

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Joshua Glenn — Fri, 01 May 2009 19:34:31 +0000

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Joshua Glenn — Fri, 01 May 2009 19:37:16 +0000

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Joshua Glenn — Fri, 01 May 2009 19:41:38 +0000

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Joshua Glenn — Fri, 01 May 2009 19:49:36 +0000

HILO Heroes, May 3-9

HILOBROW — Sun, 03 May 2009 14:03:12 +0000

Happy birthday, this week, to the following high-, low-, no-, and hilobrow heroes. Click here for more HILO birthdays. *** MAY 3 James Brown Pete Seeger *** MAY 4 Keith Haring Jane Jacobs *** MAY 5 Tammy Wynette Karl Marx (circa 1844 Paris Manuscripts) Kenneth Burke Søren Kierkegaard *** MAY 6 Orson Welles Gaston Leroux Sigmund Freud Randall Jarrell *** MAY 7 Gabby Hayes Traci Lords *** MAY 8 Don Rickles Edmund Wilson Thomas Pynchon Gary Snyder *** MAY 9 Ghostface Killah William Moulton Marston ---------------- Now playing: Jamie Lidell - Little Bit of Feel Good via FoxyTunes

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Joshua Glenn — Sun, 03 May 2009 17:07:22 +0000

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Joshua Glenn — Sun, 03 May 2009 17:07:55 +0000

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Joshua Glenn — Sun, 03 May 2009 17:09:02 +0000

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Joshua Glenn — Sun, 03 May 2009 17:20:06 +0000

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Joshua Glenn — Sun, 03 May 2009 17:22:08 +0000

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Joshua Glenn — Sun, 03 May 2009 17:24:36 +0000

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Joshua Glenn — Sun, 03 May 2009 17:26:23 +0000

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Joshua Glenn — Sun, 03 May 2009 17:28:54 +0000

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Joshua Glenn — Sun, 03 May 2009 17:33:33 +0000

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Joshua Glenn — Sun, 03 May 2009 17:36:15 +0000

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Joshua Glenn — Sun, 03 May 2009 17:53:33 +0000

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Joshua Glenn — Sun, 03 May 2009 17:55:35 +0000

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Joshua Glenn — Sun, 03 May 2009 17:55:47 +0000

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Joshua Glenn — Sun, 03 May 2009 17:57:52 +0000

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Joshua Glenn — Sun, 03 May 2009 17:59:14 +0000

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Joshua Glenn — Sun, 03 May 2009 18:01:27 +0000

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Joshua Glenn — Mon, 04 May 2009 11:34:34 +0000

Hilo at Pazzo

Joshua Glenn — Mon, 04 May 2009 11:42:38 +0000

On Thursday, the editors of Hilobrow.com discussed the particulars of our project during a weekly meetup with Brian and Tom Nealon, proprietors of the excellent Pazzo Books (located in the Boston neighborhood of West Roxbury). We're glad to see that we've infected their brains. In Saturday's episode of Pazzo TV, in a segment devoted to La Place's Le Theatre Anglois, Vol. I-IV (1746), the first French translation of Shakespeare (which was bowdlerized), the two gruff, folksy litterateurs had the following exchange: TOM: It wasn't until the 1770s that you had a proper translation, with the fart jokes kept in, by Le Tourneur. [Le Theatre Anglois has] got a false imprint of London, because nobody would have approved of it in Paris. BRIAN: Too embarrassing. TOM: It was too embarrassing. Although obviously it's not the dirty stuff, which they liked there. The potty humor. Brian: The lowbrow. The French are highbrow humorists. Tom: Yeah, they are. Buy the La Place set here, only $1,500. A steal!

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Joshua Glenn — Mon, 04 May 2009 11:47:59 +0000

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Joshua Glenn — Mon, 04 May 2009 12:08:04 +0000

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Joshua Glenn — Mon, 04 May 2009 12:10:03 +0000

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Joshua Glenn — Mon, 04 May 2009 12:16:13 +0000

Hilobrow Cover Art (7)

Joshua Glenn — Mon, 04 May 2009 12:20:51 +0000

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Joshua Glenn — Tue, 05 May 2009 01:23:01 +0000

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Joshua Glenn — Tue, 05 May 2009 01:23:57 +0000

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Joshua Glenn — Tue, 05 May 2009 01:24:16 +0000

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Joshua Glenn — Tue, 05 May 2009 01:24:38 +0000

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Joshua Glenn — Tue, 05 May 2009 01:26:08 +0000

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Joshua Glenn — Tue, 05 May 2009 11:24:07 +0000

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Joshua Glenn — Tue, 05 May 2009 11:24:25 +0000

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chopin

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Joshua Glenn — Tue, 05 May 2009 11:25:25 +0000

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Joshua Glenn — Tue, 05 May 2009 11:27:45 +0000

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Joshua Glenn — Tue, 05 May 2009 13:36:08 +0000

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Hilobrow Cover Art (8)

Joshua Glenn — Tue, 05 May 2009 13:42:26 +0000

Will wonders never cease? These covers keep flooding in. Thanks to everyone who's contributed to this important cultural archaeology project. Check out the entire series. *** *** *** *** *** *** Thanks, Jonathan Lethem, for this fine example of a different hilo phenomenon: the use of highbrow art to set a lowbrow mood. Cf. Schoenbergian dissonances in horror movie scores. *** *** *** *** *** HILOBROW COVER GALLERY: Orwell's 1984 | Huxley's Brave New World | Chesterton's The Man Who Was Thursday* | Sartre's Les Mains Sales | Murger's Scènes de la vie de bohème | Zola's Pot-Bouille | West's Miss Lonelyhearts | Faulkner's Sanctuary | Bowles's Let It Come Down | Himes's If He Hollers Let Him Go | (Not) Kierkegaard's Fear and Trembling | Céline's Death on the Installment Plan | McCarthy's The Company She Keeps | Pynchon's The Crying of Lot 49 | DeLillo's Running Dog | Hardy's Far from the Madding Crowd | Remarque's All Quiet on the Western Front | Butler's The Way of All Flesh | Koestler's Darkness at Noon | Huxley's Time Must Have a Stop | Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow | Dostoyevsky's Crime and Punishment | Hoagland's Cat Man | Isherwood's The Last of Mr. Norris | Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man | Lawrence's Love Among the Haystacks | Lawrence's The Thorn in the Flesh | Caldwell's A Lamp for Nightfall | Orwell's Keep the Aspidastra Flying | Nabokov's Laughter in the Dark | Miller's Focus | McCullers' The Heart is a Lonely Hunter | Maugham's Cosmopolitans | Christie's The Boomerang Clue ** | Greene's Brighton Rock | Greene's The Man Within | Lewis's Babbitt | Steinbeck's Cannery Row | West's The Day of the Locust | Warren's All The King's Men | Maugham's The Moon and Sixpence | Huxley's Antic Hay | Hardy's The Return of the Native | Fante's Ask the Dust | Louys' Aphrodite | Dostoevsky's The Brothers Karamazov | Orwell's Burmese Days | Maugham's Cakes and Ale | Orwell's Down and Out in Paris and London | PLUS: Classical LPs with Racy Covers * Actually, the cover image depicts a scene from a different story in the same issue of Famous Fantastic Mysteries. ** Agatha Christie is not a highbrow author. But check out the De Chirico-esque cover imagery.

goethecone

Matthew Battles — Tue, 05 May 2009 20:23:26 +0000

Metamorphoses

Matthew Battles — Tue, 05 May 2009 20:55:04 +0000

The catalogue of the MIT Press arrived in the mail today. One of my favorite university presses, MIT publishes books that are terrifyingly smart, but often audacious and surprising as well. (last year's Digital Apollo by David Mindell, in which the Apollo program comes off as half steampunk fever dream and half bureaucratic clusterfuck, is an ideal case in point). The first entry in this season's catalogue: a new edition of Goethe's 1790 treatise The Metamorphosis of Plants, with luminous photographs and an introduction by Gordon L. Miller, historian and director of the interdisciplinary Environmental Studies Program at Seattle University. Botany is not a topic we anglophones normally associate with the German arch-Romanticist. But Goethe's life and art were not so neatly segregated as modernity's later division of the arts and sciences would lead us to expect. The author of Sorrows of Young Werther was as avid a naturalist and philosopher of science as he was litterateur. Romantic to the core, Goethe vibrated in sympathy with a natural world which, he felt, returned the communication. Thus he was troubled by the Cartesian turn towards materialism and rigid empiricism, which he found expressed most fully in Newton's dry-as-dust dissection of light into the spectrum. The Newtonian formula struck Goethe as not only nonsense—how could the very ideal of whiteness be composed of colors?—but as a kind of violence against nature, an brutal insensitivity to its subjective aspect. "Colors," he wrote in a huff, "are the deeds and sufferings of light." When it came to plants, Goethe was not only an avid collector but a florid dreamer. His method could be called a kind of ecstatic empiricism; in his precise observation of the forms plants take in root, leaf, and flower, he saw the outlines of an Urpflanz—the indreamt, unfolding plantness of all plants, the flourishing vegetal spirit spilling forth as a cornucopia of forms. His vision of nature would later inspire Ralph Waldo Emerson as he browsed the cabinets of the Jardin des Plantes in Paris. "The Universe is a more amazing puzzle than ever," he observed, "as you glance along this bewildering series of animated forms, the hazy butterflies, the carved shells, . . . the upheaving principle of life everywhere incipient in the very rock aping organized forms." It was this vision of the striving, ramifying being of the natural world—the Goethean vision of nature filtered through the dazzling forms on display in Paris—that counterbalanced Emerson's equally epiphanic experience of the Louvre, inspiring his great essay Nature. It's safely said that Goethe had no impact on the course of modern science. But the prospect of a new edition of his Metamorphosis of Plants appearing under MIT's imprint suggests a corrective urge.

goethe1775

Matthew Battles — Tue, 05 May 2009 21:01:22 +0000

astaire-rogers-550

Joshua Glenn — Wed, 06 May 2009 01:08:39 +0000

donovan-poster

Joshua Glenn — Wed, 06 May 2009 01:10:36 +0000

mauss

Joshua Glenn — Wed, 06 May 2009 01:11:50 +0000

vicious-sid-with-nancy

Joshua Glenn — Wed, 06 May 2009 01:13:30 +0000

dali4

Joshua Glenn — Wed, 06 May 2009 12:02:05 +0000

silvers-bilko3

Joshua Glenn — Wed, 06 May 2009 12:05:17 +0000

feynman1

Joshua Glenn — Wed, 06 May 2009 12:07:09 +0000

pyle-denver

Joshua Glenn — Wed, 06 May 2009 12:08:58 +0000

hepburn-k1

Joshua Glenn — Wed, 06 May 2009 12:13:17 +0000

bataille

Matthew Battles — Wed, 06 May 2009 13:10:47 +0000

weil

Matthew Battles — Wed, 06 May 2009 13:11:49 +0000

s_zizek

Matthew Battles — Wed, 06 May 2009 13:13:45 +0000

lacan-1

Matthew Battles — Wed, 06 May 2009 13:16:34 +0000

szilard21

Matthew Battles — Wed, 06 May 2009 13:19:53 +0000

LEAGUE OF EXTRAORDINARY HILOBROWS

Matthew Battles — Wed, 06 May 2009 13:32:36 +0000

[caption id="attachment_1436" align="aligncenter" width="343" caption="Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar—unless it\'s evidence!"]Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar—unless it's evidence!" title="lacan-1" width="343" height="303" class="size-full wp-image-1436" />[/caption]Lacan at the Scene, a Lacanian crime manual by Henry Bond with a foreword by Slavov Žižek (who edits the "Short Circuits" series of which this book is a part). According to catalogue copy, Bond's book asks a compelling question: "What if Jacques Lacan had worked as a police detective . . . applying his theories to solve crimes?"

Bond places Lacan at the crime scene and builds his argument through a series of archival crime scene photographs from the 1950s—the period when Lacan was developing his influential theories. Bond takes us inside the perimeter set by police tape and guides us into a series of explicit, even terrifying, murder scenes. It is not the horror of the ravished and mutilated corpses that draws his attention; instead, he interrogates seemingly minor details from the everyday, isolating and rephotographing what at first seems insignificant: a single high‐heeled shoe on a kitchen table; carefully folded clothes placed over a chair; a plate of chocolate biscuits on a dinner table; lewd graffiti inscribed on a train carriage door; an arrangement of workman's tools in a forest clearing. From these mundane details he carefully builds a robust and comprehensive manual for Lacanian crime investigation that can stand beside the FBI's standard-issue Crime Classification Manual.

A review copy of Bond's book hasn't arrived yet, but we're already slavering at the prospect of a Lacanian police procedural. Possibilities abound—how about a Wittgensteinian game show ("do you choose case 13, or all that is the case?"), or a Sartrean reality show ("hell is other people—living together in a house in South Florida!")? Better: Lacan joining forces with Georges Bataille, Simone Weil, and Leo Szilard (you need a tech guy) as a crime-fighting team, with, Žižek—wielding some technology that lets him bring them all back from the dead—as the avuncular-yet-shadowy Charlie-like figure pulling the strings? [gallery]

west

Joshua Glenn — Wed, 06 May 2009 18:19:32 +0000

warren

Joshua Glenn — Wed, 06 May 2009 18:20:13 +0000

maugham

Joshua Glenn — Wed, 06 May 2009 18:20:32 +0000

huxley

Joshua Glenn — Wed, 06 May 2009 18:20:51 +0000

hardy

Joshua Glenn — Wed, 06 May 2009 18:21:09 +0000

fante

Joshua Glenn — Wed, 06 May 2009 18:21:25 +0000

Hilobrow Cover Art (9)

Joshua Glenn — Thu, 07 May 2009 17:51:37 +0000

05032009lama

Joshua Glenn — Fri, 08 May 2009 13:17:22 +0000

Dalai Lowbrow

Joshua Glenn — Fri, 08 May 2009 13:43:32 +0000

The Dalai Lama was in Boston recently. That's him, above, this past Sunday, speaking to a crowd of 16,000 at Foxboro Stadium. While wearing a Patriots cap. That's right: The Dalai Lama is a lowbrow! You heard it here first. Don't be offended: In Hilobrow.com's chart of Modern Dispositions, the two most admirable are Highbrow and Lowbrow. (Nobrow is impressive, but not particularly admirable; Hilobrow itself can't be described except apophatically, so... is it admirable? Impossible to say.) Despite the outdated phrenological connotations, Highbrow is not superior to Lowbrow; they are equally worthy. And we're not really judging the Dalai Lama on the basis of his headgear. If he wore a top hat, or a beret, or a crown, we'd still hail him as a lowbrow. Lowbrow's ideal is Wisdom, from which flows not only religion but empathy (compassion, warm-heartedness). Not to be confused with highbrow sympathy, lowbrow empathy shares and understands how others feel without agreement or disagreement. For better and worse, empathy is irrational, revolutionary, utopian. A few days before he spoke at Foxboro, the DL visited Harvard and MIT and hawked compassion to the highbrows:

The Dalai Lama had some imaginative ideas for MIT scientists to work for peace. "You could invent an injection for compassion," he said. "I would want that." And maybe commerce could contribute: "You could have shops selling compassion. In a supermarket, you could buy compassion."

Talk about irrational, revolutionary, and utopian! The Dalai Lama is so cool. He's an avatar of Lowbrow. PS: Lowbrow, unlike Anti-Highbrow (with which it is too often confused), is not romanticist, ideological, or fanatical. At Foxboro, the Dalai Lama illustrated this when he said: "I studied Buddhism, I practiced Buddhism, and through practice I got some sort of little experience . . . Very low but still better than zero. Buddhism is best for my case. That doesn't mean Buddhism is best religion to everyone, certainly not."

beuys-america

Joshua Glenn — Fri, 08 May 2009 19:56:34 +0000

hepburn-philadephia

Joshua Glenn — Fri, 08 May 2009 19:58:36 +0000

squier-billy

Joshua Glenn — Fri, 08 May 2009 19:59:52 +0000

dury-ian

Joshua Glenn — Fri, 08 May 2009 20:01:18 +0000

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Joshua Glenn — Fri, 08 May 2009 20:13:11 +0000

sid-vicious

Joshua Glenn — Fri, 08 May 2009 20:15:24 +0000

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Joshua Glenn — Fri, 08 May 2009 20:18:08 +0000

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Joshua Glenn — Fri, 08 May 2009 20:20:47 +0000

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Joshua Glenn — Fri, 08 May 2009 20:22:20 +0000

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Joshua Glenn — Fri, 08 May 2009 20:23:33 +0000

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Joshua Glenn — Fri, 08 May 2009 20:26:29 +0000

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Joshua Glenn — Fri, 08 May 2009 20:28:19 +0000

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Joshua Glenn — Fri, 08 May 2009 20:30:55 +0000

eno-brian

Joshua Glenn — Fri, 08 May 2009 20:32:30 +0000

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Joshua Glenn — Fri, 08 May 2009 20:35:09 +0000

brown_chester_louis_riel

Joshua Glenn — Fri, 08 May 2009 20:38:08 +0000

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Joshua Glenn — Fri, 08 May 2009 20:41:12 +0000

HILO Heroes, May 10-12

HILOBROW — Sun, 10 May 2009 17:35:13 +0000

Hilobrow gives thanks and praise to Peggy Nelson, David Smay, Mimi Lipson, Tor Aarestad, James Parker, and Greg Rowland, who contributed shout-outs to the following high-, low-, no-, and hilobrow heroes. On Wednesday, we'll publish the next installment of this series. After that, we may have to scale back the scope of these entries... it's too much! Click here for more HILO birthdays. *** MAY 10 It's true, musicals are silly, and Fred Astaire's musicals were some of the silliest. The ideas were not lofty, the plots and motivations were, shall we say, porous — but those dances were pure abstract glissandos of delight. A little thin, a little diffident, a little odder than average — maybe he doesn't look like the kind of guy you'd follow. But then the music starts, and Astaire starts to move, and sweeps you along with him. Sure, it was choreographed (by Astaire in collaboration, most notably with Hermes Pan) but choreography is just an idea — the execution is the manifestation, the dance is what's real. Does anyone dance like that anymore? If so, can you call me? No, seriously. — P.N. *** Unfairly dismissed by Sixties rock critics as a fey and twee Dylan wannabe, Donovan was clearly the unacknowledged legislator of all things fey and twee. Cat Stevens and Marc Bolan carved their entire careers out of tiny corners of his vast and misty mountained realm. You want gorgeous melodies, unbeatable pop hooks, restless musical innovation, and fantastic (tremulous) vocals? Check out Donovan's namedropping hipster's anthem "Sunny South Kensington," or his overlooked masterpiece, the early Seventies' children's album HMS Donovan. — D.S. *** Dreyfusard and socialist, political activist, gregarious, bohemian and bon vivant, inspiration to Georges Bataille and the Situationists: although his Uncle Emile (Durkheim) was an inspired highbrow, Marcel Mauss was a giant of hilo — an intellectual populist. Serious of purpose, but institutionally unhinged and informationally omnivorous, he drew in a collection of surrealists and sociologists, trained them, and sent them off to Africa to assay the range of cultural expression and human belief. He was a catalyst for Levi-Strauss through his fulgent writings on the foundational nature of gift exchange in social and cultural life — among the first to grant equal status to belief and social facts in the study of sociology. (Earlier sociologists and anthropologists considered religion and culture epiphenomenal to social relations.) Remembered by a student as a man of "inspired confusion." — T.A. *** Sid Vicious *** MAY 11 Salvador Dali *** Both Phil Silvers and his best-known character, Sergeant Bilko, were driven by a manic energy that sought to control, disrupt, and ultimately collapse all forces of linear, mathematical, or hierarchical order — reflecting the devout wish of the obsessive gambler. Silvers had a Royal Flush-level comedic virtuosity, while Bilko's monomaniacal obsession with material self-advancement elegantly disemboweled the American Dream. So Silvers is an unacknowledged hero of '50s counterculture: smart enough to slip his subversion into prime time, thus guiding his audience towards an increasingly skeptical view of authority while still enabling laughter at the hysterically heroic limits of rampant individualism. — G.R. *** The original cyberpunk? Feynman's joy at constructing the myth of Feynman-as-outsider-genius seemed nearly as great as what he experienced expanding the frontiers of modern physics. His curiosity ranged from quantum physics to building tiny motors to picking up chicks. He was as interested in heuristics as in theory — if a principle could not be communicated in a freshman lecture, it was not properly understood. Described by Freeman Dyson as "half genius and half buffoon," he was nanotechnology's godfather and spiritual ancestor to all makers and pickup artists. — T.A. *** You know everything you need to know about Denver Pyle's career by looking at his characters' names: Amos Carruthers, Bagley the Blacksmith , Jumpy Jordan, Grandpappy John, Briscoe Darling, and, of course, Uncle Jesse. The avuncular hillbilly par excellence, Pyle looked fabulous in either buckskins or overalls. Not so much an actor as a found object of mountain-man authenticity in size, bearing, face, and voice. With a filmography that features more than seventy-five films, he managed exactly three stone classics: Johnny Guitar, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, and Bonnie and Clyde. — D.S. *** MAY 12 An icon as much for her chin line and Ivy League drawl (which possibly she made up; they certainly didn't talk like that at Cornell!), Katharine Hepburn was a strong and independent woman, perhaps even more so than the ones she portrayed onscreen. My favorite roles of hers are the screwball comedies like The Philadelphia Story, which combined romantically convoluted plotlines with a little slapstick and a lot of incredibly intelligent repartee. Back when fast and action-packed were adjectives applied to the dialogue. These exchanges required the characters to be on for the entire length not only of the film but, one suspects, their lives. — P.N. *** A conceptual artist, self-inventor, and master of materials who constructed his strongest work out of intangibles, Joseph Beuys was our postcard deity in art school. His sense of the absurd combined with his high seriousness in presentation made him the perfect icon both for those that wanted to take him seriously, and for those that had to mock him. And the great thing was, it made absolutely no difference: mocking the thing was the thing, it was both A and ~A at the same time. Not for nothing did Beuys choose to lock himself in a cage with a coyote, the trickster of myth, when he visited America, for pretty much no reason except to make a spectacle out of himself. A perfect commentary on the American Dream, which markets itself the world over as the ultimate Spectacle. — P.N. *** Billy Squier *** IAN DURY (1942-2000) is often identified with the original wave of British punk, but it's hard to see much similarity between Dury and Johnny Rotten or Sid Vicious. Bawdy and sensual where they were aggressive and anarchic, Dury always seemed like he was enjoying every ounce of his life. After growling the chorus to "Sex & Drugs & Rock & Roll" he sings mincingly, "Every bit of clothing ought to make you pretty." It's easy to imagine this song inspiring all those child aesthetes who became the hair-metal heroes of the 1980s. But I like him best, perhaps, for his thumb to the middlebrow's eye shortly before his death. Andrew Lloyd Webber asked Dury to adapt the lyrics for Cats: "But I said no straight off. I hate Andrew Lloyd Webber. He's a wanker, isn't he?" — T.A. *** Absurdity’s great-uncle; Freudian punchline, with all those noses of yours (a procession of disappointed phalli); exploder-in-chief of the grand Victorian beard (you filled it with birds)... we salute you, EDWARD LEAR. You did to the limerick what the Melvins did to heavy metal. No, that’s not quite right — but you looped and compressed it, made an absurdist algorithm out of it. ("There was an Old Man of Vienna,/Who lived upon Tincture of Senna;/When that did not agree,/He took Camomile Tea,/That nasty Old Man of Vienna") Your nonsense was as free as air, but it was also masonic, an initiation. Here, for instance, is how you crowned your recipe for Amblongus Pie: "Watch patiently till the crust begins to rise, and add a pinch of salt from time to time. Serve up in a clean dish, and throw the whole out of the window as fast as possible." — J.P. ***

richman

Joshua Glenn — Sun, 10 May 2009 23:43:32 +0000

brown-yummy

Joshua Glenn — Sun, 10 May 2009 23:45:31 +0000

tori-spelling-o4

Joshua Glenn — Sun, 10 May 2009 23:49:41 +0000

terkel-studs

Joshua Glenn — Sun, 10 May 2009 23:51:02 +0000

aphrodite-avon257

Joshua Glenn — Mon, 11 May 2009 12:48:22 +0000

brotherskaramazov-signett1488

Joshua Glenn — Mon, 11 May 2009 12:48:50 +0000

burmesedays-pop0459

Joshua Glenn — Mon, 11 May 2009 12:49:43 +0000

cakes-cardinalc019

Joshua Glenn — Mon, 11 May 2009 12:50:01 +0000

downandout-permap267

Joshua Glenn — Mon, 11 May 2009 12:50:41 +0000

Hilobrow Cover Art (10)

Joshua Glenn — Mon, 11 May 2009 13:00:09 +0000

800px-eso-l_calcada_-_pluto_by

Matthew Battles — Mon, 11 May 2009 13:31:53 +0000

percival_lowell-observing_mars_from_the_lowell_observatory

Matthew Battles — Mon, 11 May 2009 14:03:03 +0000

lowell_mars_channels

Matthew Battles — Mon, 11 May 2009 14:13:39 +0000

11phair190

Matthew Battles — Mon, 11 May 2009 14:28:31 +0000

Venetia Phair (1919–2009) or, Alien Naming Conventions

Matthew Battles — Mon, 11 May 2009 14:42:21 +0000

[caption id="attachment_1579" align="aligncenter" width="300" caption="The surface of Pluto, based on computer modes. L. Calçada"]The surface of Pluto from computer models, by L. Calçada" width="300" height="168" />[/caption] VENETIA PHAIR (née Burney), who named the planet Pluto, died on April 30 in Banstead, Surrey. She was 90. In March 1930, Eleven-year old Venetia was talking to her grandfather, Falconer Madan, about the discovery of the new planet when she proposed naming it after the Roman god of the underworld. Madan was a bibliographer of Lewis Carroll and retired librarian of the Bodleian at Oxford; his brother already had named the twin moons of Mars, Phobos and Deimos, after the war god's attendants. Madan relayed young Venetia's notional name to an astronomer friend, who cabled colleagues at the Lowell Observatory in Arizona, where Clyde Tombaugh had recently discovered the planet. Phair later studied mathematics at Cambridge and married the classicist Maxwell Phair, head of English at Epsom College. Her story is a charming one—the image of her as a child in Oxford, playing at planets in the garden with her mates, puts one in mind of Lyra, protagonist of Phillip Pullman's His Dark Materials trilogy and the plucky denizen of a parallel Oxford. But her remarkable name—and that of her grandfather—hint at another possible truth: Venetia was an alien, part of a vast trans–solar-system plot to cover up the existence of Earth's nemesis, the planet Nibiru. Clyde Tombaugh's boss was an astronomer named Vesto Melvyn Slipher—who was possessed of another clearly another alien moniker. We hypothesize that Slipher and Phair were Zetas sent to Earth to throw Percival Lowell off the trail of Planet X, which he came close to discovering after his explanation of canals on Mars was thrown into doubt by Alfred Russel Wallace. [caption id="attachment_1586" align="aligncenter" width="239" caption="Percival Lowell in his observatory."]Percival Lowell in his observatory." width="239" height="300" />[/caption] [caption id="attachment_1593" align="aligncenter" width="300" caption="Lowell's depiction of the canals of Mars."]Lowell's depiction of the canals of Mars." width="300" height="153" />[/caption] Lowell had noticed perturbations in the orbits of the gas giants which led him to speculate the existence of a giant outermost planet, "Planet X" (which we now know is Nibiru, or Wormwood according to St. John the Divine). Pluto? It's a decoy (its eccentric orbit makes this clear) put in place by the Zetas to hide their existence from us until their planet comes crashing through the inner solar system in 2012, causing a pole reversal and destroying human civilization. In 2006, Pluto lost its designation as a planet. But by then, of course, the Zetan plot had succeeeded. The orbital perturbations Lowell had observed were discredited in 1992 by an astronomer named Myles Standish. Falconer Madan, Venetia Phair, Vesto Slipher—and now Myles Standish! One thing about the Zetas is clear: they have a flair for names.

lifeincbanner-299x300

Matthew Battles — Tue, 12 May 2009 16:04:56 +0000

Share This Book!

Matthew Battles — Tue, 12 May 2009 16:26:37 +0000

DOUGLAS RUSHKOFF'S BOOKS include novels, cyberspace memoirs, works of media criticism and religious exploration, and the cult classic Stoned Free: How to Get High Without Drugs. But with the forthcoming Life, Inc.: How the World Became a Corporation and How to Take It Back, Rushkoff makes a bid to join the ranks of Lewis Hyde, Murray Bookchin, and Henry David Thoreau as a hilobrow political economist par excellence. Tracing the history of the corporation in the West, Rushkoff uncovers the dark side of the Renaissance, when princes first sought to take control of the value created in everyday exchange by licensing groups of investors to skim from commerce and productive labor, redefining plunder as profit. What began as a kind of economic droit de seigneur became Corporatism—an unquestioned set of assumptions about work and value that now infiltrate every facet of modern life. Rushkoff wants us to question this "new normal" by creating value amongst ourselves—in our towns and neighborhoods—through barter, local currencies, and other cooperative ventures. While utopians have long called for a political-economic reboot along such lines, Rushkoff's suggestions seem sound and down to earth. But hey, you be the judge! True to his message, Rushkoff is sharing the book as a guest blogger for the next couple of weeks at BoingBoing. And for a taste, you can check out the trailer for the book right here: We recommend you take the plunge and acquire the book. But don't steal it! Instead, buy a copy at your local bookstore, and when you're finished, pass it on. Or better, trade it for child care or fresh greens or a room-cleaning. To paraphrase Abby Hoffman: Share This Book!

FRANCE - ERIK SATIE

Joshua Glenn — Wed, 13 May 2009 00:22:01 +0000

Erik Satie (1866-1925), compositeur franÃais. RV-57030 /Â©Roger-Viollet

ramone-joey3

Joshua Glenn — Wed, 13 May 2009 00:24:58 +0000

waller-fats4

Joshua Glenn — Wed, 13 May 2009 00:31:50 +0000

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Joshua Glenn — Wed, 13 May 2009 01:06:02 +0000

morrissey4

Joshua Glenn — Wed, 13 May 2009 01:15:27 +0000

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Joshua Glenn — Wed, 13 May 2009 01:18:57 +0000

yun-fat-killer

Joshua Glenn — Wed, 13 May 2009 03:20:49 +0000

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Joshua Glenn — Wed, 13 May 2009 03:22:23 +0000

HILO Heroes, May 13-16

HILOBROW — Wed, 13 May 2009 10:08:42 +0000

Hilobrow.com thanks Mimi Lipson, David Smay, Peggy Nelson, and Tor Aarestad for these shoutouts to high-, low-, no-, and hilobrow heroes born on the following dates. Click here for more HILO birthdays. Starting next week, we'll be structuring these birthday posts differently. Stay tuned! MAY 13 Rest in peace, BEA ARTHUR (1922–2009). She was intelligent, decent, effortlessly funny, and she was old-school show-biz. We adored her as Maude in her signature smock-vests and slacks: broadcasting suburban liberal values with that trumpet-like voice, one eyebrow skeptically arched. — M.L. *** Ritchie Valens *** MAY 14 Bobby Darin *** David Byrne *** MAY 15 L. FRANK BAUM (1856–1919) is best known for The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, and wrote 13 sequels. Which seems like a lot until you realize that the series was dwarfed by the number of other fantasy novels he wrote. With a stated purpose of cleaning up fairy tales for optimistic and pragmatic American children, and a Theosophist subtext of "If you believe in it hard enough, you can make it happen," Baum shaped generations of young psyches well before we knew enough semiotics to deconstruct it all. And let's not forget Pink Floyd. — P.N. *** JAMES MASON (1909–1984), actor, gave us Brutus, Captain Nemo, Hugo Drax. But above all, he gave us a Humbert Humbert who was elegant yet never effete, and through whose doleful, non-specifically European eyes we somehow managed to gaze uncreepily at an American nymphet. — M.L. *** In The Master and Margarita MIKHAIL BULGAKOV (1891-1940) created a gang of villains so fantastical and vivid in their descriptions — stocky Azazello with his straw patch of flaming hair hanging down, solitary fang protruding from his mouth; Koroviev, a nefarious Jacques Tati; and Woland, the devil himself with half-platinum, half-gold crowned teeth, one green eye and one black and black mustache — that I haven't ever found their match. But the best of them all is Behemoth, the deranged overgrown black cat with his cigars and revolvers. He's either Sean Connery's Bond gone bad (and a bit to seed) or Jack Black in full leer. I remember visiting Bulgakov's apartment in Moscow; the walls in the alley and up the stairwell were covered with graffiti. Dominating all of the scribbled messages were multifarious depictions of his characters — early drafts of a graphic novel revision that has yet to arrive? — T.A. *** The contemporary iteration of BRIAN ENO (born 1948) as cerebral master of oblique strategies is certainly worth considering. But my affection is for the balding, androgyne playboy of the early Seventies. Nobody had more sex in 1972 than Eno, and nobody seemed to be having more fun. He ditched his classical clarinet training to mar the finish on Roxy Music with blasts and blurps of electronic noise, while wearing costumes that would make Bob Mackie tap his lips thoughtfully and murmur, "That might be a little much." Forget Discreet Music, I love him for his yodeling, post-glam, proto-punk single "Seven Deadly Finns." — D.S. *** Known best for his Flag (1954-5) and Map (1961), JASPER JOHNS (born 1930) along with his friend and one-time lover Robert Rauschenberg, applied gestural painting and bold, unblended color to everyday images and objects. Focusing on subjects with meanings so completely familiar and known in the culture that they were basically symbols of themselves, he liberated these objects and images from their iconic confinement — thus freeing Painting from its "vast seriousness" (to sort of paraphrase Fitzgerald) and opening the door to Warhol, deconstruction, humor, and, well, you and me. — P.N. *** JONATHAN RICHMAN (born 1951) sings to us exactly as we speak to ourselves. And besides, without him poor Affection would sit there standing in the corner, saying to itself, "I wish someone would give me something to do." — M.L. *** MAY 16 Though CHESTER BROWN (born 1960) is still creating vital work, nothing's ever going to match the jolt of subversive glee we got upon seeing Ronald Reagan topple into an immeasurable vat of shit, get stuck face first in a trans-dimensional portal, and have his head transplanted onto the tip of a penis. Only Jim Woodring's Frank can bear comparison to Ed the Happy Clown's delirium. Bonus points for Yummy Fur’s backup feature: The Gospel of Mark, seen as Grumpy Jesus and his Glowering Apostles. Chester then turned to the nascent autobiographical comic genre and created one of its few masterpieces, I Never Liked You. A bona fide genius. — D.S. *** Without question, YVONNE CRAIG (born 1937) had the coolest TV credits of the Sixties: Batman, Mission: Impossible, Star Trek, 77 Sunset Strip, The Man From U.N.C.L.E., Wild Wild West. Even knowing that she was a trained dancer, it was startling to see her pop up in the documentary Ballet Russe. On the Sixties nerdboy's pinup girl rankings she'd come in third — just behind Diana Rigg as Mrs. Peel, and Julie Newmar as Catwoman. But how could you choose between Yvonne's two iconic roles, each so distinct and delectable: The Green-Skinned Girl on Star Trek or Batgirl? Oh yeah, and she dated Elvis. — D.S. *** We've fallen out of touch with TORI SPELLING (born 1973) lately. We haven't read her best-selling autobiography or seen any of her three reality shows, but never mind. We'll always have 90210. Her casting as the virginal Donna Martin was nepotistic... and spot-on. She embodied the eponymous zip code — but sweetly. — M.L. *** STUDS TERKEL (1912–2008): shovel-ready and irony free. Fifty years from now, who will remind our grandchildren what a progressive looks like? And without another Federal Writer’s Project, who'll collect oral histories from the survivors of our Depression? — M.L.

Enlarging the Trek Fanfic Canon

Matthew Battles — Wed, 13 May 2009 15:43:07 +0000

THE STAR TREK MYTHOS hosts one of the most flourishing bodies of fan fiction since Euripides and the boys got busy on Homer back in the day (indeed, Trekkies ushered in the modern fan fiction movement). And while the new J. J. Abrams-directed film may not qualify for inclusion, elements of the blockbuster prequel are making their way into the canon's growing edge. One mashup interlaces the jumpy audio of the new film's trailer with the cool/camp visuals of the old: Another mashup artist has taken the lens-flare treatment notable in the Abrams film ("I love the idea that the future was so bright it couldn't be contained in the frame," the director has explained) and applied it to Gene Rodenberry's stylings: Finally, a fan has speculated how the old crew might greet the advent of the new film: Other examples? Let us know!

kirk_spock_tmp

Matthew Battles — Wed, 13 May 2009 19:25:16 +0000

roboflan

Matthew Battles — Thu, 14 May 2009 17:07:58 +0000

metropolisposter

Matthew Battles — Thu, 14 May 2009 17:09:45 +0000

Roboflânerie

Matthew Battles — Thu, 14 May 2009 17:10:19 +0000

AUTONOMOUS CITY EXPLORER, or "Ace," is a robot built by researchers at the University of Munich that navigates city streets by asking passers-by for directions. New Scientist has the story.

mothersbaugh-devo-3

Joshua Glenn — Fri, 15 May 2009 15:36:30 +0000

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Joshua Glenn — Fri, 15 May 2009 15:49:01 +0000

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Joshua Glenn — Fri, 15 May 2009 15:49:28 +0000

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Joshua Glenn — Fri, 15 May 2009 15:49:29 +0000

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Joshua Glenn — Fri, 15 May 2009 15:49:31 +0000

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Joshua Glenn — Fri, 15 May 2009 15:49:32 +0000

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Joshua Glenn — Fri, 15 May 2009 15:49:33 +0000

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Joshua Glenn — Fri, 15 May 2009 15:49:34 +0000

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Joshua Glenn — Fri, 15 May 2009 15:49:36 +0000

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Joshua Glenn — Fri, 15 May 2009 15:49:37 +0000

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Joshua Glenn — Fri, 15 May 2009 15:49:38 +0000

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Joshua Glenn — Fri, 15 May 2009 15:49:41 +0000

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Joshua Glenn — Fri, 15 May 2009 15:49:44 +0000

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Joshua Glenn — Fri, 15 May 2009 15:49:47 +0000

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Joshua Glenn — Fri, 15 May 2009 15:49:48 +0000

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Joshua Glenn — Fri, 15 May 2009 15:49:50 +0000

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Joshua Glenn — Fri, 15 May 2009 15:49:52 +0000

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Joshua Glenn — Fri, 15 May 2009 15:49:53 +0000

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Joshua Glenn — Fri, 15 May 2009 15:49:55 +0000

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Joshua Glenn — Fri, 15 May 2009 15:49:57 +0000

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Joshua Glenn — Fri, 15 May 2009 15:49:58 +0000

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Joshua Glenn — Fri, 15 May 2009 15:50:01 +0000

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Joshua Glenn — Fri, 15 May 2009 15:50:03 +0000

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Joshua Glenn — Fri, 15 May 2009 15:50:04 +0000

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Joshua Glenn — Fri, 15 May 2009 15:50:07 +0000

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Joshua Glenn — Fri, 15 May 2009 15:50:09 +0000

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Joshua Glenn — Fri, 15 May 2009 15:50:11 +0000

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Joshua Glenn — Fri, 15 May 2009 15:50:13 +0000

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Joshua Glenn — Fri, 15 May 2009 15:50:15 +0000

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Joshua Glenn — Fri, 15 May 2009 15:50:17 +0000

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Joshua Glenn — Fri, 15 May 2009 15:50:19 +0000

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Joshua Glenn — Fri, 15 May 2009 15:50:21 +0000

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Joshua Glenn — Fri, 15 May 2009 15:50:22 +0000

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Joshua Glenn — Fri, 15 May 2009 15:50:25 +0000

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Joshua Glenn — Fri, 15 May 2009 15:50:26 +0000

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Joshua Glenn — Fri, 15 May 2009 15:50:28 +0000

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Joshua Glenn — Fri, 15 May 2009 15:50:29 +0000

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Joshua Glenn — Fri, 15 May 2009 15:50:31 +0000

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Joshua Glenn — Fri, 15 May 2009 15:50:32 +0000

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Joshua Glenn — Fri, 15 May 2009 15:50:33 +0000

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Joshua Glenn — Fri, 15 May 2009 15:50:35 +0000

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Joshua Glenn — Fri, 15 May 2009 15:50:38 +0000

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Joshua Glenn — Fri, 15 May 2009 15:50:40 +0000

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Joshua Glenn — Fri, 15 May 2009 15:50:44 +0000

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Joshua Glenn — Fri, 15 May 2009 15:50:45 +0000

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Joshua Glenn — Fri, 15 May 2009 15:50:47 +0000

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Joshua Glenn — Fri, 15 May 2009 15:50:48 +0000

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Joshua Glenn — Fri, 15 May 2009 15:50:50 +0000

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Joshua Glenn — Fri, 15 May 2009 15:50:59 +0000

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Joshua Glenn — Fri, 15 May 2009 15:51:03 +0000

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Joshua Glenn — Fri, 15 May 2009 15:51:05 +0000

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Joshua Glenn — Fri, 15 May 2009 15:51:08 +0000

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Joshua Glenn — Fri, 15 May 2009 15:51:09 +0000

FRANCE - ERIK SATIE

Joshua Glenn — Fri, 15 May 2009 15:51:12 +0000

Erik Satie (1866-1925), compositeur franÃais. RV-57030 /Â©Roger-Viollet

FRANCE - ERIK SATIE

Joshua Glenn — Fri, 15 May 2009 15:51:29 +0000

Erik Satie (1866-1925), compositeur français. RV-57030 /©Roger-Viollet

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Joshua Glenn — Fri, 15 May 2009 15:51:36 +0000

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Joshua Glenn — Fri, 15 May 2009 15:51:37 +0000

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Joshua Glenn — Fri, 15 May 2009 15:51:39 +0000

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Joshua Glenn — Fri, 15 May 2009 15:51:41 +0000

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Joshua Glenn — Fri, 15 May 2009 15:51:42 +0000

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Joshua Glenn — Fri, 15 May 2009 15:51:44 +0000

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Joshua Glenn — Fri, 15 May 2009 15:51:51 +0000

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Joshua Glenn — Fri, 15 May 2009 15:51:57 +0000

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Joshua Glenn — Fri, 15 May 2009 15:51:59 +0000

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Joshua Glenn — Fri, 15 May 2009 15:52:01 +0000

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Joshua Glenn — Fri, 15 May 2009 15:52:03 +0000

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Joshua Glenn — Fri, 15 May 2009 15:52:21 +0000

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Joshua Glenn — Fri, 15 May 2009 16:18:10 +0000

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Joshua Glenn — Fri, 15 May 2009 16:18:11 +0000

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Joshua Glenn — Fri, 15 May 2009 16:18:12 +0000

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Joshua Glenn — Fri, 15 May 2009 16:33:36 +0000

Hilo Heroes, May 17-23

HILOBROW — Sun, 17 May 2009 07:04:33 +0000

Happy Birthday, this week, to the following high-, low-, no-, and hilobrow heroes. More Hilo birthdays. MAY 17 Parisian composer ERIK SATIE (1866-1925) was the great-grandaddy of ambient music, the distant progenitor of Musak and smooth jazz. In 1902, Satie and friends introduced what they called "Furniture Music" in a Paris Gallery — that is, atmospheric music, intended to be ignored — and failed miserably when the crowd stopped looking at the art to watch the musicians. Like many a musical avant-gardist, the Velvet Gentleman's influence outlived him. For example: Ravel and Debussy, Cage and Ono, Subotnik and Lesh, Eno and Aphex Twin, Kenny G and The Microsoft Windows ’95 Startup Sound. I dare any child of the 1970s to listen to Satie's "Gymnopedie" compositions without being abruptly transported back to the torturous boredom of childhood, waiting for parents in a mattress store or watching a soft-focus TV-movie romance. — Jason Grote MAY 18 Although other rock frontmen had been strange before MARK MOTHERSBAUGH (born 1950), none had been so aggressively strange or so brazenly uncool. Devo was the soundtrack of a life spent stumbling on uneven pavement, knocking over full glasses at the dinner table. Mothersbaugh is a nonfictional Lionel Essrog, giving Tourettic yelps and pricks to unsettle the comfortable. The classic Devo single is "Mongoloid" — even as you sing along you feel like the mark in a long con. For years since Devo's peak Mothersbaugh has been inserting counter-hegemonic viruses into the heads of children of all ages through his work scoring Rugrats, Pee-Wee's Playhouse, and Wes Anderson's films, for instance. But practice nodding that head in 7/8 time, because a new Devo album is scheduled for fall 2009. — Tor Aarestad MAY 19 Look at the way people describe JOEY RAMONE's (1951-2001) voice: "bleat," "snarl," "hiccup." Would they say the same about Ronnie Spector? His voice was honest, plangent... it was bliss. He left us too soon, yes, but was it a shock? Not really. He was a fragile Ramone — a romantic, brokenhearted Ramone. We secretly favored the sweet love songs, and we were gratified to learn that he did, too. We cry for our teenage selves when we listen to "I Wanna Be Your Boyfriend." We're listening to it right now. — Mimi Lipson MAY 20 JIMMY STEWART (1908-97) endlessly reprised Everyman... yet his most iconic films are perfect set pieces of horror. Capra's It's a Wonderful Life, supposedly a Christmas classic, is a vicious exposé of the underpinnings of capitalism. In it, Business As Usual presents a value proposition of such incoherence, in both economic and human terms, that the only rational course left to Everyman is suicide. And in Hitchcock's Vertigo, Stewart plays a retired detective — a nice, normal guy who's spent his adult life coming up with convincing explanations and tidy solutions. But he has one little problem... which widens into a fault line revealing an abyss of phobia and obsession. Soon, Everyman has blundered his way to the frontier of rationality, and his world has become an endless feedback loop that mocks his, and our, attempts at escape. Plus, a pre-20th century figure for whom we have a certain amount of admiration: The result of what must be the gold standard of overparenting, JOHN STUART MILL (1806-73) was a prodigy who read Greek at 3, Latin at 8, pretty much everything else by his teens, befriended (and edited!) his father's famous friends including Jeremy Bentham, and achieved his first nervous breakdown at 20. But Mill was not just his father's lab experiment. He exposed the holes in his father's philosophy, made his own friends, and wrote extensively on every -ology, -osophy, -onomy and -ism. The most famous of these, Utilitarianism, he reformatted into a how-to manual for happiness. He emphasized practicality and action even as he examined underlying assumptions with a subtle lens, rendering him Eminently readable, even for a Victorian. — Peggy Nelson MAY 21 FATS WALLER (1904-43) lives in some impossible space between Paganini, St. Augustine, and James Brown. Tracks like "Handful of Keys" show Fats challenging Art Tatum in sublime stride-piano ostentation. But Waller was also fearlessly upfront in his depictions of tougher aspects of Harlem culture. Listen to "The Joint is Jumping" for references to rent-party violence, sexual licentiousness, and mass arrests. But who really believes that Fats "Ain't Misbehavin"? It's precisely his self-reflexiveness, cherubic bravado, and sense of a perpetually postponed repentance that puts him decades in advance of contemporary performers who try to commodify the urban black experience for the voyeuristic gratification of mainstream audiences. — Greg Rowland MAY 22 Hilobrow.com was recently drugged, blindfolded and pushed through a series of strangely booming rooms en route to an exclusive listening party for the new MORRISSEY (born 1959) album. And still we managed to take notes! Titled The Great Divorce and produced by Rolf Harris, Moz's latest will feature the following eight tracks: "They Hanged My Saintly Billy" (groaning torch song), "You'll Still Be Ugly In The Morning" (glam chug), "Goodbye To All That" (plasma-pop), "I Laughed For The First Time The Day You Drowned" (scuffling mozzabilly), "Arthurian Torso" (music hall), "I Can’t Hug You Anymore (I've Cut Off My Arms)" (unisex opera), "My Mate Stanley" (crime spree), and the epic, feedback-laden closer "Last of the Eager Hangers On." You heard it here first, pop pickers! — James Parker MAY 23 — Hergé cartoon by Joe Alterio More Hilo Heroes born May 17-23... May 17: Dennis Hopper, Maureen O'Sullivan, Frederic Prokosch May 18: Bertrand Russell, Walter Gropius, Reggie Jackson, Don Martin, George Strait, Tina Fey May 19: Malcolm X, André the Giant, Grace Jones, Peter Mayhew (Chewbacca), Pete Townshend May 20: Cher, Jimmy Stewart, Hal Clement, Jane Wiedlin May 21: Mr. T, Notorious B.I.G., Marcel Breuer, Robert Creeley, Henri Rousseau May 22: Arthur Conan Doyle, Gérard de Nerval, Laurence Olivier, Vance Packard May 23: James Blish, Scatman Crothers, Margaret Fuller, Robert Moog

herge-600

Joshua Glenn — Sun, 17 May 2009 11:01:51 +0000

Immortal New Gods

Joshua Glenn — Mon, 18 May 2009 08:01:48 +0000

A YEAR AGO this month, I identified a generational cohort of Americans and Western Europeans: the New Gods. Born between 1914 and 1923, the New Gods are — to translate my periodization into the middlebrow-speak of lazy journalists, pop sociologists, and Boomer historians — the Greatest Generation's younger half-cohort. The New Gods really were an impressive bunch, in their heyday: heroic, empowered, godlike. As artists and writers, but also as actors, politicians, musicians, filmmakers, journalists, and so forth, they operated in two registers — the everyday and the mythical — simultaneously. Hence their moniker, which I borrowed from comics artist-writer Jack Kirby (b. 1917). The youngest New Gods are turning 86 this year; the oldest New Gods are turning 95. The recent deaths of New God hilo heroes Bea Arthur, Philip José Farmer, and Ricardo Montalban, not to mention last year's loss of Alain Robbe-Grillet, Charlton Heston, Bettie Page, Cyd Charisse, Edmund Hillary, Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Eddy Arnold, Edward Lorenz, Arthur C. Clarke, Forrest J. Ackerman, and Richard Widmark, are sobering reminders that this important generation is nearly extinct. And yet... among the New Gods lurk a handful of men and women who have never been young. And who will, therefore, in all likelihood never die. Hilobrow.com is onto them! Here they are, a handful of New Gods who are actually — like gods — immortal. Ernest Borgnine (born 1917) Carol Channing (born 1921) Abe Vigoda (born 1921) Nancy Reagan (born 1921) Christopher Lee (born 1922) Henry Kissinger (born 1923) *** POSTSCRIPT Including Maila Nurmi (born 1922), the cult actress better known as Vampira, on this list would have been the crowning touch. Alas, she died last year. RIP.

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Joshua Glenn — Mon, 18 May 2009 11:40:48 +0000

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Joshua Glenn — Mon, 18 May 2009 11:43:45 +0000

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Joshua Glenn — Mon, 18 May 2009 11:47:45 +0000

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Joshua Glenn — Mon, 18 May 2009 11:51:56 +0000

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Joshua Glenn — Mon, 18 May 2009 11:54:47 +0000

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Matthew Battles — Tue, 19 May 2009 20:11:26 +0000

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Matthew Battles — Tue, 19 May 2009 20:12:36 +0000

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Matthew Battles — Tue, 19 May 2009 20:16:27 +0000

The Little People

Matthew Battles — Tue, 19 May 2009 20:30:43 +0000

THE LITTLE PEOPLE always have been with us. Since 2004, human paleontologists have watched news emerging from the Indonesian island of Flores, where researchers discovered the bones of a small humanoid that lived in the archipelago as recently as 17,000 years ago, well after full-sized Homo sapiens arrived in the area. But there's been public controversy since the story broke—controversy that never erupts when paleontologists fight over, say, the systematics of the nematodes or the hydrodynamics of nautiloid shells. Not everyone agrees that the remains of the creatures, dubbed Homo floresiensis by scientists but called "the hobbit" by a breathless press, represent a species distinct from modern humans. While its discoverers believe they've found a unique form of hominid, others argue that the bones belong to a human beset with microcephaly or dwarf cretinism. As reported recently in the New York Times and elsewhere, the controversy continues. The various interpretations are plausible, and the debate is normative. Scientists squabble over this sort of thing all the time. It's how knowledge—and careers—advance. What's different here? We're talking about the Little People. There's much to be said about the notion of little people, the most famous fictional form of which inspired the popular name for the newly-discovered cave dwellers of Indonesia. J. R. R. Tolkien's hobbits share etymological as well as folkloric roots with many other kinds of little people. Tolkien took his name, he said, from the Old English holbytla, a word for a hole-dweller. But British folklore had room for creatures called hobs, minor household gods who helped with farmwork, could cause mischief if crossed, and could be bought off with a freshly-made suit of clothes. Of course, we're just touching here on the endless fascination with the Little People. And it's that perennial belief in fairies, pixies, elves, gnomes sprites, sidhe, and selkies, and not the public fascination with paleontology, that explains why the Homo floresiensis controversy gets covered here, here, and here (among many other places). Even if the artist's reconstruction of the extinct Hobbit of Flores (top of post) looks more like Gollum than dear old Bilbo. But still, we haven't explained the fascination with minor gods and hill-dwelling folk. Where does it come from? We may never know—unless a specimen of Homo floresiensis turns up in Oxfordshire.

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Joshua Glenn — Wed, 20 May 2009 14:04:10 +0000

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Joshua Glenn — Wed, 20 May 2009 14:10:49 +0000

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Joshua Glenn — Wed, 20 May 2009 14:13:45 +0000

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Joshua Glenn — Wed, 20 May 2009 14:15:13 +0000

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Joshua Glenn — Wed, 20 May 2009 14:17:29 +0000

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Matthew Battles — Wed, 20 May 2009 14:58:21 +0000

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Matthew Battles — Wed, 20 May 2009 14:59:20 +0000

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Matthew Battles — Wed, 20 May 2009 15:29:53 +0000

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Matthew Battles — Wed, 20 May 2009 15:34:32 +0000

LEBANON/

Matthew Battles — Wed, 20 May 2009 15:53:28 +0000

Dogs search through a garbage hill in the Port city of Sidon in south Lebanon, October 3, 2007. REUTERS/Ali Hashisho (LEBANON)

587px-pompeji_getoteter_hund

Matthew Battles — Wed, 20 May 2009 16:02:52 +0000

The Feral is Beautifully Broken

Matthew Battles — Wed, 20 May 2009 16:18:41 +0000

[caption id="attachment_1912" align="aligncenter" width="300" caption="Australia's dingo has been feral for five thousand years."]Australia's dingo has been feral for five thousand years." title="newhollanddingo" width="300" height="215" class="size-medium wp-image-1912" />[/caption] THE DOMESTIC BEAST has been bred to special purpose; the tame animal is a wild thing brought to heel. The feral creature, by contrast, is a domesticated animal living without the intercession of man, beyond the bounds of our species' habitus. Jack London's Call of the Wild is the great novel of the feral. This moment, where the dog Buck begins to sense the lure of freedom while toiling in the traces, certainly evokes the lure:

With the aurora borealis flaming coldly overhead, or the stars leaping in the frost dance, and the land numb and frozen under its pall of snow, (the) song of the huskies might have been the defiance of life, only it was pitched in a minor key, with long-drawn wailings and half-sobs, and it was more the pleading of life, the articulate travail of existence. It was an old song, old as the breed itself—one of the first songs of the younger world in a a day when songs were sad. It was invested with the woe of unnumbered generations, this plaint by which Buck was so strangely stirred. When he moaned and sobbed, it was with the pain of living that was of old the pain of his wild fathers, and the fear and mystery of the cold and dark that was to them fear and mystery. And that he should be stirred by it marked the completeness with which he harked back through the ages of fire and roof to the raw beginnings of life in the howling ages.

That stirring completeness strikes a chord, to be sure. But I'm not sure London gets it exactly right—in his portrait of Buck there is a hint of bloodlust and muscle-worship that strikes me in places as more fascist than feral. It's now thought that the first domesticated dogs were not stolen wolf cubs; more likely, they were low-status pack members forced to the margins. These are wolves that would have learned the signs of aggression; they would have been quick with songs of supplication. Such creatures—edgy border-dwellers, cunning and quick—would have been well equipped to learn the signs of welcome and warning offered by the humans whose refuse piles they were learning to haunt. The feral lives at this precipice, this limit of wildness and domestication—looking not back but forward, with a smile and a hungry eye. If the domesticated animal is a kind of technology, a made thing in zoological form, then in a sense the feral creature is a broken tool—but if so, then it is a technology that is beautifully broken. [caption id="attachment_1920" align="aligncenter" width="293" caption="Cast of dog killed in the eruption of Pompeii, 79 AD. Photo by Claus Ableiter"]Cast of dog killed in the eruption of Pompeii, 79 AD. Photo by Claus Ableiter" title="587px-pompeji_getoteter_hund" width="293" height="300" class="size-medium wp-image-1920" />[/caption]

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Joshua Glenn — Wed, 20 May 2009 16:32:47 +0000

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Joshua Glenn — Thu, 21 May 2009 20:14:52 +0000

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Joshua Glenn — Thu, 21 May 2009 20:33:23 +0000

My Wes Anderson Problem — And Ours

Joshua Glenn — Thu, 21 May 2009 20:53:11 +0000

WES ANDERSON'S Bottle Rocket (1996) raised the hopes of hilobrows everywhere, and his Rushmore (1998) fulfilled those hopes in spades. So what happened? Anderson once knew how to get a great performance out of his actors. In Bottle Rocket, Luke Wilson wasn't yet the stiff romantic foil he's since become; or, to be more precise, his stiffness was charming, anti-actorly somehow — like Nicolas Cage and Matt Dillon used to be, too. Owen Wilson was truly extraordinary: the actor's lazy yet determined unwillingness to do anything but play himself seemed tailormade for his idealistic-eccentric slacker role. Rushmore introduced us to Jason Schwartzman, who's never been as good since he lost the braces and glasses; and to a soulfully lame Bill Murray whose existence nobody but Anderson (with the possible exception of Tim Burton) suspected. When Luke and Andrew Wilson (not to mention Kumar Pallana) reappeared in Rushmore, and Owen's name appeared again as co-writer, we thought: Wow! Anderson, like Ed Wood or Orson Welles or Martin Scorsese (or Tim Burton, again — has anyone ever compared the two?), has a troupe! Scorsese himself named Anderson the next Scorsese. In those first movies, Anderson's penchant for precisely correct props, stylishly unstylish costumes, bleak settings rendered exquisite through the use of primary colors and neo-autistic symmetries, and cherry-picked pop songs sparkling against an ambient setting crafted by the great Mark Mothersbaugh, was received by this moviegoer as nothing less than an antidote to that year's supposedly thrilling low-middlebrow actioners (Independence Day, Mission: Impossible), supposedly charming mainstream Hollywood fare (Jerry Maguire, Swingers), and shamesplotation disguised as supposedly smart high-middlebrow indies (Welcome to the Dollhouse).* Anderson's movies were mostly hailed as charming, but they were also thrilling (the botched robbery at the end of Bottle Rocket, Max's attempts to revenge himself on Blume in Rushmore), and — yes — smart. Rushmore was a far more penetrating examination of the dandy-as-artist than, for example, that same year's Velvet Goldmine. I didn't ever want Rushmore to end. Despite a few standout performances, though, I couldn't wait to see the last of The Royal Tenenbaums, The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou, and The Darjeeling Limited. I know! I know! I'm hardly alone in deploring Anderson's slide from style to shtick; Steely Dan, for example, has openly stated its collective preference for the director's early work to his twee trilogy of family dysfunction and cool vintage suitcases. But the problem has metastasized! As Elbert Ventura (a Zetan?) reported in Slate today, Anderson's now-regressive shtick ("poker-face eccentricity, affection for the oddball, fastidiously arranged clutter, an affinity for the precocious and childlike") has spread like a virus from American indie cinema — Ventura calls Juno, Napoleon Dynamite, Son of Rambow, Charlie Bartlett, and Garden State an "Andersonian quirkfest" — to TV shows (Flight of the Conchords), music videos (Vampire Weekend's "Oxford Comma," the Decemberists' "16 Military Wives"), and commercials (see below). Friends, we must study the qualitative differences between Anderson's first two and last three movies, in order to reverse-engineer Middlebrow's sinister method of quatsch-ification. Exactly what happened to Anderson's style? What rough edges were smoothed, what happy accidents routinized, what uncanny moments rendered all too canny? How were Anderson's dynamically opposed childish and adult sensibilities synthesized into the merely grownup? Answer these questions soon, so you'll be critically armed in time for his forthcoming adaptation of Roald Dahl's Fantastic Mr. Fox. Anderson has been quirked around, hilobrows. Don't let it happen to you. * No disrespect intended to 1996's actually thrilling movies like Broken Arrow and Fargo, and actually smart indies like I Shot Andy Warhol and Big Night.

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Joshua Glenn — Thu, 21 May 2009 23:19:46 +0000

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Matthew Battles — Fri, 22 May 2009 14:35:59 +0000

How Can I Counteract?

Matthew Battles — Fri, 22 May 2009 14:38:05 +0000

FIRST PAGE FROM GOOGLE on the phrase "how can I counteract?": How can I counteract the depressing hospital setting? How can I counteract the food cravings I get on HRT? How can I counteract the side effects of steroids? how can I counteract the belief that I can't get ahead financially? How can I counteract the belief that I'm not smart enough to be wealthy? How can I counteract the negativity of a few employees? I had too much coffee earlier, can I counter act it? How can I counteract the stress in my life? How can I counteract the effect of charcoal left in my vegetable garden? How can I counteract the effects of ecstasy?

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Joshua Glenn — Sat, 23 May 2009 21:29:47 +0000

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Joshua Glenn — Sat, 23 May 2009 21:32:29 +0000

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Joshua Glenn — Sat, 23 May 2009 21:35:50 +0000

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Joshua Glenn — Sun, 24 May 2009 14:26:48 +0000

Hilo Heroes, May 24-30

HILOBROW — Sun, 24 May 2009 14:27:24 +0000

HAPPY BIRTHDAY, this week, to the following high-, low-, no-, and hilobrow heroes. Click here for more Hilo Hero birthdays. MAY 24 I know it's a bold claim, but JOSEPH BRODSKY (1940-96) just might be the greatest poet ever to be rejected by the Soviet School for Submariners. (Tragically, there were no survivors of the School for Human Torches.) He was tried and condemned as a parasite (for writing poetry on the job), sent to a labor camp, then exiled from his home country. You need to force your imagination back to the Cold War to grasp the impact of Brodsky's poetry, which had the force of moral law — adjudicating from the underground against the dull, grinding edge of a cruel Soviet century. Brodsky saw himself first as a Jew, then as a Russian, and there is something in his sensibility which is almost rabbinical: reasonable, passionate, questioning, tough, rooted, ethical. But it was Anna Ahkmatova's early patronage of Brodsky which created an unbroken lineage in Russian poetry stretching from the Stray Dog Cabaret to samizdat. — David Smay MAY 25 MILES DAVIS (1926-91) was the son of a dentist, but visited a primal Oedipal rebellion upon the smug bourgeois sadism of his father's profession. A dentist, as you know, uses your mouth to cause you pain, embarrassment, and discomfort, whereas Davis used his chops to create an unfolding narrative of modernist beauty that profoundly transformed the musical aesthetics of the 20th Century. His was a restless progression that covered everything from the '50s cool school to '70s avant-funk, via some serious modal harmonic innovation and meta-groovy electric experimentation in the '60s. The greatest "Not-Dentist" of all time doesn't quite cover Davis' enduring brilliance, but it's as close as I'm going to get. — Greg Rowland MAY 26 PAM GRIER (b. 1949) was the Joan of Arc of late-night UHF-TV, when such a thing still existed. Starting with The Big Dollhouse (1971), a film which absolutely must be seen on drugs to be appreciated fully, Grier built a career around becoming the avenging angel of righteous black female anger at The Establishment, eventually being reintroduced to a new generation by Quentin Tarantino in Foxy Brown (1997). But it was always beneath Grier's talents to play such a cardboard cutout proxy. Grier on-screen is a glowing vision, and it's not just because she's an absolute knock-out. She nearly takes your breath away with her presence. Just standing in a room she walks into must be tough; after all, she's the "baddest one-chick hit-squad that ever hit town!" — Cartoon and shout-out by Joe Alterio MAY 27 DASHIELL HAMMETT (1894-1961) invented the crime novel — as distinct from the whodunit or the police procedural — and he came up with a case-hardened, all-weather prose that can be read with pleasure by people of every degree of relative literacy. Each of his distinct five novels spawned a separate legacy. They are by turns witty and brutal, poetic and blunt, cartoonish and profound, as if he was determined to hit every note on the scale at least once. Red Harvest and The Maltese Falcon are sufficiently wired into our brains that it’s possible to forget how radical they were. His sui generis American name and his long, thin, mustached appearance were uncannily exact accessories to his style. It’s sad but not surprising that he burned out by 40; since he muddied his own early trail, the biographies are pretty much all epilogue. — Luc Sante MAY 28 Trained in a school of doing anthropology that emphasized extended case studies of conflict and process within social structures, VICTOR TURNER (1920-83) did it brilliantly. But Turner was interested in affect as well as structure, turning to Freud and phenomenology — and, late in his life, to neuroscience — for inspiration. In linguistic terms, that is, he became a code-switcher, writing at one moment about the numinous aspects of cultural symbols, then about their structural function. While others followed Levi-Strauss and Geertz in analyzing culture as text, Turner viewed social relations as theater, with unscripted moments that were potential sites of change. Though it's not generally acknowledged, Turner is a key theoretical progenitor of many of our culture's most revered countercultural spaces: Woodstock, Lollapalooza, Burning Man. How? He exploded van Gennep's idea of an interstitial space in all rites of passage into the mega-concept of liminality; he then described that utopian, anomic place where status hierarchies dissolve and creative symbolic manipulation and identity transformation happens and dubbed it communitas. Wannabe Liminals have been seeking communitas ever since. — Tor Aarestad MAY 29 "To and fro/Stop and go/That's what makes the world go round..." Ugh. I pity the fool who sees Disney's 1963 adaptation of The Sword in the Stone (from which these insipid lyrics are quoted) before enjoying its original: the 1938 novel of the same title by British author T.H. WHITE (1906-64). Isn't retelling English myth a middlebrow activity? Usually, yes. But whereas Tolkien and C.S. Lewis — whom I do enjoy, without admiring so much — write romantic fantasies for grownup kiddies (cf. Michael Moorcock's critique, "Epic Pooh"), White's animal farm is as fraught, witty, and politically daring as Orwell's. Disney's Sword depicts Wart learning sentimental truisms from cute squirrels; in White's The Book of Merlyn, a nomadic goose convinces Wart of the merits of Fourier-esque anarchism. Plus: a leather-clad Maid Marian! Colonel Cully, the mad hawk! King Pellinore! Unlike the so-so Harry Potter series, whose author claims White as a key influence, White's Once and Future King tetralogy demands rereading. Now. — Joshua Glenn MAY 30 No contemporary soul artist has embraced depression, mental illness, and the Afro-freak legacy of Sun Ra and George Clinton with the frankness, ardor, and musical chops of Thomas Calloway, aka CEE-LO GREEN (born 1974). As a member of The Goodie Mob in the '90s, Cee-Lo — the son of two ordained ministers — helped make R&B gangsta. He's since combined hip hop and soul with garage rock and psychedelia, both as a solo artist and as one half (with DJ Danger Mouse) of Gnarls Barkley. The duo's best-known gimmick — appearing in different complementary costumes for each concert or photo — combines the outré power of drag with the geeky fun of a comic convention. It's hard to pick which costume combo is my favorite: the hair-metal outfits of Mötley Crüe, Cee-Lo's glowering Lex Luthor, or, in a jokey take on Fleetwood Mac, Danger Mouse posing as a groom to Cee-Lo's thickly muscled and tattooed bride. — Jason Grote BONUS: Here's a pre-20th-century figure whose influence we recognize at Hilobrow.com. My first encounter with MIKHAIL BAKUNIN (1814-1876) was not with the Russian noble, anarchist, and frenemy of Marx, Fourier, and George Sand. Nor was it with his namesake, the scary Russian Other on Lost, but with a cranky, aging doberman pinscher belonging to my friend and mentor Stephen Duncombe. Bakunin the dog nearly bit my wife's hand off, his way of saying he was tired of her petting him, which seems a fitting parallel to the anti-Marxist author of God and the State. By turns a near-Jeffersonian, a closet authoritarian, an anti-nationalist, and an anti-Semite, there were few hands Bakunin was unwilling to bite — an admirable quality in our toothless age. — Jason Grote

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Joshua Glenn — Tue, 26 May 2009 12:32:25 +0000

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Joshua Glenn — Tue, 26 May 2009 12:34:04 +0000

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Joshua Glenn — Tue, 26 May 2009 12:42:38 +0000

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Joshua Glenn — Tue, 26 May 2009 12:46:39 +0000

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Joshua Glenn — Tue, 26 May 2009 12:55:01 +0000

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Joshua Glenn — Tue, 26 May 2009 13:03:05 +0000

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Matthew Battles — Wed, 27 May 2009 21:04:45 +0000

Death Becomes Us

Matthew Battles — Wed, 27 May 2009 21:07:35 +0000

HORROR IS CRUCIAL to human experience. Like sex, innocence, and despair, the fear of death is a wellspring of all kinds of creative activity; with the help of its zombified double, the uncanny, it unsettles and realigns our art. While not proscribing it as in the case of pornography, middlebrow's response to horror is disparagement. Or... something else. Co-optation, perhaps, or domestication. As the following advertisements show, horror may be defanged in service of consumer desire, calories, or the public good. Gamers like to think of themselves as subversive, and also infernal; there's the whiff of occult magic and defiance about the console gamer's world. But only a whiff! The gamer is a sorceror's apprentice in stocking feet—an enfant terrible, but still an infant. Sony's now-vintage advertisement for the PS/3 plays with this uncanny minor magic: Like forbidden fruit in the old tales, candy has gained a subversive savor in this health-conscious age. Bingeing on Skittles confers upon the sugar-addicted some of the fairy tale's pixillated power: A drive in the country can offer bucolic sensations; it can also deal out death with reckless speed. Where the peasants of Languedoc met Death's arrival by crossing themselves, secular travelers in the French countryside today may practice a similar gesture to greater effect:
Boston Phoenix writer Sharon Steel last year bestowed the name "Quatsch" on the kind of uncanny cuteness embraced by the mainstream in the likes of LOLcats, Hello Kitty, and the fey pose adopted by McSweeney's and Believer, flagships of Dave Eggers' literary armada. In explaining her coinage she quoted Hilobrow's own Joshua Glenn identifying that strain of “quirk (that) has been defanged and embraced by the mainstream.” There's an unsettlingly analogous move underway in these advertisements: the Reaper carries not a scythe but a feather duster, and he can be bought off with the swipe of a credit card.

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Joshua Glenn — Fri, 29 May 2009 01:40:11 +0000

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Joshua Glenn — Fri, 29 May 2009 01:41:20 +0000

Hilo Heroes, May 31-June 6

HILOBROW — Sun, 31 May 2009 14:45:06 +0000

HAPPY BIRTHDAY, this week, to the following high-, low-, no-, and hilobrow heroes. Click here for more Hilo Hero birthdays. MAY 31 Back when rock’s head was swelling, when the attention deficit disorder of a Keith Moon could be mistaken for genius, JOHN BONHAM (1948-80) was largely dismissed as a ham-fisted lout. Now we know that the quintessence of rock is the ham-fisted lout. As such, Bonham’s volume and physical command, his concern for rhythmic commitment rather than finesse or filigree, lends his sounds the meaty presence of a Rodin sculpture. The funkiest of classic rock drummers, Bonham peeled away the sluttish sauciness of the groove to reveal a chthonic vein of bubbling pitch that rooted his rhythms in the earth. Though many find the use of such organic metaphors a dodgy move in criticism, with Bonham one must simply bow before the upwelling force. If we do not acknowledge how low the lo in hilo can go, we are lost in the muddle of the middle, the fussy fill before the resounding return to the beat. — Erik Davis JUNE 1 An intellectual historian and historian of intellectuals, CHRISTOPHER LASCH (1932-94) picked up the torch offered by negative-dialectical curmudgeons (T.W. Adorno, Dwight Macdonald) who'd rejected the shibboleths of liberals and conservatives alike. Pinpointing the social, political, cultural, and economic ills of the 1960s-80s, Lasch traced their origins to crucial moments in American history when reformists and change agents compromised their principles or lost their way. Why did the Left embrace a secular-messianic vision of an all-encompassing change in the human condition, achieved through the revolutionary transformation of society? Why did the Right abandon its suspicion of capitalism and its disastrous effects on traditional institutions? Lasch answered such questions with every bit as much anarchical lucidity as Thomas Pynchon and Woody Allen, whose greater wit made them not one whit more capable of preventing their Boomer juniors from exacerbating the errors of earlier rebels-with-a-cause. — Joshua Glenn JUNE 2 In the endless metamorphoses of Black Flag, it fell to DEZ CADENA (born 1961), son of a West Coast jazz producer, to be the band’s third lead singer, and then its first second guitarist. To both tasks he brought a weight of soul and a purity of intent that were the definition of Black Flag’s early years: hoarse, skinny, and existential as a frontman ("Just around the corner, there's a bed of cold pave-ment, waitin' for meeeeee....!!!!"), he switched to guitar upon the arrival of Henry Rollins and immediately added a dimension of almost limitless solemnity to the sonic brainstorms of Greg Ginn. There's a lost-gospel feel to this brief five-man incarnation of Black Flag: scantily recorded, its heaviness is best commemorated on YouTube clips wherein you can also admire Dez's beautiful and punk-enraging long hair. — James Parker JUNE 3 There are two kinds of people in this world: Shaft and Superfly people. But while Shaft and Isaac Hayes have long enjoyed an irony-driven revival, the far superior Superfly and CURTIS MAYFIELD (1942-99) are overdue for a comeback. Paralleling the films' qualities, Mayfield's soundtrack is simultaneously more campy, more moving, and more subversive than Hayes'. Mayfield did have his share of hits, both in and out of The Impressions: among them, "People Get Ready," "Move On Up," and "Freddie's Dead." But considering his influence on artists as diverse as Whitney Houston and Bad Brains, and his unique ability to chronicle urban black America from the tumultuous '60s to the apocalyptic '70s, we should be surrounded every day with Mayfieldiana. — Jason Grote JUNE 4 With his casual athleticism and big white teeth, with his good-looking features that somehow fail to coalesce into good looks, BRUCE DERN (born 1936) is the dropout personified — the kid who had every advantage but turned out bad. For all his superior acting chops, he seems most at home in an old Gunsmoke or a Movie of the Week. He's usually playing some combination of motormouth, dreamer, or hustler, and he's always at least a little unhinged. He strikes us as someone we'd like to go on a bender with. Maybe it's all those Roger Corman movies (The Wild Angels, The Trip, Bloody Mama); Dern just seems like he'd be up for anything. — Mimi Lipson JUNE 5 PANCHO VILLA (born Doroteo Aranga Arámbula; 1878-1923) was an outlaw with a world-class strategic intelligence who became a general during the chaotic and unending Mexican Revolution. John Reed was present in the Governor’s palace in Chihuahua when Villa was honored by the elegantly turned-out officers of his artillery corps: “He was dressed in an old plain khaki uniform, with several buttons lacking. He hadn’t recently shaved, wore no hat, and his hair had not been brushed." He slouched on the throne during the speeches, "his mouth hanging open, his little shrewd eyes playing around the room." When they gave him the medal, he peered at it and said, "This is a hell of a little thing to give a man for all that heroism you are talking about!" Then he spat violently on the floor. (Insurgent Mexico, 1914) Actors who have portrayed Villa include Wallace Beery, Leo Carillo, Alan Reed, Yul Brynner, Telly Savalas, and Freddy Fender. — Luc Sante JUNE 6 Filmmaker CHANTAL AKERMAN (born 1950), the arthouse precursor to Charlie Kaufman, Jem Cohen, and even Sam Mendes, took one small step for a woman, and one giant leap into interstitial space, with her investigations of what lies between the subject and the object, the intention and the action, the you and the me. Akerman works against the phallic thrust of narrative climax by alternating between leisurely investigations of domestic details (Jeanne Dielman, shown above), and manic picaresque activity (Toute une nuit), the kind usually left out of "the story," in order to show how we build our lives between the overlooked and the busy. Refreshingly feminist, and often very funny, she uses absurd and unrelated settings and events to release the tethers from our stories and set them free. — Peggy Nelson

Prince

Joshua Glenn — Mon, 01 Jun 2009 12:01:43 +0000

Prince in Purple Rain, 1984. Directed by Albert Magnoli. *** EDITORIAL USE ONLY *** NO TRADE OR COMMERCIAL USE *** Credit: Warner Brothers / Photofest / Retna Ltd. Film Still

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Joshua Glenn — Mon, 01 Jun 2009 12:07:26 +0000

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Joshua Glenn — Mon, 01 Jun 2009 12:10:40 +0000

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Joshua Glenn — Mon, 01 Jun 2009 12:15:13 +0000

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Joshua Glenn — Mon, 01 Jun 2009 12:38:05 +0000

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Matthew Battles — Mon, 01 Jun 2009 16:26:40 +0000

Eat Your Heart Out, Chinette

Matthew Battles — Mon, 01 Jun 2009 16:33:15 +0000

WASARA IS "DISPOSABLE paper ware for spiritual enrichment." Made from sugar cane refuse and other low-footprint fibers, these high-concept paper plates and cups meld Japanese aesthetics, industrial disposability, and a touch of DIY panache (or japonaiserie-porn, greenwashing, and fauxthenticity, depending on where you're sitting). A set of six of these coffee cups costs about nine bucks—or it will once WASARA finds a North American distributor; for now, they're only available in Japan. Other pieces include maru and kaku—Japanese plates with little dimples for grasping with the fingers, ideal for serving up grocery store sushi—as well as tumblers and wine cups and compotes. A paperware compote! It gives the detachable-stem plastic champagne flute a run for its money.

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Joshua Glenn — Tue, 02 Jun 2009 02:07:31 +0000

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Joshua Glenn — Tue, 02 Jun 2009 02:08:13 +0000

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Matthew Battles — Tue, 02 Jun 2009 15:25:57 +0000

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Matthew Battles — Tue, 02 Jun 2009 15:26:45 +0000

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Matthew Battles — Tue, 02 Jun 2009 15:28:20 +0000

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Matthew Battles — Tue, 02 Jun 2009 15:29:31 +0000

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Matthew Battles — Tue, 02 Jun 2009 15:30:26 +0000

I After the Cloudy Doubly Beautifully

Matthew Battles — Tue, 02 Jun 2009 16:44:15 +0000

BEFORE THE TURN of the century when the Web was new, I worked in the bowels of Harvard's Widener Library. There was as yet no Twitter, no Facebook, no YouTube; blogs and wikis were the glamorous spells of a whispering cognoscenti. But a web there was—enough of one to encourage the library to send many books off to storage in dark, refrigerated warehouses, never to be read again. This was my work in the Widener deeps. I was one of Bradbury's firemen, almost—though instead of heat and flame, we used the cool buzz of networked catalogs to put the books out of reach. Among the duties with which I had been charged was clearing out the "X-cage." I wish I had made up this name; I wish I had made it up and then discarded it in embarrassment—alas, the X-cage was real. It was the repository of books, sheaves of paper, and artifacts in odd sizes and formats, of paper too fragile or content too salacious for the open stacks. Some of these I sent away to be stored elsewhere, while others I tried to place in more suitable libraries or museums. And some, frankly, I didn't know what to do with. My fascination with one such item has lingered through the years. Although it never was listed in the online system, I found it recorded in the card catalog while it still could be browsed in the library's attic. The card reads as follows:

Benjamin, Walter. Übersetzung Maschine. 1946. Gift of le bibliothèque Orléans, Fr.

[caption id="attachment_2204" align="alignleft" width="265" caption="An early typewriter similar in form to the Übersetzungmaschine, no photograph of which exists."]An early typewriter similar in form to the Übersetzungmaschine, no photograph of which exists." title="sholes_typewriter" width="265" height="300" class="size-medium wp-image-2204" />[/caption]The device was housed in a case the size and shape of a largish briefcase, which led me to wonder: could it in fact have been the valise Benjamin carried with him in his flight over the Pyrennees? But the catalogue card contained no further information, and it's useless now to speculate. The device itself looked for all the world like an Underwood typewriter, at once sleek and erect. In place of the roller carriage, however, rose a stately glass dome, like that on a ticker tape machine (when inverted, the dome stores cunningly in the cavity of the machine). Peering inside the glass dome, one glimpsed a reservoir of steel ball bearings each of which proved, upon closer inspection, to carry a letter in raised, reverse relief. The bearings appeared to travel through finely-milled grooves in a sleek steel cartridge, which slid out of the base of the machine; a bit of machine oil made the whole operation very smooth. There was one of these machined cartridges for each of the languages represented: German, English, French, Spanish, and Portuguese. I oiled the parts, fitted to the assembly the carriage marked Deutsch, and began gingerly to type. W—I found that—A—each key went down with a ratchety resistance—L—and would not rebound until—D—the crank on the side of the machine was pulled—at which point the depressed keys all rose like clockwork and the works of the device flung the bearings about like popcorn in the dome, making an unbelievable racket. Finally the bearings settled, several of them having landed in a narrow steel track in the back of the machine. At the press of the RETURN key (on which the word Zurückgehen was marked in a thick fraktur type) the balls were rolled against a narrow paper tape; the tape advanced, the balls rolled down the track to rejoin their fellows, and the machine stood ready for another word. And I found that the paper tape as it clicked its way out of the machine carried the word WOODLAND in plain type. I wondered, of course, about the machine's authenticity. I find only circumstantial evidence for it in Benjamin's own writings. In "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction," Benjamin famously recognizes the loss of "aura" that attends the mechanical reproduction of art. He hopes, however, that freedom of access to the means of art's production might ultimately compensate us for this loss. If, furthermore, we can say that the differences among the languages, whatever beauty they may have, are ultimately to be counted among the tools of oppression and division—of Fascism in Benjamin's own time—then putting the means of effecting their negation into the hands of the masses surely would have appealed to Benjamin. [caption id="attachment_2205" align="alignright" width="300" caption="The grave of Walter Benjamin at Portbou, Catalonia"]The grave of Walter Benjamin at Portbou, Catalonia" title="796px-grab_walter_benjamin" width="300" height="225" class="size-medium wp-image-2205" />[/caption] It was 1998 when I stumbled upon the Übersetzungmaschine; the internet bubble was still on the rise, and new sites and features expanded the Web's imperium from week to week. The latest "tool" to arrive on the scene was a network-based machine translation service called Babelfish (on the Alta Vista search site, now long defunct). In a Feed magazine review of Babelfish, technoculture critic Julian Dibbell explored the tantalizing and esoteric possibilities of machine translation, noting the uncanny fact that in Babelfish translations "there (was) no flash of mystery that (couldn't) be traced to a mechanical arithmetic of words made into numbers." Dibbell recognized that Babelfish at its heart was a mystical enterprise, seeking to smoothe out the postlapserian confusion of the tongues: "We can certainly say that where, throughout its history, translation has veered between the two extremes of license and literalism, seeking at its best a middling compromise, Babelfish manages the unprecedented feat of attaining both ends simultaneously." Reading this, Benjamin's Translation Machine suddenly seemed plausible—and not merely plausible; it had been the beginning of a mighty enterprise. After all, the hope for a machine that kabbalistically reproduces language (and with it, the universe) has deep roots, stretching back through Erasmus Darwin's speech machine, through Jonathan Swift's "Discourse Concerning the Mechanickal Operation of the Spirit," to the Mysterium Magnum of the mystic Jacob Boehme. Now I was excited to try the translation machine on a real text, and returned to the X-cage to search for something appropriate. A nearby box proved to be jammed full of pamphlets and chapbooks from Alfred Jarry's College de 'Pataphysique; I yanked out the tiny, triangular booklet containing Jarry's chanson "Tatane":

Chanson/pour faire/rougir/les negres/et/glorifier/le Pere Ubu .1. "Ne me chicane Ce seul cadeau: Jamais tatane Dans le dodo!" .2. Lors reste en panne Je ne sais ou Un diaphane En caoutchouc...

As I entered the above stanzas from the first page of the booklet, my enthusiasm flagged. The technicians of the early machine age were not exactly ergonomically aware, and the energy required to depress the keys took its toll. My carpal tunnels aflame, I pulled the lever one last time and tore out the tape, which read as follows:

Tatane Song to make redden the negres and glorifier the Ubu Father 1. "does not baffle me This only gift: Never trotter-case In the dodo!" 2. At the time broken down remainder I do not know or diaphanous Out of rubber...

The translation that results at first glance appeared as literally word-for-word as could be. But in these provisional gropings, the machine was reaching for the ineffable. It took the broken and inexpressive words in Jarry's poem and searched out mundane replacements—thereby alienating the text further from the target language than the avant-garde original. As "tatane" becomes "trotter-case," and "caoutchouc" shifts to "Out of rubber," we're brought into contact with the jumble of paradox that plays behind language's staid, everyday façade. I wasn't surprised—for to Benjamin, the word itself was the mere ground of the translation, granting entrée to the expansive mystery of the Word itself. As he writes in his "the Task of the Translator":

A real translation is transparent; it does not cover the original, does not block its light, but allows the pure language, as though reinforced by its own medium, to shine upon the original all the more fully. This may be achieved, above all, by a literal rendering of the syntax which proves words rather than sentences to be the primary element of the translator. For if the sentence is the wall before the language of the original, literalness is the arcade.

It's this arcade of literalness through which the user of Bejamin's translation device ambles, a flâneur gratefully lost in the significatory flux that exists among the languages—which is, in fact, according to Benjamin, the primordial medium that exists prior to language, prior to the cataclysm of Babel:

In this pure language—which no longer means or expresses anything but is, as expressionless and creative Word, that which is meant in all languages—all information, all sense, and all intention finally encounter a stratum in which they are destined to be extinguished.

Determined to use Bejamin's machine as it had been intended—by extinguishing information, sense, and intention in a pure language—it occurred to me that the operation of Benjamin's machine could take place any number of times over the same text, exchanging the language cartridges again and again, retranslating cyclically, algorithmically. This might have the effect of putting the languages themselves in dialogue, as it were, about the very nature of this pure language. To test this, I wanted a text that was both richer and more lexically and syntactically coherent than "Tatane"; my eyes seized upon an early, hand-bound Viennese edition of Goethe's 1789 Schriften, and I began laboriously to enter the first lines of the Dedication:

Der Morgen kam; es scheuchten seine Tritte Den leisen Schlaf, der mich gelind umfing, Daß ich, erwacht, aus meiner stillen Hütte Den Berg hinauf mit frischer Seele ging; Ich freute mich bei einem jeden Schritte Der neuen Blume die voll Tropfen hing; Der junge Tag erhob sich mit Entzücken, Und alles war erquickt mich zu erquicken... .

which the 1983 Selected Poems, edited by Christopher Middleton, has as follows:

The morning came, away its footfall sent The gentle sleep that floated lightly o'er me, So wide awake out of my hut I went And gaily up the mountain slope before me. At every stride I took, the flowers tender, Brimming with dew, a pleasure were to see; The young day sprang to life in all its splendour, And everything seemed glad to gladden me... .

I continued to feed in the German text, on to the sixty-fourth line. Then I tore out the printed tape, switched cartridges from English to German, and began to type again. My reiterative translation took a week to produce, and I only managed six cycles, German to English and back again, before I became too exhausted to continue. Here's my last English translation:

The morning came; scheuchten its job paragraph, to which the peace sleep wakes up, which I easily, which I clasped, my calm hut, which the mountain with fresh soul went over; I was fallen with each job paragraph of the new flower, which drops hung completely; The new day rose with Entzuecken, and everything was renews me, in order to renew. And during I rose, from the river of the meadows drew nebula eight out into the strip. It accessories and to the river modified and grew winged me too around over precedes: 'I not are not to enjoy the beautiful opinion somehow longer, the area covered for me a cloudy Flor; Soon I saw from the clouds, how Bekehrte surrounded and with me, if they dawn at one time seemed the sun into the fog for reached through to the left a clarity longs. Here it sant calmly for diverson; Here ' it theilt, which rises around forest and Hoehn. Receive how hopes' I it the first greeting! She hopes 'I after the cloudy doubly beautifully. Luft'gekampf for a long time, do not surround a gloss, which I was executed and I dazzled. Soon I for breaking the eyes open innrerantrieb the inside again courageously, i-konnt, for which ' it is formed only with fast opinion Trauen, because everything also seemed for burning and gluehn. There goettlich, which forwards central eyes to a swum Mrs, no beautiful figures I in my life overvoltage, you, regard which I saw and remained, to the Swimming of the Remains with the carried clouds. Don't you know me? she spoke with an opening, this all dear ' and Loy

The essential purity of this translation speaks for itself, I think. While the 1983 translation enfolds Goethe's Romantic German in a nostalgic English—triangulating among inversions and archaisms and the free line of modern prosody—the machine produces a glossolalic howl, a gift of the tongue in a voice at once bacchic and prophetic. Where the 1983 version has "gaily up the mountain slope before me,"—which, despite its faithfulness to the "information" of the original, can't help being too tritely bucolic—the machine, with concision bordering on impaction, gives us "which the mountain with fresh soul went over." German words glow here like gems on the ground of a deutschified English. And the English itself often seems pulled from these words like the entrails from a fowl: the sentence "Luft'gekampf for a long time, do not surround a gloss, which I was executed and dazzled" is the ideal example of this phenomenon, and manages to constitute a manifesto of translation in the process. And Goethe's "Tritte" or footsteps, and "Schritte" or steps—a delicate modulation, which the 1983 version strives to emulate—the machine ruthlessly pares down to an essential unity in the startling phrase "job paragraph." By resorting to pure language, we can see that Goethe is writing the world with his very strides. My appetite was whetted. It now occurred to me that if I ran a text through each cartridge in succession, then all the languages could engage in the conversation at once. Exhausted by the Goethe, I chose a shorter text: Milton's 1633 verse translation of Psalm I:

Bless'd is the man who hath not walk'd astray In counsel of the wicked, and ith' way Of sinners hath not stood, and in the seat Of scorners hath not sate. But in the great Jehovah's Law is ever his delight, And in his Law he studies day and night. He shall be as a tree which planted grows By watry streams, and in his season knows To yield his fruit, and his leaf shall not fall, And what he takes in hand shall prosper all. Not so the wicked, but as chaff which fann'd The wind drives, so the wicked shall not stand In jugdment, or abide their tryal then, Nor sinners in th'assembly of just men. For the Lord knows th' upright way of the just, And the way of bad men to ruine must.

Running through all the cartridges in succession, from English to French to German to Portugese to Spanish and back home to English, I produced the following translation:

Bless ' d é human beings, em avocats that moinhos you conseils misdirected ' athd não vêem or bad and do ith ' do innershath não caught and not scornershath do assento, em ordem for não to satisfer itself. But em great Jehovahs to law é never seu to prazer, and em sua law examines or day and prejudica-o. Não will return or seu, of like uma árvore, of which plantem or increase hair atrywuerfe, and em seu branco gives estaÁão, em winch of sua fruit and suas you are gives page, and or that face exame nonregulamento, to prosper all. Bad, but like Flitter that fann ' d or vento gives attempt, assim, for manter- bad like nenhuns not jugdment não também ou nele do remains tryal então, sinners imóveis joint do th internal ' two homens right. For or cavalheiro vê knows stops to direita or th ' of hardly, and to maneira of homens maus na ruína deve.

In this translation the languages weave among each other like dancers around a maypole, exchanging tenses and inflections and making light of homophony. The words themselves fall like angels through the void, swerving in Lucretian, meaning-making trajectories. The "counsels of the wicked" become so many "conseils misdirected," and then the language pulls back like a curtain to reveal that the Lord Himself is a prancing "cavalheiro." As Benjamin once wrote, commenting on Genesis 1:27:

God created man from the word, and he did not name him. He did not wish to subject him to language, but in man God set language, which had served him as a medium of creation, free.

But here my investigation broke off. I had hopes to continue the work, putting to the task all the power of the computer technology that, in Benjamin's time, had not yet disclosed itself. The algorithmic potential of the computer to reiterate these translations thousands, even millions of times, may bring us to the very brink of the territory Benjamin describes:

Translation does not find itself in the center of the language forest but on the outside facing the wooded ridge; it calls into it without entering, aiming at that single spot where the echo is able to give, in its own language, the reverberation of the work in the alien one.

Translation is always an amalgam of hope and nostalgia, combining the yearning for home with the urge to press forward into new territories. William Brenner, writing about the Philosophical Investigations, wonders if Wittgenstein doesn't come to understand language as a kind of colonial outpost on the edge of a great wilderness. Perhaps there is a harmony here, in the language mysticism of Benjamin and Wittgenstein: the several human languages are so many outposts, and the wildnerness is this inexpressible, pure language about which Benjamin writes. If my thoughts on these issues are muddled, my enthusiasm was keen; alas, the Übersetzungmaschine was not to remain my plaything for long. Other duties took me from the X-Cage for a time; one day while running an errand, I noticed a familiar case on the library loading dock, stuck with a delivery label that indicated an address in Mountain View, CA. I wanted to spirit the package away—but the dock was busy, and the package was soon on its way. In the intervening years, Babelfish wriggled deep into the Internet's ear canal, becoming a virtual engine on the Web and desktops that automatically translates digitally-encoded texts into the increasingly polyglot English of globalization. In his Feed article, Julian Dibbell had wondered if Babelfish wouldn't expand the horizons of literary creation. In this, I don't think he was far from an incipient truth—a tantalizing and unnerving prospect, like the "bitistics" of Stanislaw Lem's fictions—a machine-created literature of the conscious supercomputers, which seeks to complete the incompleteness of human literary works. "For this literature," Lem wrote, "which has taken nothing from us apart from language, humanity appears not to exist." In fact, I don't fear the prospect; I like to imagine such a literature becoming the vehicle of an avant-garde language mysticism. In Benjamin's machine—in its reiterative translation, multiplied millions of times in computers—I glimpsed a kind of auto-mystical reading practice erotic in its fixation, masturbatory in its repetitiousness. It seemed something from the dreams of Georges Bataille—who, as keeper of the Library at Orléans, might well have been the librarian who preseved Benjamin's machine for us during the darkest years of the war. And couldn't the primordial flux of pure language, modulated and spun for us by our ever-faster computers, someday become the very medium of our own literature? Wherein works will reside simultaneously in all their possible translations, to be plucked spinning from the void, viewed, and thereby determined, like so many quantum particles. —This piece first appeared at Hermenaut.com on August 16, 2000; it appears here revised and updated.

porter-cole2

Joshua Glenn — Wed, 03 Jun 2009 00:08:25 +0000

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Joshua Glenn — Wed, 03 Jun 2009 00:12:13 +0000

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Joshua Glenn — Wed, 03 Jun 2009 00:15:09 +0000

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Joshua Glenn — Thu, 04 Jun 2009 17:06:02 +0000

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Matthew Battles — Thu, 04 Jun 2009 20:40:44 +0000

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Matthew Battles — Thu, 04 Jun 2009 20:43:20 +0000

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Matthew Battles — Thu, 04 Jun 2009 20:49:07 +0000

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Matthew Battles — Thu, 04 Jun 2009 20:49:42 +0000

Taking Three Wolves to the Moon

Matthew Battles — Thu, 04 Jun 2009 21:01:42 +0000

We know, we know: the Three Wolves Moon T-Shirt thing is old news: snarky hipster posts an Amazon "review" of one of those silk-screened t-shirts of the trippy druidic sort—others sport dragons, dolphins, and fey, buxom mermaids—and a few days and hundreds of reviews later, it's the most popular apparel item on Amazon. It's the texture of the phenomenon that's interesting to us now. Amazon allows customers to post not only reviews, but also photos. At this writing, 137 customer photos appear on Amazon. While many of them show customers wearing the shirt, others seek more creative ends: Photo posting presumably originated with the expectation that customers would share their uses of Amazon products, enjoying the frisson of appearing online while contributing their few calories of advertising power to the product-spewing gastrointestestinal system that is Amazon. With its ever-evolving set of reviewing, photo-posting, and other social networking offerings, Amazon is the prototype of the social media. It's a publishing platform on its own, and its authors are neither independent of nor precisely parasitic upon the consumerist leviathan. Posting at Amazon, customers become like the remoras that clean the skin of sharks or the birds that purportedly feed from the mouths of crocodiles.

napoleon-dynamite-8

Joshua Glenn — Fri, 05 Jun 2009 15:20:02 +0000

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Joshua Glenn — Fri, 05 Jun 2009 15:46:43 +0000

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Joshua Glenn — Fri, 05 Jun 2009 16:02:40 +0000

Quatschwatch (1)

HILOBROW — Fri, 05 Jun 2009 18:00:10 +0000

OUR READERS already know that Hilobrow.com has a problem with — in fact, an animus against — quatsch. As of today, we're going to start fighting back against its reign of terror. Building on my own mid-'90s research into the mainstreaming of camp, kitsch, and cheese, and perhaps also on Michael Hirschorn's 2007 anti-quirk manifesto, the fledgling cultural critic Sharon Steel has defined quatsch as "a coy combination of quirk (various cultural productions considered cute and fun despite their damaged, lame quality, à la not only the movie Napoleon Dynamite, but also the 'Vote for Pedro' T-shirt phenomenon it spawned), kitsch (ironically appreciated found art, such as pink lawn flamingos and velvet Elvis paintings), cheese (Wayne's World and Chicken Soup for the Soul), camp (Susan Sontag described it as the cultural elite's brilliant excuse to enjoy and love the low-brow), and cuteness." A toxic admixture! For Hirschorn, "the gentle ministrations of public radio's This American Life; the strenuously odd (and now canceled) TV sitcom Arrested Development; the movies of Wes Anderson; Dave Eggers's McSweeney's Web site; the performance art, music, and writing of Miranda July; and the just-too-wacky-to-be-fully-believable memoirs of Augusten Burroughs" are prime examples of "contemporary quirk," which he defines as "beneficent, wide-eyed gazing upon the oddities of our fellow man" — and also "a self-satisfied pose that stands for nothing and doesn't require you to take creative responsibility." Steel, too, points to McSweeney's (which she calls McTweeney's) and Miranda July; she also identifies Chuck Klosterman, the magazine FOUND, and Diablo Cody as avatars of a sensibility informing both the creation and reception of cultural productions that are "offbeat, but just so; eccentric, but not too; awkward, but self-aware; quirky, but formulaic in their quirkiness." In a word: quatsch. Back in 1997, I criticized Eggers's pre-McSweeney's projects (Might Magazine, the Might collection For The Love of Cheese), and wrote that "people who enjoy kitsch (cultural products intended to be high quality, but seriously flawed in conception or taste) in a naive, relatively straightforward way may be out of it, but they are still to be sympathized with as fellow human beings who at least have not lost the capacity to feel. People who pretend to enjoy kitsch as part of some lame 'anti-hip' put-on are, on the other hand, to be pitied and even despised." Translating this into Hilobrow.com terminology, the former is a lowbrow sensibility, and therefore worthy of respect — as is the highbrow sensibility, which dismisses kitsch as unworthy of a second glance. The latter sensibility — that of the anti-hip hipster — is a hallmark of what Hilobrow.com calls "nobrow." The nobrow and hilobrow sensibilities are both unheimlich, and therefore difficult for the uninitiated to distinguish from one another. Although this doesn't let Eggers off the hook, perhaps it's no wonder that we're so caustic whenever an opportunity to criticize a nobrow comes along. However, the real target of Hilobrow.com's animus isn't nobrow, but the middlebrow sensibility. Middlebrow isn't unheimlich, it's gemütlich. With its invisible hand, Middlebrow is forever sanding the rough edges off the eccentric, the quirky, and the weird until it's been domesticated, defanged, mainstreamed... quatschified. (In economic terms, Middlebrow commoditizes; it renders everything fungible.) How did the Chris Ware who gave us the brilliant, kaleidoscopic, slapstick Quimby Mouse comics become the Chris Ware who decorates New Yorker covers (and McSweeney's San Francisco HQ)? How did the John Waters who inflicted Pink Flamingos and Polyester on a horrified public turn into the director of Hairspray? How did the unbearably damaged Bill Murray of Rushmore become the bearably, endearingly damaged Bill Murray of Lost in Translation, The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou, and Broken Flowers? The answer: Quatsch, the latest and greatest tool at Middlebrow's disposal. Here's a quirky, kitschy, cutesy metaphor for you, readers. If the Blue Meanies of Yellow Submarine represent the forces of Middlebrow, then quatsch is the O-blue-terator: an unseen WMD capable of transforming everything that's different into more of the same. (As the Chief Meanie puts it, "Let us not forget that Heaven is blue... tomorrow the world!") Here at Hilobrow.com, we've declared war on Middlebrow — and one of our objectives is disabling its most effective weapon. This irregular series of posts, "Quatschwatch," aims to do just that. *** The above introduction is a long one, so we'll just mention three recent examples of quatsch that have come to our attention. 1) Book: Causing a Scene: Extraordinary Pranks in Ordinary Places with Improv Everywhere is a newly published book chronicling the hijinks of a New York-based comedic performance art group dedicated to causing "scenes of chaos and joy in public places." Hilobrow.com applauds pranks and pranksters, tricks and tricksters, Billionaires for Bush and Reverend Billy; the RE/Search book Pranks! belongs in every hilobrow's library. But Improv Everywhere — which has given us the annual No-Pants Ride on New York's subway system, and Ted's Birthday, a This American Life-covered put-on in which a fake birthday party was thrown for a random person at a New York bar — is cheesy. (Just look at the neither particularly shocked nor particularly amused expressions on the faces of the subway riders in the 2009 No-Pants Ride video. Middlebrows delight in cheese; everyone else just puts up with it.) PS: Would you call us crazy if we suggested that the very notion of the harmless, laughing-up-your-sleeve, good-way-to-meet-girls put-on was introduced to the American counterculture by CIA moles worried about the effectiveness of Yippie pranks? 2) News Story: Quirky Mini-Golf Course Set Up In Brooklyn Loft. A bunch of Brooklyn artists created a mini-golf course out of upcycled materials, in order to showcase their work. Nothing particularly kooky or quirky about that — sounds pretty fun, to us. But it made middlebrow journalists anxious, apparently. Hence the use of the term "quirky." And just listen to the middlebrow emphasis that one New York newscaster puts on the word unique. 3. Radio Program: Robert Laughlin, a Nobel Prize-winning physicist at Stanford, was interviewed on the May 29 episode of the Public Radio International show "To the Best of Our Knowledge." (Interview starts around 14:10.) Laughlin was invited to share his hard-won insights about the "personalities" of the various scientific disciplines; in doing so, he was having fun, but not doing a comedy shtick. This is a gray area in which middlebrow journalists in every medium do not enjoy finding themselves. So they quatschify. Listen carefully as show host Jim Fleming says, "Laughlin has a ... rather quirky view of his fellow physicists." An entire treatise could be written about the fraught pause that Fleming injects between the article and the adjectives in that sentence, and a second treatise about the particular emphasis that he places on the word "quirky." PS: During the interview itself, it's important to note that Laughlin's interlocutor uses the word "oddball," though Laughlin himself prefers the un-pejorative term "eccentric."

mccarthy-mary

Joshua Glenn — Fri, 05 Jun 2009 19:43:59 +0000

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Joshua Glenn — Fri, 05 Jun 2009 19:47:31 +0000

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Joshua Glenn — Fri, 05 Jun 2009 19:49:23 +0000

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Joshua Glenn — Fri, 05 Jun 2009 19:50:47 +0000

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Joshua Glenn — Fri, 05 Jun 2009 19:52:18 +0000

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Joshua Glenn — Fri, 05 Jun 2009 19:54:12 +0000

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Joshua Glenn — Fri, 05 Jun 2009 19:57:45 +0000

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Joshua Glenn — Fri, 05 Jun 2009 19:59:51 +0000

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Joshua Glenn — Fri, 05 Jun 2009 20:08:56 +0000

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Joshua Glenn — Fri, 05 Jun 2009 20:34:43 +0000

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Joshua Glenn — Fri, 05 Jun 2009 20:35:44 +0000

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Joshua Glenn — Fri, 05 Jun 2009 20:43:40 +0000

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Joshua Glenn — Fri, 05 Jun 2009 20:47:25 +0000

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Joshua Glenn — Fri, 05 Jun 2009 20:50:39 +0000

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Joshua Glenn — Fri, 05 Jun 2009 22:12:14 +0000

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Joshua Glenn — Fri, 05 Jun 2009 22:12:52 +0000

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Joshua Glenn — Fri, 05 Jun 2009 22:15:59 +0000

And we lived beneath the waves

Joshua Glenn — Fri, 05 Jun 2009 22:22:03 +0000

FORGET THE DA VINCI CODE, that ham-fisted compendium of half-baked claptrap. You want psychedelic revelations about the artificial nature of reality? Want ringside seats for the never-ending battle between radical change agents and the forces of epistemological orthodoxy? Look no further than the 1968 animated movie Yellow Submarine, an Argonautica-meets-Alice in Wonderland fantasy in which the Beatles voyage across space and time to free a utopian Pepperland from the Albigensian Crusade-style depredations of the Blue Meanies. Need proof that the quest for gnosis is a threat to established institutions? Look no further than the object pictured here, in all its obscene materiality. Directed by George Dunning and art-directed by Heinz Edelmann without any input from the Beatles themselves, Yellow Submarine was an exercise in misprision, a creative misreading of an influential text — in this case the 1967 album Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band. The film's effort to construct a meaningful narrative from "A Day in the Life," "Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds," and the record's title track was every bit as paranoid, really, as Charles Manson's simultaneous effort to do the same with the Beatles' so-called White Album. But Yellow Submarine was also paranoid in the they're-out-to-get-us sense because the film portrays the powers-that-be as always looking to crush gnosticism. How, exactly, is Yellow Submarine a gnostic movie? It's obvious once you know what to look for. The gnostic attempt to achieve intuitive knowledge of the infinite is enacted by the yellow submarine's voyage out of the material world into Nowhere Land. Also, the gnostic desire to be united with one's higher self is articulated by the "John" figure, who, upon encountering the Lonely Hearts Club Band, sagely opines that they're "extensions of our own personalities suspended, as it were, in time, frozen in space." And the religio-political establishment's determination to be humanity's sole conduit to divine wisdom? It's expressed by the Chief Meanie's dictum: "Let us not forget that heaven is blue... tomorrow the world!" As for the object in question, it's an extremely rare Yellow Submarine merchandising tie-in, a weapon referred to but never actually pictured in the movie: not the Meanies' Anti-Music Missile or the Dreadful Flying Glove but the O-blue-terator. It was doubtlessly conceived and produced by the pop-culture arm of the anti-gnostic institutional complex to which I have already alluded. It's obscene not merely because it's an epistemological WMD for kids, but because Yellow Submarine cannot and should not be three-dimensionalized. Speaking of which, audiences at the time were shocked by Edelmann's employment of limited animation, an inexpensive alternative to Disney-style cartoon realism in which cels and sequences of cels are animated on top of static cels. Compared with a multidimensional, hand-painted Disney cartoon, say, Yellow Submarine did look flat and crappy. Yet limited animation is what Marshall McLuhan called a cool medium: Its low definition of information requires viewers to participate actively in the creation of meaning. Given the movie's gnostic message, this medium is only appropriate. "John," "Paul," "George," and "Ringo," not to mention the Nowhere Man, the Chief Meanie, and the movie's other figures, aren't characters but symbols. And — as we've been instructed most recently by the paintings of Laylah Ali — in order to engage the imagination, symbols must remain flat abstractions. ALSO: Disney was, in those days, the most middlebrow (and therefore anti-gnostic) thing going; note that the Blue Meanie shock troops wore Mickey Mouse ears! "Untitled" (2000), by Laylah Ali "You surprise me, Ringo," says "John" at one point in the film. "Dealing in abstracts." The Blue Meanies, of course, want to make surprise impossible; their vision of utopia is a postmodern-middlebrow one in which everything forever means one thing and one thing only — a fate worse than meaninglessness itself. This is what Herbert Marcuse (surely one of the primary inspirations for Yellow Submarine, along with the Symbolist movement) was getting at when he described the US and the USSR alike as "one-dimensional" social orders. The great insight of Dunning and Edelmann was that creative misreading, which is the hilobrow's preferred mode of reading and interpreting, and a pretty good definition of gnosticism, is impossible unless the "real world" is first flattened out — into one-dimensional symbols pregnant with discoverable and inventable meaning. Full speed ahead, Mr. Parker, full speed ahead! A version of this essay appeared in the "Thing" column of the quarterly journal Cabinet (Summer 2006).

Hilo Heroes, June 7-13

HILOBROW — Sun, 07 Jun 2009 13:00:07 +0000

HAPPY BIRTHDAY, this week, to the following high-, low-, no-, and hilobrow heroes. Click here for more Hilo Hero birthdays. JUNE 7 Time is a trick, says PRINCE (born 1958), and to consider him as a continuous being existing in the same chrono-soup as the rest of us is an error. Born in Minneapolis, Prince's childhood was troubled, leading to a homeless and itinerant adolescence in which he dreamt up a self as multifarious and unpredictable and immortal as music. Prince has imagined and disciplined himself into becoming an avatar of the astro black, the shadow history in which jazz came from the sun priests of Egypt, and the music of the spheres is on the one. Like Duke Ellington and James Brown, he is a ferocious band leader and party spirit; like Sun Ra he partakes of occult knowledge, in which an intense reading of the Bible reveals the censorship behind the sacred; like Miles Davis, he reinvents so as to not be controlled by his followers. Like George Clinton, he is the mask-wearing funk trickster — and he has even time fooled, for now. He used to be thirteen years older than me, now he looks thirteen years younger. — Matthew De Abaitua JUNE 8 NANCY SINATRA (born 1940) was everywhere in the mid-1960s: dressed in tight leather as a motorcycle mama in The Wild Angels, blowing minds with Lee Hazlewood and Sammy Davis, Jr. on her Movin' With Nancy television special in ’67, singing a creepy duet with her dad ("Something Stupid") that same year, auditing Elvis as an IRS inspector in Speedway. Her greatest moment, though, was her tender-as-nails performance of Hazlewood's "These Boots Are Made for Walkin'," which reached No. 1 on the pop charts early in ’66. Dismissed by some as a campy classic — and loved by others for the same reason — "Boots" is one of very few Top-100 pop numbers of that era in which a woman sings about her willingness to kick a man to the curb. While Cher chirped about how her baby shot her down ("Bang Bang," later covered by Sinatra) and Dusty Springfield begged her errant lover to come home, no questions asked ("You Don't Have to Say You Love Me"), Nancy walked — strutted! — away for something better. — Lynn Peril JUNE 9 Called by collaborator Moss Hart "the greatest amateur I ever met," COLE PORTER (1891-1964) treated the plots and characters of his Broadway shows and Hollywood films as shim-thin pretexts for his brilliant, brittle, notably frank songs. "I Get a Kick Out of You" allowed that "Some get a kick from cocaine," while the streetwalker's lament "Love For Sale" so scandalized 1930 audiences that it was reassigned from a white singer to an African-American one after a few performances. (Of which production? The New Yorkers, but you see my point.) Still, certain shows have endured: when dramatic unity became de rigueur post-Oklahoma, Porter rallied with 1948's half-Shakespearean Kiss Me, Kate, surely the first musical to name-drop the Kinsey Report. — Franklin Bruno JUNE 10 What did it take to be the most scandalous performer in Weimar Berlin? ANITA BERBER (1899-1928) had a penchant for going out in public naked under her sable wrap, affairs with married women and judges, an enduring relationship with a mother-daughter team, and she flaunted her cocaine addiction. But none of these would have been remarkable in ’20s Berlin. Nor was it her dance titled "The Depraved Woman and the Hanged Man," at the climax of which she was on her back lapping at the sperm of the executed man. It wasn't even the pet monkey. I think the scandal was Berber's unashamed glee at embodying every vice and dark kink in that city and era. She was not ashamed to be Berlin. Performance art, The Living Theater, Punk, club kids: New York's downtown history plays out like one of Berber's idle hash dreams. — David Smay JUNE 11 In more than 120 television specials JACQUES-YVES COUSTEAU (1910–97) portrayed a floating utopia in which perfectly tanned, massively skilled argonauts roamed the seven seas in search of beauty and danger, supported by donations and calendar sales. With their silver lamé wetsuits, fur-trimmed parkas, and shipboard attire of speedos and insouciant red caps, Cousteau and the crew of the Calypso forged a style that can only be called nauticosexual. Behind the style, however, Cousteau displayed chops as a technologist, filmmaker, and environmentalist. During World War II he organized underwater commando raids against the Fascist forces of Italy; later, he helped develop the aqualung that made modern diving possible. He aided in underwater rescues, invented a submarine as graceful and otherworldy as a flying saucer, correctly guessed that dolphins use echolocation before scientists could prove it, and stopped nuclear waste dumping on the high seas. Wonder-struck and commandingly cool, he was a seamless blend of Arthur C. Clarke, Maurice Chevalier, and Captain Nemo. — Matthew Battles JUNE 12 EGON SCHIELE (1890-1918) was the best thing about the blizzard I spent in Vienna. I had gone to see the remnants of a nervous splendor, expecting well-behaved aesthetic souvenirs from a once-hypermodern past. But when I got to the Schieles my careful tourism fell apart. They raged off the canvas — violent, distorted, explicit nudes, confrontational gazes, feverish spots of color against lead white, black sketchy outlines that would not be in vogue until the advent of the postpunk zine. Shot through it all was an incredible and paradoxical optimism that I could not then, and cannot now, reduce to any one aspect or combination. Schiele's self-portraits (and they are all, in essence, self-portraits) have been categorized as expressionism, pornography, even anorexic chic. I would instead borrow Rod Steiger's self-description in Dr. Zhivago, and call Schiele's work "not high-minded, not pure — but alive." — Peggy Nelson JUNE 13 You can grok many modernists through the forms of tradition they undermine and idolize. While Irish lore loomed mighty for WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS (1865-1939), the more scandalous tradition which beguiled the poet was the practical mysticism of the occult. As a young man, Yeats waved his magic wand in the Golden Dawn (think Freemasonry plus kabbalah and girls). Decades later he melded his wife's spiritualist channelings into the weirdness of A Vision: "When we perceive the Daimons as Passionate Body, they are subject to time and space, cause and effect; when they are known to the Spirit, they are known as intellectual necessity, because what the Spirit knows becomes a part of itself." More "tradition" than tradition, this stuff can also be seen as an erudite preview of the pulp occulture to come. Occult lore and practice were Yeats' Dr. Strange, his Ouija board, his Incredible String Band collection — the faery food found on the margins of official culture. — Erik Davis

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Matthew Battles — Mon, 08 Jun 2009 14:38:52 +0000

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Cold War of the Ancients and the Moderns

Matthew Battles — Mon, 08 Jun 2009 15:37:59 +0000

FROM THE STRUGGLE between Cartesian science and the Classics lampooned by Jonathan Swift in his "Battle of the Books," to the "Two Cultures" argument of physicist and novelist C. P. Snow, to the "nonoverlapping magisteria" of endlessly optimistic evolutionist Stephen Jay Gould, thinkers have sought to smooth the contradictions of science and faith, reason and wisdom, analysis and contemplation. We want to believe—with Goethe and Emerson, with Charles Fort and Carl Sagan—that revelation and empirical observation can challenge and inform one another, that wonder and worldliness can be complementary and not contradictory. In our reckoning reason and wisdom are equally salubrious, and equally dangerous. But the middlebrow impulse to de-fang, co-opt, and consume is a strong one. Few chains of evidence demonstrate this middlebrow tendency with greater clarity than the early recruitment advertisements of the military-industrial complex. The following ads (chosen from a remarkable Flickr photostream compiled by bustbright), in which potential recruits are exhorted to see themselves not as candidate cogs in a war machine, but members of freedom's intellectual vanguard. The Rise of Daedalus You though the legend of Icarus was a cautionary tale, a warning against the dangers of hubris and the limits of techne? Wrong! It's actually an early example of "space propulsion by muscle power": Distilling the Essence of Innovation The image below, taken from the Kleines Distillierbuch (1500) of Hieronymus Brunschwig, illustrates an early version of the technology used to refine crude oil into gasolines, jet fuel, and the precursors of plastics. To join Beckman as a young scientist isn't to become a technologist of pollution and disposability—rather, you're akin to the heroic early scientists who fought back unreason and superstition to usher in the the modern age. We few, we happy few The following three recruitment ads, the coldwar think tank RAND exhorts young graduates to see the calculation of neoliberalism and cold war supremacy as a grand intellectual adventure. Together, they imply an ethic for the worker in the military-industrial complex: to dream—but only in service of "the well-organized society"; to "find no contradiction in the union of old and new"; to "leave nothing to "the routine of practice or the sagacity of conjecture," but "study all the determining agencies equally." Honey and Ashes One of the animating images of the Battle of the Ancients and Moderns opposed the spider and the bee. To Swift, the opposition was between the predatory designer and maker and the bumbling, sun-drunk nectar-sipper: "Instead of dirt and poison," he wrote, "we have rather chosen to fill our hives with honey and wax." But the metaphor can be spun in other ways. In Dupont's recruitment ad, industry metastasizes to subsume the natural world—a premonition of our age, in which robots are designed to mimic insects, and the brain increasingly is likened to its eventual replacement, the computer. This ad ran when Benjamin Braddock, Dustin Hoffman's character in The Graduate, would have been contemplating which kind of livelihood to pursue: that of the spider or that of the bee. You'll recall that Mr. Robinson urged him to consider one word: plastics. Now that oceanic gyres swirl with Dupont's poisonous legacy, the middlebrow cancellation of all contradictions and soothing of all oppositions seems more than hasty—instead it's a tangled web, a toxic clusterfuck.

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Joshua Glenn — Tue, 09 Jun 2009 13:38:39 +0000

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Joshua Glenn — Tue, 09 Jun 2009 19:38:36 +0000

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Double Exposure (3)

Joshua Glenn — Tue, 09 Jun 2009 20:11:08 +0000

Is it so small a thing To have enjoy'd the sun, To have lived light in the spring, To have loved, to have thought, to have done...

SO DEMANDS THE protagonist of Matthew Arnold's 1852 verse drama, Empedocles on Etna. Though often excerpted (and retitled "From the Hymn of Empedocles") in middlebrow collections of poetry about springtime, Arnold's poem bears no traces of uplift. Instead, it's the anguished final testament of a proto-modern philosopher who struggles to reconcile within his own person the competing and conflicting demands of what we'd today call highbrow and lowbrow dispositions. Empedocles, who is climbing the volcanic Mt. Etna (a Beckett- or Eliot-esque "charred, blackened, melancholy waste") as he versifies, anticipates Kant in lamenting that "mind" and "thought" are inhibiting barriers, which "never let us clasp and feel the All/But through their forms, and modes, and stifling veils." Sick of doing time in this invisible prison, the abyss-gazing Empedocles plans to literally hurl himself into the abyss — that is, into the fiery crater at Etna's peak. (Spoiler! He does it.) Although his sentimental, complacent (i.e., middlebrow) companion, Pausanias — to whom Empedocles says things like, "Couldst thou but once discern.Thou hast no right to bliss,/No title from the Gods to welfare and repose;./Then thou wouldst look less mazed/Whene'er of bliss debarr'd,/Nor think the Gods were crazed/When thy own lot went hard" — is left with Stoic advice about seeking a "moderate bliss," Arnold's Empedocles is no Stoic. For, shortly after the passage quoted above, Empedocles expresses envy for the lowbrow "village churl," whose perceptions of what Empedocles elsewhere in the poem calls "the life of life" appear to be direct and straightforward ones — blissfully unmediated, that is to say, by highbrow intellectual conceptions. Like Schopenhauer, Arnold seems to regard Stoics as impressive but ultimately misguided. Rather than become a groovy, above-it-all nobrow, it's preferable to torture yourself in the effort to strike a precarious balance between highbrow and lowbrow. (The real Empedocles, whose teachings combined mysticism and political radicalism, was a hilobrow; also check out Friedrich Hölderlin's unfinished verse drama, The Death of Empedocles.) Which brings us to Hilobrow.com's latest Double Exposure, one well suited to the chilly, overcast spring day on which it was written. "Take a Staycation," urges the cheerful, pragmatic voice of Body + Soul, a low-middlebrow magazine — dedicated to "whole living" — published by Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia. After reciting a litany of complaints about travel (too stressful, expensive — implicit but unspoken is too dangerous), an article in the April issue offers tips on vacationing at home. The illustration: a contemporary Stoic, experiencing the moderate bliss of worshiping the sun not at the beach, nor even in her backyard, but in her living room, toes tickled by artificial grass. "Is it so small a thing/To have enjoy'd the sun"? Apparently so. The staycation, a middlebrow fad written up in every newspaper and magazine lately, is a manifestation of Stoicism redux — a worldview that leaves its practitioners feeling calmed, comforted, sustained, no matter what kind of mess the world around them is in. Resist it! More to Hilobrow.com's liking is this advertisement for Benadryl, from the April issue of Conde Nast Traveler. Here, a fellow who has apparently been counseled — by well-meaning loved ones, who worry that his allergies will flare up if he goes camping — to camp indoors, instead. In his living room, on artificial grass. So there he sits, our would-be Stoic, in a lotus-like position, struggling to achieve resignation. Take a look at the expression on his face! His staycation is driving him insane. "To have lived light in the spring,/To have loved, to have thought, to have done..." — these are not the ambitions of a Stoic. Nor are the lines that immediately follow: "To have advanced true friends, and beat down baffling foes." Yes! Hilobrow.com approves! Do all these things! But first, you have to get off your AstroTurf. This is the third in an irregular series of posts seeking access to the dominant discourse's secrets via holographic scrutiny of two or more fraught images.

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Joshua Glenn — Wed, 10 Jun 2009 14:46:30 +0000

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The Argonaut Folly (part 1 of 3)

Joshua Glenn — Wed, 10 Jun 2009 17:22:49 +0000

I set out to commemorate the heroes of old who sailed the good ship Argo ... in quest of the Golden Fleece. Muses, inspire my lay.

The gentleman’s name is GORGON! ONCE UPON A TIME, according to Apollonius of Rhodes (and before him Homer, Hesiod, Pindar, and countless forgotten mythopoets), a Greek prince named Jason was sent by his uncle, a usurper, to parts unknown on a mission impossible: to fetch a magical golden ram's fleece. Jason commissioned a 50-oared galley, the Argo, and manned it with the noblest heroes of the era. Their number included mighty Heracles; the bard Orpheus, whose voice enchanted nature itself; bronco-busting Castor and his immortal brother, the boxer Polydeuces; Zetes and Calaïs, the winged sons of the North Wind; as well as the seer Idmon, the sign-reader Mopsus, fleet-footed Euphemus, eagle-eyed Lynceus, shape-shifting Periclymenus, and Aethalides the mnemonist. After adventures on one perilous island after another, and having safely navigated the Clashing Rocks guarding the entrance to the Black Sea, the surviving Argonauts arrived at Colchis (Georgia), acquired the fleece with the aid of the witch Medea, and made their way back home. That, at any rate, is what we learn from children's books of mythology. But a wised-up reading of the Argonautica of Apollonius suggests that Jason's crew of ultra-talented specialists was less a ship of heroes than a Narrenschiff, a ship of fools. Or rather: a ship of heroes is always already a ship of fools. At which juncture I will crib from Ruskin by stating that if, at any point of this inquiry, I should interfere with any of the reader’s previously formed conceptions, and use the term "Argonaut" in any sense which he would not willingly attach to it, I do not ask him to accept, but only to examine and understand, my interpretation, as necessary to the intelligibility of what follows. Take Jason, for example. Except when under the influence of Medea's pharmaceuticals he's more of a dandy and a cocksman than a warrior; and for someone we've been taught to think of as an inspiring leader, he spends an inordinate amount of time "obsessed by fears and intolerable anxiety," as he puts it in the Argonautica, and lamenting that all is lost. As for the rest of the crew, they are not only fiercely competitive but a violently quarrelsome lot. Famously prone to fits of drunken rage after which those close to him turn up dead, Heracles is accidentally marooned by the helmsman, Tiphys; when Telamon accuses Tiphys of doing it on purpose, a cynical reader can't help but agree. And it's not a little suspicious that overweening Idas, having threatened Jason's loyal supporter Idmon, should be one of the only witnesses when Idmon is slain by a boar. Later, Idas will off Castor in a dispute over cattle and Polydeuces will snuff Idas' brother, Lynceus; later still, Heracles will massacre Zetes and Calaïs. To be an Argonaut, then, is to be a member of an outfit that is, to say the least, agonistic. But in what sense can the Argonauts be called foolish? They are fools for precisely the same reason that they are heroes: because each one of them is superior to ordinary mortals in an overly specialized fashion. When they're in their rightful element — council, banquet table, or boudoir, in Jason's case; in Heracles', the battlefield — there is no stopping them. But in every other circumstance the Argonauts are, as Apollonius frequently notes, amechanos: without resource. Jason is all talk, no action; Heracles is all brawn, no brain. When Tiphys dies (after a mysterious illness that, frankly, bears investigation), Jason collapses on the beach, lamenting, "We are doomed to grow old here, inglorious and obscure"; and when Heracles breaks his oar he sits speechless and glaring: "He was not used to idle hands." It proves all too easy for these intrepid birds of passage to become as helpless as Baudelaire's albatross, whose enormous wings make him monarch of the air but a risible cripple on earth. No wonder that Heracles grumbles about how they seem more like exiled criminals than heroes: to be an Argonaut is to be a superman viewed by ordinary mortals as a misfit, a loser, an outlaw. It first occurred to me to read the Golden Fleece myth against the grain half a dozen years ago, around the time that Hermenaut, an independent journal whose title was not uninfluenced by Greek myth, and which I'd spent the 1990s editing and publishing, was foundering. A journal published without the sponsorship of a foundation or university, and also without the benefit of a trust fund or a sugar daddy, is a ship plowing uncharted waters without compass or anchor: each new issue is an uncharted island harboring exotic dangers and delights, while the twin hazards of distribution and ad sales typically prove as impassable as the Clashing Rocks. The editors of such journals can only console themselves that their masthead and contributor list will one day be regarded as rosters of the best and brightest talents of the era. But in decades past, certain writers, thinkers, and artists have taken off on even more ambitious flights of fancy. For such dreamers, merely collaborating with peers who possess skills as unique and impressive as they know their own to be isn’t good enough. Like the Argonauts, they want nothing less than to live and strive together, each and every day. I call this dangerously alluring fantasy the Argonaut Folly. Among us hide... the INHUMANS! I myself fell prey to an Argonaut Folly in 1989, while taking time off from college. I was 21, and living in the still mostly un-gentrified Boston neighborhood where I'd grown up, in the Egleston Square neighborhood on the border of Jamaica Plain and Roxbury. The elevated train along Washington Street had recently come down, revealing to my eyes, as though for the first time, the disused former Franklin Brewery. I dreamed of moving into the building along with the most visionary and talented young men and women of my acquaintance. Living and working in our massive brick habitat, which would (I fantasized) encompass apartments, offices and studio spaces; a public restaurant and a private nightclub; a collective library of books, journals, and records; and eventually a school and rooftop playground for our children, we would form a freewheeling, democratic research seminar whose findings would change... everything. But communes had gone out of fashion, by then. So I went back to school. In 1992, around the time that I was dropping out of a master's program at BU, I launched Hermenaut as a photocopied zine. Scott Hamrah, who soon became the zine's coeditor, and I published a new issue whenever I'd saved up enough money from one of the many jobs I held during those years. In the latter part of the Nineties, I went to work for an Internet start-up. When it was acquired by a publicly traded company, I immediately cashed in my options (less than $100,000, but a fortune to me), borrowed more from friends and family, and rented a tiny office in the former Haffenreffer Brewery, just down the street from the Franklin Brewery building. I spent every day there, working shoulder to shoulder — editing and publishing what had become a journal, and a website — with a dissensual, agonistic group of talented peers. Could my youthful vision of an Argonaut Folly, I sometimes wondered, be far from realization? [caption id="attachment_2567" align="aligncenter" width="550" caption="Outtake from a Hermenaut staff portrait. From left: Joshua Glenn, Chris Fujiwara, Michael Lewy, Tony Leone, Ingrid Schorr, Scott Hamrah, James Parker."]Hermenaut staff portrait. From left: Joshua Glenn, Chris Fujiwara, Michael Lewy, Tony Leone, Ingrid Schorr, Scott Hamrah, James Parker." title="hermenaut_outtake1-5502" width="550" height="455" class="size-full wp-image-2567" />[/caption] After a couple of heady years, however, Hermenaut went broke. So did I. Unable to afford a house in my own rapidly gentrifying neighborhood, I moved with my pregnant wife, our toddler son, and a heavy load of unsold magazines and credit-card debt to West Roxbury. This sleepy Boston neighborhood's one claim to fame, I was soon reminded, is Brook Farm, New England's first secular utopian community, which failed after transforming itself into a Phalanx modeled upon the anarchistic theories of the French social scientist Charles Fourier. Readers, I could relate all too well to Brook Farm's failure! That's why our tour begins there. In 1841, Brook Farm co-founder George Ripley announced that the object of the colony was "to guarantee the highest mental freedom, by providing all with labor, adapted to their tastes and talents, and securing to them the fruits of their industry... and thus to prepare a society of liberal, intelligent, and cultivated persons [leading] a more simple and wholesome life, than can be led amidst the pressure of our competitive institutions." After failing in '47, Brook Farm would be remembered as little more than a bucolic retreat for abolitionists, Transcendentalists, and other progressive Bostonians. But here in the 21st century, when even leftists warn that utopian schemes lead to oppression and mass murder, its reputation may be worsening: a 2004 revisionist history of the experiment was subtitled The Dark Side of Utopia. The author of that book takes his cue in part from Ripley's friend Ralph Waldo Emerson, who declined an offer to join the colony. Writing in the Dial in 1841, Emerson criticized Fourierism for regarding man as a mutable thing to be "ripened or retarded" at the will of the system. What utopians overlooked, insisted the arch individualist, was the "faculty of Life, which spawns and scorns system-makers." Every utopia is a dystopia, claimed America's first anti-utopianist. But although Brook Farm had its downsides, I'd argue that its failure was a success — because it spawned, in American literature, our first Argonaut Folly. Nathaniel Hawthorne's 1852 novel, The Blithedale Romance, is a treatise on the failings of thoroughgoing social reform disguised as a novel set in a West Roxbury utopian colony. In '41, the 37-year-old Hawthorne was casting about for a place where he would have the leisure and energy to concentrate on his writing. Invited to join Brook Farm, he quit his position in the Boston customhouse and became one of Brook Farm's founding members; but a few months later, he moved out. Scholars have tended to describe the fictional colony of Blithedale as a dystopia, and Hawthorne as an anti-utopian predecessor to the likes of Zamyatin, Huxley, or Orwell. Certainly, Hawthorne had little sympathy for utopian notions: Coverdale, the semi-autobiographical narrator of Blithedale, reflects ruefully on "our exploded scheme for beginning the life of Paradise anew," while Zenobia, a character who may have been inspired by Margaret Fuller, laments what she calls the colony's "effort to establish the one true system." But read between the lines of Hawthorne's text and we discover what Fredric Jameson calls "anti-anti-utopianism": an effort to free the imagination from the paralyzing spell of the quotidian without falling into the error of totalitarianism. [caption id="attachment_2571" align="aligncenter" width="550" caption="1845 painting of Brook Farm by Josiah Wolcott."][/caption] "On the whole, it was a society such as has seldom met together; nor, perhaps, could it reasonably be expected to hold together long," Hawthorne has Coverdale recount of Blithedale. "Persons of marked individuality — crooked sticks, as some of us might be called — are not exactly the easiest to bind up into a fagot," he goes on to explain. One feels compelled to remind readers about the etymology of the term fascism, and to suggest that Coverdale's apparently negative comment about Blithedale's failings can be read positively. But do these crooked sticks, these Emersonian individualists, have anything at all in common? Just one thing, according to Coverdale: each of them possesses sufficient lucidity and strength of character to discern and escape from what has been called the invisible prison of everyday life under capitalism. "We had left the rusty iron frame-work of society behind us," exults Coverdale. "We had broken through many hindrances that are powerful enough to keep most people on the weary tread-mill of the established system, even while they feel its irksomeness almost as intolerable as we did." Not noble, saintly utopians, then, but cranks and idlers: these are Hawthorne's heroes. Unanimity of purpose was never enforced at Brook Farm, we learn even from the new revisionist history of the colony; nor was it at the fictional Blithedale. (Hawthorne quit his labors at Brook Farm not because he was an individualist rebelling against repressive groupthink, but because he soon discovered, as he has Coverdale put it, that "intellectual activity is incompatible with any large amount of bodily exercise.") In fact, Hawthorne's Blithedale fails because the colony's founding members cannot finally agree on the point of the experiment: Hollingsworth is entirely consumed with his own philanthropic theory; Zenobia's overweening cause is women's rights; Coverdale is an aesthete and intellectual. "Our bond, it seems to me," the narrator muses, "was not affirmative, but negative. We had individually found one thing or another to quarrel with in our past life, and were pretty well agreed as to the inexpediency of lumbering along with the old system any further. As to what should be substituted, there was much less unanimity." Again, we can read Hawthorne's negativity as an affirmation. An agonistic, dissensual community whose members reject any kind of overarching ideology may be a lousy model for what we usually think of as a utopian social order. But for precisely that reason, it's the only kind of intentional community that Hawthorne could have joined. In his preface to Blithedale, he goes out of his way to make clear that he is no anti-utopian, confessing that the author had "ventured to make free with his old and affectionately remembered home at Brook Farm, as being certainly the most romantic episode of his own life." For aspiring Argonauts, Blithedale is indeed an inspiring romance. So, for that matter, is the rewritten myth that Hawthorne would publish the very next year, in Tanglewood Tales: "The Golden Fleece." PART ONE | PART TWO | PART THREE An abridged version of this essay appeared in the journal n+1 (Winter 2007).

The Argonaut Folly (part 2 of 3)

Joshua Glenn — Wed, 10 Jun 2009 17:36:03 +0000

Those who would DESTROY us! In 1878, a quarter-century after The Blithedale Romance, Friedrich Nietzsche published Human, All Too Human, a collection of aphorisms whose subtitle proclaimed it "A Book for Free Spirits." Here, the 33-year-old Nietzsche expressed his deep concern for the flourishing of potentially exemplary individuals. Harking back to a fantasy he'd entertained when, as a stripling academic, he'd proposed to friends a "new Greek Academy" in which a revitalized western culture might be forged, throughout Human, All Too Human Nietzsche reached out to superior types disgusted by "the ochlocratic nature of superficial minds and superficial culture," and to those "free spirits" able to overcome within themselves their "origin, environment... [and] class." In scattered entries that read today like New York Review of Books lonelyhearts ads, Nietzsche implored "oligarchs of the spirit" to overcome "all spatial and political separation," by living and working together somewhere in Europe. Like Hawthorne's Coverdale, Nietzsche admiringly described his imaginary colleagues as jailbreak artists, outsiders, crooked sticks. In Human, All Too Human, he suggests that "the prisoner's wits, which he uses to seek means to free himself by employing each little advantage in the most calculated and exhaustive way, can teach us the tools nature sometimes uses to produce... the perfect free spirit." And in his 1881 aphorism collection, Daybreak, he laments that those free spirits who "do not regard themselves as being bound by existing laws and customs" are everywhere "denounced as criminals, free-thinkers, immoral persons, and villains." Elsewhere in Daybreak, Nietzsche characterizes his proposed "company of thinkers" as intrepid sailors traversing the void, as voyageurs whose ship may end up "wrecked against infinity," and as "aeronauts of the spirit": birds of passage on an island enjoying "a precarious minute of knowing and divining, amid joyful beating of wings and chirping with one another." Impatiently waiting for these aeronauts and Argonauts to join him in forming a colony, he writes of them, "Is it too much to ask that they should give a sign to one another?" [caption id="attachment_2586" align="aligncenter" width="447" caption="1882 photo of Lou Salomé, Paul Rée, and Nietzsche."][/caption] Nietzsche's lonelyhearts ads went unanswered — except by Paul Rée and Lou Salomé, who first proposed to him a non-sexual yet "trinitarian" workshop and living arrangement, then ran away together. By 1887, he had given up on his colony. In a preface to a new edition of Human, All Too Human, published that year, Nietzsche would confess with great bitterness that he had "invented for myself the 'free spirits' to whom this melancholy-valiant book... is dedicated." Having become bitter about the impossibility of an Argonaut Folly, he began — in his later writings, beginning with Thus Spoke Zarathustra — to sketch out an anti-egalitarian social order organized for the benefit of an elite caste of Übermenschen, whose sole concern would be the cultivation of their own excellence. The rest of humankind would be put to work. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, modernist writers and thinkers like Thomas Mann, André Gide, William Butler Yeats, Rainer Maria Rilke, George Bernard Shaw, Eugene O’Neill, and August Strindberg responded enthusiastically to either the early, hilobrow Nietzsche's vision of a community of uniquely talented free spirits, or to the later, anti-lowbrow Nietzsche's vision of an aristocracy of the best and brightest, a utopia for the few and dystopia for the many. Among those fictional characters who in the early part of the 20th century would echo the later Nietzsche's vision is Mr. Scogan, who in Aldous Huxley's 1921 novel, Crome Yellow, defends eccentric visionaries, whom he insists should be kept "safe from public opinion, safe from poverty, leisured, not compelled to waste their time in the imbecile routines that go by the name of Honest Work." Scogan later reveals his fantasy of a brave new world in which the visionaries will be Directing Intelligences, and in which all the imbecile routines will be performed by the hapless Herd. Herman Hesse's 1943 novel, The Glass Bead Game, meanwhile, is set in Castalia, a scholarly enclave whose uniquely talented inhabitants dedicate themselves to a syntactic game requiring a mastery of every one of the arts and sciences. If Hesse's fictional colony is anti-lowbrow, his protagonist is something of a hilobrow. He finally sours on Castalia not because it's elitist, but because it's not free-spirited. BEWARE, the HIDDEN LAND! But let's back up, slightly, to the years of moral and intellectual crisis during and after World War I, when so many thinkers and writers lost confidence in the culture of rationality that had prevailed in the West since the Enlightenment. "How can one get rid of everything that smacks of journalism, worms, everything nice and right, blinkered, moralistic, Europeanized, enervated?" demanded Hugo Ball in 1916. The answer to that question, not a few outsider intellectuals suggested, involved first joining forces with one's comrades and beating a retreat. We might take note, for example, of the Forte Circle, a network of radical pacifist intellectuals and artists — including the German anarchist Gustav Landauer, the Viennese Jewish philosopher Martin Buber, the Russian-born painter Wassily Kandinsky, the French writer Romain Rolland, and the progressive American novelist Upton Sinclair — who toyed with the notion that a community devoted to intellectual and spiritual activity might arrest the political crises of pre-World War I Europe. (In 1906, Sinclair had plowed the proceeds from The Jungle into Helicon Hall, a New Jersey commune — its name, like Hesse's Castalia, was drawn from Greek myth — where 80 intellectuals and artists lived until it burned down in '07.) We might also point to D.H. Lawrence, who in the winter of 1914 worked out the objectives, aims, and laws for communal life in Rananim, a colony far from England, perhaps on an island. Lawrence urged the most talented writers of his acquaintance — E.M. Forster, Bertrand Russell, a young Aldous Huxley — and England's more daring young aristocrats to make this daydream a reality. But his friends quickly stopped listening, especially after Lawrence drunkenly vomited on himself during one memorable Rananim appeal. And then there's Dada, a movement that began not in the usual sense of artists committed to a particular aesthetic credo, but as a way for displaced and fed-up outsiders to pass the time together. Located in neutral Zurich, the Cabaret Voltaire, as German founders Hugo Ball and Emmy Hennings renamed their favorite bar, became a gathering point not only for Voltaire-esque freethinkers like Hans Arp (Alsace), Francis Picabia (France), and Tristan Tzara (Romania), but for pacifists, draft dodgers, revolutionaries, and iconoclasts. As Dada scholar Leah Dickerman points out, before Dada was a movement starring André Breton, Max Ernst, and Man Ray, the Cabaret Voltaire "served to foster community... [it was] a self-consciously low-tech corrective to the increasingly attenuated bonds of modern society." Ignore its reconceptualization of art as intervention, its pioneering of montage and the readymade: Dada's achievement lies first and foremost in its successful realization of Nietzsche's vision of a transnational community of misfits. To gaze upon Raoul Hausmann's 1920 collage, Dada Triumphs, which asks us to imagine Dadaists plotting world domination, is to feel the absurdist optimism of Argonauts setting off on a mission impossible. Next stop: Breton’s first Manifesto of Surrealism, published in 1924. Breton was concerned with what has elsewhere been called the invisible prison of daily life, the legitimating discourse of which we're trained to think of as common sense. Who can escape such a prison and embark on new adventures? Perhaps only the insane, writes Breton: "Christopher Columbus should have set out to discover America with a boatload of madmen." Breton then describes just such a ship of foolish Argonauts: "For today I think of a castle, half of which is not necessarily in ruins; this castle belongs to me, I picture it in a rustic setting, not far from Paris," he writes. "A few of my friends are living here as permanent guests: There is Louis Aragon leaving; he only has time enough to say hello; Philippe Soupault gets up with the stars, and Paul Eluard, our great Eluard, has not yet come home. There are Robert Desnos and Roger Vitrac out on the grounds poring over an ancient edict on dueling... there is T. Fraenkel waving to us from his captive balloon," and so forth. Sadly, though not unexpectedly, in a 1929 Preface for a Reprint of the Manifesto, we find Breton describing his vision as "something that, no matter how bravely it may have been, can no longer be." Still, during the 1930s and early '40s, thinkers and artists continued to band together for Argonaut-ish purposes. Think of the re-launching of Partisan Review in '37 as a journal whose editors — including Philip Rahv and Dwight Macdonald — adhered to the ideal of the luftmensch. (This Argo soon foundered on the rocks of the postwar liberal consensus; Macdonald jumped ship.) Think too of the cadres of writers and artists (Hemingway, Malraux, Dos Passos, Orwell, Buñuel, Miró) who banded together on behalf of the Republican cause in Spain; or Georges Bataille's anti-fascist journals/organizations Contre-attaque, Acéphale, and College of Sociology; or the efforts of Adorno, Horkheimer, Marcuse, and the rest of the Frankfurt School-in-exile to analyze the infinitely subtle workings of late capitalism from New York and Los Angeles. There’s also Black Mountain, the experimental college in North Carolina where, from 1933-56, talented misfits like John Cage, Merce Cunningham, Buckminster Fuller, Charles Olson, and Paul Goodman rubbed elbows. Think, too, of the Brooklyn townhouse inhabited in '40-41 by W.H. Auden, Carson McCullers, Paul and Jane Bowles, and Gypsy Rose Lee. At the core of each of these endeavors, the animating spirit of the Argonaut Folly can be detected. PART ONE | PART TWO | PART THREE An abridged version of this essay appeared in the journal n+1 (Winter 2007).

nietzsche-1882

Joshua Glenn — Wed, 10 Jun 2009 17:39:27 +0000

dada_siegt-550

Joshua Glenn — Wed, 10 Jun 2009 17:43:06 +0000

231653990

Joshua Glenn — Wed, 10 Jun 2009 17:49:27 +0000

beatles-pepper

Joshua Glenn — Wed, 10 Jun 2009 18:11:25 +0000

The Argonaut Folly (part 3 of 3)

Joshua Glenn — Wed, 10 Jun 2009 18:15:50 +0000

The coming of GALACTUS! By the end of World War II and the early years of the Cold War, utopianism was on the wane. How could any program of radical social transformation be taken seriously after the Holocaust and the Moscow trials? In 1952, Reinhold Niebuhr spoke for the chastened ex-socialist writers and editors of Partisan Review when he rejected the widespread utopianism of the ’30s as "an adolescent embarrassment." Where did that leave the Argonaut Folly? The anarchistic Dwight Macdonald, who had split with Rahv and Partisan Review in the early ’40s, and who'd launched his own journal, politics, in ’47, never joined the anti-utopian camp. Neither did author and politics co-founder Mary McCarthy, whose 1949 novella, The Oasis, is a fine example of the American tradition of discovering an Argonaut Folly in the failure of a utopian project. The Oasis re-tells the story of Macdonald’s breakup with Rahv as a realistic fable about Utopia, a colony established, at a disused Vermont hotel, by intellectuals in retreat from wartime New York. Here, the "purists," led by Macdougal Macdermott (Macdonald) quarrel endlessly over first principles with the "realists," chastened leftists led by Will Taub (Rahv). Like Hawthorne’s Coverdale (who first praises Blithedale's mission, "showing mankind the example of a life governed by other than the false and cruel principles on which human society has all along been based," then rejects it), McCarthy has Katy Norell, a semi-autobiographical character, conclude that every utopian colony which "treats itself as a kind of factory or business for the manufacture and export of morality" is destined to fail. Though Norell abandons her naïve utopianism, she begins to imagine a "new pattern" — neither wholly purist nor wholly realist, which is to say anti-anti-utopian — for the colony. Ayn Rand, who had studied Nietzsche closely in postrevolutionary Petrograd, attempted to imagine an anti-utopian Argonaut Folly in her 1957 science fiction novel, Atlas Shrugged. The pro-capitalist potboiler is set partly in Galt's Gulch, a fictional Colorado valley into which "the men of ability, the men of the mind," no longer willing to sacrifice their talents to their mediocre contemporaries, have secretly withdrawn. (The 1923 British SF novel Nordenholt's Million, by J.J. Connington, has a similar plot, though it takes an eco-catastrophe to set things in motion.) Life imitates art: neoconservative ideologues have, in recent decades, espoused a Nietzschean revolt of elites. Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Perle, and William Kristol, among others who studied with or were influenced by Leo Strauss, the classical scholar who praised Nietzsche as a guide to the leveling impulse at work in democracy, club together in think tanks and one tight-knit group named after the Roman god of weapon-making, Vulcan. So are these Argonaut Follies, too? I would disqualify them. George W. Bush's foreign policy advisers more resemble Jason's scheming uncle, who cynically sends the Argonauts off on a quest he believes to be impossible. They do not want to break free of the established system. They wish to run the jail. Anti-anti-utopian narratives began to reappear in the Sixties and Seventies via the offbeat science fiction novels of writers like Philip K. Dick, Ursula K. LeGuin, and Samuel R. Delany, as Fredric Jameson argues in Archaeologies of the Future: The Desire Called Utopia and Other Science Fictions. But science-fiction writers tend to imagine entirely new social orders. With the exception of post-apocalyptic novels, in which ragtag survivors form small communities — and perhaps Olaf Stapledon's Odd John (1935), in which an international band of teenage and twentysomething "supernormals" (or "wide-awakes") form an island colony, where they can devote themselves to "individualistic communism" and the founding of a new mutant species — the genre hasn't given us many Argonaut Follies. These reappeared, around the same time, in another, equally adolescent narrative medium: the superhero comic book. In 1961, comic-book editor and writer Stan Lee collaborated with the talented artist Jack Kirby to invent a superhero team that would compete with The Justice League of America, a popular but dull series about uncomplicated superheroes who — like the Argonauts about whom we read in bowdlerized myths — get along just fine. With The Fantastic Four, Lee, who in the 1974 book, Origins of Marvel Comics, describes himself as a "vociferous reader" of mythology, gave the world a team of quarrelsome heroes. Their godlike abilities — the ill-tempered, mighty Thing, for example, is a new Hercules — render them misfits, losers, outsiders among their fellow humans. Together, however, their team is greater than the sum of its parts. This was a winning formula; Lee and Kirby's Boomer readers were eager for fictional Argonaut Follies. They got plenty of ’em. In ’63, Lee and Kirby launched The X-Men, a comic about teenage mutants who'd been ostracized from their hometowns, and who lived together in a mansion in the suburbs of New York. Myth was mined: the ill-tempered Beast is another Hercules, the Angel is a winged son of the North Wind, Professor X is a seer, and then there's Cyclops. That same year, Lee and Kirby created The Avengers, a comic about a Justice League-type group of heroes whose number included Thor, whom Lee had earlier borrowed from Norse mythology, and the Hercules-like Hulk; their headquarters was a mansion on New York's upper East Side. In ’65, Lee and Kirby's Inhumans made their debut in issue #44 of Fantastic Four: Black Bolt, Crystal, Karnak, and two others straight out of Greek myth, Medusa and Gorgon, were a peripatetic team of super-powered mutants, exiled from their secret homeland in the Himalayas. Of all the Argonaut Follies dreamed up by Lee and Kirby, the Inhumans are the most romantic — by which, I mean they're the least sympathetic, the most doomed. [caption id="attachment_2612" align="aligncenter" width="550" caption="Merry Pranksters Ken Kesey (right) and Stewart Brand, in October 1966."][/caption] Lee and Kirby's contemporary mythos influenced readers who would leave their mark on the era we today think of as the Sixites. Shortly after the debut of The X-Men, 28-year-old Ken Kesey moved to a rural property outside of San Francisco and invited a multitalented group, later known as the Merry Pranksters, along. In a semi-autobiographical screenplay that Kesey would write in ’66, the Kesey-based character, sometimes referred to as Professor X, calls his Pranksters the "X-Men." These were Argonauts on acid. Science fiction and comic books weren't the only type of adolescent pop culture production to produce influential Argonaut Follies. In their movies, from Help! (1965) to Magical Mystery Tour (1967) to Yellow Submarine (1968), the Beatles were portrayed — or portrayed themselves — as housemates whose deep-seated differences were a productive source of creativity. Nor were the Beatles' efforts to form an Argonaut Folly restricted to the screen. Their Apple Corps Ltd, an exercise in “Western Communism” headquartered on Savile Row, was a failed Argonaut Folly. And in ’67, the Beatles decided to purchase Leslo, a Greek island on which they were going to build an elaborate structure — four homes, all connected to a central studio — where they could live and work in convivial isolation. "We're all going to live there, perhaps forever, just coming home for visits," John told Beatles biographer Hunter Davies, at the time. "There's some little houses on there which we'll do up and knock together. It will be amazing.... We can set a studio up and just make our albums, swim about in the Aegean and get stoned." It sounds as though John, like David Bowie, was an Olaf Stapledon fan. But the "Beatledome," as wags dubbed it, was never built. Like Lee and Kirby's comics, the Beatles' productions played a key role in the invention of The Sixties. In 1967, according to Abbie Hoffman's autobiography, inspiration for the Yippies — heroic political pranksters regarded by many of their peers (to this day) as a confederacy of dunces — was found on the cover of Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band. Check it out: The album's illustration asks us to imagine a trans-historical Argonaut Folly in which the Beatles rub elbows with the likes of Edgar Allan Poe, Oscar Wilde, and Lenny Bruce. There have been other Argonaut Follies — the Situationists; the Nouveau Réalistes; the Playboy Mansion, circa 1961-66; Public Image Ltd, the postpunk outfit made up of ex-members of The Sex Pistols and the Clash, who lived and worked together at John Lydon's Victorian house in London — and yet where are we now? Anti-utopianism has gone from a neoconservative ideology to common sense. Everything today encourages us to see the dark side, the folly, the impossibility, not just of utopia but of an anti-anti-utopian social order where we'd have a project in common besides selling our commodified labor, intellectual or otherwise. Everything encourages us to think we face a choice between detached houses in a row, where we cook our dinners in private, or the gulag. But there can be — can't there? — community without tyranny. Sure, the company of other misfits would make you feel bad sometimes; but it also feels bad to have nothing to look forward to but domesticity, work, and TV. Maybe the Argonaut Folly can only be a failure — unless it's a perverted, for-profit version, like Playa Grande, the Dominican Republic island property being developed by Moby, Charlie Rose, Alex von Furstenberg, and Fareed Zakaria, where "artists and writers would be invited to stay at cost and the moguls and moneymen who'd financed the place could vacation, play golf and bask in the glow of their artsy neighbors," as The New York Observer put it. Of course, atomized life under the sign of the market is doomed to failure, too, if we think of excitement, joy, or surprise. The dream dies hard. So permit me a lonelyhearts ad of my own: I seek talented individuals who — like the Blithedale colonists, who'd "gone through such an experience as to disgust them with ordinary pursuits but who were not yet so old, nor had suffered so deeply, as to lose their faith in the better time to come" — are neither so mature as to be anti-utopian nor so adolescent as to be naively utopian. I don't know what we'll do, once we've found one another. But is it too much to ask that you should get in touch?

Farewell, heroic, happy breed of men! Your blessing on this lay of mine. And as the years go by, may people find it a sweeter and yet sweeter song to sing.

PART ONE | PART TWO | PART THREE An abridged version of this essay appeared in the journal n+1 (Winter 2007).

fantasticfour44-420

Joshua Glenn — Wed, 10 Jun 2009 18:20:53 +0000

ff481

Joshua Glenn — Wed, 10 Jun 2009 18:22:25 +0000

Igor's Blues

Peggy Nelson — Wed, 10 Jun 2009 18:30:34 +0000

WHEN I WATCH old monster movies, I think, What is it with these scientists? Whenever you have some Misshapen Fiend lurching all over the frame, muttering gibberish, trying to kill everything in its path and generally acting like a junkyard dog, odds are there's a Scientist — lab coat, beakers, and all — who's the cause of the problem. Why are these scientists involved with monsters instead of, like, collecting graduate students, filling out requisitions for more petri dishes, arguing with their colleagues about tenure, and other properly scientific stuff? Glad you asked. And thanks for stopping by. You wouldn't want to leave just yet; it is, after all, a dark and stormy night. You like ghost stories, don't you? Sit right down, let's start with you. Tell me all about yourself — and these friends of yours, too. How well do you know them? I mean, you hear their words, and observe their actions, and draw certain conclusions, right? But you can't read their minds. Perhaps you sometimes wonder: How far does it go? How much is everyone concealing? Who are these people I think I know? For that matter, how well do you know yourself? You sometimes say things you don't mean. And there are a few things you do that you don't want anyone else to know about. Right? That's what I thought. Monster movies play on exactly this kind of epistemological dread: how do we know what we know? As of the latest reports, we still really can't say. We can say what we believe, and what we think we know, and what others insist upon, but we don't have ultimate proof of the kind that would finally allay our fears and allow us to plant our feet firmly upon the ground and kick rocks, philosophically speaking. Science is the practice that's supposed to provide such proof for us, tell us what the world (and the mind) is really like, "illuminate the subject with a great white light, to the inexpressible advancement of human knowledge," to borrow a phrase from Ambrose Bierce's definition of magnetism. Scientists are supposed to reveal the structure of reality so the rest of us don't have to worry about it and can get on with whatever it is that we think we're doing, like driving around in our cars and renting videos and going to work and talking on the phone. Quick: what's the ultimate, indivisible unit of matter? An atom? An electron? A quark? A psion? An antimatter particle? Or is everything just a cloud of probability states with different ways of manifesting in the world depending on whether or not the thing thinks I'm looking at it? The thing thinks I'm looking at it? This is supposed to be reassuring? In short, worries persist. We want the scientist to be Dr. Jekyll, discovering and explaining the foundations of reality. Instead, he's Mr. Hyde — he's cloning sheep, growing square tomatoes, perfecting Agent Orange, and putting Thorazine in the water supply. Remember in Scooby Doo, how the culprit so often turned out to be Dr. Wilson from the lab? We've displaced our fear that reality itself is chaotic and flexible instead of ordered and stable onto the figure of the scientist. Like the reality we long for him to explain, the scientist in the popular imagination isn't what he seems. So what is the scientist? In popular culture, we're always afraid the answer is going to be: Monster, run for your lives! How to deal with the monstrous realization that reality is not what we imagine it to be? Not through conventional means. You know how the police and the military are always called in to stop the monsters, but their bullets and missiles have no effect? Conventional law enforcement and military actions are only effective under the laws of conventional reality. Once those laws have been repealed: Your bullets are useless against me, mortals! Ah ha ha! Monster-movie scientists with their bubbling beakers are updated versions of witches and druids with bubbling cauldrons — earlier figures, that is to say, onto whom the rest of us displaced our anxiety about the reality of reality. This anxiety has a long historical precedent: Gnostic movements dating back to the third century after Christ claimed that humans are divine souls trapped in a material reality (created by an imperfect god, the Demiurge) that is not merely an inferior simulacrum of a higher-level reality, but an evil prison for its deluded inhabitants. Scientists, in 20th-century pop culture, were charged with the task of (a) figuring out the truth about reality, and (b) rescuing us from this invisible prison. But inevitably, they failed at both. The scientist's work of analyzing reality as we perceive it seems to makes no sense. Everyone can see that the sun revolves the Earth, so why investigate this fact? Starting with the discovery that the Earth revolves around the sun, scientific investigations have made us more, not less anxious, about the realness of reality. We are made up of mostly empty space! There are black holes that warp the fabric of space-time! Space-time is a fabric? Our monsters — the Other to our Same — reflect our ever-increasing horror about reality itself: giant bugs and animals that want to destroy our cities, tiny bugs and animals that want to destroy our cities, aliens that invade from outer space, aliens that invade from the inside out, not to mention legions of undead zombies who are getting faster all the time. Fear of the Other may be epistemological in origin, but it has very real social and political consequences. Who are those people who look and act differently? How can we believe anything they say — including, "We come in peace?" Since we can't really know anyone, might not everyone we know be Other? In that case, might not everyone we know be a... Monster, run for your lives! And what about you? Why do monsters want to kill you? Why should you care if they do kill you; what's so important about living? What's the meaning of life — yours, or generally speaking? Are you sure? How do you know? You don't, really — and that's terrifying, too. Meaninglessness is aggressive and unstoppable, and you're its target. As Jean-Paul Sartre might say, meaninglessness itself is a... Monster, run for your lives!

kesey-brand-550

Joshua Glenn — Wed, 10 Jun 2009 18:42:29 +0000

1291191042

Joshua Glenn — Thu, 11 Jun 2009 02:52:08 +0000

laurel-sepia

Joshua Glenn — Thu, 11 Jun 2009 18:54:19 +0000

habermas1

Joshua Glenn — Sat, 13 Jun 2009 03:30:08 +0000

Hilo Heroes, June 14-20

HILOBROW — Sun, 14 Jun 2009 12:00:15 +0000

HAPPY BIRTHDAY, this week, to the following high-, low-, no-, and hilobrow heroes. Click here for more Hilo Hero birthdays. JUNE 14 The name MARGARET BOURKE-WHITE (1904-71) conjures up an image: a woman with a camera balanced atop one of the chromed, art-deco eagles that guard the upper reaches of New York's Chrysler Building. Though she didn't snap the shutter herself, the portrait is emblematic of both her physical courage and commitment to her art. Her photojournalism broke barriers at time when women were supposed to be shy and retiring: Bourke-White's work inside steel factories, as the first western photographer allowed into the Soviet Union, and on the front lines of World War II demonstrated otherwise. Her autobiography, Portrait of Myself, was published in 1963; I read it in fifth grade and was inspired by her larger-than-life experiences, among them witnessing the liberation of Buchenwald, and interviewing Gandhi hours before his assassination. She survived a helicopter crash and being strafed by the Luftwaffe, succumbing at the end only to Parkinson's disease. So when adversity strikes, I like to remind myself of Bourke-White on her precarious perch: fearless and following her dream. — Lynn Peril JUNE 15 The 1960s-80s comic series Corto Maltese, by Italian-born cartoonist HUGO PRATT (1927-95), was — on the surface — a 1930s-style pulp adventure that improved on Terry & The Pirates and the like through its attention to historical detail as well as lyrical writing and illustration. But Pratt's work was deeper even than such inspirations as Robert Louis Stevenson and Jack London. As all the best cartoonists seem to do, Pratt used his erstwhile adventurer character as a way to engage with a world that often seems random and tragic: Corto Maltese, a sailor and man of action born without a fate line on his palm, is on a journey which may involve smugglers, pirates, and villains, but which at its core is an examination of the fickle nature of life. Pratt — a World War II survivor, accused spy, and resident of Africa, Europe, and South America — offers an insight into everything we hold dear in this modern world. It could all be taken away by a rogue wave. — Joe Alterio JUNE 16 While it's conventional to call Oliver Hardy a "straight man," it would be more accurate to think of the character created by British comic actor STAN LAUREL (1890- 1965) as the duo's "curved man." Though he may seem idiotic, perhaps Stan's character developed as a result of knowing too much. Ollie, who insists on recognizing every category of politeness and propriety, no matter how absurd, is a fool; Stan, however, refuses ever to recognize any categories. If he can't differentiate, for example, between male and female — he sometimes replies to an admonishing male authority figure with a meek, "Yes, ma'am" — it's because in Stan's world the categories "male" and "female" don't exist. So when Stan touches his chest, ruffles his hair, and lets the hysteria run through him — or does a languid double-take at the sight of a water fountain or some other mundane object — he's not just being silly. He's reflecting back to us our own doubts, our epistemological and phenomenological anxieties. He's reflecting mine, anyway. — Greg Rowland JUNE 17 It's never been easy to like Eric Reed Boucher, better known as JELLO BIAFRA (born 1958). In my New Jersey high school, the mainstream kids were offended the very idea of the Dead Kennedys, while the hardcore purists found them old hat. Jello himself — with his screeching voice, hatred of nostalgia, and holier-than-thou left politics — still seems like he's defying you to embrace him. But embrace him I do: he saved my life. I vividly remember unfolding the cassette liner notes for Frankenchrist (1985) and learning I was not alone in my Reagan-era anger and despair. With lyrics like "Let kids learn communication/Instead of schools pushing competition/How about more art and theater instead of sports?... No one will do it for us/We'll just have to fix ourselves/Honesty ain't all that hard," Jello knocked the scales from my teenaged eyes. — Jason Grote JUNE 18 Perhaps JÜRGEN HABERMAS (born 1929) is most dear to us for developing and elaborating over the course of decades an intricately woven Grand Theory founded in the notion that sincere, earnest public discussion is the basis for a well-lived life and a just, well-ordered democracy. Although its historical accuracy has been challenged, we still love Habermas' first book for bringing into general discourse the notion of the Öffentlichkeit, or public sphere, and its importance in the development of a true deliberative democracy. Having been trained in postwar Germany, Habermas demanded that philosophy grapple with the empirical as well the theoretical. Despite the fights between their adherents during the 1980s, Habermas and Foucault found themselves much aligned in many respects: both believed that one cannot separate life from theory; both worried over the mission creep of modernity into what Habermas would call the Lifeworld. But where Foucault seemed defeated by this, Habermas remains inexhaustibly hopeful about the possibilities of real human communication. Although the café culture may be kaput, in Argonaut Follies, little magazines, fledgling websites, and vigorous bookstore debates lies the hope for the future. — Tor Aarestad JUNE 19 In 1965, SHIRLEY MULDOWNEY (born 1940) beat down the doors of the National Hot Rod Association and became the first licensed female drag racer. And despite the signature pink cars monogrammed with her nickname, "Cha-Cha" (which she has long since renounced: "There's no room for bimboism in racing"), she was in no way a novelty act. She distinguished herself in the surprisingly dangerous Funny Car category, surviving fiery crashes and setting records, before moving on to win three NHRA Top Fuel championships. In the 1983 biopic, Heart Like A Wheel, Bonnie Bedelia plays the young Muldowney as a plucky housewife with a need for speed. It's a nice movie, but I doubt it even approaches the true measure of Muldowney's badass velocity. To look at her in this video, you might think you'd discovered the missing link between Wanda Jackson and Steve McQueen. She pulls on her boots, checks the engine, tucks away her teased black hair, and lowers herself behind the wheel of a funny car. A few seconds later you're watching a parachute open, and you know that someone has just eaten her dust. — Mimi Lipson JUNE 20 Just as it isn't Burt Bacharach's fault that his name is now rock-critical shorthand for "This band knows someone with a flugelhorn," BRIAN WILSON (born 1942) is not to be blamed that his is invoked every time more than two people sing together on a record, even when the results sound more like The Roches (Dirty Projectors) or The Back Porch Majority (Polyphonic Spree). Even when the familiar (and gorgeous) block harmonies he arranged for The Beach Boys are copped with some success (Grizzly Bear), the amalgam of whimsy, melancholia and sheer melodic grace — often closer in spirit to Irving Berlin or even Stephen Foster than anything comfortably categorized as rock and roll — at the core of Wilson's best work remain elusive. Perhaps it's only the overt auterist complexities of Pet Sounds and Smile (the unfinishable Woyzeck of popular music, its 2004 Wilson-approved live reconstruction notwithstanding) that allow us to hear the same qualities in such early, ostensibly frothier fare as "Fun, Fun, Fun." But that doesn’t mean they aren't there. — Franklin Bruno

mccarthy

Joshua Glenn — Mon, 15 Jun 2009 11:28:45 +0000

toth-550

Joshua Glenn — Mon, 15 Jun 2009 11:29:15 +0000

lorre-falcon3-550

Joshua Glenn — Mon, 15 Jun 2009 12:57:28 +0000

star-trek-490

Joshua Glenn — Mon, 15 Jun 2009 16:54:24 +0000

elton-john-billy-joel-550

Joshua Glenn — Mon, 15 Jun 2009 17:01:25 +0000

obama-nyt-550

Joshua Glenn — Mon, 15 Jun 2009 17:06:32 +0000

star-trek-550

Joshua Glenn — Mon, 15 Jun 2009 17:13:41 +0000

The Trouble with Boomers

Joshua Glenn — Mon, 15 Jun 2009 17:17:23 +0000

The oldest Boomers turn 65 this year, and the youngest turn 56. By now, they've partially relinquished their collective death grip on the best jobs — though not the best lifestyles, which they'll always enjoy. So why do we continue to live in the Boomers' world? This summer, for example, we're all required to watch blockbuster movies (Star Trek, X-Men) based on TV shows and comics originally created for the amusement of Boomer young adults. We're also supposed to pony up the big bucks to see Boomers (Bruce Springsteen, Billy Joel, Elton John, Fleetwood Mac, The Eagles, Jimmy Buffett) and the Boomers' idols (Paul McCartney, The Rolling Stones, Simon and Garfunkel) wheeze out their golden oldies on much-hyped tours. Here at Hilobrow.com, we admire and enjoy the pioneering work and activism of a few Boomer low-, high-, no- and hilobrows, including: Neil Young, David Lynch, Freddie Mercury, Iggy Pop, David Bowie, Debbie Harry, Bill Griffith, John Carpenter, Octavia Butler, David Byrne, Andy Kaufman, Jonathan Richman, Joey Ramone, Jim Jarmusch, and Larry David. Standing on the shoulders of their immediate elders, these North American and British Boomers have articulated a lucid critique of what's wrong with western culture — and they've done so in forms that regular folks can appreciate. Their irony is of the fierce and politically engaged variety, and their productions are smart without being (too) pretentious. But the vast majority of Boomers — generally speaking, the ones who still rake in the dough every time they get out of bed — have never been so unique, bold, or talented. What do George Lucas, Michael Douglas, Don McLean, Alice Walker, Jerry Bruckheimer, Kurt Loder, Eric Clapton, Diane Keaton, Cher, Donald Trump, George W. Bush, Bill Clinton, Steven Spielberg, Philip Pullman, Dave Barry, Stephen King, James Taylor, Billy Crystal, Andrew Lloyd Webber, Billy Joel, Bruce Springsteen, Jay Leno, Rush Limbaugh, Brian Grazer, Robin Williams, Sting, and Thomas Friedman have in common? They're the avatars of a middlebrow generation, one that has always insisted upon having its cake and eating it, too. They're conservative liberals, socialist capitalists, mainstream outsiders, millionaire populists; the increasingly clownish yet supposedly stylish look of a Diane Keaton or an Elton John speaks volumes. It gets worse. All too many of us now in our late 30s, 40s and early 50s are "Boomer-identified." We have internalized the values of our generational oppressors. We are every bit as besotted with Bob Dylan as the Boomers were; and we've been trained to loathe and pity ourselves because we never did get a '68 of our own. Nostalgic for the golden years of their own particular youth, the Boomers have mortgaged our collective future. Don't fall into this trap, readers. Think carefully before you purchase or enjoy a Boomer-produced or -approved product. [caption id="attachment_2718" align="aligncenter" width="550" caption="Barack Obama: not a Boomer."][/caption] How did the Boomers pull off Stockholm Syndrome on a generational scale? In an era marked by de-colonization, the Boomers were savvy, unrepentant generational colonialists. That is, their predominance is due in part to a brilliant, rapacious ability to claim cultural creatives and activists both older (Gloria Steinem, Abbie Hoffman, Eldridge Cleaver, Hunter S. Thompson, Ken Kesey, Don DeLillo, Thomas Pynchon, Woody Allen, Richard Pryor, Elvis, Tina Turner, George Clinton, Aretha Franklin, Bob Dylan, The Beatles and The Rolling Stones, The Velvet Underground, Jefferson Airplane, Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, Captain Beefheart, Frank Zappa) and younger (Matt Groening, Seinfeld, Elvis Costello, The Sex Pistols, Joy Division, Michael Moore, Jonathan Franzen, David Foster Wallace) of whom they approve. Only recently, with the candidacy of Barack Obama, who repeatedly denied that he is now, or ever has been a Boomer, has this trend been challenged. There must be more to Boomer hegemony than colonialism, though. This question demands immediate and prolonged investigation, lest something of a similar nature happen in the future. Never again. Hilobrow.com encourages your comments on this urgent matter.

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Joshua Glenn — Wed, 17 Jun 2009 13:34:41 +0000

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Joshua Glenn — Wed, 17 Jun 2009 13:45:17 +0000

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Joshua Glenn — Wed, 17 Jun 2009 16:31:16 +0000

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Joshua Glenn — Wed, 17 Jun 2009 16:34:32 +0000

CARMICHAEL SPEAKS TO STUDENTS

Joshua Glenn — Wed, 17 Jun 2009 16:41:01 +0000

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Joshua Glenn — Wed, 17 Jun 2009 16:49:00 +0000

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Joshua Glenn — Wed, 17 Jun 2009 19:05:33 +0000

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Joshua Glenn — Wed, 17 Jun 2009 19:35:16 +0000

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Joshua Glenn — Wed, 17 Jun 2009 19:36:22 +0000

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Joshua Glenn — Wed, 17 Jun 2009 20:01:39 +0000

Judging the judges

HILOBROW — Fri, 19 Jun 2009 18:44:55 +0000

Looking back on it all, from the vantage point of a couple months, it's apparent that the Susan Boyle Phenomenon (SBP) had very little to do with poor Susan Boyle (SB) herself. Susan Boyle's judges (supposedly) didn't think she could sing. Their nonplussed reaction — whether sincere or calculated — to the very sight of SB cued the Britain's Got Talent audience to chuckle and smirk. Then SB sang some Broadway show tune, and the judges' blood-stained beaks dropped open; their crocodile eyes glinted with unshed tears. SB received a standing ovation, and within days of her debut, videos of her audition, subsequent interviews, and her 1999 rendition of "Cry Me a River" had been viewed online a combined total of over 100 million times. Pundits pontificated. The SBP was a modern parable about judging by appearances. Or, more cynically, the SBP was merely evidence demonstrating that YouTube users like to be surprised. Nattering nabobs have interpreted the SBP through a feminist filter, and also a populist filter. But the middlebrow critics of the MSM are, as usual, wrong-headed. So are the people. Sorry, YouTube users who've posted comments like "Boyle has the most beautiful voice ive ever heard in my life its just amazing!!!!!!!!!!!" but you're wrong: NO es increible la voz. What's truly amazing and incredible is just how conflicted we westerners are about the now-dominant, Gong Show-pioneered mode of judging talent competitions — a mode in which contestants aren't just critiqued but also sometimes mocked and humiliated. We all love watching the judges mock; but, as was revealed by the SBP, we particularly love it when the judges' mockery is silenced. (William Blake speaks for all of us: "Mock on, mock on, Voltaire, Rousseau:/Mock on, mock on: ‘tis all in vain!/You throw the sand against the wind,/And the wind blows it back again.") What's the source of this conflict that so many of us experience so deeply? How is it that these mocking judges push our buttons so effectively? Hilobrow.com has the answer. Emceed by Chuck Barris, one of our great homegrown postmodernists, The Gong Show was a parody of more innocent TV variety shows: Gong Show acts like The Unknown Comic, Gene Gene the Dancing Machine, and The Popsicle Twins were a bathetic version of comedy, dance, and novelty acts that earlier generations of Americans enjoyed. But even though the sometimes-nice, often-nasty judges on "reality-competition" TV programs like American Idol, America's Got Talent (and Britain's Got Talent, on which SB made her debut), Dancing with the Stars, America's Next Top Model, Project Runway, Last Comic Standing, and So You Think You Can Dance might be exaggerating their responses for entertainment value, they're no parodists. When Simon and Paula, Nigel and Mary, Tyra and Paulina roll their eyes, cringe with pseudo-empathetic shame, and laugh up their sleeves, they're not criticizing and celebrating (like Gong Show judges like Jaye P. Morgan, Jamie Farr, Arte Johnson, Rip Taylor, and Phyllis Diller were) the seamy underside of showbiz. They're giving us what we've come to demand. Thus the SBP. Why did the spectacle in which SB played a catalyzing but minor role turn into a full-fledged P? Boyle is transporting because she shatters the flattering mirror in which we usually find what Lacan calls "the little other." We usually see conventionally attractive people struggling to let the little other out, rummaging about within themselves to find that pretty pearl. Boyle's the proverbial sow's ear purse, out of which the pearls spilled in profusion. The pearls had flaws to be sure — but there were more there than we usually admit to; set off against her awkwardness, that little otherness got to shine. Let's back up, from Lacan to Freud. Freud divides our psychic apparatus into three parts — each of which, Hilobrow.com would argue, corresponds to one of the three crucial elements of a reality-competition show. The uncoordinated instinctual trends (i.e., the show's audience) are the "id"; the organized, realistic part of the psyche is the "ego" (the contestant); and the critical and moralizing function is the "super-ego" (the panel of judges). Until The Gong Show, talent-show judges weren't particularly denigrating — so the SBP was impossible. The SBP has pulled back the curtain not on showbiz, but on the complex and fraught network-operation of the "I." As another British Simon — the philosopher Simon Critchley — argues in his recent book, Infinitely Demanding: Ethics of Commitment, Politics of Resistance (Verso), "There is something at the heart of me, that arguably makes me the 'me' that I am, but which is quite opaque to me." Critchley is here syncretizing Lacan, among other philosophers who argue that we will always necessarily fail to see and grasp our inner otherness, the what of our who. The particular manner in which we fail to do so plays a crucial role in orienting the way we live. Lacan claims that our inner otherness has two parts, the little and the big. The little other we find in one another — in those whom we resemble, separated from us by a gap that seems bridgeable. Desire consists in wishing to cross that gap, and jouissance plays with the tensing of the crouch and the release of the leap. The unknowableness of that little other takes the form of language; we can put it into words, express it. But there's the Big Other, too — the law, the governance of desire — within which resides the wild Otherness that's extralinguistic, really scary. It's a Lacanian move to bury opposites within each other. Where the aspects of the psyche in Freud are like radically different planets in orbit, in Lacan they seem like computer programs, each with its own embedded virus. Or stories that contradict themselves. The SBP is doubly renewing, because the Big Other, the superego, the Law (which grins like death, and looks like an endless howl on the inside — yes, we're talking about Simon Cowell) sets itself up as the route to finding the little other. It's the arbiter, the regulator, parceling out jouissance like a chairman of some psychic federal reserve. And yet it's really got no grip on that little other, which after all is just as infinite and unconquerable. When Susan Boyle took the stage, it was the Big Other that was outed as manqué; its lack, and not that of our mirror image, the contestant, is reflected. To Slavov Žižek, the haunting otherness is embodied in his beloved Hitchcock's MacGuffin — that strange attractor at the heart of thrillers whose glamor motivates the action. The satchel, the necklace, the Maltese Falcon — they all contain some unnameable quality we seek, which once secured invariably fails to satisfy. What's the MacGuffin for shows like Britain's Got Talent? It's celebrity. For fame isn't a prize; it's a package. Susan Boyle broke it open, and showed us that on the inside it's only plaster.

earthrise

Matthew Battles — Fri, 19 Jun 2009 19:39:42 +0000

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Matthew Battles — Fri, 19 Jun 2009 19:59:16 +0000

Repo Man

Joshua Glenn — Sat, 20 Jun 2009 18:11:33 +0000

Repo Man Generation

Joshua Glenn — Sat, 20 Jun 2009 18:13:54 +0000

In a recent Hilobrow.com post, I casually asserted that the Baby Boomers were born from 1944-53. I'm aware, of course, that America's postwar "baby boom" began in 1946 and ended in 1957; and I realize that the influential pop demographers William Strauss and Neil Howe lumped everyone born from 1943-60 into the Boom Generation. But I stand by my half-serious, purposely eccentric (too strict, too regular) generational periodization; despite its kookiness, I think it's more accurate, more revealing, than any other that's been proposed yet. [caption id="attachment_2887" align="aligncenter" width="550" caption="Repo Man, directed by Alex Cox (born 1954) and starring Emilio Estevez (1962), is a key work of the Original Generation X."]Repo Man, directed by Alex Cox (born 1954) and starring Emilio Estevez (1962), is a key work of the Original Generation X." title="Repo Man" width="550" height="311" class="size-full wp-image-2887" />[/caption] Click here for a series of posts on my generational periodization scheme.

Hilo Heroes, June 21-27

HILOBROW — Sun, 21 Jun 2009 12:00:34 +0000

HAPPY BIRTHDAY, this week, to the following high-, low-, no-, and hilobrow heroes. Click here for more Hilo Hero birthdays. JUNE 21 Today, the name MARY McCARTHY (1912-89) first brings to mind the frank bed-hopping and catty portraiture of The Company She Keeps and The Group, her biggest seller. But she was also an immaculate stylist, and excelled at cerebral satire — The Oasis and The Groves of Academe are novels of ideas in which all the ideas are either insincerely held or plain lousy — and even the randier books pause to cast a skeptical eye upon the Freudianism and Stalinism that pervaded McCarthy's New York intellectual milieu. She was no less an iconoclast in public life and nonfiction, breaking from friends and lovers at Partisan Review as it listed rightward, founding the non-doctrinal politics with Dwight Macdonald, and executing crackling journalism on Vietnam and, while well into her sixties, Watergate. More alive to the link between temperament and intellect than many of her contemporaries, she once chalked up her antipathy for dogma (and love of fine distinctions) to her Catholic education: "I always enjoyed arguing with the clergy." — Franklin Bruno JUNE 22 Much has been written (and rightly so) about white appropriation of black culture, but it's only recently — in these days of Barack Obama, Pharrell Williams, and TV on The Radio — that we hear talk of the reverse: the ascendancy of the Afro-nerd, the black embrace of culture that's long been considered "white." Like millennial Christianity, geekdom is inherently utopian in its disregard of racial categories. This is why I love to think of the young OCTAVIA E. BUTLER (1947-2006) poring over 1950s SF magazines in her working-class Baptist household, imagining other possible worlds. Winner of Hugo and Nebula Awards, and the first SF writer to win a MacArthur, Butler used SF as a Brechtian alienation device to explore not only race relations, but equality, asymmetric warfare, and humanitarian law. In Kindred, she combined time travel with slave narrative; in Lilith's Brood, she used the tropes of alien invasion and Darwinist thought-experiment to presuppose the Iraq War by more than a decade; and in her Parable series, she used the apocalypse to talk about slum culture and gated communities. Since Butler, the future has never been the same. — Jason Grote JUNE 23 ANNA AKHMATOVA (1889-1966) was the Joni Mitchell of her day, strikingly angular and beautiful, wrapped in a Spanish shawl, tearing through love affairs with the celebrated poets and artists of her age. Her early work spoke directly to a generation of women, giving voice to the poised ambiguities of love. She was imitated as often as she was painted in portrait, and earned the high praise of a Nabokov parody. Brodsky said she arrived with her voice fully realized, working in a classical style in an avant-garde age, her work laced with precise imagery, irony and wit. But Joni Mitchell didn't have Stalin for an an enemy! Akhmatova was too famous and beloved to attack directly, so from 1925 to 1940 she was banned from publication, her husband was executed and her son sentenced to a labor camp, and her friends were tortured and murdered. Though Stalin made her a ghost in her own life and in her own country, he could not still her voice: Akhmatova's Requiem, an epic about the Stalinist terror, is the greatest work of 20th-century Russian poetry. In the end, she outlived her persecutor, enduring long enough to see her work come back into print in the Soviet Union. — David Smay JUNE 24 AMBROSE BIERCE (1842-1914?) Ambrose Bierce, You were terribly fierce: You fought in the Civil War. Pigs eating men’s faces And strategic disgraces Were some of the things you saw. In affairs sacrilegious You were quite prodigious, Regarding Our Lord as a fag. But all is forgiven And now you’re in heaven, You magnificent brimstone wag. — James Parker JUNE 25 ALEX TOTH (1928-2006) occupies one of the strangest positions in the pantheon of great cartoonists: an artist of enormous power and lasting influence, he produced almost nothing but ephemera, throwaways and hackwork. Toth could strip any figure down to a handful of perfectly brash lines; he composed every panel and page with immaculate attention to its dramatic force and storytelling fluidity. A master of character design, he devised the look of Space Ghost and the Super Friends cartoon. But Toth was enough of a perfectionist that he became impossible to satisfy — in 1991, he dismissed contemporary comics as "the ugly, mean, vile, banal, twisted, sick, bloody celebration of torture, rape, cruelty, filth, demonic and socio-political psycho-babble." (His handwritten evisceration of a Steve Rude-drawn Jonny Quest story from 1986 still circulates among cartoonists.) So Toth's admirers seek out the dopey, gorgeous little stories he scattered across decades of grade-Z funnybooks — Hot Wheels, Red Circle Sorcery, Our Fighting Forces — and try to follow his example, knowing that he could never approve of their efforts. — Douglas Wolk JUNE 26 From Abbott, the courtly assassin in Hitchock's The Man Who Knew Too Much, to the un-manly yet indefatigable Joel Cairo, in The Maltese Falcon, PETER LORRE (1904-64) mocked or otherwise subverted the very concept of "villain" with an ironic self-awareness unavailable to earlier horror actors like Lugosi and Karloff. His characters' priorities disturb and thrill those moviegoers who've been conditioned to assume that villains only desire money and power, sex and violence. Instead, Lorre's uncanny bad-guys long to collaborate with their intellectual equals; the furious Weltschmerz with which he infuses the word "idiot" has been echoed gleefully by Lorre-esque cartoon characters, from Mel Blanc's mad scientists to Jon Kricfalusi's mad chihuahua, for over half a century. Ever get the feeling that civilization is being overrun by testosterone-addled jackasses? Me, too. You don't have to be a Hungarian-German Jewish refugee, like Lorre was, to sympathize with what we must recognize as his characters' (perverted, to be sure) idealism. — Joshua Glenn JUNE 27 What was it about EMMA GOLDMAN (1867-1940) that made her, at the turn of the twentieth century, the most dangerous woman in America? Was it her early support of violent Attentats, such as her partner Alexander Berkman's attempted murder of ruthless anti-labor heavy Henry Frick? Or her brusque debating style? (When erstwhile companion Johann Most changed his view on Attentats and printed defamatory insinuations against Berkman, Goldman demanded that he support his claims in print. When he didn't, she appeared at one of his talks and beat him with a horsewhip.) Maybe her impudent stance on the position of women: a fellow little magazine editor said that Emma was sent to prison "for advocating that women need not always keep their mouths shut and their wombs open." Most likely it was her withering fury at middlebrow beliefs, insinuating itself into every fervid, sloganeering phrase she produced: "What hosts are laid at your feet, Morality, destroyer of life." — Tor Aarestad

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Joshua Glenn — Mon, 22 Jun 2009 10:12:58 +0000

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Joshua Glenn — Mon, 22 Jun 2009 10:13:14 +0000

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Matthew Battles — Mon, 22 Jun 2009 14:43:21 +0000

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Matthew Battles — Mon, 22 Jun 2009 15:49:59 +0000

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Matthew Battles — Mon, 22 Jun 2009 15:54:32 +0000

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Matthew Battles — Mon, 22 Jun 2009 16:02:00 +0000

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Matthew Battles — Mon, 22 Jun 2009 16:04:48 +0000

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Matthew Battles — Mon, 22 Jun 2009 16:11:01 +0000

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Matthew Battles — Mon, 22 Jun 2009 16:46:47 +0000

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Matthew Battles — Mon, 22 Jun 2009 18:55:59 +0000

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Matthew Battles — Mon, 22 Jun 2009 18:56:36 +0000

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Matthew Battles — Mon, 22 Jun 2009 19:02:52 +0000

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Matthew Battles — Mon, 22 Jun 2009 19:12:15 +0000

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Joshua Glenn — Tue, 23 Jun 2009 10:20:39 +0000

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Joshua Glenn — Tue, 23 Jun 2009 10:22:58 +0000

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Joshua Glenn — Tue, 23 Jun 2009 10:23:16 +0000

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Joshua Glenn — Tue, 23 Jun 2009 10:23:34 +0000

Double Exposure (4)

Joshua Glenn — Tue, 23 Jun 2009 13:31:23 +0000

"I am the sum of my small steps," announce the handwritten-style notes in an advertisement torn from a recent issue of Oprah Magazine. Ecce Middlebrow's ideal American woman, forever in pursuit of a clear (un-anxious, that is, not lucid) head, healthy heart, toned legs, tight abs, and pretty toes. Taking these steps, according to Sun Chips's groovy avatar, permits you to "live brightly" — as good a euphemism as any for what Hilobrow.com recognizes as the contemporary middlebrow version of enlightenment. But don't call it that — doing so reminds us of Kant's demanding definition: "man's emergence from his self-imposed immaturity." Instead, call this contemporary state of mens inanis in corpore lentesco "upliftment" — or perhaps "enlightening," an awkward but unthreatening adjectival noun favored by Oprah and her spiritual teacher, motivational speaker Eckhart Tolle. Ugh. Enlightening [middlebrow enlightenment] is attained not in a flash, but step by step; you've attained it when you're having fun, eating right, de-cluttering, doing yoga, taking walks, achieving orgasm, filing-not-piling, and maintaining your sense of self-esteem ("I deserve it," e.g., a pedicure). Oh, and make sure not to sweat the small stuff — like your job, family, community, or environment — sorry, but "going green" barely counts. Thus writes Middlebrow's moving finger, in "funky" handwriting — and in a sassy, sisterly first-person singular. (NB: Sarah Jessica Parker's enduring appeal can only be explained by her mastery of the spoken form of this mode.) Keep your eyes peeled, and you'll notice Middlebrow's sentimental lettering everywhere. Like, for example, in this ad for Turning Leaf wine, spotted in the current issue of Real Simple. Here we discover the inverse of enlightening. If middlebrow enlightenment apes highbrow enlightenment (it's progressive, cumulative, attained through effort and willpower — though perhaps not of the variety demanded by Kant), then the middlebrow ecstatic apes romanticism. The middlebrow ecstatic counsels "taking a minute," demanding some You-Time in which to shed the burdensome construct of your adulthood. Sun Chips Woman may be the sum of her small steps; but Turning Leaf Woman is not the sum of her responsibilities. Which is not to suggest that Sun Chips Woman and Turning Leaf Woman are actually different; in fact, they are exactly the same. The former never really gets a grip on herself, never emerges from her self-imposed immaturity; her version of striving and effort are thoroughly infused with what Nietzsche called "letting yourself drop." (Self-esteem is the dialectical synthesis — a middlebrow operation — of effort and letting yourself drop.) The latter, meanwhile, never really cuts loose, never risks existential vertigo by peering into the void. Enlightenment is highbrow. Ecstasy is lowbrow. The hilobrow doesn't want to synthesize these modes; she doesn't want anything to do with lukewarm, feel-good enlightening or middlebrow ecstatic. Instead, she wants the impossible: enlightenment and ecstasy, sincerity and authenticity, simultaneously. Because you're worth it, ladies. This is the fourth in a series of posts reviving the ancient practice of extispicy — i.e., divining the outlines of our invisible prison (formerly known as Fate) via a close study of anomalies in animal entrails. Only instead of sheep livers and cow lungs, we're using magazine ads and other middlebrow media images.

Thirteen Ways of Looking at Apollo

Matthew Battles — Tue, 23 Jun 2009 14:49:24 +0000

...Otherwise this stone would seem defaced beneath the translucent cascade of the shoulders and would not glisten like a wild beast's fur: would not, from all the borders of itself, burst like a star: for here there is no place that does not see you. You must change your life. — Rainer Maria Rilke, "Archaic Torso of Apollo," translated by Stephen B. Mitchell

WHEN HUMANS FIRST made their mark on the moon forty years ago, it was a moment that attracted the fascination of millions. And yet today its impact seems as remote as the flags, landing stages, and footprints left on Earth's satellite by successive landings — footprints that no wind will wither. For all the optimistic hopes — that by the scope and grandeur of the Apollo program we would overcome our species' many foibles; that through its mixture of Promethean energy and humble industry we would domesticate space itself — it was an ineluctably human endeavor, suffused with the tensions of myth. This moment of transcendence was shot through with one species' peculiar habits of sense and attention. Even the choice of destination was parochial and impulsive; the moon, after all, is an insignificant body by any measure but our own. Watching the progress of Apollo, many boggled at the distances and speeds involved, the incomprehensible abysses we could now leap with our machines. And yet didn't we discover, looking back home over the desolation of the moon's horizon, that even such distances were as nothing in the vastness of space? That even with great expenditure of energy — colossal, flagrant, unparalleled in history — we were still stuck in our own backyard?

In the lens of retrospect, the moon landings appear as some island culture that flourished briefly and then vanished, leaving only ruined towers, ritual costumes, and incomprehensible glyphs. In the decades since, NASA's ambitions for manned space exploration have been comparatively middle class. Apollo by contrast was always more a work of art than an expedition; it was the prototypical space opera, the only one carried out on the very stage itself. Next to it, all manned endeavors in space since have been akin to sideshow or vaudeville. Like classical Greek drama, Apollo's moment is gone, and some of its rituals, its choruses, will never make sense to us again. The age of easy space travel that Apollo seemed to promise never materialized; the jet-setting, space-hopping life envisioned in films like 2001 seems as spectacularly misbegotten as visions of skies dominated by Zeppelins and flying cars. At the time, some thinkers believed the moon would be disenchanted by our visiting it. Yet it remains suffused with a brilliance that seems to come from within. Even in a world in which there is no place which does not see you, the moon remains inscrutable, unperturbed. Forty years after a small band of humans set foot on the moon, a great cohort of our species have become astronauts of a kind, and the planet we visit is our own. Our mission controls have moved to office parks in Louisiana and call centers in Mumbai. We climb into the hermetically sealed capsule of our vehicles, which we navigate by satellite. We wear on our belts tiny computers with more processing power than those used on the whole of the Apollo program. We're wired up with earbuds, heart monitors, mobile phones, and laptops. RFID chips in our ID cards talk to the network and track our movements. As we shoot thus encapsulated from place to place, the systems hum; distant servers chart our progress; chatter bounced off satellites keeps us company. Across what used to be called the digital divide, meanwhile, typhoons sweep away villages, rice crops wither, and children kill each other over bundles of firewood. And yet "their" problems seem "our" problems, their sorrows our responsibility. It's this aspect of Apollo's legacy that says, you must change your life.

The craft the Apollo astronauts rode to the moon was a capsule of contradictions: an engineering marvel and a jury-rigged bucket of bolts, a pill-like pod of corrugated metal contrived to give its aviator-cum-astronauts the feel of flight in an airless environment; a symbol of existential enigma and loneliness in which each system, no matter how minute, had its operators and monitors and simulation-ready counterparts on Earth. The command module would travel further from home than any vehicle heretofore, and yet its subtlest changes would be watched and scrutinized to an unprecedented extent. Apollo was a congeries of machines aimed not only at the moon, but at one of modernity's primary questions: to what extent will the tools we create come to dominate us? In a sense, Apollo was a giant confidence game played against the astronauts — one so successful that it gulled us all. The astronauts came from the world of test pilots, the testbed of machismo and consummate skill, the attitude depicted by Wolfe in the Right Stuff. But even for these skilled and talented men, space flight proved too complex. The calculations required to maintain attitude even in the simplest trajectories are at once elegant and mind-boggling in their permutations, and the speed with which they must be carried out is beyond all human possibility. But the astronauts demanded control — and they had their swagger, the adulation of the public, and the fact that it was their lives on the line to back up their argument. In the end, Apollo's systems would give them the illusion of complete control, responding to their instructions, their movements of sticks and switches. It's an intoxicating notion, piloting across the star-studded reaches of space. The drama of the Apollo landings — all of which were accomplished under manual override of automatic systems — was evoked in the classic Lunar Lander video game. When Luke in the climactic battle of Star Wars turns off his targeting computer and dives at the Death Star with eyes closed, The Force merges with The Right Stuff. In fact, Apollo's computers aided the intuition of their pilots, figuring out in milliseconds how to do what the astronauts wanted to do. Jim Lovell used star sightings to navigate Apollo 8 to lunar orbit and back. But on subsequent missions, the NASA planners would never again trust the astronauts to drive their craft to the moon unaided.

Norman Mailer was especially touched and perplexed by the problems of the astronauts. "They were virile men," Mailer writes in Of a Fire on the Moon,

but they were prodded, tapped into, poked, flexed, tested, subjected to a pharmacology of stimulants, depressants, diuretics, laxatives, retentives, tranquilizers, motion sickness pills, antibiotics, vitamins, and food which was designed to control the character of their feces. They were virile, but they were done to, they were done to like no healthy man alive.... On the one hand to dwell in the very center of technological reality . . . and yet to inhabit — if only in one's dreams — that other world where death, metaphysics, and the unanswerable questions of eternity must reside, was to suggest natures so divided that they could have been the most miserable and unbalanced of men if they did not contain in their huge contradictions some of the profound and accelerating opposites of the century itself.

To Mailer, alienation was the century's theme, and Apollo was but a grand fugue played on it. Certainly the revelatory power of the moon was at risk. Astronaut Pete Conrad admits to him that having "dreamed" of going to the moon for years, as an astronaut "now the moon is nothing but facts to me." Mailer trumpets his decision to found a new psychology, the "psychology of Astronauts, for they were either the end of the old line or the first of the new men." In fact they were neither the beginning nor the end — they were in the midst of a change older than the century, more comprehensive than machines. It was system, not machine, that was alienating us — and technology is at most system's handmaiden. System is what deranged Melville's Bartleby and Kafka's dreaming, hapless clerks; and system, not machinery per se, is what made Apollo. So the machine, despite all its mercilessness, its coolness, its implacable thingness, is no obstacle to dreaming. Indeed for the planners and politicians who made the space race, these are the machine's very attractions, the source of inspiration. Mailer imagines an American male regarding the moon shot:

He has worked with machines all his life, he has tooled cars to the point where he has felt them respond to his care, he has known them and slept beside them as trustingly as if they were hunting dogs, he knows a thousand things about the collaboration between a man and a machine, and he knows what can go wrong. Machines — all the old machines he has known — are as unreasonable as people.... He has spent his life with machines, they are all he has ever trusted.... He will see a world begin where machines are king and he does not know whether to cry from pride or (from) the all-out ache that he does not really understand the new machinery.

In 1963, not long after JFK issued his famous injunction to reach for the moon by the end of the decade, C. S. Lewis wrote that the first lunar landing would rob the moon of its meaning. "The immemorial moon," he wrote, "the moon of the myths, the poets, the lovers — will have been taken from us forever.... Artemis, Diana, the silver planet belonged in that fashion to all humanity: he who reaches it first steals something from us all." And yet even this attempted theft has its mythopoetic grandeur. While its ambitions were Promethean and Faustian, its rhythms and otherworldly reach evoke an Orphic strain, that of the trickster and tale-teller — Loki, Odysseus, the Haida Raven, even beanstalk-climbing Jack — who finds a way to the world of the clouds and the realm of the gods to steal golden eggs or a goddess's golden hair, the beloved dead, or the light. Except that this time it was no trickster who stole the moon's light. Since Galileo realized that the moon is no inscribed disk or embodied spirit but a place of mountains and plains, the prospect of a visit to the moon has captured the imagination. But in story it is the poet and dreamer — not the warrior or the master builder much less the test pilot or the engineer — who makes the imagined first landing. In modern times, images of lunar voyagers partook of the Victorian conceit that explorers, like Richard Burton or David Livingstone, should be well-spoken rakes, men of letters as well as men of action (and men above all). Jules Verne imagined the moon conquered by a group of boastful gun enthusiasts. In C. S. Lewis's first venture into science fiction, Out of the Silent Planet, the problem of interplanetary travel is conquered by a pair of poetry-quoting dons who build a rocket in their garden. Not until the 1950 film Destination Moon was a lunar voyage depicted as an enormous techno-industrial effort of the scale Apollo would assume. Science fiction author Robert Heinlein contributed to the film, which was based on his books Spaceship Galileo and The Man Who Sold the Moon, both of which featured renegade industrialists of Ayn Rand stripe who defy government restrictions in pursuit of their lunar ambitions. With Heinlein as with the ancients, the moon was the goal of renegades, misfits, and outriders; it was not a place for the establishment. The Apollo astronauts too had their Odyssean side — they were men of many ways, the boys with the brightest teeth and the longest forward pass. But although the systems that powered them to the moon were designed to give the astronauts the appearance of existential wanderers in the vastness of space, their arrival on the moon was the triumph of engineers and computer scientists who found the ways to send steel and glass and air and water into the void and bring it back again. Who is the god of the engineers & the bureaucrats? What spirit presides over this hijacking of magic by engineering and administration? The Romans had gods for these energies of mass society: there was Securitas, who presided over state security, and even Cloacina, goddess of the sewer works (and for the Roman engineers, the underground was like our outer space, a world beyond to be tamed). The true pioneers of the space race, from Werner von Braun to the MIT engineers who designed Apollo's guidance system, were descended neither from Gilgamesh nor Achilles (much less Orpheus). Their forebears were viziers and clerks, the crafty subordinates who devised agriculture, writing, and the phalanx.

Apollo's technology — its millions of parts, its hundreds of inventions, its theretofore unimaginably complex integrations — from today's perspective make a fascinating blend of sophistication and brute simplicity. The Apollo guidance system included a "space sextant" which the navigator used to sight on fixed stars or features on the Earth and moon; for all their craft's space-age sophistication Apollo astronauts relied on the ancient practice of celestial navigation to keep it on course. One of the engineers on the MIT team that designed the Apollo Guidance Computer was in fact a descendant of Nathaniel Bowditch, author of The American Practical Navigator (still in print) and an eighteenth-century authority on steering by the stars — a practice that would have been familiar to Polynesian mariners lacking writing, metallurgy, and the wheel.

Those Pacific voyagers wove their charts of wickerwork and shells; the positions of the astronauts' stars were woven into the "core ropes" of physical memory that comprised the programming code of the Apollo guidance computer. Unlike today's software, the programs the computer needed to run Apollo's systems weren't merely sets of arbitrary symbols written transferably on magnetic media. They were tangible, material things — assemblages of fine wire threaded through magnetic loops, the ins and outs of which represented the ones and zeroes of code. The resulting "ropes," woven by retired millworkers in Massachusetts, weren't mere text, but textile — densely woven, thumb-thick hawsers of cable snaking in and out of the on-board computer. To change the software, engineers needed not only to rewrite the code, but to weave new ropes.

If Apollo's computer put a new spin on ancient technologies, in other ways it was starkly innovative — less the heart than the face of a new machine. Much derided today — compared to early PCs and even pocket calculators, its processing powers were minuscule — the Apollo Guidance Computer made use of a new concept, the interface, to adapt its powers to the astronauts' use. The calculations needed to transport a manned vessel to the moon and return were dazzlingly complex and interdependent, a tapestry of celestial maps, Newtonian physics, and chemical and electrical engineering. While many NASA engineers wanted all of this calculation done on the ground, pressure from astronauts compelled planners to devise ways to monitor systems, calculate variables, and navigate and steer from onboard the spacecraft. Previous computers were autonomous; they were architecture; they were places. To interact with a computer even in the late sixties was to program it. On the Apollo missions, however, the astronauts would use computer software as a set of "tools" that were "embedded" in the machine. Engineers designing the computer were given one cubic foot within which to accomplish their task. But with this wondrous efficacy, the machinery so loved by the American male was changing fundamentally; it was at once becoming more obscure and more intimate. On each Apollo mission, the Lunar Module pilot would assume control of the craft during landing — but the control was partial; the stick he manipulated also talked to the computer, which made numberless infinitesimal adjustments to his inputs. Apollo doesn't create the shift to cyborg life; it only marks it, serves as its archetype. Perhaps the time is swiftly coming — indeed has arrived — when machines will search space not in our stead, but as our extensions. Mariner, Voyager, Odyssey — these are tools; they descend from flint axe and firebow. Hannah Arendt understood that the limits of our machines were bound up with our own possibilities. She pointed out that computers could only replace our cognitive labor; they could never on their own take up the world-making work that goes by the name of wisdom — a habit of mind that needs a wanting, feeling, failing body to make it whole. Apollo was a product of the long struggle to step outside the blinkered viewpoint of the human, to reach what Arendt called the "Archimedian Point" — the vantage from which all nature could be abstracted and objectified. In the space race Arendt saw the drama of this struggle entering a crucial stage — indeed its tragic one. For she surmised that from the moon we would look down only on ourselves; that each step in the conquest of space would only redraw the borders of our parish, our domicile, our prison. Tools themselves have never delivered us from our disappointments, and they never will. Consider HAL, the interface that was also the artificial malevolence at work in 2001. HAL embodied a fear that has been with us since the start of the machine age, but he also effaced the functional late-sixties mystery of how computers would help us do our work. Behind HAL's red eye was a black box — indeed the ultimate black box, that of the human pysche with its needs and passions.

Not only in its technology but in its images and its cultural effects, Apollo is a marooned legacy. How do we place the energies and emanations of Apollo amidst the bloody kaleidoscope that was 1968? From today's vantage point it's hard to reconcile images of the lunar program — a combination of austerity, hope, and sheer power — with the spectrum of tragedies that turned the counterculture's transformative possibilities into a tissue of rage, desire, and self-annihilation. But these images were very much on the minds of Apollo's critics, as well as its planners, its engineers, and the astronauts themselves. Hardly a public announcement of progress in the program could be made without pious admonitions to turn the energies of innovation and the spirit of exploration loose on the problems of an Earthbound human race. As engineering historian David Mindell points out, while frontier images and Right Stuff machismo resonated in Apollo, it was also a time of increasing fear of technology running amok. Lewis Mumford had coined the term "megamachine" to describe "the aggregate of technology, social organization, and management." 2001: A Space Odyssey, which appeared in 1968 — and which the astronauts watched in part to prepare themselves for a lengthy sojourn in deep space — conjoined the futurist optimism of Arthur C. Clarke and the dystopian hopelessness of Kubrick's view of mankind. Clarke thought we could perfect ourselves by going to the stars; Kubrick knew that no salvation was possible. Though their views of our prospects were very different, Clarke and Kubrick shared a sense that mankind was inherently flawed. Such a meeting of contrary sensibilities was hardly limited to the creators of 2001, however. The angry dichotomies of political and cultural life in the sixties revolved around questions of our capacities for change and how to seek it. And in time it would be the counterculture, despite its criticism of the colossally misspent energies of Apollo, that would embrace the vision of Earth from space.

The astronauts of Apollo 11 and the later landings would bring back rocks and dust — handfuls first, and then great heaps; nearly nine hundred pounds of lunar rocks in all. The astronauts' specimens are kept to this day in controlled vitrines, bathed in nitrogen to prevent their corrosion in the Earth's atmosphere. But these shards are orphaned, their shimmer faded (ironically, they're ultimately fragments of the Earth, as the moon itself was shorn from our planet by a massive impact billions of years ago; in the final analysis, the lunar rocks have come home.) Mailer ends Of Fire on the moon inspecting a fragment of lunar geology behind its double panes of glass at the Lunar Science Center, apostrophizing it as a long-lost lover or a virgin mother. It's fair to say the moon has kept its unimpeachable magic; in its unchanging revolutions it is as baleful and benevolent as ever. Its influence remains undiminished by a trampling of footprints, however giant they may have been for Mankind. The one truly magical artifact brought back from the moon was made by the Apollo 8 astronauts: the famous photo of Earth's swirling whites and blues set against the burnished grey plain of the moon. The picture Bill Anders shot through the one unfogged window of his capsule was quickly dubbed Earthrise — and yet it captured the imagination not of a rising, but of a setting world. Historian Robert Poole points out that this was a view imagined by the ancients, anticipated by modern internationalists, and claimed ultimately by the environmental movement as a transcendant symbol of the living planet as the final commons.

O thin men of Haddam, Why do you imagine golden birds? Do you not see how the blackbird Walks around the feet Of the women about you? — Wallace Stevens, "Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird"

Mailer, like Lewis, feared that Apollo would rob the moon of its glamour. By the magic of Apollo it was not the moon but the Earth that we lost. No longer is it Turtle Island, the fundament, the enduring core; we've seen it for what it is: a bubble, a mote. Spaceship Earth, in the pre-Apollo coinage of Buckminster Fuller. Robert Poole points out that the astronauts saw something similar to the Earth of Plato's imagining: "variegated, a patchwork of colours of which our colours here are, as it were, samples that painters use. . . . Even its hollows," Plato supposes, "full as they are of water and air, give it an appearance of colour, gleaming among the variety of other colours, so that its general appearance is one of continuous multicoloured surface." For all Plato's world-eschewing idealism, the ultimate ideal is perhaps the Earth itself; we've always been our own heavens. But once the image's inspiration had cooled, once the hyperbole had died down, we were left with the realization that the Earth's resources are finite. Are we fellow travelers on Spaceship Earth? Or survivors cast adrift at sea, fighting for the last scrap of food, the last swig of sweet water?

"Spaceship Earth" was a concept that fit well with Buckminster Fuller's philosophy of engineering and design driven by natural forms. Fuller approached Earth as a sort of broken vessel which it was our job to repair and keep well. Perhaps more than any designer or engineer or science fiction author, Fuller recognized that we were all astronauts already, that Earth is not merely in space but of it. Many commentators, from Arthur C. Clarke to Anthony Lewis, by contrast, had seen humanity's move to space not as a chance to know and love the Earth better, but to leave it and its legion miseries behind. By 1968, clearly, the twentieth century had brought those miseries to what seemed an apocalyptic head; with the world wracked by famine, conflict, and the prospect of nuclear annihilation, it seemed we couldn't break free from Earth's bonds fast enough. With riots in the ghettoes, the moon shot looks like a step towards the ultimate white flight, getting out of the neighborhood before everything goes to hell. And yet some recognized that even in its straitening harshness, the Earth provided a unique protection to the life that had evolved upon it. In War of the Worlds, for instance, H. G. Wells saw that the Earth was no mere vessel, but a protector of its living creatures as well. In the end the Martians die of bacterial infections against which humans had long been inoculated; "by the toll of a billion deaths," he writes, "man has bought his birthright of the Earth."

"The medieval notion of the earth put man at the center of everything," wrote Archibald MacLeish in a New York Times commentary that many believed was the best early distillation of the Apollo moment. "The nuclear notion of the earth put him nowhere — beyond the range of reason even — lost in absurdity and war." By achieving the moon, MacLeish paradoxically hoped, we would discover a new humility — a humility born of the very recognition that this mythic act was manufactured, made by working men and women with the tools at their disposal. "This latest notion may have other consequences," he offered. "Formed as it was in the minds of heroic voyagers who were also men, it may remake our image of mankind. No longer that preposterous figure at the center, no longer that degraded and degrading victim off at the margins of reality and blind with blood, man may at last become himself." No longer at the center; no longer at the margins, man becomes himself. We were in the midst of that becoming in 1968, and it was a complicated becoming — and Apollo was but a piece of it. We were learning how to accept our reflection in technology. MacLeish goes on to say that "To see the earth as it truly is, small and blue and beautiful in that eternal silence where it floats, is to see ourselves as riders on the earth together, brothers on that bright loveliness in the eternal cold — brothers who know now they are truly brothers."

Two months later, Arthur C. Clarke in the pages of Look magazine predicted a blazing future for man in space: "Many of the children born on the day Apollo 8 splashed down," he wrote, "may live to become citizens of the United Planets." Born on December 22, 1968, I am one of those children; my father cried as he listened to the Genesis broadcast on the radio while driving home from the hospital after my delivery. The Apollo 8 command module itself ultimately found a home in Chicago's Museum of Science and Industry, where I visited it throughout my childhood. The connection of the moon shot and my December nativity filled my imagination in those years; I was just old enough to watch and remember the later Apollo missions, when astronauts tore up the lunar surface in the rover and Alan Shepard hit his golf shot out of the biggest bunker in the solar system. The years that followed brought little but frustrating news from the space program; by the time we sat in the school library and watched Christa MacAuliffe and her fellow astronauts disappear in a spidery plume of smoke over the ocean in 1986, it seemed unlikely that I would ever have my passport stamped on the moon, much less Mars or the outer planets. And yet the view from space now dominates the imaginings of us Earthbound astronauts. We download satellite imagery with the flick of a mouse; our unmanned craft even now speed among the outer planets, sift their sediments for signs of life, and probe the edge of the solar system itself, millions of miles from Earth where the sun's influence finally ebbs. We've embodied that self-regarding wonder in the tools of exploration themselves: the Mars rovers Spirit and Opportunity, like their forbears Viking and the Voyagers, have captured the imagination of millions with their inexhaustible adaptability. The Voyager probes carry burnished plaques with human forms engraved upon them, an acknowledgment, however inchoate, that they are our interstellar avatars. Like WALL-E, the plucky robot star of last summer's popular movie, the probes are tricksters and explorers, adaptationists, machines of many ways. As conjectured in the first Star Trek film, in which Voyager 6 returns to our solar system as a demiurge called "V'ger" striving to merge with its creator, they are latent gods as well. As with Apollo, of course, we're fooling ourselves a bit — the Mars rovers are not autonomous adventurers, but long-distance tools controlled by hosts of engineers and scientists here on Earth. But using their aid not only to probe and explore but to adventure and to dream, we may be taking another kind of giant leap. Once we sent humans into space to give a focus to our imagination; we needed heroes to embody our passions and our frailties. It's by virtue of machines, however, that we have reached beyond the moon. Machines can compute but cannot feel; they express our intentions but cannot share our passions. Such has been the understanding, and the dilemma, of modern times. But perhaps we've underestimated the machine — which is only another way of saying that we've underestimated ourselves. Dimly, we've begun to realize that as we extend ourselves with tools, we inhabit them with our dreams and desires as well. Perhaps as we probe the reaches of interstellar space, we'll feel more keenly the extension of our senses by even such abstract and remote tools as these. We're coming to the point where machines may become not only tools and extensions of our senses, but our heroes, too. Two of the best recent books on Apollo are Robert Poole's Earthrise: How Man First Saw the Earth (Yale) and David Mindell's Digital Apollo: Human and Machine in Spaceflight (MIT); both were supremely influential in the writing of this essay. Hannah Arendt's thoughts on the "conquest of space" appeared in a 1963 essay entitled "The Conquest of Space and the Stature of Man," a version of which appeared in subsequent editions of The Human Condition.

destination_moon_1950

Matthew Battles — Tue, 23 Jun 2009 14:57:26 +0000

destination_moon_1950

Matthew Battles — Tue, 23 Jun 2009 14:59:37 +0000

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Joshua Glenn — Wed, 24 Jun 2009 18:40:48 +0000

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Joshua Glenn — Wed, 24 Jun 2009 18:51:17 +0000

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Joshua Glenn — Wed, 24 Jun 2009 19:47:25 +0000

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Joshua Glenn — Thu, 25 Jun 2009 11:54:43 +0000

AFs & TAZs (1)

Joshua Glenn — Thu, 25 Jun 2009 11:57:12 +0000

The first of an occasional series of posts documenting certain Argonaut Follies, Temporary Autonomous Zones, and other gatherings-together (no matter how momentarily or informally) of freethinkers. Julie Kavanagh remembers London life, in the mid-1970s, with Martin Amis. From the Summer 2009 issue of the magazine Intelligent Life.

What regularly gathered the so-called literary mafia together were the lunches which took place most Fridays at a Turkish-Cypriot joint on Theobalds Road. These were almost exclusively male occasions, but I was tolerated from time to time either because I was Martin’s moll, or because of my flattering sponging-up of every word. Looking back, I suppose the Friday lunches could best be described as combining the highbrow, uninhibited conversation of the fortnightly dining club at Magny’s restaurant in 1860s Paris with the irreverent jousting of today’s “Have I Got News for You”. But if Flaubert, Gautier, Turgenev and the Goncourt Brothers had feasted on M. Magny’s Chateaubriand and Tournedos Rossini, the London literati made do with kebabs or a Yobs’ Breakfast—ie, a mixed fry-up—at a nearby caff, washed down with gallons of red wine. It’s abbreviation “YB” was collectively understood by the group, as were the other code words, expressions and inflections: “rig” [penis]; “tonto” [mad]; “sock” [house]; “Taxiiiiiiiiiiiii!” [desperate to get out of a situation]; “unlucky” [said with a yobbish dip ]; “hot in the cot” [good in bed]. These were either expressions from Martin’s novels or inventions of the Hitch, his conversational foil. Current affairs rarely came up, as Martin was completely uninterested in politics at that period, but recurring topics were things like plagiarism—what was and was not permitted for a writer to steal. “It’s absolutely ok—in fact it’s a triumph to take something from ordinary speech,” Martin says at a lunch I once taped. “Well, I wish I’d thought of skinhead,” adds Craig. “Skinhead is brilliant.” Much hilarity sprung from juvenile word games (substituting “sock” for “house” in well-known titles or phrases, as in Bleak Sock, The Sock of Windsor…) or mimicry, with Martin inevitably taking the lead. “The glue of those Friday lunches was everyone’s adoration of Martin,” says James Fenton, the poet, theatre critic and foreign correspondent, who was another participant. Hitch agrees. “He was the conversation, he was the charisma.” But Clive James was always a stellar performer, and so was Kingsley, an occasional guest of honour. Julian Barnes, later to be my brother-in-law, was noticeably more reticent, though he added a note of gravitas, as did the other, less extrovert regulars Dai [Russell] Davies, the critic and jazz musician, and Terry Kilmartin, the Observer’s literary editor. “We needed them there,” says Hitch. “We couldn’t just have shown off to each other.”

Via Brainiac.

kafka

Joshua Glenn — Thu, 25 Jun 2009 16:26:09 +0000

kafka-metamorphosis-1915first

Joshua Glenn — Thu, 25 Jun 2009 16:29:20 +0000

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Joshua Glenn — Thu, 25 Jun 2009 17:00:24 +0000

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Joshua Glenn — Thu, 25 Jun 2009 17:36:59 +0000

benjamin

Joshua Glenn — Thu, 25 Jun 2009 18:56:15 +0000

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Joshua Glenn — Thu, 25 Jun 2009 19:10:33 +0000

button-hook

Joshua Glenn — Thu, 25 Jun 2009 19:13:09 +0000

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Joshua Glenn — Thu, 25 Jun 2009 19:15:15 +0000

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Joshua Glenn — Thu, 25 Jun 2009 19:17:45 +0000

safetymatch

Joshua Glenn — Thu, 25 Jun 2009 19:18:45 +0000

toothpicks2

Joshua Glenn — Thu, 25 Jun 2009 19:20:50 +0000

The Woollett Question... answered!

Joshua Glenn — Thu, 25 Jun 2009 19:21:24 +0000

EVER SINCE the 1903 publication of Henry James' The Ambassadors, critics and readers have puzzled over a literary mystery that has come to be known as the Woollett Question. What, everyone from E.M. Forster to David Lodge has wanted to know, is the "little nameless object" manufactured in Woollett, Mass.? The case went cold at some point in the 1960s, but earlier this week [note: this essay was originally published by Slate, in October 2007] it was reopened... and cracked. In James' late and longiloquent novel, our protagonist is Lewis Lambert Strether, the middle-aged amanuensis and aspiring fiance of Mrs. Newsome, a wealthy widow who presides over the fictional manufacturing town of Woollett. Strether is traveling from Boston to Paris, where he hopes to track down Mrs. Newsome's son, Chad, the wayward heir of the family's booming industry. Along the way, he is befriended by a young American abroad, Maria Gostrey, who soon inquires what, exactly, it is that they manufacture back in Woollett. "It's a little thing they make — make better, it appears, than other people can, or than other people, at any rate, do," says Strether. When prompted to explain further, he again equivocates, describing the business as "a manufacture that, if it's only properly looked after, may well be on the way to become a monopoly." Impatient with Strether's "postponements," Gostrey asks him whether the article in question is something improper — perhaps even unmentionable? "Oh no, we constantly talk of it; we are quite familiar and brazen about it," Strether hastens to reply. "Only, as a small, trivial, rather ridiculous object of the commonest domestic use, it's just wanting in — what shall I say? Well, dignity, or the least approach to distinction." The manufactured item is, he concludes, "vulgar." Her interest piqued, Gostrey ventures three guesses: Clothespins? Saleratus? (That is, baking soda.) Shoe polish? No, no, and no. Not until the novel's final chapter will Strether offer to name the "little nameless object." But at this point in the narrative, Gostrey, whose romantic overtures have been rejected by Strether, no longer cares to know. Generations of readers have felt differently: One critic after another has speculated about what small, vulgar, everyday item might have been manufactured at the turn of the century in Massachusetts. In the 1920s, several James exegetes took the low road, arguing that Strether's protestation notwithstanding, the Newsome family was most likely turning out an unmentionable. In his 1925 book, The Pilgrimage of Henry James, Van Wyck Brooks guesses that the object is "a certain undistinguished toilet-article," by which he means a grooming or personal hygiene product. In Aspects of the Novel (1927), E.M. Forster insists that we can't know what the "little thing" is, then facetiously claims that it is a button hook — a doohickey used for fastening one's garments, gloves, or boots. In David Lodge's 1965 campus novel, The British Museum is Falling Down, Brooks and Forster's mildly titillating line of interpretation is updated by Camel, a grad student writing a thesis on sanitation in Victorian literature, who suggests that the thingamajig is a chamber pot. One might desire to trust the judgment of Lodge, who is the author of both a novel about James (Author, Author, 2004) and a nonfiction book about his research into James' life and letters (The Year of Henry James, 2006). But in interviews, Lodge has taken pains to point out that Camel's scatological theory was advanced only "half seriously." Other Jamesians have taken the high road, preferring to believe that Strether's reluctance to name the object has nothing to do with bodily functions, but instead reflects the expatriated novelist's own "self-distancing from American business life, whose vulgarities were much criticized by English writers," as Christopher Butler puts it in his notes to the 1985 Oxford University Press edition of the novel. In "The Meaning of the Match Image in James's The Ambassadors," a 1955 essay in the journal Modern Language Notes, for example, Patricia Evans asserts that the thingamabob is a safety match — which, she claims, would explain why James jokes at one point in the novel that Mrs. Newsome's daughter's unpleasant smile was "as prompt to act as the scrape of a safety-match." The hermeneutics of suspicion is contagious: Two years later, the same journal published "Time and the Unnamed Article in The Ambassadors," in which R.W. Stallmann, also relying on what might or might not be fraught similes and allegories in James' text, claims the object "is — or ought to be — a clock." To be precise, an alarm clock, which "represents a way of life the opposite of Europe's." Alas, without any firm evidence — Stallmann lamely notes that at Worcester, Mass., clocks were manufactured in James' day, but then sheepishly backs away from this line of argument — we're still left to guess at what the object might be. Until now. For years, I've had the Woollett Question in the back of my mind: What kind of article would fit every particular? First, the object must be small, trivially so: not a chamber pot, then, nor an alarm clock, the former being too large and the latter insufficiently trivial. Patricia Evans' safety match is an inspired guess... but matches are neither ridiculous nor vulgar. Second, the article must be something controversial, and therefore likely to have been talked about "constantly," in late 19th- and early 20th-century polite East Coast society: not a button hook, then, nor most artifacts used in making your toilet. Razors, toothbrushes, menstrual pads, earwax curettes, and the like may have been vulgar, but controversial they were not. The answer was finally revealed to me a few weeks ago, via a new book by Henry Petroski, prolific author of case histories of "useful things," from pencils to paper clips to the kitchen sink. His latest is on the toothpick. Writing in the New York Times Sunday Book Review last week, Joe Queenan excoriated Petroski for having written a worthless text. How wrong he was! For although Petroski never mentions James in The Toothpick: Technology and Culture, he nevertheless provides conclusive proof that the "little nameless object" in The Ambassadors, over which so many have brooded for so long, is, yes, a toothpick. Let's proceed with caution. Is a toothpick trivially small and ridiculous? Check. Where were ready-made wooden toothpicks first manufactured in America? In Cambridge, Mass., by Charles Forster, an entrepreneur who, in the mid-1860s, oversaw the development of a new device that transformed birch logs into flat, double-pointed toothpicks. Was the toothpick controversial? Yes! According to Petroski, although wooden-toothpick use after meals was a long-standing tradition in Spain and Latin American countries, in mid-19th-century New England, polite society regarded public tooth-picking as vulgar, and the implement was an "unknown adjunct to the dinner table." Forster slowly overcame this prejudice through assiduous marketing; according to possibly apocryphal legend, his most successful scheme was hiring "Harvard scholars" to eat at Boston restaurants and then after their meal to ask for toothpicks. By 1869, according to some estimates, machine-made toothpicks were selling in the United States at a rate as high as 5 million per day, and Forster held a virtual monopoly (recall Strether's use of the term) on their production and sale. In 1882, a year in which James was twice recalled from England to his parents' home in Cambridge, first by his mother's death, then his father's, it was big news around eastern Massachusetts that a factory capable of producing 70,000 toothpicks per hour was going to be established south of Boston, at Brockton. The New York Herald expressed the "hope that the Boston ladies will not imitate some of the New York ladies who carry toothpicks in their mouths in stores and streets." As for the Forster children, they seem to have been no more proud of their family's enterprise than the Newsomes. Petroski notes that when Charles Forster died in 1901, two years before the publication of The Ambassadors, his family would neglect to mention in his obituary his pioneering work in making and marketing toothpicks. The foregoing evidence, I submit, is stronger than anything that other Jamesians have produced so far. But there's textual proof as well. In looking through James' other writings, the references to toothpicks I've found suggest he indeed considered the item vulgar [see below]. But my favorite piece of textual evidence comes from The Ambassadors itself. In the 1880s, Forster patented a revolutionary new machine that polished, rounded, compressed, and sharpened toothpicks. This new toothpick was a marvel, according to Petroski, "ahead of its time as a designed object." Now consider Strether's first impression of Chad Newsome, whom he hasn't seen in five years when he finally tracks him down:

Chad was brown and thick and strong; and of old Chad had been rough. Was all the difference therefore that he was actually smooth? Possibly; for that he was smooth was as marked as in the taste of a sauce or in the rub of a hand.... It was as if in short he had really, copious perhaps but shapeless, been put into a firm mould and turned successfully out.

James had a habit of associating his characters with a specific piece of scenery or work of art, or, in The Ambassadors, manufactured object — recall Sarah Newsome Pocock's safety-match smile. Of Chad Newsome, it might be said that he was as compressed and polished as one of Forster's toothpicks. *** NOTES ON JAMES' ANIMUS AGAINST TOOTHPICKS In an 1870 magazine article, "Saratoga," James contrasted the sophisticated European leisure class with the American men he found in the portico of the Union Hotel, in the resort town of Saratoga Springs, N.Y.:

"They come from the uttermost ends of the continent — from San Francisco, from New Orleans, from Duluth. As they sit with their white hats tilted forward, and their chairs tilted back, and their feet tilted up, and their cigars and toothpicks forming various angles with these various lines, I imagine them surrounded with a sort of clear achromatic halo of mystery."

In an 1884 story, "Pandora," a Jamesian party of upper-class picnickers returns to Washington, D.C., from a cruise along the Potomac:

"There was some delay in getting the steamer adjusted to the dock, during which the passengers watched the process over its side and extracted what entertainment they might from the appearance of the various persons collected to receive it. There were darkies and loafers and hackmen, and also vague individuals, the loosest and blankest he had ever seen anywhere, with tufts on their chins, toothpicks in their mouths, hands in their pockets, rumination in their jaws and diamond pins in their shirt-fronts, who looked as if they had sauntered over from Pennsylvania Avenue to while away half an hour, forsaking for that interval their various slanting postures in the porticoes of the hotels and the doorways of the saloons."

In his 1884 story "Georgina's Reasons," also written during or shortly after his last visit to America, James once again suggests that the better sort of person does not chew on toothpicks:

"It was not striking to Captain Benyon why Percival Theory had married the niece of Mr Henry Platt. He was less interesting than his sisters — a smooth, cool, correct young man, who frequently took out a pencil and did a little arithmetic on the back of a letter. He sometimes, in spite of his correctness, chewed a toothpick..."

rza-chess-550

Joshua Glenn — Fri, 26 Jun 2009 02:10:43 +0000

eisler-songbook

Joshua Glenn — Fri, 26 Jun 2009 02:15:39 +0000

heinlein-stranger

Joshua Glenn — Fri, 26 Jun 2009 02:22:26 +0000

jordan-louis

Joshua Glenn — Fri, 26 Jun 2009 02:26:51 +0000

smith-cordwainer-1

Joshua Glenn — Fri, 26 Jun 2009 02:28:35 +0000

satana-4

Joshua Glenn — Fri, 26 Jun 2009 12:50:52 +0000

wong-mood

Joshua Glenn — Fri, 26 Jun 2009 13:15:37 +0000

peake-pepper2-550

Joshua Glenn — Fri, 26 Jun 2009 17:19:53 +0000

rubik

Joshua Glenn — Sat, 27 Jun 2009 21:05:01 +0000

fuller-artzybasheff

Joshua Glenn — Sat, 27 Jun 2009 21:07:20 +0000

anatomy-550

Joshua Glenn — Sat, 27 Jun 2009 21:14:46 +0000

Hilo Heroes, June 28-July 4

HILOBROW — Sun, 28 Jun 2009 17:00:58 +0000

HAPPY BIRTHDAY, this week, to the following high-, low-, no-, and hilobrow heroes. Click here for more Hilo Hero birthdays. JUNE 28 My heart still skips a beat when I look at old Rolling Stone photos of GILDA RADNER (1946-89), an early childhood crush and, then as now, one of America's greatest comediennes — and it still breaks when I think of her death from ovarian cancer at 42. Whether it was her malapropisms as Emily Litella, her primordial nerdiness as Lisa Loopner, or her general non sequitur insanity as Roseanne Rosannadanna, Radner breathed life into post-Nixonian/pre-Reaganite archetypes that will be forever indelible from our collective memory of the 1970s. The mind reels when thinking of her acting debut: the 1972 Toronto premiere of Godspell, starring Radner, Eugene Levy, Andrea Martin, and Martin Short. If I had a time machine, that would surely be my first stop. — Jason Grote JUNE 29 After the disillusioning Democratic convention of 1964, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee split into two factions, one of which favored nonviolent tactics and integration-oriented policies. The other, increasingly revolutionary faction was led by STOKELY CARMICHAEL (1941-98), a Trinidadian-born activist newly graduated from Howard with a philosophy degree; the era we know as the Sixties (1964-73, IMHO) began at precisely this moment. Influenced by Malcolm X and Frantz Fanon, Carmichael called for black Americans "to define their own goals, to lead their own organizations"; the Civil Rights Movement's unintended function, he claimed, was to integrate blacks more securely into America's invisible prison-state. His anti-anti-utopian vision of Black Power finally led Carmichael out of SNCC and out of the United States — he relocated to Guinea, and changed his name to Kwame Touré. For the rest of his life, he invariably answered the telephone with the same greeting: "Ready for the revolution!" — Joshua Glenn JUNE 30 For much of the 1940s, LENA HORNE (born 1917), Hollywood's "sepia Cinderella," was relegated to one or two set-piece numbers per film. Opulent, glamorous, and static, her turns in Two Girls and a Sailor and As Thousands Cheer bespeak segregation in action, but even these were risky at a time when so much as an eyeline match between black and white characters could get a scene (or a whole film) cut from Southern distribution. Among the revelations in Stormy Weather, James Gavin's new biography of the singer, is that her career's early direction owed no more to MGM than to the NAACP: her activist grandmother signed Horne up for the organization at the age of two, and it was political pressure that led Louis B. Mayer to place her under contract. In later decades, she grew far more independent, artistically and especially ideologically, admiring Malcolm over Martin, and telling talk-show host Mike Douglas that blacks and whites "don't really need to love each other." Eventually, she would speak with open bitterness about the studio system (and much else) in Lena Horne: Her Life and Music, her 1981 one-woman Broadway comeback. Gavin's sleuthing suggests that Horne's construal of events was as fantastic as any publicity hack's puff piece — but this time, at least, the fairy-tale was of her own devising. — Franklin Bruno JULY 1 "They threw me off the hay truck about noon." The celebrated first line of The Postman Always Rings Twice (1934) by JAMES M. CAIN (1892-1977) tersely illustrates his verbal and narrative economy as well as his acute ear for American speech, and suggests his compellingly driven use of the first person singular. Cain, who wrote about crime without being a crime writer, was instead a kind of sawed-off Zola, a stranger to mystery. His other great novel is Double Indemnity (1943), which symmetrically enough has a famous last line. ("The moon." You'll have to read it to find out why.) It was made into an equally indelible movie by Billy Wilder in 1944; the best adaptation of Postman is Luchino Visconti's unauthorized Ossessione (1943). Also noteworthy are a few books that have something wrong with them: Mildred Pierce (1941), the deeply strange Serenade (1937), and the totally overlooked The Moth (1948). Cain was a classic instance of a novelist with only one story; the further he strayed from the fatal triangle the more likely he was to embarrass himself. — Luc Sante JULY 2 Playing twins who change places, a teenager who swaps bodies with her mother, and a couple of appealing outcasts who find a way in, LINDSAY LOHAN (born 1986) once portrayed duality with an irresistible coarseness. Today, you can't take your eyes off the paparazzi's LiLo. Unlike her onetime friend, preeny Paris Hilton, through her pretty, pretty scowl and aviator shades Lohan radiates pure fury — the fury of a suburban teen. She still uses a teen's strategies, too. The cocaine in her pocket couldn't be hers, she told police in 2007 — they weren't even her pants. She admitted to Vanity Fair that she had done drugs — "a little" — and you imagine her dipping a cocktail stirrer into a pile of coke and extracting one grain with her tongue. LiLo has spent more time in rehab than on movie sets; the 84 minutes she served of her one-day prison sentence apparently didn't allow for much moral inventory. According to the movie industry, she's "unemployable." But don't ask her whether she's OK: "It's like 'Yeah, motherfucker, I'm fine.'" — Ingrid Schorr JULY 3 Patrick C. stared in silent disbelief at the bureaucrat who sat on the other side of the desk. Eventually he gathered himself and spoke in an exasperated plea: "You want me to write 150 words on FRANZ KAFKA (1883-1924)? How am I supposed to pay tribute to such an important literary influence in the space of a mere paragraph?" The bureaucrat stared back coldly. "You are required to write the piece. I'm not at liberty to tell you how or why." Not for the first time that day, Patrick C. felt alone and defeated. Why did he have to do this? Why was nobody offering to help him? Should he focus on the novels or the short stories? And how would he end the piece? By noting the appropriate fact that Kafka, highly competent insurance clerk, wanted to render his existence as a writer totally futile by having all his work posthumously burned? Or by pondering on why so much of Kafka's work remained unfini — Patrick Cates JULY 4

Pulitzer prize-winning cartoonist RUBE GOLDBERG (1883-1970) pulls string (A) which activates bellows. Bellows (B) compresses, inflating balloon (C). Expanding balloon causes glass of water (D) to tip, soaking sponge (E). Sponge, due to increased weight of water, sinks, raising candle (F), which burns string holding back needle (G). Needle swings and pokes bird (H), which is tied to Goldberg's pencil. Pencil (I) attached to Goldberg, who creates some of the most lasting and whimsical cartoons of the twentieth century, his machines becoming so indelibly part of the culture as to be honored with a dictionary definition all their own. — written and drawn by Joe Alterio

Lindsay Lohan Shopping in Maui

Joshua Glenn — Mon, 29 Jun 2009 16:00:58 +0000

26843817-26843818-large

Matthew Battles — Tue, 30 Jun 2009 15:21:53 +0000

thriller-1._V265359203_

Matthew Battles — Tue, 30 Jun 2009 15:41:05 +0000

matr1126l

Matthew Battles — Tue, 30 Jun 2009 15:59:06 +0000

Lost Boy

Matthew Battles — Tue, 30 Jun 2009 17:02:11 +0000

AMIDST THE CYCLE of encomiums spurred by Michael Jackson's death last week, his weirdness has been treated as an unfortunate epiphenomenon and distraction from his greatness. But the weird—a thoroughgoing weird without stint or scruple—was essential to MJ's work, and whatever we term his greatness can't be understood without acknowledging this. Casting about for a useful analysis of Jackson's fey glamor, we were pointed towards a penetrating, prescient essay by James Parker in the Boston Globe. Parker was writing in 2004, when Jackson's child molestation trial coincided with the centennial of J. M. Barrie's Peter Pan. "Michael and Peter go way back," Parker observed. "In his weirdness and calculation the King of Pop may have reached deeper inside the myth than anyone else would care to." Parker's essay reveals the essentially infernal nature of MJ's lure, a magic stranger even than the Pan's expiatingly feral freedom. For Jackson was as profoundly, illimitably uncanny as a Greek god or one of the death spirits the Japanese call Shinigami. His voice was a vortex of keening ecstasy; his dancing was palsied, but magically; his wonted innocence was pixillated, elfin. The iterations of his persona revealed themselves as so many nested dolls of abominated brilliance. And yet he won the adulation of millions—less a case of mass delusion than a revelation of the power of the uncanny. "His rise was phenomenal, unbelievable," Parker observes; and he concludes with startling foresight: "Guilty or not, his fall will be Luciferian."

archyandmehitabel-550

Joshua Glenn — Thu, 02 Jul 2009 10:11:19 +0000

mcsorleys54

Joshua Glenn — Thu, 02 Jul 2009 10:15:35 +0000

duchamp-fumant-p

Joshua Glenn — Thu, 02 Jul 2009 10:21:03 +0000

farrah

Joshua Glenn — Thu, 02 Jul 2009 13:22:12 +0000

howestrauss-13th-550

Joshua Glenn — Thu, 02 Jul 2009 13:46:12 +0000

Jacko and Farrah

Joshua Glenn — Thu, 02 Jul 2009 13:47:43 +0000

Earlier this week, Boston Globe columnist Alex Beam gave my generational periodization scheme a shout-out. Beam writes:

Glenn has devoted considerable time — too much time, frankly — to slicing up the post World War II generations not as the Census Bureau does but into narrower, more meaningful tranches. For instance, he eschews the media-generated labels of "Gen X" and "Gen Y." substituting instead "The PC Constructivist Generation" (born 1964-73) and "The ~~Net~~ Revivalist Generation," (born 1974-83). Amusingly, he calls my generation (born 1954-63) "The Original GenXers": "The Original Generation X is cynical, ironic, skeptical — which is not the same as directionless, nihilistic, or depressed!" he insists.... Glenn finds it unsurprising that my generation has embraced either conservatism, or the "soft ideologies" of ecologism and antiracism, instead of, say, social justice.

One mainstream journalist converted! But this is no time to rest on our laurels. A couple of days before that, The New York Times published a (widely published) AP cultural trend-piece, by Ted Anthony, which used the deaths of Farrah and Jacko as an excuse to — once again — trot out the broken-down shibboleth called "Generation X." [caption id="attachment_3407" align="aligncenter" width="402" caption="Don\'t let the skateboard fool you! Not an Xer."][/caption] "When [Michael Jackson and Farrah Fawcett-Majors] departed Thursday, just a few hours and a few miles apart," writes Anthony, "they left an entire generation — a very strange generation indeed — without two of its defining figures." Let's see, Farrah was born in ’47, making her a Boomer by anyone's reckoning; and MJ was born in ’58, which makes him a late or post-Boomer, according to generally accepted periodizations (not mine, of course). So what generation is Anthony talking about? That's right. Whenever journalists make wildly nonsensical claims about a generation, you can bet they're talking about the nonexistent Generation X. "Cynical, disaffected, rife with ADD, lost between Boomers and millennials and sandwiched between Vietnam and the war on terror," writes Anthony, "Gen X has always been an oddity." Worse, this so-called generation "struggled to find its place" and now "must wonder if it is as passé as the paper and vinyl that its icons' most memorable moments were etched upon." Middlebrow alert! These descriptions reflect journalists' barely suppressed awareness that there is no such thing as Generation X. If journalists must continually trot out weasely descriptors like "strange," "odd," and "lost" to describe a generation, this is evidence that they've been misled. When others do so, it's evidence that they're trying to mislead. This is why Richard Thau, founder of the suspect "Gen X" political action committee/think tank Third Millennium said: "The soul of Gen X is amorphous, intangible, elusive." It's why an influential 1990 Time Magazine story on "twentysomethings" claimed that the post-Boomer generation (not yet named X) "possess only a hazy sense of their own identity." And it's why Neil Howe and William Strauss wrote: "Compared to any other generation born in this century, [Generation X] is less cohesive, its experiences wider and its culture more splintery." Note to Mr. Anthony: It's middlebrow journalists who struggle to make their fictional generation seem meaningful; it's middlebrow journalists who must wonder if their own ill-made construct is passé. This is a truth they cannot admit to themselves, much less to readers. Why? Because Generation X is too convenient a fiction. We'll return to this point; first, let's revisit my claim that there is no Gen X. If there is any such thing as a generation, then surely each one should be as easily discernible as the (early) Boomers or the (late) Greatests. The so-called Generation X, a construct invented by pop sociologists, middlebrow journalists, and marketing consultants, is actually composed of members of two distinct, easily discernible generations — younger OGXers and older Constructivists, to use my own periodization. Neither of these generations is strange, odd, lost, struggling to find a place for itself, or worried that it is passé; none of those concepts can be applied to an actually existing generation. That this is the case seems glaringly obvious, to me. So why do we continue to hear about Gen X? To put it in Hilobrow.com's terms: Why does Middlebrow want us all to believe in a "Generation X"? [caption id="attachment_3409" align="aligncenter" width="550" caption="Howe and Strauss\'s Gen X book"][/caption] Here's why. It's because younger OGXers and older Constructivists did share one trait in common, around the time when "Generation X" was invented. They (we) rejected the brave new world of the Eighties (1984-93), when society split into two warring camps — defined not by nominal religion, ethnicity, social class, or political affiliation, but by ideological world views. As James Davison Hunter noted in Culture Wars: The Struggle to Define America, in the Eighties there were suddenly only two positions that one could take on hot-button issues like abortion, gun politics, separation of church and state, privacy, homosexuality, and censorship: "conservative" or "liberal." Which no longer meant, as they formerly had, Lowbrow or Highbrow. During the Eighties, they both meant: Middlebrow. At a time when everyone was struggling with the question of "choice," choice had been reduced to voting for one or another stripe of Middlebrow. The so-called Generation X didn't stand for anything; its members — actually OGXers and Constructivists — were united only in their antipathy to Middlebrow cultural politics. Middlebrow journalists, sociologists, marketers, and other defenders of the status quo found it convenient, during the early Nineties (1994-2003) to lump these dissenters together, label them with a pejorative moniker, and describe them as losers. Apparently, they still do!

ok1

Joshua Glenn — Fri, 03 Jul 2009 11:46:28 +0000

baffler-14-550

Joshua Glenn — Fri, 03 Jul 2009 11:51:14 +0000

I'd Like to Force the World to Sing

Joshua Glenn — Fri, 03 Jul 2009 12:00:13 +0000

THE THEORY STARTS like this: Plunged into despondency by the 1992 election, William Kristol, then chief of staff for Dan Quayle, fretted that the pot-smoking and draft-dodging Sixties were once again poised to disrupt the pleasant ersatz Fifties that he and his fellow reactionaries had built so carefully over the Reagan-Bush years. Despairing that his generation of squares would never again see the inside of the White House — which, as Joe Eszterhas has now confirmed, would shortly be transformed by Clinton and Co. into a satellite office of Rolling Stone — Kristol turned his attention to America's youth, the demographic cohort that makes miracles possible. Unfortunately, as the theory goes, Kristol found little in the so-called "Generation X" to encourage him. As Time magazine had reported, these sullen young men and women were far too prickly and cynical even to vote, let alone vote Republican. Yet somehow Kristol had to convince these kids, schooled in the scorn of the Reagan-Bush era, to rebel against rebellion itself. The Baffler asked me to come up with some kind of narrative that could make sense of it. My tongue-in-cheek conspiracy theory first appeared in The Baffler #14 (Spring 2001). " title="baffler-14-550" width="550" height="833" class="size-full wp-image-3442" /> Or so, anyway, goes one of the more inventive conspiracy theories now making the rounds. The funny thing is how plausible it all seems once you start looking into it. In 1993 Kristol outlined a program for selling conservatism as rebellion in the pages of Commentary magazine, declaring absurdly that "now it is liberalism that constitutes the old order." At the time this seemed quite mad. Today it seems prescient. We all have heard about the clear-eyed youngsters of "Generation Y," with their faith in Wall Street and their uncanny entrepreneurial skills. Well, it's all William Kristol's doing. He has managed to brand an entire generation with his weird logic. But how? Two words, according to the theory: OK Soda. NB: How was one to explain the sudden prominence of a cohort of young conservatives (masquerading as post-partisan pragmatists) in the last few years of the Nineties? What to make of the so-called "Generation Y" we were hearing so much about at the time? I examined their writings and organizations and congressional testimony and tried to unravel their tangled ideas, but that was not enough. The editors of The Baffler asked me to come up with some kind of narrative that could make sense of it. This tongue-in-cheek conspiracy theory first appeared in The Baffler #14 (Spring 2001). *** OK was "developed," as they say in the business, by Coca-Cola marketing chief Sergio Zyman, the same man who'd developed the "brainwater" Fruitopia, at around the time that Kristol was making his appeal to youthful iconoclasm in the pages of Commentary. In 1994, OK was introduced into nine strategically selected locations, including Boston, Denver, Minneapolis/St. Paul, and of course Austin, Portland, and Seattle; it was yanked from the market only a few months later. But wait, back up: brainwater? If you’ve always wondered about the inexplicable popularity of "smart drinks" in the early Nineties, wonder no longer. Remember: it was the CIA which, by experimenting on college students in an effort to develop drugs suitable for mind control, inadvertently introduced LSD into the counterculture. In the Nineties, Kristol and his allies in the CIA simply found a way to perform the trick in reverse. In their impossible quest to conjure up a cadre of conservative youth who'd rebel against a Sixties they'd never known, Kristol and Co., the theory maintains, conspired to dose young Americans with the concentrated essence of what they called "OK-ness." Hold on! you object. If OK was a plot funded by the conservative establishment, and carried out with the support of the CIA and Coca-Cola, then why did the thirst quencher fail? But did OK really fail? The transcript of a 1994 National Public Radio interview with Tom Pirko, the president of a food and beverage consulting firm who'd worked closely with Coca-Cola on OK, appears significant in light of what has since transpired. Pirko told host Noah Adams that OK tastes "a little bit like going to a fountain and mixing a little bit of Coke with a little root beer and Dr. Pepper and maybe throwing in some orange." When Adams expressed puzzlement that so vile a concoction was supposed to compete with such fruity stalwarts as Mountain Dew, Pirko boasted that "even though taste is always promoted as — as the key quality, the key ingredient of any brand, it really isn't. It falls way down in the hierarchy. The most important thing is advertising." ("The most important thing is advertising?" Adams asked incredulously. "No question," confirmed Pirko.) Coca-Cola's marketing consultant, laboring perhaps under the weight of guilt for his part in Kristol's conspiracy, was making a confession here: OK was never intended to succeed as a soda. The whole point of the project was to inject a hip conservative worldview, as expressed by the soda's advertising, into X'ers who'd been rendered deeply impressionable by whatever it was Kristol, et al. had put into the beverage. Once the message had been delivered, OK could vanish from the 7-Eleven has mysteriously as it had appeared in the first place. Of what did that message consist? Recall for a moment the gloomy cloud which hung over the so-called Generation X in those days. Even the happiest organs of the mass media were admitting that X'ers were right to feel an oppressive sense of reduced opportunity, thanks to (take your pick) globalization and wage stagnation, an unchecked growth in corporate profit-taking, a glut of low-wage service jobs, pervasive undereducation, and the skyrocketing cost of college and home ownership. The young people were, as one New Yorker writer put it, "millenarian, depressed, cynical, frustrated, apathetic, hedonistic, and nihilistic." Coca-Cola knew this litany well. According to a 1994 article in Time, the company had been studying the behavior and attitudes of teenagers for two years before they'd introduced OK — note the timing, again — through something they called the "Global Teenager Program," which employed graduate students from that hotbed of CIA recruitment, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Evidently concluding that global teenager programming could best be accomplished via deliberately downbeat marketing, the company proceeded to decorate OK cans with depressing art, most memorably a set of drawings of a blank-looking young man staring dolefully ahead, walking dejectedly down an empty street, and sitting outside an idle factory with his face in his hands. In the Thirties, such images might have had revolutionary connotations; in the hands of the Kristol/Coke cabal, they meant something very different. This is why the Time article, having just described the unhappy plight of Coca-Cola's target market, continued with this telling remark: "At the same time, the OK theme attempts to play into the sense of optimism that this generation retains" (my emphasis). Dead industry and optimism? The inscrutable connection was made by Brian Lanahan, manager of — note the ominous department title — Special Projects for Coke's marketing division, who told Time that "What we're trying to show with those symbols is someone who is just being, and just being OK." Translation: They were trying to produce young fogeys ready to affirm — to okay — the existing order, to look up at those silent factories and say, "Whatever." Enter the wily ad agency Wieden & Kennedy (Nike, Calvin Klein). Charged with the task of transmitting the message of OK-ness to a target audience who'd been chemically prepped by the foul-tasting beverage, the Portland-based Wieden & Kennedy developed a marketing campaign that seemed to pander to people's worst fears about the mass society; it featured references to indoctrination via television, tongue-in-cheek personality tests, and, centrally, an "OK Soda Manifesto." Copies of the manifesto are hard to come by today; I happen to have one that was printed on the back of an article I clipped from a June 1994 issue of the Minneapolis/St. Paul City Pages. I reproduce it here in full:

1. What's the point of OK? Well, what's the point of anything? 2. OK Soda emphatically rejects anything that is not OK, and fully supports anything that is. 3. The better you understand something, the more OK it turns out to be. 4. OK Soda says, "Don't be fooled into thinking there has to be a reason for everything." 5. OK Soda reveals the surprising truth about people and situations. 6. OK Soda does not subscribe to any religion, or endorse any political party, or do anything other than feel OK. 7. There is no real secret to feeling OK. 8. OK Soda may be the preferred drink of other people such as yourself. 9. Never overestimate the remarkable abilities of "OK" brand soda. 10. Please wake up every morning knowing that things are going to be OK.

In every particular, the “OK Soda Manifesto” exhibited those criteria which the psychologist Robert Jay Lifton identified in 1961 with the practice of "thought reform," or mind control. As in all mind control cults, for example, the manifesto forbade OK drinkers from associating with outsiders, and restricted their vocabulary to what Lifton calls "thought-terminating clichés." They were told how to think and warned that the individual's own experiences could not be understood except via the group. The Reverend Jim Jones' Kool-Aid had nothing on this stuff. As a 1995 OK promotional sticker that came bound into an issue of Might magazine put it, "OK-ness is that small thing that holds everything else together." Reading the "Manifesto" now one can see it as an obvious attempt to transform the then-legendary "Gen-X" disaffection into the watery contentment we associate with the (equally fictional) "Generation Y." OK-ness, as the manifesto described it, is a doctrine designed for those who grew up in the Seventies and Eighties wondering, "What's the point of anything?" The very things so-called X'ers found most alienating and confusing about the world were, it told them, quite OK: "War," if you will, "is peace." Furthermore, the OK-ness of everything was something one could only "understand" when one stopped looking for "a reason for everything"; learned to distrust the "people and situations" one had formerly looked to for guidance; and, presumably, learned to trust the forces of the market. Sound too counterintuitive? Not to worry, the "Manifesto" assured its readers: "there is no real secret" to figuring all this out, so don't bother trying. Then the purposely vague formula for daily living: OK-ness was a movement, made up of "other people such as yourself," and joining that movement would bring "remarkable" results. All one had to do is to "wake up every morning knowing that things are going to be OK." This may have seemed insipid, lame, just plain bad advertising, but it worked. Within months the media had spotted a "Generation Y" splitting off from the unhappy X cohort, a cheerful new generation for a cheerful new age. "I'm not really into that rebel thing," proclaimed one zestful participant in a 1994 New York magazine profile of American youth. In report after report since then, journalists and analysts alike have agreed that Y'ers are much better-adjusted (read: much better employees and consumers) than gloomy X'ers ever were. "Doesn't Smell Like Teen Spirit," gloated the title of an article that appeared a short time ago in The Weekly Standard, a magazine that William Kristol edits. "After a decade of Gen X'ers being despondent about their prospects for fulfillment," the story reported, "survey after survey shows teens exuberantly optimistic about their futures." In what can only be a giddy inside joke, it then proceeded to propose as the anthem of this young, GOP-friendly cohort Jewel's hit song "Hands," which begins with the line — listen to it yourself — "If I could tell the world just one thing/it would be/we're all OK." It may sound fantastic, but think about it. Kristol wanted the Nineties to be an inverted Sixties, in which young men would wear their hair short, young women would wear push-up bras, they'd all scorn the Sixties and love swing dancing — and in which passionate young people would add the imprimatur of their youth to the conservative campaign to discredit those concepts, and dismantle those institutions, that obstruct the progress of the free market. All of which has come to pass. *** Besides, what other than mental scrambling induced by adulterated soda pop can explain the brainless gang of generational "leaders" we are evidently now fated to serve under? Behold the fruits of concentrated OK-ness: 27-year-old ideologue Mark Gerson, author of The Neoconservative Vision: From the Cold War to the Culture Wars (1995) and editor of The Essential Neoconservative Reader (1996); 26-year-old economic writer Meredith Bagby, author of Rational Exuberance: The Influence of Generation X on the New American Economy (1998), and We've Got Issues: The Get Real, No B.S., Guilt-Free Guide to What Really Matters (2000); and 25-year-old "sexual counterrevolutionary" Wendy Shalit, author of A Return to Modesty: Discovering the Lost Virtue (1999). When OK was unleashed on young America, Shalit was 19, Bagby was 20, and Gerson 21. Each of them show the clear signs of repeated, heavy dosing. As in the "OK Soda Manifesto," Bagby's popular book Rational Exuberance began by drawing an unexplained connection between the disaffection of young people and the doctrine of OK-ness: "Enter Generation X. With caution — and on little cat feet — wary, worn before wear, fearful, and suspicious. Still, and in seeming contradiction, we came wrapped in the passions of newness and with the relentless energy that birth always spawns." Bagby may earn a tearful pat on the head for her maudlin "worn before wear" stuff, but she never did resolve the "seeming contradiction" of people being both fearful and optimistic at the same time. Instead, she rushed forward to define X'ers as good junior citizens, their little cat feet dutifully propelling them up the social ladder. They are "above all self-reliant and self-defining. We start our own businesses at a staggering rate. We take enormous business risks." For Bagby the proof of her generation's essential OK-ness was not "other-directed" goals such as world peace or social justice — although she does rant at length about Social Security "reform," by which she means privatization — but its desire to become millionaires. Her book described a string of successful young professionals whose self-satisfied photographs bore mute testimony to Bagby's assertion that "the 'X' in Generation X is the symbol for multiplication. For us the symbol strikes a chord because the most successful entrepreneurs don’t win by adding dollars — they win by multiplying dollars." Again and again Bagby's work betrays the telltale mental short-circuiting that is OK Soda's gift to American thought. Liking money, business, the market means you are a Republican, right? Nope. Bagby blithely insisted that she and her fellow brave new counter-counterculturalists were not only nonpartisan ("Neither Elephant Nor Donkey," as the title of a chapter in her book put it) but actually postpartisan. "In 1991, when I was a college freshman," she gloated in Rational Exuberance, "the Evil Empire whimpered its last breath. The world changed. Our ideological battle [was] won." Everything was now to be OK forever and ever. All questions had been settled, she insisted, in one shoe-pounding sound-bite after another: "We want a government that W-O-R-K-S — that delivers the mail on time, protects the environment, fosters business, secures our future by deficit control, makes our streets safe, and stays out of our way as much as possible while doing it." Bagby's latest book, We've Got Issues, offers an even more sweeping declaration of these non-principles: "Our generation is making it where it counts," she tells the world, "not in creed or controversy, but in shares and silicon — venture cap, options, start-ups, hedge funds, broadband, plug-ins, digital, IRAs, 401(K)s — those are our buzzwords." And a fine set of buzzwords they were indeed — especially for William Kristol's pals on Wall Street during that recent bout of national madness known as the Internet bubble. But beyond controversy? The cat does make one effort at leaping from the bag on its cute little feet when Bagby wonders at the book's conclusion "whether or not I stealthily interjected some of my own prejudices (oh, of course I did) or whether I remained nonpartisan and aboveboard throughout." Otherwise, though, Bagby is fairly consistent, insisting that free market capitalism somehow transcends politics, that she and her entire generation have been liberated from "ideology." A more accurate description of what has befallen her and countless other tidy young strivers, according to the theory, would be a kind of political hydrolysis, a chemical conversion to a politics that otherwise made no sense. Another victim is Mark Gerson, author of the 1996 book In the Classroom: Dispatches from an Inner-City School That Works. Gerson, too, insisted on his nonpartisanship — he just wanted things to work! But while his book ostensibly recounts a year Gerson spent as a teacher at a Catholic school in Jersey City, the plot is just there to give Gerson an opportunity to mock bilingualism, diversity training, and the idea that standardized exams may be culturally biased. Gerson's most important contribution to the literature of young conservatism is an extended meditation on the central OK activity of sucking up to authority. He expresses shock at his inner-city students' marked failure to suck up to him. Tongue nowhere near his cheek, he recounts that he and his suburban schoolmates were accomplished bootlickers; that sucking up was the most valuable skill he learned in school. Indeed, in his book The Neoconservative Vision, Gerson even gives readers a taste of his ability, heaping on the praise for neoconservative mentors and heroes like Gertrude Himmelfarb ("one of the world's great social historians"), Norman Podhoretz ("a literary phenomenon"), Michael Novak ("one of the great economic philosophers of our era"), Daniel Patrick Moynihan ("perhaps the most gifted thinker to serve in public office in this century"), and Irving Kristol ("a brilliant writer of remarkable insight and great wit"). He describes a book by James Q. Wilson as "one of the best works of nonfiction in recent memory," and his Williams College professor and mentor Jeff Weintraub as "something of a cross between an oracle and an encyclopedia." As for William Kristol, the man who drugged and brainwashed him, Gerson describes him as "a key figure — some would say the key figure — in the transformation of the modern Republican party [into] the party of intellectual imagination and ideological excitement." When it comes to your conservative elders, apparently, "The better you understand something, the more OK it turns out to be." Wendy Shalit, who went to Williams College with Gerson, became a conservative mascot in 1995 after launching a courageous journalistic crusade against co-ed bathrooms. "A Ladies' Room of One's Own," her call to arms published in Commentary, was duly reprinted by that bastion of non-ideological OKness, Reader's Digest. She's even dated John Podhoretz, the straightforwardly conservative son of the professional ex-leftist Norman Podhoretz. Shalit's Return to Modesty — which proposes that anorexia, date rape, and all the other "woes besetting the modern young woman" are the natural "expressions of a society which has lost its respect for female modesty" — also identifies liberal feminists as the real enemies of womankind. "It is no accident that harassment, stalking, and rape all increased when we decided to let everything hang out," she writes. Shalit, who's been known to defend the Promise Keepers and religious modesty laws for women, has declared that "the patriarchy, in the form of a stable structure of traditional values, and the protective authority to enforce it, is precisely what women are missing, and desperately want restored." Not only is it hip to be square nowadays, Shalit would have us understand, it's hip to be brainwashed. Describing her youthful conviction that feminists "exaggerate the difficulties of being a woman" in Return to Modesty, Shalit begs the reader not to "ask me how I was so sure of this, or what this had to do with any other part of my ideology. As anyone who has ever had an ideology knows, you do not ask; you just look for confirmation for a set of beliefs. That's what it means to have an ideology." In other words, "Don't be fooled into thinking there has to be a reason for everything." What's So Bad About Feeling Good? asked the title of a 1968 musical comedy that tantalized Bill Kristol's generation with a plot in which nihilistic beatniks were straightened out by a happiness virus. Today, OK-addled young people have converted the frustrated idealism of their immediate elders into a passionate complacency. The patriarchy is neat-o, Shalit insists; Gerson gives the nod to the social and economic hierarchy; and Bagby puts the seal of youthful approval on free-market capitalism. It's like, get with the program already... OK? *** NB: I wrote the following Afterword when this essay was republished in the 2003 collection Boob Jubilee, edited by Thomas Frank and Dave Mulcahey. In the aftermath of the recent stock-market collapse, two of the fresh-faced ideologues I had profiled in my conspiracy theory quietly stepped down from their soapboxes. In 1999, Wendy Shalit had unbuckled her whalebone corset long enough to write a blistering op-ed piece about the delusional union spokespersons outraged by the vast discrepancy between the pay scales of CEOs and workers. But now that those same CEOs are taking perp walks, shes nowhere to be found. Mark Gerson, whose butt-kissing technique had paid off a few years back, when George Gilder and others invested in his start-up market-research firm, seems to lack any further motivation to write valentines to older market triumphalists. Although they didn't recant, at least Shalit and Gerson no longer insist that everything's OK. Meredith Bagby, on the other hand, still hasn't kicked the habit. The Bagby Group, a consulting company "for businesses seeking to attract the Generation X market," never took off — so she's become a professional yea-sayer. A few weeks after the events of September 11, Bagby helped represent "young Americans" at a hearing of George W. Bush's infamous Commission to Strengthen Social Security. Abasing herself before the assembled appointees, each of whom favored the privatization of Social Security, Gen X's Most Respected Economic Writer asked that her generation be permitted to throw itself upon the actuarial grenade. "You must ask us to accept a plan that could raise our eligibility age and index it to average lifespans, lower our future benefits by altering the way they are calculated, and tax our future benefits at a higher rate," she declaimed. "If you do this, we will not oppose you." I can only repeat, in conclusion: "Never overestimate the remarkable abilities of 'OK' brand soda."

geny-newyork-may2394

Joshua Glenn — Fri, 03 Jul 2009 12:24:02 +0000

bagby-rational

Joshua Glenn — Fri, 03 Jul 2009 12:26:59 +0000

Hilo Heroes, July 5-11

HILOBROW — Sun, 05 Jul 2009 12:00:49 +0000

HAPPY BIRTHDAY, this week, to the following high-, low-, no-, and hilobrow heroes. Click here for more Hilo Hero birthdays. JULY 5 It seems impossible that the various identities — Prince Rakeem, Bobby Digital, RZArecta, The Abbot, Ruler Zig-Zag-Zig Allah — of rapper, producer, and film scorer RZA (Robert Fitzgerald Diggs, born 1969) form a coherent whole; and that his corporatism, Supreme Mathematics, kung-fu fetishism, and finely honed musical integrity exist simultaneously. But he makes it look easy. Not since P.T. Barnum has anyone internalized the lessons of American capitalism as fully — even though RZA's attempts to attract the best Ivy League talent were sometimes derailed because the talent was afraid of getting punched in the face. When Chappelle's Show joked about Wu-Tang Financial ("Smith Barney? Buncha bitches"), it was the ring of truth that made the skit; a world with Wu-Tang Financial was easily imaginable. Yet his spin-offs of the Wu brand into a universe of Wu products, the layered complexity of his corporate schemes, have always existed in parallel with the genius of his artistic vision. They converge at some point near infinity that only RZA can see. — Tom Nealon JULY 6 Kurt Weill settled into a successful Broadway career after escaping Nazi Germany, but the American soujourn of Brecht's other major Weimar-era musical collaborator did not end so fortunately. HANNS EISLER (1898-1962) set his Schoenberg-trained hand to scoring high-quality (but hardly radical) fare by such fellow emigres as Fritz Lang (Hangmen Also Die) and Douglas Sirk (A Scandal of Paris , with Carole Landis's scorching performance of Eisler's "Song of the Flame"), as well as penning the still-fascinating treatise Composing for the Films with T.W. Adorno. One of the first artists called before HUAC, which labeled him "the Karl Marx of Music," Eisler was hounded out of the U.S. less for his own political activities than for those of his brother Gerhart, a notorious Communist Party bagman. Back in Berlin, he continued to work with Brecht and composed the East German national anthem — but also spoke out against state censorship of jazz and atonal music. English-language recordings of Eisler's agit-lieder are hard to come by, though Dresden Dolls' Amanda Palmer and even Sting have essayed individual songs; Dagmar Krause's 1986 all-Eisler album Tank Battles isn't for purists, but it's an excellent way in for curious art-rockers. — Franklin Bruno JULY 7 The biography of ROBERT A. HEINLEIN (1907-88) firmly places Golden-Age SF on the grand continuum of Americana: the no-nonsense engineer's mentality of his Kansas City upbringing, his longing for military service (he graduated from the US Naval Academy but was retired for sickliness in ’34), his brief and failed political career, his dabbling with Hollywood. Critics might accuse him of flirtation with fascism, but the Heinlein who reached me as a kid was not the Boy Scout-like anticommunist of Starship Troopers (1959) but the dirty old man of The Number of The Beast (1980). Heinlein gave us two of our most prominent SF tropes: space travel as Naval metaphor, and sexy SF-for-adults. Without Heinlein, there would be no Star Trek with its studly Kirk and Starfleet Academy, no Battlestar Galactica with its sexualized androids and submarine-movie conventions. And, of course, no Omni. — Jason Grote JULY 8 For a good chunk of the 1940s, the R&B chart (or the "race records" chart, as Billboard called it then) might just as well have been called the LOUIS JORDAN (1908-75) chart: he scored hit after hit after hit, and "Choo Choo Ch'Boogie" was stapled to the top of the chart for 18 weeks. Jordan was a great entertainer: a vocalist, saxophonist and bandleader who basically invented rhythm and blues as it was known for the next couple of decades. Watch any of the "soundies" he filmed to promote his songs, and you'll see a performer who will do whatever it takes to keep the audience's eyes on him. The same went for their ears: the Tympany Five's arrangements rarely let more than a few seconds pass without some smart little instrumental gesture. And he might have been the funniest pop singer of a century that wasn't short of funny pop singers, because he was drawn to jokes that cut deep. "(You Dyed Your Hair) Chartreuse" is still a rib-tickler now, but "Jack, You're Dead" and "That Chick's Too Young to Fry" tickle ribs on the way to breaking them. — Douglas Wolk JULY 9 The castle of consciousness, turret and coign, too huge for the human head, where stalk the battlements, robed and forbidding, the super-intelligent dead, has terrible deeps and horrible heights, and walls that are wondrous thick, but can be displaced or dissolved, nonetheless, by a couple of drinks, or a brick. Or an illness. Biographies of the great MERVYN PEAKE (1911-68) make damned depressing reading. His work — as an illustrator, as a poet, as the author of the Gormenghast trilogy — was extraordinary, but it found no home in his time. Gentle, elegant, but with the architectural mass of Gormenghast installed at an unearthly pressure inside his brain, Peake moved rather spectrally through postwar literary London, always working, always needing work, trying his hand at this and that until a disastrous foray into theatre (a play called The Wit To Woo) triggered neurological chaos — he read the tepid-to-poor reviews, and the little symptoms which had been bothering him for months suddenly massed and overwhelmed him. Parkinson's Disease. Which of course happens to plenty of people who don't write books or do drawings, but which in Peake's case had a ready-made poignancy: the brilliant draughtsman was undone by the trembling hand, and the lovely man withdrew further and further until he echoed his own creation, the Earl of Groan, burning-eyed and all alone in an owl-haunted tower. — poem and writeup by James Parker JULY 10 Clad in a leather jumpsuit, tiny waist offset by enormous bosom, her performance in Russ Meyer's Faster Pussycat! Kill! Kill! (1965) transformed what could have been a run-of-the-mill B-movie into a parable of female power — and sealed her place in the pantheon of pop culture. But the story of TURA SATANA (born 1938) is far more compelling than any low-budget creation. She survived internment at Manzanar, a brutal rape, and a stint in reform school all before her mid-teens. Shortly thereafter Satana made her first appearance on the burlesque stage, where she was frequently billed as "Miss Japan Beautiful." A chance encounter in Biloxi gave her the opportunity to teach martial arts — and more — to a young Elvis Presley. About her Faster Pussycat role as the man-killing go-go dancer Varla, Satana once remarked that "I took a lot of my anger that had been stored inside of me for many years and let it loose." — Lynn Peril JULY 11 Set like jewels within a vast diadem of a single future history, the SF stories and solitary novel penned by CORDWAINER SMITH (1913-66) in the '50s and early '60s transcend the American pulps in both style and substance. Formally, they slip and slide like wry Orientalist fables (in real life, Smith was an army intelligence officer and East Asian expert named Paul Linebarger). Thematically, Smith explored the inner landscapes opened up by postwar mind science. A line can certainly be traced between Psychological Warfare, a classic military text that Linebarger published in 1948, and Smith's widely praised 1950 story "Scanners Live in Vain," in which interstellar pilots neurologically zombify themselves in order to withstand the "Great Pain of Space." Like Philip K. Dick, Smith's psychological concerns bloomed into religious ones, and the post-human nostalgia and liberation theology of some of his tales, partly rooted in his deepening Anglican faith, hold up a hard mirror to the simultaneous shattering and retrenchment of the religious imagination that characterizes our days. — Erik Davis

nam-june-paik

Joshua Glenn — Mon, 06 Jul 2009 13:49:55 +0000

zenlev

Matthew Battles — Mon, 06 Jul 2009 14:22:41 +0000

dunsany-elfland-1924

Joshua Glenn — Mon, 06 Jul 2009 14:32:03 +0000

dunsany-elfland-1924

Joshua Glenn — Mon, 06 Jul 2009 14:33:47 +0000

Double Exposure (5): the Zen of Leviathan

Matthew Battles — Mon, 06 Jul 2009 14:43:29 +0000

"My life is made up of so many other lives.... all of them rearranging themselves." This advertisement for the Palm Pre smartphone promotes the curious Zen of being your own Dear Leader. Pajama-clad minions engaged in mass calisthenics; misty mountains in the Pure Land of Bliss. What's not to like? Or, as the narrator intones, "isn't it beautiful when life simply ... flows together." It's the middlebrow myth of the smartphone: achieve release through total control. But as a T-Mobile ad from earlier this year shows, it's we who do the dance, for mobile phone companies that make handy Dear Leaders: T-Mobile's minions domesticate the flash mob, making a farce of wonder. "Life is for sharing," runs the copy at the end. Another middlebrow koan: achieve release through total transparency.

whale-bride-550

Joshua Glenn — Mon, 06 Jul 2009 14:55:50 +0000

jung-carl-1955feb14

Joshua Glenn — Mon, 06 Jul 2009 15:58:33 +0000

james-hetfield

Joshua Glenn — Mon, 06 Jul 2009 16:16:19 +0000

berry-broadside-closeup-550

Joshua Glenn — Mon, 06 Jul 2009 16:23:31 +0000

berry-wendell-common

Joshua Glenn — Mon, 06 Jul 2009 16:24:05 +0000

armstrong-louis3

Joshua Glenn — Mon, 06 Jul 2009 16:27:38 +0000

yeoh-supercop3-550

Joshua Glenn — Mon, 06 Jul 2009 16:52:16 +0000

veblen1920

Joshua Glenn — Wed, 08 Jul 2009 01:24:33 +0000

canetti-1965

Joshua Glenn — Wed, 08 Jul 2009 02:04:52 +0000

McLuhanSide

Joshua Glenn — Wed, 08 Jul 2009 02:06:55 +0000

McLuhanTop

Joshua Glenn — Wed, 08 Jul 2009 02:06:56 +0000

chuck-d-bum-rush-large-550

Joshua Glenn — Wed, 08 Jul 2009 02:59:29 +0000

CravenSide

Joshua Glenn — Wed, 08 Jul 2009 21:51:16 +0000

CravenTop

Joshua Glenn — Wed, 08 Jul 2009 21:51:18 +0000

detournement-550

Joshua Glenn — Thu, 09 Jul 2009 20:43:25 +0000

Pinakothek (1) — Détournement

Luc Sante — Thu, 09 Jul 2009 21:37:16 +0000

ONE DAY VERY SOON it will happen that our heroes, having searched and studied ancient property maps on file at the bureau of records, having rented a basement storage space on the opposite side of the block, having pretended to be a punk band and carted in instruments and actually played them very loud before switching to recordings of the same stuff played just as loud, having under cover of the loudness drilled a series of guide holes in the rear wall and then chiseled out the space between those holes, having collected the rubble in small cloth sacks and carried them out to the car and dropped them off a bridge under cover of night, having at last located the rear wall of the bank vault, having clipped all wires leading from the vault, having set off a series of fire alarms to distract the authorities and blown up a succession of metal trash cans with M-80s a block or two away to further confuse interested parties, having under that combined cover blown a hole in the rear of the vault with Semtex, having made their way into the vault, will find it as empty as Mother Hubbard's refrigerator. No cash, just an assortment of worthless securities, a few blackmail-potential photographs, an A-Rod rookie card, and somebody's collection of Beanie Babies. — Luc Sante *** Between December 5, 2007, and January 3 of this year, Luc Sante — critic, historian, translator, and friend of Hilobrow.com; author of Low Life, Evidence, The Factory of Facts, and Kill All Your Darlings — published Pinakothek, a series of imaginative, incisive readings of tintype photos, 45 RPM record labels, cigarette-paper packs, torn dustjackets, and other paper ephemera unearthed from his crazy, mixed-up files. Sante's blog is currently on hiatus, while he finishes up a few other projects. With his kind permission, we've curated a collection ten of our favorite Pinakothek installments. These will appear at the rate of one per week, starting today.

kool-moe-dee-like-me

Joshua Glenn — Fri, 10 Jul 2009 00:36:10 +0000

Skydive

Matthew Battles — Fri, 10 Jul 2009 14:54:16 +0000

star_trek_14

Matthew Battles — Fri, 10 Jul 2009 14:54:45 +0000

Bruegel,_Pieter_de_Oude_-_De_val_van_icarus_-_hi_res

Matthew Battles — Fri, 10 Jul 2009 15:21:16 +0000

Falling Is Free

Matthew Battles — Fri, 10 Jul 2009 15:48:59 +0000

FREEFALL IS ONE chief theme in this season's action films. One of the most scintillating scenes of the J. J. Abrams Star Trek movie has Kirk, Sulu, and a doomed redshirt skydive from suborbital altitude onto a mining platform with which the renegade Romulans were trying to destroy Vulcan. In sleek pressure suits, the threesome plummet headlong toward the sere surface of Spock's doomed home planet. Orbital skydiving is an occasional but recurrent trope in the Trek mythos, occurring in several novels; a scene cut from Star Trek: Generations has Chekhov and Sulu watching for Kirk while he falls from orbit to rendezvous with them. But it's cropping up elsewhere: a similar moment occurs in the forthcoming GI Joe; at 1:51 minutes into the trailer, a Joe "ejects" from some orbital war machine and plummets—again headfirst—to the (this time urbanized) surface: Such images call to mind The Man Who Fell to Earth, which used Apollo footage to imply that David Bowie's Thomas Newton literally fell through the Earth's atmosphere to a splashdown in a New Mexico lake. What's going on here? Why is everybody falling? In the more recent films, heroes rocket planetwards at unimaginable velocities; in full dive they whoosh along at the limit of control. But most of the mythology of falling involves other sensations: loneliness, fragility, eternity. Vertigo and falling are profoundly important figures in existentialism from Kierkegaard to Sartre; for Heidegger, falling is the great metaphor for anxiety, that emotion which recognizes the uncanniness of very Being. But falling's roots are deeper; as Gaston Bachelard points, it's one of the primordial fears. Perhaps more than a warning against hubris, the myth of Icarus and Daedalus is simply the earliest narrative treatment of the power of falling. In Bruegel's famous painting, Icarus' fall is unremarkable to the busy burghers, sailors, and ploughmen. We're always already falling, the Dutch master seems to be saying. For reasons too recondite to bother with here, any fall from true orbit would be fatal. But it is possible to come close. In 1960, pilot Joe Kittinger ascended for an hour and a half in the modified weather balloon Excelsior III. At an altitude of 102,800, he jumped. As he stepped to the edge of his gondola, 99 percent of Earth's atmosphere was beneath Kittinger's feet. He achieved the highest manned balloon ascent and the longest free fall, and became the first human to break the sound barrier outside an aircraft. And yet at that altitude, there is no sensation of falling—only the emptiness of space and the Luciferian attraction of the planet's brightness. Star Trek and GI Joe are thrilling—but Joe Kittinger shows us that Bruegel and Heidegger may come closer to the explaining the fall.

dickinson-iron-maiden

Joshua Glenn — Fri, 10 Jul 2009 17:03:32 +0000

ashes-donkey-550

Joshua Glenn — Fri, 10 Jul 2009 21:20:59 +0000

8a-sankatray-550

Joshua Glenn — Fri, 10 Jul 2009 21:32:53 +0000

Significant Objects

Joshua Glenn — Fri, 10 Jul 2009 21:41:07 +0000

EARLIER THIS WEEK, Rob Walker and I launched an online experiment called Significant Objects. The project, in brief: Rob's "Consumed" column in the New York Times Magazine attempts to figure out why consumers respond the way they to do particular products, from consumer items to TV shows. My book Taking Things Seriously, meanwhile, asked 75 writers, artists, and other creative types to describe the surprising significance of unlikely-looking objects they owned. Rob and I decided it would be interesting to ask authors to tell stories about objects that he and I had purchased at thrift stores and yard sales. Our question was this: Can stories, even fictional ones, transform insignificant objects into significant ones? If so, how to measure this qualitative transformation? Rob's brilliant and funny solution, to the latter question: Put the objects on eBay, using the authors' stories as item descriptions, and then see if they sell for more money than we originally paid. We've lined up a talented group of participants — over 40 of them, so far — including Stewart O'Nan, Matthew Sharpe, Ben Greenman, Michelle Tea, Kurt Andersen, Rebecca Wolff, Annie Nocenti, Jenny Davidson, Sheila Heti, Curtis Sittenfeld, and James Parker. So far, we've offered 13 objects for sale on eBay. We'll offer one new object per weekday, for the duration of the experiment. With three days left to go for the first round of auctions, the Chili Cat about which Lydia Millet wrote — starting price $0.50 — is selling for $9.50. So Millet’s story has multiplied the item’s market value by a factor of 19! Meanwhile, the Sanka ashtray (starting price: $1) about which Luc Sante wrote is now selling for ten times that; and the Candyland labyrinth game about which our own Matthew Battles wrote (starting price: $0.29) is selling for $11.50 — the magnitude of which transformation I can barely conceive, much less compute. "So is it the intrinsic utility and beauty of a commodity that creates its value, or the stories we tell ourselves about them?" asks Chris Shea, in a Brainiac post about the project. So far, our experiment suggests it's: (the latter) + (publicity). After Susannah Breslin posted an item to Boing Boing about her participation in the project — she'd written about an "All-American Official Necking Team" button, purchased by me at a flea market near Hingham, Mass., in June, for 50 cents — there was a bidding frenzy. With over 5 days left in the auction, the top bid is $36.88!

hangovercat

Joshua Glenn — Fri, 10 Jul 2009 21:47:59 +0000

hangover-ny

Joshua Glenn — Fri, 10 Jul 2009 21:49:05 +0000

The Sweetest Hangover

Joshua Glenn — Fri, 10 Jul 2009 21:50:01 +0000

WHENEVER HANGOVERS become the topic of conversation at the swanky sorts of cocktail parties I too often frequent, some would-be professional inebriate inevitably feels compelled to burden the entire gathering with the insight that there is no such thing, really, as a hangover remedy. Because God knows (we're supposed to infer), if such an elixir did in fact exist, this reincarnated Dean Martin would surely have discovered it by now. Bullshit. Two aspirins and a gallon of water will do the trick every time. I discovered and perfected this routine in college where, after long days and nights of guzzling funnels-full of warm Blatz between shots of 101-proof Wild Turkey, as my compatriots lay strewn mid-revel about whatever living room we'd invaded in as though overcome by carbon monoxide fumes, I'd shakily but purposefully choke down glass after glass of H2O, never allowing myself to black out until I'd shipped enough liquid to irrigate Fenway Park. I even took to carrying a small tin container of extra-strength aspirin with me wherever I went, since I kept inexplicably finding myself shackled to hogsheads of malt liquor in unfamiliar dormitories. These preventative measures, plus my much-imitated habit of forcing myself to vomit after every ten beers (in order to make room for more), worked perfectly: I was the only one of my friends who never lolled about on a Sunday morning poetically lamenting a richly appointed headache, a mouth that Kingsley Amis's gerbil had nested in, eyeballs dripping blood, or a gaseous ferment of the innards. Instead, I leaped out of bed each day full of vim and vigor, and applied myself industriously to the task of self-improvement. I now regret all those hours I wasted back in the days, and often wonder what I might have learned had I occupied my time in a more enlightened fashion. No, I don't regret all the drinking; what I'm sorry about is all the hangovers I missed. This is, I know, a strange thing to claim, since the hangover is one of Middlebrow's favorite bugaboos, more feared even than male pattern baldness or the heartbreak of psoriasis. (Witness the seemingly bottomless well of hangover jokes that ’50s-’60s cocktail-era cartoonists like Vergil "VIP" Partch drew from for their men's magazine illustrations, or SKYY vodka's vague promises of consequence-free pleasure.) I now believe, however, that my own middlebrow attempts to avoid becoming hungover have been a betrayal of and an impediment to whatever is good and noble about getting blotto in the first place. I recant. So what's good about a hangover? Everything (except the headache, maybe) that you think you hate about it. The hungover person is abnormally aware of sights, sounds (everything seems TOO LOUD!), tastes, odors, and textures which normally would go unremarked. That's a good thing, not a bad thing. The hungover eye, for instance, because it is neither obstructed by the blinders of our everyday biases, nor deceived by intoxicated hallucinations, is magnetically attracted to seemingly ordinary objects which take on an incredible, luminous significance: anyone who has ever experienced the "stares" when hungover knows exactly what I mean. Although the sudden awareness of the sacred in the mundane is what most religious traditions refer to as nirvana, or some type of grace, we too often shrug off these moments in our haste to get rid of our hangovers. (I suspect, actually, that the hungover eye which is somehow between the appraising eye of the teetotaler and the foggy eye of the drunkard may be the model for Hinduism's "third eye" of enlightenment.) Thus it is that the moment of the hangover can propel us into a "middle state" of perceptivity quite unlike anything we're ever likely to experience outside of a monastery. The manner in which we perceive the world and the manner in which we exist in it are inextricable, however, so it should come as no surprise that in my studies I've found several visionaries who have taken practical inspiration from the hangover. The poet William Corbett, for example, once wrote frequently about his own hangovers: e.g., "For breakfast aspirins/a glass of milky water./I am always just/learning how to live... ." ("Depression," St. Patrick's Day, 1976). I find something heartening in Corbett's notion that when we are neither sober nor drunk we have an opportunity to start over. Having experimented with mescaline, in The Doors of Perception (1954) the hilobrow Aldous Huxley writes that although he was delighted to have been freed from "that half opaque medium of concepts" which obscures from our 'straight' powers of perception "the miracle, moment by moment, of naked existence," we cannot live day to day in such a fashion. He suggests instead that we strive to "be aware, always, of total reality in its immanent otherness—to be aware of it and yet to remain in a condition to survive as an animal, to think and feel as a human being, to resort whenever expedient to systematic reasoning": in other words, we should try to perceive and behave at all times as though hungover. One final example is the nobrow Zen master Shunryu Suzuki, who teaches in Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind (1970) that "When you wake up in the morning, I think you do not feel so well. Your mind is full of 'weeds' ... But if you can cease striving to overcome those weeds, they, too, can enrich your path to enlightenment." I suspect that Suzuki-roshi's translator didn't understand that "mind-weeds" is Zen slang for a hangover. Why do we assume that intoxication leaves us with nothing the next morning but physical pain? Because we've been educated — by middlebrows — to feel that way. Middlebrow books and articles on the subject of intoxication discuss at length the difference between being drunk and being sober, yet they never explore that unavoidable duration of time during which one painfully returns from ecstasy to mundanity. A related phenomenon is our middlebrow fascination with the fun, romantic part of pilgrimages: we love accounts of life on the road, where one is freed from the uptight constraints of the social order left behind, but we don't like the part where the pilgrim must return home and begin the difficult task of putting his or her newfound insights to the test. If drinking can be compared to a pilgrimage — in both, after all, one leaves the usual for the unknown — it is clear that the lived experience of the hangover merits more attention than the usual clichés about ice-packs and people SPEAKING TOO LOUDLY. This is the hangover's hangover: we forget the moments of enlightenment, and only remember the ringing ears and the disequilibrium. If the hangover can indeed be accounted as a form of reaggregation from the extraordinary into the ordinary, as a 'middle state' of perception in which one can for a brief time see the usual in an unusual manner, it's no wonder that Middlebrow doesn't want us to enjoy it. Our socially imposed conscience is that which the imbiber seeks to escape, yet somehow our middlebrow conscience always gets its revenge by convincing us that the only consequence of crapulous excess is pain. So the next time you wake up with your tongue stuck to an empty bottle of Thunderbird, just take the lyrics to Diana Ross's "Love Hangover" as your mantra: "If there's a cure for this, I don't want it!/If there's a remedy, I'll run from it!/I've got the sweetest hangover [that] I don't wanna get over!" A version of this essay originally appeared in The Idler.

Hilo Heroes, July 12-18

HILOBROW — Sun, 12 Jul 2009 12:00:26 +0000

HAPPY BIRTHDAY, this week, to the following high-, low-, no-, and hilobrow heroes. Click here for more Hilo Hero birthdays. JULY 12 A New England scion twice kicked out of Harvard for nonconformity and "apathy," R. BUCKMINSTER FULLER (1895-1983) went on to invent the geodesic dome (he said he got the idea while watching the bubbles generated by his ship's wake in WWI), a 3-wheeled aerodynamic car, an energy-efficient house made out of discarded grain elevators, and a popular world map that reflected correct spherical geography rather than postwar politics. Dissatisfied with the referential potential of existing words and ideas, Fuller also invented his own, including dymaxion, or maximum efficiency and flexibility, which he appended to almost all his inventions; synergetics, or the science of emergent behavior; and tensegrity, or stability resulting from the opposition of dynamic and compressive structural forces. He also created one of the first massively multiplayer games, the World Game. In lectures that were as renowned for their length as for their rhetoric, Bucky insisted that another world was possible, and that design — a pursuit available to all — was the way to get there. — Peggy Nelson JULY 13 L D2 L′ F′ D2 F. U R L U2 R′ L′. F D2 F′ D′ F D F′. Anybody who has ever experienced apoplectic rage while trying to solve a Rubik's Cube, and has researched its solution, knows that these cryptic incantations all translate to the same bellow: "ERNŐ RUBIK (born 1944), you are an utter bastard!" Still, Rubik is an understated genius of micro-architecture. The Cube — and its offshoots, official and unofficial — is the bestselling toy of all time. This polychromatic bundle of infuriation was the Tetris of the early '80s: a Cold War mind-muddler designed to terrify the West into submission at the feet of Soviet mathematical genius. The playground of my youth was transformed, overnight, into a graveyard of shuffling, wrist-rotating zombies, then into a graveyard of plastic proto-rave confetti as young lads ripped their infernal Cubes apart with bare hands. Rubik is a cackling Bond villain who, to this day, telepathically controls a global army of geometry-obsessed robots. For all this, he should be hated, feared, and worshiped. — Patrick Cates JULY 14 Before NORTHROP FRYE (1912-91) there was no Literary Theory, only criticism. He blasted a place for the former, as a distinct field of study — first with Fearful Symmetry (1947) and then decisively with Anatomy of Criticism (1957) — in the no-man's land between literature and philosophy, art and humanity. Not only did he manifest Literary Theory, he bathed it in fire — sanctified it — leaving nothing petty: no arbitrary hierarchies of taste, no canonical lists. The navel-gazing New Critics were appalled: to suggest that there was something beyond the text, beyond the solitary and shimmering genius of the poet, was anathema to them. It was bad enough that the Marxists were banging at the gate, but Frye, with his underlying structures, archetypes, and scientific approach, was beyond the pale. His was not criticism for cocktail parties: he didn't tear down, he elevated — not only criticism but literature, and also the reader. And if he elevated the act of criticism, he also removed it from acting on literature. Though critics before and since have practiced it as a form of surgery, sometimes an evisceration, for Frye criticism was always an elucidation, an attempt to give voice... not to what the author intended, encoded, but instead to an expression of the continuous myth embedded in the great writings of humankind. — Tom Nealon JULY 15 In the rumpus room of midcentury intellectual culture, WALTER BENJAMIN (1892-1940) is everybody's favorite overstuffed velveteen rabbit. Susan Sontag, for example, rationalized Benjamin's many self-defeating habits: the glacial pace at which he worked, she wrote, is typical of "the melancholic's labors of decipherment," while his indecisiveness, even when it came to fleeing the Nazis, was a function of his principled position at aesthetic, political, and religious "crossroads." Whatever! Though he was brilliant — at his inaugural Frankfurt lecture, in 1931, T.W. Adorno persuasively declared that his friend's style of interpretation (in which one broods productively over montage-like "constellations" of reality-fragments, inventing and discovering meaning simultaneously) is the only non-proto-totalitarian mode of doing philosophy, sociology, or criticism — the hapless Benjamin was a burden to everyone who loved him. Worse, in the years before his apparent suicide, he was driven by Hitler's successes away from the negative-dialectical crossroads and towards messianism and party-line Marxism. So let's put the Velveteen Rabbi back in the toybox, shall we? Let's not cuddle Benjamin; instead, let's read him. — Joshua Glenn JULY 16 The falling out of Wikipedia founders Jimmy Wales and LARRY SANGER (born 1968) has become the stuff of legend — or an endless cycle of flames and manifestos, which is the form legend takes in the information age. But unlike the tales of other failed duos in the Internet pantheon, the story of Sanger and Wales hinges on matters of philosophical interest. At first blush, Wales's version of Wikipedia — encyclopedism for everyone — would seem the broader vision. Sanger, who left Wikipedia (if one ever can truly leave it) to found a specialist-moderated encyclopedia called Citizendium, harbors a notion that seem more moderate: experts working together with the rest of us; knowledge proposing, but curiosity disposing. Upon closer examination, however, it's the latter idea that's more utopian. For expertise will always exist, alongside more practical and proletarian needs, passions, and curiosities. Sanger's confederation of dunces and dons is a truly radical vision: less Diderot redux than a re-enlightening of the Enlightenment. — Matthew Battles JULY 17 Moving from Shanghai to Hong Kong at age five, WONG KAR-WAI (born 1958) learned to speak Cantonese at the movies. He hustled his way into the Hong Kong film boom of the '80s, screenwriting hackwork like The Haunted Cop Shop before making his directorial debut. He didn't set out to make art films, but every time Wong linked his thwarted genre tropes with cinematographer Chris Doyle's signature neon smear he suspended and fetishized time. Most often compared to Godard, he owes as much to the great technicolor voluptuaries Sirk and Minelli, Bertolucci and Lynch. He made Maggie Cheung suffer for his art, but rewards us with the most immaculate '60s updo since Cookie Mueller in Female Trouble, and the mesmerizing sway of Maggie's cheongsam-clad ass. How did we ever live in a world without Faye Wong's pixie cut, Brigitte Lin's blonde wig, and Amélie Daure's bob (in There's Only One Sun)? Wong is the king of the inconsummate — the romance of never connecting. His is the cinema of only desire and desire only, freed from its fulfillment. — David Smay JULY 18 A self-described "physicist turned historian for philosophical purposes," THOMAS KUHN (1922-96) was largely an autodidact in his eventual home — the then-new field of the history of science. With his scattershot academic background, it seems only appropriate that his major work, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962), became a cynosure for intellectuals from all fields for several decades. Kuhn inspired calumny from fellow scientists for arguing that every scientific paradigm is eventually replaced by a new paradigm that's no closer to "truth." Although humanist-baiter Alan Sokal has laid the blame for the Science Wars at his feet (because, for Kuhn, science was "fundamentally a social undertaking," as one of his followers paraphrased him), Kuhn rejected the anti-scientific rants of the cultural leftists as vehemently as he skewered the scientific theism of the positivists. He was an intellectual evolutionist — in his view only those theories that best suited the problems of the time would develop and thrive — and a heretic in what we can now recognize as a religious war. — Tor Aarestad

talese

Matthew Battles — Mon, 13 Jul 2009 15:28:25 +0000

615px-Gay_Talese_by_David_Shankbone

Matthew Battles — Mon, 13 Jul 2009 17:07:07 +0000

Clothes make the brow

Matthew Battles — Mon, 13 Jul 2009 17:29:45 +0000

WHAT'S A HILOBROW to wear? This is the question that bedevils me. When preparing to leave the workforce last year, I anticipated with relish the sudden sartorial liberation. No more ties and coats and codes! But then I wondered: how to express my newfound freedom? Rip the too-short sleeves off all my plaid shirts? Unleash my feral self in acts of costumed signification? But I've been at a loss, alas. Too late I've realized that my unconcerted attempts to "be myself" carry all the panache of a mussed Moosbrugger or a slightly-risque Roskalnikov, less inspiring than cringe-inducing. And downright unheimlich! Bitter reminder that in this traverse of the abyss called life there's only always already inauthenticity. Then last week, an ironic epiphany: no longer working in an office liberates me to wear suits if I wish, to reconceive professional attire not as uniform, but as costume. Such thoughts arrive in an access of nostalgia. Mid-twentieth-century writer-types knew the codes, and how to play with them. The hats! The ties! The spats! The palette was infinetely varied, the possibilities positively musical. But ah, for the committed hilobrow nothing's ever so simple, no matter the era. Take the case of narrative journalist nonpareil Gay Talese, for example. Few writers alive today are so well turned out as Talese. [caption id="attachment_3751" align="aligncenter" width="300" caption="Gay Talese, photograph by David Shankbone."][/caption] For an even more dapper take, see how Talese dresses for his role as "professional eavesdropper" for a New York Times piece about the Circle Line cruises (hint: blending in is not his modus operandi). Here surely is the answer! For in comportment as well as prose, Talese is a grand exemplar. But when I read the opening of Katie Roiphe's interview of Talese in the current Paris Review, my hope came undone like an inexpertly-cinched four-in-hand: TALESE: Usually I wake up in bed with my wife. I don’t want to have breakfast with anyone. So I go from the third floor, which is our bedroom, to the fourth floor, where I keep my clothes. I get dressed as if I’m going to an office. I wear a tie. Roiphe: Cuff links? TALESE: Yes. I dress as if I’m going to an office in midtown or on Wall Street or at a law firm, even though what I am really doing is going downstairs to my bunker. In the bunker there’s a little refrigerator, and I have orange juice and muffins and coffee. Then I change my clothes. Roiphe: Again? TALESE: That’s right. I have an ascot and sweaters. I have a scarf. Sorrowfully I confront the fact that I haven't got the energy—much less the closet space—for such sartorial rigor. Later in the interview, Talese describes how his upbringing in his parents' tailor shop influenced not only his sense of style, but his working methods: to this day, he writes on cut-up pieces of the shirtboards drycleaners use to stiffen laundered menswear. Perhaps hilobrow fashion flows not from calculation, but from one's own background—to expand the ageless formula by wearing as well as writing what one knows: Forget rooftops: I shall wear my barbaric yawp! Some hilobrows may snicker, but the die is cast. As for working methods, it's no more wordpress for me. From now on I'll be pissing my notes on rocks, clawing my posts into the bark of the very trees.

luc-columbia-550

Joshua Glenn — Mon, 13 Jul 2009 21:04:21 +0000

Pinakothek (2) — Who Owns New York?

Luc Sante — Tue, 14 Jul 2009 12:00:16 +0000

THAT IS THE APT TITLE of the Columbia University fight song. It's odd that I remember it, because I can't have heard it more than once or twice — my time there was the absolute nadir of school-spiritism, fraternities, attendance at sporting events. The old traditions were dying like bugs in a jar, and I did my best to help see them off. Still, the song's sentiment was implicit in the university's conduct, an arrogance barely dented by the events of a few years earlier — forty years ago this month.* Columbia University in the spring of 1968 was preparing to construct a gymnasium in Morningside Park, a park outside the school's property line and used mostly by the residents of Harlem. Very generously (in its own view) the university would allow Harlemites — who in those days were nearly one hundred percent African American — use of the gym, as long as they entered through the back door. To make a complicated story very simple, Rap Brown informed the citizens of Harlem of Columbia's plan and Students for a Democratic Society informed the students, and very soon the campus was enjoying an occupation and a strike. The gym, and the Jim-Crow and land-grab matters it entailed, remained at the center of the outrage, although Vietnam, corporate investment, institutional racism and elitism, the purpose and design of education, unthinking assent to social injustice, and dormitory visiting rules also entered the equation. Few people realize that Columbia's Spring ’68 bacchanal preceded the one in Paris by several weeks. A bacchanal it remained only briefly, though. The administration refused to negotiate with the striking students, the police came in with helmets and clubs and badge numbers blacked out, and they were abetted both by right-wing students and by the faculty, whose studied neutrality led them to block food deliveries to the strikers — their high-minded cowardice illustrates better than anything why "liberal" remained a vitriolic insult on the left for many years. Quite a lot of blood was shed. The police broke heads of people who were only standing up for principles. Nothing like it had been seen, at least not subsequent to the 1930s or north of Mississippi. If you want to read more, please see Hilton Obenzinger's extraordinary personal account, Busy Dying (Tucson: Chax, 2008). I entered Columbia in the fall of 1972. The last real flare-up had occurred the previous May, when an antiwar demonstration led to a Days of Rage-style smashing of Fifth Avenue shop windows. I enthusiastically attended the semester's first meeting of SDS, only to have it turn out to be the meeting at which the local chapter dissolved itself. After that came political fatigue. I first heard the term "political correctness" then, but what it meant was that some campus politico would confront you on the Walk and ask where you stood on, say, the Polisario Front, and you knew it was a trick question — were they the true Spearhead of the People, or merely running-dog roaders for the CIA? Political involvement meant endless factional disputes, paranoia, poison. Lyndon LaRouche was prominent, as well as several competing varieties of Maoists. You can tell by looking at the eyes of the figure above what replaced political passion for the rest of us. Despite the prop robes, I never bothered graduating, although to be fair I had a number of great teachers and happily lost myself in the vastness of the library, as well as making seven or eight friends who are still my friends. Not having graduated (nine incompletes; hundreds of dollars in library fines) did not prevent me from returning to teach there, in the MFA program, a couple of decades later. The place was no friendlier then than when I had been a student, maybe even less, since the Reagan years had infused a renewed spirit of entitlement, and the radical shift in the value of Manhattan real estate had considerably increased the institution's wealth. Right now Columbia is engaged in a wholesale annexation of West Harlem, proving that some things never change, although today there is little organized resistance and no publicity given to what there is. Anyway, the university is now only one of a hundred entities that could adopt the fight song as its own. — Luc Sante *** Originally published at Luc Sante's blog, Pinakothek. Hilobrow.com has curated a collection of our favorite Pinakothek installments. This is the second in a series of ten.

selby-demon

Joshua Glenn — Wed, 15 Jul 2009 00:50:38 +0000

mitchell-joseph-ears-1938-2

Joshua Glenn — Wed, 15 Jul 2009 00:58:59 +0000

mitchell-joseph-ears-1938-2

Joshua Glenn — Wed, 15 Jul 2009 01:00:01 +0000

putnam-hilary

Joshua Glenn — Wed, 15 Jul 2009 01:33:45 +0000

papers+1

Joshua Glenn — Wed, 15 Jul 2009 04:51:58 +0000

papers+2

Joshua Glenn — Wed, 15 Jul 2009 04:53:04 +0000

papers+3

Joshua Glenn — Wed, 15 Jul 2009 04:53:35 +0000

papers+4

Joshua Glenn — Wed, 15 Jul 2009 04:54:01 +0000

thurman-robert

Joshua Glenn — Wed, 15 Jul 2009 05:07:19 +0000

Vimalakirti

Joshua Glenn — Wed, 15 Jul 2009 05:09:55 +0000

gere-dalai-lama

Joshua Glenn — Wed, 15 Jul 2009 05:12:16 +0000

thich-nhat-hanh-peacemarch

Joshua Glenn — Wed, 15 Jul 2009 05:15:11 +0000

lost-horizon

Joshua Glenn — Wed, 15 Jul 2009 05:18:52 +0000

tibet-protest

Joshua Glenn — Wed, 15 Jul 2009 05:22:20 +0000

ecofont_voorbeeld_klein

Matthew Battles — Wed, 15 Jul 2009 18:18:45 +0000

Greenwash Your Inkjet

Matthew Battles — Wed, 15 Jul 2009 18:38:12 +0000

Does firing up your printer induce pangs of conscience? Do you wonder (but only a little) whether cyan and magenta are sustainable? Download Ecofont and you can go back to printing by the ream! Dutch design company SPRANGQ says the tiny holes in its new typeface reduce ink usage by 20%. And while the effect is obvious in the large font size above, at ten or eleven points, it will just make you wonder if it's time to change your contact lenses—or check with your eye doctor if you don't wear them. But I think the letters look better at large size—the holes make them look all lit up! In small (and kinda fuzzy) print, SPRANGQ admits that the font won't do much to save the polar bears. Nonetheless, the font's premier has garnered heavy coverage in the press (for a typeface) from the likes of the Guardian, Fox News, and Gizmodo. By prompting a frank and revelatory conversation about printing waste, clean living, and tension headaches, they'll surely change the course of civilization. Of course you could also simply screen back your printing to 80% black. But why bother when you can download ecofont for FREE? That's a real commitment to living gentler on this, the good Earth. Regardless of your choice, SPRANGQ recommends switching to sans serif; those little curlicue serifs use extra ink. Stop killing whales, Times New Roman!

e

Matthew Battles — Wed, 15 Jul 2009 18:40:54 +0000

Hilo Heroes, July 19-25

HILOBROW — Sun, 19 Jul 2009 12:00:58 +0000

HAPPY BIRTHDAY, this week, to the following high-, low-, no-, and hilobrow heroes. Click here for more Hilo Hero birthdays. JULY 19 If CHESTER HIMES (1909-84) hadn't found himself broke in France in the mid-1950s he might today be remembered only as the author of some acute, painful treatments of racism and prison life — the kind of books that are shelved under O for "obligatory" and seldom if ever read for pleasure. But an encounter with Marcel Duhamel, who founded the pioneering Série Noire line of rough-edged crime novels, led him to toss off nine riotous, breakneck pulp masterpieces. In these books, mostly featuring the black police detectives Coffin Ed Johnson and Grave Digger Jones, the law equals white rule, and therefore every single person — including the detectives — stands on the wrong side. While A Rage in Harlem (1957), The Real Cool Killers (1959), and the difficult, exhilarating Blind Man With a Pistol (1969), among others, make many of the same points as his earlier social realist exercises, the pain and despair are inextricably entwined with the laughs and thrills. There isn't another crime writer who so effectively used the genre to turn vinegar into wine. — Luc Sante JULY 20 In the Orwellian year of 1984, my father took me to the Centre Pompidou and exposed my 10-year-old sponge of a brain to its first contemporary art collection and, therein, to a towering agglomeration of television sets, each showing different and apparently disconnected sequences of the concrete and the abstract. I stumbled away baffled, befuddled and overstimulated, and with a hazy, unsettling montage of objects, colors and sounds seeping through my noggin. That day, NAM JUNE PAIK (1932-2006) lodged himself firmly in my consciousness. I wish I'd been at the multicolored, inside-out gasworks on New Year's Day of the same year, when Paik — inventor of video art, gadget junkie, minimalist musician, and prescient commentator on the ubiquity of the cathode ray tube — realized "Good Morning, Mr. Orwell," his shambolic compendium-cum-cabaret-act that linked Paris and New York via satellite and spliced his visionary videography with contributions from, amongst others, John Cage, the Thompson Twins, and Allen Ginsberg. But I'm happy with second best. — Patrick Cates JULY 21

In his seminal works, The Mechanical Bride (1951) and Understanding Media (1964), the Canadian philosopher MARSHALL MCLUHAN (1911-80) offered astute, didactic examinations of how the public receives and processes media, and what advertising tells us about society. Currently the darling of every Film Theory 101 class, there was a time when McLuhan — whose seminars and books were laced with puns, typographical displays, and a rapid-fire delivery at odds with staid academia — was considered at best a dilettante and at worst a crackpot. The fact that he died just as our current media era (when each blogger has her own set of followers, comic books have been elevated to neo-absurdist cinema, and Twitter has transformed each random neural firing into a public announcement) was beginning is too bad. What would McLuhan think? — written and drawn by Joe Alterio

JULY 22 JAMES WHALE (1889-1957) was born in England's industrial Black Country. Here's a typical gag from those parts:

An old left-wing activist is on his death bed. He announces that he's joined the Conservative Party. His comrades are shocked: "Why's yow doon eet? Yow beyn a Labour man aw yer loyfe!" He responds, "Ar, bood bedder one of thoyse booggers go thayne woon of oos."

Whale, who was openly gay, brought the Black Country's morbid brand of camp to 1930s Hollywood, where he is best remembered for directing Frankenstein and The Bride of Frankenstein, horror movies that provide simple allegories of gleeful or guilty men committing "crimes against nature" in the secret of the night. But camp humor is originally an English discourse — TBOF's posh'n'poofy Doctor Pretorius, the Fearsome Giant, and the "Whoopsie-Daisy" Old Crone are familiar Pantomime characters. So instead of allowing a Queer Studies reading of Whale's movies to overwhelm us, we should instead regard him as one of the engineers of a new, globalized mode of camp in which gender, death, morality, class, and sexual orientation became matters of playful distance. But even as the victorious Pretorius giggles, drinks, and smokes in a crypt lit by skull-candles, we get a sobering sense of what it is to pursue desire to its logical ends — and it always ends up with your laboratory exploding. — Greg Rowland JULY 23 John Mortimer, the barrister who successfully defended Last Exit To Brooklyn, a novel by HUBERT SELBY JR. (1928-2004), against an obscenity charge in a ’60s British courtroom, would do the same ten years later for the Sex Pistols’ Never Mind The Bollocks. In the first instance, he carried the day with his ingenious "aversion argument," which proposed that Last Exit was "intentionally disgusting, shocking and outrageous," that "it made the reader share in the horror it described and thereby so disgusted and outraged him that he would do what he could to eradicate those evils"; in the second, he somehow convinced the court that "bollocks" was a harmless medievalism. Had Johnny Lydon/Rotten read Selby? A later generation of punks were all over this gentle chronicler of human degradation: Henry Rollins, turned onto Selby’s work by Lydia Lunch, sought the older man out and formed an extraordinary friendship with him. As a writer Selby’s secret weapon was pity, that currently despised and un-Rollinsy word. Georgette, the transvestite addict in his story “The Queen Is Dead," has something to do with Van Morrison’s Madame George: both flit desperately between love-dreams and a heartbreaking daylight, between two realms that are simultaneously visible only to the tear-rinsed eye of pity. — James Parker JULY 24 Edward John Moreton Drax Plunkett, the 18th lord of the Irish barony of Dunsany, hunted big game in Africa and played champion chess. As LORD DUNSANY (1878-1957), he also wrote, without revising, a prodigious number of short stories, essays, novels, and successful plays that no one performs any more. He is justly enshrined for his marvelous and influential fantasy tales, which mutate from the lofty and limpid high myths of his early "Pagana" stories to the chummy clubhouse adventure tales of his later decades. His necessary work lies in the zone in between: the dozens of tales, mostly published in the teens, that ironically reframe, with an urbane tone at once loving and tart, the profound Faerie glamour of his first inspirations. Tales like the glorious “Idle Days on the Yann” and the hilarious “Chu-bu and Sheemish” propel us far beyond the fields we know. But they also remind us, with a forgiving smile and a frankness far removed from the stately world creation of Tolkien, why it is, and why it might be good, that we never actually escape. — Erik Davis JULY 25 In 1927, ELIAS CANETTI (1905-94) threw himself into a Viennese crowd protesting an acquittal in a murder trial. The crowd went on to burn down the Palace of Justice, and Canetti's feeling of selflessness and exhilaration vexed him for decades: "Fifty-three years have passed, and the agitation of that day is still in my bones... I became a part of the crowd, I fully dissolved in it...." During the following decade he wrote two plays and a nearly great novel, Auto-da-fé, before fleeing Austria for England. He spent the next twenty or so years working on Crowds and Power, in which he attempted to make sense of these sensations — the loss of self; and the feeling of the subjectivity of this collective being, the crowd — that he'd experienced. Crowds and Power is far too long, with too many rash generalizations, but while Gustave LeBon and others wrote with disdain about mobs from outside (as potential victims of crowd violence), only Canetti tried to describe the phenomenology of the crowd from inside. It is these moments in his flawed book that will endure, and still have not been matched. — Tor Aarestad

Pinakothek (3) — Skins

Luc Sante — Wed, 22 Jul 2009 12:00:27 +0000

ASIDE FROM BRANDY and cigars, no product on the market is packaged quite as traditionally as cigarette papers. Nearly every item on your grocer's shelf gets an image update every few years to make sure it passes the nowness scan the shopper's eye performs as it scrolls down the aisle. The rolling-paper package, however, like its fellows, presumably appeals to aged gentlemen who consume those items at their club while leafing through bound volumes of Punch, and remain faithful to the brands favored by their grandfathers; they care that their brand won the gold medal at Saragossa in 1908. Okay, but really — haven't those old gentlemen already gone to the glue factory, and aren't rolling papers mostly consumed by stoners, backpackers, squatters, Deadheads? I guess we can assume that a polite fiction is at play, the manufacturers of cigarette papers pretending that their product isn't really employed as accessory to what some people might consider a crime. Meanwhile, potheads can spend hours in happy contemplation of the complex patterns and inscrutable imagery on the packages. I had never seen the Ottoman package until I spotted it recently at a Turkish import store in Berlin; it became an instant favorite. More than any other design I can think of at the moment, it succeeds in activating the wayback machine: looking simultaneously venerable and startlingly new, it manages to replicate permanently the effect that its modernism must have had a century ago, its modern-style curlicues blending in with Victoriana to a degree, but in their asymmetry preparing the eye for the shouting Broadwayism of the logo. More than any other brand, Ottoman has suffered no updating of any sort. Its boast of excellence, within, is printed in four languages: Arabic, French, Greek, and what appears to be Amharic. The only change is that, although "Constantinople" is printed in Roman and Greek characters along the edge and "Stamboul" appears in the inside flap, the papers are now made in Italy. Abadies, with their imperial arms and fly device, were so much the most elegant of the brands that I, for one, manfully struggled with them for years even though their adhesiveness left something to be desired. Like the famous Zouave on the Zig-Zag package, the trappings of the Abadie pack seem to hark back to the reign of Napoleon III. Today, as shown, the import version is marred by a textual addition in a drastically ill-judged typeface and size. Most American vipers had no idea what that central word meant; as a result it became a kind of stoner invocation: "Riz, man..." Riz La Croix, on the other hand, just became "Rizlas" in America. If you tried to buy them in France, though, you'd have to respect the quasi-rebus and ask for "ree lah crwah." The ravages of globalism are demonstrated in this pack, made for sale in France: the gap between the "z" and the "l," formerly distinct in the European version, has been closed up. The packaging has been updated in other ways, too. Those fine white lines, not unpleasant although they nearly obscure the escutcheon, weren't there before. On the back, the phrase "Rolling Since 1796" appears, in English, a nod to the international confraternity of hacky-sack players. Finally, from the archives come the Spanish-made Blanco y Negros, a package from circa 1980 that may or may not have changed since, although I would suspect some more racially sensitive adaptation must have taken place. These fall into a different category, since they proclaim not long and immovable tradition but modernity, circa 1923. They perhaps meant to encourage subsistence farmers in Extremadura to imagine themselves reveling in the sensual delights of Harlem skyscraper speakeasies every time they rolled up a gasper. They didn't change for at least sixty years for the same reason that innocent but eager Euros perpetuated the misconceived idea of Dixieland jazz well within living memory, in thrall to a confusion of exotica and modernismo as firmly rooted in the European mythosphere as Karl May's idea of the American West. As with all these papers, whatever was being smoked in them, the packaging itself sold the consumer a viper's dream of otherness and elsewhere. — Luc Sante *** Originally published at Luc Sante's blog, Pinakothek. Hilobrow.com has curated a collection of our favorite Pinakothek installments. This is the third in a series of ten.

The Nitty Gritty of Nirvana

Joshua Glenn — Thu, 23 Jul 2009 12:00:50 +0000

ROBERT THURMAN, who was ordained a Buddhist monk in 1964 by Tenzin Gyatso, the current Dalai Lama (an avatar of Lowbrow, in the most praiseworthy sense of that term), is one of the world's most respected scholars and translators of Tibetan and Sanskrit for a Western audience — i.e., he is a Highbrow. Even more confusing: during the Nineties Thurman was best known as a mentor of middlebrow "celebrity Buddhists," and as the father of a middlebrow celebrity. So what to make of him? I interviewed Thurman for the magazine Utne Reader in 1996. GLENN: In the 1960s, it was the dream of many young Americans to trek off to the East and renounce the world of selfishness and acquisition. You did exactly that when you became the first American to be ordained a Tibetan Buddhist monk — by the exiled Dalai Lama, no less. Yet only four years later, you returned to the United States, put aside your sandals and Afghani pants for a coat and tie, and never looked back. Why? THURMAN: After being a novice and then a monk for four years, I decided to follow the bodhisattva path (although I do not consider myself a bodhisattva), which is to seek enlightenment for the sake of others, to serve others. But being a Buddhist monk was not a suitable position, at that time, from which to command people's respect, to engage them intellectually, or teach them, because everyone thought that an American Buddhist monk was somehow defective. There wasn't then, and still isn't, a real social understanding of the place of a monk in Western society. The academy is the monastery, if you will, of modern secular society, so my quitting being a monk and returning to become a professor was just a natural adaptation to America's social reality. I was also influenced shortly after I returned to the United States by The Vimalakirti Sutra, an ancient Buddhist scripture that I was hired to translate from Tibetan. Vimalakirti was not a monk, but an enlightened layperson who emphasized the notion of "nonduality," which means that one doesn't create artificial distinctions between the everyday world and some exalted state. In other words, you try to live out your nirvana in the world, not in the monastery. [caption id="attachment_3818" align="aligncenter" width="442" caption="8th-century Chinese image of Vimalakirti"][/caption] GLENN: Your translation of Vimalakirti's teachings is complex. We learn that you should strive to be neither affected by passion, desire, or hatred, nor to be free of them; you should live neither in control of your mind nor indulging it; you should be an ordinary person, yet be somehow extraordinary. But how does one function like that in the day-to-day world? THURMAN: It is very complicated. I remember when I proudly gave a published copy of my translation to my original teacher, Geshe Wangyal, and he said, "Oh, the Vimalakirti Sutra. Are you beginning to study that?" And here I had just spent forever translating it! What he was saying, of course, was that I would be finding new insights in that work for years to come, and he was right. As I understand Vimalakirti, he says that yes, there are all these amazing, miraculous, beautiful esoteric realities, but that they are all right here, right now, in the most ordinary things and events. It's really a very Zenlike idea that we should strive to be aware of the immediate situation and not be dualistic, not seek nirvana somewhere out there. Nirvana is not a place, necessarily, but rather a selfless, open way of being in the world. GLENN: The way of the bodhisattva boils down to two things, in my understanding: an awareness of "nonduality," or what's called sunyata, the "voidness" or emptiness of the self and all other things, on the one hand, and compassion for all creatures on the other. I'd like to return to the idea of compassion, but first I'd like to ask whether you think that it's dangerous to teach people that the self and the whole universe are somehow void. THURMAN: That is a very important question. The Buddha himself was, according to the great scholar Nagarjuna, very worried about teaching people about sunyata, about emptiness, since people might misinterpret it as nihilism, become confused, lose all their morals and ethics, and go around doing very negative things. But the Buddha lived in another time. In those days, people were very spiritual and lived in relatively simple societies, where everything had a traditional meaning attached to it. In this environment, the idea of sunyata was potentially very damaging. Today, however, everyone is a nihilist already. Everyone starts off with very materialistic ideas that they have no soul, no mind, just a brain floating there, with random chemical mutations determining everything. They start out in that place the Buddha worried sunyata would take people. But voidness or emptiness is not the same thing as nihilism, by any means. The teaching of sunyata simply says that nothing exists independently, that everything and everyone depend on everything and everyone else for their existence. This teaching, rather than being a danger, is the one hope for a safeguard and a cure for today's nihilism. GLENN: But the Dalai Lama refers to these sorts of teachings as the "secret" teachings, because the idea that you can be enlightened without having to retreat from all the passions and activities of everyday life is a very dangerous one, especially for people who haven't first trained, as you did. Vimalakirti, for instance, was a real man of the world, a successful businessman, a swinger, not a monk, and his example might lead others astray, right? THURMAN: Absolutely. GLENN: I can't help but wonder if someone like Richard Gere, one of the founders of Tibet House New York, who recently told US magazine that he considers himself to be a sort of monk living in the world, might not be in danger of going astray as a result of being in such close contact with a person who champions such a complex form of Buddhism. Not to mention the other "celebrity Buddhists" who have become associated with Tibetan Buddhism, people like Philip Glass, Harrison Ford, Lou Reed, Paul Simon, Laurie Anderson, Edie Brickell, Oliver Stone... THURMAN: First of all, I didn't make that much progress as a monk. I learned a lot more after coming back and having to deal with the nitty-gritty. It's comparatively easy to be a monk in a quiet monastery, but the bodhisattva tries to engage with all the noise of the world. As far as "celebrity Buddhists" go, I can't judge them individually, but I think celebrities are in a very interesting position. They've already achieved great fame, success, and wealth, and they've realized that those things alone don't bring happiness; that, in fact, they can be a real pain in the neck. They have fewer illusions than the rest of us, who still imagine that worldly success is going to solve all our problems. And many of them have looked to Buddhism, which — whether it is Tibetan, Japanese, or whatever — urges you and helps you to look inside yourself for treasures and pleasures, rather than depending on some sort of external success for ratification. Also, Richard Gere has some Tantric initiations, and he does some meditations and prostrations and so forth, but I don't think he considers himself a great Tantric yogi or anything, or pretends to be one. I'm sure if you asked any of these celebrities point-blank, "Do you do any esoteric thing?" they'd laugh and say, "No, no..." What someone does in Tibetan Buddhism is not levitate or whatever, but try to be more humble, try to be generous, try to be tolerant of things that are irritating, a little bit, day by day. That's where they measure their real progress. Finally, I don't teach people high Tantric teaching. The reason I write a bit about them is that I like everyone to know that such amazingly sophisticated things are there in the Tibetan inner sciences. But if someone wants to really study Tantra, if they've done some serious preliminary practice, I would refer them to His Holiness the Dalai Lama or to some other real guru. GLENN: Then you don't consider yourself a guru? THURMAN: I'm not a real guru, I'm an academic professor. I may be what they call a kalyanamitra, a spiritual friend of some of these people, offering advice now and then if I'm asked. But I don't try to take up the role of serious guru. In fact, part of choosing the professor's or the academic's life pattern has to do precisely with avoiding getting into the guru game with people. If I had stayed a monk, I would have had to have disciples, which gets you involved in the complications of being a guru, having people develop various kinds of transference toward you and dependencies on you, and I didn't think that was healthy for them or for me. I was helped in the decision, of course, by my wife Nena, who always insisted on maintaining that I not get deluded about there being anything exceptional about me! She's been a great spiritual friend of mine, and had the foresight to encourage me to pursue more mainstream academic pursuits. We're on a pilgrimage together as much as possible. GLENN: I'd like to get back to compassion. In the Mahayana tradition compassion is seen simply as the logical outcome of the deep understanding that all things and people and events are "void," or interdependent. Because, logically, if you harm others when your existence is inextricably bound up with the rest of the world, then you're also harming yourself. Your book The Politics of Enlightenment: A Handbook for Cool Revolution builds a whole politics of "engaged Buddhism" out of this idea of compassion. But it's a very paradoxical idea: How can someone be simultaneously indifferent to the world and altruistic? THURMAN: The concept of "engaged Buddhism" isn't my term. I believe we first heard it from Thich Nhat Hanh, the Vietnamese Zen master. But bodhicitta, the way of the bodhisattva, is exactly as you put it, the joyous and compassionate commitment to living beings born from an unwavering confrontation with the inconceivable profundity of sunyata, or emptiness. It's an idea that goes all the way back to Sakyamuni Buddha, the historical Buddha, himself. The Buddha never taught escape from responsibility or society; he taught escape from ignorance and evil thoughts and actions. After he was enlightened under the Bo tree, as the legend goes, he didn't stay there: He got up and tirelessly taught others for the rest of his life. [caption id="attachment_3823" align="aligncenter" width="550" caption="Thich Nhat Hanh (center) leading a peace march"][/caption] GLENN: But teaching Buddhism isn't the same thing as a "revolution," necessarily. Buddhism tends to be regarded, in the United States, anyway, as a nice therapy, not a force for social change. THURMAN: Well, you know, the Buddha was one of the few great religious leaders who was never persecuted or executed, because he knew the art of the possible, he was a very effective administrator and strategist. He was a prince, and in those days princes weren't trained to be comparative literature professors, or poets; if he hadn't gone over the wall, so to speak, he would have been a general. So he realized that he couldn't just say, "We're going to rule India according to the Buddhist ethic, and let's give up our armies," and so forth. He would have been crushed. Instead he founded the monastery, this very countercultural institution that exerted a slow and steady influence on many societies over the following centuries. And the sangha, the community, he founded was a sort of nation-within-a-nation in which the principles of individualism, nonviolence, personal evolutionism, simplicity, equal access to enlightenment, altruism, and pragmatism held sway. And if lots of people really started trying to live by these principles, we'd have a revolution on our hands. Also, I want to point out that these ideals fit in very nicely with what we think of as "American" ideals of freedom, civility, pluralism, altruism, generosity, faith in human development, and individualism. We don't need to call it a "Buddhist" movement, if that alienates people. The point of my book, which I'm writing all over again, by the way, is to say, look, given the fact that we live in an extremely free society, the idea that we can just sit on the sidelines and criticize everything "they" do is irresponsible, it's unenlightened, and it's un-Buddhist. There comes a time when you have to step in and take responsibility. We need to get up off our Zen pillows and mobilize active Buddhist participation in American politics. We need to speak out, we need to engage our opponents in dialogue, and we need to vote for the closest thing we can find to our principles. The Tibetan Buddhist movement in this country is only 15 or 20 years old, but I think it can become a very effective movement, and I think it's very necessary right now. GLENN: The "engaged Buddhism" of groups like the Buddhist Peace Fellowship, for instance, is very much an oppositional movement, one that practices protest and resistance, not one that seeks to actually step in and take over American society. And I hardly need to point out that Buddhism has historically tended to support the inequalities and tyrannies of whatever political system it has found itself under. THURMAN: You're right. The engaged Buddhists who come from Japan, Vietnam, or China, for instance, have a background in their respective Buddhist traditions, where Buddhism was never anything more than a countercultural institution. So these "engaged Buddhists" are operating, ironically, under a dualistic presupposition that Buddhism can only be a restraining force on a fundamentally corrupt social order they can never really transform. They're like the human rights activists who limit what they ask governments to do. They say, "Well, we're just going to restrict ourselves to stopping torture. We're not going to ask these governments to really allow self-determination, because it's hopeless, they'll never do it." There is this very defeatist attitude that basically says it's impossible to stop... well, Caesar. It fits in well with the Christian "Render unto Caesar what is Caesar's, and unto the Lord what is the Lord's," you know, because you can never stop Caesar. Caesar is going to crucify you. GLENN: I take it, then, that you get your inspiration for a "politics of enlightenment" from the history of Tibet. You have often described the preinvasion culture of Tibet glowingly as having been unique in all the world. How so? THURMAN: As an institution Tibetan Buddhism has had the experience of administering a society along Buddhist lines, not just protesting or whatever. Tibet is the only Buddhist country in history where Buddhism ever became the mainstream culture. In Japan, China, India, or in Southeast Asia, for instance, Buddhism always coexisted with something like Confucianism, Brahmanism, or Shintoism — some sort of native culture that considered Buddhism impractical as far as fighting wars or running a bureaucracy are concerned. The rulers of those countries might very well have honored the monastery at times, but the final control, socially, rested with the king, with his military establishment and his aristocracy. Whereas in Tibet, after a thousand years of that same type of dualistic social structure, where Buddhism was a kind of countercultural restraining influence on the mainstream political entity, in 1642 the citizens of Tibet asked one of their leading monks, the fifth Dalai Lama, in fact, to be the king. Most of the national budget was then invested in the monasteries, which became the training ground for the government bureaucracy. Then, once the majority of single Tibetan males were in monasteries instead of in the military, the country demilitarized. And they developed an educational system connected with a massive monastic tradition that has no replica anywhere in the world. Their gross national product of enlightened persons must have been proportionally higher than any other country ever. More than that, the Tibetans succeeded in transplanting that same cultural pattern into the Mongolian nations, which then became what I call "fully monasticized" and very demilitarized. This was kind of a miracle because the Tibetans and the Mongolians were two of the most ferocious, imperialistic, military nations in the world, and then, just as the rest of the world was gearing up to become imperialists, they turned into very peaceful monks. Both nations ended up being chewed up by the Russians and the Chinese precisely because they were demilitarized, but for three and a half centuries — right up until the Chinese conquest of Tibet in 1950 — the Tibetans were unique, and they continue to be potentially unique. If we can restore the Tibetan culture, they will show us a very meaningful society. GLENN: Tibet was the inspiration for the mystical, utopian land of Shangri-La in James Hilton's novel Lost Horizon. Are you "Shangri-La-izing" Tibet? Is Tibet really such a worthwhile culture to emulate? It wasn't a democracy, it was ruled for centuries by feudalistic noble families and then by theocratic monks, it had a low standard of living... THURMAN: Tibet was never a "theocracy"; Buddhist monasteries are run on the rules established by the Buddha, and disobedience and critical thinking are encouraged in them. But to answer my critics who accuse me of trying to pretend that every Tibetan was an enlightened yogi, and they never even wiped their butts, and they didn't have robbers and bandits and ignorant people, and they weren't cruel ever — like it's all just some sort of fantasy of mine, well, that isn't at all the case. My thesis is a sociological one that has to do with mainstream social trends. The fact that a great majority of a country's single males are monks rather than soldiers is a major social difference. Now, many of those monks might be nasty, they might punch people, some of them might pick your pockets, some of them might be ignorant. They might eat yak meat; they're not out there petting the yaks. So I am in no way Shangri-La-izing Tibet when I try to develop a non-Orientalist way of appraising and appreciating certain social achievements of Tibet, which really tried to create a fully Buddhist society. But my opponents, who want to adopt the old British attitude that Tibet was dirty, grubby, and backward; or the modernist attitude that it's a "premodern" undeveloped society; or the attitude of many other Buddhist countries that think Tibet was somehow degenerate because it was very Tantric, and Tantric Buddhism grows out of the degenerate period in India, well... I think these attitudes are mired in the idea that we modern Americans are the most advanced civilization the world has ever seen. I don't think that's the case. I consider us pretty barbaric. We're like the Mongolians before the Tibetans civilized them. GLENN: You, Richard Gere and several others founded Tibet House New York — which is a cultural embassy of sorts, combining the functions of an educational institution, a museum, a conservation foundation, and a membership community — at the Dalai Lama's request in 1987. You've said that one of the goals of Tibet House is "to make Tibetan culture familiar in every American household by the year 2000." Is that one way of "civilizing" America? THURMAN: I think so, but there are various levels on which it operates. We don't have to convince everybody that Tibet is the unique, ultimate society of the world to try to save it. There are a lot of good-hearted people who'd like to save various Native American cultures and indigenous people all over the world, and if that's how they have to consider Tibet to want to save it, that's fine with me. It is my belief that Tibet can become a great school for mind training for people who would come there from all over the world to get "higher" education. Tibet could be a kind of Switzerland, where people would go not only for spas, but also for yogic training of a certain special kind. It would be a very effective institution, if they could develop it. GLENN: The current situation in Tibet would seem to preclude any such development, don't you think? THURMAN: Ever since Mao's armies invaded Tibet in 1950, the Chinese have engaged in what has been described as a wholesale campaign of genocide and "culturecide" against Tibet. As many as one-fifth of the preinvasion population of 6 million people were killed by famine, warfare, and execution. 130,000 Tibetans have fled into exile, and hundreds of thousands more have been interred in gulags and work camps. Tibetan cultural heritage has been carefully and systematically destroyed: Historic and religious sites and monuments have been razed; the Tibetan language was basically outlawed; much of Tibet's voluminous philosophical, historical, and biographical literature was burned; and only 13 of over 6,000 Tibetan Buddhist monasteries remain standing. Worse, China's program of sinicization, an ongoing population transfer into Tibet, has resulted in seemingly irreparable damage to Tibetan culture. Tibetan culture has survived the Chinese in two places. It has been reconstructed in exile, in the tiny seed community of about 6,000 Tibetans in Dharamsala, the Indian town where the Dalai Lama lives, which is the seat of the Tibetan government-in-exile. And it has survived in the hearts of most Tibetans, and in their language, in that even though all the buildings have been destroyed, and the monks, and the education of several generations, their own hearts are still untouched in their basic faith and orientation — they haven't succumbed to Chinese materialism as a whole. But I also fear we're getting to a point now where we're many generations away from the old education and the old culture, so the memory of that thriving world is endangered. Also, the Chinese are relocating so many people to Tibet and profoundly diluting the Tibetan population. [caption id="attachment_3828" align="aligncenter" width="550" caption="Tibetans in the US protest Beijing Olympics"][/caption] GLENN: The Dalai Lama, as the exiled political leader of a very oppressed people, has taken a very peculiar position. He refuses to hate the Chinese. In fact, he has frequently said that we need to get rid of the notion of "enemy," that we need to transform our enemy into someone toward whom we feel respect and gratitude. THURMAN: It's a very difficult notion, but the Dalai Lama is saying there that the only way to peace is peace, and that you cannot achieve peace through violence. He is following an age-old tradition that includes Gandhi and Martin Luther King, but he's also staking out new territory by trying to do this in an international setting, whereas leaders like Gandhi and King were working within their own nations. Also, he is speaking for a tiny minority, 6 million Tibetans, against a vastly superior numerical opponent, which is the huge Chinese nation of 1.3 billion people. All he has on his side are the truth and his peacefulness. The amazing and audacious and visionary thing that the Dalai Lama does, and how he got the Nobel Peace Prize in 1989, is his insistence that he is going to see a free Tibet in his lifetime by nonviolent means, and that everyone should solve problems by nonviolent means. The Kissingers of this world, and the Deng Xiaopings, laugh at him and despise him. But I have great faith in him, and I believe that what he is saying will come to pass. He was really ecstatic in 1989 when the Czechoslovakian revolution against the Russians was relatively peaceful. Hungary, the Baltic states, and all of that unraveling of the Russian empire proved that this sort of thing can happen relatively peacefully, and that it is more effective if it is peaceful than if it is a violent, bloody revolution. The Dalai Lama always says, "Let's not talk about Buddhism, let's talk about the common human religion of kindness." You cannot make peace with the neighbor by hating the neighbor. The Dalai Lama gets this fundamental teaching from Shantideva, the great Mahayana teacher, who wrote the Bodhicharyavatara, the guide to the bodhisattva way of life, which is the whole yoga of developing tolerance by learning not to hate the enemy — by, in fact, learning to identify the true enemy, which is hatred. Hatred is far worse than any ordinary enemy. Ordinary enemies harm us, but the harm they do is not just in order to make us unhappy; it is also meant to be of some help to themselves. But hatred itself has no other function but to destroy our positive actions and make us unhappy. So therefore hatred is the thing you mustn't give in to, and hatred is the only thing that you can hate. THURMAN on TRANSLATION and DEATH GLENN: I'd like to ask you a question about your profession. Translation's reputation as a form of literature is low, to say the least. It is too often perceived as merely a mechanical activity, in which one simply finds words from one language that correspond to words from another. But you have been known to say that the hermeneutic — or interpretive — enterprise is the very essence of the Buddhist path, and that the problems of hermeneutics are the problems of life itself. How so? THURMAN: Well, everything is a matter of perspective and interpretation, right? And so how you interpret things has everything to do with the inner quality of your response to things. Within that, I think that translation is a wonderful exercise in seeing the multiple ways reality can be expressed and analyzed. Different languages carve up reality in different ways. There is an ancient Buddhist symbol of a translator that is a two-headed duck — not a duck, exactly, but more like a cuckoo or something. It has two heads, meaning that it looks into two different cultures and makes a bridge between them. Now, in modern times, translation is not respected. Modern cultures are fairly arrogant and ethnocentric, and think of themselves as higher than anything from the past, or any other existing "premodern" culture. So we naturally think that in translating something, we're bringing something from some lower realm into our realm just out of curiosity. Since we're the highest culture, anything we would translate into English would just be for our curiosity. But in the ancient period, and particularly in Tibet, where they had the idea that Buddhist knowledge, which they learned from India, was something of a higher nature, and that to learn about it could elevate a human being, translators were respected, because they had to look into the realm of that higher knowledge and bring it into the lower cultural realm of the target language. In our Dharma communities, though, a translator is a little more honored, because we have the idea that Western philosophy didn't get it together quite as well as the Buddhist philosophers did. GLENN: In the introductory chapter to your recent translation of The Tibetan Book of the Dead, you write that death is "a strong force close to life, a powerful impulse to the good, an intensifier of positive attitudes and actions." What do you mean by that? THURMAN: On a very human level, Tibetan culture shares our Western attitude towards death, that it is a frightening and tragic end of life. On a more spiritual level, however, Tibetans have learned that death forces everyone to let go of everything: You let go of your mind, your personality, and your sense of control over reality. And that is what Buddhism teaches, that nothing we think we are, do, feel, or have has any stability. This state of letting go can also happen in moments of great pleasure, like in orgasm, or sometimes when you make a great gift or a great self-overcoming. Heroic acts are done when people let go of their normal self-guarding attitudes; at the moment of death, then, everyone comes into some sort of heroic state. If you try to be aware that life is fundamentally let-go-able, even when you're not actually facing death, then you can begin to live in a more 'letting-go' way. You can become more sensitive in your interactions, more free, and more open. Being aware of death, even rehearsing death in meditation can make your life more rich. The art of dying is as important as the art of living.

atwoodscrab

Joshua Glenn — Sat, 25 Jul 2009 19:36:35 +0000

rosemary-scrabble

Joshua Glenn — Sat, 25 Jul 2009 19:39:30 +0000

sabrina-scrabble

Joshua Glenn — Sat, 25 Jul 2009 19:42:11 +0000

rosemary-scrabble2

Joshua Glenn — Sat, 25 Jul 2009 19:43:48 +0000

The dark side of Scrabble

Joshua Glenn — Sat, 25 Jul 2009 19:45:00 +0000

SCRABBLE IS a hilobrow board game; it rewards mental agility, a large vocabulary, and a cutthroat thirst for victory. Like all things hilobrow, the game (invented by an architect in 1938, it first achieved popularity in 1952) is enjoyed by highbrows and lowbrows alike. And yet, it subtly puts players on edge, revealing to them at some not entirely conscious level the shortcomings of their worldviews. Somehow — I don't pretend to understand the mechanism — Scrabble revalues our received values, overturns our normalized boundary stones, produces or releases new energies. But don't take my word for it. Here's the proof: in highbrow and lowbrow novels and movies since 1952, the game has served as a symbol of taboo sex, mental illness, and lethal violence. The game Scrabble, for highbrows and lowbrows alike, represents the status quo (as in the quote, below, from Abbie Hoffman's 1969 treatise, Woodstock Nation) in the moment of its demise.

Once upon a time, about a generation ago, right after the thirteen-thousand-seven hundred-and sixty-fourth demonstration against the war in Vietnam, young people started to congregate in an area of San Francisco known as the Haight Ashbury. They were sick of being programmed by an educational system void of excitement, creativity and sensuality. A system that channeled human beings like so many laboratory rats with electrodes rammed up their asses into a highly mechanized maze of class rankings, degrees, careers, neon supermarkets, military-industrial complexes, suburbs, repressed sexuality, hypocrisy, ulcers and psychoanalysts. The world they came from was a world of Double Speak. A world where Lyndon Johnson and his fabulous wife Lady Bird sat in their Miami-modern ranch house, drank their bourbon, and led the nation in a marathon game of Scrabble.

And what of Middlebrow, whose raison d'être is the domestication of disruption, the productive and profitable synthesizing of every thesis-antithesis? How does Middlebrow feel about Scrabble? In the middlebrow novels and movies I've encountered while researching this subject, Scrabble represents the unhappy compromise of thesis and antithesis, a defeated shrug of the shoulders. Instead of taboo sex, in middlebrow fictions Scrabble represents adultery; instead of mental illness, quiet desperation — a stoic acceptance of a bad situation; instead of violence, domestic malaise. Readers, don't be fooled! Despite Middlebrow's clumsy coverup attempts, Scrabble remains the most dangerous game. SCRABBLE AND SEX Although Ike and Mamie Eisenhower famously enjoyed many an innocent Scrabble match, in highbrow fiction the game is much racier. For example, when Van Veen and his cousin/lover, the titular nymphet of Nabokov's Ada (1969) can't ditch her little sister, Ada coos, "She thinks we are going to play Scrabble without her, or go through those Oriental gymnastics which, you remember, Van, you began teaching me, as you remember." Bored of staying in and playing Scrabble with their spouses, in dozens of low-middlebrow novels I surveyed, men and women take lovers and plan divorces. In lowbrow crime novels, however, the mere mention of Scrabble is a signal that lust-murder is in the air. Here are a couple of examples:

"What do you think I'm proposing, Richard Queen, a game of Scrabble?" He took a step toward her. And stopped, swallowing hard. "But Jessie, I'm an old man..." — Inspector Queen's Own Case: November Song (1956), by Ellery Queen

She was sitting by herself at a card table with a Scrabble game half finished, an empty coffee cup beside her, looking annoyed as hell. "Lose your partner?" I asked her. — The Erection Set (1972), by Mickey Spillane

[caption id="attachment_3857" align="aligncenter" width="500" caption="Margaret Atwood judges a Scrabble tournament."][/caption] Consider, too, the plight of Offred, heroine of Margaret Atwood's highbrow novel The Handmaid's Tale (1985), a dystopia set in a totalitarian future Cambridge, Mass.; she is the slave and concubine of Commander Fred, who uses her at will for sex... and Scrabble. Excerpt:

So that's what's in the forbidden room! Scrabble! I want to laugh, shriek with laughter, fall off my chair. This was once the game of old women, old men, in the summers or in retirement villas, to be played when there was nothing good on television. Or of adolescents, once, long long ago.... Now of course it's something different. Now it's forbidden, for us. Now it's dangerous. Now it's indecent.

SCRABBLE AND MENTAL ILLNESS From its early days, highbrows have associated the game with mental illness. In a posthumously published memoir, Near the Unbalanced Aquarium (written circa 1955-56), the poet Robert Lowell recounted a stay in New York Hospital's Payne Whitney Clinic, where he was treated for manic depression: "I sat gaping through Scrabble games," he wrote, "unable to form the simplest word." Likewise, when the narrator of The Bell Jar, published in '63 by Sylvia Plath, a former student of Lowell's at Boston University, is sent to a mental hospital, she gripes bitterly about "the English teacher I had in high school who came and tried to teach me how to play Scrabble." Middlebrows, who adore Sylvia Plath, have borrowed the image ever since. Scrabble is played by the mentally ill in low- and high-middlebrow novels and memoirs like Sybil (1973), Ordinary People (1976), Rick Moody's Garden State (1992), and Susanna Kaysen's Girl, Interrupted (1993). SCRABBLE AND VIOLENCE If Scrabble is supposed to be therapeutic for the mentally ill, then why do we find it mentioned in the same breath as lethal violence in highbrow and lowbrow fictions? A few examples:

"They obey their mothers. They don't go into a dark cellar without expecting to be strangled by a zombie. They bless themselves constantly. And us, what do we do? We watch television and play Scrabble. So there it is, children of light and darkness." — Americana (1971), by Don DeLillo

"Lydia, sex isn't everything. You are obsessed. For Christ's sake, give it a rest." "A rest until your leg heals? How am I going to make it meanwhile?" "I'll play Scrabble with you." Lydia screamed. The car began to swerve all over the street. "YOU SON-OF-A-BITCH! I'LL KILL YOU!" — Women (1978), by Charles Bukowski

Never mind that I am twenty years Pym's junior. What I recognize in Pym is what I recognize in myself: a spirit so wayward that, even while I am playing a game of Scrabble with my kids it can swing between the options of suicide, rape and assassination. — A Perfect Spy (1986), John Le Carré's most autobiographical novel

SCRABBLE AND REVELATION So is Scrabble's colorful grid of letters a mind-altering technology; does the game force us to revalue our values? Or is it a Kabbalistic-theosophist meditation, perhaps, a family-friendly means of studying permutations of the divine Name? Might the game accidentally tap into an occluded reality, accidentally reveal some carefully concealed truth? We find this suggested in the 1968 highbrow thriller Rosemary's Baby, for example, when Mia Farrow uses a Scrabble game to unlock the movie's dark secret. In Paul Theroux's 2001 novel, Hotel Honolulu, we catch a glimpse of the game as it might be seen by an alien, or a primitive — i.e., as a medium of divination.

His head lowered in reverence, the dark islander put out a set of fetish objects, like a shaman engrossed in a ritual for telling the future or interpreting the past.... His face was close to a painted square that was blocked with the sort of mystical patterns you find in the boldest mandalas of Oceania.... Peewee hurried behind me and said. 'You want to play?' It was Scrabble.

And then there's Seymour Epstein's Leah: A Novel (1964), in which we read: "But what I mean is that the subject, any subject, has only a sort of fill-in value, like the blank piece in a game of Scrabble." And Duke Ellington's early pronunciamento: "Playing 'bop' is like playing Scrabble with all the vowels missing" (interview with Look Magazine, August 10, 1954). And Robert Lowell, again: "I sat gaping through Scrabble games, unable to form the simplest word; I had to be prompted by a nurse, and even then couldn't make any sense of the words the nurse had formed for me." Is it a coincidence that sign and signifier seemed to have come unhinged so soon after Scrabble became popular? Is it a coincidence that the advent of Scrabble coincided so neatly with the "moment of theory" in the humanities? Does Scrabble liquefy formal meanings and structures, or merely enable the layman to glimpse momentarily what ascetic skeptics and sages from Heraclitus to Derrida thought was theirs alone to see: transcendental experiences, breakthrough phenomena, "becoming" in the flux of life? Either way, readers, for highbrows, lowbrows, and middlebrows alike, this hilo boardgame spells nothing but T-R-O-U-B-L-E. *** There's more where these examples came from! Draw your own conclusions. I've stashed my research here. A version of this essay was published by the Boston Globe's Brainiac blog, in December 2007.

archyandmehitabel-400

Joshua Glenn — Sat, 25 Jul 2009 21:19:55 +0000

putnam-hilary

Joshua Glenn — Sat, 25 Jul 2009 21:20:16 +0000

shearer-norma-500

Joshua Glenn — Sat, 25 Jul 2009 21:33:37 +0000

Tove_Jansson-550

Joshua Glenn — Sat, 25 Jul 2009 21:39:23 +0000

woz75-jobs

Joshua Glenn — Sat, 25 Jul 2009 21:39:52 +0000

schrodinger

Joshua Glenn — Sat, 25 Jul 2009 21:42:33 +0000

woz-appleii

Joshua Glenn — Sat, 25 Jul 2009 21:45:24 +0000

hitchcock

Joshua Glenn — Sat, 25 Jul 2009 21:48:18 +0000

Science&Invention_12-27

Joshua Glenn — Sat, 25 Jul 2009 21:52:04 +0000

asterix6

Joshua Glenn — Sat, 25 Jul 2009 21:55:47 +0000

asterix2

Joshua Glenn — Sun, 26 Jul 2009 03:57:26 +0000

Hilo Heroes, July 26-August 1

HILOBROW — Sun, 26 Jul 2009 10:00:52 +0000

HAPPY BIRTHDAY, this week, to the following high-, low-, no-, and hilobrow heroes. Click here for more Hilo Hero birthdays. JULY 26 If more people realized how steeped many aspects of modern life are in the ideas of CARL JUNG (1875-1961), perhaps they would use the adjective "Jungian" as often as the adjective "Freudian" when conversationally tipping their hats to psychological thinkers. Jung coined the ubiquitous terms "extrovert" and "introvert"; he theorized about the "persona" and the "complex," concepts that have long since inhabited the lexicon of the everyday; he devised the influential theory of the collective unconscious, the shared fabric of archetypes that connects us with our ancestors; and his emphasis on the importance of spiritual experience when addressing psychological problems was a catalyst in Bill W.'s creation of the Alcoholics Anonymous 12-step program. A longer treatment of Jung's influence would perhaps focus on his symbiotic relationship with Freud and on the foundation of the still-popular Jungian Analysis movement. But this is a short tribute and it will end in self-congratulatory fashion with one of Jung's many adages: "The least of things with a meaning is worth more in life than the greatest of things without it." — Patrick Cates JULY 27 JOSEPH MITCHELL (1908-96) arrived in New York City from rural North Carolina the day after the stock market crashed in 1929. Following a few years as a newspaper reporter, he went to work for the New Yorker in 1937, as a chronicler of marginal existences, vestigial occupations, saloon life, harbor trades, and self-made characters. He had a gift for turning the rhythms of uneducated American speech into plain, stripped, lyrical modernist prose; he can now be seen as an heir of William Carlos Williams and a literary counterpart to Walker Evans. Of his five books, all but the first, My Ears Are Bent (1938), were collected in Up in the Old Hotel (1992). After 1964, he never published again, although he reported for work at the New Yorker every day for three more decades. "Sometimes, in the evening elevator," Roger Angell would recall, "I heard him emit a small sigh, but he never complained, never explained." — Luc Sante JULY 28 The one piece of fine-art-inspired kitsch I've been craving ever since I first heard of it is a long-unavailable shower curtain reproducing "The Large Glass" ("The Bride Stripped Bare By Her Bachelors, Even") by MARCEL DUCHAMP (1887-1968), who was used to seeing facsimiles of his greatest works in bathrooms. He was the king's jester of modern art, the guy who figured out the funniest possible ways to express its radical potential, even when he wasn't presenting seltzer-squirters like "L.H.O.O.Q."; he called "The Large Glass" a "hilarious picture," and he was right about that, although it's the rare joke that benefits from an explanation. Duchamp had about a dozen brilliant ideas, which is eleven more than a lot of excellent artists ever have, and one of them was the wit with which he recycled the others — "Box in a Valise," the mass-produced suitcase with miniature reproductions of his greatest hits, is both an exquisite object and a merciless joke about artistic canons. — Douglas Wolk JULY 29 Novelist, poet, and newspaper man DON MARQUIS (1878-1937) was once a household name. Now he is mostly remembered for his Archy and Mehitabel story-poems. Because they are about creatures (a cockroach and an alley cat, respectively), and because they were illustrated — jazzily, tenderly — by the great George Herriman, they are sometimes taken for children's literature. And they accidentally are. What better metaphor for the locked-in syndrome of childhood than a vers libre poet whose soul has transmigrated into the body of a bug? The lustful, dreaming business of childhood, like that of Marquis' creatures, takes place beneath the notice of the busy world. Consider Archy on the moth-candle problem: and before i could argue him out of his philosophy he went and immolated himself on a patent cigar lighter i do not agree with him myself i would rather have half the happiness and twice the longevity but at the same time i wish there was something i wanted as badly as he wanted to fry himself These subversive, achingly lovely poems are suffused with the ink-stained vernacular and weary, disillusioned glamour of the first decades of the last century. Also, they are eternal. Give them to a child. — Mimi Lipson JULY 30 "The institution of a leisure class is found in its best development at the higher stages of the barbarian culture...." That first phrase from his 1899 book Theory of the Leisure Class summed up the Gilded Age, as far as academic knockabout THORSTEIN VEBLEN (1857-1929) was concerned. The lifestyle of the leading members of our supposedly advanced civilization, he drily noted, was based upon a boastful display of wealth that one might have expected to find in medieval Europe; worse, this retrogressive display took the form not of production, but "conspicuous consumption." For Veblen, economics wasn't merely the study of how society chooses to employ scarce resources to produce goods and services and distribute them for consumption; it was also necessarily the study of the evolution of our unconscious habits and ways of thinking, which rarely keep pace with the demands of the present age. We might not agree with Veblen's notion of what, exactly, those demands are — though Adorno admired his criticisms of bourgeois pasttimes, he suspected Veblen was a technocrat obsessed with efficiency and thrift to the exclusion of pleasure and culture. But his curmudgeonly intransigence remains inspiring. — Joshua Glenn JULY 31 HILARY PUTNAM (born 1926) is the most important philosopher you've never heard of. In an era when most theorists build their careers by limning the edges of history, Putnam is one of the hands-on few who has built his own box. But instead of resting in his receptacle, he climbed out before the rest of us finished climbing in — and not just once, but over and over. Discards were grabbed and recycled by computer scientists, communists, continental philosophers, and scientific realists, among others. Within his manic mutability lies a consistent meta-philosophy: all systems of concepts — the contraptions which philosophers call ontologies — are comprised of arbitrary yet necessary building blocks, which not only assemble different worldviews but which themselves must be periodically reassembled. Putnam has also argued that we are not (and could not be) brains in a vat, to the dismay of Extropians and evil demons, and the vast relief of everyone else. Rather than following the academic quest for an ever-smaller square in which to turn his spade, Putnam has renewed an ancient approach to the love of wisdom, at once pragmatic and demanding. — Peggy Nelson AUGUST 1 During the Reagan Era, CHUCK D (Carlton Douglas Ridenhour, born 1960), the hard rhymer, gave us "My Uzi Weighs a Ton," "Prophets of Rage," and "Fight the Power," not to mention Flavor Flav and the S1Ws. He was a voice for a generation worn down by AIDS, crack, junk bonds, narcissism, and institutionalized racism. If 1987's Yo! Bum Rush the Show was a shot across America's bow, the following year's It Takes a Nation of Millions was a detonation. Sure, KRS-One, Grandmaster Flash and others had made political rap before, but Public Enemy was the first political rap act; and it had been decades since anything so political had actually been popular without being hopeful or didactic. As emcee, he mixed metaphor with genuine threat ("By The Time I Get To Arizona," i.e., to assassinate those responsible for the failure to recognize Martin Luther King Jr. Day), allegory with incitement to riot ("Burn Hollywood Burn"). Everything he said or did was political, and angry. If he's evolved from Rapper to Rapper-Activist to Activist-Rapper, perhaps it's because ultimately, no entertainment medium can sustain such a heavy message. — Tom Nealon

lowell1

Joshua Glenn — Sun, 26 Jul 2009 15:34:46 +0000

yuban-550.jpg

Joshua Glenn — Mon, 27 Jul 2009 10:44:27 +0000

Pinakothek (4) — Case Study

Luc Sante — Mon, 27 Jul 2009 10:48:12 +0000

THE SUBJECT, a recent immigrant approximately nine years of age, was asked to depict his mother. It was specified that he should present her in a particular context of his choosing: a setting or activity. The resulting picture is of considerable interest. The woman is only marginably noticeable, and then only because her coat presents the largest single expanse of white space in the composition. Clearly, the subject entirely subordinates maternal affection to the far greater stimulus of commercial consumption. For that matter, the nature of the consumer products themselves is of secondary interest; the subject is enthralled by packaging, and above all by names. Because the composition is so crowded and frenetic, it is worthwhile to break down its constituent parts. The woman is pushing a shopping cart overloaded with products down a supermarket aisle. It would seem to be aisle six: coffee, tea, juice, soda. The items heaped in the cart seem at least partly stereotypical: the protruding head of celery in particular is a trope familiar from myriad cartoons and illustrations. It might likewise be doubted whether she purchases toothbrushes on a regular basis, and ditto for "wax" — presumably floor wax. Other items seem more likely to be true to his actual experience of grocery shopping: that the sack of potatoes has been placed in the cart's bottom tray, for instance, or the exact replication of the Fritos logo, or the prominence of the detergent Beads O' Bleach. But even the groceries in the cart are overwhelmed by the serried ranks of products on the shelves, which are depicted in disproportionate scale. The boxes of Lipton tea bags are nearly the size of the cart itself. (The curious symbol on the boxes represents the subject's attempt to come to terms with the concept of the tea bag. Coming from a coffee-drinking culture, he had only ever experienced tea bags as pictures on boxes, and averred he thought they looked like "pants on a hanger.") It is fascinating to observe the rigor with which the subject records brand names, even the ones that make no sense to him, resulting in solecisms: "Early' Morn" for "Early Morn'" and "Chock O' Full Nuts" for "Chock Full O' Nuts." A strong reaction to American consumer abundance is typical of recent immigrants. It can take various forms: hysterical blindness, catatonic undifferentiation, at least eighteen catalogued types of aphasia. The delirium on view here, in conjunction with the subject's powers of observation, leads us to predict that he will become a highly achieving adult, one who will subordinate all other drives and desires to the acquisition of brand-name goods. He will work three jobs, if necessary, to purchase the latest model automobile, equipped with all the premium features — such a goal, in any event, will encouragingly overshadow romance or idealism. If the subject is properly steered, he will actually work three jobs to achieve his goals. The danger remains that he may choose to rob service stations instead. The subject should therefore be closely and carefully tracked, but for now we do not recommend deportation. — Luc Sante *** Originally published at Luc Sante's blog, Pinakothek. Hilobrow.com has curated a collection of our favorite Pinakothek installments. This is the fourth in a series of ten.

yuban-550

Joshua Glenn — Mon, 27 Jul 2009 10:49:29 +0000

Prometheus-Del-L

Joshua Glenn — Mon, 27 Jul 2009 11:36:23 +0000

jekyll-hyde

Joshua Glenn — Mon, 27 Jul 2009 11:37:44 +0000

edison-550

Joshua Glenn — Mon, 27 Jul 2009 11:41:15 +0000

parsons1915

Joshua Glenn — Mon, 27 Jul 2009 11:44:30 +0000

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Joshua Glenn — Mon, 27 Jul 2009 11:47:07 +0000

Oscar Wilde, Irish dramatist, poet, and wit, born Oscar Fingal O'Flahertie Wills in 1854. 1882

ducasse

Joshua Glenn — Mon, 27 Jul 2009 11:50:30 +0000

huysmans-550

Joshua Glenn — Mon, 27 Jul 2009 11:52:35 +0000

parnell

Joshua Glenn — Mon, 27 Jul 2009 11:58:16 +0000

parnell

Joshua Glenn — Mon, 27 Jul 2009 12:00:08 +0000

parnell

Joshua Glenn — Mon, 27 Jul 2009 12:00:34 +0000

Generations (1): Prometheans

Joshua Glenn — Tue, 28 Jul 2009 10:00:43 +0000

"There are things done today in electrical science which would have been deemed unholy by the very men who discovered electricity — who would themselves not so long before have been burned as wizards." So opines Van Helsing, in Bram Stoker's Dracula. Members of this defiant, overreaching, iconoclastic generation were in their teens and 20s in the Eighteen-Sixties (1864-73; not to be confused with the 1860s), and in their 20s and 30s in the Eighteen-Seventies (1874-83). Like other Gothic novelists of the 1844-53 cohort (e.g., Robert Louis Stevenson, honorary member Oscar Wilde), Stoker recognized that the post-Enlightenment world of the mid- to late 19th century, with its settled dichotomies — "real"/"unreal," "natural"/"supernatural," material/transcendent — was an all-too unstable one. He exploited contemporary readers' inchoate anxieties about the dialectic of Enlightenment: the over-reaching of scientists and psychologists into dangerous areas of knowledge, modern man's irrational faith that the world is systematic and subject to both reason and human control. Call such anxieties, and this generation: Promethean. *** A reminder of my generational periodization scheme: 1844-53: [Progressive Generation] Prometheans 1854-63: [Progressive, Missionary Generations] Plutonians 1864-73: [Missionary Generation] Anarcho-Symbolists 1874-83: [Missionary Generation] Psychonauts 1884-93: [Lost Generation] Modernists 1894-1903: [Lost, Greatest/GI Generations] Hardboileds 1904-13: [Greatest/GI Generation] Partisans 1914-23: [Greatest/GI Generation] New Gods 1924-33: [Silent Generation] Postmodernists 1934-43: [Silent Generation] Anti-Anti-Utopians 1944-53: Boomers 1954-63: [Boomers, Late Boomers, Post-Boomers, Generation Jones] OGXers 1964-73: [Generation X, Thirteenth Generation] Constructivists 1974-83: [Generations X, Y] Revivalists 1984-93: [Millennial Generation] Throwbacks 1994-2003: [Millennial Generation] TBA *** In Greek mythology, Prometheus was a son of the Titans, who created mankind out of clay, and was punished for stealing fire (understood metaphorically to mean: forbidden knowledge of writing, medicine, science, mathematics, agriculture; or any advanced technology) from Zeus. Because of Prometheus' defiance and daring (metaphorically, for example in the works of Romantic poets like Shelley, Byron, and Goethe: the triumph of intellect over tyrannical church, monarchy, patriarchy), mankind is punished: In Hesiod's version of the story, Zeus requires mankind to labor in order to survive. Hesiod also claims that after Prometheus' theft of fire, Zeus sent Pandora to Prometheus' brother Epimetheus, bearing a box (the original technological "black box"?) full of "evils, harsh pain and troublesome diseases which give men death." The defiance and daring of this generation, their scorn for religious, political, and sociocultural tyranny, not to mention the "proper" limits of knowledge, knew no limits. Two of the greatest Prometheans — inventors Edison and Westinghouse — made stealing the fire from the gods not a metaphor but a reality. Nietzsche declared that God was dead; Lautréamont's fictional character, Maldoror, has forsaken God and mankind. Parnell led the movement for Irish self-government; Annie Besant was a women's rights activist, and supporter of Irish and Indian self-rule. Anarchists Albert and Lucy Parsons helped found the Industrial Workers of the World (Wobblies). The Decadents — in France, Joris-Karl Huysmans, and in England, Oscar Wilde — declared themselves to be "against nature." The James-Younger gang were guerrilla fighters turned outlaw; the anarchistic playwright Strindberg's first play was titled The Outlaw. Other members of this generation — Zeus-like — reacted violently against the Promethean tendencies of the era: Tsar Alexander III was a particularly retrograde monarch. Max Nordau's Degeneration was an influential attack on so-called degenerate art, as well as a polemic against the effects of various social phenomena of the period, such as rapid urbanization. The term "comstockery," meaning "censorship because of perceived obscenity or immorality", is named after a Promethean; while Carrie Nation claimed a divine ordination to promote temperance by smashing up bars. *** Meet the Prometheans: 1844: Friedrich Nietzsche (Philosopher, incredibly influential on subsequent generations), Paul Verlaine (Poet, leader of symbolist poetry movement), Abdu'l-Bahá (Baha'i leader), Karl Benz (invented the automobile), Sarah Bernhardt (French theatre actress, international sensation), Anthony Comstock (New York Society for the Suppression of Vice), Cassius Marcellus Coolidge (painted dogs playing poker), Anatole France (French novelist), Henry J. Heinz (founder of Heinz Foods), Gerard Manley Hopkins (Poet), Henri Rousseau (French painter of the exotic), Aaron Montgomery Ward (founded Montgomery Ward), Cole Younger (the brains of the James-Younger Gang). Honorary members of preceding generation: Possibly Nietzsche, but I haven't done enough research on the 1834-43 generation yet. 1845: Tsar Alexander III (Tsar of Russia, 1881-94), Georg Cantor (Mathematician, founder of set theory), Walter Crane (British children's illustrator), Ludwig II (Mad King Ludwig of Bavaria, 1864-86), Wilhelm Conrad Röntgen (Physicist, discovered X-Rays) [caption id="attachment_3992" align="aligncenter" width="310" caption="Charles Stewart Parnell"][/caption] 1846: Charles Stewart Parnell (Irish Nationalist leader), Comte de Lautréamont (Poet, Les Chants de Maldoror was a major influence on the Surrealists and Situationists), George Westinghouse (Inventor, Edison's chief rival), F. H. Bradley (Philosopher, Appearance and Reality), Buffalo Bill (Wild West showman), Jack Daniel (Moonshine magnate), Karl Faberge (Maker of jewelry and gem eggs), Julian Hawthorne (Author), Godfrey Sweven (Author), Kate Greenaway (British illustrator), Wilhelm Maybach (designed the Mercedes), Carrie Nation (Temperance crusader), Henryk Sienkiewicz (Author, Quo Vadis?) 1847: Thomas Edison (Inventor), Alexander Graham Bell (Inventor of the telephone), Bram Stoker (Author, Dracula), Annie Besant (Theosophist & Social Activist), John Bates Clark (Economist, Philosophy of Wealth), Adolph Coors (Founder of Coors Brewery), Galileo Ferraris (Physicist, invented the induction motor), Jesse James (Bank robber, with James Gang), Joseph Pulitzer (Pulitzer Prize), Albert Pinkham Ryder (idyllic American painter), Paul von Hindenburg (Namesake of doomed zeppelin) [caption id="attachment_3982" align="aligncenter" width="550" caption="Huysmans"][/caption] 1848: Joris-Karl Huysmans (Decadent author, À Rebours), Brooks Adams (Historian, The Law of Civilization and Decay), Arthur Balfour (UK Prime Minister, 1902-05), Wyatt Earp (Gunfight at the O.K. Corral), Paul Gauguin (French post-impressionist painter), Joel Chandler Harris (Novelist, Uncle Remus), Albert Parsons (Anarchist, Haymarket Martyr), Augustus Saint-Gaudens (Leading 19th c. American sculptor), Louis Comfort Tiffany (Stained glassmaker, jewelry designer) 1849: Max Nordau (Zionist and cultural critic, Degeneration), Ivan Pavlov (Scientist, studied conditioned reflexes), Jacob A. Riis (Journalist, How the Other Half Lives), Charles F. Brush (Inventor, electrical pioneer), Luther Burbank (Botanist and plant breeder), Frances Hodgson Burnett (Novelist, Little Lord Fauntleroy), John Ambrose Fleming (Engineer, invented the vacuum tube), Henry Clay Frick (Robber baron, Johnstown flood), Sarah Orne Jewett (Author), Emma Lazarus (Poet), William Osler (Doctor, father of psychosomatic medicine), James Whitcomb Riley (Poet), August Strindberg (Playwright), Alfred von Tirpitz (German admiral, pushed U-boats), John William Waterhouse (British Pre-Raphaelite painter) 1850: Robert Louis Stevenson (Novelist, Treasure Island), Ferdinand Braun (Physicist, early developer of radio), St. Frances Xavier Cabrini (Missionaries of the Sacred Heart), Pat Garrett (killed Billy the Kid), Eugen Goldstein (Physicist, cathode rays), Samuel Gompers (first president of the AFL), Lafcadio Hearn (Author), Henry Cabot Lodge (US Senator from Massachusetts, 1893-1924), Tomas Masaryk (Czech President 1920-35), Guy de Maupassant (French short story writer), Octave Mirbeau (Novelist, Le Jardin des supplices), Charles Richet (Scientist, studied anaphylaxis and ectoplasm), Augusto Righi (Physicist, electromagnetic waves) 1851: Kate Chopin (Novelist), Garrett P. Serviss (Astronomy popularizer, SF author), Melvil Dewey (Dewey Decimal System), Charles Dow (Journalist, Dow of Dow Jones), Ferdinand Foch (Allied Supreme Commander, WWI), Ernest Howard Griffiths (Physicist, Thermal Measurement of Energy), Charles Hires (Root beer), Doc Holliday 1852: Henri Becquerel (Physicist, discoverer of radioactivity), Lady Gregory (Playwright), Edwin Abbey (American artist in London), Herbert Henry Asquith (UK Prime Minister 1908-16), Antoni Gaudi (Architect), Robert Grant (Novelist, Unleavened Bread), Calamity Jane (Performance Artist, Buffalo Bill's Wild West Show), John Harvey Kellogg (Doctor, Battle Creek Sanitarium), Emperor Meiji (Emperor of Japan, 1867-1912), Albert A. Michelson (Physicist, calculated the speed of light), F. W. Woolworth (Five and dime magnate), E.P. Mitchell (newspaper editor, SF writer) [caption id="attachment_3976" align="aligncenter" width="399" caption="Police photo of Lucy Parsons, 1915"][/caption] 1853: Henri Alexandre Deslandres (Astronomer, spectroheliograph), Hendrik Lorentz (Physicist, theory of EM radiation), Bat Masterson (frontier peace officer), Heike Kamerlingh Onnes (Physicist, discovered superconductivity), Lucy Parsons (Anarchist labor organizer), Howard Pyle (Art Nouveau children's book illustrator), Elihu Thomson (Inventor, electric welding and A/C motors). Honorary Plutonians: Cecil Rhodes (De Beers), possibly Vincent van Gogh (Post- or Neo-Impressionist painter). *** HONORARY MEMBERS OF THE PROMETHEAN GENERATION: Oscar Wilde (1854). Not sure about 1834-43 generation yet. PROMETHEANS WHO ARE HONORARY MEMBERS OF THE 1834-43 GENERATION: TBD PROMETHEANS WHO ARE HONORARY MEMBERS OF THE PLUTONIAN (1854-63) GENERATION: Cecil Rhodes, possibly Vincent Van Gogh. A note on Promethean authors of Radium-Age SF. Like the mother of modern SF, Mary Shelley, who subtitled Frankenstein (1818) "The Modern Prometheus," SF writers of the 1844-53 cohort question whether it's wise for humankind to approach ever more closely the omniscience and omnipotence of God or Nature. Their fictions mirror contemporary anxieties about whether modern science and technology, from the actual (electrical devices) to the merely possible (robots), will ultimately prove helpful or harmful. Promethean SF writers include: Robert Louis Stevenson (The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde; Jekyll is a prototypical overreaching scientist, dabbling in forbidden knowledge), Julian Hawthorne ("June, 1993," The Cosmic Courtship), Godfrey Sweven (Riallaro, Limanora), Garrett P. Serviss (A Columbus of Space, The Second Deluge), Anatole France ("Through the Horn or the Ivory Gate," The White Stone), George Haven Putnam (published Radium-Age SF; wrote The Artificial Mother: A Marital Fantasy), and E.P. Mitchell ("The Man Without A Body," "The Ablest Man in the World," "The Story of the Deluge").

Hilo Hero: Don Marquis

Mimi Lipson — Wed, 29 Jul 2009 15:11:47 +0000

Novelist, poet, and newspaper man DON MARQUIS (1878-1937) was once a household name. Now he is mostly remembered for his Archy and Mehitabel story-poems. Because they are about creatures (a cockroach and an alley cat, respectively), and because they were illustrated — jazzily, tenderly — by the great George Herriman, they are sometimes taken for children's literature. And they accidentally are. What better metaphor for the locked-in syndrome of childhood than a vers libre poet whose soul has transmigrated into the body of a bug? The lustful, dreaming business of childhood, like that of Marquis' creatures, takes place beneath the notice of the busy world. Consider Archy on the moth-candle problem: and before i could argue him out of his philosophy he went and immolated himself on a patent cigar lighter i do not agree with him myself i would rather have half the happiness and twice the longevity but at the same time i wish there was something i wanted as badly as he wanted to fry himself These subversive, achingly lovely poems are suffused with the ink-stained vernacular and weary, disillusioned glamour of the first decades of the last century. Also, they are eternal. Give them to a child. *** Each day, Hilobrow.com pays tribute to one of our favorite high-, low-, no-, or hilobrow heroes on that person's birthday. Click here for more Hilo Hero shout-outs.

carluccio

Joshua Glenn — Wed, 29 Jul 2009 15:40:01 +0000

carluccio+2

Joshua Glenn — Wed, 29 Jul 2009 15:40:53 +0000

polanski-pianist-550

Joshua Glenn — Wed, 29 Jul 2009 16:59:02 +0000

bataille-erotisme-550

Joshua Glenn — Wed, 29 Jul 2009 17:06:40 +0000

bataille-erotisme-400

Joshua Glenn — Wed, 29 Jul 2009 17:09:13 +0000

Hilo Hero: Thorstein Veblen

Joshua Glenn — Thu, 30 Jul 2009 10:00:59 +0000

"The institution of a leisure class is found in its best development at the higher stages of the barbarian culture...." That first phrase from his 1899 book Theory of the Leisure Class summed up the Gilded Age, as far as academic knockabout THORSTEIN VEBLEN (1857-1929) was concerned. The lifestyle of the leading members of our supposedly advanced civilization, he drily noted, was based upon a boastful display of wealth that one might have expected to find in medieval Europe; worse, this retrogressive display took the form not of production, but "conspicuous consumption." For Veblen, economics wasn't merely the study of how society chooses to employ scarce resources to produce goods and services and distribute them for consumption; it was also necessarily the study of the evolution of our unconscious habits and ways of thinking, which rarely keep pace with the demands of the present age. We might not agree with Veblen's notion of what, exactly, those demands are — though Adorno admired his criticisms of bourgeois pasttimes, he suspected Veblen was a technocrat obsessed with efficiency and thrift to the exclusion of pleasure and culture. But his curmudgeonly intransigence remains inspiring. *** Each day, Hilobrow.com pays tribute to one of our favorite high-, low-, no-, or hilobrow heroes on that person's birthday. Click here for more Hilo Hero shout-outs.

Freud6

Joshua Glenn — Thu, 30 Jul 2009 12:50:16 +0000

tesla3

Joshua Glenn — Thu, 30 Jul 2009 12:53:26 +0000

lowell-percival

Joshua Glenn — Thu, 30 Jul 2009 12:56:34 +0000

Husserl-1

Joshua Glenn — Thu, 30 Jul 2009 13:01:58 +0000

signac_feneon-550

Joshua Glenn — Thu, 30 Jul 2009 13:04:53 +0000

1893_Edvard_Munch_The_Scream-WR400

Joshua Glenn — Thu, 30 Jul 2009 13:07:09 +0000

max_weber

Joshua Glenn — Thu, 30 Jul 2009 13:14:29 +0000

Rorschach_blot_04

Matthew Battles — Thu, 30 Jul 2009 15:20:18 +0000

Rorschach Revealed

Matthew Battles — Thu, 30 Jul 2009 15:36:10 +0000

WHAT DO YOU think it means? The New York Times reported yesterday that some psychologists were feeling panicky about physician James Heilman's decision to upload the canonical Rorschach inkblots to Wikipedia along with their most-frequently assigned descriptions. Apparently, some practicioners fear that patients will use the information to game the test, which typically is performed in a battery with other personality measurements. In a time when information wants to be free, is there no place for esoterica, for the secrets of professional guilds and cognoscenti? Perhaps not. But the case of the open-source inkblots exposes the cultural significance of Hermann Rorschach's test as the chief icon of middlebrow psyche, which wants to reveal itself in Gladwellesque blinks, moments of confrontation with everyday mystery. Revelation is that simple! And that safe. According to Heilman's captions in Wikipedia, most people see bats or birds in the blots. I see alien endoskeletons, pelvises from the stars. Interesting—but I'm sorry, our time is up.

Hilo Hero: Hilary Putnam

Peggy Nelson — Fri, 31 Jul 2009 10:00:40 +0000

HILARY PUTNAM (born 1926) is the most important philosopher you've never heard of. In an era when most theorists build their careers by limning the edges of history, Putnam is one of the hands-on few who has built his own box. But instead of resting in his receptacle, he climbed out before the rest of us finished climbing in — and not just once, but over and over. Discards were grabbed and recycled by computer scientists, communists, continental philosophers, and scientific realists, among others. Within his manic mutability lies a consistent meta-philosophy: all systems of concepts — the contraptions which philosophers call ontologies — are comprised of arbitrary yet necessary building blocks, which not only assemble different worldviews but which themselves must be periodically reassembled. Putnam has also argued that we are not (and could not be) brains in a vat, to the dismay of Extropians and evil demons, and the vast relief of everyone else. Rather than following the academic quest for an ever-smaller square in which to turn his spade, Putnam has renewed an ancient approach to the love of wisdom, at once pragmatic and demanding. *** Each day, Hilobrow.com pays tribute to one of our favorite high-, low-, no-, or hilobrow heroes on that person's birthday. Click here for more Hilo Hero shout-outs.

450px-Objectivist

Matthew Battles — Fri, 31 Jul 2009 21:29:46 +0000

Put Down that Web, You Middlebrow Titan!

Matthew Battles — Fri, 31 Jul 2009 22:10:58 +0000

[caption id="attachment_4222" align="aligncenter" width="450" caption="Atlas Sepia, by Kurt Christensen"], by Kurt Christensen" title="450px-Objectivist" width="450" height="600" class="size-full wp-image-4222" />[/caption] A COLLEGE WHERE I do a bit of teaching just sent me an email announcing the formation of a "social media working group" whose job it is to "research, suggest, and implement strategies and best practices" and "organize a system for maintaining (the college's) social media presence and content." Higher education, like the mainstream media, is frankly desperate to extend their dominion in the social networking space. Like their corporate peers, they've been eager to colonize the flourishing Internet at each phase of its development, and now is no exception. It's hardly novel of me to say that along the way they're killing everything that makes networked communication a worthwhile cultural force. At first blush, it seems as if they're right to fear the evolution of the Internet. At its ever-adapting edge, its energies and structures are fundamentally opposed to the hierarchized world of middlebrow knowledge and opinion that is the dark matter of the institutional, incorporated way of life. That's why it's so dispiriting that to date these shifting technologies have proven amenable to middlebrow domestication at every turn—and the social media are proving no different. I'm no advocate of censorship; these media should be used in every possible way. But when I use Twitter and other social media, I'm seeking a dialogue with individual minds, not corporate interests. Friending or following major-media news shows, accredited colleges, and corporate philanthropies is not dialogue in any true sense of the word. In a thriving networked culture, it should be possible not merely to complement but to replace institutions and corporations with commons-native constellations of intelligence. The mainstream media quakes before the ever-multiplying range of news-gathering alternatives. In the intellectual world, the Infinite Summer—a massively distributed endeavor to collectively read and discuss the late novelist David Foster Wallace's magnum opus Infinite Jest—is proving the power of social media to build loosely-structured networks of brains to replace the medieval legacy of colleges, faculties, and curricula. But the middlebrow institutions—Titans of modernity's prior imperium—keep getting in the way. Do not friend them; do not follow.

ark

Joshua Glenn — Sat, 01 Aug 2009 01:00:34 +0000

baum-oz-poppie3

Joshua Glenn — Sat, 01 Aug 2009 01:01:20 +0000

blake-moses-bush

Joshua Glenn — Sat, 01 Aug 2009 01:04:12 +0000

Subgenius-JHVH-1-by-St-Ken

Joshua Glenn — Sat, 01 Aug 2009 01:06:49 +0000

MCI-Cochineal-prep

Joshua Glenn — Sat, 01 Aug 2009 01:08:39 +0000

scarlet-rahab

Joshua Glenn — Sat, 01 Aug 2009 01:12:22 +0000

Hilo Hero: Chuck D

Tom Nealon — Sat, 01 Aug 2009 10:00:50 +0000

During the Reagan Era, CHUCK D (Carlton Douglas Ridenhour, born 1960), the hard rhymer, gave us "My Uzi Weighs a Ton," "Prophets of Rage," and "Fight the Power," not to mention Flavor Flav and the S1Ws. He was a voice for a generation worn down by AIDS, crack, junk bonds, narcissism, and institutionalized racism. If 1987's Yo! Bum Rush the Show was a shot across America's bow, the following year's It Takes a Nation of Millions was a detonation. Sure, KRS-One, Grandmaster Flash and others had made political rap before, but Public Enemy was the first political rap act; and it had been decades since anything so political had actually been popular without being hopeful or didactic. As emcee, he mixed metaphor with genuine threat ("By The Time I Get To Arizona," i.e., to assassinate those responsible for the failure to recognize Martin Luther King Jr. Day), allegory with incitement to riot ("Burn Hollywood Burn"). Everything he said or did was political, and angry. If he's evolved from Rapper to Rapper-Activist to Activist-Rapper, perhaps it's because ultimately, no entertainment medium can sustain such a heavy message. *** Each day, Hilobrow.com pays tribute to one of our favorite high-, low-, no-, or hilobrow heroes on that person's birthday. Click here for more Hilo Hero shout-outs.

moses-veil

Joshua Glenn — Sat, 01 Aug 2009 12:43:40 +0000

moses-veil2

Joshua Glenn — Sat, 01 Aug 2009 12:44:28 +0000

moses-veil2

Joshua Glenn — Sat, 01 Aug 2009 12:44:56 +0000

heston-moses-550

Joshua Glenn — Sat, 01 Aug 2009 12:46:32 +0000

Sinai-Peninsula-550

Joshua Glenn — Sat, 01 Aug 2009 12:58:41 +0000

rahab-lego-550

Joshua Glenn — Sat, 01 Aug 2009 13:00:18 +0000

The YHWH Virus

Joshua Glenn — Sat, 01 Aug 2009 13:00:55 +0000

WHEN PARANOID TYPES encounter a word as enduring and pervasive as scarlet (OF, escarlate; It., scarlatto; ON, skarlat; mod. Gr. skarlaton; Serbian, skrlet; etc.), we sit up and take notice. A signifier used nowadays to refer to a vivid red color inclining to orange or yellow, scarlet is believed to be an alteration of the Persian saqalat (saqirlat, in modern Arabic), meaning a high-quality cloth, usually dyed red. Not just any red, though! In non-industrial societies, flame-red scarlet symbolizes fertility and vitality. Color therapists consider scarlet a vasoconstrictor, arterial stimulant, and renal energizer: they employ it to raise blood pressure, stimulate erections, increase menstruation, and promote libido. And in our popular culture, it’s associated with fallen women (The Scarlet Letter) and those women whom we’d like to see fall (Scarlett O’Hara, Scarlett Johansson, Miss Scarlet from the boardgame Clue). It is an intoxicating, maddening hue. But if scarlet is reminiscent of sex, it’s also reminiscent of death. Since the days of Genghis Khan, poets have marveled at how poppies as scarlet as blood tend to spring up in war-torn meadows; that’s why veterans wear poppies on Memorial Day. And recent archaeological discoveries in the Middle East suggest that scarlet has symbolized death for nearly as long as humans have engaged in symbolic thinking: lumps of ocher found near the 90,000-year-old graves in the Qafzeh Cave in Israel, scholars have claimed, were carefully heated in hearths to yield a scarlet hue, then used in ritual activities related to burying the dead. Thus in the history of symbolic thought, scarlet has meant both Eros and Thanatos, Sex and Death, the conflicting drives that — according to Freud — govern every aspect of human activity. But what if we’ve got it backwards? What if scarlet caused us to become passionately fixated on transcending ourselves, via merging with others in the act of sex, or by killing and being killed? What if scarlet was a drug — like rhoeadine, the sedative in scarlet poppies used by the god Morpheus, not to mention the Wicked Witch of Oz — first distilled in the ancient Middle East? What if saqalat was not merely a luxury item but an intoxicant whose use was cornered, through means military and political and for reasons unknown to all (except an elite cabal of priests and strongmen), by the followers of a strange new god? Not until we understand the substance saqalat, in this analysis, can we properly read the Old Testament. *** Let’s face it: the Pentateuch, which is to say the first five books of the Hebrew Bible (the Christian Old Testament), authored by Moses himself, tells a far-out story. Skipping over Genesis, the prequel to the main narrative (it’s The Hobbit, if you will, to Moses’ Lord of the Rings), we read in Exodus that the author, an adopted Egyptian prince who came to sympathize with the multiracial community of slaves known as Hebrews, encountered an entity he'd describe as flames of fire from within a bush. This unnameable phenomenon (YHWH means “I am who I am”) seems to possess and inflame Moses: When Moses comes down from Mount Sinai after spending 40 days with YHWH, “he was not aware that his face was radiant” (Ex 34:29), and forever after, one reads, he wears a veil when he’s out in public (Ex 34:33-34). Was Moses somehow infused or injected with a substance or energy that turned his face a scarlet hue? Or did YHWH instruct him to smear his face and hands with a scarlet-colored substance before approaching the bush? Why would YHWH have done so? We can look for clues to this mystery by asking another question: what does YHWH want? To shape the Hebrews into a nation unlike other nations, one with no king but YHWH; to reveal Its laws to the Hebrews; and, oddly enough, to instruct the Hebrews in suspiciously exacting detail on how to erect a tabernacle where It will dwell. Does this take-me-to-your-leader business put anyone in mind of JHVH-1 (JEHOVAH), the evil, godlike space creature dreamed up by the parodic Church of the SubGenius? No surprise there, because in several important respects YHWH does resemble an extraterrestrial. Like the radioactive alien in the movie Repo Man, YHWH can’t be directly viewed by the Hebrews. It’s kept under lock and key in a protective containment sphere of sorts: the tabernacle. (The first written description of the tabernacle is in Exodus 33:7-10. The tabernacle would be set up outside of camp, and a "pillar of cloud" — perhaps some kind of airlock? — was visible at its door. Scholars attribute this description to the Elohist source (E), which was written about 850 BC.) Though the Hebrews have fled into the wilderness with only a few possessions, throughout Exodus YHWH demands from them rare and specific materials for his dwelling place. First and foremost, It orders them to bring offerings of “blue, purple, and scarlet” (Ex 25:4), meaning dyes derived (in the case of blue and purple) from shellfish that swarm in the waters of the northeast Mediterranean, and (in the case of scarlet) from Dactylopius coccus, the cochineal bug, as well as from the various caterpillars and larvae that feed on cochineals. Now, the scarlet pigment harvested from cochineals and their predators is a compound called carminic acid, which — according to chemical ecologists — functions as a protective substance. (It deters predation by other insects.) So when YHWH tells Moses that It wants Its tabernacle and Its door to be constructed of saqalat, and that furthermore It wants the ark in which It lives to be surrounded by more saqalat (Ex 26:1,36 and 27:16), It is obviously sterilizing Its environment. YHWH goes on to design the vestments of its priests, also of richly dyed cloth, and It forbids anyone “unclean” to enter the tabernacle: any priest who has become unclean through contact with other Hebrews, YHWH insists, must wash himself in scarlet. *** A quick note, speculating on which microorganisms, exactly, had YHWH so worried. According to a 2004 paper titled "The Bible and Microbiology," when Moses instructed the Hebrews to isolate sufferers from contagious disease (e.g., Numbers 5:3, Leviticus 12:1-15:33), "this practice was not borrowed from the Egyptians, who had the most advanced overall medical know-how of the ancient world. Rather, this is an example of divine solicitude for human welfare. It preceded many hundreds of years the idea of contagion." Moses instructed the Hebrews to salt food — not merely as a means of food preservation, we now suspect, but because salt is an antiseptic that controls and inhibits microbial population in such foods as bread, butter, cheese, and certain vegetables. Microorganisms must have their nutrients in a water solution, and salt can inhibit bacterial growth that causes foodborne illness, such as salmonella, E. coil, and molds. Moses' obsession with microorganisms may even explain Exodus 16:20: “Notwithstanding they hearkened not unto Moses: but some of them left of it [manna] until the morning, and it bred worms, and stank: and Moses was wroth with them.” The growth of microorganisms on the sugary medium of manna (whatever that is), scholars now suggest, may have released sulfur. Apparently one of the Earth substances that YHWH is allergic to is yeast. We assume that the Hebrews ate unleavened bread because they were in a hurry to flee Egypt — that's the excuse/justification given in Exodus 12:39, and that's what we hear every year at Passover. But even before the Hebrews fled, and after, YHWH commanded them to make their bread without yeast. Check it out:

"Seven days shall ye eat unleavened bread; even the first day ye shall put away leaven out of your houses: for whosoever eateth leavened bread from the first day until the seventh day, that soul shall be cut off from Israel" (Exodus 12:15). "Ye shall eat nothing leavened; in all your habitations shall ye eat unleavened bread" (Exodus 12:20). "Unleavened bread shall be eaten seven days; and there shall no leavened bread be seen with thee, neither shall there be leaven seen with thee in all thy quarters" (Exodus 13:7).

YHWH certainly didn't want the Hebrews getting any yeast into his meal (blood), or leaving his meal out where microorganisms could breed in it:

"Thou shalt not offer the blood of my sacrifice with leavened bread; neither shall the fat of my sacrifice remain until the morning" (Exodus 23:18, cf. 34:25). "No meat offering, which ye shall bring unto the LORD, shall be made with leaven: for ye shall burn no leaven, nor any honey, in any offering of the LORD made by fire" (Leviticus 2:11). "It shall not be baken with leaven. I have given it unto them for their portion of my offerings made by fire; it is most holy, as is the sin offering, and as the trespass offering" (Leviticus 6:17).

I'm not making this stuff up. It's right there, in black and white, friends. If YHWH wasn't deathly allergic to yeast, how to explain all these obsessive regulations? *** Leviticus, a book dedicated entirely to the special duties of YHWH’s priests, seems to suggest that scarlet dye was also used by the priests to infect others with what we might call the YHWH virus. In Leviticus 14, for example, we read that YHWH instructed the Levites to use a length of scarlet-dyed cord to sprinkle liquids onto the open sores of ailing Hebrews. As we shall see, the scarlet cord, which functioned something like a syringe in the hands of Moses' priests, would become an important symbol for the Hebrews. Scarlet, then, didn't only function to protect YHWH from Earth's microorganisms — which, as H.G. Wells would speculate, might be the only thing that can kill off aliens. It was also one component of an apparently potent mind-control drug, one that made subjects receptive to what the psychiatrist Robert J. Lifton calls the eight coercive methods of "thought reform," including isolation from society at large (e.g., in a desert, for forty years), mystical manipulation (experiences that appear spontaneous but in fact were planned and orchestrated by the group or its leaders in order to demonstrate divine authority; too many of these in the Old Testament to mention); demand for purity (which we've just been discussing); and so forth. Side note: according to popular mythology, one of Coca-Cola's secret ingredients is cochineal, the scarlet dye harvested from the insect of the same name. Coca-Cola insists that this is not the case, though at present FDA regulations do not require foods containing cochineal to list it among the other ingredients. There is a great deal more of this kind of thing in Leviticus and also in Numbers, an account of the Hebrews’ nomadic existence in the Middle East following their initial organization at Sinai. But in Numbers, YHWH finally reveals to the Hebrews his plan: they are to invade Canaan. Why? Because Canaan, later called Phoenicia, was a land where the dyeing industry was of central importance to the economy (both names in fact mean “land of purple”); and YHWH must have desired to corner the market. Having possessed the minds and bodies of the Hebrews via his priests’ scarlet cords, YHWH organizes them into a military camp and they march from Sinai as Its conquering army. The only problem is that the Hebrews keep defying YHWH: after 39 years they still haven’t invaded Canaan, and the old guard of tabernacle insiders is dying off. In Deuteronomy, the final book of the Pentateuch, Moses makes a last-ditch series of speeches urging the Hebrews to remain faithful to YHWH, and then dies himself. *** This might have been the end of the history of YHWH on Earth, were it not for the efforts of Joshua, a Hebrew strongman whose got his start standing guard outside the first, temporary tent that Moses set up for YHWH. Joshua leads the Hebrews across the Jordan into Canaan, occupies the kingdoms of Og and Sihon, and sends spies into the fortified kingdom of Jericho. At this transitional moment in the Book of Joshua (and the history of mankind), sex and death play a crucial role. Rahab, a prostitute, shelters Joshua’s spies and delivers to them the intel that the Canaanites are terrified of the Hebrews and YHWH. The spies then inform Rahab that when the Hebrews take Jericho, she can spare the lives of her family by hanging something out of her window. Remember what it was? That’s right: a scarlet cord. Joshua and the Hebrews conquered Jericho and went on to seize control of all the hill country and the Negev, thus gaining control of the area’s dye industries. The next three major books of the Hebrew Bible — Judges, Samuel, and Kings — record Israel’s rise and fall. As the distinguished Bible scholar Richard A. Horsley points out in Bandits, Prophets, and Messiahs, Judges portrays a kind of anarchist utopia unlike any other nation (i.e., an exploitative monarchy), because it could have only one king: YHWH. Early in Samuel, however, the Israelites bring YHWH’s ark into battle against the Philistines, and it is captured. [caption id="attachment_4261" align="aligncenter" width="550" caption="17th-century illustration of of 1 Samuel 5:1-7 (by Nicolas Poussin), showing what happened to the Philistines when they stole the Ark and neglected to keep YHWH safe from Earth microorganisms with saqalat."]saqalat." title="poussin_Ark_Of_Ashdod" width="550" height="405" class="size-full wp-image-4261" />[/caption] For twenty years, the ark remains outside its protective tabernacle, and diseases follow it everywhere (1 Sam 5:6). It seems correct to assume that YHWH, unprotected by saqalat, was destroyed at some point during this period. Perhaps this is what Philip K. Dick was getting at in Our Friends from Frolix 8, in which a character announces, “God is dead. They found his carcass in 2019. Floating out in space near Alpha.” Its protective container breached, its body decaying, YHWH became lethally toxic to humans. One thinks, again, of Repo Man — of Fox Harris's unforgettable performance as a government scientist slowly being killed by the decaying alien in his car's trunk. What did Alex Cox know? The Hebrews, meanwhile, minds no longer clouded by whatever ego-obliterating substance they’d received via the priests’ scarlet cords, ceased to obey YHWH’s injunction that they should have no other king. Immediately after we learn of the ark’s capture, we read that Samuel, the most distinguished of Israel’s judges, was approached by a committee of Hebrews who demanded, “Now appoint a king to lead us, such as all the other nations have.” Samuel anointed Saul, who proceeded to do what kings everywhere have always done: he built a standing army, invaded other countries, and exploited the populace. By the end of 1st and 2nd Kings, we cannot help but agree with the Hebrew prophets — who lamented that Israel had become a nation like all the other nations. PLEASE NOTE: This essay is in no way intended to be a commentary on the present-day nation of Israel. *** One last note: The cochineal insect is found in Mexico and South America, not the Middle East. Also, in Biblical Hebrew, which like Phoenician is a dialect of Canaanite, the Tyrian purple-red dye extracted from the Murex brandaris, a marine gastropod also known as the spiny dye-murex, is known as shani שָׁנִי [ʃɔni], but usually translated as "scarlet." The cochineal, in other words, may have nothing to do with YHWH. But that doesn't mean that Moses' YHWH wasn't an alien, one so terrified of microorganisms that It used what tools were available in that time and place — dyes, and other substances — not only to fashion for Itself a sterile environment, but also mind-controlling chemicals with which to ensure that Its followers would remain loyal. It's a crackpot theory, of course. But if it were true, it would explain much that is opaque about the narrative of the Old Testament... and about modern-day America. We Americans have always enjoyed portraying ourselves as a new Israel, but these days it’s only too apparent that we’re the empire-building Israel about which Isaiah lamented. Not only that, we’re a nation of sex and death addicts, ricocheting from one extreme to another — anorexia/obesity, Puritanism/pornography, sloth/war. Why? Call it an attempt to recapture the blissfully self-annihilating highs and lows experienced thousands of years ago by the Hebrews under Moses. Like them, we’re apparently happiest when we’re drinking somebody's Kool-Aid. *** A version of this essay was first published by Cabinet Magazine (Fall 2006, issue 23). NB: The phrase "YHWH virus" seems to have been coined in 1989 by a ghost hunter adopting the name of Major Jack Downing. "Downing" writes:

Most or all concepts of a god are transmitted through written or spoken words, and thereafter all manifestations natural or supernatural are seen as emanating from the will of that 'god.' The brain has become reprogrammed by that thought-virus to perpetuate and spread the virus to others, just as real viruses do to DNA.... The most powerful Deity Virus is the YHWH virus, and all of its mutations.... The only way to cure an individual of an active Deity Virus is by Heroic Deprogramming, a process as brutal and harrowing to the patient as chemotherapy is to a cancer patient, and as with the latter example, likely as ineffectual, with the possibility of an eventual reinfection.

poussin_Ark_Of_Ashdod

Joshua Glenn — Sat, 01 Aug 2009 13:20:38 +0000

matzos.jpg

Joshua Glenn — Sat, 01 Aug 2009 13:59:15 +0000

foxharris

Joshua Glenn — Sat, 01 Aug 2009 14:35:26 +0000

Hilo Hero: Wes Craven

Joe Alterio — Sun, 02 Aug 2009 10:00:17 +0000

When I was a kid, I told friends that my parents wouldn't let me watch the diabolical movies of WES CRAVEN (born 1939). But the truth was that I'd been completely terrified when a friend had explained the concept of Nightmare On Elm Street to me in the schoolyard. In those days, I consumed slasher flicks featuring other antiheroes with joyous abandon. Jason Vorhees, Leatherface, Michael Meyers — they were merely men in masks; anyone could see them. But a bogeyman who stalked your dreams, and feasted upon your worst nightmares? The mere idea of Freddy Krueger shook me to the core, and left me fearing bedtime. Craven's astute dissection of scary, from The Last House on the Left through the Scream franchise, reveals what he'd learned as a student of literature and psychology. It's not what's outside the house that's terrifying; it's what's inside your head.

*** Each day, Hilobrow.com pays tribute to one of our favorite high-, low-, no-, or hilobrow heroes on that person's birthday. Click here for more Hilo Hero shout-outs.

sadism

Joshua Glenn — Sun, 02 Aug 2009 14:54:49 +0000

lo+duca

Joshua Glenn — Sun, 02 Aug 2009 14:55:30 +0000

jansson-1

Joshua Glenn — Sun, 02 Aug 2009 15:06:36 +0000

Hilo Hero: James Hetfield

Patrick Cates — Mon, 03 Aug 2009 10:00:13 +0000

Even when JAMES HETFIELD (born 1963) smiles — which he did copiously during this year's induction of Metallica into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, for example — his face can't fully escape its natural scowling contortion. He was still a teenager when they burst onto the metal scene in the early 1980s with Kill ’Em All, a furious, thrashing pitbull of an album that was originally titled Metal Up Your Ass. Some thirty years later, after a campaign of self-destruction that has included broken limbs, third-degree burns, fistfights, and rehab, Hetfield is still giving voice to his emotions with that instantly recognizable mix of bile, spit, and growl. And the words that encapsulate the rage don't change much, either. "Fuck it all and fucking no regrets", he roars on "Damage Inc." (Master of Puppets, 1987). "Fuck it all and fucking no regrets," he bellows on "St. Anger" (St. Anger, 2003). Hetfield is anger and Metallica is the loudhailer that broadcasts it to the world. *** Each day, Hilobrow.com pays tribute to one of our favorite high-, low-, no-, or hilobrow heroes on that person's birthday. Click here for more Hilo Hero shout-outs.

Pinakothek (5) — Hooliganism

Luc Sante — Mon, 03 Aug 2009 14:00:53 +0000

Just about as rare as if it had never been published at all, this may be the only extant copy of Dave Carluccio's only book--typed, photocopied, folded, and stapled by its author in 1980 in an edition of fewer than a hundred, maybe fewer than twenty. The title and the cover image both refer to Aleksei Kruchenykh's Against Hooliganism in Literature (1926), cover by Gustav Klutsis. That work in turn, which has never been translated, is to the best of my knowledge a polemic by the veteran cubo-futurist directed against some rival Soviet avant-garde gang. But that didn't matter much to Carluccio, who most likely just saw the cover reproduced in some book and ran with it. "Hooliganism"--a word strangely omnipresent in Russian and ultimately derived from a slur against the Irish--was to him something desirable, especially in literature, which he persisted in seeing in early-modernist terms, as a genteel tea party much in need of being forcibly invaded and broken up. I knew Carluccio's brother slightly in high school. We weren't friends, and I didn't even know of Dave's existence until half a decade later, when he showed up at my apartment one day with a group of people who were looking for a party. I wasn't giving a party and wasn't in a hospitable mood, which is probably what impelled them to hang out somewhat longer than necessary, opening the beers they had brought, lighting joints, and putting records on the turntable. While most of the five or six of them were having a high old time and I was calling around trying to find the party, or any party, to get them out of my hair, Carluccio was looking through my books. Finally, when their beers were drained and before they could go for seconds, I pretended someone had given me an address on the other side of town and sent them on their way. A week later I received an envelope from Carluccio containing a sheaf of tiny stories typed on the backs of pink "While You Were Out" notes. It was the first of more than a dozen such envelopes. As it turned out, I was to meet Carluccio only twice more. The first time was about a year later. I was coming out of a party in Tribeca, one of those huge, brawling things where maybe ten percent of the guests had actually been invited. I had no idea who the hosts were and didn't know anybody there, but on my way down the stairs some guy I didn't recognize rushed to catch up and immediately started talking at me. He had sent me the stories because I had Bataille and Artaud and Mayakovsky on my shelves and he knew I'd understand. He talked from Franklin Street up to Canal, east to the Bowery, north to St. Mark's Place, and would have talked me all the way home if I hadn't suddenly ducked into a tenement behind somebody who had just been buzzed in. His talk was all very much checklist literature--you know, the kind of thing young guys do, like throwing names of bands at each other in lieu of conversation. He was very excited about Lautréamont and Cendrars and Traven and Burroughs and Ballard and Iceberg Slim. He wanted to celebrate murder and burn down churches and throw up barricades and liberate the zoos. He wanted to invent a new language, a new literature, make the future happen today. He was talking as fast as a sports announcer in a foreign language, sweating even though it was February. But I already knew the song by heart. I had been there. His writings were not the unpunctuated breathless screedlike verses you might expect, but on the other hand they weren't much better. He had apparently decided that the crime novel was the essential building block of literature, the constituent unit of its DNA, and he had set about reducing and recombining it--I could just about see the wheels turning in his head--much the way punk rockers had cloned and distilled and chopped up the standard Chuck Berry guitar riff. Each story, if that's what those things could be called, was a paragraph long, titled and signed, and each resembled a page of a crime novel if you were trying to read it while it whipped by on a conveyor belt. It wasn't much, I thought. Oh, he had a good ear and all--maybe he should have been writing song lyrics. And maybe the French would appreciate it. But it hardly amounted to any kind of revolution, literary or otherwise. I can't say that I was really disappointed. What more could you expect from the typical punk-rock overgrown juvenile, too hopped up to sit still long enough to write more than 150 words? On the other hand, he was writing something, which was considerably more than I was doing at the time, for all my knowingness and jadedness and the seniority of my 25 years. Maybe Dave Carluccio was onto something, however long it would take him to get there. As the envelopes kept coming, their contents changed. The stories grew in length, formed series, were incorporated into collages. And Carluccio, who always wrote in the first person, became a character of his own devising, the hero of his stories, addressed by name by the other characters. One envelope consisted entirely of a sheaf of author's bios: he was variously a rogue CIA agent, a Vietnam War deserter, a drug trafficker operating out of the Golden Triangle, a con artist masquerading as a movie producer, a public-relations expert simultaneously working for and working to undermine every unsavory public figure in the world, a chameleonic and indiscriminate traitor to all sides. I published some of Carluccio's work in an occasional zine I put out then, but I never managed to run into him again. My friends, who never met him at all, became convinced that I had invented him and was using the name as a pseudonym. I laughed along at first--if I had wanted a pen name, wouldn't I have come up with something more clever? But it started to grate a bit. I wouldn't have admitted it then, but my condescension toward Carluccio began shading into a feeling of rivalry, gradually deepening into jealousy. Meanwhile, the envelopes, which at first had all been posted in Manhattan, started appearing with more far-flung and even unlikely postmarks: Lincoln, Nebraska; Guelph, Ontario; Truckee, California; Guadalajara, Jalisco; Merida, Yucatan; Punta Gorda, Belize; Tegucigalpa, Honduras. Was he attempting to enact the character he wrote about? Or was it that his writing in some way reflected what his life had become? 1980 was an insane time, at least for me: drugs were spiraling up, romance was spiraling down, and melodrama was abundant. I had gotten a job in the mailroom of a prominent literary journal, a job that permitted me to arrive at noon--since my co-worker had to leave early to attend music lessons--and then not return after taking the mailbag to the post office, which I usually contrived to do before four o'clock. I was not serious. I was fucking around heavily, not writing, pretending to be a musician but not managing to practice. I walked around in a daze of self-kidding. Late one night in early summer I was perhaps on my way to or from a party, probably high, when I happened to pass the 24-hour copy shop on Mercer Street just south of Eighth. I glanced in briefly--it was the place where I had put together my zine, and I knew most of the employees. A few doors south I felt a hand on my shoulder. Once again I didn't recognize him. I've never been good with faces, but this time there was an additional reason. Carluccio had grown, broadened, darkened--he was very nearly a different person altogether. He led me back to the copy shop, where he was collating and folding stacks of sheets laid out in a row. He finished assembling one, stapled it, signed it, and handed it to me. We must have made some sort of conversation, but I remember none of it. I didn't even remember the chapbook until days later, when I picked my jacket up off the floor next to the bed and discovered it sticking out of the side pocket. The book collects all the contents of all those envelopes, along with a sampling of other matter--letters, pronouncements, manifestos, poems, all of it strung together apparently in chronological order. It is hasty, confused, random, jejune--and it is bursting with every kind of world-beating youthful energy. It would have made a fine first effort for anybody, the sort of thing that sits unsold on the consignment shelves of bookstores for months and even years, and then suddenly is changing hands for four figures, and eventually cannot be obtained at all unless some major collector dies. But Carluccio's slim volume is both exceedingly rare and exceedingly obscure. For all intents and purposes it doesn't exist. He will never produce a follow-up. It was my friend G., then working for the AP, who spotted the item on the teletype in 1983. I've managed to lose the printout he sent me, but the gist was that a corpse of foreign appearance, found at a border station near Antombran, Guatemala, just across from El Salvador, had been indentified as a certain David Carluccio, 24 years old, of Scotch Plains, New Jersey. He had been killed with a machete. Local police were investigating the matter. *** Originally published at Luc Sante's blog, Pinakothek. Hilobrow.com has curated a collection of our favorite Pinakothek installments. This is the fifth in a series of ten.

Bob-Newhart-The-Windmills-Are-475373

Joshua Glenn — Mon, 03 Aug 2009 21:12:47 +0000

mad+1968

Joshua Glenn — Mon, 03 Aug 2009 21:19:44 +0000

National+Lampoon+1973

Joshua Glenn — Mon, 03 Aug 2009 21:22:01 +0000

pogo1

Joshua Glenn — Mon, 03 Aug 2009 21:34:35 +0000

Hilo Hero: Louis Armstrong

Greg Rowland — Tue, 04 Aug 2009 10:00:18 +0000

Miles Davis once said that the history of jazz could be summed up by two names: Charlie Parker and LOUIS ARMSTRONG (1901-71). I'd go further, and claim that the ABC of 20th century pop culture are: Armstrong, The Beatles, and Chaplin. Though we know him as "Satchmo," his fellow jazzers called him "Pops" — which suited him well, because Armstrong was Zeus, the All-Father whose innumerable offspring, musicians whose output ranged from banal to sublime, tumbled in his thunderous wake. Want to hear the grammar of jazz redefined for the solo instrument? Listen to any tracks by Armstrong's Hot Fives and Sevens. Need convincing that Armstrong defined vocal recording, while also introducing the idea of expressive personality into popular singing? Check out his 1930s "Stardust." The pillars of the written tune were granite... until Armstrong resculpted them, again and again. He made it possible for us to see, listen, and even think in an entirely new playful/serious and improvisatory way. *** Each day, Hilobrow.com pays tribute to one of our favorite high-, low-, no-, or hilobrow heroes on that person's birthday. Click here for more Hilo Hero shout-outs.

Comedy and the Death of God

Joshua Glenn — Tue, 04 Aug 2009 14:00:51 +0000

Hey, PhD students looking for a thesis topic — here's a freebie. These sketchy notes are inspired by a B&N.com review of Thomas Pynchon's latest novel, Inherent Vice, by Hilobrow.com friend James Parker. Parker writes:

The '60s, of course, were a historic low point for humor. I mean humor of the sort enjoyed by people who aren't a) tenured or b) high, the sort defined by William James as "common sense, dancing." Categories, hierarchies, proprieties, the basic intuitions of mankind as to its own status and destiny — those things on which humor has traditionally depended were suddenly up in the air, and while there was plenty of inane and liberated laughter to be heard, the sound of the authentic assenting chuckle, of the joke being solidly got, almost died away.

It's difficult to disagree. Particularly if you agree with me that the Sixties (not to be confused with the 1960s) ran from 1964-73. It's difficult to disagree, anyway, when you think of humorists whose sensibilities were formed during the Sixties; humorists already in their prime — that is, in their 30s and 40s — during the Sixties are another story. The following members of the Postmodern Generation were in their 30s and 40s during the Sixties: Johnny Carson, Art Buchwald, Jerry Lewis (who made brilliant movies in the late Fifties, then stopped in ’64 — more evidence that my periodization scheme is correct), Don Rickles, Mel Brooks (whose great movies, with the exception of The Producers, begin in ’74 — more evidence), Mort Sahl, Bob Newhart, Jackie Mason, Dick Gregory, Carol Burnett, Stan Freberg; the Mad Magazine folks (Wally Wood, Harvey Kurtzman, Jack Davis, Don Martin); plus Jules Feiffer, Tom Wolfe. Humorous novelists? Philip K. Dick (in spots), John Barth (sometimes), Donald Barthelme (ditto), Philip Roth (for sure). The Postmoderns incorporated the death of comedy into their work. (Art Spiegelman said, of Mad Magazine: "The message Mad had in general is, 'The media is lying to you, and we are part of the media.' It was basically... 'Think for yourselves, kids.'") Collectively, they're like Nietzsche's madman who announces in the public square that God is dead. After them, everyone is doing humor in the void. What Parker says about Pynchon is, by and large, true of humorists who were in their 20s and 30s in the Sixties:

Was everything meaningful, or nothing at all? Ah, that was the gag, the cosmic put-on, expressible only via cracked puns and the smirk of satori. Pynchon danced upon this pinhead with an insistent nimbleness: whose fictional world signified more compulsively and indiscriminately than his, the significance itself being quite beside the point? The quasi-allegorical names (Floyd Haruspex, Dichotomy Jones, Dr Whitewhale — to make up a few in the Pynchonian vein), the veiled acronymic entities (WASTE, IGLOO) that might be gangs or priesthoods or think-tanks, the omnivore's digressions into science and pop culture, the fluorescent landscape, the sense of bottomless and undiscoverable conspiracy — for a setup this elaborate, no earthly, or indeed celestial, punch line was possible.

The following humorists are members of the Anti-Anti-Utopian Generation, which is to say they were in their 20s and 30s in the Sixties: George Carlin, Bill Cosby, Richard Pryor, the National Lampoon gang (Tony Hendra, Michael O'Donoghue, Chris Miller). Novelists whom I consider funny: Don DeLillo, John Kennedy Toole, Kesey (heavy handed), Pynchon, McGuane, and Hunter S. Thompson. Other funny people from this generation: Woody Allen, R. Crumb, Abbie Hoffman, George W.S. Trow, Bob Dylan. Alan Arkin. [caption id="attachment_4311" align="aligncenter" width="299" caption="Infamous 1973 National Lampoon — last gasp of the Sixties"]National Lampoon — last gasp of the Sixties" title="National+Lampoon+1973" width="299" height="400" class="size-full wp-image-4311" />[/caption] Interestingly enough, Anti-Anti novelists like DeLillo, Kesey, Wambaugh, Pynchon, McGuane, Toole, and Thompson are more hopeful than are Postmoderns like Updike, Roth, and Cormac McCarthy. More hopeful, that is, about the possibility of a radically improved social order or American way of life emerging at some point, even if they're (understandably) unwilling to articulate what that order might look like, except in negative ways. The Postmoderns lack (and mock/mourn) the virile can-do spirit of some of their immediate predecessors; and their protagonists are beset with anxiety-provoking tensions, uncertainties, paradoxes that can never be resolved. It's the kind of thing that makes Woody Allen, say, funnier than Jules Feiffer. And what of Boomer humorists, who — more than anyone — had their sensibilities formed by the Sixties? They tend very much to the fey and absurdist and bleakly satirical: David Lynch, Bill Griffith, underground cartoonists, John Carpenter, David Byrne, Andy Kaufman, Jim Jarmusch, Steve Martin. The original Saturday Night Live cast. Wacky Packages. But of course Parker's pronunciamento doesn't include the Boomers, who were in their teens and 20s during the Sixties — that is, they were in the audience. Readers, what do you think?

Hilo Hero: Wendell Berry

Jason Grote — Wed, 05 Aug 2009 10:00:04 +0000

As a kid, my upbringing pulled me in divergent directions: on my mother's side, an urban technophile Jewishness (inspired, in part by her own lack of nostalgia for her childhood on a chicken farm) and on my stepfather's, a hardy German-American naturalism. There were aspects of this I loved (hiking, fishing), hated (gardening), and was ambivalent toward (hunting). It wasn't until I read WENDELL BERRY (born 1934) that I realized my ambivalence had meaning, that it was of a piece with America's complicated relationship with nature. A farmer as well as a poet, novelist, and essayist, Berry's natural world is neither the romanticized Eden of the hippie urbanist nor the utilitarian raw material of the industrialist, but something greater than either: it is a vast force both hard and soft, forgiving and unforgiving. Berry's earth can speak to us but is indifferent to our existence; he shows us a world that alters us even as we alter it. *** Each day, Hilobrow.com pays tribute to one of our favorite high-, low-, no-, or hilobrow heroes on that person's birthday. Click here for more Hilo Hero shout-outs.

mannequin

Joshua Glenn — Wed, 05 Aug 2009 20:37:44 +0000

hughes

Joshua Glenn — Wed, 05 Aug 2009 20:45:49 +0000

lovecraft-wall-arkham1943

Joshua Glenn — Wed, 05 Aug 2009 21:02:59 +0000

Birth_of_Venus

Matthew Battles — Wed, 05 Aug 2009 21:04:22 +0000

Paranoid Theory: The Ape That's All Wet

Matthew Battles — Wed, 05 Aug 2009 21:10:14 +0000

Elaine Morgan is a Welsh screen writer whose credits include Dr Finlay's Casebook and How Green Was My Valley. But for more than thirty years she is best known as a stalwart defender of the theory that mankind descended from aquatic apes. Morgan has passionately advanced this notion in some half-dozen books since the early 1970s. Most recently she defended her theory at the bespoke intellectual salon juggernaut TED's global meeting in Oxford. In Darwin's bicentenary year, she warns, evolutionists will chime in to "enlighten us on almost every aspect of Darwin... [but] there's one aspect of this story which they have thrown no light on, and they seem anxious to skirt around and step over it and talk about something else." In language like this we catch the distinct timbre of paranoid theory. But hold on. While the Aquatic Ape hypothesis shares traits with Intelligent Design—notably, a reliance on post-hoc just-so stories rather than testable hypotheses and empirical evidence—Morgan's paranoid critique of mainstream science deserves our admiration. For hers is a critical science, not an empirical one. Morgan's interest in evolution began with a justifiable frustration with male-centered explanations of human traits; she grew zealous as she came to know the gender-skewed structure of authority in academic natural history and the generally sketchy nature of paleontological evidence. The idea has an interesting history. Anaximander first speculated mankind's descent from water creatures in the sixth century BC. In the early twentieth century, eminent marine biologist Alister Hardy noted that in several traits (hairlessness, subcutaneous fat deposits, conscious control of the breath) humans bear a resemblance to some aquatic mammals. Desmond Morris visited the theory in his highly popular book The Naked Ape, where Elaine Morgan first encountered it. In its defense she has conducted an admirable-if-eccentric course of scientific criticism in the public sphere, which she charmingly expounds in her TED talk. Did humankind crawl from the seas a second time in a slightly farcical sequel of life's terrestrial adventure? It's highly unlikely. But Morgan's spirited, romantic defense of her ideas makes for a bracing plunge in the energizing waters of paranoid theory.

bukowski028

Joshua Glenn — Wed, 05 Aug 2009 21:51:10 +0000

hilobrow-ancestor

Joshua Glenn — Wed, 05 Aug 2009 22:22:13 +0000

On the difficulty of identifying Hilobrows

HILOBROW — Wed, 05 Aug 2009 22:22:46 +0000

Nobrows are easily recognized, for their gait is dancing and bold. But Hilobrows frequently deceive one because their bearing is curiously like that of a class of people heartily despised by Nobrows as well as by Hilobrows — the Middlebrow.

So wrote one of Hilobrow.com's predecessors, a daring and perceptive seeker pictured above, in a cruel caricature. NB: We might not have the translation of this material exactly right; that is to say, we've seen other translations. Our intellectual ancestor continues:

Let me admit frankly that I have not in my experience encountered any certain specimen of this type; but I do not refuse to admit that as far as I know, every other person may be such a specimen. At the same time I will say that I have searched vainly for years.... As I said, I have not met with such a one; but I can easily imagine her. Here she is. I make her acquaintance and am introduced to her. The first moment I lay my eyes on her I push her back, leaping back myself, I hold up my hands in amazement and say to myself: 'Good Lord! That person? Is it really she — why, she looks like [Ellen DeGeneres]!' But it is really she.

Ellen DeGeneres? Well, close enough. You get the idea. This is a tricky business!

Generations (2): Plutonians

Joshua Glenn — Thu, 06 Aug 2009 10:00:53 +0000

I've named this 1854-63 generation after one of its members: Percival Lowell, the astronomer who predicted the existence of Planet X — which was discovered in 1930, and named Pluto in part to echo P.L.'s initials. Pluto is the god of the underworld, and members of this generation — Freud, Emil Kraepelin, Sir James Frazer, Eugen Bleuler, Julius Wagner-Jauregg, Franz Boas, Émile Durkheim — were dedicated to spelunking the darkest corners of the unconscious, rationalizing the world's religions and myths, laying bare the deepest structures of society and culture. And then there's Plutonian Joseph Conrad's voyage to the Heart of Darkness and Rimbaud's Une Saison en Enfer. Kellogg and Post were spelunkers of humankind's intestinal underworld; their invention of breakfast cereal (at their respective communes) was one aspect of their shared fascination with nutrition and enemas. Erik Davis tells me: "Pluto is a dark technological god of transformation. So you get the apocalyptic dimension, the sense of transformation, the 'cosmic' current." Yes, Plutonians like Rimbaud, Samuel Liddell MacGregor Mathers, Arthur Edward Waite, Arthur Machen, Edmund Husserl, Theodor Reuss, Pierre Janet, Margaret Murray, Rudolf Steiner, Alfred North Whitehead, and Henri Bergson were fascinated with occultism, metaphysics, the systematic derangement of the senses, the élan vital, the cosmic perspective, the naked lunch at the end of the fork perceived only via the phenomenological epoché. Oh, and speaking of plutonian currents and technological transformation: the Serbian-born inventor Nikola Tesla invented alternating current (the AC to Edison's DC). As we read in the July 26, 2009 New York Times Magazine, in Serbia, Tesla "is not just the local kid made good: his name, everywhere, stands for the hope that lurking beneath the tediously materialistic surface of our world lie the phantasmagorical powers of a hidden realm." The Tesla coil, patented in 1891, took ordinary sixty-cycle per second household current and stepped it up to extremely high frequencies — which allowed its inventor to develop some of the first neon and fluorescent illumination, and to take the first x-ray photographs. Tesla also invented wireless telegraphy, though credit eventually went to Marconi. And in 1890, Tesla illuminated a vacuum tube wirelessly — having transmitted energy through the air. Wireless remote control soon followed. After building an experimental station near Pikes Peak, in Colorado Springs, Tesla's technicians assembled an enormous Tesla coil, specially designed to send powerful electrical impulses into the earth. Tesla, the greatest of all Plutonians, had decided that the earth itself was a great conductor, "literally alive with electrical vibrations" — and that he could use it to transmit electrical power without wires. Tesla claimed that soon, humankind would tap the sun's energy with an antenna, control the weather with electrical energy, and establish a global system of wireless communications. "When wireless is fully applied the earth will be converted into a huge brain," he told backer J.P. Morgan, "capable of response in every one of its parts." Morgan financed Tesla's Wardenclyffe project, a 187-foot tower supporting a 55-ton steel sphere. Beneath the tower, iron pipes plunged 420 feet into the ground so that currents could pass through them and seize hold of the earth. "In this system that I have invented," Tesla explained, "it is necessary for the machine to get a grip of the earth, otherwise it cannot shake the earth. It has to have a grip... so that the whole of this globe can quiver." *** Pluto was also the Roman god of precious metals, because they are mined from the underworld. Every generation has its plutocrats, but the very names of the 1854-63 cohort's American capitalists and Wall Street journalists are iconic: Barron, Mellon, Schwab, and (Dow) Jones! Diamond Jim Brady! Not to mention Ford, Gillette, Sears, Duke, Hearst, Guggenheim, Hershey, Dayton, Maytag, Smucker, Hormel, Wrigley, and honorary Plutonians Cecil Rhodes, John Jacob Astor, and Jim Beam. A handful of Plutonians were some of the most brilliant critics of the horrors, paradoxes, and absurdities of modern capitalism, ever: Thorstein Veblen (The Theory of the Leisure Class), Georg Simmel (Philosophy of Money), muckraker Ida Tarbell (History of the Standard Oil Company), and honorary Plutonian Max Weber (The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism). *** A reminder of my generational periodization scheme: 1844-53: [Progressive Generation] Prometheans 1854-63: [Progressive, Missionary Generations] Plutonians 1864-73: [Missionary Generation] Anarcho-Symbolists 1874-83: [Missionary Generation] Psychonauts 1884-93: [Lost Generation] Modernists 1894-1903: [Lost, Greatest/GI Generations] Hardboileds 1904-13: [Greatest/GI Generation] Partisans 1914-23: [Greatest/GI Generation] New Gods 1924-33: [Silent Generation] Postmodernists 1934-43: [Silent Generation] Anti-Anti-Utopians 1944-53: Boomers 1954-63: [Boomers, Late Boomers, Post-Boomers, Generation Jones] OGXers 1964-73: [Generation X, Thirteenth Generation] Constructivists 1974-83: [Generations X, Y] Revivalists 1984-93: [Millennial Generation] Throwbacks 1994-2003: [Millennial Generation] TBA *** Meet the Plutonians. 1854: Hertha Ayrton (Physicist, electric arc), David Buick (designed the first Buick motorcars), F. Marion Crawford (Novelist), George Eastman (inventor of the Kodak camera), Sir James Frazer (Anthropologist, The Golden Bough), Samuel Liddell MacGregor Mathers (Magician, founder of The Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn), Henri Poincaré (Mathematician, Poincaré Conjecture), C. W. Post (invented Postum and Grape-Nuts), Arthur Rimbaud (Poet, Une Saison en Enfer), Charles Angrand (Neo-Impressionist painter), John Philip Sousa (Composer, "Stars and Stripes Forever"), Thomas A. Watson (Assistant to Alexander Graham Bell). Honorary Prometheans (1844-53): Oscar Wilde (Anglo-Irish playwright, author, dandy, decadent). He was more of a Uranian than a Plutonian — ha! (Sorry, period humor.) 1855: Percival Lowell (Astronomer, predicted existence of Pluto), Clarence W. Barron (Wall Street Journal proprietor, 1903-28), John Browning (gun designer), Eugene V. Debs (Labor leader, ran for President five times), King Gillette (Invented safety razor), Ned Kelly (iron-clad Australian outlaw), Andrew W. Mellon (US Secretary of the Treasury, 1921-32), Evelyn De Morgan (British Pre-Raphaelite painter), Theodor Reuss (founded the Ordo Templi Orientis), James Barnes (American writer, magazine editor). 1856: Sigmund Freud (Psychiatrist), Nikola Tesla (invented alternating current), L. Frank Baum (Novelist, The Wizard of Oz), Woodrow Wilson (28th US President, 1913-21), Louis D. Brandeis (US Supreme Court Justice, 1916-39), James Buchanan Duke (American Tobacco Company), Daniel Guggenheim (Mining magnate), H. Rider Haggard (Novelist, King Solomon's Mines), Frank Harris (Anglo-Irish-American author, My Life and Loves), Elbert Hubbard (founder of Roycroft Press), Diamond Jim Brady (larger-than-life millionaire), Edward Jones (co-founder of Dow Jones, editor of Wall Street Journal), Emil Kraepelin (Psychiatrist, manic depression and schizophrenia), A. Lawrence Lowell (President, Harvard University, 1909-33), Henri Edmond Cross (Neo-Impressionist painter), Robert E. Peary (Explorer, first to reach the North Pole), Philippe Pétain (Leader of Vichy France), John Singer Sargent (American portraitist), George Bernard Shaw (Anglo-Irish dramatist and pamphleteer), Louis Sullivan (early skyscraper architect), J. J. Thomson (Physicist, discovered the electron), Booker T. Washington (Educator, Activist, Up From Slavery), Kate Douglas Wiggin (Novelist, Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm), Edmund Beecher Wilson (Biologist, The Cell in Development and Inheritance). 1857: Thorstein Veblen (Economist, The Theory of the Leisure Class), Joseph Conrad (Author, Heart of Darkness), William Howard Taft (27th US President, 1909-13), Edward Barnard (self-taught astronomer), Eugen Bleuler (Psychiatrist, coined term schizophrenia), Clarence Darrow (Attorney, Scopes Monkey Trial), George Draper Dayton (founder of what is now Target Stores), Edward Elgar (Composer, "Pomp and Circumstance"), George Gissing (Novelist, New Grub Street), Milton Hershey (founder of Hershey's), Heinrich Hertz (Physicist, discoverer of electromagnetic radiation), Edwin Lester Arnold (British author, Lieut. Gullivar Jones), Gertrude Franklin Atherton (American novelist, Senator North, Black Oxen), Konstantin Eduardovich Tsiolkovsky (Russian and Soviet astronautics and rocket dynamics pioneer, author), George Griffith (British SF author, explorer), Robert Baden-Powell (Founder of the Boy Scout movement), James E. Keeler (Astronomer, composition of Saturn's rings), Frederick L. Maytag (founder of Maytag Corporation), Emmeline Pankhurst (Militant suffragette), Le Pétomane (legendary fartiste), Pope Pius XI, Charles Sherrington (Doctor, neurons and synapses), Frank J. Sprague (invented streetcars and express elevators), Ida M. Tarbell (Journalist, History of the Standard Oil Company), Julius Wagner-Jauregg (Psychiatrist, pioneered shock therapy), Arthur Edward Waite (Paranormal, created the Rider-Waite Tarot deck) 1858: Franz Boas (father of American Anthropology), Charles Chesnutt (Novelist, The Conjure Woman), Rudolf Diesel (inventor of the Diesel Engine), Émile Durkheim (Sociologist, Rules of the Sociological Method), Eleanora Duse (most famous Italian actress of her time), Rémy de Gourmont (Poet), Benjamin Kidd (Sociologist, Social Evolution), E. (Edith) Nesbit (Novelist, The Story of the Treasure Seekers; co-founded the Fabian Society), Adolph Ochs (New York Times Publisher, 1896-1936), Giuseppe Peano (Mathematician, infinitesimal calculus), Max Planck (Physicist, originator of quantum theory), Giacomo Puccini (Composer, Madame Butterfly), Theodore Roosevelt (26th US President, 1901-09), Georg Simmel (Sociologist, Philosophy of Money), Jerome Smucker (Founder of J. M. Smucker Company), John A. Hobson (British economist, anti-imperialist). 1859: Edmund Husserl (Phenomenological philosopher), Arthur Conan Doyle (Anglo-Irish novelist, creator of Sherlock Holmes, Professor Challenger, much more), Georges Seurat (Neo-Impressionist painting pioneer), Sholem Aleichem (Author, Fiddler on the Roof), Henri Bergson (Philosopher, L'Évolution Créatrice), Billy the Kid (frontier outlaw), Walter Camp (Father of American football), Pierre Curie (Physicist, early investigator of radiation), John Dewey (Pragmatist philosopher, education reformer), Alfred Dreyfus (Dreyfus Affair scapegoat), Havelock Ellis (Biologist, Studies in the Psychology of Sex), George Ferris (inventor of the Ferris Wheel), Knut Hamsun (Norwegian novelist), A. E. Housman (Poet), Pierre Janet (Founder of Automatic Psychology), Jerome K. Jerome (Author, Three Men in a Boat), Oscar Mayer (Oscar Mayer Meats, Inc.), Maurice Prendergast (American Post-Impressionist watercolorist), Kaiser Wilhelm (last of the German emperors) 1860: Charlotte Perkins Gilman (American sociologist, novelist, utopian feminist, Women and Economics), Jane Addams (Activist), J. M. Barrie (Author, Peter Pan), Lizzie Borden (Presumed axe murderer), William Jennings Bryan (Politician, prosecutor of the Scopes Monkey Trial), Anton Chekhov (Playwright and short story writer), Charles Chree (Astronomer, geomagnetic phenomena), William K. L. Dickson (inventor, motion picture camera), Theodor Herzl (Lead Zionist), George A. Hormel (Founder of Hormel Foods Corporation), Ishi (last of an extinct tribe), Jigoro Kano (founder of Judo), Will Keith Kellogg (corn flakes and Rice Krispies), Gustav Mahler (Composer), Harriet Monroe (founder of Poetry magazine), Annie Oakley (performance artist), Lillian Russell (actress, suffragette), Elmer Sperry (gyroscopic compass), Andrew Volstead (legislated enforcement of Prohibition), Owen Wister (Author, The Virginian) [caption id="attachment_4173" align="aligncenter" width="550" caption="Portrait of Felix Feneon, Opus 217 (Against the Enamel of a Background Rhythmic with Beats and Angles, Tones and Tints, Portrait of Felix Feneon in 1890), Paul Signac, 1890-91"]Portrait of Felix Feneon, Opus 217 (Against the Enamel of a Background Rhythmic with Beats and Angles, Tones and Tints, Portrait of Felix Feneon in 1890), Paul Signac, 1890-91" title="signac_feneon-550" width="550" height="431" class="size-full wp-image-4173" />[/caption] 1861: Félix Fénéon (French anarchist, art critic), William Bateson (Biologist, founder of genetics), William C. Durant (founder of General Motors), Frederick Hopkins (Scientist, discovered vitamins), Victor Horta (Art Nouveau architect), James Naismith (inventor of Basketball), Frederic Remington (Sculptor), Rudolf Steiner (Philosopher, Anthroposophical Society), Rabindranath Tagore (Poet), Frederick Jackson Turner (Historian, Frontier Thesis), Alfred North Whitehead (metaphysical mathematician), William Wrigley, Jr. (chewing gum magnate) 1862: Carl Charlier (Astronomer, Motion and the Distribution of the Stars), Claude Debussy (French Impressionist composer), Robert Emden (Mathematician, stellar structure), Robert Ford (shot and killed Jesse James), O. Henry (Author), David Hilbert (Mathematician, Hilbert Space), Gustav Klimt (Painter, Founder of the Vienna Sezession), Maurice Maeterlinck (Playwright), Joseph Merrick (The Elephant Man), Arthur Schnitzler (Playwright), Charles M. Schwab (founder of Bethlehem Steel), Billy Sunday (Evangelist), Ida B. Wells-Barnett (civil rights advocate), Edvard Westermarck (Anthropologist), Edith Wharton (Novelist, The Age of Innocence), Maurice Barrès (French novelist, journalist, and anti-Semite nationalist politician and agitator) 1863: Leo Baekeland (inventor of Velox and Bakelite), Annie Jump Cannon (Astronomer, census-taker of the sky), Franz Ferdinand (assassination touched off WWI), Henry Ford (founder of Ford Motors), David Lloyd (UK Prime Minister, 1916-22), William Randolph Hearst (newspaper magnate), Casey Jones (railroad hero), Arthur Machen (Welsh horror novelist, occultist), George Herbert Mead (Pragmatist, social behaviorist), Margaret Murray (Egyptologist, mother of Wicca), Richard F. Outcault (Cartoonist, Yellow Kid), Henry Royce (designed the first Rolls-Royce), George Santayana (Philosopher, The Realms of Being), Richard W. Sears (Sears, Roebuck founder), Jessie Willcox Smith (The Water-Babies illustrator). Honorary Anarcho-Symbolists: Gabriele D'Annunzio (Author, Anarchist Dictator of Fiume, 1919-20), Edvard Munch (Painter, Scream), Luis P. Senarens (SF writer). *** MORE NOTES ON THE PLUTONIANS The Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn: Samuel Liddell MacGregor Mathers (1854), founder of the Order; Arthur Edward Waite (1857), created the Rider-Waite Tarot deck; Arthur Machen (1863), Welsh horror novelist. Neo-impressionists: Charles Angrand, Henri Edmond Cross, Georges Seurat, honorary Plutonian Toulouse-Lautrec. Also, speaking of the Plutonians' grasp of deep sociocultural patterns: Owen Wister's The Virginian (1902), the prototypical early fictional Western, transposed the Knights of the Round Table into the American West with cowboys as knights, and tyrannical owners of cattle empires as kings. [caption id="attachment_4178" align="aligncenter" width="404" caption="Max Weber"][/caption] HONORARY PLUTONIANS: From the Promethean Generation: Cecil Rhodes, possibly Vincent Van Gogh. From the Anarcho-Syndicalist Generation: John Jacob Astor, Jim Beam (Bourbon baron), Nellie Bly (Journalist, Ten Days in a Mad-House), Max Weber (Sociologist, The Protestant Ethic), Wilhelm Wien (Physicist, Blackbody radiation), Henri Toulouse-Lautrec (all 1864). PLUTONIANS WHO ARE HONORARY MEMBERS OF THE PROMETHEAN (1844-53) GENERATION: Oscar Wilde (1854). PLUTONIANS WHO ARE HONORARY MEMBERS OF THE ANARCHO-SYMBOLIST GENERATION (1864-73): Gabriele D'Annunzio, Edvard Munch, Luis P. Senarens (all 1863) PS: The 19th-century's three most notable oddities (Ishi, The Elephant Man, and legendary fartiste Le Pétomane) are Plutonians. Team them up with Tesla, and you've got the plot of a League of Extraordinary Gentlemen-style comic book...

Hilo Hero: Michelle Yeoh

David Smay — Thu, 06 Aug 2009 10:00:54 +0000

[caption id="attachment_3541" align="aligncenter" width="550" caption="A scene from Police Story III: Super Cop"]Police Story III: Super Cop" title="yeoh-supercop3-550" width="550" height="310" class="size-full wp-image-3541" />[/caption] Most Western filmgoers didn't discover the greatest female action star in the history of film until Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon — or when she blew Pierce Brosnan off the screen in Tomorrow Never Dies. But HK action fanatics had been raving about the HSQ (Holy Shit Quotient) of MICHELLE YEOH (Yang Zi Chong, born 1962) since she jumped a motorcycle onto a moving train in 1992's Police Story 3: Supercop. (Personally I favor her brutal fight scene in Project S where she takes out a guy twice her size with coin bags and innumerable kicks to the face). A ranked swimmer, diver, and squash player, as a teenager Yeoh enrolled in London's Royal Academy of Dance; after a spinal injury, she wound up costarring in Jackie Chan action comedies that played off the stern dignity of her screen presence. But don't be lulled by her serene elegance. Yeoh might kick you in the head at any moment and there's not a damn thing you'll be able to do about it. *** Each day, Hilobrow.com pays tribute to one of our favorite high-, low-, no-, or hilobrow heroes on that person's birthday. Click here for more Hilo Hero shout-outs.

brady-diamondjim

Joshua Glenn — Thu, 06 Aug 2009 10:46:04 +0000

NYT2008122315471033C

clip_image002

Joshua Glenn — Thu, 06 Aug 2009 10:53:53 +0000

reason

Joshua Glenn — Thu, 06 Aug 2009 11:00:34 +0000

reason+2

Joshua Glenn — Thu, 06 Aug 2009 11:00:53 +0000

basquiat

Joshua Glenn — Thu, 06 Aug 2009 11:05:20 +0000

jarry-ubu

Joshua Glenn — Thu, 06 Aug 2009 12:10:23 +0000

kandinsky-square

Joshua Glenn — Thu, 06 Aug 2009 12:16:47 +0000

dubois-550

Joshua Glenn — Thu, 06 Aug 2009 12:18:36 +0000

landauer-550

Joshua Glenn — Thu, 06 Aug 2009 12:23:56 +0000

aubrey_beardsley4

Joshua Glenn — Thu, 06 Aug 2009 12:25:27 +0000

stein-picasso-550

Joshua Glenn — Thu, 06 Aug 2009 12:26:55 +0000

nash-ogden

Joshua Glenn — Thu, 06 Aug 2009 12:51:31 +0000

2455049657_e3158a2a46

Joshua Glenn — Thu, 06 Aug 2009 20:58:33 +0000

400px-Martha_Stewart_at_Met_Opera

Matthew Battles — Fri, 07 Aug 2009 00:22:48 +0000

777px-Wittgenstein_haus

Matthew Battles — Fri, 07 Aug 2009 00:23:39 +0000

93294-004-FC68754E

Matthew Battles — Fri, 07 Aug 2009 00:27:08 +0000

goethe warhol

Matthew Battles — Fri, 07 Aug 2009 00:28:20 +0000

Farber Schwartzen

Matthew Battles — Fri, 07 Aug 2009 00:36:53 +0000

LONG BEFORE PRISON, Martha Stewart proposed and then dropped a plan to endow the Martha Stewart Professorship in Home Economics at the Harvard Business School. Evidently, Ms. Stewart wanted not only to fund the chair, but to be named its first incumbent as well. Not long after the deal fell apart, America's unofficial Dean of Dining and Decorating put in a speaking appearance at Radcliffe, proving that her goodwill towards the richest university in the world was undiminished. Such sportsmanship offer hope that one of Harvard's libraries might someday play host to the Martha Stewart Archives. Imagine the riches—including the following document, taken from the transcripts of the MarthaStewartLiving.com chatroom. It would seem—if this transcript is to be believed—that Martha Stewart's concept of color attracted the interest of dead white men Ludwig Wittgenstein and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, who managed to find their way to her site through the ether which connects the World Wide Web to the World Beyond. (Hermenaut has been in the vanguard here, bringing to light such occult phenomena of the information age; see issue 16's "Dear Teddie" for a similar discovery). In what follows, "MSL" is the voice of the chatroom host; we're not sure it isn't the would-be Professor of Home Economics, Martha Stewart herself. —eds. MSL: Hello all! We're opening our chatroom today to talk about colors and how to use them in decorating our homes. Let's take our first question: heinz57: We're currently building our first home. Should we choose colors now, or wait until the house is built? MSL: Hi, heinz! It really depends on you. If you know you have real strong color preferences, then you should start thinking about matching them to the rooms. Otherwise, it's probably a good idea to get inside the house and see what it feels like in there. WITT: Well, this is very interesting to me! When I designed my sister's house in Vienna, we never even discussed color, and of course you know how it turns out: white, white, white—every room is white! MSL: Yes, well people say that rooms always look bigger when they're painted white, but there are plenty of other colors that will work, even in small rooms. WITT: Though it's interesting that we call white a "color," isn't it? I want to say that it isn't a color at all, that my sister's house has no color at all. MSL: Thanks, Witt! And now we're on to the next question. bld1: We have an olive couch, and our living room has hardwood floors. What's a good color for us? MSL: You know, olive is a great color, because it can be warm or cold depending on what you pair it with. WITT: I want to ask a question about olive as well. Could you not also call it reddish-green? MSL: I'm not sure what you mean. WITT: I mean the color "olive"; would you call it reddish-green? MSL: I don't know about that, Witt. Didn't your art teacher tell you that mixing red and green makes brown? But we ought to move on, now, and talk the mid-range neutrals. Now, these colors are not dark, but they're not light either. They give a room good presence without a lot of color. And, like a pair of khakis,they'll match anything! RAH15949: What are the names of those colors? Can I find them at Martha's Paints? MSL: Oh yes, and there are lots of special colors, you can find them all at Kmart. Let's see, there's Scone, one called Fresh Hay, a very sort of warm blue one called Cornflower, and another good neutral called Old Linen. WITT: I should like to ask, what is the color "scone"? MSL: Well, it's sort of a warm, dry, creamy, gold—you know, like a baked English scone. WITT: Yes, I am familiar with these scones and have enjoyed them on occassion. But I what I want to know is, is "scone" a single color, or several colors? MSL: It's a single color in that when you buy it it comes in one can, so you don't need to worry about mixing it or anything. WITT: But you say that colors such as this may have highlights in them? And those highlights would be colors themselves, correct? MSL: Sure. Sure they would be colors. But maybe we should take another question right now. burnco: Hi! We're about to have a baby and we don't want to pick the same old colors—we want colors that aren't overly stimulating but are fun and certainly gender-neutral. MSL: I guess the baby can't offer much input yet! Anyway, I'm glad you want to avoid the obvious old pink-and-blue. So: think about a light, pale green, which works well with either a boy's or girl's room. If you do want to go a more traditional route and still have fun, try a blue with a lot of green in it, almost a pale aqua for the boy; and for the girl, try something like a melted creamsicle. WITT: Why are pink and blue obvious? MSL: Oh, you know. Pink's girls, and blue is for boys. WITT: And this we learn not from the colors themselves, but from the way people use them? MSL: Yes. And no. I mean, pink is cute, really, like little baby girls, while blue heinz57: I see what you're saying, Witt. It drives me nuts that everyone thinks pink is for girls and blue is for boys. What's up with that? MSL: Well it drives me nuts too heinz—it's just plain bad taste. It's *common*! But I can see where the idea comes from. WITT: So blue, for example, what does it mean to you? What does blue do in the world? MSL: I don't know—blue is cool and sort of—distant. WITT: So colors are like the "moods" of people. But tell me another thing: Are blue and, say, Cornflower, are they "colors" in the same way? MSL: I'm sorry, I WITT: I mean are they both the same kind of thing. Or are they different. MSL: Well, blue is just generic blue. But Cornflower is specific. WITT: Do you want to say it evokes some specific thing in the world? Namely the cornflower. MSL: Yes! Yes that's exactly what I'm saying. WITT: And when you see a certain blue, and you tell me, "this color is called Cornflower," do you expect that I should see in my mind a picture of a cornflower? MSL: Yes, I like that, only I've never seen a cornflower before. WITT: Neither have I! Or I should say that I have probably seen them without knowing I have seen them[, w]hich is essentially the same thing. But my question for you now is, how is that different from the little boy's blue? MSL: I'm sorry? WITT: You say this color, Cornflower, evokes a certain response that the generic blue does not. And yet you say that blue is cool and distant. MSL: But not just any blue—I don't think— WITT: I want to say that we're working with a kind of color animism here, in which we talk about colors using the language of certain spiritual or metaphysical properties. bld1: I remember Cornflower, it comes in the Crayola box. I never knew what it meant either! I always thought corn was just green and yellow. WITT: Yes! And so when you are thinking of that crayon, and you tell someone it's Cornflower, and they have seen cornflowers, but never the crayon, then are you both talking about the same color? heinz57: I know what you mean! It's like talking about traffic lights with a colorblind person. He knows what you mean even though he doesn't know green. WITT: Yes, Herr Heinz, though I want to say this is the opposite case—but the problem arises in the same fashion. Yet with these scones and cornflowers, we have something else, too, which we also have when we talk about a boy's colors and girl's colors. For here we are talking about colors in the same way we talk of spiritual things. burnco: Wait! WITT, what color do *you* recommend for a baby's room? MSL: People, I really don't think Mr. WITT here is qualified to answer these kinds of questions... Let ME do the recommending in this chatroom. Now, does anyone have a specific question? GOETHE: Colors are infused with just these mystical Properties! Don't you see that they are themselves the very stuff of Spirit, extending into the World? We become acquainted with their Ways in their infinite Variations, in their Struggles, which are the Struggles of Shadow and Light themselves! MSL: That's not even a question! WITT: Herr Goethe, please: I have thought of color as a kind of arithmetic. I mean that color terms have been used to talk in a kind of shorthand about the world, without having to deal with the set of all things that are the case. But with these colors, Cornflower and Scone, which are also names of things, there is no arithmetic, no system. Here we have as many colors as there are objects in the world. GOETHE: But these are the Practitioner's own terms, mein gute Freund. It makes an enormous Difference which Route to Understanding you choose in these Things. To those who use Color, these Words have Meanings and Significances, which are inadmissable to the Mathematician or Physicist. We are not discussing the Physics of Light, you see, but the Phenomena of Color. WITT: The problem is not the question of physical laws but of how we talk about these things in the first place. Cornflower: presumably it changes with the seasons and from flower to flower. Is a cornflower blue on a moonless night? NO—although hair may be blonde in a black-and-white photo, or a white piece of paper appear grey when placed on newly fallen snow. The language game of color as we usually play it allows for such—I want to say "multiplications"; they increase the "amplitude" of that which may be spoken. But this cornflower—color animism—by multipyling the names we speak for color, the amplitude of the words which can be spoken about color diminishes. More words, only they're passing through a narrow opening, without relating to one another. MSL: I am sorry, but I must break in again here. Do either of you have a room to paint? A rug to choose? We can even talk about cool and warm color choices for one's wardrobe—but if you don't have a question like this, I really have to move on to someone else. Now. aunty9: My husband wants a dark color like Chocolate for our living room and I like it too, only it's too dark. But I don't like light creamy tans either. Is their a treatment for these dark colors? MSL: Well yes, using a sponge and a white paint you could whiten it. WITT: How can whiteness be added to a color? When we see white as an absolute, which would seem to disappear whenever color arises. MSL: But yes you can make whiteness appear in color! It's called HEATHER! GOETHE: Say, this Creamsicle Color, which MSL states is best for die Kinder, sounds absolutely delightful—like the Color of the Sun as it pierces the Thunderstorm's gloomy Veil, where it makes a Halo of the most joyous and sprightly Colors. Even primitive Folk will take this as the Sign of God's Holy Covenant with Man! WITT: But the creamsicle itself is a cold confection, Herr Goethe, despite the warmth of its color, which makes all of this very interesting indeed. aunty9: That's so true! I mean, it's funny that they chose a *warm* color for a popsicle. burnco: And I like what you say about white, WITT, it really is different from the other colors. WITT: Yes it is. After all, you can imagine colors as transparent as in stained glass windows but you really can't imagine a clear white. heinz57: That's totally right! MSL: But a clear white is milky! Creamsicle is coolish-warm! And if you don't know what a cornflower is, I mean really, I don't what to say! And I'm sorry, but now we really are out of time. A version of this transcribed and edited chat first appeared in April 2001 on Hermenaut.com.

sturges-sull

Joshua Glenn — Fri, 07 Aug 2009 01:26:14 +0000

freddie-mercury2

Joshua Glenn — Fri, 07 Aug 2009 01:33:22 +0000

Hilo Hero: Bruce Dickinson

Tor Aarestad — Fri, 07 Aug 2009 10:00:05 +0000

With the ouster of original vocalist Paul Di'Anno and the hiring of BRUCE DICKINSON (born 1958) just before the release of their immortal third album, The Number of the Beast, Iron Maiden had finally completed its transformation from workaday maggot to luminous blue bottle. Dickinson's ululations and earnest dramatic flair allowed Steve Harris's compositions to go full-on space-operatic, as in Maiden's adaptation of Frank Herbert's Dune: "He rules the sandworms and the Fremen/In a land amongst the stars/Of an age tomorrow.... Without a stillsuit you would fry/On the sands so hot and dry/In a world called Arrakis." In so many respects peak-era Iron Maiden resembles the famously ridiculous Spinal Tap, but it is Dickinson's sincerity that makes the songs brilliant even when they are preposterous. Where Di'Anno was a snarling pub rocker, Dickinson is a strolling minstrel regaling us with yarns — accompanied by galloping bass, electric guitar pas de deux, and sepulchral voiceovers — about the Flight of Icarus, the Charge of the Light Brigade, and the cult British sci-fi series The Prisoner. *** Each day, Hilobrow.com pays tribute to one of our favorite high-, low-, no-, or hilobrow heroes on that person's birthday. Click here for more Hilo Hero shout-outs.

Hilo Hero: Kool Moe Dee

Douglas Wolk — Sat, 08 Aug 2009 10:00:32 +0000

Pity Mohandas Dewese, d/b/a KOOL MOE DEE (born 1962): briefly one of the most popular rappers alive, he's now mostly remembered for a feud with LL Cool J that the market effectively decided in LL's favor. (The old-schooler with the wraparound shades got in the best blow, though: the pugnacious B-side "Let's Go," in which he subjects Mr. Smith to a torrent of alliterative abuse, ending "laborious louse on the loser's list/live in limbo, lyrical lapse/low-life with the loud raps." Whoa.) KMD was maybe the most technically impressive of the first wave of recorded MCs — check out his breath-defying verses on the Treacherous Three's "New Rap Language" — but his blunt, declamatory party-rocking started to sound like a throwback around the time his career peaked. His 2003 book, There's a God on the Mic, is a fascinatingly pedantic, wonky breakdown of his favorite MCs, evaluated in 17 categories and ranked. He lists himself as #5 — modestly, but not too modestly — and LL Cool J as #7. *** Each day, Hilobrow.com pays tribute to one of our favorite high-, low-, no-, or hilobrow heroes on that person's birthday. Click here for more Hilo Hero shout-outs.

Hilo Hero: Tove Jansson

Tor Aarestad — Sun, 09 Aug 2009 10:00:37 +0000

In all of her writing and art TOVE JANSSON (1914-2001) paid keen attention to the beauty and detail in the natural world. But the descriptions and illustrations of people (or their fantastical stand-ins: hemulens, fillyjonks, snorks, moomins) are humanely depicted absurdities, all hat or nose or eyes. Through Jansson's lens, homologies reign supreme — natural and social worlds, dyadic social bonds, even individual psyches only differ by the degree of articulation, and all are seen as beautiful but fragile organisms. (Everything and everyone in Moominvalley exists in a fraught equipoise. The loner Snufkin, the Natty Bumppo and Yoda of Moominvalley, at once loves Moomintroll and resents him for the leash that their social bond becomes: "You can't ever be really free if you admire someone too much.") Jansson reaches her peak in Tales from Moominvalley, a series of often devastating if not entirely hopeless fables. Here is the Fillyjonk who believes in Disasters trying to communicate honestly with her bourgeois neighbor:

"You were talking about wind... but I'm speaking about cyclones. Typhoons, Gaffie dear. Tornadoes, whirlwinds, sandstorms... But most of all I'm talking about myself and my fears, even if I know that's not done. I know everything will turn out badly. I think about that all the time. Even while I'm washing my carpet. Do you understand that? Do you feel the same way?"

It is her mastery of such surprising moves —from ridiculous to poignant and human — that defines Jansson's genius. *** Each day, Hilobrow.com pays tribute to one of our favorite high-, low-, no-, or hilobrow heroes on that person's birthday. Click here for more Hilo Hero shout-outs.

Hilo Hero: Norma Shearer

Peggy Nelson — Mon, 10 Aug 2009 10:00:36 +0000

Known as "that ugly girl who can't dance," NORMA SHEARER (1902-83) was a self-made urchin who became the Queen of (Pre-Code) Hollywood, personifying the "she's gotta have it" ethos. Stylish, independent, and opinionated, her characters wrapped men around their little fingers and — most scandalously — had fun doing it. Offscreen she won the successful role of Mrs. Irving Thalberg, the babyfaced Hollywood producer who was the preenactment of a contemporary nerd. Post-code her narratives changed, and she's perhaps best known now for her star turn in Clare Boothe Luce's horribly awesome The Women, where all they do (and I do mean ALL they do) is talk about men. Shearer plays the Pollyanna protagonist pining away for her nerd, an engineer who has left her (somewhat unaccountably) for racy retail spawn Joan Crawford, Shearer's longtime real-life frenemy. The Shearer cult, dormant for decades, is currently enjoying a revival. Attention, 21c nerds, and the ladies that love them: watch and learn. *** Each day, Hilobrow.com pays tribute to one of our favorite high-, low-, no-, or hilobrow heroes on that person's birthday. Click here for more Hilo Hero shout-outs.

Pinakothek (6): Vile Smut

Luc Sante — Mon, 10 Aug 2009 12:00:05 +0000

Reminiscing about my early days in the used-paper trade, I find that I can become tender if not actually moist-eyed at the thought of the publications that were both produced and purchased by the raincoat brigade. You young people today, saturated in smut, are so jaded and jaundiced and all that you may not immediately appreciate the pathos of the many approaches to porn in the time before the soi-disant sexual revolution. Consider the many shadings of the word "art," especially as applied to privately printed portfolios and editions of "exquisite" and "piquant" and sometimes "frank" character, intended exclusively for an audience of "discerning connoisseurs." Think of slim paperback novels, published in Hollywood in awkwardly boxy typefaces and dirt-colored wrappers, armed with introductions by persons able to append a Ph.D. to their names. Imagine a bookstore of the bygone sort, as discreet as a boudoir, with a curtained doorway in the rear leading to locked glass-fronted bookcases housing a category known as "curiosa." These musings were occasioned by the rediscovery on my shelves of Sadism in the Movies, by one George [sic] de Coulteray, published in 1965, in a translation worthy of Babelfish, by the important-sounding Medical Press of New York City. "The book that shocked a nation," screams the dust jacket, an unlikely encomium coming from a starchy scientific publishing house. To read the book I find that I have to reverse-translate in my head, since many sentences make no sense whatever in English but are convincing in the presumed original as St.-Germain des Prés table talk:

But one must admit that since the end of the 19th century one is in the presence of a rise so brutal that in our times the spanking has become the privileged form of what may be called minor sadism, a harmonious mixture of pain, slight in itself, and a ceremony which by making ridiculous, emphasizes its humiliating character, followed by the double arousal, active and passive.

But nobody ever read it, anyway. They bought the book for the pictures, half of which derive from the original and look as though they were photocopied with a machine of the era — they're so murky you can barely make them out. All the pictures are stills, all are unidentified, some show garden-variety brawls and others get into skulls-and-chains territory. Nearly all are so smudgy and hasty and low-rent they seem much smuttier than the movies themselves (or even a decent print of any given still) ever could. The one shown above is in its own right a terrific example of the power of film stills — you just can't imagine that the rest of the movie, whatever it is, could possibly measure up to the sheer sordidness of the image. But to go back to the French, the adjacent book on the shelf is Lo Duca's L'Érotisme au Cinéma (J.-J. Pauvert, 1957) which is both serious and sumptuous in exactly the ways its neighbor isn't. Just flipping through it is guaranteed to inspire indulgent fondness for the French at their most nominally insufferable. Take this chart, for example, which is worthy of Edward Tufte's books: The movies are (1) The Blue Angel, (2) Ecstasy, (3) Tabu, (4) The Lady from Shanghai, (5) Notorious, (6) Bitter Rice, (7) Manon, (8) Los Olvidados, (9) Miss Julie, and (10) One Summer of Happiness. No, I'd never heard of that last one, either. Don't you wish you could nonchalantly illustrate your humid reveries with charts so rigorously white-smocked? I certainly do. *** Originally published at Luc Sante's blog, Pinakothek. Hilobrow.com has curated a collection of our favorite Pinakothek installments. This is the sixth in a series of ten.

Hilo Hero: Steve Wozniak

Patrick Cates — Tue, 11 Aug 2009 10:00:00 +0000

[caption id="attachment_3901" align="aligncenter" width="425" caption="Woz (right) introduces the Apple II with Steve Jobs"][/caption] When most people hear "Steve" and "Apple" mentioned in the same sentence, they think of Steve Jobs, ringmaster of technology fetishists, evangelizing about the latest sleek iToy. They forget about the "Other Steve," STEVE WOZNIAK (born 1950). In the late 1970s, Woz was slaving over circuit boards in his garage to impress his fellow nerds at the local computer club when Jobs, his old college chum, came along and saw dollar signs. In 1977, the two Steves unveiled the Apple II, for which Wozniak had registered the understated patent "Microcomputer for use with video display"; the Apple II represented a colossal paradigm shift and, in the space of a couple of years, it turned Apple Computer into a billion-dollar company. However, after crashing his airplane in 1981 and suffering a spell of amnesia, Woz, one of the founding fathers of microcomputing, experienced a personal paradigm shift. Nowadays, while collecting a tiny honorarium from Apple, he prefers to spend his time tinkering with gadgets at home and passing on his enthusiasm for all things hi-tech to local children. *** Each day, Hilobrow.com pays tribute to one of our favorite high-, low-, no-, or hilobrow heroes on that person's birthday. Click here for more Hilo Hero shout-outs.

Hilo Hero: Erwin Schrödinger

Franklin Bruno — Wed, 12 Aug 2009 10:00:44 +0000

Over his fecund scientific career, ERWIN SCHRÖDINGER (1887-1961) placed quantum wave mechanics on a firm mathematical basis, contributed to the theory of color measurement and perception, and, in the 1944 lecture "What Is Life?", anticipated the molecular basis of genetic coding. Still, it's that damned cat-in-a-box Gedankexperiment, proposed in 1930s correspondence with Einstein, that has kept his name alive among the non-labcoated set. Schrödinger meant to oppose the weird metaphysical implications of the "Copenhagen interpretation" of quantum physics: even if we don't know whether a bit of radioactive decay has killed an unobserved puss-puss (because of the probabilistic nature of the microphysical event), he argued that the macrophysical system (here, the cat) was determinately alive or dead. Nonetheless, the notion of spectral felines existing in some liminal/purgatorial/zombified state has inspired both science fiction (Ursula K. LeGuin, Robert Anton Wilson), and all manner of pseudo-scientific speculations on consciousness and epistemology. At least Schrödinger hasn't suffered his colleague Werner Heisenberg's fate of becoming a character in a portentous "drama of ideas" (Michael Frayn's Copenhagen), perhaps because his biography is insufficiently colorful. Except, you know, for the 40-year open marriage and fascination with Vedanta mysticism. *** Each day, Hilobrow.com pays tribute to one of our favorite high-, low-, no-, or hilobrow heroes on that person's birthday. Click here for more Hilo Hero shout-outs.

Generations (3): Anarcho-Symbolists

Joshua Glenn — Wed, 12 Aug 2009 13:00:54 +0000

The Anarcho-Symbolists are a lost generation, overshadowed by their immediate elders (the deep-diving Plutonians) and juniors (the high-flying Psychonauts). Hilobrow luminaries of this generation include Alfred Jarry, Emma Goldman, Edvard Munch, William Butler Yeats, Paul Valéry, André Gide, Richard Strauss, Arthur Symons, Wassily Kandinsky, Erik Satie, Luigi Pirandello, Gustav Landauer, Marcel Proust, Aubrey Beardsley, Alfred Stieglitz, Miguel de Unamuno, G. K. Chesterton, and Gertrude Stein. In what sense is this a "lost" generation? The hilobrows listed above are hailed today for their influence on subsequent political, aesthetic, and intellectual movements, or as late adherents to previous movements; and it's common, in discussions of this or that literary or intellectual or artistic "generation," to see an asterisk by the names of, e.g., Yeats, Stein, or Unamuno — e.g., was Stein really a member, along with Hemingway, of the capital-L Lost Generation? No! In fact, the Anarcho-Symbolist Generation invented neither anarchism nor Symbolism. Pierre Joseph Proudhon, the first person ever to call himself an anarchist, died just as the earliest members of this generation were being born. And the original Symbolist litterateurs (Rimbaud, Verlaine, Mallarmé, as well as Remy de Gourmont, Paul Adam, Alfred Vallette) were older, too. However, in this 1864-73 generational cohort, these unrelated and incompatible movements were negatively-dialectically synthesized, held together in a productive tension unthinkable to members of earlier or later generations... with the exceptions of Mallarmé, who in 1894 insisted that only the poet should be called an anarchist; and Félix Fénéon, about whom we should all learn more. I thought I'd coined the term "Anarcho-Symbolist" (a play on anarcho-syndicalism), only to discover that I must have encountered it first in Roger Shattuck's The Banquet Years, which describes the heyday (1885-1918) of this 1864-73 cohort. Shattuck employs the term to describe certain proto-Situationist tendencies originating in fin de siècle and early 20th-century Paris, where outsider anti-political and literary anarchists and nihilists declared that "the style of one's life and one's art took precedence over their content, the act of rebellion over the cause." Alfred Jarry — often called a "forerunner to the Surrealists," or listed as an inspiration to juniors like Guillaume Apollinaire, André Salmon, Max Jacob, or Pablo Picasso — is the prototypical Anarcho-Symbolist. Jarry's life and art, his pranks and ’pataphysics, his absurdism and experimentalism, are a microcosm of this generation's impetus and style. *** Notable anarchist members of this generation — including Gustav Landauer, Emma Goldman, Alexander Berkman, Voltairine de Cleyre, Gaetano Bresci, Rudolf Rocker, Leon Czolgosz, Shūsui Kōtoku, Émile Henry, Sante Geronimo Caserio, Michele Angiolillo, Luigi Lucheni, Alexandros Schinas, and Ricardo Flores Magón, plus honorary Anarcho-Symbolist Gabriele D'Annunzio — ranged from (often violent) radicals to reformers (like Mahatma Gandhi), and from staunch individualists to anarcho-syndicalists and -communists. But they agreed that human beings are capable of rationally governing themselves in a peaceful, cooperative, productive manner, and that government, exploitative owners of the means of production, despotic teachers, and domineering parents are all part of the problem. If anarchism was the ne plus ultra of Enlightenment political tendencies, the late-Romantic literary movement known as Symbolism was a quasi-occult mode of knowledge deliberately opposed to the positivism of the period. In his 1899 book The Symbolist Movement in Literature, which introduced French Symbolism (Rimbaud, Verlaine, Mallarmé) to the English-speaking world, Arthur Symons calls symbolism "a form of expression... for an unseen reality apprehended by the consciousness." And in a 1900 essay, William Butler Yeats derided the realist trend ("scientific movement") in literature and praised instead the symbolist tendency, because it "call[s] down among us certain disembodied powers, whose footsteps over our hearts we call emotions." The artist, in this philosophy, is a hierophant communing with the occult truths hidden by the "veil" (a favorite term of Symbolists) called reality. Notable Symbolists of the 1864-73 cohort include Symons, Yeats, Paul Valéry, Henri de Régnier, Dmitry Merezhkovsky, Vyacheslav Ivanov, John Gray, Ernest Dowson, Zinaida Gippius, André Gide, Tadeusz Miciński, and Valery Bryusov. Plus: Edvard Munch. *** A reminder of my generational periodization scheme: 1844-53: [Progressive Generation] Prometheans 1854-63: [Progressive, Missionary Generations] Plutonians 1864-73: [Missionary Generation] Anarcho-Symbolists 1874-83: [Missionary Generation] Psychonauts 1884-93: [Lost Generation] Modernists 1894-1903: [Lost, Greatest/GI Generations] Hardboileds 1904-13: [Greatest/GI Generation] Partisans 1914-23: [Greatest/GI Generation] New Gods 1924-33: [Silent Generation] Postmodernists 1934-43: [Silent Generation] Anti-Anti-Utopians 1944-53: Boomers 1954-63: [Boomers, Late Boomers, Post-Boomers, Generation Jones] OGXers 1964-73: [Generation X, Thirteenth Generation] Constructivists 1974-83: [Generations X, Y] Revivalists 1984-93: [Millennial Generation] Throwbacks 1994-2003: [Millennial Generation] TBA *** Meet the Anarcho-Symbolists. Honorary Anarcho-Symbolists: Gabriele D'Annunzio, Edvard Munch, Luis P. Senarens (all born 1863). 1864: Alfred Stieglitz (Photo-Secessionist), Richard Strauss (Composer, Also sprach Zarathustra), Miguel de Unamuno (Philosopher), Henri de Régnier (one of the foremost French symbolists in the early 20th century), George Washington Carver (Inventor), Camille Claudel (French sculptor, mistress of Rodin), Thomas Dixon (Author, The Clansman), Maurice Leblanc (Novelist, creator of Arsène Lupin), Walther Nernst (Chemist, Third Law of Thermodynamics), Frank Wedekind (German expressionist playwright avant la lettre). Honorary Plutonians: John Jacob Astor (Philanthropist, died aboard the Titanic), Jim Beam (Bourbon baron), Nellie Bly (Journalist, Ten Days in a Mad-House), Max Weber (Sociologist, The Protestant Ethic), Wilhelm Wien (Physicist, Blackbody radiation), Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec (Post-Impressionist painter). 1865: Arthur Symons (English symbolist poet), William Butler Yeats (Anglo-Irish symbolist), Irving Babbitt (Philosopher), King George V (King of England, 1910-1936), Frederic W. Goudy (designer of Garamond and Goudy fonts), Warren G. Harding (29th US President, 1921-23), Rudyard Kipling (Author, The Jungle Book), Jean Sibelius (Composer, The Swan of Tuonela), Dmitry Merezhkovsky (one of the earliest and most eminent ideologues of Russian Symbolism), M. P. Shiel (SF author, decadent), Robert W. Chambers (American author, best-known for fantasy). 1866: Wassily Kandinsky (Abstractionist and theorist), Erik Satie (Composer), H. G. Wells (Author, The War of the Worlds), Vyacheslav Ivanov (Russian symbolist), Sun Yat-sen (President of China, 1911-12), Beatrix Potter (Author-Artist), Lincoln Steffens (early muckraking journalist), Butch Cassidy (train and bank robber), Ramsay MacDonald (first Labour Prime Minister of UK), Matthew Henson (Explorer, possibly first to reach North Pole), Voltairine de Cleyre (Anarchist without an adjective, author of The Gods and the People, The Worm Turns, Anarchism, Direct Action), Benedetto Croce (Italian anti-Catholic and anti-Communist philosopher, multi-volume Philosophy of the Spirit), Anne Sullivan (Educator, The Miracle Worker), George Barr McCutcheon (Novelist, Brewster's Millions), Ernest W. Brown (Astronomer, Tables of the Motion of the Moon), Sophonisba Breckinridge (Suffragette and abolitionist), Aby Warburg (Scholar), John Gray (English symbolist translator), Archibald Marshall (English novelist, publisher). 1867: Luigi Pirandello (Playwright), A.E. (George William Russell, Irish nationalist, writer, poet, painter), Maximilian (Emperor of Mexico, 1864-67), Frank Lloyd Wright (America's most famous architect), Gustave Le Rouge (French SF author), Cy Young (Baseball pitcher), Marie Curie (early nuclear chemist), Arturo Toscanini (virtuoso conductor), Molly Brown (Activist, unsinkable), Ernest Dowson (English Decadent poet), Edith Hamilton (Educator, The Greek Way), Carl Laemmle (Film/TV Producer), J. P. Morgan, Jr. (banking magnate), Arthur Rackham (British Golden Age children's book illustrator), Sakichi Toyoda (founder of Toyota Industries Corporation), Laura Ingalls Wilder (Author, Little House on the Prairie), Wilbur Wright (co-inventor of the airplane), Ernest Dowson (English symbolist and decadent). 1868: W. E. B. Du Bois (American philosopher, sociologist, prophetic Marxist, architect of civil rights and Black Pride), Dietrich Eckart (Nazi intellectual), Harvey Firestone (rubber tire baron), Gaston Leroux (French mystery, SF author), Alfred Fowler (Astronomer, celestial spectroscopy), Stefan George (Poet), Maxim Gorky (Playwright), George Ellery Hale (Astronomer), Felix Hoffmann (Chemist, aspirin and heroin), Scott Joplin (the King of Ragtime), Robert A. Millikan (Physicist, determined the charge of an electron), Tsar Nicholas II (last of the Russian Tsars), Eleanor H. Porter (Novelist, Pollyanna), Theodore W. Richards (Chemist, proved existence of isotopes), Edmond Rostand (Playwright, Cyrano de Bergerac), The Sundance Kid (Criminal), John Townsend (Mathematician, electron's charge), John Stewart Barney (minor SF author). 1869: Mahatma Gandhi (Activist, proselytizer of nonviolence, spiritual leader, anarchist), Emma Goldman (Anarchist and feminist libertarian), Zinaida Gippius (Russian symbolist), Neville Chamberlain (architect of appeasement), Herbert Croly (Author, The Promise of American Life), André Gide (Author, symbolist, Le Voyage d'Urien), Bill Haywood (Labor leader, Industrial Workers of the World), Typhoid Mary (notorious typhoid carrier), Stephen Leacock (Canadian political economist, humorist), Edgar Lee Masters (Poet), Henri Matisse (free, expressive French painter), Ernest Fox Nichols (Physicist, infrared radiation), Edwin Arlington Robinson (Poet), Booth Tarkington (Novelist, The Magnificent Ambersons), Gaetano Bresci (Italian-American anarchist, assassin of Italian King Umberto I). 1870: Gustav Landauer (German Anarchist), Alexander Berkman (Russian-American anarchist, A.B.C. of Anarchism, attempted to assassinate Frick), Arthur Fisher Bentley (American journalist, activist, scholar, pioneer in the study of group behavior), Alfred Adler (founder of Individual Psychology), Pierre Louÿs (French poet), Bernard M. Baruch (coined the term "Cold War"), Hilaire Belloc (Author, The Bad Child's Book of Beasts), A. P. Giannini (founder of Bank of America), Lenin (revolutionary leader of Soviet Union), Adolf Loos (Architect, Ornament and Crime), Maria Montessori (founder of Montessori Education Method), H. H. Munro (Saki) (Novelist), Frank Norris (Novelist, The Octopus), Maxfield Parrish (American book and magazine illustrator), Jean Perrin (Physicist, verified atomic nature of matter). 1871: Paul Valéry (last of the French Symbolists), Rosa Luxemburg (co-founder, Communist Party of Germany), Samuel Hopkins Adams (Journalist, "The Great American Fraud"), Shūsui Kōtoku (Japanese anarchist), Giacomo Balla (Italian futurist painter), Stephen Crane (Novelist, The Red Badge of Courage), Theodore Dreiser (Novelist), Marcel Proust (In Search of Lost Time), Rasputin (Russian mystic), Georges Rouault (Expressionist painter of clowns, Christs), Michele Angiolillo (Italian anarchist, assassinated Spanish Prime minister Cánovas), Ernest Rutherford (Father of Nuclear Physics), Frank Schlesinger (Astronomer, stellar parallaxes), John Millington Synge (Playwright, The Playboy of the Western World), Orville Wright (co-inventor of the airplane). 1872: Aubrey Beardsley (leading English illustrator, decadent), Max Beerbohm (English critic, parodist, caricaturist, decadent), Émile Henry (French anarchist, detonated a bomb at the Café Terminus in the Parisian Gare Saint-Lazare), Charles Greeley Abbot (Astronomer, solar energy), Roald Amundsen (Explorer, first to reach South Pole), Ma Barker (Criminal), L. L. Bean (Founder of L. L. Bean, Inc.), Léon Blum (thrice Prime Minister of France), Calvin Coolidge (30th US President, 1923-29), Willem de Sitter (Astronomer, expanding space), William Duddell (Physicist, electronic music), Paul Laurence Dunbar (Poet), Zane Grey (Novelist, Riders of the Purple Sage), Learned Hand (influential American justice), Marcel Mauss (Sociologist, The Gift), Piet Mondrian (Dutch abstract painter), John Cowper Powys (Novelist), Bertrand Russell (Philosopher, Mathematician, Atheist, Social Critic), William Monroe Trotter (Activist), Howard R. Garis (Novelist, Uncle Wiggily and Tom Swift series). 1873: Alfred Jarry (Playwright, inventor of the hilobrow science 'Pataphysics), Tadeusz Miciński (influential Polish symbolist, gnostic, a forerunner of Expressionism and Surrealism), Valery Bryusov (Russian symbolist), Rudolf Rocker (anarchist without adjectives), Enrico Caruso (operatic tenor nonpareil), Max Adler (Austro-Marxist philosopher), Sante Geronimo Caserio (Italian anarchist, assassin of Marie François Sadi Carnot, President of the French Third Republic), Willa Cather (Novelist), Colette (Novelist), Leon Czolgosz (Anarchist, President McKinley's assassin), Walter de la Mare (Poet), Ford Madox Ford (Novelist, The Good Soldier), Arthur O. Lovejoy (Historian, The Great Chain of Being), Ricardo Flores Magón (Anarchist, agitator behind Mexican revolution), G. E. Moore (Philosopher, Principia Ethica), William Morris (Founder, William Morris Agency), Luigi Lucheni (Italian anarchist, killed Elisabeth of Bavaria, Empress consort of Austria and Queen consort of Hungary), Condé Nast (Founder of Condé Nast Publications), Emily Post (Columnist), Alexandros Schinas (Greek anarchist, exact birthdate unknown, assassinated King George I of Greec), Sergei Rachmaninov (Composer), Eliel Saarinen (Finnish-American art nouveau architect), Alfred E. Smith (twice Governor of New York), Charles Walgreen (founder of Walgreen Co.), Robert Wiene (Film Director, The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari), Adolph Zukor (founder of Paramount Pictures). Honorary Psychonauts: J.D. Beresford (British SF author), Hans Berger (Physicist, Electroencephalogram), William W. Coblentz (Astronomer, infrared spectroscopy), W. C. Handy (Father of the Blues), William E. Riker (Holy City cult leader). Honorary Anarcho-Symbolists: G. K. Chesterton, Amy Lowell, Gertrude Stein (all born 1874). *** HONORARY ANARCHO-SYMBOLISTS: Gabriele D'Annunzio, Edvard Munch, Luis P. Senarens (1863); G. K. Chesterton, Amy Lowell, Gertrude Stein (1874). ANARCHO-SYMBOLISTS WHO ARE HONORARY PLUTONIANS: John Jacob Astor (Philanthropist, died aboard the Titanic), Jim Beam (Bourbon baron), Nellie Bly (Journalist, Ten Days in a Mad-House), Max Weber (Sociologist, The Protestant Ethic), Wilhelm Wien (Physicist, Blackbody radiation), Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec (Post-Impressionist painter). ANARCHO-SYMBOLISTS WHO ARE HONORARY PSYCHONAUTS: J. D. Beresford, William W. Coblentz (Astronomer, infrared spectroscopy), W. C. Handy (Father of the Blues), William E. Riker (Holy City cult leader), Karl Schwarzschild (Astronomer, black holes). Radium-Age science fiction authors from this generation include: Gustave Le Rouge (La Conspiration des Milliardaires, Le Prisonnier de la Planète Mars, La Guerre des Vampires), Maurice Leblanc (The Three Eyes, The Tremendous Event), M.P. Shiel (The Purple Cloud, "The Future Day"), W.E.B. DuBois ("The Comet"), Gaston Leroux (The Machine to Kill), Rudyard Kipling (With the Night Mail, A Diversity of Creatures, "As Easy as A.B.C."), H.G. Wells (Radium-Age SF includes: The Food of the Gods, In the Days of the Comet, The War in the Air, The World Set Free, Men Like Gods), Archibald Marshall (Upsidonia), H.H. Munro (Saki) (The Chronicles of Clovis, When William Came), Howard R. Garis (wrote Tom Swift series as Victor Appleton), Samuel Hopkins Adams (The Flying Death), Alfred Jarry ("How to Construct a Time Machine"), Hilaire Belloc (Mr. Petre, But Soft — We Are Observed!), Ford Madox Ford (The Inheritors, with Joseph Conrad), Booth Tarkington ("The Veiled Feminists of Atlantis"), John Stewart Barney (L.P.M.: The End of the Great War), Stephen Leacock ("The Iron Man and the Tin Woman," The Hohenzollerns in America), A.E. (George William Russell, The Avatars), and Robert W. Chambers (Police!!!). Note: J. D. Beresford (1874, Goslings, The Hampdenshire Wonder) is an honorary Psychonaut; so is Luis P. Senarens (1863, "Frank Reade, Jr., and His Steam Wonder," et al). However, G.K. Chesterton (1874, The Napoleon of Notting Hill) is an honorary Anarcho-Symbolist.

Hilo Hero: Alfred Hitchcock

Jason Grote — Thu, 13 Aug 2009 10:00:04 +0000

ALFRED HITCHCOCK (1899-1980) was schooled in the genre conventions of the English Murder Mystery and the Hollywood Thriller, and his primary goal was always to entertain. A legendary control freak, he invented some of cinema's most spectacular innovations: the landmark-as-backdrop of Saboteur and North By Northwest, the famous dolly shot in Vertigo, or the dizzying overhead perspectives of Psycho and Dial M For Murder. But for my money, his most notable contributions have been to high culture and modern philosophy. Hitch has enchanted thinkers as wide-ranging as François Truffaut and Slavoj Žižek; the poet Anne Carson has compared him to Euripides. One could scarcely imagine Baudrillard's Simulacrum without Hitchcock's painstakingly recreated street scenes. And what is Lacan's petit objet a if not the ultimate MacGuffin? *** Each day, Hilobrow.com pays tribute to one of our favorite high-, low-, no-, or hilobrow heroes on that person's birthday. Click here for more Hilo Hero shout-outs.

borges

Matthew Battles — Thu, 13 Aug 2009 13:40:12 +0000

Hilo Hero: René Goscinny

Joshua Glenn — Fri, 14 Aug 2009 10:00:08 +0000

Unlike Baudrillard, Deleuze, and Foucault, exact contemporaries of his who were merely inspired by pop culture, the French-born postmodernist RENÉ GOSCINNY (1926-77) cranked the stuff out; Les Aventures d'Astérix, which he authored (and Albert Uderzo illustrated) from 1959-77, is the bestselling bande dessinée ever. It's been asserted that Goscinny's village of indomitable Gauls is a metaphor for French resistance to the Nazis; or that the villagers are paleoconservative Europeans thumbing their noses at American economic imperialism. Yet every child understands, at some level, that what Asterix actually depicts is a heterotopia in which fixed, universal categories and certainty (e.g., the Romans) will forever be stymied and sometimes K.O.'ed ("BIFF! BANG! TCHOC!") by difference and anomaly — as represented by the recalcitrant, life-loving Gauls, which is to say the French and Belgians, and other Celtic types (the British cousin Anticlimax, the Spanish chief Huevos y Bacon) to whom we are introduced. Asterix is a wily trickster, Obelix a rotund peg who smashes his way free of every square hole. Over the course of 24 Goscinny-penned adventures, the duo turned the Enlightenment itself every which way but loose. *** Each day, Hilobrow.com pays tribute to one of our favorite high-, low-, no-, or hilobrow heroes on that person's birthday. Click here for more Hilo Hero shout-outs.

houdini-1

Joshua Glenn — Fri, 14 Aug 2009 15:27:59 +0000

einstein_albert_1

Joshua Glenn — Fri, 14 Aug 2009 15:29:33 +0000

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Joshua Glenn — Fri, 14 Aug 2009 15:30:29 +0000

crowley3

Joshua Glenn — Fri, 14 Aug 2009 15:32:26 +0000

gurdjieff_icon

Joshua Glenn — Fri, 14 Aug 2009 15:43:57 +0000

klee-1920-AngelusNovus

Joshua Glenn — Fri, 14 Aug 2009 15:46:29 +0000

klee-1920-AngelusNovus

Joshua Glenn — Fri, 14 Aug 2009 15:46:45 +0000

picasso2

Joshua Glenn — Fri, 14 Aug 2009 15:50:20 +0000

franz-kafka

Joshua Glenn — Fri, 14 Aug 2009 15:50:47 +0000

WarlordOfMars11

Joshua Glenn — Fri, 14 Aug 2009 15:51:57 +0000

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Joshua Glenn — Fri, 14 Aug 2009 19:02:21 +0000

Finlayson

Joshua Glenn — Fri, 14 Aug 2009 21:15:36 +0000

DorothyParker5

Joshua Glenn — Fri, 14 Aug 2009 22:18:21 +0000

lurie-tates

Joshua Glenn — Fri, 14 Aug 2009 22:28:05 +0000

Hilo Hero: Léon Theremin

Erik Davis — Sat, 15 Aug 2009 10:00:26 +0000

Child of St. Petersburg, bug-maker for the KGB, and husband of the African-American dancer Lavinia Williams, LÉON THEREMIN (1896-1993) achieved immortality through the eponymous electronic instrument he invented in 1920. Originally called the "aetherphone," the theremin was one of the first electronic instruments, and certainly — with its spectral tone and incorporeal interface — one of the spookiest. Leon set his sites high: his prodigee Clara Rockmore performed the classics at Carnegie Hall, while composers like Ives, Varese, and Shostakovich included the instrument in their scores. But by the 1950s, Theremin's device had performed a classic hi-lo flip-flop, as composers started milking the thing for eerie exotica in the soundtracks for flicks like Spellbound, The Day the Earth Stood Still, and The Thing. Though Brian Wilson used a modified theremin for "Good Vibrations," the instrument's timbre and tones have become permanently welded to the pop uncanny. *** Each day, Hilobrow.com pays tribute to one of our favorite high-, low-, no-, or hilobrow heroes on that person's birthday. Click here for more Hilo Hero shout-outs.

sellers-strangelove-550

Joshua Glenn — Sun, 16 Aug 2009 02:38:22 +0000

Hilo Hero: Charles Bukowski

Patrick Cates — Sun, 16 Aug 2009 10:00:30 +0000

Until he was nearly 50, CHARLES BUKOWSKI (1920-94), drinker, womanizer, brawler and writer, cranked out short stories and poetry only in his spare time. These garnered him a reputation for miniatures that accurately and painfully encapsulated the condition of the modern working man. (Also, nobody exposed the ugly underbelly of life in Los Angeles more effectively than he did.) But it was only after he quit his long-held position at the post office, and wrote a novel about the experience, that he moved on to bigger canvases and evolved into the influential father of "dirty realism." Post Office, penned in just a month, is a grim, hilarious proto-slacker masterpiece that has become a bible for surviving the tediously torturous conditions of white-collar slavery. Traces of Post Office and its two subsequent appendices, Factotum and Women, can be found in the work of many modern cynics (Henry Rollins, Chuck Palahniuk, Michel Houellebecq). It's in no small part thanks to Bukowski, and those he influenced, that it is now impossible to regard the impositions of the latter-day 9-to-5 complacently. *** Each day, Hilobrow.com pays tribute to one of our favorite high-, low-, no-, or hilobrow heroes on that person's birthday. Click here for more Hilo Hero shout-outs.

classico-550

Joshua Glenn — Sun, 16 Aug 2009 16:13:22 +0000

tostitos

Joshua Glenn — Sun, 16 Aug 2009 16:16:37 +0000

tostitos

Joshua Glenn — Sun, 16 Aug 2009 16:28:19 +0000

absolut

Joshua Glenn — Sun, 16 Aug 2009 16:38:40 +0000

Double Exposure (6) — Food Fight

Joshua Glenn — Sun, 16 Aug 2009 16:44:31 +0000

Michael Pollan, author of The Botany of Desire (2001), The Omnivore's Dilemma (2006), and In Defense of Food (2008), is a highbrow. I say so not because he's a graduate of Bennington, Oxford, and Columbia who deftly translates complex subjects from co-evolution to "nutritionism" into journalism-ese, but because — despite his ever-increasing influence when it comes to hot-button issues around the food we eat and serve to our children — Pollan remains resolutely Apollonian. Like all highbrows, Pollan punctures our religious and faddish devotion to the mythology of simple solutions via recourse to careful scientific research. And his rhetoric is always moderate: "Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants." The complementary position to Highbrow is, of course, Anti-Lowbrow. In the screeds of romantic anti-agribusiness ("corporate farming") critics, everything from contemporary farm practices, seed supply, agrichemicals, and food processing to marketing, advertising, and retail sales aren't merely in need of reform but wicked: inauthentic, perverted. Pollan is also a critic of agribusiness, and a champion of sustainable farming practices. As a highbrow, though, he's less extreme and uncompromising than the anti-lowbrows: he's more empirical, less ideological. Seeking a gemütlich synthesis of Highbrow and Anti-Lowbrow, in food as in all other areas, Middlebrow currently offers a bumper crop of Rousseauvian advertisements in which foodstuffs are simultaneously fetishized and processed for mass consumption. [caption id="attachment_4618" align="aligncenter" width="550" caption="Classico ad from Better Homes & Gardens, June 2009"]Better Homes & Gardens, June 2009" title="classico-550" width="550" height="791" class="size-full wp-image-4618" />[/caption] Why Rousseauvian? According to our research, Rousseau — who mixed elements from both the mainstream (highbrow) and radical (anti-lowbrow) Enlightenment in his philosophy — was the first middlebrow. So it's no surprise to discover, in the advertisements shown here, idealized fruits and vegetables straight out of Rousseau's wildly popular novel, Julie, ou la nouvelle Héloïse (1761): "Excellent vegetables, eggs, cream, fruit; those are her daily fare...." [caption id="attachment_4626" align="aligncenter" width="550" caption="Tostitos ad in Cosmopolitan, July 2009"]Cosmopolitan, July 2009" title="tostitos" width="550" height="763" class="size-full wp-image-4626" />[/caption] Middlebrow's message, which so many have found so convincing for so long now, always strikes the same note: semi-idealistic and semi-realistic. (Think of the early Neoconservatives who claimed they were "liberals who'd been mugged by reality.") In the communications shown here, we discover the same old tasty recipe being prepared for us by the master chefs of Madison Avenue. The foods shown in these ads aren't realistic but hyper-realistic, so true to life that they've become fantastical. This is Middlebrow's preferred mode of visual representation, now. [caption id="attachment_4628" align="aligncenter" width="550" caption="Absolut ad, In Style, June 2009"]In Style, June 2009" title="absolut" width="550" height="713" class="size-full wp-image-4628" />[/caption] Baudrillard, who is charmed by clumsy fakery, but creeped out by hyper-realism, describes second-order simulacra (like the tomatoes and garlic on this page) as a kind of technology employed by those (middlebrow) social forces whose relentless purpose is to terminate history itself — i.e., by eliminating oppositional elements (e.g., highbrow, lowbrow, anti-lowbrow, anti-highbrow) in society, and transforming the mass into "the silent majority." Which brings us right back to Rousseau, whose doctrine of the volonté générale, the idea that the common good can be judged by no criteria other than what best serves the interests of the silent majority), ought not to be confused with the authoritarian (anti-lowbrow, or anti-highbrow — extreme ideologies tend to resemble one another) instantiation of the doctrine adopted by pseudo-Rousseauvian revolutionaries such as Maximilien de Robespierre and the Abbé Sièyes. Rousseau's own (middlebrow) conception of the general will is less authoritarian than that — therefore less charming, Žižek would insist, in his joshing, crypto-Baudrillardian way — but simultaneously more acceptable, more reasonable-sounding. And, therefore, creepy. Like these ads. *** This is the sixth in a series of posts reviving the practice of extispicy — i.e., divining the outlines of our invisible prison (formerly known as Fate) via a study of signs and portents found in the unlikeliest of places.

Hilo Hero: Ted Hughes

David Smay — Mon, 17 Aug 2009 10:00:58 +0000

The very public tragedies in the life of TED HUGHES (1930-98) sometimes overshadow his work. He's been blamed him for the murder/suicide of his second wife and daughter, and most famously for the suicide of his first wife, Sylvia Plath. Plath's devotees, in particular, seem to read the poets' imagery (the predators in Hughes' work) and literary personae (Plath's fierce, defiant victims) as nonfiction. Out of all this black loss Hughes wrote Crow (1970), a scabrous, bleak, hilarious, harrowing masterpiece — the darkest corner in English literature since Shakespeare committed Macbeth. In Crow Hughes significantly moves away from the hawks and wolves of his earlier work to explore a mythological trickster figure. Crow strips the world down, plucks out the carrion eye, and mocks the false, feeble truths that we muster against death; it is also, for all its wide, mythic imagery, an heroic self-portrait of an utterly shattered man. In Britain, Hughes is best remembered as the poet laureate from 1984 until his death, and for his 1968 children's novel, The Iron Man, and the enormously popular poetry anthology, The Rattle Bag, which he compiled with his great friend Seamus Heaney. But it is the unflinching vision of Crow that will endure. *** Each day, Hilobrow.com pays tribute to one of our favorite high-, low-, no-, or hilobrow heroes on that person's birthday. Click here for more Hilo Hero shout-outs.

Pinakothek (7): Turf

Luc Sante — Mon, 17 Aug 2009 12:00:10 +0000

This was the view out my back window in New York City for more than ten years. That time (1979-1990) was the heyday of Wild Style, when graffiti truly became an artform, as is documented most vividly in Henry Chalfant's photographs. These tags, though, are primal. You can imagine them — in chalk — festooning an alley a century ago, or even earlier. Gang tags probably go back to antiquity. Today, owing to a couple of decades of outsized police response to graffiti, much urban tagging, accomplished under great pressure, is even cruder than this primal sort. Wild Style graffiti is a late, studied, self-conscious phenomenon, a sterling example of postmodernism in action. This sort of zero-degree tagging, by contrast, seldom if ever even gestures in the direction of art (although photographs by Helen Levitt, Cartier-Bresson, and John Guttmann show examples of it that qualify as poetry). Both are unauthorized sets of marks made by urban youth, generally, on surfaces that do not belong to them. Graffiti of both sorts aims to broadcast and publicize the existence and identity of the tagger. You might say that graffiti is, at base, a form of advertising. In the places where graffiti is found there is frequently also advertising of the authorized sort. Space rented from the owner of the surface in question is given over to printed tags that publicize goods and services for sale. You might say that the one form of advertising is intransitive — no action is required on the part of the beholder other than perhaps to steer clear if one is of a rival crew — while the other is transitive: it intends to prompt expenditure. So the form of graffiti that inveigles the passerby into surrendering cash is viewed as legitimate by society, while the kind that is strictly gratuitous, or nearly so, is considered vandalism. The financial aspect has further ramifications, of course: the first sort pays rent while the second squats. But squatters never displace other tenants; they merely occupy otherwise vacant spaces. Likewise, graffiti roosts on unemployed surfaces. And as ugly as it sometimes is, it's indisputably human, which cannot be said about the post-industrial walls and sidings it occupies. Yes, this is an argument I've been carrying in my pocket for thirty years. The passage of time may have made it less pressing, but hardly obsolete, I think. *** Originally published at Luc Sante's blog, Pinakothek. Hilobrow.com has curated a collection of our favorite Pinakothek installments. This is the seventh in a series of ten.

Hilo Hero: Roman Polanski

Annie Nocenti — Tue, 18 Aug 2009 10:00:26 +0000

The life and films of ROMAN POLANSKI (born 1933) in turn foreshadow, stalk and haunt each other. His films seem apolitical, but the claustrophobia of his childhood — in the Kraków Ghetto, surrounded by barbed wire and Nazis —is ever close. Small and agile, he would scramble through holes in the walls and slip into German-run movie houses; is it any wonder this auteur has a profound sense of the absurd? Repulsion, a sexual horror film, and The Tenant, with its gender-confused protagonist, are surrealist experiments in identity: nothing is to be trusted, especially not oneself. His masterpiece, the triangulated Knife on the Water, gracefully slips a blade into the heart of marriage. When filming Chinatown, he insisted that power triumph, the hero be left helpless, the heroine dead. Polanski lost things: his mother to a concentration camp, his wife and unborn child to the Manson cult, his ability to live in America to a rash indiscretion. In Rosemary’s Baby, every shot is from the pregnant Rosemary’s subjective POV, and therefore the existence of the devil is suspect. In many of his films, the POV is that of an unreliable narrator; as he once told me in an interview: “Well, I guess that means I’m the unreliable narrator.” *** Each day, Hilobrow.com pays tribute to one of our favorite high-, low-, no-, or hilobrow heroes on that person's birthday. Click here for more Hilo Hero shout-outs.

Hilo Hero: Ogden Nash

Douglas Wolk — Wed, 19 Aug 2009 10:00:48 +0000

OGDEN NASH (1902-71) was the American master of light verse, an art that has fallen on hard times, since it requires both gentle jokes that everyone can find amusing and barnstorming verbal agility of the kind more often reserved these days for poetic performances that objurgate populist goofiness. Nash leaned heavily on a few surefire tricks: the mock-portentous title ("Further Reflections on Parsley"), the rhyme attained by Procrustean mangling (the aforementioned poem in its entirety: "Parsley/Is gharsley"), the line that rambles myopically along until it finds a potential rhyme and pounces ("Hypochondriacs/Spend the winter at the bottom of Florida and the summer on top of the Adirondriacs"). Still, his command of language has a deep dazzle that shines through his comedy's glitter. "Objurgate" made its most memorable appearance in "The Centipede," and not even as a rhyme — it just makes the first line funnier. And once you've read "I Do, I Will, I Have," it's difficult to see the word "incompatibility" without thinking of Nash's "particularly if he has income and she is pattable." *** Each day, Hilobrow.com pays tribute to one of our favorite high-, low-, no-, or hilobrow heroes on that person's birthday. Click here for more Hilo Hero shout-outs.

Generations (4): Psychonauts

Joshua Glenn — Wed, 19 Aug 2009 14:00:07 +0000

The Psychonauts, born from 1874 to 1883, are a generation of expatriates, strangers in a strange land, emigrés and internal exiles. Discontented with the familiar, some of them were intrepid adventurers: Howard Carter, Shackleton, and Jack London, for example, not to mention extreme balloonist Jean Piccard. Others — like Carl Jung, Houdini, Aleister Crowley, Edgar Cayce, Peter D. Ouspensky, Gurdjieff, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, Charles Fort, Gerald Gardner, and William E. Riker — wandered without compass or rudder through uncharted territories of the mind and spirit. Hilobrow members of the Psychonaut cohort were argonauts and astronauts boldly going where no man had gone before: across, through, and deep into psychic, esoteric, and paranormal phenomena of the most uncanny sorts. They roamed far and wide in search of signification, discovering (and/or inventing) meaning in the unlikeliest of locations. As the images on this page in which a Psychonaut is juxtaposed with cryptic runes, codes, or formulae suggest, they were code-breakers and browbeaters, often mocked and ignored — but regarded as visionaries and inspirational examples today, at least by Hilobrow.com. [caption id="attachment_4526" align="aligncenter" width="300" caption="Aleister Crowley"][/caption] *** A reminder of my generational periodization scheme: 1844-53: [Progressive Generation] Prometheans 1854-63: [Progressive, Missionary Generations] Plutonians 1864-73: [Missionary Generation] Anarcho-Symbolists 1874-83: [Missionary Generation] Psychonauts 1884-93: [Lost Generation] Modernists 1894-1903: [Lost, Greatest/GI Generations] Hardboileds 1904-13: [Greatest/GI Generation] Partisans 1914-23: [Greatest/GI Generation] New Gods 1924-33: [Silent Generation] Postmodernists 1934-43: [Silent Generation] Anti-Anti-Utopians 1944-53: Boomers 1954-63: [Boomers, Late Boomers, Post-Boomers, Generation Jones] OGXers 1964-73: [Generation X, Thirteenth Generation] Constructivists 1974-83: [Generations X, Y] Revivalists 1984-93: [Millennial Generation] Throwbacks 1994-2003: [Millennial Generation] TBA *** Psychonaut scientists grappled with invisible forces: Einstein (relativity), Marconi (radio), Maurice de Broglie, Max von Laue, Charles Glover Barkla (X-rays), Francis W. Aston (the mass spectograph), Hans Geiger, Victor Francis Hess, and Frederick Soddy (radiation, radioactivity), Otto Hahn and Lise Meitner (nuclear fission), Hans Berger (electroencephalogram), William W. Coblentz (infrared spectroscopy), and Karl Schwarzschild (black holes). Hilobrow authors, poets, painters, and musicians of the 1874-83 cohort refused to accept any limitations on their respective mediums. James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, Wallace Stevens, Apollinaire, Picasso, Braque, Modigliani, Marie Vassilieff, Klee, Malevich, Wyndham Lewis, Umberto Boccioni, Igor Stravinsky, Anton Webern, Edgard Varèse, and Arnold Schoenberg were experimentalists ahead of their own time and perhaps even our own. Psychonauts also tended to have exciting, evocative, spooky-kooky names and monikers. I realize that I've said something similar about the Plutonians, but I'd really like to see Mata Hari, Houdini, Zapata, Gurdjieff, Einstein, Apollinaire, Picasso, and Atatürk star in their own League of Extraordinary Gentlemen-style story. [caption id="attachment_4525" align="aligncenter" width="465" caption="Portrait of Virginia Woolf by Roger Fry"][/caption] *** Meet the Psychonauts. Honorary Psychonauts: J. D. Beresford, Hans Berger (Physicist, Electroencephalogram), William W. Coblentz (Astronomer, infrared spectroscopy), W. C. Handy (Father of the Blues), William E. Riker (Holy City cult leader), Karl Schwarzschild (Astronomer, black holes) (all born 1873). 1874: Harry Houdini (best-known magician and debunker), Charles Fort (Scientist, prophet of the Unexplained), Arnold Schoenberg (Composer), Howard Carter (Archaeologist, Tutankhamun's Tomb), Ernest Shackleton (Antarctic explorer), W. Somerset Maugham (Novelist, Of Human Bondage), Robert Frost (Poet), Charles A. Beard (Historian, The Rise of American Civilization), Winston Churchill (WWII Prime Minister of England), Clarence Day (Author, Life with Father), Gustav Holst (Composer, The Planets), Herbert Hoover (31st US President, 1929-33), Charles Ives (Composer), James L. Kraft (inventor of processed cheese), Guglielmo Marconi (Scientist, inventor of the radio), Lucy Maud Montgomery (Novelist, Anne of Green Gables), John D. Rockefeller, Jr. (Built Rockefeller Center), Honus Wagner, Thomas J. Watson (Founder of IBM), Chaim Weizmann (First President of Israel). Honorary Anarcho-Symbolists: G. K. Chesterton (Author, The Man Who Was Thursday), Amy Lowell (Poet, What's O'Clock), Gertrude Stein (avant-garde writer, saloniste). 1875: John Buchan (Author, The Thirty-Nine Steps), Edgar Rice Burroughs (Novelist, Tarzan, Pellucidar, etc.), Aleister Crowley (Wickedest man in the world), Rainer Maria Rilke (Poet, Duino Elegies, Sonnets to Orpheus), Carl Jung (Psychiatrist, inventor of the collective unconscious), Thomas Mann (Novelist, Buddenbrooks), Walter P. Chrysler (Founder of Chrysler Corporation), D. W. Griffith (Film Director, The Birth of a Nation), Masujiro Hashimoto (Founder of Nissan Motor Co.), Maurice Ravel (Composer), Albert Schweitzer (Humanitarian and theologian), Edgar Wallace (highly prolific English novelist), Perley Poore Sheehan (American pulp writer, screenwriter), Albert I (King of Belgium, 1909-34), Maurice de Broglie (Physicist, X-ray spectroscopy) 1876: Jack London (Novelist), Sherwood Anderson (Author, The Triumph of the Egg), Constantin Brancusi (Sculptor), Mata Hari (Spy), Max Jacob (Poet), Pope Pius XII (signed treaty with Hitler). [caption id="attachment_4532" align="aligncenter" width="354" caption="A Gurdjieffian icon"][/caption] 1877: G. I. Gurdjieff (Esoteric philosopher, The Fourth Way), Isadora Duncan (Mother of modern dance), Hermann Hesse (Author, The Glass Bead Game), Francis W. Aston (Chemist, invented the mass spectograph), Charles Glover Barkla (Physicist, X-Ray scattering), Edgar Cayce (performed "paranormal" readings), Charles Coburn (Actor), Frederick G. Cottrell (Inventor, Electrostatic precipitator), Raoul Dufy (French Fauvist painter), Henry Norris Russell (Giant stars and dwarfs), Frederick Soddy (Investigated radioactivity, isotopes), Alice B. Toklas (Gertrude Stein's lover). 1878: Martin Buber (Philosopher), Upton Sinclair (Novelist), Pancho Villa (Revolutionary, invaded United States), Don Marquis (archy and mehitabel), Lise Meitner (Physicist, discovered Nuclear Fission), Peter D. Ouspensky (Esoteric philosopher, Tertium Organum), Joseph Bushnell Ames (American novelist), Reza Shah Pahlavi (Shah of Iran, 1925-41), Carl Sandburg (Illinois poet, Lincoln biographer), Stalin (brutal dictator, Soviet Union), Joel Stebbins (Astronomer, photoelectric photometry), John Watson (Psychologist, founder of Behaviorism), Jean de La Hire (French SF author), Ernst F. W. Alexanderson (Inventor, developed radio and television at GE and RCA), Lionel Barrymore (Actor), Harry Carey, Sr. (Actor), Louis Chevrolet, André Citroën, George M. Cohan (Composer, "Yankee Doodle Dandy"), Glenn Curtiss (American aviation pioneer), Alfred Döblin (Novelist, Berlin Alexanderplatz), Jack Johnson (first black heavyweight champion), Kazimir Malevich (Painter, Founder of Suprematist school) [caption id="attachment_4534" align="aligncenter" width="500" caption="Paul Klee, Angelus Novus (1920)"]Angelus Novus (1920)" title="klee-1920-AngelusNovus" width="500" height="640" class="size-full wp-image-4534" />[/caption] 1879: Paul Klee (German-Swiss abstract painter), Albert Einstein (Physicist, Theory of relativity), E. M. Forster (Author), Wallace Stevens (Poet), Leon Trotsky (Bolshevik exile murdered by Stalin), Emiliano Zapata (Mexican patriot, revolutionary), James Branch Cabell (Novelist, Jurgen, A Comedy of Justice), Sydney Greenstreet (Actor), Otto Hahn (Chemist, demonstrated fission), Joe Hill (Labor leader), Max von Laue (Physicist, diffraction of X-rays on crystals), Vachel Lindsay (Poet), Mabel Dodge Luhan (Author), H. B. Reese (peanut butter cups), Will Rogers (cowboy, humorist), Margaret Sanger (birth control advocate), Edward Steichen (Photo-Secessionist), Victor Rousseau Emanuel (British pulp author), Ethel Barrymore (Actor) 1880: Guillaume Apollinaire (Poet), H. L. Mencken (anti-lowbrow critic who described middlebrows as the "booboisie"; unlike later anti-middlebrows, he blamed the audience for its lack of interest in serious culture), Robert Musil (Novelist, Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften), Alexander Blok (Russian Silver Age poet), Oswald Spengler (Historian, The Decline of the West), Lytton Strachey (Author, Eminent Victorians), W. C. Fields (Comic), David H. Keller (SF writer), John Oliver La Gorce (Antarctica explorer, National Geographic editor), Albert Wallace Hull (Physicist, inventor of the magnetron tube), Helen Keller (deaf and blind activist), Douglas MacArthur, Joe May (Film Director), Tom Mix (silent movie cowboy), Sean O'Casey (Playwright), Mack Sennett (Film/TV Producer), Carl Van Vechten (Novelist, Patron of the Harlem Renaissance), Leonard Woolf (British memoirist, husband of Virginia), Bertram Atkey (British writer, The Strange Case of Alan Moraine) [caption id="attachment_4540" align="aligncenter" width="400" caption="Pablo Picasso"][/caption] 1881: Pablo Picasso (abstract painter and sculptor), Pierre Teilhard de Chardin (Philosopher), P. G. Wodehouse (Author), Franklin Pierce Adams (Columnist), Kemal Atatürk (President of Turkey, 1923-38), Bela Bartok (Hungarian composer), Padraic Colum (Novelist), Clinton Davisson (Physicist, diffraction of electrons), Cecil B. DeMille (pioneering film director), Alexander Fleming (discovered penicillin), Pope John XXIII (Roman Catholic Pontiff, 1958-63), A. R. Radcliffe-Brown (father of modern social anthropology) 1882: Virginia Woolf (novelist), Wyndham Lewis (Painter, Vorticist movement), Bela Lugosi (Actor), Umberto Boccioni (Italian Futurist painter and sculptor), James Joyce (Author), Ion Antonescu (Pro-Nazi dictator of Romania), Harold D. Babcock (Astronomer, solar radiation), John Barrymore (Actor), Noah Beery, Sr. (Actor), Max Born (pioneer of quantum mechanics), Georges Braque (Artist, co-Founded Cubism), Tod Browning (Film Director, Freaks), Arthur Eddington (Astronomer, Eddington luminosity), E. R. Eddison (Novelist, The Worm Ouroboros), Felix Frankfurter (US Supreme Court Justice, 1939-62), Hans Geiger (Physicist, co-Inventor of the Geiger Counter), Eric Gill (Typographer), Robert Goddard (father of modern rocketry), Samuel Goldwyn (Film/TV Producer), Edward Hopper (Painter), Rockwell Kent (Painter), Inayat Khan (founder of Universal Sufism), Fiorello LaGuardia (New York City Mayor, 1934-45), Jacques Maritain (Philosopher), A. A. Milne (Author), George Jean Nathan (Author, Editor: American Mercury), Franklin D. Roosevelt (US President during WWII) 1883: Douglas Fairbanks, Sr. (Actor), Faisal I (King of Iraq, 1921-33), Victor Fleming (Film Director), Khalil Gibran (Poet, The Prophet), Jaroslav Hasek (Author, The Good Soldier Svejk), Sax Rohmer (British/American author), Coco Chanel (Fashion Designer), Wild Bill Donovan (founded the OSS), Max Eastman (socialist writer, later embraced McCarthyism), Victor Francis Hess (Physicist, proved cosmic origin of radiation), John Maynard Keynes (Economist), Frank King (Cartoonist, Gasoline Alley), Frank Mars (invented Milky Way and Snickers bars), Edgard Varèse (Composer, Poème électronique), Edwin Balmer (American author). Honorary Modernists: Franz Kafka (Expressionist novelist), Rube Goldberg (Cartoonist, designer of impossible contraptions), Karl Jaspers (Existential philosopher), Anton Webern (Expressionist composer), Lon Chaney (Actor), Walter Gropius (Architect, founder of the Bauhaus school), William Carlos Williams (Poet), Benito Mussolini (Fascist dictator of Italy) HONORARY PSYCHONAUTS: J. D. Beresford, Hans Berger (Physicist, Electroencephalogram), William W. Coblentz (Astronomer, infrared spectroscopy), W. C. Handy (Father of the Blues), William E. Riker (Holy City cult leader), Karl Schwarzschild (Astronomer, black holes) (all born 1873). Also: A. Merritt (SF writer), Gerald Gardner (Founder of Modern Wicca), Emil Jannings (Actor, The Last Command), Amedeo Modigliani (Cubist Italian sculptor and painter), Marie Vassilieff (Russian Cubist painter, atelier hostess) (all born 1884). PSYCHONAUTS WHO ARE HONORARY MODERNISTS: Franz Kafka, Rube Goldberg, Karl Jaspers, Anton Webern, Lon Chaney, Walter Gropius, William Carlos Williams, Benito Mussolini (all 1883) PSYCHONAUTS WHO ARE HONORARY ANARCHO-SYMBOLISTS: G. K. Chesterton, Amy Lowell, Gertrude Stein (all 1874) Radium-Age SF writers of this generation include: Edgar Rice Burroughs (SF includes Barsoom series, Pellucidar series, The Land That Time Forgot, The Moon Maid, some of the Tarzan books), E. R. Eddison (The Worm Ouroboros), Sax Rohmer (Grey Face, She Who Sleeps, The Day the World Ended), Jack London (The Iron Heel, The Scarlet Plague), E.M. Forster ("The Machine Stops"), Aleksey Nikolayevich Tolstoy (Aelita, The Death Box), John Taine (pseudonym of Eric Temple Bell) (Green Fire, The Iron Star, The Purple Sapphire, Quayle's Invention), Reginald Glossop (The Orphan of Space), George Allan England (The Air Trust, Darkness and Dawn, The Flying Legion, Out of the Abyss, The People of the Abyss), William Hope Hodgson (The House on the Borderland, The Night Land), David Lindsay (Sphinx), Maurice Renard (The Hands of Orlac, New Bodies for Old), S. Fowler Wright (The Amphibians, Dawn, Deluge, The New Gods Lead, The World Below), Charles Fort (A Radical Corpuscle), Victor Rousseau (pseudonym of Victor Rousseau Emanuel, The Messiah of the Cylinder, "Draft of Eternity"), Joseph Bushnell Ames (The Bladed Barrier), Bertram Atkey (The Strange Case of Alan Moraine), Edwin Balmer (Flying Death, co-authored When Worlds Collide and After Worlds Collide), Perley Poore Sheehan (The Copper Princess, The Ghost-Mill, co-author of Blood and Iron), Jean de La Hire (Nyctalope series), Guillaume Apollinaire ("Remote Projection," "The Disappearance of Honore Subrac"), John Buchan (The Gap in the Curtain, The Moon Endureth), A. Merritt (The Face in the Abyss, The Metal Monster, The Moon Pool), J. D. Beresford (Goslings, The Hampdenshire Wonder), and Luis P. Senarens ("Frank Reade, Jr., and His Steam Wonder," et al).

artaud-man-ray-1926

Joshua Glenn — Wed, 19 Aug 2009 19:18:03 +0000

john_zorn

Joshua Glenn — Wed, 19 Aug 2009 19:32:46 +0000

51BRKH1BSML._SS500_

Joshua Glenn — Wed, 19 Aug 2009 19:44:46 +0000

stanislaw-lem

Joshua Glenn — Thu, 20 Aug 2009 00:53:50 +0000

gernsback-wonder

Joshua Glenn — Thu, 20 Aug 2009 01:50:04 +0000

avedonpound

Joshua Glenn — Thu, 20 Aug 2009 01:50:35 +0000

duchamp-fumant-p

Joshua Glenn — Thu, 20 Aug 2009 01:51:33 +0000

marxbros

Joshua Glenn — Thu, 20 Aug 2009 01:52:54 +0000

ball-cabaret-1917

Joshua Glenn — Thu, 20 Aug 2009 01:56:05 +0000

Grosz-pillars-of-society

Joshua Glenn — Thu, 20 Aug 2009 01:58:51 +0000

Hilo Hero: H.P. Lovecraft

Erik Davis — Thu, 20 Aug 2009 10:00:45 +0000

There are few greater examples of the alchemy of pulp fiction than the tales of H.P. LOVECRAFT (1890-1937), the weird uncle overlord of the twentieth century horror story. Working with the febrile sensations and adjectival miasma that pervade the lowbrow lit of the time, Lovecraft crafted a body of work that expressed, in the midst of its writhing Poe-faced cephalopodic thrashings, a new quality of the cosmic imagination. He called it outsideness, a stark vertigo in the face of a cosmos utterly hostile to human meanings — including traditional images of evil. This appropriately “nameless” cosmic dread was the affective and visionary expression of Lovecraft’s own pitiless and misanthropic philosophical materialism, which peels back the religious mask of the sublime to discover the meaningless bio-physical clockwork that modernity installed in the rotting corpse of the old enchanted universe — that very cosmos whose uncanny afterimages continue to compose the core material of fantasy. As if that weren’t enough, Lovecraft also deployed the productive referentiality of meta-fiction in order to create a virtual gamespace — the so-called Cthulhu Mythos — whose infection of the collective imaginary has brought his pulp visions to a half-life impervious to the in-jokes (like Cthulhu plushies) we might throw at them to keep them at bay. *** Each day, Hilobrow.com pays tribute to one of our favorite high-, low-, no-, or hilobrow heroes on that person's birthday. Click here for more Hilo Hero shout-outs.

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Joshua Glenn — Thu, 20 Aug 2009 17:41:16 +0000

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Joshua Glenn — Thu, 20 Aug 2009 20:42:07 +0000

Double Exposure (7): Free-Range Children

Joshua Glenn — Thu, 20 Aug 2009 20:47:23 +0000

"The domestic beast has been bred to special purpose; the tame animal is a wild thing brought to heel. The feral creature, by contrast, is a domesticated animal living without the intercession of man, beyond the bounds of our species’ habitus." So writes Matthew Battles in an early Hilobrow.com post. Several advertisements in middlebrow periodicals recently suggest that this schema might be applicable not only to dogs and dingos, but to children — as represented, that is, by the MBM. [caption id="attachment_4731" align="aligncenter" width="400" caption="A pride of feral \"Gen X\" youth depicted in 1990"][/caption] Americans born between the mid-1970s and the mid-1990s — i.e., the Revivalist Generation and the Throwbacks — were, in their youth, collectively labeled "Generation Y," by a middlebrow media (MBM) eager to distinguish them from the more obdurate and recalcitrant so-called Generation X. [Above: a pride of feral "Gen X" youth.] [caption id="attachment_4732" align="aligncenter" width="550" caption="A herd of domesticated \"Gen Y\" youth, circa 1998"][/caption] If members of "Generation X" (actually younger OGXers and older Constructivists) had gone feral, and were therefore of no use to society, there remained some hope for their juniors — who've been portrayed with great admiration, by the MBM, as a Greatest Generation-like cohort of content, hard-working, well-adjusted, easy-to-teach-and-train citizens: i.e., as domesticated beasts. [Above: a herd of domesticated "Gen Y" youth.] And what of the latest crop of young Americans? Those children born — like my own — between the mid-1990s and the mid-2000s? How are they being portrayed by the MBM? The domestication of children has gone too far, one now learns from MBM magazine stories and op-eds, in Dangerous Books for Boys and Girls, on mommy blogs and from NPR. What's required are alternadads and slacker moms, who will not helicopter parent but instead let kids be kids. Which is just what the kids shown in the three advertisements displayed in this post are being. Not that today's children should be permitted to go feral, like the so-called Gen Xers were! No, we've learned our lesson. Alternadads are not absentee dads; slacker moms may not helicopter parent, but neither do they neglect their children. Somewhere between feral and domesticated is the sweet spot. Following Battles' schema, let's call today's children (as depicted by the MBM) tame. Or even: free-range. Like chickens allowed to exit their cages once in a while by Burger King's suppliers. Whom we might as well call... parents.

mieville

Joshua Glenn — Fri, 21 Aug 2009 02:31:55 +0000

Hilo Hero: Kim Cattrall

Sarah Weinman — Fri, 21 Aug 2009 10:00:37 +0000

[caption id="attachment_4332" align="aligncenter" width="375" caption="Kim Cattrall in Mannequin"]Mannequin" title="mannequin" width="375" height="293" class="size-full wp-image-4332" />[/caption] The thing about KIM CATTRALL (born 1956) is that when she was young she was middle-aged, and in middle age found her youth — that is, she was playing Samantha Jones in lowbrow movies years before Darren Star cast her as a mature vamp in the middlebrow Sex and the City. Watch Cattrall run around with the boys in Porky's; dress up in full geisha gear and sardonically cry, "Way to go, Jack!" at Kurt Russell in Big Trouble in Little China; or display more personality as a dummy than the ostensibly human Andrew McCarthy does in Mannequin. Sure, she was cast as eye candy, but the power she wields over men wasn't only due to her sharp cheekbones. Her confident posture and occasional flares of exasperation reveal that Cattrall's characters are always ten steps ahead of everyone else on the screen. In throwaway scenes where other '80s-era ingénues would have screamed or simpered, Cattrall forces viewers to remember her — because she’d be back some day, when our desire and maturity had finally coalesced. *** Each day, Hilobrow.com pays tribute to one of our favorite high-, low-, no-, or hilobrow heroes on that person's birthday. Click here for more Hilo Hero shout-outs.

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Joshua Glenn — Fri, 21 Aug 2009 15:14:34 +0000

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Joshua Glenn — Fri, 21 Aug 2009 21:42:25 +0000

Hilo Hero: Dorothy Parker

Ingrid Schorr — Sat, 22 Aug 2009 10:00:37 +0000

Despite her reputation as the witty gal of the Algonquin Round Table, DOROTHY PARKER (1893-1967) dismissed the clique as “just a lot of people telling jokes and telling each other how good they were.” They did help her gain a national renown, though, by quoting her lunchtime ad libs and verses in their newspaper columns. Those mordant verses (“Razors pain you/rivers are damp...”) don’t really endure (though they are fun to discover, and certainly I was one of those girls who would moan “What fresh hell is this?” when her dorm-room phone rang), and Parker’s numerous book and theater reviews for the New Yorker and Vanity Fair are remarkable more for their voice than their contribution to modern criticism. But her short stories, published mostly in the New Yorker between 1926 and 1955, sound and feel like the best of Marianne Faithful or Sleater-Kinney, with the melody coming from the jagged, crippled connections between Parker’s women and the obtuse, unhearing, or simply drunken men who fail, again and again, to “get” them. (Occasionally, the missed connection is between women, and no less bruising.) Parker famously had no truck with “the quaintsy-waintsy,” nostalgia, or the earnest or sedulous; she admired Lardner, Fitzgerald, Faulkner, and Hemingway, and savaged formulaic writing — whether the subject was agony or sunshine. Blacklisted by Hollywood and the subject of a 1,000-page FBI dossier, she left her literary estate to the NAACP and an inadequate reputation to an unappreciative public. *** Each day, Hilobrow.com pays tribute to one of our favorite high-, low-, no-, or hilobrow heroes on that person's birthday. Click here for more Hilo Hero shout-outs.

Hilo Hero: Clifford Geertz

Tor Aarestad — Sun, 23 Aug 2009 10:00:30 +0000

The most widely known American anthropologist since Margaret Mead, CLIFFORD GEERTZ (1926-2006) was instrumental in turning anthropology into the respectable and (more importantly) theory-poachable discipline it became in the 1970s and ’80s. How? Though he turned out plenty of thorough monographs, Geertz was anthropology's greatest stylist, tout court, and the essay form constrained him most productively. His throwaway lines are sheer magic: ethnography, say, is "a vitality phrased." Though Geertz's tone motored along at lettré avuncular, he was a master at slipping in the parenthetical blade: he introduces Lévi-Strauss, for example, as an "intellectual hero... as Susan Sontag, who is in charge of such matters, called him"; and in reference to Foucault's "What is an Author?," he writes, "(which in fact I agree with, save for its premises, its conclusions, and its cast of mind)." Geertz was delighted at the new authority of hermeneutical enterprises as legitimate heuristics: "As social theory turns from propulsive metaphors (the language of pistons) toward ludic ones (the language of pastimes), the humanities are connected to its arguments not in the fashion of skeptical bystanders but, as the source of its imagery, chargeable accomplices." Yet, as the "accomplices" tag suggests, he recognized the obligation that this creates for hermenauts, forever drawn to postmodern solipsism, to act responsibly. *** Each day, Hilobrow.com pays tribute to one of our favorite high-, low-, no-, or hilobrow heroes on that person's birthday. Click here for more Hilo Hero shout-outs.

OGXers in all but name

Joshua Glenn — Sun, 23 Aug 2009 19:29:38 +0000

In today's New York Times Week in Review section, Mary Jo Murphy uses the 40th anniversary of Woodstock as a peg/excuse to air a few half-thoughts about a generational cohort born, she claims, between 1955 and 1964. She's writing, in other words, about those Americans that I've named the Original Generation X. And yet... the Week in Review doesn't dare break with William Strauss and Neil Howe's generational periodization scheme. Why? What could possibly explain the awe with which Howe and Strauss's half-baked scheme, first advanced in their bestselling 1991 pop sociology book, Generations, continues to be regarded by middlebrow journalists? What does Middlebrow, one wonders, stand to gain when Time, Newsweek, or the New York Times suggests for the nth time that a Lost Generation was born between 1883 and 1900, a GI or Greatest Generation from 1901-24, a Silent Generation from 1925-42, a Boom Generation from 1943-60, a Thirteenth or X Generation from 1961-81, and a Millennial Generation from 1982-2003? For what reason do middlebrow periodicals continue to mount an unconvincing defense of Strauss & Howe's scheme? The Week in Review section has monkeyed with Strauss & Howe's hegemonical scheme, now and again, but it's never rejected it. Back in March, for example, Kate Zernike wrote a Week in Review story titled "Generation OMG," which quoted Glen H. Elder Jr.'s (hardly revolutionary) notion that there are marked "differences even between two cohorts of children born relatively close together," i.e., that generations are a question of birthdates, yes, but more importantly one of formative experiences. During the latest presidential campaign, the Week in Review tied itself in knots trying to explain how John McCain could possibly be considered a member of the so-called Silent Generation, and why Barack Obama refused to accept that he was a member of the Boom Generation. [NB: The graphic shown at the page to which I've just linked is credited to LifeCourse Associates — i.e., to Strauss and Howe.] Thanks to Obama's anti-Boomerism, in February 2008 the Times grew courageous enough to admit that there are competing generational periodization schemes out there. A Week in Review article by Jenny Lyn Bader boldly proposed that "the practice of defining generations is more complicated than the theory" — i.e., than the influential periodization of Strauss & Howe. But that's as far as Bader went — perhaps it's as far as she was permitted to go. Did some middlebrow operative censor Bader before she went too far? It's not that journalists assigned stories about the Boomers, say, or the so-called Generation X, or the Millennials don't glimpse the truth, once in a while. Often enough, a forensic reading of a Strauss- and-Howe-influenced piece of a middlebrow article about this or that generational trend reveals that the author has spotted the same flaws in Strauss and Howe's badly cobbled-together scheme that I did back in 1992 (in the very first issue of Hermenaut), when I announced my own, half-joking generational periodization scheme. Murphy's piece is no exception. *** [caption id="attachment_4977" align="aligncenter" width="550" caption="Hermenaut issue #1, Summer 1992"][/caption] According to my scheme, which I revived and refined at the Boston Globe's blog, Brainiac, beginning in February 2007, the so-called Lost Generation is actually composed of the Modernist Generation (1884-93) and older members of the Hardboiled Generation (1894-1903); the so-called GI or Greatest Generation is composed of younger members of the Partisans Generation (1904-13) and the New Gods Generation (1914-23); the so-called Silent Generation is composed of members of the Postmodernist (1924-33) and Anti-Anti-Utopian Generations (1934-43); and the Boom Generation was actually born from 1944-53, but has been yielded older members of the Original Generation X (1954-63) by Strauss & Howe. The so-called Thirteenth or X Generation, meanwhile, is composed of younger OGXers, my own Constructivist Generation (1964-73), and older members of the Revivalist Generation (1974-83). The so-called Millennial Generation, whom I call the Throwbacks, was actually born from 1984-93; this cohort has been yielded — again, by Strauss & Howe — younger Revivalists, along with an entire generational cohort (1994-2003) still too young to be named. I describe my scheme as "half-joking," because of course it's absurd — in the middlebrow sense of the term, I mean — for any generational periodization to be so regimented, so precise. All those 3's and 4's! And yet, middlebrow intellectual standards be damned, I suspect that my absurdist scheme is 100% correct. *** Murphy is writing, she claims in today's Week in Review story, about

the nearly 45 million Americans ages 45 to 54 who form a tag-along cohort to their big brothers and sisters. They are the babiest of the boomers, carrying all of the baggage but none of the bragging rights of their generation. No draft numbers or Hendrix for them. Marches and moon walks were past their bedtime.... And yet they are lumped together with the 78 million or so citizens born between 1946 and 1964 [i.e., the demographic baby boom, which even Strauss and Howe realize doesn't in itself constitute an actual generation] who as a giant oxygen-sucking mass are supposedly going to bankrupt Social Security and otherwise leave the world (taking their sweet time) a place of vastly diminished resources, expectations and dreams.

"Not this, not that... and yet." This is the magical formula wielded by Middlebrow to defend its entrenched truisms and received wisdom and common sense from all challengers. Americans born from 1955-64 (cf. my OGXers, born 1954-63; or even Jonathan Pontell's lame "Generation Jones," born 1954-65) have little to nothing in common with Boomers born from 1946-54 (cf. my Boomers, born 1944-53), writes Murphy. And yet these "boomer laggards," or "young boomers," in Murphy's phrasing, are Boomers nonetheless. Why? I've called the Boomers a middlebrow generation, but that's not quite right. For one thing, as I've noted, North Americans and Europeans born from 1944-53 like Neil Young, David Lynch, Freddie Mercury, Iggy Pop, David Bowie, Debbie Harry, Bill Griffith, John Carpenter, Octavia Butler, David Byrne, Andy Kaufman, Jonathan Richman, Joey Ramone, Jim Jarmusch, and Larry David aren't middlebrows. But Middlebrow does exert some kind of undue control over members of the Boomer generation; it's as though the influence of Middlebrow reached some kind of unholy apex just as this generational cohort came of age. Here, I suspect, is the answer to a lot of things that puzzle me about generational trend pieces published in middlebrow periodicals like Time, Newsweek, and the Times' Week in Review section. If we could just figure out how and why the Boomers have been manipulated by Middlebrow from a young age, we might catch a glimpse of the Black Iron Prison itself. Perhaps middlebrow periodicals work so hard to obscure the true birthdates of the Boomers (1944-53) because the so-called Late Boomers (OGXers, in my scheme) somehow escaped Middlebrow's malign influence. By asking us to believe that OGxers and Boomers are a single generation, that is, middlebrow journalists are (purposely?) making it impossible for us to figure out what's so wrong with the Boomers, and whether there's an antidote to Middlebrow's influence over the rest of us. What's the Matter with the Boomers? Thomas Frank demanded, more or less, in his underrated first book, The Conquest of Cool (1997). We need to keep asking that same question!

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Joshua Glenn — Sun, 23 Aug 2009 19:29:46 +0000

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Joshua Glenn — Mon, 24 Aug 2009 01:21:24 +0000

Hilo Hero: Jorge Luis Borges

Matthew Battles — Mon, 24 Aug 2009 10:00:26 +0000

JORGE LUIS BORGES (1899–1986). The gaucho stood over the dead man, smeared the blade of his facón across his poncho, and slid it away somewhere within the folds of cloth. The smell of blood already mingled with that of the liquor and the walls of sod. And then a cackling laugh broke the stillness. From the shadows a white finger stabbed out, fixing the gaucho in his place. "You will be the subject of great songs," the old woman said. "Before the century is out a poet will be born. He will sing of time, space, the sea, the night. He will speak many tongues, learn words found in numberless books. But a blow as sharp as one you now delivered will blind him. In one stroke God will grant him the gift of books and the night. And he shall withdraw like the wind across the grasslands, run like water back through the labyrinth of rocks; his song will roar through these unplumbed holes. He shall sing your song, terrible gaucho—but it shall be a song lost among the clocks and printed leaves, lost amid the roar of the ocean, lost amid the garden's forked paths and the cries of wild beasts, lost amid the rhyming and the tintinnabulation. Your violence and your unnameable hunger shall haunt his songs, and yet you shall be lost in their shadows, amid the harmonies of your own hymn." At this the gaucho grinned, stepped over the body of one who was no longer his enemy, and walked out into the sun. *** Each day, Hilobrow.com pays tribute to one of our favorite high-, low-, no-, or hilobrow heroes on that person's birthday. Click here for more Hilo Hero shout-outs.

In Praise of Doodling

Matthew Battles — Mon, 24 Aug 2009 12:30:04 +0000

Preliterate, primordial, the doodle is at once the most common and the most ignored art form. And yet for all its primitivity, and despite its surely universal occurrence among the literate peoples of the world, there was no English word for the behavior we now call doodling until the middle of the twentieth century. The Oxford English Dictionary (which defines the doodle as "an aimless scrawl made by a person while his mind is otherwise applied") cites a source for the first use of the word doodle in the familiar, autohypnotographic sense — Russell M. Arundel, who in his 1937 book, Everybody's Pixillated, defines the doodle as "a scribble or sketch made while the conscious mind is concerned with matters wholly unrelated to the scribbling." Arundel makes the claim that civilized man's natural state is one of "pixillation" — a condition of pixie-like enchantment that, though concealed by the lumber and business of modern life, emerges most clearly in the "automatic writing" he calls "doodling." To prove his point, Arundel catalogues the doodles of midcentury notables — the likes of Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Cab Galloway are represented — with thumbnail psychological workups of each one based on elements of doodling style. Arundel finishes with a "pixillation chart" that taxonomizes major doodling motifs, allowing the reader to gather an accurate picture of his own fey subconscious. Someone who scrawls rhyming words, for instance, is "poetic in nature and a lover of music"; the mere "repetition of words and letters," on the other hand, "indicates you are cynical or morbid." After Arundel, doodle quickly appears in popular magazines, such as Life; in 1942, Punch described Labour M.P. Clement Attlee as a maker of "doodles of intricate pattern." By 1947 the word is available to Auden, who in The Age of Anxiety describes "memories stuffed / With dead men's doodles." Doodle, it would seem, possesses that handy sort of oddball appropriateness that quickly finds a home in everyday language. Like Nerval's apocryphal lobster, the doodle may be strange — but it does not bark, and it knows the secrets of the deep. While our current sense of doodle is relatively new, it is an old word. In his Dictionary of the English Language, Samuel Johnson defines a doodle as "a trifler, an idler," calling it a mere "cant word" and suggesting that it derives from the expression "do little." Later dictionaries, however, trace it from the Portuguese doudo, for foolish, or more plausibly from the Low German dudel, as in dudeltopf, a nightcap (an etymology that crosses aptly with that of "dunce cap," so named for the medieval Scholastic philosopher Duns Scotus, whose aversion to classicism earned the derision of Renaissance schoolmasters). The best-known such use occurs in the colonial sobriquet "Yankee Doodle," which may have originated as a Dutch New Yorker nickname for Anglo-American colonists — with Yankee from the Dutch New Yorker Janke, or "Johnny," which in turn became a catchall British nickname for Americans during the Revolutionary War. By the late nineteenth century, it is used to describe a cheat; and gradually "doodling" becomes the name of idle, deviant, or erratic behavior. In America the term took an entomological turn, denominating the larval ant lion, or "doodle-bug," whose apoplectic fits of excavation gave it a reputation for prophecy or second sight like that enjoyed by madmen and sibyls. Ever the expert folklorist, Mark Twain uses the doodlebug in Tom Sawyer: when a magic ritual fails to return to Tom his lost marbles, he turns to the insect's divinatory powers to reveal the cause:

... he searched around till he found a small sandy spot with a little funnel-shaped depression in it. He laid himself down and put his mouth close to this depression and called: "Doodle-bug, doodle-bug, tell me what I want to know! Doodle-bug, doodle-bug, tell me what I want to know!" The sand began to work, and presently a small black bug appeared for a second and then darted under again in a fright. "He dasn't tell! So it WAS a witch that done it. I just knowed it."

Tom's Bacchic tendencies would seem to endow him with a doodler's impulsive nature. But Huck's is the idle and playful mind; with Tom, by contrast, indolence is never without purpose. In the midst of a dreary school day in an earlier chapter, for instance, Tom passes the time by drawing on his slate a picture of a house with a man and woman — but this is no doodle; he makes the drawing to win Becky Thatcher's attention, promising to "learn" her the art if she'll meet him after school. Around the turn of the century, doodle goes dormant, disappearing altogether from standard consumer-grade dictionaries like the Webster's Third Collegiate. When it finally re-emerges, it attaches its baggage of madness and prophecy to the sober arts of writing, daubing, sketching, and inscribing. Before the twentieth century, the nearest term was scribble — a word with an obviously Latin origin that came into use, seemingly coeval with widespread vernacular literacy, in the late Middle Ages. But scribbling is not doodling, because scribbles are marks made in haste or by an uncertain hand. Doodling, by contrast, is beyond craft and criticism; it belongs to us all; it's impossible to do it badly — or well. It springs from that flourishing thicket, common to everyone, where mind shoots forth its florid branches from the rootstock of the animal brain. Its intent, if it has one, differs from the preliminary brainstorming of sketching and the territorial mark-making of graffiti: it is the graphic expression of ennui, an existential criticism of the world-as-such. And yet, even if our sense of doodling emerges only in a post-Freudian perspective, evidence for graphic thumb-twiddling stretches back through the millennia. The tablets of Mesopotamian apprentice clerks, their edges decorated with epithets and images poked irresolutely into clay now long dry, betray the doldrums of the scribal college day. Writing inscribed in ceramic, unlike marks on paper, lasts for centuries; thus were these most ancient ephemera preserved for the ages. Despite differences in media, doodling behavior is remarkably constant over time; in medieval manuscripts, margins are filled with serpentine scrollwork or a scribe's name written over and over. These marks are different from glosses, marginalia, and fabrications, which flower like poppies amid the uncial harvest of medieval manuscripts; those, by contrast, guide reading, study, and interpretation. But for the practical monks, even doodling had a reason: their term for the practice was probatio pennae, the "proving of the pen." And yet there is the whiff of an excuse behind this term, a hiccuping attempt at vindication: for often the ragged columns of names go on too long to be the product of anything but the doodler's idle urge. In its modern sense, doodling is surrealism and abstract expressionism's dour bachelor uncle — a workaday, intuitive expression and proof of the conviction that the artist is coextensive with nature. And the power of all art, furthermore, is bound up in our empathetic experience as doodlers; great art returns our doodles to us with a kind of alienated majesty. It was Emerson who said this, referring to the works of great thinkers — in whose complex, polished, and ramified ideas we may discern the traces of our own abandoned musings. The young Emerson, in fact, was a prolific doodler. As he matured, however, this studied and self-regarding man was careful to purge his journals of all that would not be of use in essays, lectures, and poems. It's often supposed that the doodles of esteemed authors might help to explain the origin of their talent. But of Emerson's early doodles little can be said. Composed when the Sage of Concord was a middling student in Harvard College, they are indistinguishable from any boy's adolescent jottings: ships, amiable lancers, and piratical profiles predominate. And yet it's somehow more comforting to find nothing but the pure old graphic impulse gratified without tinge of greatness. Emerson would have been the first, I think, to agree that doodles drop from the Over-soul; their origin is somehow corporate and transpersonal. This is why bibliographers, who have learned to count and classify the meaningful marks of authors, printers, readers, and redactors, largely pass over the doodle in silence. If a doodle has anything to tell us about the creative work of its author, then it isn't a doodle. But if doodles have nothing to say about their creators as authors or artists, they do tell stories about them as people. We doodle in solitude, fixing styles as private as the individuated, inner cosmologies of thought that betray themselves in the slow smiles or the clouded faces of strangers on the subway. I have the most intimate evidence at hand: my father's doodles are typographical, filled with bulked-up capitals and ballooning logograms of obscure intent; my wife, who is a computer programmer, doodles intense, fractal mappings of non-Euclidean spaces; and as for me, I fill notepads with calligraphic whorls, filigrees, and unbalanced, pillowy arabesques, which I suppose are crude evocations of an antiquarian penmanship. But I hesitate to ascribe meaning. For like all doodling, mine is about anything but expression. Its joys are sensuous and immediate: the dry catch of the pencil point as it tangles in the fibers of the page, the gelid smoothness of the ballpoint unrolling a fat swath of ink, the pliant bouquet of crayons and the stink of coloring markers. It should be counted as a windfall, a private feast of roadside berries, that doodling offers a fossil poetry as well. This article first appeared in Autumn 2004 issue of The American Scholar.

Gary Cooper on Doodling

Joshua Glenn — Mon, 24 Aug 2009 14:41:10 +0000

Here's a postscript to Matthew Battles' terrific meditation on doodling. In this scene, Gary Cooper gives us all permission to doodle and otherwise be "pixillated" — another word that features importantly in Mr. Deeds Goes to Town.

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Laylah Ali: Doodler

Joshua Glenn — Mon, 24 Aug 2009 18:00:20 +0000

Another postscript to Matthew Battles' meditation on doodling. I originally wrote this item for Laylah Ali: 5 Responses to 5 Paintings, an exhibition brochure published by the Indianapolis Museum of Art in 2002. *** Late one night in 1968 — just a few weeks before my friend Laylah Ali was born — Eldridge Cleaver stepped out of his car, unzipped his pants, and began to pee onto a deserted Oakland street. An entire squad of police officers suddenly materialized, and an amplified voice ordered the Black Panther Party's Minister of Information to put up his hands; he reached down to zip himself up, and a bloody shoot-out ensued. When he got out of the hospital, the ex-con was indicted on charges of assault with intent to kill, and shortly after that he was instructed to report back to prison. Cleaver fled to Algiers instead, where he told an interviewer: "I believe that there are two Americas. There is the America of the American dream, and there is the America of the American nightmare. I feel that I am a citizen of the American dream, and that the revolutionary struggle of which I am a part is a struggle against the American nightmare, which is the present reality." Many artists have attempted to depict in images the so-called American Nightmare, which is to say everyday life under what Cleaver described as "the racist, capitalist, imperialist, neo-colonialist power structure," and critics and curators alike have tended to agree that Ali's paintings are merely a contemporary development and extension of this tradition. The naive, almost cartoon-like style in which she presents tableaux of Greenheads in uniform, ecclesiastical robes, and mufti confronting, interrogating, torturing, and executing their fellow Greenheads has been interpreted as an ironic strategy on Ali's part; she is, we're reminded again and again, a member of the most pop-culture-damaged generation yet. But Ali rejects these too-easy interpretations. "The 'psycho-political' is where the psychological meets the political," she's explained, "and both converge in my studio space." If these paintings are devoid of any natural or social context, it's because the Greenheads inhabit a negative zone between the artist's unconscious and the world outside; their motivations are as mysterious to the artist as they are to the rest of us. Those thugs clutching belts in their gloved hands aren't in the employ of the Capitalist Ruling Class, then; nor are the paramilitary types jogging around in tight formation Imperialist Lackeys; nor are the whiskey-priest blackcoats in basketball shoes, the ones who look a bit sheepish about their own incompetence, Agents of Neo-Colonial Oppression. The Greenheads are neither signs nor symbols. They're doodles: semi-conscious expressions of our collective, frustrated utopian dreams. The Greenheads actually began as doodles, scribbled in the margins of Ali's notebooks during boring art-school theory lectures. First came the big round heads, and later the brown-skinned bodies, dangling loosely down underneath like balloon strings. After a while, some big-headed doodles began to restrain other big-head doodles, with trusses and chains. Eyes, legs, and arms were plucked out or lopped off, and little "flesh"-colored Band-Aids applied to raw wounds and incisions. Drawn in a kind of fugue state, this is the stuff of nightmares: terrifying, but also absurd. So perhaps Ali's stubborn willingness to renounce realisticism points us toward a solution, of sorts — one which Cleaver, who'd found himself in a waking nightmare in which the world was out to get him, and in which his zipper was unzipped too, articulated at the conclusion of the above-mentioned interview. "What happens to people in the United States is that they are given these dreams and then they are put through a very subtle process of twisting and deformation and brainwashing, and they really have no defenses against this process because it's done by a very elaborate structure," Cleaver explained. "Our struggle is to make a demarcation between the dream and the nightmare. And that's all I'm saying, and that's all I ever want to say, because that's all that is important, you see." Ali's paintings aren't calls for direct action, nor are they ironic riffs on Revolutionary Art. Like the fugitive individual in one of her own paintings — the one standing in an attitude of wary readiness, face covered by a balaclava like the one worn by Subcomandante Marcos of the EZLN — Ali is a twenty-first-century guerrilla, concerned less with radical politics than with outwitting that "elaborate structure" which prevents us from abandoning the American nightmare for the American dream.

Picture 1

Joshua Glenn — Tue, 25 Aug 2009 01:03:44 +0000

GW BUSH IN PORKYS

Joshua Glenn — Tue, 25 Aug 2009 01:10:46 +0000

foucault-rulingclass

Joshua Glenn — Tue, 25 Aug 2009 01:23:09 +0000

Hilo Hero: Walt Kelly

Annie Nocenti — Tue, 25 Aug 2009 10:00:21 +0000

"My nose is blown, doc," mopes a bandaged bloodhound cop as he sags against a panel border. In "No Nose is Good Nose," Dr. Howland Owl laughs at the patient, violating his "hippocritical oaf." Set in Okefenokee Swamp, Pogo (1948-75) features a wealth of sarcastic, nonsensical critters: an antidote to Disney. WALT KELLY (1913-73) did time in The Mouse Factory before creating Pogo. "What hath got rot?" says Kelly, speaking through Grizzle Bear. Via Li'l Mouse, he says of his artistic forerunner Krazy Kat: "It was an intellectual thing... one used to chuck a brick at the other." As a child, I mimicked Pogo: "We have met the enemy and he is us!" but only reading the strip as an adult did I understand Kelly was spoofing everything from pride ("Somebody is offered you a feature part in a lamb stew?") to politics ("The ecomedy of my country is already undermound," says Castro the bearded goat.) With its satirical skewers, fluidity of line and fractured wordplay, Pogo is a comic masterpiece. While "skeptnics" argue over the ice cream moon race, Albert Alligator overeats and complains: "A free country should have protected us from making pigs of ourselves." The Plotters Thicken. *** Each day, Hilobrow.com pays tribute to one of our favorite high-, low-, no-, or hilobrow heroes on that person's birthday. Click here for more Hilo Hero shout-outs.

Pinakothek (8): The Appeal to Reason

Luc Sante — Tue, 25 Aug 2009 12:00:03 +0000

What caused me to pick this item out of the trash heap was not its title — there are better editions of DeQuincey's book out there (if none so pocket-sized) — but its publisher. Appeal to Reason was America's leading Socialist weekly between its founding in 1897 and its demise in 1922. Yes, its offices were in Kansas. At its height it had a circulation of 760,000. Its contributors included Jack London, Mother Jones, Upton Sinclair, Joe Hill, Helen Keller, and Eugene Debs. Its editor commissioned Sinclair to write The Jungle. At the same time, its offices were regularly broken into and its editors subject to smear campaigns and arrests on trumped-up charges. Its founding editor committed suicide under the strain. His son, who inherited the paper, diluted its radical spirit considerably — he caved in to the government and endorsed the nation's entry into World War I, for example. The Red Scare eventually put the paper out of its misery. One of the Appeal to Reason's most striking sidelines was its People's Pocket Series, a series of 3 1/2" x 5" paperbacks that sold for 25 cents apiece — five for a dollar. The back and inside covers of this one list 131 different titles (you can tell it dates from near the end, since the list includes both Adult Education in Russia by Mme. Lenine [sic] and War Speeches and Messages of Woodrow Wilson). The series included books on evolution and birth control, on hypnotism and home nursing; Marx, Shakespeare, Oscar Wilde, Balzac, Thomas Paine, Boccaccio, Tolstoy, Whitman, Lincoln, Kropotkin, Zola. It was large-spirited enough to contain titles by both Clarence Darrow and William Jennings Bryan, both Robert Ingersoll and Pope Leo XIII. A banker brought in as an investor during the paper's last years continued the series after its demise, as Haldeman-Julius's Little Blue Books. These were massively influential, to judge by how often they are invoked in the early chapters of at least two generations of autobiographies. We all know what happened to Socialism, unfortunately. What I'd like to know is: What happened to continuing self-education? These books were read by teamsters and machinists and stevedores and farmhands and miners. They read them not because they thought the books could help them get a better job but because they were curious. They were hungry — they wanted to consume the world. This isn't to say that every hod-carrier in Michigan in 1910 was reading them, but enough were to make the series continually expand. And none of it was fluff, or merely mercenary, or simple-minded propaganda. How many people — with considerably longer formal educations and a larger fund of leisure time — read anything like that sort of thing today, for fun? How many people assume without thinking about it that reading is and has always been a pursuit strictly for the privileged? Would it be too much to consider a connection between the rightward shift in politics and the decline of self-motivated learning? *** Originally published at Luc Sante's blog, Pinakothek. Hilobrow.com has curated a collection of our favorite Pinakothek installments. This is the eighth in a series of ten.

macm

Joshua Glenn — Tue, 25 Aug 2009 14:04:24 +0000

Hilo Manifesto (04): Neo-Populist

Joshua Glenn — Tue, 25 Aug 2009 23:26:48 +0000

Ever since Highbrow and Lowbrow first emerged, they have been complemented by dispositions not accounted for by the rudimentary binary opposition High/Low: Anti-Lowbrow complements Highbrow, while Anti-Highbrow complements Lowbrow. It is as though the antagonism between Highbrow and Lowbrow — which is, as we've seen, milder than you might have thought — weren't thrilling enough, so two more dispositions were conjured up in order to answer the following questions: What happens if you negate or deny Highbrow? or Lowbrow? Highbrow and Lowbrow are contrary, while Anti-Lowbrow and Anti-Highbrow are contradictory; they have nothing in common but romanticism, extremism, fanaticism. Anti-Lowbrow is the third of four heimlich dispositions. Anti-Lowbrow prizes science — but anti-lowbrows are impatient with Highbrow's cautious empiricism, its methods of logical deduction and inference. Though anti-lowbrow scientists do experiment, they subordinate experiment and its results to what, to them, is a broadly correct, wider, theoretical and philosophical framework. This is not as counter-productive as it may seem: if it weren't for the early modern anti-lowbrow theory that motion is inherent in matter, for example, we might never have arrived at the theory of evolution — i.e., the notion that the creation and evolution of living things is a natural process inherent in the properties of nature itself. For positivist anti-lowbrows, the laws science demonstrates through experiment and mathematical calculation are universally valid and the sole criterion of truth; in their extreme anti-skepticism, they would eradicate the highbrow practice of doubting or suspending judgment. But as T.W. Adorno points out, this is a metaphysical system that cannot be proved or disproved; positivists have made an idol out of the "brute fact." Meanwhile, for early modern and postmodern anti-lowbrows, who pooh-pooh highbrow empiricism and lowbrow "irrationalism" and "mysticism," true knowledge is intuitive. The anti-lowbrow sees herself as an evolved homo superior with a cosmic perspective. The cult-like appeal of Derrida, Kristeva, Althusser, and their intellectual heirs, it has been suggested, can be explained by their self-proclaimed ability to see through the illusion of everyday life into the inmost essence and wider scheme of things. Yet Anti-Lowbrow is opposed to organized religion, and for that matter to fideism or faith. Intensifying Highbrow's philosophical reason into atheism, the first anti-lowbrow philosophers identified God with Nature, abolished Heaven and Hell, and insisted that there is no reality beyond the unalterable laws of Nature and, consequently, no Revelation, miracles, or prophecy. Unlike Highbrow and Lowbrow, Anti-Lowbrow creates an absolute and irreconcilable antithesis within reality, between the natural and the supernatural. Anti-lowbrows insist that religion is at bottom merely a question of psychology. Some anti-lowbrows even insist that it's naive to believe that God has given us free will, since our appetites and attitudes are hard-wired into us, either from birth or a very early age. Indeed, Anti-Lowbrow is obsessed with mind control, and the credulity of the multitude. On the one hand, anti-lowbrows claim that priestcraft is a system of organized imposture and deception, rooted in credulousness and superstition, and that Scripture is written in such a way as to excite wonder and instill piety in the minds of the multitude. Nothing is based on God's Word or commandments, and therefore no institutions are God-ordained and no laws divinely sanctioned. Anti-lowbrows place great faith in the possibility of "self-overcoming" — that is, overcoming our inability to moderate or restrain our emotions, and rejecting all culturally constructed beliefs. On the other hand, an illiberal strain of Anti-Lowbrow political theory — most recently associated with Leo Strauss — emphasizes the need to inculcate obedience to society's laws, and even attributes to organized religion a continuing usefulness, for this very purpose. In Nietzsche's anti-lowbrow writing, we find a blueprint for a social order organized for the benefit of an elite caste of self-overcoming types; everyone else would be put to work, and controlled via religion. This ought not to suggest that Anti-Lowbrow is not attractive. In the early modern era, anti-lowbrows heroically defended liberty against "despotism" — i.e., the expansion of the monarchical state in the direction of absolutism and arbitrary authority. However, anti-lowbrows also fear the crowd's despotism. Though anti-lowbrows do believe in the natural liberty of men, they don't necessarily believe in the people's right to participate in politics — because, they often claim, the people aren't equipped for it. Instead of a pure democracy, then, anti-lowbrows from Spinoza to Tocqueville tend to favor an aristocratic republic — the aristocracy of which would not be a hereditary elite, but a meritocratic one: an aristocracy of talent and ability. Even this doesn't detract, necessarily, from Anti-Lowbrow's widespread appeal: Ayn Rand's anti-lowbrow novels, Atlas Shrugged and The Fountainhead, are perennially popular. When Van Wyck Brooks lamented, in 1915, that Highbrow lacks "humanity, flexibility, tangibility," and that it is capable of producing only "a glassy inflexible priggishness... which paralyzes life," he was mistaking Highbrow for Anti-Lowbrow. Anti-Lowbrow tends towards the utopian — and dystopian. (Highbrow and Lowbrow do not.) Though Anti-Lowbrow's goal is to emancipate society and the individual from bogus bonds of authority and by doing so to reinstate human liberty, its utopian narratives and blueprints, which share a naive and unseemly eagerness to force square pegs into round holes via thought control and coercion, do lack humanity, flexibility, and tangibility. The anti-lowbrow's utopian society, like her modernist architecture, is glassy, priggish, and paralyzing. This is not to suggest that utopianism is always proto-totalitarian; as we'll see, this is not the case. However, anti-lowbrow political philosophy did lead straight to the Terror. Anti-Lowbrows are sometimes: modernist. Anti-Lowbrows are sometimes: fascist or proto-fascist. The Futurists were anti-lowbrow; so was Ezra Pound. Anti-Lowbrow is

Hilo Hero: Peggy Guggenheim

Lynn Peril — Wed, 26 Aug 2009 10:00:09 +0000

She had oodles of cash, acres of style, and eventually her very own 18th-century palazzo on Venice’s Grand Canal, where she slept in a sterling silver bed designed by Alexander Calder. There was heartache — her father went down on the Titanic, her favorite sister died in childbirth, and her two marriages ended in divorce — but overall her life was a Who’s Who of the twentieth-century avant garde. PEGGY GUGGENHEIM (1898-1979) was photographed by Man Ray [in 1924, shown above], played tennis with Ezra Pound (“a good player, but he crowed like a rooster whenever he made a good stroke,” she remembered), and paid Jackson Pollock’s living expenses. She left a cavalcade of lovers in her wake, among them Samuel Beckett and the Surrealists Yves Tanguy and Max Ernst (her second husband). Above all, Guggenheim bought artworks. In 1939, armed with a list prepared by art critic Herbert Read, she put herself on “a regime to buy one picture a day” in anticipation of opening a London-based Museum of Modern Art. World War II intervened, so she ended up bequeathing the Picassos, Miros, Ernsts, Magrittes, and Dalis she'd purchased to a museum that she airily described as “my uncle’s garage. That Frank Lloyd Wright thing on Fifth Avenue.” *** Each day, Hilobrow.com pays tribute to one of our favorite high-, low-, no-, or hilobrow heroes on that person's birthday. Click here for more Hilo Hero shout-outs.

Generations (5): Modernists

Joshua Glenn — Wed, 26 Aug 2009 12:00:37 +0000

Members of the Modernist Generation, born from 1884-93, were in their teens and 20s during the Nineteen-Oughts (1904-13, not to be confused with the 1900s), during which time — according to Virginia Woolf — human nature underwent a fundamental change, as a result of technological breakthroughs and global violence; and in their 20s and 30s during the war-torn Nineteen-Teens (1914-23, not to be confused with the 1910s). In Modernism (2000), Peter Childs might be describing this generational cohort when he writes: "There were paradoxical if not opposed trends towards revolutionary and reactionary positions, fear of the new and delight at the disappearance of the old, nihilism and fanatical enthusiasm, creativity and despair." [caption id="attachment_4825" align="aligncenter" width="507" caption="Hugo Ball at the Cabaret Voltaire, 1917"][/caption] "How can one get rid of everything that smacks of journalism, worms, everything nice and right, blinkered, moralistic, europeanised, enervated?" demanded Hugo Ball in his 1916 Dada Manifesto. "Make it new," insisted Ezra Pound. High-, low-, no-, and hilobrow members of the Modernist cohort include: Anna Akhmatova, Antonio Gramsci, Arthur Cravan, Charlie Chaplin, D.H. Lawrence, Djuna Barnes, Egon Schiele, Emmy Hennings, Ernst Bloch, James M. Cain, Jean Cocteau, Jean/Hans Arp, Karel Čapek, Kurt Schwitters, Ezra Pound, F. W. Murnau, Fritz Lang, Georg Grosz, Groucho Marx, György Lukács, H.P. Lovecraft, Hannah Höch, Harpo Marx, Henry Miller, Hugo Ball, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Man Ray, Marc Chagall, Marcel Duchamp, Max Ernst, Mikhail Bulgakov, Olaf Stapledon, Oskar Kokoschka, Randolph Bourne, Raoul Hausmann, Richard Huelsenbeck, Sophie Taeuber-Arp, T.S. Eliot, Thea von Harbou, Franz Kafka, Rube Goldberg, Karl Jaspers, Anton Webern, Van Wyck Brooks, Walter Benjamin, William Carlos Williams, and Yevgeny Zamyatin. The romantic anti-capitalism (Lukács's pejorative phrase) of their elders wasn't good enough for the Modernist Generation, who dismissed 19th-century utopianism as a quietist longing for a mythical — often neo-medieval — golden age. Instead of looking backward nostalgically (i.e., retrogressively), utopian Modernists discovered and invented what NKer Van Wyck Brooks called a "usable past." Pound, for example, found inspiration for his poems in classical Chinese poetry, while T.S. Eliot was inspired by the ironic poems of the 19th-century French symbolist Jules Laforgue. A key usable past, for the Modernist Generation, was childhood: Randolph Bourne, for example, lamented that the older generation ruled the world, "hence grievous friction, maladjustment, social war." Ernst Bloch and Walter Benjamin argued that utopian socialism is nourished by the fairy tales and fantasies of childhood. (Meanwhile, "dada," one of childhood's first words, became the rallying cry of a hilobrow movement pioneered by an international gang of Modernists dodging WWI in Zurich.) But this idealization of childhood is not to be confused with today's "rejuvenilization"; in The New Radicalism in America (1965), Christopher Lasch would write that the American “movement of intellectual renewal of which Bourne was the most courageous and clearsighted exponent” was the closest thing this country ever had to the spirit of the Frankfurt School. Bourne and other members of the same generation, writes Lasch, couldn’t "conceive of enslavement in the uncomplicated categories of the old radicalism, the radicalism of Mill and Marx. Men, they knew, were everywhere in chains, but the chains had become invisible.... Tyranny came to mean to them not oppression but repression, and the battleground between freedom and authority shifted from society to the self." Honorary Modernist Aldous Huxley's Brave New World is about precisely this. *** A reminder of my generational periodization scheme: 1844-53: [Progressive Generation] Prometheans 1854-63: [Progressive, Missionary Generations] Plutonians 1864-73: [Missionary Generation] Anarcho-Symbolists 1874-83: [Missionary Generation] Psychonauts 1884-93: [Lost Generation] Modernists 1894-1903: [Lost, Greatest/GI Generations] Hardboileds 1904-13: [Greatest/GI Generation] Partisans 1914-23: [Greatest/GI Generation] New Gods 1924-33: [Silent Generation] Postmodernists 1934-43: [Silent Generation] Anti-Anti-Utopians 1944-53: Boomers 1954-63: [Boomers, Late Boomers, Post-Boomers, Generation Jones] OGXers 1964-73: [Generation X, Thirteenth Generation] Constructivists 1974-83: [Generations X, Y] Revivalists 1984-93: [Millennial Generation] Throwbacks 1994-2003: [Millennial Generation] TBA *** Another Modernist movement was spearheaded by Franz Kafka, Anton Webern, Egon Schiele, Oskar Kokoschka, Marc Chagall, Thomas Hart Benton, Milton Avery, Fritz Lang, F. W. Murnau, and Alban Berg, each of whom mined the (Psychonaut-discovered) collective unconscious for the "clear essence" of impressions and mental images, which they expressed in the form of simple short-hand formulae and symbols — hence the term Expressionism. Expressionism, which distorts reality for emotional effect, lent itself easily to another, far less exalted Modernist Generation genre: science fiction, horror, and fantasy novels and films. "[W]e drift unfamiliar to ourselves, immersed in darkness," writes Bloch in The Spirit of Utopia (1918), in a brooding passage that could have been lifted from his contemporaries J.R.R. Tolkien, H. P. Lovecraft, Clark Ashton Smith, Yevgeny Zamyatin, Olaf Stapledon, Thea von Harbou, or Karel Čapek. "But the thought of [utopia] is at hand," continued Bloch. "For only we proceed slowly forward, darkly, atomistically, individually, subjectively, within everything moving or amassing, as the unresolved utopian tension constantly undermining everything shaped." There is something utopian, or at least anti-anti-utopian about the Modernist Generation. Before Dada was an aesthetic movement, after all, it was a transnational community of misfits, an Argonaut Folly. D.H. Lawrence urged his friends to help him found an island commune, but to no avail; perhaps this was because the friends he asked were either too old (E.M. Forster, Bertrand Russell) or too young (Aldous Huxley) to be New Kids. [caption id="attachment_4877" align="aligncenter" width="550" caption="New Kids John Reed and Louise Bryant"][/caption] In America, Floyd Dell, John Reed, Maxwell Bodenheim, Eugene O'Neill, and others from this cohort formed an illiberal, non-repressive social order of sorts in New York's Greenwich Village. Listen to Malcolm Cowley, writing in Exile's Return about the older Villagers ("They") that he and his fellow Hardboileds ("We") encountered after 1917:

"They" had once been rebels, political, moral, artistic or religious — in any case they had paid the price of their rebellion... "We" had avoided issues and got what we wanted in a quiet way, simply by taking it.... "They" had been rebels: they wanted to change the world, be leaders in the fight for justice and art, help to create a society in which individuals could express themselves. "We" were convinced at the time that society could never be changed by an effort of the will.

Unlike their immediate elders, the Psychonauts, the Modernists described by Cowley weren't interested in leaving civilization behind, or escaping into uncharted territories of the mind and spirit; and unlike their immediate juniors, the Hardboileds, they didn't grow up "to find all gods dead, all wars fought, all faiths in man [i.e., ideologies] shaken," as F. Scott Fitzgerald would put it. Instead, the Modernists were the generational cohort who did the fighting and the shaking. I am not suggesting that what we know as the modernist movement in the arts was pioneered by this generational cohort; it was pioneered in the Nineteen-Tens (1904-13) by Psychonauts and Anarcho-Symbolists like Arnold Schoenberg, Wassily Kandinsky, the Futurists, and Picasso and Braque, all of whom embraced discontinuity, approved disruption, and questioned or rejected the Enlightenment ideal of Progress. Literary modernism was pioneered by Psychonauts and Anarcho-Symbolists like Guillaume Apollinaire, James Joyce, Franz Kafka, Gertrude Stein, Wallace Stevens, Virginia Woolf, and William Butler Yeats. The youngest members of the Modernist Generation had just turned 20 in 1913 — i.e., the year of Ezra Pound's founding of Imagism, the Armory Show in New York, and, in Saint Petersburg, the first Futurist opera. However, the modernist movement exploded in the Nineteen-Teens (1914-23), during and immediately after the Great War, when the Modernist Generation were in their 20s and 30s. And then the modernist movement turned hardboiled in the Twenties (1924-33); avant-garde artists and writers of that period rejected the work of the Modernist Generation, which was found guilty of emphasizing continuity with a (useable) past while rebelling against it, and which seemed excessively mannered, irrational, and emotionalistic. Yet another demonstration of my periodization scheme's accuracy! I could go on about this fascinating cohort. But after mentioning that Axis leaders Hitler, Mussolini, and Tojo, not to mention most of the Algonquin Round Table (Heywood Broun, Robert Benchley, Marc Connelly, Edna Ferber, George S. Kaufman, Harpo Marx, Dorothy Parker, New Yorker founding editor Harold W. Ross, and Alexander Woollcott), as well as many of the New Yorker's notable early writers and cartoonists (Woollcott, Benchley, Parker, James M. Cain, Janet Flanner, Charles Brackett, Helen Hokinson, and honorary NKer James Thurber) are also members of the Modernist Generation, I'll stop. *** Meet the Modernists. Honorary Modernists (born 1883): Franz Kafka, Rube Goldberg, Karl Jaspers, Anton Webern, Lon Chaney Sr., Walter Gropius, William Carlos Williams, Benito Mussolini 1884: Eleanor Roosevelt (Activist, First Lady under FDR), Damon Runyon (Journalist, Guys and Dolls), Norman Thomas (leading American socialist, pacifist, and six-time presidential candidate for the Socialist Party of America), Waldo Peirce (American painter), Hugo Gernsback (influential SF author and editor, founded Amazing Stories in 1926), Harry S. Truman (33rd US President, 1945-53), Roger Nash Baldwin (founder of the ACLU), Robert J. Flaherty (Film director, Nanook of the North), Bronislaw Malinowski (founder of social anthropology), Walter Huston (Actor, The Treasure of the Sierra Madre), Ivy Compton-Burnett (Novelist), Georges Duhamel (Novelist, Civilisation), Hideki Tojo (Prime Minister of Japan 1941-44), Max Beckmann (ex-Expressionist painter associated with Neue Sachlichkeit), Hugh Walpole (best-selling English novelist), Clement Davies (Leader of the UK Liberal Party, 1945-56), Alexander Belayev (Russian SF writer), Max Brod (Novelist, Kafka's literary executor). Honorary Psychonauts: A. Merritt (SF author), Gerald Gardner (Founder of Modern Wicca), Emil Jannings (Actor, The Last Command), Amedeo Modigliani (Cubist Italian sculptor and painter), Marie Vassilieff (Russian Cubist painter, atelier hostess), Jean Piccard (extreme balloonist). 1885: Ezra Pound (American poet, The Cantos), D.H. Lawrence (British novelist, Lady Chatterley's Lover), Emmy Hennings (German Dadaist performer and poet), György Lukács (Hungarian Marxist philosopher and literary critic, founder of Western Marxism), Ernst Bloch (German Marxist philosopher, utopian theorist), Leadbelly (American musician, "Goodnight Irene"), Sinclair Lewis (American novelist, Arrowsmith and Elmer Gantry), George S. Patton (American military leader), Will Durant (American historian), Ring Lardner (American journalist, Gullible's Travels), Charles Merrill (Founder of Merrill Lynch), Milton Avery (American modern painter), Theda Bara (American actress), Wallace Beery (American actor), Harry Blackstone (American magician), Jerome Kern (American composer), Edna Ferber (American novelist, Show Boat and Giant), Gabby Hayes (American actor, perennial sidekick), Billie Burke (American actress), Louis Untermeyer (American poet, anthologist), Erich von Stroheim (Austrian actor, director), Louis B. Mayer (Belarussian-American film and TV producer, the final "M" in MGM), Alban Berg (Viennese composer), François Mauriac (French novelist), Allan Dwan (Canadian film director), Lionel Atwill (English actor), Niels Bohr (Danish physicist, father of Quantum Theory), St. John Philby (British spy, Arabist) 1886: Van Wyck Brooks, Randolph Bourne, Hugo Ball, Martin Heidegger, Raoul Hausmann, Olaf Stapledon, Karl Korsch, Oskar Kokoschka, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, Jean/Hans Arp, Karl Barth, Paul Tillich, Ma Rainey, H.D., Aldo Leopold, Ed Wynn, Margaret Anderson, Willis O'Brien, Clarence Birdseye, Ty Cobb, Henry King, Edward Everett Horton, Joyce Kilmer, Alain Locke, Fred Quimby, Charles Ruggles, Rex Stout, Edward Weston, Nell Brinkley, Hugo Ball, Martin Heidegger, Al Jolson, Diego Rivera, David Ben-Gurion, Michael Curtiz, Karl von Frisch, Frank Lloyd, Hugh Lofting, George Mallory, Kay Nielsen, Siegfried Sassoon, Charles Williams 1887: Marcel Duchamp, Marc Chagall, Le Corbusier, Arthur Cravan, Jimmy Finlayson, Boris Karloff, Erwin Schrödinger, John Reed, Sylvia Beach, Raoul Walsh, Robinson Jeffers, Chico Marx, Alexander Woollcott, Marianne Moore, Georgia O'Keeffe, Floyd Dell, George Abbott, Fatty Arbuckle, Ruth Benedict, Walter Connolly, Jim Thorpe, Jack Conway, John Cromwell, Norman Foerster, William Frawley, Conrad Hilton, Alvin York, Juan Gris, Kurt Schwitters, Marcus Garvey, Rupert Brooke, Julian Huxley, Chiang Kai-Shek, Paul Lukas, Edith Sitwell, Blaise Cendrars, Bernard Montgomery, Ernst Roehm. 1888: T.S. Eliot, Irving Berlin, Harpo Marx, Raymond Chandler, Josef Albers, F.W. Murnau, Nestor Makhno (Ukrainian anarcho-communist guerrilla leader), Eugene O'Neill, Maxwell Anderson, Beulah Bondi, Anita Loos, John Foster Dulles, Heywood Broun, Richard E. Byrd, Dale Carnegie, S.S. Van Dine, Joseph P. Kennedy, Robert Moses, Franklin Pangborn, John Crowe Ransom, Tris Speaker, Edgar Church, Katherine Mansfield, Vicki Baum, Georges Bernanos, Nikolai Bukharin, Maurice Chevalier, Giorgio de Chirico, Barry Fitzgerald, T. E. Lawrence, Fernando Pessoa, Knute Rockne, Ernst Heinkel 1889: Charlie Chaplin, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Hannah Höch, Jean Cocteau, Walter Lippmann, Thomas Hart Benton, Sophie Taeuber-Arp, Anna Akhmatova, R. G. Collingwood, Carl Theodor Dreyer, Conrad Aiken, Seabury Quinn, Robert Benchley, George S. Kaufman, Ray Collins, W. S. Van Dyke, Waldo Frank, Erle Stanley Gardner, Alfred E. Green, Lambert Hillyer, Edwin Hubble, Shoeless Joe Jackson, William Keighley, Robert Z. Leonard, Donald MacBride, DeWitt and Lila Wallace, Adolf Hitler, Arnold Toynbee, James Whale, Gabriel Marcel, John Middleton Murry, Claude Rains 1890: Groucho Marx, Man Ray, H. P. Lovecraft, Ho Chi Minh, Fritz Lang, Charles de Gaulle, Egon Schiele, Karel Čapek, Stan Laurel, Dwight D. Eisenhower, Frank Morgan, E. E. "Doc" Smith, Marc Connelly, Robert Armstrong, Edward Arnold, Robert L. Ripley, Clarence Brown, Jelly Roll Morton, Katherine Anne Porter, Frederick Lewis Allen, Edwin H. Armstrong, Birdman of Alcatraz, Conrad Richter, Eddie Rickenbacker, Colonel Sanders, Ossip Zadkine, Agatha Christie, Michael Collins, Naum Gabo, Vyacheslav Molotov, Aimee Semple McPherson, Claude McKay, Adolphe Menjou, Boris Pasternak, Jean Rhys. 1891: Henry Miller, Antonio Gramsci, Max Ernst, Mikhail Bulgakov (Russian dramatist, author), Cole Porter, Fanny Brice, Leo Burnett, W. Averell Harriman, George E. Marshall, Archie Mayo, Irving Pichel, Carl Stalling, Arthur Hays Sulzberger, Earl Warren, David Sarnoff, Otto Dix, Rudolf Carnap, Edward Bernays, Ronald Colman, Reginald Denny, Edmund Goulding, Pär Lagerkvist, Gene Lockhart, Osip Mandelshtam, Sergei Prokofiev, Erwin Rommel, Herbert Asbury (Novelist, The Gangs of New York), Otis Adelbert Kline (SF writer). 1892: Walter Benjamin, Ernst Lubitsch, Richard Huelsenbeck, Harold W. Ross, J.R.R. Tolkien, James M. Cain, Charles Atlas, Djuna Barnes, Grant Wood, Janet Flanner, Maxwell Bodenheim, Oliver Hardy, Gummo Marx, Archibald Macleish, William Powell, William Beaudine, Charles Brackett, Joe E. Brown, Pearl S. Buck, Eddie Cantor, William Demarest, Alfred A. Knopf, Gregory La Cava, Alfred Lunt, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Reinhold Niebuhr, Mary Pickford, Hal Roach, Frank Tuttle, Wendell Willkie, Leo G. Carroll, J. Paul Getty Sr., Erwin Panofsky, Basil Rathbone, Haile Selassie, Manfred von Richthofen, Jack L. Warner, Rebecca West 1893: Dorothy Parker, Mae West, George Grosz, Lillian Gish, William Moulton Marston, Helen Hokinson, Beatrice Wood, Clark Ashton Smith, Dean Acheson, Russel Crouse, Donald Davidson, Allen W. Dulles, Edsel Ford, Harold Lloyd, Huey Long, Hattie McDaniel, Karl Menninger, Hermann Goering, I. A. Richards, Chaim Soutine, Dorothy L. Sayers, Leslie Howard, Victor Gollancz, Alexander Korda, Karl Mannheim, Mao Zedong, Eimar O'Duffy (Irish satirist, author). Honorary Hardboileds: Anita Loos, Edward G. Robinson, Charles S. Johnson, Walter Francis White, Joan Miró, Jimmy Durante, John P. Marquand. Honorary Modernists (born 1894): Aldous Huxley, Ben Hecht, Donald Ogden Stewart, James Thurber, Rudolf Hess MEMBERS OF THE 1884-93 COHORT WHO ARE HONORARY HARDBOILEDS: Anita Loos, Edward G. Robinson, Charles S. Johnson, Walter Francis White, Joan Miró, Jimmy Durante, John P. Marquand (all born 1893), plus Zora Neale Hurston (1891, but claimed she was born in 1901, so I think we can make an exception for her). MEMBERS OF THE 1884-93 COHORT WHO ARE HONORARY PSYCHONAUTS: A. Merritt, Gerald Gardner, Emil Jannings, Amedeo Modigliani, Marie Vassilieff, Jean Piccard (all born 1884) *** Authors of Radium-Age science fiction born 1884-93 include: Clark Ashton Smith (The Uncharted Isle), Seabury Quinn (The Phantom Fighter), Hugo Gernsback (Ralph 124C41+, editor of Amazing Stories, coined term "science fiction), Yevgeny Zamyatin (WE), Olaf Stapledon (Last and First Men, Odd John, Star Maker), Joseph O'Neill (Land Under England), Ray Cummings ("The Girl in the Golden Atom"), Frigyes Karinthy (Voyage to Faremido, Capillaria), Thea von Harbou (Metropolis, The Rocket to the Moon), Miriam Allen deFord, Karel Čapek (The Absolute at Large, Krakatit, R.U.R.), H. P. Lovecraft (SF includes At the Mountains of Madness, The Shadow Out of Time, The Whisperer in Darkness), E.E. Smith (The Skylark of Space), Edward Shanks (The People of the Ruins), F. Britten Austin (Battlewrack, By the Aero-Mail, On the Borderland, The War-God Walks Again), Otis Adelbert Kline (The Prince of Peril, numerous stories in pulp SF magazines), John Ernest Bechdolt (The Torch), Alexander Belayev (The Amphibian, The Struggle in Space), Eimar O'Duffy (King Goshawk and the Birds, The Spacious Adventures of the Man in the Street, Asses in Clover), Pearl S. Buck (Command the Morning, post-Radium Age), Sinclair Lewis (It Can't Happen Here, post-Radium Age). NB: A. Merritt (The Face in the Abyss, The Metal Monster, The Moon Pool) is an honorary member of the Psychonaut Generation. Aldous Huxley (Brave New World) is an honorary Modernist.

peggy-guggenheim-manray-1924

Joshua Glenn — Wed, 26 Aug 2009 12:01:19 +0000

Hilo Hero: Jimmy Finlayson

Greg Rowland — Thu, 27 Aug 2009 10:00:11 +0000

All hail the Mighty Fin! For was it not JIMMY FINLAYSON (1887-1953), third banana in 33 Laurel and Hardy films, who offered us emancipation through his unique enactment of The Double Take & Fade Away? Let us explore the three stages of political consciousness that The Fin elucidates. The First Take: The conventional bourgeois response to social relations and capital, wherein all is normalized and therefore no significant surprise is registered, no mater how bizarre the circumstances. The Double Take: The moment of revolutionary epistemological rupture wherein, for the briefest of moments, a new reality thunders through the consciousness, accompanied by an exclamation like "D’Oh!" — i.e., the anguished cry of a drowning man who briefly inhales the oxygen of truth. The Fade Away: Unable to sustain the unthinkable fury of heightened consciousness without a concomitant change in base-superstructure systems, The Fin invites us to squint suspiciously at a partially restored reality: i.e., to treat the world of First-Take Bourgeois Normativitism with swivel-headed paranoia. In conclusion, let us therefore denounce Homer Simpson for his counter-revolutionary usurping of Finlayson's "D’Oh!" — and let us strive to retrieve The Fin from the dustbin of two-reeler history. *** Each day, Hilobrow.com pays tribute to one of our favorite high-, low-, no-, or hilobrow heroes on that person's birthday. Click here for more Hilo Hero shout-outs.

Hilo Hero: Jack Kirby

David Smay — Fri, 28 Aug 2009 10:00:19 +0000

The dense, blocky dynamism of his Fourth World art, as inked by Mike Royer. The narrative build leading to the heartbreak on Ben Grimm's face as Reed Richards forced him to transform back into The Thing in Fantastic Four #40. Kamandi's Jackie Kennedy-esque bouffant flip. The photo montages he used when depicting the Negative Zone. Stealing The Demon's face from a panel in Hal Foster's Prince Valiant. The epic backgrounds in Tales of Asgard. The "Mother Delilah" story in Boy's Ranch #3. Fin Fang Foom! These are some things I particularly love about the work of JACK KIRBY (1917-94). All of which barely hints at his genius. His achievement is so vast that inventing the genre of romance comics is just a footnote in his career. I don't rate the King with his handful of comics peers (Tezuka, Hergé, Barks, Eisner, Crumb). Why? Because he was the James Brown of comics: insanely prolific, unbelievably vital, formally inventive, forever influential. Kirby was superbad. *** Each day, Hilobrow.com pays tribute to one of our favorite high-, low-, no-, or hilobrow heroes on that person's birthday. Click here for more Hilo Hero shout-outs.

Quatschwatch (2): The Keeping-My-Baby Meme

Joshua Glenn — Fri, 28 Aug 2009 14:00:35 +0000

In honor of Lindsay Lohan's new straight-to-cable-and-DVD film, Labor Pains, about an assistant editor at a publishing firm who feigns pregnancy in order to keep her job, and who — we're willing to bet — realizes, along the way, how wonderful it would be if she were pregnant, Hilobrow.com is publishing a slightly rewritten item that was published in the Boston Globe back in January 2008, when the movies Knocked Up, Waitress, and Juno were in the news. PS: I couldn't use all the research that I did for this story; peruse it, at your leisure, here. *** Papa don't preach! In a spate of recent indie and Hollywood movies that can't entirely be dismissed as middlebrow, inconveniently pregnant women decide to keep their babies — and in every case, this turns out to be wise. In Bella, an Anglo waitress allows a coworker to talk her out of an abortion; then he introduces her to his warm Latino family. Another waitress, played by Keri Russell in Waitress, gets knocked up by her husband, whom she loathes; so she keeps the baby, bakes pies, and has an affair with her obstetrician. (Fun!) In Knocked Up, an ambitious TV presenter won't even say the word "abortion"; instead, she encourages her one-night-stand lover to stop being such a slacker, which he does — and all ends well. The 16-year-old heroine of Juno, finally, briefly considers an abortion; but she decides, against everyone's advice, to have the baby and give it up for adoption. Happy endings all around. [caption id="attachment_5044" align="aligncenter" width="535" caption="A scene from Juno"]Juno" title="Juno-1" width="535" height="395" class="size-full wp-image-5044" />[/caption] Liberals who support abortion rights don't seem eager to challenge what we might dub the Keeping-My-Baby meme in American pop culture — after all, the last public figure who criticized a fictional single mother was Dan Quayle. Conservatives who support abstinence-only sex ed programs, meanwhile, apparently don't have a problem with non-abstinent fictional teens... if they keep their babies. So why does it feel like movie and TV screenwriters have come a long way, in the wrong direction, since the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision? Why is abortion no longer a real option for fictional American women? "By some screenwriter consensus," laments Ellen Goodman, "abortion has become the right-to-choose that's never chosen." There are no simple answers to such questions, but an analysis of half a century's worth of TV shows and movies that have dealt with unwanted pregnancies reveals significant trends. Before Roe v. Wade, fictional women who got abortions suffered dire physical, mental, and social consequences; in the following decade, this was no longer the case. However, as single motherhood lost its stigma, women were no longer forced to choose between abortion and adoption. That's when TV networks and movie studios, perhaps intimidated by the "right-to-life" movement, which was then hitting its stride, developed a meme. [caption id="attachment_5047" align="aligncenter" width="280" caption="Lucille Ball... \"expecting\""][/caption] Let's look at a few pre-Roe examples. In 1964, on the lowbrow soap opera Another World, Pat Matthews is impregnated by her boyfriend, who persuades her to have what is referred to only as "an illegal operation." (Such reticence is hardly suprising: In 1952, when Lucille Ball's character was expecting Ricky Jr. on I Love Lucy, CBS wouldn't permit the word "pregnant" to be spoken on-air.) Fearing that the operation has left her sterile, Pat ends up murdering her lover. In a 1969 lowbrow thriller, Daddy's Gone A-Hunting, an insane man stalks a woman who aborted his child; and in the high-minded 1970 drama The End of the Road (based on John Barth's 1958 novel), the film's only sympathetic character dies horribly during an illegal abortion. The message is clear: just say "no" to abortion. Margaret Sanger, who died in ’66, must have been horrified. [caption id="attachment_5052" align="aligncenter" width="480" caption="A scene from the two-part Maude episode, \"Maude\'s Dilemma\""]Maude episode, "Maude's Dilemma"" title="Picture 2" width="480" height="359" class="size-full wp-image-5052" />[/caption] Then, in a two-part, November 1972 episode of the highbrow sitcom Maude, aired while Roe v. Wade was being argued before the Supreme Court, and not long after New York's governor vetoed a repeal of the state's right-to-abortion law, Bea Arthur's middle-aged character — who lives in New York — gets an abortion. "When you were young, abortion was a dirty word," her adult daughter reassures her, "It's not anymore." A few months later, Erica Kane, Susan Lucci's iconic character on the lowbrow soap opera All My Children, would have daytime TV's first legal abortion — because she doesn't want to lose her modeling job. Highbrow and lowbrow, as always weren't too far apart: neither Maude nor Erica was made to suffer unduly for her difficult decision. But when CBS re-aired the "Maude's Dilemma" episodes of Maude in 1973, some 40 affiliates refused to air it, and national advertisers declined to buy ad time. Next thing you know, in 1976, Mariel Hemingway was playing a pregnant teen who exercises her right to choose... and her choice was articulated by the middlebrow made-for-TV movie's title: I Want to Keep My Baby. But the meme was ahead of its time, since as late as 1982, Jennifer Jason Leigh's teenage character in the lowbrow cult movie Fast Times at Ridgemont High could get an abortion without any permanent or particularly punishing agonies; same thing goes for Diane Franklin's teen character in the 1982 lowbrow movie The Last American Virgin. At the height of the Reagan and Bush era, however, the keeping-my-baby meme triumphed. In 1986, Madonna's middlebrow song "Papa Don't Preach," written from the point of view of a teenage girl who's "keeping my baby," topped the charts. Then, in the 1988 middlebrow movie For Keeps, Molly Ringwald plays a pregnant high school senior who — well, you figure it out. By 1991, when Candice Bergen (an avatar of middlebrow) decided to raise a child without a father on Murphy Brown, the keeping-my-baby meme was already well established. In fact, another fictional middle-aged liberal, the titular protagonist of NBC's dramedy (a middlebrow genre) The Days and Nights of Molly Dodd, beat Brown to the punch by a season. Shortly after the birth of Murphy Brown's baby, America elected a president who was both pro-choice and a devout Christian. For nearly a decade, low-middlebrow TV screenwriters waffled along with Clinton, penning one scenario after another in which a knocked-up character agonizes over whether to have an abortion, then suffers a miscarriage before going through with it. Victims, in chronological order, of this conflicted meme include: Heather Locklear's Amanda, on Melrose Place; Neve Campbell's Julia, on Party of Five; Jennie Garth's Kelly, on Beverly Hills 90210; and Courtney Thorne-Smith's Alison, on Melrose Place again. Even the high-middlebrow 1996 film Citizen Ruth, which lampoons both sides of the abortion debate, would end with Laura Dern's miscarriage. Since the election of the current President Bush, however, the times, they are a-slowin' down again. On the DVD of Fast Times, director Amy Heckerling says that she "could never make that movie now," because its depiction of guilt-free sex (and, presumably, consequence-free abortion) is "unacceptable in the current political climate." In recent years, we've seen unmarried and unprepared women on middlebrow shows like ER, Grey's Anatomy, and The O.C., choose to keep their babies, no matter what the consequences. It's enough to make the convenient miscarriage meme seem downright progressive. Bella and Waitress are middlebrow movies, so it's no great surprise to see the compassionately conservative Keeping-My-Baby meme resurface in them. But what of the ironic, above-it-all Knocked Up and Juno? Aren't they, like, nobrow? Actually, no. They're examples of Middlebrow's latest and most powerful weapon: quatsch. Be afraid! Be very afraid.

Hilo Hero: Preston Sturges

Mimi Lipson — Sat, 29 Aug 2009 10:00:02 +0000

Filmmaker PRESTON STURGES (1898-1959) made a joyful mockery of the Hays Code with his improbably wholesome card sharks, unwed mothers, imposters and flimflammers, his ballot box stuffers, shoplifters, party girls and bigamists. "I can't keep on marrying people," says Betty Hutton's character in The Miracle of Morgan's Creek, "no matter how sweet they are." For his greatest characters are also decent and ordinary — that is, if you accept the premise, as he did, that ordinary people are loquacious, quick-witted, and generous. Sturges ennobled the lowest common denominator without ever stooping to sentimentality. The real sentimentalists, as he showed us Sullivan’s Travels, are the lugubrious do-gooders grasping for realism; his comedies were sustenance. *** Each day, Hilobrow.com pays tribute to one of our favorite high-, low-, no-, or hilobrow heroes on that person's birthday. Click here for more Hilo Hero shout-outs.

Odd Cameos

Joshua Glenn — Sat, 29 Aug 2009 15:00:02 +0000

I've been watching a lot of movies on my desktop, lately, via Netflix: Watch Instantly. Works great. The only problem is, the selection is quite limited, so I end up watching movies I've never heard of. (Who knew Walter Matthau made so many movies?) Which is a good thing, really — in a "secret history" kind of way. For example, did you know that after George W. Bush lost his first election, for the House of Representatives (because his opponent portrayed him as being out of touch with rural Texans), but before he quit drinking, he appeared briefly in the lowbrow 1982 comedy Porky's? His Porky's cameo was W's bid to reinvent himself as a good ol' boy, I guess. I find it very convincing! More convincing, really, than anything Al Gore's actor roommate at Harvard has ever done in that same vein. And then there's French philosopher Michel Foucault's cameo in The Ruling Class, the 1972 nobrow comedy for which Peter O'Toole — who plays a paranoid schizophrenic — was nominated for an Academy Award. In the aftermath of '68, of course, Foucault was studying disciplinary institutions for his 1975 book, Surveiller et punir, which would describe prison as just one part of the vast carceral network (including schools, factories, and mental hospitals) that is modern society. Le voici, in a scene set in a mental hospital. The Panopticon, Foucault writes in Surveiller et punir, is a figure of political technology that "serves to reform prisoners, but also to treat patients, to instruct schoolchildren, to confine the insane..." Apparently, he did his homework. I suppose the directors of these movies intended for these character actors to closely resemble W and Foucault. I wonder if anyone got the joke, though?

800px-The_City_of_Detroit_(from_Canada_Shore)

Matthew Battles — Sat, 29 Aug 2009 15:26:16 +0000

Living in the Feral City

Matthew Battles — Sat, 29 Aug 2009 15:33:03 +0000

James D. Griffioen is a Detroit photographer, blogger, and father whose work chronicles the strangely ruinous renaissance taking place in his city. I first hit upon his work thanks to Twitter, where friends pointed me to Griffioen's photographs of what he called "feral houses"—abandoned homes taken over by vegetation. At first, Griffioen's work may seem merely another example of the ruin porn coming out of Detroit, New Orleans, and other urban harbingers of American decline. But there's more going on here. His use of the word feral — such as when he titles a photograph of a kitchen filled with garden-grown vegetables and farmer's market produce "the feral table" — is complicated and useful. For as we've discussed at hilobrow here and here, the feral isn't a style or even an ideology. It's the survival response of the domesticated animal who knows it's living in the wild — the habitus of the beautifully broken. It's what Griffioen plumbs in his blogging about raising kids in a ruined city, displays in his eye for the triumph of beauty in the outsider architecture of Detroit houses, and in his writing about run-ins with wage slavery and his own imperfections. Griffioen's photography is rightfully attracting the notice of major media; his work has appeared in Harper's and other magazines, and he's been interviewed on public radio as well. In such venues he's often described as an "urban explorer" or "urban pioneer," labels Griffioen eschews. "I am not a Ponce de León," he writes at his blog, Sweet Juniper. "No one here lost three oxen crossing the Missouri River. Detroit, and these buildings, are far from uncharted territory. I am a trespasser with a DSLR and a tendency to pen purple prose about vacant structures." We hope he won't mind being called a feral photographer, a limner of the beautifully broken.

Hilo Hero: Fred MacMurray

Katie Hennessey — Sun, 30 Aug 2009 10:00:15 +0000

Though often cast as a lovable father in middlebrow comedies like The Shaggy Dog and the long-running TV show My Three Sons, FRED MACMURRAY (1908-91) was more convincing in noir films. In Double Indemnity (1944), for example, he played an affable but cold-blooded insurance salesman who, upon confessing to the murder of his lover’s husband, asked: “How could I have known that murder can sometimes smell like honeysuckle?” MacMurray’s charming demeanor and crooked smile may have disarmed a generation of housewives and Disney fans, but his ability to pull off the role of scheming murderer with such aplomb leads me to wonder if he was an evil Mister Rogers, hiding a black heart beneath his cardigan. *** Each day, Hilobrow.com pays tribute to one of our favorite high-, low-, no-, or hilobrow heroes on that person's birthday. Click here for more Hilo Hero shout-outs.

Hilo Hero: Raymond Williams

Franklin Bruno — Mon, 31 Aug 2009 10:00:23 +0000

He began his critical career as a Welsh signalman’s son drawn to English literary tradition, and ended it as a Cambridge don extolling the vitality of rural and working-class life. In between, RAYMOND WILLIAMS (1921-88) wrote copiously, for academic and popular audiences, on topics from Orwell and Ibsen to advertising (which he called “the magic system”) and Monty Python — just about any verbal expression that might be construed as “culture.” In his decades-long struggle to rescue that last word from both its exclusionary association with “the best that has been thought and known,” and from an orthodox Marxism that would dissolve the category entirely, he did as much as any single writer to seed the ground for what we now call “cultural studies.” Notoriously restless in both his theoretical and political affiliations (he stuck with the British Communist Party for less than a year), Williams’ most illuminating concepts — “the long revolution,” “structures of feeling” — shifted in significance over his career, which may also explain why Keywords in Culture and Society, tracing several centuries of semantic drift in the use of terms from “aesthetic“ to “work,” is his most characteristic (and indispensable) book. *** Each day, Hilobrow.com pays tribute to one of our favorite high-, low-, no-, or hilobrow heroes on that person's birthday. Click here for more Hilo Hero shout-outs.

Pinakothek (9): Basquiat

Luc Sante — Mon, 31 Aug 2009 12:00:58 +0000

The first time I met Jean-Michel Basquiat was in November or December 1978, at the Mudd Club. His hair was dyed orange and cut very short with a v-shaped widow's peak in the front. He wore a lab coat and carried a briefcase. "Going on a trip?" I asked him. "Always," he replied. He had a disquieting stare. He had probably taken fifty drugs that night, but it was clear there was a lot more to him than that. He was sleeping on the floors of a rotating set of NYU dorm rooms then. He had no money at all. He had recently stopped tagging as SAMO and had renamed himself MAN-MADE, although that wasn't a tag but a signature for things he made, T-shirts and collages and these color-xerox postcards, which he sold for a buck or two. Eventually he sold one to Henry Geldzahler and one to Andy Warhol, and his name became currency. Before that, though, he was still writing on walls, but as a poet rather than a tagger. I wish I could remember more of his works than just the one someone photographed him writing on Lafayette Street near Houston: "The whole livery line/ Bow like this/ With the big money all crushed into these feet." He moved in with my friend F. and ate all the cans of blackeyed peas her mom sent from Detroit, then he moved in with my friend A. and painted the refrigerator door (which she eventually sold to Bruno Bischofberger), sections of wall, a window shade, a golden coat, many other things. He also wrote "pendejo" in microscopic print somewhere near the building's second-floor landing, and I always looked for it until the walls were repainted. He was busy. His band Test Pattern, which after awhile became Gray, played often, usually at the most obscure and unattended clubs in town. There always seemed to be about fifteen people in the crowd. For some reason tapes don't seem to have survived — the only thing I've come across is a bit of feedback/noise on some compilation, which doesn't really sound like what they did, which was somewhere on the dub/jazz continuum. He made mixtapes on which the songs are all brutally cut into and out of — a painterly use of the medium. He also made so many painted T-shirts and sweatshirts none of his friends knew what to do with them. Many if not most got thrown away. The last time I saw Jean I was going home from work, had just passed through the turnstile at the 57th Street BMT station. We spotted each other, he at the bottom of the stairs, me at the top. As he climbed I witnessed a little silent movie. He stopped briefly at the first landing, whipped out a marker and rapidly wrote something on the wall, then went up to the second landing, where two cops emerged from a recess and collared him. I kept going. A month later he was famous and I never saw him again. We no longer traveled in the same circles. I was happy for him, but then it became obvious he was flaming out at an alarming pace. I heard stories of misery and excess, the compass needle flying around the dial, a crash looming. When he died I mourned, but it seemed inevitable, as well as a symptom of the times, the wretched '80s. He was a casualty in a war — a war that, by the way, continues. Years later I needed money badly and undertook to sell the Basquiat productions I own, but got no takers, since they were too early, failed to display the classic Basquiat look. I'm glad it turned out that way. *** Originally published at Luc Sante's blog, Pinakothek. Hilobrow.com has curated a collection of our favorite Pinakothek installments. This is the ninth in a series of ten.

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Matthew Battles — Mon, 31 Aug 2009 21:17:40 +0000

belzstreet

Matthew Battles — Mon, 31 Aug 2009 21:18:47 +0000

belzrock

Matthew Battles — Mon, 31 Aug 2009 21:23:41 +0000

belzview

Matthew Battles — Mon, 31 Aug 2009 21:25:25 +0000

The Manuscript of Belz

Matthew Battles — Mon, 31 Aug 2009 21:36:27 +0000

THE LIBRARY IS collapsing on itself, trying to digest itself. Renovation has turned the whole place into a vast construction site, where tradesmen build temporary walls surrounding temporary walls surrounding temporary walls, ad-hoc postindustrial labyrinths lit by bare bulbs encroaching on the bookstacks. Construction workers come into my office daily, sledgehammering pillars and propping them up again, removing thermostats, ceiling lights, and flooring. It's out of this maze of dust and incandescent light that Brko emerges, bearing apologies and a manuscript—the apologies for his intrusion, and the manuscript for his enrichment. Then again, I suppose that's what his apologies are really for, too. Brko is a construction engineer; he wears a hard hat with some a troubled Balkan state's flag taped to it. Day after day in the bowels of the library he demolishes walls with a front-end loader. I've seen him stumping down the halls, sweaty and swollen-faced, but haven't spoken to him until today. When he enters, I think he's here to knock the thermostat off the wall again. But he says nothing, only gazing at the stacks of old, leatherbound volumes heaped up on my desk. After awhile, he says, "my book is more beautiful than this. I can show you?" I smile and nod, thinking how little ever comes of such offers. But yes, I tell him, I'd love to see it, of course. "It is here," he says, handing me a dingy manila envelope. But I thought it was a book, I say. "Well, yes, it is piece of book. A page. But it is very beautiful. You look, maybe library will to buy." The single leaf slides out easily; singed fragments of paper rain down upon the floor. But yes, it is beautiful—a nearly whole first page of a richly illuminated manuscript. I sit awhile stunned, burned by the iridescence of the gold leaf, the blue whorls of the abjad. I want to know where Brko got it. "Before I came, I was driver," Brko says. "I drove for UN, for journalists, for others, too—mostly at the end for UN inspectors. Someone gave to me. I knew it was beautiful. So I kept." I wonder what else he knows about it. "It comes from town called Belz, it had mosque, it had beautiful manuscript. Interior troops hit town hard, they break mosque down and burn. This the only page who survived." I gaze a bit longer before handing the piece back to him. It is beautiful, yes, I say. But we surely won't acquire it. We don't know its provenance—we can't know its origin with any certainty—and besides, it's incomplete, and badly damaged. At this, Brko's face turns red. "Is this library telling me this, or you only? I am happy going someplace else." I nod apologetically. No no, I say. I am no expert. I will show your manuscript to someone who is. And Brko slips the envelope on my desk and backs away, his head swaying to and fro. "Then we will see," he says. And with that, he exits. I place a call to the curator of manuscripts. She's not answering, so I leave a voice mail and try to put the envelope out of my mind, to no avail. Late in the afternoon, I withdraw the delicate leaf from its sleeve and place it in a yellow puddle of lamplight. It is Ottoman, no doubt, masterfully done and prodigously well-preserved; the parchment fresh, the ink all but moist. But where would it have come from, what sort of a place? A little village in the rain. It always rained on Belz. This would have been the lore of the region, the prejudice against Belz, and the residents of the town would have shared it, even taken a perverse pride in it, perhaps. Why do I imagine such a downpour? Maybe I'm trying to forestall the fires, the bombing and burning that await the town and its manuscripts. In any case, with the rain as with so much else, things had been this way as long as anyone in the country could remember. Even through the most difficult times of the Federated Republic and all that had followed, right up until the Nationalists took power, Belz would have been the same: a small town of white flaking walls, red tile roofs, and running gutters, framed by the chalky bulk of the mountain looming white among the clouds. Nearer to town would have stood the walnut orchards with their silken worm-bags hanging in the branches, the air pungent with the pulp of the fallen walnut husks mellowing in the Belz rain. In the center of town stood a mosque built of chips of stone taken from the mountain. It was very old, and had been beautiful once, the white rocks laced together with black mortar. During the Federated Republic, the stones of this same mountain, which in places bore the rough graffiti of Roman occupiers, were used all around the country to cover hillsides with great white letters that read out slogans like PARTY AND PEOPLE and the Grave Leader's name. These stones were Belz's second claim to fame—though the residents of Belz were dubious of their renown in this matter, having been the conscripts who had carried those chips down the slopes in heavy baskets. In the Federated Republic, the mosque had fallen out of use and into disrepair, and now it was a museum of sorts. Among a few old coins and shards of classical earthenware, it contained Belz's third most famous property, after the rain and the stones: the Manuscript of Belz. The people of Belz with their wet shoulders and their runny noses took great pride in this artifact, this venerable book of scripture filled with calligraphy and ornamented with gold leaf and brilliant illuminations. Scholars came to Belz from as far away as the capital city to view and study the book. The town kept a small cell adjoining the display room in good repair, that scholars might have space in which to work and to spend a few nights if they so wished. An old man, who fancied himself the keeper of the book, visited the mosque regularly to tidy the room and to attend to the scholars' needs. Though he could not make out the writing it contained—the old calligraphic styles never were prized for their legibility—he nonetheless loved to fondle it as it lay in its velvet cradle under glass. He made a ceremony of turning over a leaf of the manuscript each morning; this he did first thing, before going to the cell to dust its floor beams with a stiff broom. Sometimes he ran his rain-cracked fingertips over the loops and serifs of the characters, feeling the ridges the ancient pen had made as it had cut into the paper. He stared down at the illuminations, taking off his skullcap of roughly knitted wool and twisting it in his fists as he gazed wonderingly into the book. When the Nationalists took power, the residents of Belz had cause to worry. Although they were not at all political—the Federated Republic and its Grave Leader had taken care of that—the Nationalists hated the Muslims, hated their skullcaps and their dark eyes, hated their distaste for pork and strong liquor, hated the harsh fricatives of their dialect, all so reminiscent of the heretical empire of old. Though to tell the truth, the Nationalists would have hated Belz even if its people spent their days bare-headed beneath the cloudy skies, drinking vodka and eating ham sandwiches. The curator of manucripts arrives, interrupting my reverie. "Let's have a look at this forgery your friend has brought you," she says as I hand her the envelope. A forgery, I ask? That's too bad. Of course, I'm not surprised to hear it. She slips the page from its cover, and the scent of burnt hide fills the room. "I'm being unfair," she says. "It's not precisely a forgery—more of a facsimile, really. And as the story goes, it was produced for the best, most quixotic reason. You see, the people of the town knew that the army was destroying all the Islamic objects they could find, and they wanted to save their manuscript. So they hired a conservator who knew the manuscript well, and he produced a facsimile for them. The idea was to replace the original, to leave the fake for the soldiers to find." So if this is the fake, I wonder, what happened to the original? The curator shrugs. "No one knows," she says. "According to the prevailing opinion, the conservator must have absconded with it. But Belz was razed only a couple of years ago. The volume could still turn up, intact, in an auction somewhere." What about Brko's piece, I ask. The curator holds the piece at eye level, letting the lamplight plane off the prismatic text. "It's shockingly good," she says. "I'll take it back to the lab for a closer look, just to be sure. But you'll probably have to tell him he's got a fine conversation piece." The people of Belz knew that the Nationalists had begun their cleansing; they saw tall stalks of black smoke rise and blossom on the horizon. And the old man knew—for visiting scholars had told him—that the Nationalists would burn the manuscript if it fell into their hands. He brought the problem before the town council, who, naturally, were divided over the matter. "They won't bother us here," one said. "When have they ever?" "What about the young men?" one asked. "Each day another one goes to join the fighters in the hills. The troops will come when they find out about this." "Couldn't we send the manuscript along with one of these boys?" someone asked in reply. "My nephew leaves tomorrow, nothing I've said will stop him." "But what if he's caught?" "My son is planning to pack his family and leave the country," said another. "He could take it with him." "But they'll be stopped and searched at the border!" "No no, the Interior Police won't bother with a simple family mulecart!" "How can you hope to beat these thugs at their own games?" cried an older man. "When the troops arrive, we should welcome them with gifts of bread and salt in their custom. We should bow to them and hand over the manuscript. That way they won't burn our houses!" "But no one can burn the houses of Belz!" someone said. He stood and shook his fist. "Our rain will stop them!" he shouted, and the crowd replied with hoots and peals of laughter. The old man, who had stood patiently in the middle of the chamber through it all, shook his head, put his finger to his nose, and spoke. "I have a plan. Years ago a young scholar visited us. Now, this scholar, whose name was Fadim, I remember that he was also an artist. He told me that he knew how to write in the ancient calligraphic style of the manuscript, that he could bind the leaves into a book and sew a grand leather cover. Though this man had once worked in the capital city, he left when the university closed. He lives now with family not far from Belz. Now this Fadim, perhaps we can entice him to come, to make a facsimile of the manuscript that we can turn over to the police in place of the original." The council argued awhile longer, but finally agreed to do as the old man suggested. The next day he borrowed a battered sedan from one of the councilors and drove over the pitted road to find Fadim and ask him to Belz. Fadim was unhappy on his cousin's farm: afraid of the animals, repelled by the smells of the barn, he insisted that plowing and sowing should not be allowed to wreck his scholar's hands with a stick of wood for being such a useless wreck did he at last join in the work of the farm. He took refuge in solitary tasks, and even came to enjoy milking the cow—her udder leather-dry, her milk the same creamy yellow color as paper. Such opportunities for reverie were far-flung, however, and he passed through his days on the farm as if they were so many abandoned rooms. He squinted at the dirty children, cursing the country silence and the frozen stupidity of his cousin's people. When the old man arrived from Belz, Fadim was perplexed. The venerable fellow made a strange ambassador, after all, with his moist skullcap and his sniffles. But at his first mention of Belz, Fadim's heart fluttered. His breath caught at the thought of the famous manuscript. And when the old man explained his mission, his invitation buoyed Fadim at once. He did not need to take a second glance at the bruised farm lying all around him before saying yes to the old man. He was careful, however, to mask his eagerness to leave, and his hunger to have the manuscript in his hands once again. "We cannot pay you," the old man said. "But you will have use of the mosque, and free board for as long as you need." Fadim pinched his chin and shook his head. "How much time do we have?" he asked. The old man only shrugged, for who could know? Perhaps the troops would never come—or perhaps they were in Belz already. Fadim grumbled about his family and his duties on the farm, just to make a show of it. But in the end, of course, he told the old man he would come. It didn't even matter that Belz couldn't pay him, as the country's money was worthless. Belz offered honor, though, greater honor than he could ever find prodding his cousin's muddy sheep to return to their fold. So Fadim told his cousin he was leaving (the man only wiped his brow and spit on the ground) and packed a worn valise full of tools and materials and a bottle of cream fresh from the morning's milking. He placed his valise in the back seat of the sedan and settled in beside the old man, who sat behind the wheel eating a raw, peeled onion. The old man steered the car over the road, chattering on in his onion-scented fricatives about all the scholars who had ever visited Belz. Belz welcomed Fadim like a martyr. The rain had dwindled to a premonitory mist; boys jumped up and down along the road playing their boom boxes as the car bumped up the steep hill toward the mosque. Some men roasted a goat while women linked their arms and danced in the muddy yard. The old man accompanied Fadim everywhere, smiling broadly and patting him on the back. Finally, he led him into the moist innards of the mosque, led him to the neat cell with its high desk and its window looking out on the gray skies and the houses of Belz fringed with the yellow-leafed crowns of the walnut trees. As the rain hammered the chipped stone wall outside, Fadim unpacked his needles and silken threads, his inks, and his pots of pigment and powdered gold. Fadim began the labor thinking that his work need only be reasonably accurate. The Interior Police were infamous illiterates, criminals released from the state prisons, and easily fooled. Any antique-looking book full of flourishes would satisfy their flames. But as he studied the manuscript—removed from its glass case and placed in its velvet cradle atop the high desk—Fadim was charmed once again by its sublime script. He read the holy words as if for the first time, and the manuscript spoke to him. He inhaled the incense of its antiquity—the dry, spiced scent of moldering paper and leather—until, when he fell into bed at night, he could smell it on his hands and in his hair. The figures of the script sang, made sounds of words the likes of which he had forgotten. How could he have missed all this beauty on his first visit to Belz? He was young then, of course, his graduate studies barely finished. And now, after all that had happened to him, he could see fresh milk and smell wet fields among the pages of the ancient text. In thrall to all this voluptuousness, he longed to reproduce it. He wanted nothing less than to recreate the Belz Manuscript—he would have stayed in that cell and made a thousand of them; he would have drawn and gilded and folded and sewn until he fell dead from the stool, had such a thing been possible. He would have filled the world with Manuscripts of Belz until they were plentiful as plums. And when the work was finished and the new manuscript lay atop the table beside its older twin, it seemed all the more glorious for its freshness. It lacked the scent of the old book, of course, but even that would come in time. The ringing phone interrupts my reverie. It's the curator of manuscripts. "I have, well, interesting news, and then I have bad news," she says. "Bad news first: as I said, and as you thought, we can't really use the piece. It's fine, really, a first-rate example of the illuminations from its period. We can't firmly substantiate where it's from, as the manuscript was never microfilmed. So we don't know enough about it to curate it. But now, here's the interesting part: it's the real thing. It's not a facsimile. It's a genuine fifteenth century Ottoman manuscript, a fragment of the Koran, in fact." You're kidding. That's incredible. The curator snickers into the phone. "You can tell your friend Brko to get in touch with me," she says. "I'll set him up with the someone at Sotheby's." I remember that the Koran is an attribute of Allah, as perfect and eternal as His beauty, His anger, and His mercy. I hang up the phone and stare at the heaps of books around me. Walls of precious, rare codices, safely imurred in my library. Somewhere nearby, Brko knocks down a wall of bricks, and dust sifts from still more tomes as they tremble imperceptibly on their shelves. I suppose I should be surprised that Brko holds a piece of the original manuscript—that for all his attempts to pass a fake as the real thing, it proved to be authentic after all. Then again, perhaps the whole story of the facsimiles was a hoax, a confidence man's clumsy parable concocted to pique buyer Brko's interest. I can't let go of Belz, though, or Fadim. I feel sure that Fadim was real, and that he had to betray Belz in the end. For would you not have felt, as Fadim must surely have felt, that such a work—a work of one's own hands, after all, the consummation of a lifetime's perfection of the rarest and most esoteric skills—could never be given over to the flames? Surely this is what Fadim felt. And surely this is why, on that last wet morning before the sun had risen, he padded softly out of the mosque with the manuscript, the new Manuscript of Belz, wrapped in a kerchief in his valise. He slipped down the hill and splashed out onto the road, ignored by the dogs who yawned and shook off the rain as he passed. That very same night, of course, the tanks and armored trucks of the Interior Police had climbed the hills on the outskirts of Belz. They paused now among the walnut trees on the edge of town. Young men with shaven heads and blue eyes passed the hours smoking furtively and watching the lights of Belz flicker in the rain. They were eager for the sun to come up and their work to begin, for fighters from the hills had struck hard in the capital city, and the soldiers knew what revenge they would seek in the damp town below them. As the sun rose, the soldiers swiveled their rockets and fired at the mosque. The shells slammed into its walls, shaking them shrilly, clapping them like bells. Thick smoke poured from the white rock walls. The soldiers rushed into town with the tanks close behind. They gathered Belz men, still bleary-eyed from sleep, and began sorting them out. Any man with rough hands and tanned skin they judged a fighter; they pushed these men against walls and shot them in their faces. The councilor who had argued appeasement now tottered bareheaded from his house, offering bread and salt in his raised hands. A soldier hit him in the head with the butt of his rifle. Soldiers caught women hiding in root cellars and raped them. They burned the low silos and they shot the milk cows while the stones of the mosque rolled and cracked in the flames that incinerated the famous manuscript and the old man, who died asleep in his cell. As sour smoke curled among the piles of rubble, soldiers laughed and took turns firing across the fields at townspeople running into the walnut orchards. Those running through the fields did not notice how the sun, rising for once in a clear sky, had warmed the dew in the grass. The soldiers caught Fadim as they were driving out of the uprooted town. He had hidden in a bank of grass along the road where the rocket tanks had stopped, and had been too frightened to move. As the tanks churned through the ditches and over the road one made straight for him, forcing him to run, and the soldiers pointed their rifles at his head. A young soldier, deprived of spoils by his comrades, demanded that Fadim give up his valise. Convinced by his pallor and the softness of his hands that he was no fighter from the hills, the soldiers told him to go away. As they drove Fadim off with taunts and blows, the young soldier prised open the case, spilled its contents into the mud, and cursed to find nothing of value. This story first appeared in September 2000 on hermenaut.com; it's published here with a nudge from Peggy Nelson. The photograph of bookshelves in the Älteste Bibliothek of Halle is in the Flickr stream of gynti_46 and is used here under a Creative Commons attribution/share-alike license.

Hilo Hero: Edgar Rice Burroughs

David Smay — Tue, 01 Sep 2009 10:00:33 +0000

There's a case to be made that the 20th Century begins in America when EDGAR RICE BURROUGHS (1875-1950) published his first story, "Under the Moons of Mars," in All-Story Magazine in 1912. Burroughs trafficked in all the dominant pop literary tropes of the late 19th century — hollow earth adventures, lost races and cities, Martian canals, astral projection to other planets, and feral children — but stripped them clean of their fusty, Victorian values. His lost race yarns aren't nearly as racist as those of A. Merritt or H. Rider Haggard. Burroughs doesn't need to deform science to explain his hollow earth, and his astral projection doesn't drag inMadame Blatavsky in order to launch a cavalryman to Mars. Burroughs doesn't give a shit about the ideologies of the genres strip-mines for stories; and he streamlines 19th-century pseudoscience into pure sensation and thrills. What's more 20th-century American than value-free sensationalism, I ask you? Kreegah Bundolo! *** Each day, Hilobrow.com pays tribute to one of our favorite high-, low-, no-, or hilobrow heroes on that person's birthday. Click here for more Hilo Hero shout-outs.

fairbanks-poster

Joshua Glenn — Tue, 01 Sep 2009 13:12:09 +0000

gatsby

Joshua Glenn — Tue, 01 Sep 2009 15:22:31 +0000

west-lonely

Joshua Glenn — Tue, 01 Sep 2009 16:42:27 +0000

disney-mickey

Joshua Glenn — Tue, 01 Sep 2009 16:43:28 +0000

keaton-buster-550

Joshua Glenn — Tue, 01 Sep 2009 16:50:09 +0000

faulkner-sanctuary-1931-first

Joshua Glenn — Tue, 01 Sep 2009 17:04:42 +0000

Hammett

Joshua Glenn — Tue, 01 Sep 2009 23:47:25 +0000

hemingway-havenot-1937-first

Joshua Glenn — Wed, 02 Sep 2009 00:12:33 +0000

Hilo Hero: John Zorn

Douglas Wolk — Wed, 02 Sep 2009 10:00:34 +0000

[caption id="attachment_4650" align="aligncenter" width="300" caption="John Zorn conducting Hip Hop Cobra, July 2000"][/caption] JOHN ZORN (born 1953) has been the nexus of the musical avant-garde in New York for a couple of decades — an unbelievably prolific composer and performer and curator and label-dude whose early look-how-eclectic-I-am tendencies quickly resolved into depth and breadth of vision. The jewel of his enormous oeuvre, though, is "Cobra," one of his early "game pieces" — which is to say that you perform or watch a performance of it as you would a spectator sport, rather than a composition. It's a 1984 set of rules for a dozen musicians to improvise under the direction of a prompter who has a role somewhere between "conductor" and "dungeon master"; headbands, urgent gestures, and rapidly shifting alliances are involved. The complete rules to "Cobra" have never officially been published — part of the fun is that they're passed hand-to-hand among musicians. The game's durability probably has something to do with its relentless Zorniness: it's never the same twice and totally dependent on the specific musicians playing it, and it changes shape faster than the dueling wizards in The Sword in the Stone. *** Each day, Hilobrow.com pays tribute to one of our favorite high-, low-, no-, or hilobrow heroes on that person's birthday. Click here for more Hilo Hero shout-outs.

The Library Dreams of Knowledge's End

Matthew Battles — Wed, 02 Sep 2009 14:42:46 +0000

Here's a short film that captured my fancy, discovered via Twitter architecture maven @twiliteprincess: Alex Roman's "Kahn's Library," which features the 1965 Phillips Exeter Academy Library designed by Louis Kahn. As a modernist interior the building is striking; it would make a fine space in which to set a futuristic first-person shooter. But what's really unsettling about Roman's film is that the library is empty.

Kahn's Exeter Short Film from Alex Roman on Vimeo.

As an edifice and an institution, the library is the Derridean trace par excellence. The library wants to consume the books, to endure and overcome them. It's a hardy meme, a selfish gene, the library—using words and ideas to get itself built, much as a prep-school elite could be said to consume and efface liberal tradition in order to ratify their authority and satisfy conspicuous needs. Before the first volume is placed on the shelves and after the last leaf crumbles away, the library is always already a book.

kahnlib

Matthew Battles — Wed, 02 Sep 2009 14:47:38 +0000

bloop

Matthew Battles — Wed, 02 Sep 2009 15:58:12 +0000

Music for Cats of All Kinds

Matthew Battles — Wed, 02 Sep 2009 16:08:37 +0000

We've been reading news today about music composed for monkeys. Most animals don't respond to music. But is that because music per se is incomprehensible to them, or because it's customarily created from the spectrum of humankind's sonic world? By scrutinizing patterns of vocalizations of tamarin monkeys and cataloguing the natural sounds to which they respond, researchers discovered that the lower-order primates have a musical sensibility tuned to the modes and rhythms of their own lifeworld. Although the project has a scientific imprimatur, the composer behind it, David Teie, also has started a commercial venture marketing his tunes composed for cats—and has filed a patent to protect "the concept of species-specific music based on naturally occurring emotional responses to sound." We don't think Teie's intellectual property rights are being trampled by Andy Baio, although he asks a similar question. Baio, digital impresario and founder of the online funding crowdsourcer Kickstarter, wanted to translate the angular tonic calisthenics and cool vibe of Bebop into a neuronally-appropriate musical language for gamers and geeks. "What would the jazz masters sound like on a Nintendo Entertainment System," he wondered—"Coltrane on a C-64? Mingus on Amiga?" Thus the birth of "Kind of Bloop," in which a group of 8-bit maestros pay tribute to Miles Davis by remaking his multi-platinum album "Kind of Blue." Now finished, the album can be downloaded in MP3 or FLAC format for a mere five dollars. Of course, Davis's work was already music for a cat of a certain kind; Baio's project merely brings the music of this pioneer of Bebop, Cool, and Fusion to a species heretofore immune to the wiles of jazz.

Generations (6): Hardboileds

Joshua Glenn — Thu, 03 Sep 2009 13:00:44 +0000

Gertrude Stein and others (including Strauss & Howe) have lumped Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot, Ernest Hemingway, and F. Scott Fitzgerald into a single "Lost Generation." But there's a critical, generationally specific difference between the cultural productions of Pound, Eliot, and other members of what I've called the Modernist Generation (1884-93), and that of Hemingway, Fitzgerald, and others who belong to a generation born from 1894 through 1903. I call the latter cohort: the Hardboileds. Like the Modernist Generation, a few of the eldest Hardboiled artists and writers served in the Great War (Dos Passos, Cummings, Hammett, and a very young Hemingway, for example, were ambulance or camion drivers), and/or participated in modernism's first explosive moments. However, the Hardboileds didn't regard themselves as belonging to the same generation as their immediate elders. Among the Modernist Generation, there were "paradoxical if not opposed trends towards revolutionary and reactionary positions," according to a standard account of the era. But the Hardboileds saw themselves as "a new generation," as Fitzgerald would write in his debut novel, This Side of Paradise (1920), one that had "grown up to find all Gods dead, all wars fought, all faiths in man shaken." The Modernists were an ambivalent generation, attempting to synthesize conflicting ideologies, all the while suspecting that unfreedom had been relocated inside their own heads; their juniors, the Hardboileds, who acknowledged the truth of the Modernists' insight, were accordingly more fatalistic, pessimistic, and — after the brief drama of their expatriot period — bitterly resigned to unfreedom. Malcolm Cowley's autobiographical Exile's Return (1934) explicitly supports Fitzgerald's depiction of those men and women who were in their teens and 20s during the Teens (1914-23, not to be confused with the 1910s), and in their 20s and 30s during the Twenties (1924-33, not to be confused with the 1920s). In the book's 1951 prologue, Cowley grumbles that "Lost Generation" is "as useful as any half-accurate tag could be" — i.e., for a generational cohort whom he describes as having graduated from college "between 1915, say, and 1922." Cowley's periodization dovetails almost exactly with my own scheme; his 22-year-old college graduates were born from 1895 through 1902. (Cowley himself was born in ’98.) Exile's Return also agrees with my characterization of the difference between Modernists (whom the author calls "They," in the following passage) and Hardboileds ("We"):

"They" had once been rebels, political, moral, artistic or religious — in any case they had paid the price of their rebellion... "We" had avoided issues and got what we wanted in a quiet way, simply by taking it.... "They" had been rebels: they wanted to change the world, be leaders in the fight for justice and art, help to create a society in which individuals could express themselves. "We" were convinced at the time that society could never be changed by an effort of the will.

The Modernists were ambivalent; the Hardboileds were hopeless. Cowley's Exile's Return may have been marketed as a guide to the so-called, imaginary Lost Generation. As a first-hand account of the experiences shared by writers and artists of the Hardboiled Generation, though, it's indispensable. High-, low-, no-, and hilobrow members of the Hardboiled Generation include: Hemingway and Fitzgerald, John Dos Passos, Howard Hawks, Bertolt Brecht, the Frankfurt School (Max Horkheimer, Herbert Marcuse, Erich Fromm, plus honorary Partisan Generation member T.W. Adorno, among others), the Surrealists (André Breton, Georges Bataille, Louis Aragon, Philippe Soupault, Paul Éluard, Robert Desnos, Antonin Artaud, Luis Buñuel, and René Magritte, among others), Nathanael West, Duke Ellington, Hart Crane, Chester Gould, Louis Armstrong, Ogden Nash, Jacques Lacan, Alfred Hitchcock, Vladimir Nabokov, Dashiell Hammett, Graham Greene, Jorge Luis Borges, Kenneth Burke, Wilhelm Reich, Preston Sturges, Peggy Guggenheim, Dashiell Hammett, E. E. Cummings, Louis-Ferdinand Céline, John Ford, Edmund Wilson, Buckminster Fuller, Buster Keaton, Peter Lorre, Weegee, and Philip Gordon Wylie. *** A reminder of my generational periodization scheme: 1844-53: [Progressive Generation] Prometheans 1854-63: [Progressive, Missionary Generations] Plutonians 1864-73: [Missionary Generation] Anarcho-Symbolists 1874-83: [Missionary Generation] Psychonauts 1884-93: [Lost Generation] Modernists 1894-1903: [Lost, Greatest/GI Generations] Hardboileds 1904-13: [Greatest/GI Generation] Partisans 1914-23: [Greatest/GI Generation] New Gods 1924-33: [Silent Generation] Postmodernists 1934-43: [Silent Generation] Anti-Anti-Utopians 1944-53: Boomers 1954-63: [Boomers, Late Boomers, Post-Boomers, Generation Jones] OGXers 1964-73: [Generation X, Thirteenth Generation] Constructivists 1974-83: [Generations X, Y] Revivalists 1984-93: [Millennial Generation] Throwbacks 1994-2003: [Millennial Generation] TBA *** If we define hardboiled fiction — as at least one critic has — as novels and stories in which an "anxious sense of fatality is usually attached to a pessimistic conviction that economic and socio-political circumstances will deprive people of control over their lives by destroying their hopes and by creating in them the weaknesses of character that turn them into transgressors or mark them out as victims," then it becomes apparent that this generation's lowbrow genre novelists (including Dashiell Hammett, Horace McCoy, Geoffrey Household, Paul Cain, Raoul Whitfield, Philip Gordon Wylie, and honorary Hardboiled Graham Greene; please note that "lowbrow" does not mean stupid or untalented) were by no means alone. Among the most important works of high-, no-, and hilobrow hardboiled fiction are: John Dos Passos' The 42nd Parallel and 1919, William Faulkner's Sanctuary and Light in August, Erskine Caldwell's Tobacco Road and God's Little Acre, Nathanael West's Miss Lonelyhearts and The Day of the Locust, Hemingway's To Have and Have Not and For Whom the Bell Tolls, Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby, and Erich Maria Remarque's All Quiet on the Western Front. NB: John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath and Of Mice and Men, and Thornton Wilder's The Bridge of San Luis Rey are also hardboiled — but they're middlebrow. Less interested than Modernist Generation types had been in discovering a useable past, Hardboiled modernists also sought to eradicate anything romantic or sentimental — e.g., the excessively mannered, irrational, emotionalistic — from their work. Raymond Chandler, a member of the Modernist cohort, would explain that the hardboiled fiction of his juniors was their response to a postwar "world gone wrong, a world in which, long before the atom bomb, civilization had created the machinery for its own destruction and was learning to use it with all the moronic delight of a gangster trying out his first machine-gun." NB: Noir fiction, in which the protagonist is usually not a detective, but instead a victim, a suspect, or a perpetrator, and in which sex plays a prominent role, was pioneered by Cornell Woolrich. The titles of Woolrich's novels — e.g., The Bride Wore Black (1940), The Black Curtain (1941), Black Alibi (1942), The Black Angel (1943), The Black Path of Fear (1944) — inspired French critics to call movies based on them "noir." But noir is not a hardboiled phenomenon. Born in 1903, Woolrich is an honorary member of the Partisan Generation, which also includes noir novelists Jim Thompson, Dorothy B. Hughes, and Charles Williams. In a Minima Moralia entry titled "Tough Baby," T.W. Adorno, also born in 1903, suggests that the Hardboileds' effort to purge sentimentality is itself sentimental. The style of Minima Moralia itself, which was written in 1940s LA, is perhaps more noir than hardboiled. (Discuss.) *** Though Middlebrow wouldn't triumph until midcentury, and though its most perspicacious critics would therefore be members of the Partisan Generation, its first flowering was on the Hardboiled cohort's watch — and many of its most influential peddlers are members of this generation. Which might explain why Strauss & Howe's influential (and pro-Middlebrow) generational periodization scheme, which is obeyed slavishly by generational trend-spotting journalists and marketers, lops off the youngest members of the Hardboiled Generation and assigns them to the so-called GI or Greatest Generation (1901-24, supposedly). Why 1901? Because that's when Walt Disney, that world-beating avatar of Low Middlebrow, was born. In every triumphalist middlebrow account of American history, things were going poorly until the so-called GI/Greatest Generation came along. Strauss & Howe are dismissive of the Lost Generation (actually the Modernists and older members of the Hardboileds), whose "selfishness and unreason," "fatalism," "stark nihilisms" (i.e., surrealism, Dada, expressionism, futurism, "Freudian relativism"), and "pessimistic theories" they contrast unfavorably (in their 1991 bestseller, Generations) with the "fearless but not reckless" manner of those "confident and rational problem-solvers," the GI or Greatest Generation (actually the Partisans and the New Gods). Middlebrow, which deceptively styles itself as non- or post-partisan, approves only of those fictional generations that eschew fretting about subjective forms of unfreedom and focus instead on getting the job done: in the 20th and 21st centuries, the Greatest/GIs and the so-called Millennials. (Boomers, who worship the GIs and the Millennials, are forever kicking themselves for not being even more middlebrow than they are.) All of which explains why Walt Disney, that master of cutesying up fairy and folk tales, national cultures, and real-world locales (i.e., the raw ingredients of ideology, which is to say resistance to the soft tyranny of Middlebrow's hegemonic discourse), must be plucked out of his own generation (the Hardboileds) and assigned to the Greatests . Further study of the semi-hopeful, semi-fatalistic Hardboiled Generation might provide useful clues — useful to saboteurs, that is — regarding the subtle mechanism that keeps Middlebrow ticking. This is not the place for such an investigation, but let's just take note of the fact that Walt Disney, along with fellow Hardboileds Norman Rockwell, Bernard De Voto, Norman Vincent Peale, Robert Maynard Hutchins, Mortimer J. Adler, Mark Van Doren, James Gould Cozzens, and Thornton Wilder are among those who first either attempted to synthesize the energies of Highbrow and Anti-Lowbrow, by hustling a ham-fisted attempt at cultural and intellectual achievement known today as High Middlebrow; or who synthesized the energies of Lowbrow and Anti-Highbrow and cranked out a variety of wildly successful low middlebrow (i.e., semi-hopeful, semi-fatalistic) cultural productions, from Rockwell's Saturday Evening Post covers to Wilder's Our Town, to — you know — all things Disney. In fact, it can be extremely difficult — now, even more so than then — to distinguish pre-midcentury middlebrow productions from the non-middlebrow cultural milieux out of which they first emerged. Adorno and Edmund Wilson were perhaps the only critics born before 1904 who even attempted to do so; and for their troubles they've been castigated as "mandarins" and "elitists" — i.e., by middlebrow critics posing as populists — ever since. To the untrained eye, and to blunted sensibilities, there's not a great deal of difference between Fleischer Studios' Betty Boop, say, and Disney's early Mickey Mouse cartoons. Yet the latter are middlebrow, Adorno and Horkheimer insist in their essay on the Culture Industry in The Dialectic of Enlightenment (though unlike Dwight Macdonald, who was influenced by Adorno's criticism, they don't use that term), while the former are not. If this judgment outrages you, then imagine the scorn poured on Adorno for having dared to criticize jazz and certain films that we admire immoderately today (noir films, for example); or on Wilson, who reviled popular mystery novelists (Agatha Christie, Rex Stout) and the beloved J.R.R. Tolkien ("Oo, Those Awful Orcs")! One's admiration for these early, courageous anti-middlebrow critics grows by leaps and bounds. *** Meet the Hardboileds. MEMBERS OF THE 1884-93 COHORT WHO ARE HONORARY HARDBOILEDS: Anita Loos, Edward G. Robinson, Charles S. Johnson, Walter Francis White, Joan Miró, Jimmy Durante, John P. Marquand (all born 1893), plus Zora Neale Hurston (born 1891, but claimed she was born in 1901, so let's split the difference and say she was born on the cusp of the two generations, too). 1894: Dashiell Hammett, E. E. Cummings, Harold L. Davis, Jack Benny, Donald Deskey, Jean Toomer, Norman Rockwell, Mark Van Doren, Walter Brennan, Isham Jones, Moms Mabley, Bessie Smith, Martha Graham, Paul Green, Blind Lemon Jefferson, Fred Allen, Stuart Davis, Harold Gray, E.C. Segar, James P. Johnson, Norbert Wiener, John Howard Lawson, Philip K. Wrigley, Meher Baba, Nikita Khrushchev, Louis-Ferdinand Céline, King Edward VIII, Isaac Babel, Joseph Roth, J. B. Priestley, Jean Renoir, Friedrich Pollock. Honorary Modernists: Aldous Huxley, Ben Hecht, Donald Ogden Stewart, James Thurber, Rudolf Hess. [caption id="attachment_5631" align="aligncenter" width="550" caption="Buster Keaton"][/caption] 1895: Buster Keaton, John Ford, Edmund Wilson, Buckminster Fuller, Max Horkheimer, Paul Éluard, Gala Dalí, Gracie Allen, Bud Abbott, J. Edgar Hoover, Lewis Mumford, Robert Hillyer, George Schuyler, Machine Gun Kelly, Babe Ruth, Michael Arlen, Robert Hillyer, Shemp Howard, Milt Gross, Dorothea Lange, Busby Berkeley, Ernst Jünger, F.R. Leavis, Robert Graves, Mikhail Bakhtin, Jiddu Krishnamurti, Rudolph Valentino, László Moholy-Nagy. 1896: F. Scott Fitzgerald, Howard Hawks, André Breton, Antonin Artaud, George Burns, John Dos Passos, Louis Bromfield, Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings, Ira Gershwin, Robert E. Sherwood, Blind Gary Davis, Ethel Waters, Mamie Eisenhower, Jimmy Doolittle, Irwin Edman, Raoul Whitfield, André Masson, Martin Niemoller, Wallis Simpson, Jean Piaget, Raymond Massey, A.C. Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupada, Oswald Mosley, Raymond Postgate. 1897: William Faulkner, Kenneth Burke, Georges Bataille, Wilhelm Reich, Bernard De Voto, Fletcher Henderson, Sidney Bechet, Rudolph Fisher, Frank Capra, Louise Bogan, Gene Tunney, Marion Davies, Thornton Wilder, Louis Lepke, Walter Winchell, Moe Howard, Amelia Earhart, Horace McCoy, Fletcher Henderson, Lucky Luciano, Louis Aragon, Philippe Soupault, Douglas Sirk, Walter Pidgeon, Pope Paul VI, Vito Genovese, Eric Knight (Richard Hallas), Joseph Goebbels, Anthony Eden. 1898: Preston Sturges, Herbert Marcuse, C.S. Lewis, René Magritte, Erich Maria Remarque, Bertolt Brecht, Paul Robeson, George Gershwin, Stephen Vincent Benét, Malcolm Cowley, Lil Hardin Armstrong, Eric D. Walrond, Aaron Douglas, George Jessel, Armand Hammer, Scott O'Dell, Norman Vincent Peale, Thomas Boyd, Horace Gregory, Berenice Abbott, Alexander Calder, Peggy Guggenheim, Hanns Eisler, Lotte Lenya, Golda Meir, Kenji Mizoguchi, Sergei Eisenstein, Alvar Aalto, Tamara de Lempicka, M. C. Escher, Henry Moore. 1899: Vladimir Nabokov, Alfred Hitchcock, Duke Ellington, E. B. White, Humphrey Bogart, Jorge Luis Borges, Leo Strauss, Weegee, Al Capone, Hart Crane, James Cagney, Ernest Hemingway, Robert Maynard Hutchins, W.R. Burnett, Fred Astaire, Thomas A. Dorsey, Hoagy Carmichael, Allen Tate, Irving Thalberg, George Cukor, Léonie Adams, Vera Caspary, Gloria Swanson, Walter Lantz, Juan Trippe, Doc Barker, Norman Taurog, Louis Adamic, Charles Boyer, Roger Vitrac, Erich Kastner, Charles Laughton, Noel Coward, Federico Garcia Lorca, Nevil Shute, Ramon Novarro, F.A. Hayek, Brassai, Jean de Brunhoff, Elizabeth Bowen, C.S. Forester, Bruno Hauptmann. 1900: Chester Gould, Adlai Stevenson, Spencer Tracy, Yvor Winters, Kurt Weill, Luis Buñuel, Charlie Green, Don Redman, Thomas Wolfe, Aaron Copland, Stephen Bechtel, Natalie Schafer, Taylor Caldwell, Margaret Mitchell, Jean Arthur, Norman Foster, Lefty Grove, Mervyn LeRoy, Agnes Moorehead, Helene Weigel, Erich Fromm, René Crevel, Robert Desnos, Hans-Georg Gadamer. Yves Tanguy, Leo Löwenthal, Franz Leopold Neumann, Ignazio Silone, Jacques Prévert, Wolfgang Pauli, Martin Bormann, Ignazio Silone, Antoine de Saint Exupéry, Gilbert Ryle, Heinrich Himmler, Rudolf Hoess, Xavier Cugat, Adi Dassler, James Hilton, Geoffrey Household, Richard Hughes, Jean Negulesco, Nathalie Sarraute, Robert Siodmak, Charles Vidor. 1901: Louis Armstrong, Walt Disney, Robert Bresson, Marlene Dietrich, Jacques Lacan, Gary Cooper, Clark Gable, Zeppo Marx, Ed Sullivan, Sterling Allen Brown, Carl Barks, Ed Begley Sr., Whittaker Chambers, A.B. Guthrie, Bebe Daniels, Brian Donlevy, Melvyn Douglas, Allen B. DuMont, Nelson Eddy, George Gallup, John Gunther, Granville Hicks, Ub Iwerks, Allyn Joslyn, Harry Partch, Linus Pauling, Rudy Vallee, Chic Young, Michel Leiris, Henri Lefebvre, André Malraux, Enrico Fermi, Fulgencio Batista, Maurice Evans, Alberto Giacometti, Werner Heisenberg, Emperor Hirohito, Louis Kahn, Lee Strasberg. 1902: John Steinbeck, Langston Hughes, Karl Popper, Meyer Lansky, Eric Hoffer, Ogden Nash, Tallulah Bankhead, Ray Kroc, Sidney Hook, Wallace Thurman, Gwendolyn B. Bennett, Arna Bontemps, Christina Stead, Wolcott Gibbs, Thomas Nast, Ansel Adams, Kenneth Fearing, Mortimer J. Adler, George Carol Sims (Paul Cain), Henry Steele Commager, Richard J. Daley, Stepin Fetchit, Larry Fine, Strom Thurmond, Margaret Hamilton, Corliss Lamont, Max Lerner, Charles Lindbergh, F. O. Matthiessen, Talcott Parsons, Richard Rodgers, David O. Selznick, Jessamyn West, Darryl F. Zanuck, Anthony Asquith, Joe Adonis, Carlo Gambino, Albert Anastasia, Erik Erikson, John Houseman, Victor Jory, Ayatollah Khomeini, Max Ophüls, Oskar Morgenstern, Emeric Pressburger, Ralph Richardson, Leni Riefenstahl, Norma Shearer, Christina Stead, Alfred Tarski, William Wyler. 1903: Nathanael West, Joseph Cornell, Claudette Colbert, Evelyn Waugh, Eliot Ness, Walker Evans, Bob Hope, Countee Cullen, Roy Acuff, John Dillinger, Bix Beiderbecke, Arnold Gingrich, Erskine Caldwell, Vincente Minnelli, James Beard, Kay Boyle, Dorothy Dodds Baker, Arthur Godfrey, Edgar Bergen, Chill Wills, Ward Bond, Al Hirschfeld, James Gould Cozzens, Lou Gehrig, Curly Howard, Estes Kefauver, Clare Boothe Luce, Anne Revere, Dr. Spock, James Michener, Hans Jonas, Herbert Spencer, Bruno Bettelheim, Kenneth Clark, Raymond Queneau, Victor Gruen, Malcolm Muggeridge, Tor Johnson, Louis Leakey, Anaïs Nin, Alan Paton, Georges Simenon. Honorary Partisans: John Beynon Harris (John Wyndham), Cornell Woolrich, George Orwell, Mark Rothko, Bing Crosby, maybe T.W. Adorno and Cyril Connolly (all 1903). MEMBERS OF THE 1904-1913 COHORT WHO ARE HONORARY HARDBOILEDS: James T. Farrell, Graham Greene, Peter Lorre, Salvador Dali, Edmond Hamilton, Pretty Boy Floyd (gangster), Edgar G. Ulmer (noir film director), S. J. Perelman (New Yorker humorist), A.J. Liebling (New Yorker journalist), Jacques Tourneur (noir film director) (all born in 1904). *** HONORARY MODERNISTS: Ben Hecht, Donald Ogden Stewart, James Thurber, Rudolf Hess (all born 1894). HONORARY PARTISANS: John Beynon Harris (John Wyndham), Cornell Woolrich, George Orwell, Mark Rothko, maybe T.W. Adorno and Cyril Connolly (all born 1903). PS: African-American writers and artists born between 1894 and 1903 — e.g., Jean Toomer, Langston Hughes, Wallace Thurman, Eric D. Walrond, Countee Cullen, Aaron Douglas, Rudolph Fisher, Arna Bontemps, Sterling Allen Brown, Gwendolyn B. Bennett, and Zora Neale Hurston (or so she claimed) — gave us the Harlem Renaissance. Which is not a hardboiled phenomenon! It's a modernist phenomenon. In other words, black American artists and writers were (productively, perhaps) out of step with mainstream US culture; this would remain the case until fairly recently — the Nineties, say. PPS: Radium-Age SF authors born 1894-1903: Aldous Huxley (Brave New World), Charlotte Haldane (Man's World), J. B. Priestley (Adam in Moonshine), F. Scott Fitzgerald (“The Diamond as Big as the Ritz"), Murray Leinster (“The Runaway Skycraper," the Preston-Hines series), Robert M. Coates (The Eater of Darkness), Laurence Manning (“Man Who Awoke" series, "Stranger Club" series), Philip Gordon Wylie (Gladiator, The Murderer Invisible; with Edwin Balmer: When Worlds Collide, After Worlds Collide). Honorary member of the Hardboileds: Edmond Hamilton (Across Space, The Metal Giants)

Hilo Hero: Alison Lurie

Joshua Glenn — Thu, 03 Sep 2009 13:30:40 +0000

Most of my favorite campus novels — from Mary McCarthy's The Groves of Academe and Kingsley Amis's Lucky Jim to, say, Don DeLillo's White Noise — were penned by a novelist who'd done short time in academe (e.g., as a visiting lecturer) while taking catty notes on tenured Marxists, feminists, or Cult Studs, not to mention outrageously left-wing, right-wing, or apathetic students. But the campus novels of ALISON LURIE (born 1926) are snark-free — which is to say, they may be less guffaw-provoking than comedies peopled by two-dimensional phonies, but they're more deeply enjoyable for it. Lurie, who graduated from Radcliffe in ’47, then followed her literary critic husband to Harvard, Amherst, UCLA, and Cornell, has spent her adult life on campus, which accounts for her empathetic perspective. (From 1970 until recently, Lurie — who is also a scholar of fashion, folklore, and children's literature — taught at Cornell.) Her first novel, Love and Friendship (1962), which concerns the sexual-existential awakening of a faculty wife at a fictionalized Amherst, takes its title from a Jane Austen satire of middlebrow "novels of sensibility." It's as such — and not, that is to say, as (nobrow) satires of academic types — that everyone should read The Nowhere City (1965), The War Between the Tates (1974), and the Pulitzer Prize-winning Foreign Affairs (1984), which wittily criticize the manners and morals of the professoriate without a hint of sententiousness. *** Each day, Hilobrow.com pays tribute to one of our favorite high-, low-, no-, or hilobrow heroes on that person's birthday. Click here for more Hilo Hero shout-outs.

Hilo Hero: Antonin Artaud

Jason Grote — Fri, 04 Sep 2009 10:00:19 +0000

As a playwright, I'm always lamenting theater's (often-deserved) reputation as a staid and boring art, and have often wished for a modern-day ANTONIN ARTAUD (1896-1948) to shake things up. Magician, schizophrenic, (ab)user of opiates and peyote, purged Surrealist, and progenitor of The Theater of Cruelty, Artaud sought to tear the veil between dreams and waking life. His "cruelty" referred not to sadism, but to the ruthless exposure of consensus reality as just another delusion. Like much great art, Artaud's was based on a misunderstanding: while watching a Balinese puppet show, he misinterpreted a complex language of gestures (universally known in Bali) as pure abstraction, frightening and alien. In his error, performance art was born. *** Each day, Hilobrow.com pays tribute to one of our favorite high-, low-, no-, or hilobrow heroes on that person's birthday. Click here for more Hilo Hero shout-outs.

walt-disney

Joshua Glenn — Fri, 04 Sep 2009 12:50:42 +0000

art-norman-rockwell-connoisseur

Joshua Glenn — Fri, 04 Sep 2009 12:55:10 +0000

Hardboiled Middlebrow

Joshua Glenn — Fri, 04 Sep 2009 12:56:40 +0000

Though Middlebrow wouldn't triumph until midcentury, and though its most perspicacious critics would therefore be members of the Partisan Generation, its first flowering was on the Hardboiled cohort's watch — and many of its most influential peddlers are members of the 1894-1903 generational cohort. Which might explain why Strauss & Howe's influential (and pro-Middlebrow) generational periodization scheme, which is obeyed slavishly by generational trend-spotting journalists and marketers, lops off the youngest members of the Hardboiled Generation and assigns them to the so-called GI or Greatest Generation (1901-24, supposedly). Why 1901? Because that's when Walt Disney, that world-beating avatar of Low Middlebrow, was born. This item is excerpted from yesterday's essay on the Hardboiled Generation. In every triumphalist middlebrow account of American history, things were going poorly until the so-called GI/Greatest Generation came along. Strauss & Howe are dismissive of the Lost Generation (actually the Modernists and older members of the Hardboileds), whose "selfishness and unreason," "fatalism," "stark nihilisms" (i.e., surrealism, Dada, expressionism, futurism, "Freudian relativism"), and "pessimistic theories" they contrast unfavorably (in their 1991 bestseller, Generations) with the "fearless but not reckless" manner of those "confident and rational problem-solvers," the GI or Greatest Generation (actually the Partisans and the New Gods). Middlebrow, which deceptively styles itself as non- or post-partisan, approves only of those fictional generations that eschew fretting about subjective forms of unfreedom and focus instead on getting the job done. In the 20th and 21st centuries, that means the so-called Greatest/GIs and the so-called Millennials. Boomers, like Strauss and Howe, worship the Greatest and Millennial Generations. Members of the deluded Boomer generation, that is, are forever kicking themselves for not being more middlebrow than they already are. All of which explains why Walt Disney, that master of cutesying up fairy and folk tales, national cultures, and real-world locales (i.e., the raw ingredients of ideology, which is to say resistance to the soft tyranny of Middlebrow's hegemonic discourse), must be plucked out of his own generation (the Hardboileds) and assigned to the Greatests . Further study of the semi-hopeful, semi-fatalistic Hardboiled Generation might provide useful clues — useful to saboteurs, that is — regarding the subtle mechanism that keeps Middlebrow ticking. This is not the place for such an investigation, but let's just take note of the fact that Walt Disney, along with fellow Hardboileds Norman Rockwell, Bernard De Voto, Norman Vincent Peale, Robert Maynard Hutchins, Mortimer J. Adler, Mark Van Doren, and Thornton Wilder are among those who first either attempted to synthesize the energies of Highbrow and Anti-Lowbrow, by hustling a ham-fisted attempt at cultural and intellectual achievement known today as High Middlebrow; or who synthesized the energies of Lowbrow and Anti-Highbrow and cranked out a variety of wildly successful low middlebrow (i.e., semi-hopeful, semi-fatalistic) cultural productions, from Rockwell's Saturday Evening Post covers to Wilder's Our Town, to — you know — all things Disney. In fact, it can be extremely difficult — now, even more so than then — to distinguish pre-midcentury middlebrow productions from the non-middlebrow cultural milieux out of which they first emerged. Adorno and Edmund Wilson were perhaps the only critics born before 1904 who even attempted to do so; and for their troubles they've been castigated as "mandarins" and "elitists" — i.e., by middlebrow critics posing as populists — ever since. To the untrained eye, and to blunted sensibilities, there's not a great deal of difference between Fleischer Studios' Betty Boop, say, and Disney's early Mickey Mouse cartoons. Yet the latter are middlebrow, Adorno and Horkheimer insist in their essay on the Culture Industry in The Dialectic of Enlightenment (though unlike Dwight Macdonald, who was influenced by Adorno's criticism, they don't use that term), while the former are not. If this judgment outrages you, then imagine the scorn poured on Adorno for having dared to criticize jazz and certain films that we admire immoderately today (noir films, for example); or on Wilson, who reviled popular mystery novelists (Agatha Christie, Rex Stout) and the beloved J.R.R. Tolkien ("Oo, Those Awful Orcs")! One's admiration for these early, courageous anti-middlebrow critics grows by leaps and bounds.

Our_Town

Joshua Glenn — Fri, 04 Sep 2009 13:03:17 +0000

Hilo Hero: Freddie Mercury

Sarah Weinman — Sat, 05 Sep 2009 10:00:06 +0000

If FREDDIE MERCURY (Farrokh Bulsara, born 1946) had been born a century earlier, audiences would have flocked to see him hit high Cs at La Scala or Opera de Paris instead of belting out the last movement of "Bohemian Rhapsody" at Wembley or Madison Square Garden. But there's much more to Mercury and Queen than the rock-opera bombast they embraced so heartily in their 1970s heyday, and which also produced the the wonderfully hard-driving sports anthems "We Will Rock You" and "We Are the Champions." There's the hard bass groove underlying Mercury and David Bowie's duet, "Under Pressure"; the gleeful transvestite kitsch of "I Want to Break Free"; the rockabilly debt called in for "Crazy Little Thing Called Love" and "The Great Pretender"; and the soaring vocals of "Somebody to Love." All of these leave an indelible impression, especially live in concert. Yet the performance I keep reloading on YouTube is "Barcelona," the anthem Mercury wrote for an Olympics he wouldn't live to see. He flails his body and arms around and — amazingly — matches Spanish opera superstar Montserrat Caballe note for note (albeit an octave lower.) In those five minutes, Mercury's flamboyant past and stolen future merge into one. *** Each day, Hilobrow.com pays tribute to one of our favorite high-, low-, no-, or hilobrow heroes on that person's birthday. Click here for more Hilo Hero shout-outs.

Hilo Hero: China Miéville

Sarah Weinman — Sun, 06 Sep 2009 10:00:34 +0000

The precise definition of "New Weird" (a recent avant-garde literary movement seeking to update a moribund Fantasy/SF genre) remains elusive, but the works of British author CHINA MIÉVILLE (born 1972) simultaneously fit and subvert the label. His New Crobuzon novels, especially Perdido Street Station (2000) and The Scar (2002) are very much aware of the world as a contemporary, urban, fluid space. And yet the smell of the sea, the hyperarticulate prose, and the menace of the fantastical monsters that play in Miéville's vision aren't so much avant-garde as revivalist: his writing takes us back to earlier times, whether childhood or historical. These are the novels he'll be remembered by, but I'm equally excited by his foray into genre-bending detective fiction with this spring's The City & The City, a cooler-headed, stripped-down, mirror-twinned look at cities seen and unseen, secrets kept and unkept, and lives lived and snuffed out. *** Each day, Hilobrow.com pays tribute to one of our favorite high-, low-, no-, or hilobrow heroes on that person's birthday. Click here for more Hilo Hero shout-outs.

Hilo Hero: Buddy Holly

Lynn Peril — Mon, 07 Sep 2009 10:00:30 +0000

The early death of BUDDY HOLLY (1936-59) transformed him into an icon of the Boomers' Happy Days-esque vision of American life in the 1950s, all poodle skirts and sock hops at the malt shop, or horn-rimmed glasses and “the day the music died.” He has been name-checked or referenced by other songwriters besides Don McLean, and he's been the subject of a truly bad biopic; adding insult to injury, one of his most famous songs was hijacked for the title of a middlebrow rom-com, Peggy Sue Got Married. All of which is terribly unfair, because the non-mythological Holly was a much more interesting figure. A brilliant songwriter and performer, he had recorded enough material by the time of his death at 22 that “new” platters were still being released a decade later. A young Bob Dylan caught Holly on tour, as did a youthful Keith Richards — John Lennon and Paul McCartney had to settle for records and the radio. (McCartney later made up for the loss by buying the rights to Holly's entire catalog.) The plane crash that immortalized Holly cut short a career in flux. He’d left his hometown of Lubbock, Texas, for Greenwich Village — where he enjoyed going to jazz and folk clubs, and was said to be experimenting with flamenco-style guitar. *** Each day, Hilobrow.com pays tribute to one of our favorite high-, low-, no-, or hilobrow heroes on that person's birthday. Click here for more Hilo Hero shout-outs.

Hilo Hero: Peter Sellers

Patrick Cates — Tue, 08 Sep 2009 10:00:18 +0000

He was a violent husband (to four different wives) who managed his depression by consorting with an astrologer; and a drug-abusing freemason who dealt with his self-induced heart condition by consorting with a psychic healer. Yet PETER SELLERS (1925-80) gave us such touching and hilarious characters as Clouseau, the dimwitted flic who bumbles his way through the Pink Panther series; the simple-minded gardener, Chance, who gets catapulted to the top of the Washington social ladder in Being There; and the hapless Indian actor, Hrundi V. Bakshi, who klutzes his way through a glamorous Hollywood soiree in The Party. Sellers's juggling of accents and identities reached its apotheosis in Dr. Strangelove, in which he embodied three different Cold War caricatures, each as plausibly ridiculous as the next. It is one the funniest scenes in this dark satire that feels uncannily symbolic of his inner turmoil: Sellers, playing Strangelove, the insane, wheelchair-bound scientist, jerks and tics his way Germanically through a Q&A with the American war machine. Meanwhile his hand, gloved in black leather, takes on a life of its own and tries to strangle him. This troubled, complicated man's performances will forever be etched in the collective film-going consciousness. *** Each day, Hilobrow.com pays tribute to one of our favorite high-, low-, no-, or hilobrow heroes on that person's birthday. Click here for more Hilo Hero shout-outs.

Pinakothek (10): The Grasshopper and the Ant

Luc Sante — Tue, 08 Sep 2009 13:00:57 +0000

Like the ant, the teenage stoner labors ceaselessly and uncomplaining, pursuing an arduous task that casual onlookers would dismiss as pointless, yet which is essential to the little creature's survival. Like the ant, the stoner lacks an animating concept, but sets to work at one corner and emerges, hours or days later, at the opposite corner. Like the insane who express themselves visually, the stoner is drawn to symmetry, to altars and monuments, to murky quasi-spiritual allusions, and like them, too, the stoner abhors a vacuum. Like Manny Farber's termite, the stoner "leaves nothing in its path other than the signs of eager, industrious, unkempt activity," although unlike the termite the stoner is unlikely to be rediscovered by the French. Like the ant, the stoner can carry many times his or her weight, often traveling through dense undergrowth or over endless arid terrain, and appears to enjoy using outmoded or simply impractical tool — in this case a Hunt's Crow Quill pen, hence the blots. Like the ant, the stoner endures the contempt of family and friends in stoic if sullen silence. Unlike the ant, the stoner will require eyeglasses — if not now, then soon. Unlike the ant, the stoner works to the accompaniment of music, typically some carpetlike stream of psychedelic monotony. Like the ant, the stoner is as yet innocent of carnal pleasure. Like the grasshopper, the stoner — as the name would indicate — is on drugs. *** Originally published at Luc Sante's blog, Pinakothek. Hilobrow.com has curated a collection of our favorite Pinakothek installments. This is the tenth in a series of ten.

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Joshua Glenn — Tue, 08 Sep 2009 17:41:58 +0000

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Joshua Glenn — Tue, 08 Sep 2009 17:45:04 +0000

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Joshua Glenn — Tue, 08 Sep 2009 18:11:49 +0000

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Joshua Glenn — Tue, 08 Sep 2009 18:57:49 +0000

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Joshua Glenn — Tue, 08 Sep 2009 22:59:00 +0000

Hilo Hero: Otis Redding

Katie Hennessey — Wed, 09 Sep 2009 10:00:10 +0000

"I'm sittin' on the dock of the bay/Watching the tide roll away/Oooh, I'm just sittin' on the dock of the bay/Wastin' time...." Time was one thing that OTIS REDDING (1941–67) didn’t have to waste. Posthumously dubbed the King of Soul for his ability to convey intense emotion in spirit-thrashing song, he died in a plane crash at 26. Best known for the gravelly exhaustion and desperate longing displayed in R&B hits like “I’ve Been Loving You Too Long” and “Try a Little Tenderness,” Redding seemed to be headed in a new direction with his rockin’ performance at the 1967 Monterey International Pop Festival. “(Sittin' On) The Dock of the Bay,” a masterpiece of lassitude, was recorded only days before his death and was, in Redding’s opinion, unfinished. The whistled verse at the end, oft considered the apotheosis of summertime languor, was actually filler thrown in as placeholder until Redding could come up with new lyrics. Still, along with “Shake” and “Try a Little Tenderness,” “(Sittin' On) The Dock of the Bay” made the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame’s list of the "500 Songs that Shaped Rock and Roll.” How fitting that it, like the genre it shaped and the man who helped shape it, was a work in progress. *** Each day, Hilobrow.com pays tribute to one of our favorite high-, low-, no-, or hilobrow heroes on that person's birthday. Click here for more Hilo Hero shout-outs.

Generations (7): Partisans

Joshua Glenn — Wed, 09 Sep 2009 13:00:49 +0000

William Strauss and Neil Howe claim that a "GI Generation" (renamed the "Greatest Generation," in recent years) was born from 1901-24; however, the GI/Greatest Generation is a particularly wrong-headed and ill-made example of periodization. It's so awkward and unconvincing, in fact, that there must be a strategic rationale behind it — naturally, I believe it has something to do with middlebrow. As I've previously suggested, Strauss & Howe lopped off the last three years of the Hardboiled Generation (1894-1903) and crammed them into the so-called GI Generation because Walt Disney, the man who single-handedly reinvented Low Middlebrow and made it a popular success at midcentury, was born in 1901. Why? Strauss & Howe — not to mention the myriad of pseudo-journalists and marketing consultants who've adopted their periodization for nearly 20 years now — are agents of Middlebrow. As such, they instinctively fear and despise the deeply ambivalent (utopian yet fatalistic) Modernists (1884-93) and Hardboileds (1894-1903), on the one hand, and the deeply ambivalent (fatalistic yet utopian) Postmodernists (1924-33) and Anti-Anti-Utopians (1934-43), on the other. The former two cohorts they lump together and dismissively name a "Lost" generation, the latter two they lump together and name a "Silent" one. Thus does Middlebrow ever depict its rivals and foes: as confused, woolly-headed, irrational, immature, and inarticulate. The so-called Greatest/GI Generation comprises two distinct generational cohorts: one born from 1904-13, and another from 1914-23. The latter cohort I'll discuss in a subsequent installment. Some of the most impressive writers and thinkers who belong to the former cohort were involved with the journal Partisan Review. In 1934, the journal was founded in New York by William Phillips (1907) and Philip Rahv (1908); then, in '38, it was relaunched by Phillips, Rahv, Dwight Macdonald (1906), F.W. Dupee (1904), and George L.K. Morris (1905). It was the most influential literary-political journal of both the prewar anti-Stalinist Left (a.k.a. the high-, low-, anti-low, and hilobrow New York Intellectuals), and then the WWII/Cold War era's chastened leftists, born-again liberals, anti-utopians, aesthetes, and pioneering neoconservatives: i.e., middle-, no-, and anti-highbrows. The transformation of Partisan Review — and the decamping of Macdonald from the journal, after which he was branded, by his ex-colleagues, as confused, woolly-headed, irrational, immature, and inarticulate — can be regarded as a microcosm of Middlebrow's triumph in the West. Hence this generation's moniker: the Partisans. [caption id="attachment_5836" align="aligncenter" width="382" caption="Partisan Review staff (Dwight Macdonald, upper right)"]Partisan Review staff (Dwight Macdonald, upper right)" title="pr" width="382" height="469" class="size-full wp-image-5836" />[/caption] *** High-, low-, no-, and hilobrow members of the Partisan Generation include: Albert Camus, Claude Lévi-Strauss, Clement Greenberg (whose 1939 Partisan Review essay, "Avant-Garde and Kitsch," and 1953 Commentary essay, "The Plight of Our Culture," are important anti-middlebrow treatises), Cornell Woolrich, Dwight Macdonald (whose 1960 Partisan Review essay, "Masscult and Midcult," and various New Yorker essays from 1952-62, among others, are important anti-middlebrow treatises), Emmanuel Levinas, Ernie Bushmiller, Fats Waller, Flann O'Brien, George Orwell (whose 1936 essay "Bookshop Memories" and 1945 essay "Good Bad Books," among others, are anti-middlebrow), Hannah Arendt (who conflated totalitarianism and the homogenizing effects of mass media when warning about threats to a public sphere of liberal discourse and critical judgment), Hergé, Isaiah Berlin (who complains of middlebrows in a 1936 letter), Jackson Pollock (whose abstract expressionism the arch-middlebrow Norman Rockwell parodied savagely), Jacques Tati, Jacques-Yves Cousteau, Jean-Paul Sartre, Julio Cortazar, Lawrence Durrell, Marguerite Duras, Marshall McLuhan (a critic of middlebrow magazines like Time and Life), Mary McCarthy (who, like her friends Macdonald, Arendt, and Greenberg, was savagely anti-middlebrow; and she was married to a key anti-middlebrow critic of an older generation, Edmund Wilson), Maurice Blanchot, Mervyn Peake, Northrop Frye, Paul Bowles, Paul Goodman, Paul Ricoeur, Phil Silvers, Rachel Carson, Robert E. Howard, Robert Johnson, Roberto Rossellini, Samuel Beckett, Simone de Beauvoir, Simone Weil, T.W. Adorno (as noted, a key anti-middlebrow critic), Walt Kelly, Willem de Kooning, and Woody Guthrie. *** A reminder of my generational periodization scheme: 1844-53: [Progressive Generation] Prometheans 1854-63: [Progressive, Missionary Generations] Plutonians 1864-73: [Missionary Generation] Anarcho-Symbolists 1874-83: [Missionary Generation] Psychonauts 1884-93: [Lost Generation] Modernists 1894-1903: [Lost, Greatest/GI Generations] Hardboileds 1904-13: [Greatest/GI Generation] Partisans 1914-23: [Greatest/GI Generation] New Gods 1924-33: [Silent Generation] Postmodernists 1934-43: [Silent Generation] Anti-Anti-Utopians 1944-53: Boomers 1954-63: [Boomers, Late Boomers, Post-Boomers, Generation Jones] OGXers 1964-73: [Generation X, Thirteenth Generation] Constructivists 1974-83: [Generations X, Y] Revivalists 1984-93: [Millennial Generation] Throwbacks 1994-2003: [Millennial Generation] TBA *** The Partisans were in their teens and 20s in the Twenties (1924-33; not to be confused with the '20s), and in their 20s and 30s in the Thirties (1934-43). Older Partisans came of age during a period of economic prosperity, rapid urbanization, and technological miracles like television, talking pictures, nonstop transatlantic flights, new land-speed records, frozen food, color cartoons, and long-playing records. Younger Partisans came of age as the US stock market collapsed, and the Great Depression began. It was an Age of Ideology. Communists forecast the Death of Capitalism, while Roosevelt's New Deal used government spending — on programs including the Federal Emergency Relief Administration, the Civil Works Administration, the Public Works Administration, the Works Progress Administration, and the Civilian Conservation Corps — to restore faith in American democracy at a time when many people believed that the only choice left was between communism and fascism. Partisans enlisted to fight on the side of the socialists, communists, liberals, and anarchists in the Spanish Civil War. As continental Europe succumbed to authoritarian and totalitarian regimes, European artists and intellectuals fled to America. As the Thirties ended in 1943, the US geared up to enter WWII. So much for their formative years. The Partisans' greatest influence was still to come — during the Cold War. *** In addition to anti-Stalinist leftism, high-, low-, no-, and hilobrow Partisans were entirely responsible for EXISTENTIALISM (the postwar existentialist philosophers and psychologists — Camus, Sartre, Beauvoir, Merleau-Ponty, Viktor Frankl, Rollo May — as well as supposedly existentialist writers and filmmakers like Genet, Beckett, Ionesco, Cioran, Antonioni, Kurosawa, Adamov, were all born from 1904-13); NOIR FICTION (except for David Goodis, the important noir authors — Jim Thompson, Dorothy B. Hughes, Charles Williams — were born from 1904-13; honorary Partisan Cornell Woolrich was born in ’03); and ABSTRACT EXPRESSIONISM (Arshile Gorky, Philip Guston, Franz Kline, Willem de Kooning, Lee Krasner, Barnett Newman, Jackson Pollock, David Smith, and Clyfford Still were born from 1904-13; honorary Partisan Mark Rothko was born in ’03). After reading the above paragraph, who can still argue that the tightly knit 1904-13 cohort ought to be lumped into some amorphous, sprawling pseudo-generation like the GI/Greatests? I ask you. Interesting to think of the Existentialists as the immediate juniors of the Hardboileds. As noted, the Hardboileds accepted the truth of the Modernists' claim that unfreedom had been relocated inside our own heads; this, in fact, is what it means to be a modern. The Hardboileds were fatalistic, pessimistic, and bitterly resigned to unfreedom. The Existentialists accept unfreedom, but put an optimistic spin on it: we can be free within unfreedom, they claim. Sartre insisted that we must accept responsibility for our "thrownness" into a situation that we didn't choose; we're free if we choose our unfreedom. Camus, who self-consciously aped the style of hardboiled crime novelists, asked us to imagine that Sisyphus, perhaps the least free figure in western mythology, and the one most aware of the absurdity (unmeaningfulness) of life, was happy. No wonder Middlebrow is so comfortable with the so-called GI/Greatest Generation. Note that I distinguished between hardboiled literature and noir in an earlier post. I wrote: Noir fiction, in which the protagonist is usually not a detective, but instead a victim, a suspect, or a perpetrator, and in which sex plays a prominent role, was pioneered by Cornell Woolrich. The titles of Woolrich’s novels — e.g., The Bride Wore Black (1940), The Black Curtain (1941), Black Alibi (1942), The Black Angel (1943), The Black Path of Fear (1944) — inspired French critics to call movies based on them “noir.” Partisans are also entirely responsible for the first wave of GOLDEN-AGE SCIENCE FICTION and FANTASY, which, if you ask me, is a middlebrow version of what I've named Pre-Golden-Age or Radium-Age SF (published 1904-33). Born from 1904-13: Robert A. Heinlein (Stranger in a Strange Land, Starship Troopers), Fritz Leiber (The Wanderer, Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser series), L. Sprague de Camp (continued Conan series), L. Ron Hubbard (Battlefield Earth, invented Scientology), Lester Dent (Doc Savage series), Fredric Brown (SF stories), Jack Finney (The Body Snatchers), Nelson S. Bond (SF stories), Ross Rocklynne (SF stories), Clifford D. Simak (Way Station, City), C.L. Moore (SF stories; one of the first women SF writers), A.E. van Vogt (Slan, The World of Null-A), A. Bertram Chandler (Rim World series), Edgar Pangborn (A Mirror for Observers), and Eric Frank Russell (Sinister Barrier). Four other Partisans started as Radium-Age SF writers: John W. Campbell Jr. (The Black Star Passes; as editor of Astounding Science Fiction, single-handedly ushered in the so-called Golden Age of SF); Jack Williamson (The Legion of Space series; after Heinlein, the "Dean of Science Fiction"); Eando Binder (Earl Andrew Binder & Otto Oscar Binder, known for their SF stories; Otto later wrote nearly 1,000 Captain Marvel stories); and Robert E. Howard (Conan series). Honorary Partisans George Orwell (1984) and John Beynon Harris (John Wyndham: The Day of the Triffids, The Midwich Cuckoos) made important contributions to SF, as did the following Partisans not known primarily as SF writers: Ayn Rand (Atlas Shrugged, Anthem), Samuel Beckett (Endgame), Pierre Boulle (Planet of the Apes), Hergé (The Shooting Star), Louis L'Amour (The Haunted Mesa), and B.F. Skinner (Walden Two). Al Capp wrote "The Time Capsule," a genuine SF adventure starring Li'l Abner, which appeared in Satellite (August 1957); and without Partisans Joseph Campbell, Alex Raymond (Flash Gordon), and Buster Crabbe, we'd have no Star Wars. Alfred Bester is an honorary member of the New Gods; Edmond Hamilton is an honorary Hardboiled. *** All of the above topics are fascinating. But I will restrict myself, in this limited space, to the following notes on Abstract Expressionism and BIG BAND SWING (Glenn Miller, Jimmy Dorsey, Chick Webb, Tommy Dorsey, Jack Teagarden, Benny Goodman, Gene Krupa, Shep Fields, Artie Shaw, Bob Crosby, Woody Herman, were all born from 1904-13). Writing under the anti-middlebrow pseudonym “Hektor Rottweiler," honorary Partisan T.W. Adorno rejected the claim that jazz of this (or any) sort was a musical form whose spontaneity and primitivism expressed liberation. Jazz, he scoffed, combines "the lament of unfreedom" (the music's pseudo-spontaneous elements, e.g., moments when a a soloist takes center stage, and improvises a solo) with unfreedom's "oppressed confirmation" (the music's unchallenged rhythm, the steady pounding of the drum). Like Middlebrow itself, Big Band Swing dialectically transforms contrariness into smoothness; instead of revolutionary energy, Adorno found in the music only the “half-resentful, half-compliant” submission to slavery that (he wrote) characterizes the blues from which it sprung. In its very form, according to Adorno, Big Band Swing reflects a social order (one diagnosed by the Modernists and Hardboileds) in which coercion has been relocated within spontaneity, authority within liberty. (Discuss.) [caption id="attachment_5846" align="aligncenter" width="550" caption="Barnett Newman\'s The Death of Euclid (1947)"]The Death of Euclid (1947)" title="BarnettNewman-The-Death-of-Euclid-1947-550" width="550" height="439" class="size-full wp-image-5846" />[/caption] Influenced by the anti-middlebrow art movements Surrealism (e.g., the automatic art of Pollock, De Kooning, Hofmann) and Cubism (e.g., the simple, unified blocks of color of Newman, Still, Rothko), Abstract Expressionism might seem to be a redoubt of anti-middlebrow cultural production during an era in which Middlebrow triumphed in the west. The anti-middlebrow art critic Clement Greenberg, who regarded Abstract Expressionism as highbrow art, argued persuasively that this was the case. However, the impression of intellectual, aesthetic, and perhaps most importantly, political freedom evoked by Pollock's psychologically intense action paintings, Rothko's spiritually overwhelming multiforms, and Smith's witty connect-the-dot sculptures, for example, were easily coopted by CIA-funded propagandists in order to reassure Americans that we — unlike the recently defeated Nazis, and particularly the ever-more powerful Communists — were on the right side of history. The question is: Were those propagandists high-middlebrow? highbrow? Or anti-lowbrow? (Discuss.) *** Meet the Partisans. HONORARY PARTISANS: John Beynon Harris (John Wyndham), Cornell Woolrich, George Orwell, Mark Rothko, maybe T.W. Adorno and Cyril Connolly (all born 1903). 1904: Willem de Kooning (Abstract Expressionist), Glenn Miller (popular swing bandleader and trombonist), Jimmy Dorsey (popular bandleader and swing musician), Max Shachtman (American Marxist theorist), Arshile Gorky (Abstract Expressionist), Clyfford Still (Abstract Expressionist), Count Basie (big band pianist), Cary Grant (movie star), Deng Xiaoping (Communist Chinese leader), John Gielgud (actor), Mississippi Fred McDowell (bluesman), Coleman Hawkins (jazz tenor sax), Ray Bolger (actor), Meyer Schapiro (art historian), B. F. Skinner (behaviorist), Joseph Campbell (middlebrow mythographer), Clifford D. Simak (SF novelist), Theodor Seuss Geisel (Dr. Seuss), Fats Waller (jazz pianist), Peter Arno (New Yorker cartoonist), F.W. Dupee (Partisan Review), Johnny Weissmuller (actor, athlete), George Stevens (director), Ralph Bellamy (actor), Phil Harris (musician), Joan Crawford (actress), Robert Oppenheimer (Physicist, headed the Manhattan Project), Isaac Bashevis Singer (author), Greer Garson (Actress), George Balanchine (choreographer), Ernst Mayr (evolutionary biologist), Pablo Neruda (Chilean poet), Gregory Bateson (anthropologist). Honorary Hardboileds: James T. Farrell, Graham Greene, Peter Lorre, Salvador Dali, Edmond Hamilton, Pretty Boy Floyd (gangster), Edgar G. Ulmer (noir film director), S. J. Perelman (New Yorker humorist), A.J. Liebling (New Yorker journalist), Jacques Tourneur (noir film director). 1905: Lionel Trilling, Lillian Hellman, John O'Hara, Ayn Rand, Greta Garbo, Jean-Paul Sartre, Otto Preminger, Henry Fonda, Eddie Anderson, Chick Webb (big band swing), Bob Wills, Arthur Crudup, Ernie Bushmiller, Howard Hughes, Viktor Frankl, Tommy Dorsey (big band swing), Jack Teagarden (big band swing), Robert Penn Warren, Eddie Condon, Diana Trilling, Agnes de Mille, Kenneth Rexroth, Friz Freleng, Barnett Newman (Abstract Expressionism), Lois Mailou Jones, Anna May Wong, Myrna Loy, Arthur Lake, Clara Bow, Joseph Cotten, Thelma Ritter, Robert Donat, Ray Milland, Christian Dior, Maria von Trapp, Albert Speer, Elias Canetti, Anthony Powell, Eric Frank Russell. 1906: Samuel Beckett, Dwight Macdonald, Hannah Arendt, Emmanuel Levinas, David Smith (Abstract Expressionist sculptor), Aristotle Onassis, Billy Wilder, Roberto Rossellini, Harold Rosenberg, Anthony Mann, Clifford Odets, Carol Reed, Ed Gein, Grace Hopper, William Bendix, Janet Gaynor, Bugsy Siegel, Janet Gaynor, John Carradine, Josephine Baker, Estée Lauder, Fredric Brown, Louise Brooks, Wild Bill Davison, Nelson Goodman, Anne Morrow Lindbergh, Eddie Albert, Lou Costello, Robert E. Howard, Lon Chaney, Jr., Satchel Paige, Ozzie Nelson, Victoria Spivey, Jacques Becker, Albert Hofmann, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Madeleine Carroll, Henny Youngman, Adolf Eichmann, Kurt Godel, T. H. White, John Betjeman, Imam Hassan al Banna, Luchino Visconti, Leonid Brezhnev. 1907: William Phillips, Barbara Stanwyck, Rachel Carson, W.H. Auden, Hergé, Frida Kahlo, Cab Calloway, Katharine Hepburn, John Wayne, James A. Michener, Rosalind Russell, Jessamyn West, Cesar Romero, Buster Crabbe, Robert A. Heinlein, Sunnyland Slim, Milton Caniff, William Shawn, Orville Redenbacher, Gene Autry, William Steig, Burgess Meredith, L. Sprague de Camp, Jimmie Foxx, Charles Alston, Don the Beachcomber, Mircea Eliade, Jean Hippolyte, Baldur von Schirach, Laurence Olivier, René Char, Fay Wray, Maurice Blanchot, Run Run Shaw, Astrid Lindgren, Jacques Tati, Jacques Barzun, Peggy Ashcroft. 1908: Simone de Beauvoir, Philip Rahv, Bette Davis, Richard Wright, John Kenneth Galbraith, Claude Lévi-Strauss, Lyndon B. Johnson, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Edward R. Murrow, Louis L'Amour, Theodore Roethke, Buddy Ebsen, Lee Krasner (Asbtract Expressionist), Carole Lombard, Lionel Hampton, William Maxwell, Ethel Merman, C. Vann Woodward, Nelson S. Bond, Joseph Mitchell, Fred MacMurray, James Stewart, Abraham Maslow, Joseph McCarthy, Mel Blanc, Tex Avery, Milton Berle, Leon "Chu" Berry, Thurgood Marshall, Arthur Adamov, Anna Magnani, Rex Harrison, David Lean, Edward Teller, Daisy and Violet Hilton, Michael Redgrave, Ian Fleming, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Jack Williamson (prolific SF author). 1909: Simone Weil, Isaiah Berlin, Clement Greenberg, Benny Goodman (big band swing), Malcolm Lowry, James Agee, Lester Young, Nelson Algren, Wallace Stegner, Eudora Welty, Herschel Evans, Barry Goldwater, Bukka White, Gene Krupa (big band swing), Ann Sothern, Rollo May, Joseph L. Mankiewicz, Alex Raymond, Dean Rusk, Art Tatum, Edgar Pangborn, Hugh Beaumont, Wallace Stegner, John Fante, Edwin H. Land, Moon Mullican, Mother Maybelle Carter, Burl Ives, Leo Fender, Al Capp (US cartoonist Alfred Gerald Caplin, Li'l Abner), Kay Thompson, Eve Arden, Vivian Vance, Albert R. Broccoli, Eugène Ionesco, Elia Kazan, Errol Flynn, Stanislaw Ulam, Carmen Miranda, James Mason, Jessica Tandy, Colonel Tom Parker, Michael Rennie, Francis Bacon, Victor Borge. 1910: Franz Kline (Abstract Expressionist), Lionel Abel, Paul Bowles, Howlin' Wolf, Jean Genet, A.J. Ayer, Clyde Barrow and Bonnie Parker, Louis Prima, Shep Fields (big band swing), Wright Morris, Big Joe Turner, Fritz Leiber, Paul Sweezy, Russell Lynes, Dizzy Dean, Joan Bennett, John W. Campbell Jr., Charles Olson, Spade Cooley, Dorothea Tanning, Gloria Stuart, Mae Clarke, Mary Wickes, Scatman Crothers, Artie Shaw (big band swing), T-Bone Walker, E.G. Marshall, William Hanna, John H. Hammond, Akira Kurosawa, Diana Mitford, Eero Saarinen, Django Reinhardt, David Niven, Jacques-Yves Cousteau, Mother Teresa. 1911: Robert Johnson, Tennessee Williams, Paul Goodman, Emil Cioran, Ronald Reagan, Josef Mengele, Flann O'Brien, J.L. Austin, Czeslaw Milosz, Mervyn Peake, Hume Cronyn, Marshall McLuhan, Louise Bourgeois, Buck Clayton, Babe Zaharias, Ginger Rogers, Elizabeth Bishop, Martin Denny, Gypsy Rose Lee, Hugh Marlowe, L. Ron Hubbard, Lucille Ball, Maureen O'Sullivan, Kenneth Patchen, Roy Rogers, John Sturges, Butterfly McQueen, C. L. Moore, Roy Eldridge, Lee Falk, Jack Finney, Jean Harlow, Phil Silvers, Joseph Barbera, Jack Ruby, Hubert H. Humphrey, Vincent Price, Spike Jones, Bernard Herrmann, Mitch Miller, LaVerne Andrews, Jane Wyatt, Romare Bearden, Ruth Hussey, Lee J. Cobb, Kenneth Patchen, Nicholas Ray, Robert Taylor, Otto Oscar Binder (American SF author), William Golding, Nino Rota. 1912: Mary McCarthy, Woody Guthrie, Jackson Pollock (Abstract Expressionist), Michelangelo Antonioni, Northrop Frye, Kim Philby, Jacques Ellul, Milton Friedman, Gene Kelly, Samuel Fuller, John Cheever, Don Siegel, Julia Child, Studs Terkel, Doris Wishman, Charles Addams, Teddy Wilson, Chuck Jones, Lady Bird Johnson, Barbara Tuchman, John Cage, Lightnin' Hopkins, Pat Nixon, Bayard Rustin, Karl Malden, Archibald Cox, Sam Snead, Ben Hogan, Perry Como, Jay Silverheels, Art Linkletter, Minnie Pearl, Gordon Parks, Richard Brooks, José Ferrer, Eva Braun, Pierre Boulle, Lawrence Durrell, Wernher von Braun, Sonja Henie, Kim Il-sung, A. E. van Vogt, Alan Turing, Pope John Paul I, Franz Jakubowski. 1913: Albert Camus, Walt Kelly, Muddy Waters, Delmore Schwartz, Rosa Parks, William Barrett, Richard Nixon, Anthony Quayle, Max Kaminsky, Philip Guston (Abstract Expressionist), Mary Leakey, Ad Reinhardt (Abstract Expressionist), Paul Ricoeur, Frank Tashlin, Danny Kaye, Jimmy Hoffa, Bob Crosby (big band swing), Jimmy Preston, Lloyd Bridges, Ross Rocklynne, Loretta Young, Jim Backus, William Casey, Richard Helms, Frankie Laine, Oleg Cassini, Tyrone Power, Woody Herman (big band swing), William Reddington Hewlett, David Packard, Dorothy Kilgallen, Red Skelton, W. Mark Felt (Deep Throat), Frances Farmer, John M. Mitchell, Mickey Cohen, Stanley Kramer, Robert Capa, Victor Mature, Robertson Davies, Peter Cushing, Trevor Howard, Vivien Leigh, Benjamin Britten, Hedy Lamarr, Stewart Granger, Lucien Goldmann. Honorary New Gods: Joe Simon, Gerald Ford, Alan Ladd, Burt Lancaster, Cordwainer Smith, Vince Lombardi, Jesse Owens, Alfred Bester, maybe Ralph Ellison. HONORARY PARTISANS: Daniel J. Boorstin, Howard Fast, Marguerite Duras, Julio Cortazar, Dylan Thomas (all 1914).

escape_from_the_planet_of_the_apes_1971_685x385

Matthew Battles — Wed, 09 Sep 2009 14:22:01 +0000

Monkey Science Roundup

Matthew Battles — Wed, 09 Sep 2009 14:35:51 +0000

Monkeys are making news across the world of science. As we discussed last week, researchers discovered that tamarin monkeys prefer music composed for them. Yesterday, Science Daily reported a study in which monkeys were found to follow the laws of supply and demand. In the experiment, groups of vervet monkeys were offered locked containers containing sought-after apple chunks. Initially, only one monkey—a low-status member selected by the researchers—was able to open the containers. The new supplier found herself the beneficiary of intense grooming attention from the rest of the group. But when researchers granted a second monkey access, the original supplier's grooming time was cut in half. "A change in price—grooming for less long if there is another monkey that supplies apples—is only possible if a negotiation process takes place," according to Science Daily. "Many economists assume that such negotiations can only take place if they are concluded with a contract. However, the vervet monkeys do not have the possibility to conclude such binding contracts and yet they still succeed in agreeing to a change in price for a service." We're hopeful that this research offers tantalizing clue to a problem that has long captured the fancy of primatologists: perhaps if an infinite number of monkeys were turned loose on an infinite number of typewriters, they'd produce The Fountainhead.

backlash

Joshua Glenn — Wed, 09 Sep 2009 15:38:49 +0000

High-Mid shenanigans

Joshua Glenn — Wed, 09 Sep 2009 15:44:58 +0000

In today's Wall Street Journal, Thomas Frank wittily and intelligently notes that high-middlebrow pundits have whipped their ground troops up into a backlash against a highbrow (or, really, an anti-high-middlebrow) upsurge "that maybe should have happened but that didn't." Though Frank doesn't use these terms, high-middlebrow neocons and neoliberals in the Bush administration, and at the Securities and Exchange Commission, led us off a cliff. But High Middlebrow has managed to make itself nearly immune to criticism and reform, much less abolition. So instead of slinking off in disgrace, high middlebrows have manipulated the Beltway's Ayn Rand-worshipping anti-lowbrows into joining forces with their natural enemies, i.e., lowbrow populists and anti-highbrow zealots, in order to funnel American fear and rage towards the (relatively) highbrow Obama administration. And it's working! Frank writes:

Today, from the floor of town-hall meetings and the heights of the Republican Party, alarmed Americans fret about secret socialists and denounce the president as a dictator. They make plans to pull their children out of school rather than have them exposed to his hypnotic oratorical powers. They quail at imaginary death panels, storm at imaginary threats to gun rights, and froth at an imaginary birth-certificate scandal.... The most notable literary response to last year's financial crisis was not to turn to the obvious genre—books about Wall Street shenanigans in the 1920s—but to skip several historical stages and to go straight to Ayn Rand's 1957 novel Atlas Shrugged, in which heroic titans of industry are persecuted by a meddling government.

This is how Middlebrow operates — outside the Highbrow/Lowbrow/Anti-Highbrow/Anti-Lowbrow rubric that we've all been trained to accept as natural and sufficient. Because it exists on the uncanny margins of this classic but outdated four-square rubric, Middlebrow is uniquely able to beguile highbrows, lowbrows, anti-highbrows, and anti-lowbrows alike. Middlebrow adopts aspects of each of these traditional, familiar dispositions as needed, cynically using them as leverage for its own ends. Deploying anti-lowbrows, lowbrows, and anti-highbrows against highbrows, Middlebrow remains uncriticized. The following video making the rounds today, for example, amusingly attacks anti-lowbrows and anti-highbrows in the name of highbrow and lowbrow alike. Videos like this are fun! They make highbrows feel good! This kind of ideological back-and-forth sells newspapers and bumper stickers. Alas, because they're blinkered, such efforts will never rid us of Middlebrow.

Hilo Hero: Georges Bataille

Luc Sante — Thu, 10 Sep 2009 10:00:28 +0000

GEORGES BATAILLE (1897-1962) was, in no particular order, a librarian at the Bibliothèque Nationale, a major latter-day gnostic thinker (who wrote a Summa Atheologica), the dissident Surrealist who most effectively blew the whistle on André Breton when he left the cabal, the man who hid the notes for Walter Benjamin's Arcades Project from the Nazis, the editor of two particularly far-seeing journals in the 1930s (Documents and Acéphale), a founding member of the Collège de Sociologie, a pioneer anti-fascist advocate of Nietzsche, an uncredited priest in Jean Renoir's Une Partie de Campagne (1936), and a great theorist and taxonomist of eroticism. His masterpiece, though, is The Accursed Share (1949), an economic theory that focuses on the notion of excess energy, and the corresponding excess production of societies — that part which cannot be reabsorbed and must be expended in large, symbolic bonfires: war, monuments, luxury, or potlatch. The form that this conspicuous waste assumes both characterizes and threatens the workings of that society. He is also the deepest pornographer ever: in a genre not otherwise known for depth, Blue of Noon gets my vote, but The Story of the Eye isn't far behind. *** Each day, Hilobrow.com pays tribute to one of our favorite high-, low-, no-, or hilobrow heroes on that person's birthday. Click here for more Hilo Hero shout-outs.

363px-Comstock_1832_title_page

Matthew Battles — Thu, 10 Sep 2009 12:59:57 +0000

THE BOOK: TERMS OF SERVICE

Matthew Battles — Thu, 10 Sep 2009 13:06:22 +0000

THE BOOK

Terms of Service

Statement of Rights and Responsibilities This statement of the terms of service of The Book is derived from principles of the public sphere, covered in the U.N. Declaration of Human Rights, the American Declaration of Independence, the Magna Carta, the Golden Rule, and the Bhagavad Gita, as well as the works of Virginia Woolf, Friedrich Nietzsche, Booker T. Washington, Emily Dickinson, Karl Marx, Thomas Carlyle, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Thomas Paine, Mary Shelley, John Locke, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Voltaire, the Marquis de Sade, Michel de Montaigne, Erasmus, Francis Bacon, Martin Luther, Thomas Aquinas, Maimonides, Hypatia, Augustine, Aristotle, and Plato, among other pursuant documents not exclusive of other acts and agreements past, present, and future. In using The Book, either by creating works in the form of The Book (writing) or by deriving information and/or pleasure from other works in said form (reading), you do not necessarily subscribe to the the principles set forth in these aforementioned documents. But they protect your rights and suggest your responsibilities just the same. I. Privacy What takes place in the exchange between your brain and the contents of The Book is your exclusive private concern. The Book will never download the contents of your brain, either whole or in part. II. Intellectual Property A. The Book often contains ideas and information created by others. The continued appearance of such ideas and information depends on the recognition of a limited property right enjoyed by creators of said ideas and information. But recognizing that the terms of service also require access to ideas and information and the ability to repurpose them in the creation of new works, the creator's monopoly right shall be understood to be limited and circumscribed. B. In order to facilitate exchange of ideas and information, The Book claims no license, exclusive or non-exclusive, to thoughts and experiences of the user ("reader"). When you experience ideas and information contained in The Book, said experiences remain your exclusive property, to be transferred, transformed, repurposed, or forgotten subject only to limits recognized by fellow users as described in part I.A., above. III. Registration The Book has no account registration procedure. No credit card, social security number, passport, diploma, blood type, vision test, or waiver of rights shall be required to use The Book. This provision is subject to perversions of politics, religion, and market forces beyond the control of The Book. IV. Use of The Book The Book is a work of art and a product of craft, and as such is open to any use or repurposing imaginable by readers, writers, and other users, who may scribble in, decorate, deface, gloss, footnote, illustrate, carve, stack, shelve, hide, beg, borrow, or steal as deemed appropriate, subject only to the expectations of fellow users and political, religious, or market forces, which as mentioned in II.B are beyond the control of The Book. V. Special Provisions A. The Book will not place ads in your brain, nor seek to control placement of such ads by others. B. The Book cannot reject users for any reason. C. If you violate the spirit or letter of this agreement, or place in jeopardy The Book or the Public Sphere in which it operates, The Book will not stop providing its services. But the ultimate consequences of said violation, as well as aforementioned perversions political, religious, or economic, may render said services of The Book useless. Click here if you agree to the terms of The Book. Click here if you do not agree. Life is nasty, brutish, and short.

NakaSide

Joshua Glenn — Thu, 10 Sep 2009 16:40:15 +0000

NakaTop

Joshua Glenn — Thu, 10 Sep 2009 16:40:18 +0000

thompson-nothing

Joshua Glenn — Thu, 10 Sep 2009 18:09:28 +0000

orwell-550

Joshua Glenn — Thu, 10 Sep 2009 19:04:20 +0000

Partisan Middlebrow

Joshua Glenn — Thu, 10 Sep 2009 19:15:23 +0000

[caption id="attachment_5944" align="aligncenter" width="550" caption="Dwight Macdonald, anti-middlebrow critic"][/caption] High-, low-, no-, and hilobrow members of the Partisan Generation include: Albert Camus, Claude Lévi-Strauss, Clement Greenberg (whose 1939 Partisan Review essay, "Avant-Garde and Kitsch," and 1953 Commentary essay, "The Plight of Our Culture," are important anti-middlebrow treatises), Cornell Woolrich, Dwight Macdonald (whose 1960 Partisan Review essay, "Masscult and Midcult," and various New Yorker essays from 1952-62, among others, are important anti-middlebrow treatises), Emmanuel Levinas, Ernie Bushmiller, Fats Waller, Flann O'Brien, George Orwell (whose 1936 essay "Bookshop Memories" and 1945 essay "Good Bad Books," among others, are anti-middlebrow), Hannah Arendt (who conflated totalitarianism and the homogenizing effects of mass media when warning about threats to a public sphere of liberal discourse and critical judgment), Hergé, Isaiah Berlin (who complains of middlebrows in a 1936 letter), Jackson Pollock (whose abstract expressionism the arch-middlebrow Norman Rockwell parodied savagely), Jacques Tati, Jacques-Yves Cousteau, Jean-Paul Sartre, Julio Cortazar, Lawrence Durrell, Marguerite Duras, Marshall McLuhan (a critic of middlebrow magazines like Time and Life), Mary McCarthy (who, like her friends Macdonald, Arendt, and Greenberg, was savagely anti-middlebrow; and she was married to a key anti-middlebrow critic of an older generation, Edmund Wilson), Maurice Blanchot, Mervyn Peake, Northrop Frye, Paul Bowles, Paul Goodman, Paul Ricoeur, Phil Silvers, Rachel Carson, Robert E. Howard, Robert Johnson, Roberto Rossellini, Samuel Beckett, Simone de Beauvoir, Simone Weil, T.W. Adorno (as noted, a key anti-middlebrow critic), Walt Kelly, Willem de Kooning, and Woody Guthrie. This item is excerpted from yesterday's essay on the Partisan Generation. In addition to anti-Stalinist leftism, high-, low-, no-, and hilobrow Partisans were entirely responsible for EXISTENTIALISM (the postwar existentialist philosophers and psychologists — Camus, Sartre, Beauvoir, Merleau-Ponty, Viktor Frankl, Rollo May — as well as supposedly existentialist writers and filmmakers like Genet, Beckett, Ionesco, Cioran, Antonioni, Kurosawa, Adamov, were all born from 1904-13); NOIR FICTION (except for David Goodis, the important noir authors — Jim Thompson, Dorothy B. Hughes, Charles Williams — were born from 1904-13; honorary Partisan Cornell Woolrich was born in ’03); and ABSTRACT EXPRESSIONISM (Arshile Gorky, Philip Guston, Franz Kline, Willem de Kooning, Lee Krasner, Barnett Newman, Jackson Pollock, David Smith, and Clyfford Still were born from 1904-13; honorary Partisan Mark Rothko was born in ’03). After reading the above paragraph, who can still argue that the tightly knit 1904-13 cohort ought to be lumped into some amorphous, sprawling pseudo-generation like the GI/Greatests? I ask you. Interesting to think of the Existentialists as the immediate juniors of the Hardboileds. As noted, the Hardboileds accepted the truth of the Modernists' claim that unfreedom had been relocated inside our own heads; this, in fact, is what it means to be a modern. The Hardboileds were fatalistic, pessimistic, and bitterly resigned to unfreedom. The Existentialists accept unfreedom, but put an optimistic spin on it: we can be free within unfreedom, they claim. Sartre insisted that we must accept responsibility for our "thrownness" into a situation that we didn't choose; we're free if we choose our unfreedom. Camus, who self-consciously aped the style of hardboiled crime novelists, asked us to imagine that Sisyphus, perhaps the least free figure in western mythology, and the one most aware of the absurdity (unmeaningfulness) of life, was happy. No wonder Middlebrow is so comfortable with the so-called GI/Greatest Generation. Note that I distinguished between hardboiled literature and noir in an earlier post. I wrote: Noir fiction, in which the protagonist is usually not a detective, but instead a victim, a suspect, or a perpetrator, and in which sex plays a prominent role, was pioneered by Cornell Woolrich. The titles of Woolrich’s novels — e.g., The Bride Wore Black (1940), The Black Curtain (1941), Black Alibi (1942), The Black Angel (1943), The Black Path of Fear (1944) — inspired French critics to call movies based on them “noir.” Partisans are also entirely responsible for the first wave of GOLDEN-AGE SCIENCE FICTION and FANTASY, which, if you ask me, is a middlebrow version of what I've named Pre-Golden-Age or Radium-Age SF (published 1904-33). Born from 1904-13: Robert A. Heinlein (Stranger in a Strange Land, Starship Troopers), Fritz Leiber (The Wanderer, Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser series), L. Sprague de Camp (continued Conan series), L. Ron Hubbard (Battlefield Earth, invented Scientology), Lester Dent (Doc Savage series), Fredric Brown (SF stories), Jack Finney (The Body Snatchers), Nelson S. Bond (SF stories), Ross Rocklynne (SF stories), Clifford D. Simak (Way Station, City), C.L. Moore (SF stories; one of the first women SF writers), A.E. van Vogt (Slan, The World of Null-A), A. Bertram Chandler (Rim World series), Edgar Pangborn (A Mirror for Observers), and Eric Frank Russell (Sinister Barrier). Four other Partisans started as Radium-Age SF writers: John W. Campbell Jr. (The Black Star Passes; as editor of Astounding Science Fiction, single-handedly ushered in the so-called Golden Age of SF); Jack Williamson (The Legion of Space series; after Heinlein, the "Dean of Science Fiction"); Eando Binder (Earl Andrew Binder & Otto Oscar Binder, known for their SF stories; Otto later wrote nearly 1,000 Captain Marvel stories); and Robert E. Howard (Conan series). Honorary Partisans George Orwell (1984) and John Beynon Harris (John Wyndham: The Day of the Triffids, The Midwich Cuckoos) made important contributions to SF, as did the following Partisans not known primarily as SF writers: Ayn Rand (Atlas Shrugged, Anthem), Samuel Beckett (Endgame), Pierre Boulle (Planet of the Apes), Hergé (The Shooting Star), Louis L'Amour (The Haunted Mesa), and B.F. Skinner (Walden Two). Al Capp wrote "The Time Capsule," a genuine SF adventure starring Li'l Abner, which appeared in Satellite (August 1957); and without Partisans Joseph Campbell, Alex Raymond (Flash Gordon), and Buster Crabbe, we'd have no Star Wars. Alfred Bester is an honorary member of the New Gods; Edmond Hamilton is an honorary Hardboiled. *** All of the above topics are fascinating. But I will restrict myself, in this limited space, to the following notes on Abstract Expressionism and BIG BAND SWING (Glenn Miller, Jimmy Dorsey, Chick Webb, Tommy Dorsey, Jack Teagarden, Benny Goodman, Gene Krupa, Shep Fields, Artie Shaw, Bob Crosby, Woody Herman, were all born from 1904-13). Writing under the anti-middlebrow pseudonym “Hektor Rottweiler," honorary Partisan T.W. Adorno rejected the claim that jazz of this (or any) sort was a musical form whose spontaneity and primitivism expressed liberation. Jazz, he scoffed, combines "the lament of unfreedom" (the music's pseudo-spontaneous elements, e.g., moments when a a soloist takes center stage, and improvises a solo) with unfreedom's "oppressed confirmation" (the music's unchallenged rhythm, the steady pounding of the drum). Like Middlebrow itself, Big Band Swing dialectically transforms contrariness into smoothness; instead of revolutionary energy, Adorno found in the music only the “half-resentful, half-compliant” submission to slavery that (he wrote) characterizes the blues from which it sprung. In its very form, according to Adorno, Big Band Swing reflects a social order (one diagnosed by the Modernists and Hardboileds) in which coercion has been relocated within spontaneity, authority within liberty. (Discuss.) [caption id="attachment_5846" align="aligncenter" width="550" caption="Barnett Newman\'s The Death of Euclid (1947)"]The Death of Euclid (1947)" title="BarnettNewman-The-Death-of-Euclid-1947-550" width="550" height="439" class="size-full wp-image-5846" />[/caption] Influenced by the anti-middlebrow art movements Surrealism (e.g., the automatic art of Pollock, De Kooning, Hofmann) and Cubism (e.g., the simple, unified blocks of color of Newman, Still, Rothko), Abstract Expressionism might seem to be a redoubt of anti-middlebrow cultural production during an era in which Middlebrow triumphed in the west. The anti-middlebrow art critic Clement Greenberg, who regarded Abstract Expressionism as highbrow art, argued persuasively that this was the case. However, the impression of intellectual, aesthetic, and perhaps most importantly, political freedom evoked by Pollock's psychologically intense action paintings, Rothko's spiritually overwhelming multiforms, and Smith's witty connect-the-dot sculptures, for example, were easily coopted by CIA-funded propagandists in order to reassure Americans that we — unlike the recently defeated Nazis, and particularly the ever-more powerful Communists — were on the right side of history. The question is: Were those propagandists high-middlebrow? highbrow? Or anti-lowbrow? (Discuss.)

macd-span

Joshua Glenn — Thu, 10 Sep 2009 19:19:52 +0000

NakaSide

Joshua Glenn — Thu, 10 Sep 2009 19:29:32 +0000

NakaTop

Joshua Glenn — Thu, 10 Sep 2009 19:29:35 +0000

NakaTop2

Joshua Glenn — Thu, 10 Sep 2009 19:38:31 +0000

NakaSide3

Joshua Glenn — Thu, 10 Sep 2009 19:40:41 +0000

Hilo Hero: T.W. Adorno

Joshua Glenn — Fri, 11 Sep 2009 10:00:22 +0000

Infamous among middlebrow intellectuals then and now for dismissing the mainstream American music, movies, and "millionaire's magazines" of the 1940s and '50s as nothing more than vehicles for a relentless message of "adjustment and unreflecting obedience," the German-born social philosopher and theorist T.W. ADORNO (1903-69) had a relentless message of his own. Thanks to the "introjection and integration of social pressure and coercion, men resign themselves to loving what they have to do, without even being aware that they are resigned," he insisted, in everything he wrote: i.e., even though there's no shepherd issuing orders, we behave like docile sheep. (Sound Foucauldian? In a 1978 interview, Foucault said that if he'd been familiar with Adorno's work, "I would have avoided many of the detours which I made while trying to pursue my own humble path.”) But Adorno was not entirely pessimistic , even about pop culture. In fact, he enjoyed unique and eccentric lowbrow productions — which he described as being every bit as "embarrassing" to the coercive aims of the Disneyfied culture industry as were those highbrow works (e.g., Schoenberg) for which he is a better-known advocate. The Hilobrow.com project is deeply indebted to Adorno's anti-middlebrow negative dialectics. *** Each day, Hilobrow.com pays tribute to one of our favorite high-, low-, no-, or hilobrow heroes on that person's birthday. Click here for more Hilo Hero shout-outs.

sikoryak-dostoevsky

Joshua Glenn — Fri, 11 Sep 2009 14:18:55 +0000

sikoryak-kafka

Joshua Glenn — Fri, 11 Sep 2009 14:21:24 +0000

sikoryak-masterpiece

Joshua Glenn — Fri, 11 Sep 2009 14:30:30 +0000

Hilobrow Comics

Joshua Glenn — Fri, 11 Sep 2009 14:37:52 +0000

R. Sikoryak is a versatile, witty, and well-read cartoonist and illustrator who's retold Dante's Inferno in the style of Bazooka Joe bubblegum comics, Crime and Punishment in a Bob Kane-era Batman mode (above), and The Metamorphosis as though it were written and drawn by Charles Schulz. The guy is a genius: he hasn't merely adapted, parodied, or recontextualized these novels and comics, he's rebooted them. Rob Clough's comics blog, High-Low, says, of Sikoryak's masterpiece comics: "It's a stunning collision of so-called 'high' and 'low' art, done with an affectionate nod and wink to both." Hilobrow productions like this are far more rare — since Middlebrow's triumph, last century — than you might imagine. Although Sikoryak has illustrated covers for The New Yorker, among other high-profile gigs, unless you've spent the past two decades following low-circulation comix journals like Raw and Snake Eyes, you've missed out. (In 2000-01, Sikoryak also contributed to the journal that I published, Hermenaut; his convincing illustrations of A.S. Hamrah's "Beckett-Bushmiller Letters" helped turn that imaginative exercise into an unintentional hoax that won't quit.) Not to worry: earlier this month, Drawn & Quarterly published Masterpiece Comics, a 64-page, hardcover collection of Sikoryak's brilliant pastiches. Check out this slideshow of excerpts from the book; and buy it! Sikoryak is doing two signings this weekend, in Brooklyn: at the comic shop Rocketship on Saturday, and at the Brooklyn Brook Festival on Sunday. Follow his Twitter feed for updates.

album-Leonard-Cohen-Songs-of-Love-and-Hate

Joshua Glenn — Fri, 11 Sep 2009 21:13:21 +0000

unlikely-1-550

Joshua Glenn — Fri, 11 Sep 2009 21:41:22 +0000

unlikely-2-550

Joshua Glenn — Fri, 11 Sep 2009 21:41:47 +0000

unlikely-3-550

Joshua Glenn — Fri, 11 Sep 2009 21:42:02 +0000

Hilo Hero: Stanislaw Lem

Tom Nealon — Sat, 12 Sep 2009 10:00:07 +0000

Philip K. Dick believed that the Polish novelist STANISLAW LEM (1923-2006) was operating from behind the iron curtain to control, among others, academic SF critics Frederic Jameson and Peter Fitting — in an attempt to destroy science fiction and trap Dick himself in a KGB prison. He claimed that "Lem" wrote in too many voices and styles to be one person, and was most likely a committee. It's possible. What seems more likely is that Lem farmed out a great deal of his writing to one of the half-crazed, single-minded machines depicted in Mortal Engines (1964) and The Cyberiad (1967); this would explain not only the changes in voice but the way Lem's plots whipsaw between acetylene brilliance and grinding ennui. Only one of Lem's irascible robots could lead us down the many crystalline cul de sacs of annoying masterworks like A Perfect Vacuum (1971), which is a book of reviews of non-existent books; or the winding, winded, Swiftian genius of The Matrix forerunner, The Futurological Congress (1971). It's just as well that he was booted by the Science Fiction Writers of America. It's easier to make sense of Lem — who was always more of a fabulist, an augmenter ad absurdum, and chronicler of foibles (even if they were robot foibles) than a straight SF writer — in the company of Calvino, Vonnegut, and Voltaire. *** Each day, Hilobrow.com pays tribute to one of our favorite high-, low-, no-, or hilobrow heroes on that person's birthday. Click here for more Hilo Hero shout-outs.

Roald Dahl

Tor Aarestad — Sun, 13 Sep 2009 02:20:49 +0000

Hilo Hero: Roald Dahl

Tor Aarestad — Sun, 13 Sep 2009 10:00:54 +0000

We're riding a swell of black-humored children's literature, these days — the Lemony Snicket books are just a whitecap. However, as dark as these contemporary tales may be, none is so misanthropic as those of ROALD DAHL (1916-90), whose own childhood was nearly as Dickensian as the Baudelaire children's. In his fables ( James and the Giant Peach, George's Marvelous Medicine) Dahl warns children what to expect from the world: most people are greedy and self-serving, cruel and child-hating; you have no one to rely on but yourself; violent and sometimes fatal events happen arbitrarily but continually; only the humble, self-reliant, and abstemious will be redeemed. Dahl is Popperian in his narrative efforts to convince readers of the veracity of these fantastic accounts. Child protagonists regularly question the truth of stories within the stories (and receive swift rebuttals), and Dahl occasionally throws out falsifiable real world claims, challenging the skeptical to pursue them (viz the existence of benevolently-run Henry Sugar Orphanages around the world). These ruses are all by way of successfully delivering this message: You are surrounded by cretins, and you may very well be struck dead at any moment, so live with integrity and love those few whom it's worth loving. Also see James Parker's essay on Roald Dahl, here.

***

Each day, Hilobrow.com pays tribute to one of our favorite high-, low-, no-, or hilobrow heroes on that person's birthday. Click here for more Hilo Hero shout-outs.

chocolate

Joshua Glenn — Sun, 13 Sep 2009 20:44:28 +0000

blake-wonka

Joshua Glenn — Sun, 13 Sep 2009 20:47:16 +0000

charlie-64-first

Joshua Glenn — Sun, 13 Sep 2009 20:54:48 +0000

dahl

Joshua Glenn — Sun, 13 Sep 2009 20:56:10 +0000

Chocolate Factory

Joshua Glenn — Sun, 13 Sep 2009 20:57:24 +0000

Winds of Magic (1): Dark Chocolate

James Parker — Sun, 13 Sep 2009 21:09:23 +0000

Director Tim Burton's Charlie and the Chocolate Factory has many fine qualities, but they founder and die away to nothing on the eerie smoothness of his leading man's chin. Johnny Depp may be beautiful, but a Willy Wonka without his beard is no Willy Wonka at all. And beardlessness is not the worst of it. In place of the compact and exclamatory figure of Roald Dahl's 1964 book we have, in Depp, a Wonka who is green-faced, addled, epicene, who needs cue-cards to remind him what to say. Critics have noted his resemblance to Michael Jackson — this Wonka is damaged. Burton has invented a past for him: a horrid dentist father, a chocolate-hater who imprisons his son's head in an orthodontic cage. Nice idea, but a fatal indulgence — the real Wonka has no past. He does not come hauling his problems, with a weak Jacksonian smile, but springs anarchically from nowhere, baggageless and fully formed, the little black fuse of his beard touching off the face that is ''alight with fun and laughter." It is this sharp-bearded, puff-of-smoke quality that announces Wonka as a fairy — a Puck, an imp, a Robin Goodfellow — and Dahl's Chocolate Factory as a fairy tale, whose figures are not driven by some screenwriter's conceit of character, but by their nature. The tale, of course, is that of young Charlie Bucket, humble and deserving but condemned to eat cabbage soup with his shivering family in a shack on the fringe of some nameless industrial hub, until he finds the last of five Golden Tickets issued by Mr. Willy Wonka, mysterious candy tycoon, and in the company of four other children — who happen to be very poorly behaved — and their guardians, is granted access to Wonka's incredible Chocolate Factory. There, the bad children are picked off one by one, each suffering a fate appropriate to his or her particular vice (greed, TV addiction, etc.), until only pale Charlie is left, at which point he is clasped to the Wonka bosom and pronounced the Factory's heir apparent. Some traditional fairy tale trappings are present. We have the buried ''Cinderella" theme, as Charlie is raised from poverty by the essential nobility of his nature (and the intercession of a fairy); we have the use of the powerful number 3 (three bears, three little pigs, three Wonka chocolate bars before the Golden Ticket is found); we have the violated interdictions — '''Whatever you do, don't go into the Nut Room!"' — and the appalling consequences. But the biggest clue to the book's fairy nature is its abrupt and supernaturally enhanced cruelty. When the Grimm brothers, Jacob and Wilhelm, were gathering and redacting Black Forest folk tales for their collections, they were careful to prune them of their sexual edge — Rapunzel, for example, ceased to be pregnant. But the violence was left intact: Cinderella's stepsisters have their eyes pecked out by doves, Rumpelstiltskin rips himself in half, Little Brother in "The Juniper Tree" is decapitated by his stepmother and served to his father in a stew. ''Children," wrote G.K. Chesterton, ''are innocent and love justice, while most of us are wicked and naturally prefer mercy." The Dahl Doctrine was to the point: ''Beastly people must be punished." And beastly children above all. In Chocolate Factory, the parents who spoil them get away with bruises or a light coating of trash — it is the children who are stretched, inflated, distorted, jammed in pipes. Here, Dahl was almost magically fortunate in his choice of illustrator. Quentin Blake's gaseous, squiffy drawings, all pointy limbs and fried-egg eyes, act as pressure-valves for the story: whenever the action gets too nasty, the tension is flared off in a hi-speed illustration. Real suffering, in a Blake drawing, is impossible. The eye of a more somber and laborious draughtsman — Mervyn Peake, say, author/illustrator of the Gormenghast trilogy — would have turned the Factory into a torture chamber. Unlike the great Victorian/ Edwardian enchanters, those dreaming bachelors and slightly worrying uncle-figures, Dahl (who died in 1990) was not child-besotted. Neither idealizing nor eroticizing nor even particularly respecting children -- they are "much more vulgar than grown-ups," he told an interviewer in 1986. "They have a coarser sense of humor. They are basically more cruel" -- he came, we may say, from an older and harder tradition. Writing for children was not his first thought. In 1959, as he began work on James and the Giant Peach, he was already well-established as a producer of macabre and highly adult short stories for The New Yorker, The Atlantic Monthly, and Playboy. He was a thrusting, worldly character, well-dented by life. Born in Wales (in 1916) to Norwegian emigrants, he was speedily sent away to boarding school -- which he loathed, and where he was regularly beaten. As a fighter pilot in World War II, serving in Africa, he was almost killed by a forced landing in the desert: His nose was driven into his skull, and his eyes were swollen shut for six weeks. By the time Charlie and The Chocolate Factory was published, Dahl had also endured the death of his first child, Olivia, from measles, and the serious injury of his infant son, Theo, in a road accident. In Dahl's writing there is no whimsy, and little nonsense. His style is craggy and telegraphic; in prose he admired not Kenneth Grahame but Ernest Hemingway. The deficits in his ability, as well as something of his vulgarity, are apparent in his attempts at verse. The songs of the Oompa-Loompas in Chocolate Factory, cautionary verses in the tradition of "Struwwelpeter" and Hilaire Belloc, have neither the crude energy of the former nor the wit of the latter. The thumping, merciless iambic tetrameter is — in Dahl's hands — practically inert: "'So please believe us when we say/That chewing gum will never pay....'" But doggerel, too, is the language of the fairy tale. ("Fee fi fo fum...") In our age of interpretation, fairy tales — as befits their magical nature — have suffered many fates. But they have survived them all, because they are obstinate, irreducible productions of psychic life. A Freudian like Bruno Bettelheim might be interested in the excremental torrent of Willy Wonka's chocolate river; the woollier Jungian folklorist Robert Bly might address himself to Charlie's lack of a strong father. And both would be right, in their way, without remotely affecting the essentials of the story. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory has outlived accusations of racism (by the critic Lois Kalb Bouchard, after which Dahl rethought and eventually rewrote the Oompa-Loompas) and sadism (by the children’s author Eleanor Cameron, who now passes into history in the role of Dahl’s priggish accuser). The Chocolate Factory, like Jack's beanstalk and the gingerbread house in "Hansel and Gretel," sits with a sort of enlarged, insolent brightness in the territory of the unconscious. "'Notice how all these passages are sloping downwards!' called Mr Wonka. 'We are now going underground! All the most important rooms in my factory are deep down below the surface!'" Way down beneath the Factory lies, miraculously, a toy-town Xanadu, a version — entirely in candy — of Coleridge's "Kubla Khan" underworld. Through caverns measureless to man the chocolate river rolls. There is the same sense of huge forces at war — the rushing-down of the chocolate waterfall, the hydraulic upward heave of the pipes, with their "never-ending suck-suck-sucking" — and of a primal abundance of energy: "'Thousands of gallons an hour, my dear children! Thousands and thousands of gallons!'" The ups are fierce, the downs are fierce. Extremes of feeling are the currency of fairy tales, and Dahl pursued them. In his first novel, 1948's Some Time Never, the pilot-hero is overcome by a sickness that "seemed to concentrate in one small fiery pin-point just below the ribs, a long, thin, white-hot needle pressing deeper, deeper through the flesh, into the empty coldness of the stomach then up toward the heart; and when the sharp, hot point touched the outer tissues of the heart it was like all the mental pain of the world pouring in hot rivulets through your body and dripping drop by drop from out your fingertips...." Sixteen years later, when Grandpa Joe is first shown Charlie's Golden Ticket, this awful inward pressure is reversed, and from that same single laser-spot of sensitivity the energies expand outward in a shockwave of joy: "...Very slowly, with a slow and marvelous grin spreading all over his face, Grandpa Joe lifted his head and looked straight at Charlie. The color was rushing to his cheeks, and his eyes were wide open, shining with joy, and in the center of each eye, right in the very center, in the black pupil, a little spark of wild excitement was slowly dancing." The white-hot needle's tip, the dancing spark: This is the eye of existence, where children live. Around this point the extremities are always in motion: good and evil, hope and terror, reward and punishment. And if — like Roald Dahl — you can put your finger on it, you are a teller of the oldest tales. *** Originally published by the Boston Globe, July 2005. From 2004-08, our friend and colleague James Parker, currently a contributing editor at The Atlantic, was a culture critic for the Boston Globe's Ideas section and for Boston's alt-weekly, The Phoenix. Hilobrow.com has curated a collection of Parker's writings from this period. This installment is the first in a series of ten.

sanger

Joshua Glenn — Mon, 14 Sep 2009 02:34:32 +0000

jacko-wave

Joshua Glenn — Mon, 14 Sep 2009 12:02:07 +0000

VB-00006099-001

Joshua Glenn — Mon, 14 Sep 2009 12:02:47 +0000

BoyStatue_cmykWKD.eps

pan-programme-04

Joshua Glenn — Mon, 14 Sep 2009 12:10:39 +0000

lostboys

Joshua Glenn — Mon, 14 Sep 2009 12:11:33 +0000

jackson-closeup

Joshua Glenn — Mon, 14 Sep 2009 12:13:54 +0000

jacko-swing

Joshua Glenn — Mon, 14 Sep 2009 12:14:54 +0000

nipsey

Joshua Glenn — Mon, 14 Sep 2009 12:30:43 +0000

silverstein-shel

Joshua Glenn — Mon, 14 Sep 2009 12:36:37 +0000

Hilo Hero: Margaret Sanger

Lynn Peril — Mon, 14 Sep 2009 16:00:07 +0000

As a visiting nurse in New York’s tenements at the turn of the 20th century, MARGARET SANGER (1879-1966) once heard a woman recovering from a self-induced abortion beg her doctor for information on how to keep from getting pregnant again. “Tell Jake to sleep on the roof” was his flippant reply. When the woman died three months later after another attempt to end yet another pregnancy, Sanger embarked on a lifelong crusade to make contraception available to the masses. It wasn’t easy. Most issues of her publication, Woman Rebel — the term “birth control” made its first appearance in its pages — were confiscated by the Post Office, but that didn’t stop the authorities from indicting Sanger on nine counts of sending contraceptive information through the mails. On the eve of trial in 1914, she fled to Europe, where she took the opportunity to learn still more about birth control methods; the indictment was eventually quashed. In 1916, she and her sister opened their first birth control clinic, in Brooklyn; the police shut it down, and Sanger spent 30 days in jail. The court case that followed laid the groundwork for the eventual legalization of birth control — for married couples in 1965, and singles seven years later. Also see: The Keeping-My-Baby Meme.

***

Each day, Hilobrow.com pays tribute to one of our favorite high-, low-, no-, or hilobrow heroes on that person's birthday. Click here for more Hilo Hero shout-outs.

newman-1978

Joshua Glenn — Mon, 14 Sep 2009 18:51:38 +0000

garbo-steichen-550

Joshua Glenn — Mon, 14 Sep 2009 21:59:33 +0000

garbo-46

Joshua Glenn — Mon, 14 Sep 2009 22:13:10 +0000

siegel

Joshua Glenn — Tue, 15 Sep 2009 01:27:22 +0000

socko

Joshua Glenn — Tue, 15 Sep 2009 01:28:58 +0000

vintage-computer-ad

Joshua Glenn — Tue, 15 Sep 2009 01:32:56 +0000

Hilo Hero: Nipsey Russell

Franklin Bruno — Tue, 15 Sep 2009 10:00:00 +0000

Like Bea Arthur, Pearl Bailey, and Redd Foxx, the televisual omnipresence of JULIUS “NIPSEY” RUSSELL (1918?-2005) belied his status as a veteran of less sanitized showbiz pursuits. He tap-danced his way out of his native Atlanta, acted with a Chicago stock company, and by the early ’50s was a popular emcee at Harlem’s Café Society-styled Baby Grand. Langston Hughes lobbied for the comic to play Jesse B. Semple in Hughes’ 1957 musical, Simply Heavenly. The same year, Russell appeared as interlocutor on the LP Christine Jorgenson Reveals, mediating many Americans’ first brush with transsexuality. (A “confirmed bachelor,” Russell’s own sexuality is as murky as Hughes’.) After Ed MacMahon tagged him “the poet laureate of television,” on the short-lived Missing Links, he delivered his trademark quatrains on innumerable Goodman-Todson quiz shows, while also taking on the odd movie role (The Wiz, Mario Van Peebles’ Posse). Russell sometimes slipped light socioeconomic commentary into his largely innocuous verse, as in 1974’s “To slow down this recession/And make this economy thrive/Give us our Social Security Now/We’ll go to work when we’re sixty-five.” Not Ali, perhaps, but as actors identifying as poets go, better Russell’s unpretentious doggerel than the neo-Beat posturings of Viggo Mortenson and Amber Tamblyn.

***

Each day, Hilobrow.com pays tribute to one of our favorite high-, low-, no-, or hilobrow heroes on that person's birthday. Click here for more Hilo Hero shout-outs.

usa04

Joshua Glenn — Tue, 15 Sep 2009 11:33:46 +0000

newgods1

Joshua Glenn — Tue, 15 Sep 2009 11:36:24 +0000

ccc

Joshua Glenn — Tue, 15 Sep 2009 11:51:40 +0000

ccc

Joshua Glenn — Tue, 15 Sep 2009 11:51:57 +0000

2456a1

Joshua Glenn — Tue, 15 Sep 2009 11:56:19 +0000

rockwell-rosie-550

Joshua Glenn — Tue, 15 Sep 2009 12:00:31 +0000

action1

Joshua Glenn — Tue, 15 Sep 2009 12:34:18 +0000

garbo-46

Joshua Glenn — Tue, 15 Sep 2009 15:28:42 +0000

mamaspapas

Joshua Glenn — Tue, 15 Sep 2009 15:42:17 +0000

sheeplookup

Joshua Glenn — Tue, 15 Sep 2009 16:12:44 +0000

lalanne

Joshua Glenn — Tue, 15 Sep 2009 19:14:26 +0000

asimov-robot

Joshua Glenn — Tue, 15 Sep 2009 19:15:51 +0000

william_s_burroughs-1

Joshua Glenn — Tue, 15 Sep 2009 19:21:37 +0000

Esquivel-OWOS

Joshua Glenn — Tue, 15 Sep 2009 19:26:14 +0000

Hilo Hero: Colin Newman

Erik Davis — Wed, 16 Sep 2009 10:00:10 +0000

[caption id="attachment_6110" align="aligncenter" width="352" caption="Colin Newman — with Wire in 1978"][/caption] Now that the radical punch of punk seems no more potent than a daisy in a National Guardsman's rifle, the artsy-fartsy fundament of its posture has become as evident — and as significant — as its street snarl. The fact that COLIN NEWMAN (born 1954) formed Wire with pals in art school, or that his lyrics are saturated with avant-garde influences, does not undermine punk’s bid for negative authenticity; it is the bid. “Anger is an energy,” sang a post-Pistols John Lydon; for Newman (who, like Mission of Burma’s Roger Miller, sings like he’s thinking and dodging thought at the same time), anger is a gesture: the slice of the cut-up, the quick jab of intelligence itself, “intended to pierce.” Wire’s early records not only mapped and scrambled the zone between punk and post-punk, but between tone-deaf riffage and “atonality”: the burst of skronk in Chairs Missing’s safety-pinned grinder “Sand in My Joints” is a case in point. Newman’s post-Wire work continued this hi-lo tango, juxtaposing scintillating pop hooks and odd formal experiments, like all-instrumental auto-remixes named after fish. Landing, the forthcoming record from Newman’s latest band, Githead, is razorsharp and driving, though it lacks snot. *** Each day, Hilobrow.com pays tribute to one of our favorite high-, low-, no-, or hilobrow heroes on that person's birthday. Click here for more Hilo Hero shout-outs.

HandwritingCursiveCapDir

Matthew Battles — Wed, 16 Sep 2009 13:44:30 +0000

Only Connect

Matthew Battles — Wed, 16 Sep 2009 13:51:10 +0000

Last week the New York Times's occasional "Op-Art" column was furnished by Inga Dubay and Barbara Getty, whose handwriting manuals explain and promote the italic hand. In "Write Stuff," they offer italic as a balm to soothe the nation's frayed nerves. The country's in a bad way, Dubay and Getty note. And it shows in our penmanship. The problem, they argue, is rooted in the grammar-school handwriting program known as the Palmer Method, "an ornate style that was difficult to learn and broke down under pressure." They promise that we can "learn how to stop mumbling on the page" by "embrac(ing) letterforms born in the Italian Renaissance." Dubay and Getty proceed with a quick primer on the Italic hand, with diagrams (on which you can practice your own italic letters in the print edition of the Times —score one for the physical newspaper!). In their instructions, they exhort us to relax: "letters do not have to be relentlessly connected," they caution. "Many find this to be a relief." And there's something very twenty-first century in their injunction to avoid the death grip when holding one's pen. Relax: everything depends on it! As a bit of a loose joiner myself, I'm inclined to shape my line to their advice. But the middlebrow notion that correctness in penmanship breeds moral rectitude and economic vitality is as old as it is useless—it's precisely what motivated the nasty Palmer-promoters of old. And as anyone who works with archival materials knows, the present has no monopoly on illegibility. In the literary sphere—where scribes might be inclined to fret over legibility—Boswell, Emerson, and Emily Dickinson all had blindingly crabbed hands. Handwriting breaks down under pressure because we break down under pressure. And we always have—whether wielding reed, quill, or fountain pen.

Generations (8): New Gods

Joshua Glenn — Wed, 16 Sep 2009 14:00:44 +0000

Members of the generational cohort born from 1914-23 were in their teens and 20s during the Thirties (1934-43, not to be confused with the the 1930s), and in their 20s and 30s during the Forties (1944-53). Though this cohort is easily distinguished from their immediate elders, the Partisan Generation (born 1904-13), the influential generational periodizers William Strauss and Neil Howe lumped the two together and named the resulting construct the "G.I. Generation" (1901-24). I've already theorized, in a previous post, that Strauss and Howe, acting on behalf of Middlebrow, lopped off the last few years of the Hardboiled Generation and added them to the G.I.s because they wanted to ensure that middlebrow impresario Walt Disney (b. 1901) was included in the pseudo-generation that Tom Brokaw would later name the "Greatest." In their 1991 book, Generations, Strauss and Howe struggle in vain to be convincing about their Frankenstein's monster of a demographic conceit; in their introduction to the chapter on the so-called G.I. Generation, they have little to say about anyone born before 1914-ish besides Walt Disney, Charles Lindbergh (born 1902; a Hardboiled), and Ronald Reagan (1911; a Partisan). Tellingly, the introduction focuses on the "G.I. second wave" (a weaselly phrase justifying a divided pseudo-generation; only a movement, e.g., an aesthetic movement, can span generations in successive "waves"), about whom Strauss and Howe gush:

Throughout their lives, [late-born members of the GI Generation] have been America's confident and rational problem-solvers: victorious soldiers and Rosie the Riveters; Nobel laureates; makers of Minuteman missiles, interstate highways, Apollo rockets, battleships, and miracle vaccines; the creator's of Disney's Tomorrowland; "men's men" who have known how to get things done.... No other generation this century has felt (or been) so Promethean, so godlike in its collective, world-bending power.

Godlike! In 1998, Tom Brokaw would insist that "this is the greatest generation any society has produced" — but it seems even that superlative is insufficient to describe the likes of Jack Kennedy, Jack Kerouac, and Jack LaLanne. So I've borrowed a moniker for the Partisan's immediate juniors from a short-lived comic book series by one of my favorite Jacks from this cohort: Jack Kirby. The generational cohort born from 1914-23 may superficially resemble mere homo sapiens, but they are stronger, faster, and smarter than the rest of us; they possess superior technology; and they may even exist in a dimension outside of normal time and space. Let's call them: the New Gods. High-, low-, no-, and hilobrow members of the New Gods Generation include: Alfred Bester, Charles Bukowski, Charles Mingus, Charlie Parker, Cordwainer Smith, Dean Martin, Dizzy Gillespie, Elizabeth Hardwick, Eric Hobsbawm, Hank Williams, Hugh Kenner, Jack Cole, Jack Kerouac, Jack Kirby, Jackie Gleason, James Tiptree Jr. (Alice Bradley Sheldon), Jane Bowles, John Berryman, Jonas Salk, Joseph Beuys, Juan Garcia Esquivel, Leslie Fiedler, Louis Althusser, Manny Farber, Merce Cunningham, Murray Bookchin, Nelson Mandela, Norman Mailer, Paul Celan, Paul de Man, Ralph Ellison, Raymond Williams, Roald Dahl, Robert Lowell, Robert Motherwell, Roland Barthes, Stan Lee, Stanislaw Lem, Sun Ra, Thelonious Monk, Tove Jansson, Vampira, Walker Percy, Will Elder, and William S. Burroughs. *** A reminder of my generational periodization scheme: 1844-53: [Progressive Generation] Prometheans 1854-63: [Progressive, Missionary Generations] Plutonians 1864-73: [Missionary Generation] Anarcho-Symbolists 1874-83: [Missionary Generation] Psychonauts 1884-93: [Lost Generation] Modernists 1894-1903: [Lost, Greatest/GI Generations] Hardboileds 1904-13: [Greatest/GI Generation] Partisans 1914-23: [Greatest/GI Generation] New Gods 1924-33: [Silent Generation] Postmodernists 1934-43: [Silent Generation] Anti-Anti-Utopians 1944-53: Boomers 1954-63: [Boomers, Late Boomers, Post-Boomers, Generation Jones] OGXers 1964-73: [Generation X, Thirteenth Generation] Constructivists 1974-83: [Generations X, Y] Revivalists 1984-93: [Millennial Generation] Throwbacks 1994-2003: [Millennial Generation] TBA *** [caption id="attachment_6145" align="aligncenter" width="550" caption="The Civilian Conservation Corps, 1933"][/caption] The 1914-23 generation came of age during the Depression, during which time they were kept busy by the Civilian Conservation Corps "getting things done, building things that worked, things that have lasted to this day," as Strauss and Howe admiringly put it. The Tennessee Valley Authority was the handiwork of youthful New Gods. As adults, the 1914-23 generation fought World War II. After the war, they saved American industry, tamed the business cycle, built the suburbs and moved into them. Or so we hear, again and again, in middlebrow paeans to the cohort that shored up the gains of older (Hardboiled) middlebrows. How did Middlebrow inspire a generation to to say in harness so long, and accomplish so much? What persuasive ideology helped prevent the New Gods from kicking against the pricks? [caption id="attachment_6184" align="aligncenter" width="400" caption="Jack LaLanne, real-life strongman"][/caption] One such ideology, it seems to me, was machismo. The New Gods venerated the macho man, and some deluded anti-middlebrows even hailed him as an antiheroic savior of sorts. This generation produced only one president, but it was the macho JFK, who brought the "best and the brightest" into the White House, faced down the Soviet Union, and put a man on the moon. Astronauts Alan Shepard and John Glenn are members of this generation; so is faster-than-sound test pilot Chuck Yeager. Other New Gods who were macho men, actors who played macho men, and novelists who wrote about macho men: Kirk Douglas, Robert Mitchum, Gregory Peck, William Holden, Dean Martin, Frank Sinatra, Jack Palance, Anthony Quinn, Jack Lord, Ernest Borgnine, Telly Savalas, Yul Brynner, Eli Wallach, Charles Bronson, Woody Strode, Montgomery Clift, Charlton Heston, Edmond O'Brien, Norman Mailer, James Jones, James Dickey, James Arness, Jake LaMotta, and honorary NGs Marlon Brando, Alan Ladd, Burt Lancaster, Lee Marvin, Rocky Marciano, Audie Murphy, and Jesse Owens. Wow! Think of all the violent buddy/caper movies the New Gods made, in the Fifties (1954-63) and Sixties (1964-73): Gunfight at the O.K. Corral (1957: Lancaster, Douglas); The Young Lions (1958: Bando, Clift, Martin); Ocean's Eleven (1960: Sinatra, Martin); The Magnificent Seven (1960: Brynner, Wallach, Bronson); The Guns of Navarone (1961: Peck, Quinn); The Great Escape (1963: Bronson); The Professionals (1966: Marvin, Lancaster, Ryan, Strode, Palance); The Dirty Dozen (1967: Marvin, Borgnine, Bronson, Ryan, Savalas; and The Wild Bunch (1969: Holden, Borgnine, Ryan, O'Brien). The musk of testosterone shrouded the New Gods, making it difficult for them to see — or think — straight. Even the women of the New Gods generation were macho: films and posters featuring "Rosie the Riveter" encouraged women to go to work in support of the war effort. Behold arch-middlebrow Norman Rockwell's vision of Rosie: Speaking of Mailer and JFK, in 1960 the former wrote an overheated Esquire essay about the latter titled "Superman Comes to the Supermarket." America, Mailer claimed, was the land where people still believed in heroes — and it needed a macho hero to rescue it from the triumph of Middlebrow during the Fifties (1954-63).

The film studios threw up their searchlights as the frontier was finally sealed, and the romantic possibilities of the old conquest of land turned into a vertical myth, trapped within the skull, of a new kind of heroic life, each choosing his own archetype of a neo-renaissance man, be it Barrymore, Cagney, Flynn, Bogart, Brando or Sinatra, but it was almost as if there were no peace unless one could fight well, kill well (if always with honor), love well and love many, be cool, be daring, be dashing, be wild, be wily, be resourceful, be a brave gun. And this myth, that each of us was born to be free, to wander, to have adventure and to grow on the waves of the violent, the perfumed, and the unexpected, had a force which could not be tamed no matter how the nation’s regulators — politicians, medicos, policemen, professors, priests, rabbis, ministers, idèologues, psychoanalysts, builders, executives and endless communicators — would brick-in the modern life with hygiene upon sanity, and middle-brow homily over platitude; the myth would not die.

Mailer correctly diagnosed the triumph of Middlebrow, but he failed to recognize that machismo is no solution. In fact, whenever Highbrow or Lowbrow is coded "masculine," then Anti-Highbrow or Anti-Lowbrow is coded "not-feminine"; Middlebrow's synthesis of these cultural constructs is: "real man" or "macho." (When Highbrow or Lowbrow is coded "feminine," then Anti-Highbrow or Anti-Lowbrow is coded "not-masculine"; Middlebrow's synthesis of these cultural constructs is: "ultra-feminine" or "vamp," another New God paradigm.) Nobrow, to continue for a moment, is neither masculine nor feminine ("angelic"), while Hilobrow is androgynous or hermaphroditic. Mailer, whose own machismo was a performance piece, didn't quite grasp all this — not then. During the Thirties and Forties, superman really did come to the supermarket, as the New Gods ushered in what we've been encouraged to regard as the Golden Age of superhero comics. Beginning in 1938 with the debut of Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster's Superman in DC's Action Comics # 1, the comic book made its debut as a mainstream art form. Comic-book authors, artists, and editors born between 1914 and 1923 include the likes of Bob Kane and Bill Finger, Julius Schwartz, Will Eisner, Bill Everett, Carl Burgos, Sheldon Mayer, and honorary New God Joe Simon — who invented and refined comic-book superheroes as we know them: Superman and Batman, Captain America, The Spirit, Namor the Sub-Mariner, Daredevil, The Human Torch, Flash, Green Lantern, Hawkman, and the Justice Society of America. Enjoyable stuff! But with the exception of Jack Cole's Plastic Man, it's middlebrow. Of course, there were New God cartoonists who weren't middlebrow. Will Elder, John Severin, Dave Berg, Al Jaffee, and former EC Comics publisher William Gaines, for example, brought us Mad Magazine (whose successful formula, I think, is due to the fact that half of its staff were New Gods and half were Postmodernists; more on that some other time). Charles M. Schulz wasn't a middlebrow, exactly, though Middlebrow would enthusiastically embrace and champion his work. In the late Fifties (beginning in '61, to be precise), New Gods Stan Lee and Jack "King" Kirby would give us the Fantastic Four, the X-Men, Thor, the Incredible Hulk, Iron Man, the Silver Surfer, Doctor Doom, Galactus, The Watcher, Magneto, the Inhumans, and many more comic-book superheroes who were neither macho nor middlebrow — at least, they weren't in their earliest incarnations. Middlebrow triumphed in the newspapers: Bil Keane, Hank Ketcham, Dik Browne, Fred Lasswell, Mort Walker, Brant Parker, and Reg Smythe gave us the middlebrow strips Family Circus, Dennis the Menace, Hi and Lois, Hagar the Horrible, Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, Beetle Bailey, Wizard of Id, and Andy Capp. Ever wonder why some newspaper strips end, while others go on and on? The answer is: Middlebrow. Many of these strips, whose authors are now retired or dead, are still going — i.e., they're immortal. I've noted elsewhere that, in the era before the Partisans pioneered the so-called Golden Age of science fiction, and the New Gods pioneered the so-called Golden Age of superhero comics, homo superior and supermen were considered... creepy. Olaf Stapledon, Philip Wylie, George Bernard Shaw, and other Radium-Age SF authors tended to agree that the superman (whose values and worldview we mere mortals can't share, or even comprehend) wouldn't seem friendly but cold, inhuman, alien. Even, or especially when, he is trying to help us — because he'd surely understand himself as a shepherd responsible for the wellbeing of dumb animals, and treat us accordingly. Wylie's 1930 SF novel, Gladiator, features a superman who is nearly invulnerable ("He was like a being of steel"), runs faster than a train, leaps higher than trees, and hurls boulders like baseballs. He creates a fortress of solitude (in Colorado), fights the Germans in WWI, then adopts a secret identity, moves to Manhattan, and vows to become "an invisible agent of right — right as best I can see it." It's that last line that distinguishes Wylie's man of steel from Siegel and Shuster's; in the end, Wylie's superman despairs of flawed mortals and abandons them, The paradigm shift from pre-Golden Age science fiction and comic-book superhero is a telling one, isn't it? Small wonder, perhaps, that Middlebrow — which sees itself as a shepherd responsible for the wellbeing of dumb animals, but would never be so foolish as to admit to this fact — admires the Partisans and New Gods (collectively: the G.I. or Greatest Generation) so much, and insists that they ushered in a Golden Age in SF and superhero comics! What Asimov and other historians of SF mean by "Golden Age" is that SF "grew up" beginning in the mid-1930s; at midcentury, Middlebrow was eager to have ’30s-era utopianists grow up. Does this mean that all Golden-Age SF and comic-book authors are middlebrow — witting or unwitting dupes of proto-neocon middlebrows? No, it doesn't. But it does mean that we should skeptically revisit the so-called Golden Age of SF and comic books. Golden-Age SF authors born from 1914-23 include: James Tiptree Jr. (Alice Bradley Sheldon, stories), Isaac Asimov (The Foundation Trilogy; I, Robot), James Blish (Earthman Come Home, Star Trek novelizations), Leigh Brackett (The Long Tomorrow), Lester del Rey (editor; known for Young Adult SF), Pohl (Gateway, The Space Merchants), Gordon R. Dickson (Childe Cycle and Dragon Knight series), Philip José Farmer (Riverworld series), Frank Herbert (Dune saga), Cyril M. Kornbluth (The Space Merchants, with Pohl), Walter M. Miller, Jr. (A Canticle for Leibowitz), and Theodore Sturgeon (More Than Human, famous Star Trek episodes. Star Trek creator Gene Roddenberry is also a New God. Ray Bradbury (Fahrenheit 451) and Arthur C. Clarke (2001: A Space Odyssey) are not middlebrow, if you ask me; neither are honorary New Gods Cordwainer Smith and Alfred Bester. (Kurt Vonnegut is an honorary Postmodernist.) However, Jack Vance, who cranked out 60 novels and innumerable pulp stories, might be considered a lowbrow were it not for the fact that a recent New York Times Magazine profile described him as "one of American literature’s most distinctive and undervalued voices" — which makes me suspicious. *** Meet the New Gods. Honorary New Gods: Joe Simon (comics editor), Gerald Ford, Alan Ladd, Burt Lancaster, Cordwainer Smith, Vince Lombardi, Jesse Owens, Alfred Bester, maybe Ralph Ellison (all born 1913). 1914: William S. Burroughs (SF author), Sun Ra, Jack Cole, John Berryman, Jonas Salk, Tove Jansson, Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster, Woody Strode, Ida Lupino, Alec Guinness, Saul Steinberg, Joe DiMaggio, George Reeves (played Superman on TV), Danny Thomas, Ward Kimball, William Westmoreland, Bernard Malamud, Vance Packard, E.G. Marshall, Ernest Tubb, Paul Rand, Bill Finger, Joe Lewis, Jackie Coogan, Kenny Clarke, Clayton Moore, Allen Funt, Jack LaLanne, Billy Eckstine, John Hersey, Billy Graham, Arthur Kennedy, Dorothy Lamour, Richard Widmark, Floyd Tillman, Donald A. Wollheim, Hammond Innes, Thor Heyerdahl, Patrick O'Brian. HONORARY PARTISANS: Daniel J. Boorstin, Howard Fast, Marguerite Duras, Julio Cortazar, Dylan Thomas. 1915: Roland Barthes, Robert Motherwell, Orson Welles, Frank Sinatra, James Tiptree Jr. (Alice Bradley Sheldon, SF author), Muddy Waters, Billie Holiday, Saul Bellow, Ingrid Bergman, Julius Schwartz, Arthur Miller, Alan Lomax, Thomas Merton, Edmond O'Brien, Zero Mostel, Herman Wouk, Les Paul, Leigh Brackett, David Rockefeller, Bob Kane, Sargent Shriver, Eli Wallach, Herbert Huncke, Lester del Rey (SF author, editor), Lorne Greene, Ross Macdonald, Barbara Billingsley, Anthony Quinn, Moshe Dayan, Edith Piaf. 1916: Roald Dahl, Walker Percy, Jackie Gleason, Elizabeth Hardwick, Walter Cronkite, Dinah Shore, Jay McShann, Irving Wallace, Eugene McCarthy, John Ciardi, Herb Caen, Gregory Peck, Betty Furness, Glenn Ford, Harold Robbins, Carl Burgos, Charlie Christian, Robert McNamara, Fred Lasswell, Martha Raye, Jack Vance (SF author), Walter Cronkite, Sherwood Schwartz, Kirk Douglas, Shirley Jackson, Betty Grable, Olivia de Havilland, James Herriot, Francois Mitterrand, Perez Prado, Mary Stewart, Francis Crick. 1917: Thelonious Monk, Dizzy Gillespie, Manny Farber (anti-middlebrow film critic), Jack Kirby, Robert Lowell, Leslie Fiedler (anti-middlebrow critic), Dean Martin, Eric Hobsbawm, David Goodis (Noir author), John F. Kennedy, Will Eisner, Buddy Rich, Ella Fitzgerald, Arthur C. Clarke (SF author), Roger W. Straus, Jr., Jane Bowles, Gwendolyn Brooks, Jane Wyman, Jerry Wexler, John Raitt, Robert Mitchum, Ernest Borgnine, Sidney Sheldon, Carson McCullers, Bill Everett, Tex Williams, Rufus Thomas, Robert Bloch, Irving Penn, Sheldon Mayer, Katharine Graham, Lena Horne, Phyllis Diller, Dik Browne, Caspar Weinberger, John Lee Hooker, Mel Ferrer, Red Auerbach, Louis Auchincloss, June Allyson, Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, James Harry Lacey, Zsa Zsa Gabor, Anthony Burgess, Desi Arnaz, Vera Lynn, Raymond Burr, Ferdinand Marcos, Joan Fontaine, Heinrich Boll, Reg Smythe. 1918: Juan Garcia Esquivel, Louis Althusser, Elaine de Kooning, Mike Wallace, Rita Hayworth, Ingmar Bergman, Nelson Mandela, Art Carney, Oral Roberts, Billy Graham, Elmore James, Howard Cosell, Robert Aldrich, Philip José Farmer (SF author), Madeleine L'Engle, Theodore Sturgeon (SF author), Stirling Silliphant, John Forsythe, Joey Bishop, Mickey Spillane, Mercedes McCambridge, Sam Walton, William Holden, Betty Ford, Jack Paar, Richard Feynman, Julius Rosenberg, Eddy Arnold, Ann Landers and Abigail Van Buren, Leonard Bernstein, Ted Williams, E. Howard Hunt, Bob Feller, Spiro Agnew, Jerome Beatty, Jr., Joe Williams, Gamal Abdal Nasser, Nicolae Ceauşescu, Muriel Spark, Ida Lupino, Richard Hoggart, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Anwar Sadat. 1919: Paul de Man, Merce Cunningham, Eva Gabor, Eva Peron, Pete Seeger, Iris Murdoch, Art Blakey, Jackie Robinson, J. D. Salinger, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Ernie Kovacs, Frederik Pohl (SF author), Robert Stack, Tennessee Ernie Ford, Jack Palance, Jennifer Jones, Lawrence Tierney, Nat King Cole, John Cullen Murphy, Bernard Krigstein, Liberace, Richard Scarry, Pauline Kael, Anita O'Day, Sir Edmund Hillary, Pierre Elliott Trudeau, Doris Lessing, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi (Shah of Iran), Mikhail Kalashnikov, Dino De Laurentiis . 1920: Charles Bukowski, Charlie Parker, Ray Bradbury (SF author), Frank Herbert (SF author), Isaac Asimov (SF author), Eric Rohmer, Richard Adams, Sun Myung Moon, Paul Celan, Federico Fellini, Hank Ketcham, Timothy Leary, Saul Bass, Dave Berg, Norman Lear, DeForest Kelley, Walter Matthau, Tony Randall and Jack Klugman, Mario Puzo, Howard Nemerov, Jack Webb, Arthur Hailey, Montgomery Clift, Carmen McRae, Peter O'Donnell, Denver Pyle, Peggy Lee, Brant Parker, Ray Harryhausen, Leona Helmsley, Bella Abzug, Shelley Winters, Mickey Rooney, Jayne Meadows, Dave Brubeck, Jack Lord, Rex Allen, An Wang, James Doohan, Ronald Searle, Alfred Peet, Boris Vian, Werner Klemperer, Ravi Shankar, Thomas Szasz, Pope John Paul II, Yul Brynner, Maureen O'Hara, Ricardo Montalban. 1921: Raymond Williams, Stanislaw Lem (SF author), Joseph Beuys, Will Elder, Murray Bookchin, John Glenn, Carol Channing, James Blish (SF author), Arthur "Guitar Boogie" Smith, John Severin, Patricia Highsmith, Donna Reed, Vampira, Mario Lanza, Betty Friedan, Wayne Booth, Abe Vigoda, Betty Hutton, Richard Wilbur, Cyd Charisse, Alan Hale, Jr., Al Jaffee, Harry Carey, Jr., Nelson Riddle, Jake LaMotta, Erroll Garner, Bill Mauldin, Nancy Reagan, Harvey Ball, Gene Roddenberry, Charles Bronson, James Jones, Rodney Dangerfield, Steve Allen, Simone Signoret, Dirk Bogarde, Peter Ustinov, Satyajit Ray, Andrei Sakharov, Leon Garfield, Monty Hall, Deborah Kerr. 1922: Jack Kerouac, Stan Lee, William Gaines, Charles M. Schulz, William Gaddis, Charles Mingus, Les Baxter, Kingsley Amis, Philip Larkin, Judy Garland, Ava Gardner, Howard Zinn, Bea Arthur, Ray Goulding, Hal Clement, Dorothy Dandridge, Betty White, Quinn Martin, Telly Savalas, Arthur Penn, Dan Rowan and Dick Martin, Kathryn Grayson, Helen Gurley Brown, Carl Reiner, Russ Meyer, Thomas Kuhn, Bil Keane, Sid Caesar, Jackie Cooper, Barbara Bel Geddes, Veronica Lake, Samuel Youd (John Christopher, SF author), Paul Scofield, Patrick Macnee, Yitzhak Rabin, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Christopher Lee, Denholm Elliott, Yma Sumac, José Saramago. HONORARY POSTMODERNS: Loathe as I am to make exceptions, let's do it for postmodern authors William Gaddis (JR) and Kurt Vonnegut Jr. (postmodern and SF, Slaughterhouse Five), who were almost born in ’23: December 29, 1922; and November 11, 1922, respectively. 1923: Norman Mailer, Hugh Kenner, Joseph Heller, Hank Williams, Alan Shepard, Chuck Yeager, Brendan Behan, Franco Zeffirelli, Marcel Marceau, Henry Kissinger, Sam Phillips, Charlton Heston, Philly Joe Jones, Fats Navarro, Cyril M. Kornbluth (SF author), James Schuyler, Walter M. Miller, Jr. (SF author), Jim Reeves, Philip Whalen, Bob Elliott, Jean Stapleton, Anthony Hecht, Paddy Chayefsky, James Dickey, Dexter Gordon, Ed McMahon, Don Adams, Bettie Page, Aaron Spelling, Albert King, Al Lewis, Anne Baxter, James Arness, Bob Dole, Mort Walker, Bob Barker, Sumner Redstone, Denise Levertov, Nadine Gordimer, Gordon R. Dickson (SF author), Freeman Dyson. HONORARY POSTMODERNS: Italo Calvino (Italian author, Invisible Cities, If on a winter's night a traveler), Roy Lichtenstein (all born 1923). HONORARY NEW GODS: Lee Marvin, Max Roach, Marlon Brando, Rocky Marciano, Audie Murphy, George H.W. Bush (all born 1924). Following the attacks on Pearl Harbor in 1941, at the age of 18, Bush postponed going to college and became the youngest naval aviator in the US Navy at the time; that's so New Gods. PS:

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Joshua Glenn — Wed, 16 Sep 2009 17:45:38 +0000

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Joshua Glenn — Wed, 16 Sep 2009 18:35:49 +0000

Academia_mosaic

Matthew Battles — Thu, 17 Sep 2009 03:00:35 +0000

Infinite Liberal Arts

Matthew Battles — Thu, 17 Sep 2009 03:01:59 +0000

I've been a mere lurker at Infinite Summer, the online book club which sprang up to honor the late David Foster Wallace by exploring his magnum opus, Infinite Jest. Thousands of people have participated in a forum that seems to transcend the idea of the "book club" entirely—the result looks more like a crowdsourced, massively parallel postgraduate seminar. But no, that's not it either; trappings of institutional learning like "postgraduate" and "seminar" don't really have a place here. Infinite Jest's complexity, its author's pixillated, autodidactic, logorrhoeic condition, make it very hard to teach. But these same qualities, with its flowing, braided links to film, tennis, fractals, logic, and recovery, as well as a score of other topics, make it an enormously productive imaginal space in which to cultivate the kind of wide-ranging, splintering discussion that is native to the web. I thought about Infinite Summer while reading a couple of recent essays decrying the miserable state of the institutional humanities. In the current issue of the Chronicle Review, Emory English professor Mark Bauerlein decries the state of the academy in the post-theory era. In the September issue of Harper's, meanwhile, Mark Slouka claims that intellectual history is over, and the dismal science won. The liberal arts, he explains, have been ousted from their central place in the academic world, replaced by math and science (with the implacable machinery of economics now driving the operation). I'm sympathetic to the concerns Bauerlein and Slouka raise. But I worry that their visions of the humanities, far from diagnosing a veiled condition, are themselves symptoms of the damage already done. Bauerlein would seem to prefer the professoriat chastened and humbled by the splendors of the commercial and the technological, content to serve as the reduced clerisy of the good and the true. Slouka is rightly disgusted by the transformation of education into a kind of investment bank for "human capital" (the notion that the proper focus of learning is bankable skills is a noxious one)—and yet to redress the slight he would politicize the humanities, holding them up as the balm for a civic crisis. "The humanities . . . are a superb delivery mechanism for what we call democratic values," he writes. But this seems to me to give the game away. And yet now when I think of Infinite Summer, I remember that the liberal arts are at their heart not a profession or a civic medicine but a disposition. The institutions of the life of the mind are in a bad way—and they always have been! I wouldn't have given you two cents for the institutions at any point in the history of civilization. But the life of the mind isn't really about institutions, is it? I know I'm simplifying things; it could be argued that without institutional exposure to the liberal arts, Infinite Summer's far-flung participants would never have undertaken conversation. The Cassandras too have their place. But when I try to conjure a utopia, it looks something like an infinite summer, a succession of flowerings: the trivium and the quadrivium are all there as of old, but they're unafraid of transposing their muse-struck, cosmophillic mien into other keys: grammar turning to code; rhetoric budding into mapping; logic blooming into a kind of reenchantment. Infinite Summer, like other examples of what some are calling the New Liberal Arts or ""Liberal Arts 2.0," offers a glimpse of a self-sustaining humanistic culture beyond the powers and the perils of institutional support. It's a rose-colored vision, I know. And any kind of harvest demands all our careful tending. We need to remember that the liberal arts, as a term, applies not only to a disposition or an ideal but also to a meme—a remarkably successful one, which survived ages upon ages cloaked in the canons of authority and the trappings of tradition. Perhaps we've reached the point where there's nothing left but the cloak, the trappings. Or perhaps buried in the folds, the taste for wonder and wisdom, a sensibility that will endure.

Quatschwatch (3): Words of Power

Joshua Glenn — Thu, 17 Sep 2009 03:27:03 +0000

The New York Times Magazine recently published a cover story about Spike Jonze, whose cultural productions — for two decades, at this point — have hovered uncannily around the edges of the four heimlich dispositions: Highbrow, Lowbrow, Anti-Lowbrow, Anti-Highbrow. So is Jonze nobrow? Or is he hilobrow? It's tough to say. (Same thing goes for his muses, the Beastie Boys.) Middlebrow is ever on the alert for such unheimlich figures. Middlebrow is desperate to suborn Jonze, just as it has already suborned the other so-called American Eccentrics: Coppola, Wes Anderson, David O. Russell, and Alexander Payne. (Paul Thomas Anderson, we think, is still at large.) Now that he's teamed up with newfangled high-middlebrow David Eggers on an adaptation of Maurice Sendak's hilo classic, Where the Wild Things Are, Middlebrow is springing its trap. Keep an eye on Where the Wild Things Are coverage in the middlebrow media in the coming months... it will be educational. Will Jonze — who has escaped Middlebrow's clutches once before, when he and Sofia Coppola split up in 2003 — remain at large? As shown above, in small print, the NYT Magazine is doing its part on behalf of Middlebrow. In fact, it has unleashed one of the twelve High-Middlebrow Words of Power, and in so doing cast a spell to ensnare Jonze once and for all. Wait. You're unfamiliar with "Words of Power," you say? OK, let me explain. The twelve Low-Middlebrow Words of Power are well-known. Rumor has it that in the 1970s, researchers in Duke University's Psychology Department ran a number of experiments in neuro-linguistic programming, and concluded that the following words can beguile, hypnotize, persuade, and command low middlebrows: "You," "Money," "Save," "New," "Easy," "Love," "Discovery," "Results," "Health," "Proven," "Guarantee," and "Free." Low-middlebrow magazines have since evolved these terms: "Wellness," say, instead of "Health." "Guilt-Free" instead of "Easy." You get the idea. But the underlying low-middlebrow disposition remains the same: a semi-hopeful, semi-fatalistic admixture of low-demand spirituality and magical science. The High-Middlebrow Words of Power, however, have never been analyzed! But Hilobrow.com is on the job. We've spotted one of them, tagged and bagged it. Let's take a closer look: Did you spot it? That's right — the word is unlikely. As opposed to Low Middlebrow, High Middlebrow doesn't traffic in luck or fate, or magic dressed up like science; instead, High Middlebrow is realistic-ist. High Middlebrow prides itself on its savviness; though High Middlebrow isn't cynical, exactly. High Middlebrow loves the line attributed to Churchill about how democracy is the worst form of government except all the others that have been tried — it's a semi-cynical, semi-idealistic disposition. The high middlebrow brags that he's an idealist mugged by reality. The word unlikely is an incantatory one for High Middlebrow because it's gemütlich — it expresses a cozy, complacent, altogether unshocking mode of being-surprised. Jonze has surprised and shocked, delighted and amazed for long enough, it seems. Middlebrow is casting its spell on him. Will it work? Will he continue to do the unexpected and amazing? Or will Jonze begin, under Middlebrow's spell, merely to do the unlikely? BONUS: Check out the headline from the back-page essay in the same issue of the NYT Magazine: *** This is the third in a series of posts tracking the course of Quatsch.

Hilo Hero: Yuji Naka

Joe Alterio — Thu, 17 Sep 2009 10:00:06 +0000

Full disclosure: I was a Nintendo kid. The 900-lb. (Donkey Kong) gorilla's advertising in the late Eighties worked on my zygote brain until I just had to have the original NES. A couple of years later, though, a whizzing blue ball jumping around the screen of my friend's TV gave me a sinking feeling: I'd made a terrible mistake. In 1988, YUJI NAKA (born 1965), who'd go on to be the lead programmer of the awe-inspiring Sonic the Hedgehog game, saw what became painfully obvious to Nintendo kids like me only in retrospect: Nintendo's games were a little boring, and so slow. In fact, the beta version of Naka's Sonic was so fast that the Sega brass asked him to slow it down — because the test players were experiencing motion sickness. Naka went on to program other games for Sega, and has since started his own game studio. But nothing else he's done so far has approached the cultural achievement of Sonic. Don't take my word for it, though: use an online simulator to play Super Mario Bros., then immediately play Sonic. I rest my case.

*** Each day, Hilobrow.com pays tribute to one of our favorite high-, low-, no-, or hilobrow heroes on that person's birthday. Click here for more Hilo Hero shout-outs.

New God Middlebrow

Joshua Glenn — Thu, 17 Sep 2009 13:00:43 +0000

High-, low-, no-, and hilobrow members of the New Gods Generation include: Alfred Bester, Charles Bukowski, Charles Mingus, Charlie Parker, Cordwainer Smith, Dean Martin, Dizzy Gillespie, Elizabeth Hardwick, Eric Hobsbawm, Hank Williams, Hugh Kenner, Jack Cole, Jack Kerouac, Jack Kirby, Jackie Gleason, Jane Bowles, John Berryman, Jonas Salk, Joseph Beuys, Juan Garcia Esquivel, Leslie Fiedler, Louis Althusser, Manny Farber, Merce Cunningham, Murray Bookchin, Nelson Mandela, Norman Mailer, Paul Celan, Paul de Man, Ralph Ellison, Raymond Williams, Roald Dahl, Robert Lowell, Robert Motherwell, Roland Barthes, Stan Lee, Stanislaw Lem, Sun Ra, Thelonious Monk, Tove Jansson, Vampira, Walker Percy, Will Elder, and William S. Burroughs. This item is excerpted from yesterday’s essay on the New Gods Generation. [caption id="attachment_6145" align="aligncenter" width="550" caption="The Civilian Conservation Corps, 1933"][/caption] The 1914-23 generation came of age during the Depression, during which time they were kept busy by the Civilian Conservation Corps "getting things done, building things that worked, things that have lasted to this day," as Strauss and Howe admiringly put it. The Tennessee Valley Authority was the handiwork of youthful New Gods. As adults, the 1914-23 generation fought World War II. After the war, they saved American industry, tamed the business cycle, built the suburbs and moved into them. Or so we hear, again and again, in middlebrow paeans to the cohort that shored up the gains of older (Hardboiled) middlebrows. How did Middlebrow inspire a generation to to say in harness so long, and accomplish so much? What persuasive ideology helped prevent the New Gods from kicking against the pricks? [caption id="attachment_6184" align="aligncenter" width="400" caption="Jack LaLanne, real-life strongman"][/caption] One such ideology, it seems to me, was machismo. The New Gods venerated the macho man, and some deluded anti-middlebrows even hailed him as an antiheroic savior of sorts. This generation produced only one president, but it was the macho JFK, who brought the "best and the brightest" into the White House, faced down the Soviet Union, and put a man on the moon. Astronauts Alan Shepard and John Glenn are members of this generation; so is faster-than-sound test pilot Chuck Yeager. Other New Gods who were macho men, actors who played macho men, and novelists who wrote about macho men: Kirk Douglas, Robert Mitchum, Gregory Peck, William Holden, Dean Martin, Frank Sinatra, Jack Palance, Anthony Quinn, Jack Lord, Ernest Borgnine, Telly Savalas, Yul Brynner, Eli Wallach, Charles Bronson, Woody Strode, Montgomery Clift, Charlton Heston, Edmond O'Brien, Norman Mailer, James Jones, James Dickey, James Arness, Rocky Marciano, Jake LaMotta, and honorary NGs Marlon Brando, Alan Ladd, Burt Lancaster, Lee Marvin, and Jesse Owens. Wow! Think of all the violent buddy/caper movies the New Gods made, in the Fifties (1954-63) and Sixties (1964-73): Gunfight at the O.K. Corral (1957: Lancaster, Douglas); The Young Lions (1958: Brando, Clift, Martin); Ocean's Eleven (1960: Sinatra, Martin); The Magnificent Seven (1960: Brynner, Wallach, Bronson); The Guns of Navarone (1961: Peck, Quinn); The Great Escape (1963: Bronson); The Professionals (1966: Marvin, Lancaster, Ryan, Strode, Palance); The Dirty Dozen (1967: Marvin, Borgnine, Bronson, Ryan, Savalas); and The Wild Bunch (1969: Holden, Borgnine, Ryan, O'Brien). The musk of testosterone shrouded the New Gods, making it difficult for them to see — or think — straight. Even the women of the New Gods generation were macho: films and posters featuring "Rosie the Riveter" encouraged women to go to work in support of the war effort. Behold arch-middlebrow Norman Rockwell's vision of Rosie: Speaking of Mailer and JFK, in 1960 the former wrote an overheated Esquire essay about the latter titled "Superman Comes to the Supermarket." America, Mailer claimed, was the land where people still believed in heroes — and it needed a macho hero to rescue it from the triumph of Middlebrow during the Fifties (1954-63).

The film studios threw up their searchlights as the frontier was finally sealed, and the romantic possibilities of the old conquest of land turned into a vertical myth, trapped within the skull, of a new kind of heroic life, each choosing his own archetype of a neo-renaissance man, be it Barrymore, Cagney, Flynn, Bogart, Brando or Sinatra, but it was almost as if there were no peace unless one could fight well, kill well (if always with honor), love well and love many, be cool, be daring, be dashing, be wild, be wily, be resourceful, be a brave gun. And this myth, that each of us was born to be free, to wander, to have adventure and to grow on the waves of the violent, the perfumed, and the unexpected, had a force which could not be tamed no matter how the nation’s regulators — politicians, medicos, policemen, professors, priests, rabbis, ministers, idèologues, psychoanalysts, builders, executives and endless communicators — would brick-in the modern life with hygiene upon sanity, and middle-brow homily over platitude; the myth would not die.

Hilo Hero: Greta Garbo

David Smay — Fri, 18 Sep 2009 10:00:28 +0000

[caption id="attachment_6158" align="aligncenter" width="500" caption="Garbo at 46 — a rare color photo"][/caption] What is it about GRETA GARBO (1905-90) that set her apart from the other great Hollywood beauties — that makes us fetishize her, if a bit uneasily? She wasn't a better actress than Sophia Loren or Ingrid Bergman. She wasn't as lovable as Audrey Hepburn (or Ingrid Bergman). She was no more exotically European than Hedy Lamarr or Marlene Dietrich. I'm not even sure she was more beautiful than Elizabeth Taylor or Ava Gardner. However, Garbo was singular in that she had no bad angles. She's the rebuttal to Bacon's assertion that there is no great beauty without some touch of asymmetry to catch and intrigue us; Garbo's symmetrical features make her inhumanly beautiful. She was as alien as David Bowie in his prime. The private Garbo, however, was by no means inhuman. Though her photo sessions were epic in duration, she was never a diva. Louise Brooks described her as a "tender and charming lover." Her humor was wry, dry, Swedish. And despite her reclusive reputation, Garbo spent her forties, fifties and sixties jetsetting around the world with fabulous friends — and investing early in Rodeo Drive real estate. She left a savvy businesswoman's $20 million estate to her niece. What she left us was more valuable: her illimitable face. Also see the following discussion about Garbo and middlebrows. *** Each day, Hilobrow.com pays tribute to one of our favorite high-, low-, no-, or hilobrow heroes on that person's birthday. Click here for more Hilo Hero shout-outs.

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Matthew Battles — Fri, 18 Sep 2009 12:21:33 +0000

Rockbound

Matthew Battles — Fri, 18 Sep 2009 12:24:36 +0000

I can't decide whether this is evidence of the book's staying power, or a sign that its end is near: to commemorate the fortieth anniversary of the first lunar landing, the art publisher Taschen has released Moonfire: the Epic Journey of Apollo 11, a book of photographs from the mission with excerpts from Norman Mailer's 1970 book Of a Fire on the Moon. Taschen is releasing an edition of 1969 copies, most of which will carry the retail price of one thousand dollars. Twelve copies, however, have been bound with a fragment of a lunar meteorite. Priced individually according to the size of the sample, the rock-bound editions will likely trump Taschen's previous most-expensive book, the Muhammad Ali tribute volume GOAT, copies of which went for five grand apiece. A friend suggested that Goodnight Moon might make a more charming setting for a lunar-rock binding. But Of a Fire on the Moon has a suitably luxurious pedigree; when Mailer sold the book to Little, Brown, he nabbed a then-astronomical million-dollar advance (unlike the moon, we've been back to that figure a few times since). And Mailer ends his book with a lyrical passage about a sample of lunar rock brought down to Earth by the astronauts:

Was she very old, three billion years or more? Yet she was young, she had just been transported here, and there was something young about her... (I) wondered if her craters were the scars of a war which had once allowed the earth to come together in the gathered shatterings of a mighty moon.

It's important to note that Moonfire isn't bound with rocks brought back by astronauts, which are essentially priceless (photographs featured in the pricey tome, by contrast, were taken during the Apollo missions, and thus are NASA images in the public domain). The Taschen rocks are slivers milled from a lunar meteorite, a chunk of rock broken away from the moon by meteor impact, which fell to Earth as a falling star long ago. The supreme irony, of course, is that the moon was born of the Earth. A cataclysmic meteor strike more than three billion years ago likely cleaved away a great portion of the young planet's crust, which formed into the moon through the long ages of its orbit. Since they missed out on the whole "life" business, they have much to tell us about the early history of our planet. But essentially, lunar rocks are only Earth rocks by another name; however astronomical their price on the market, they have only come home. I haven't been able to learn whether any of the twelve rockbound copies of Moonfire have been sold, and if so what prices they have fetched. But there is a glimpse here of a strange future for the book: bespoke volumes bound in precious or impossible-to-source materials, rarefied editions priced for space tourists. But of course, that's how the book started out; much of its latter-day glamor is a survival of the great medieval codices, sumptuous and bejeweled. Like the moon rocks, perhaps the book is destined to go full circle.

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Joshua Glenn — Fri, 18 Sep 2009 22:44:04 +0000

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Joshua Glenn — Fri, 18 Sep 2009 23:10:52 +0000

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Joshua Glenn — Fri, 18 Sep 2009 23:10:53 +0000

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Joshua Glenn — Sat, 19 Sep 2009 01:49:33 +0000

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Joshua Glenn — Sat, 19 Sep 2009 01:50:52 +0000

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Joshua Glenn — Sat, 19 Sep 2009 01:51:39 +0000

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Joshua Glenn — Sat, 19 Sep 2009 05:12:54 +0000

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Joshua Glenn — Sat, 19 Sep 2009 05:14:16 +0000

Hilo Hero: Mama Cass Elliot

Katie Hennessey — Sat, 19 Sep 2009 10:00:08 +0000

Contrary to rumor, MAMA CASS ELLIOT (1941-74) did not choke to death on a sandwich. Officially, she died from “heart failure due to fatty myocardial degeneration due to obesity.” Mama Cass wasn't merely obese, though: she was a planet, around which The Mamas and the Papas orbited like so much space junk. Originally excluded from the band because of her girth, Elliot became its center; her counter-melodies on “California Dreamin’” and “Monday Monday" were... countercultural. Elliot's cathartic charisma and the pure tonal quality of her voice left little room for her petite, pony-tailed counterpart, Michelle Phillips. Soon after recording the Billboard heartbreaker “Dream a Little Dream of Me," Elliot embarked on a solo career, not merely as a singer but as a comedic actress on everything from Hollywood Squares and the Carol Burnett Show to Scooby Doo. Her performance as the Witch Hazel in the movie adaptation of H.R. Pufnstuf, dreamed up (while tripping, perhaps?) by neighbors Sid and Marty Kroft, was a psychedelic show-stopper. Elliot, who died in her sleep after performing sold-out shows at the Palladium in London, referred to herself as “the happiest person in the world." I believe it. *** Each day, Hilobrow.com pays tribute to one of our favorite high-, low-, no-, or hilobrow heroes on that person's birthday. Click here for more Hilo Hero shout-outs.

Hilo Hero: Jay Ward

David Smay — Sun, 20 Sep 2009 10:00:14 +0000

We at Hilobrow.com are all alumni of JAY WARD's (1920-89) Wossamatta U. After being well versed in the lowest form of humor, matriculates may choose from such intriguing course offerings as: Dim Canadian Gallantry, or Leading with your Jaw; Tune in Next Week, or Milking the Serial; and Rapunzel is Broken, or Bruno J. Bettelheim Can Bite My Moose. Certainly some of the papers out of Wossamatta have been controversial ("Squirrel and Moose: Come Back To the Raft, Rocky Honey") but Prof. Ward's work erases the entirely imaginary distinction between advertising and media commentary. "Watch me pull a career out of my hat that converts Cold War paranoia into slapstick, undermines fustian history, and creates a generation of skeptical wisenheimers." "But that trick never works." "This time for sure!" *** Each day, Hilobrow.com pays tribute to one of our favorite high-, low-, no-, or hilobrow heroes on that person's birthday. Click here for more Hilo Hero shout-outs.

Winds of Magic (2): The Real Peter Pan

James Parker — Sun, 20 Sep 2009 21:00:40 +0000

On January 16, 2004, outside the California courthouse where he had just been arraigned on seven counts of child molestation and two counts of administering an "intoxicating agent with intent to commit a felony," Michael Jackson climbed up onto the roof of his SUV and struck a pose. It wasn't a pop pose — one of his freeze-framed, blast-lit snarls or crotch-grabs. Nor was it a pose from his life as a global celebrity — the veiled figure waving faintly from limousines, balconies, and departing ambulances. This pose was strange and statue-like, addressing itself apparently to history, or to memory: the chin was raised, the right arm lifted high, the open right hand extended in a gesture that mingled defiant self-acclamation with a commanding, beckoning wave. Had anyone outside the courthouse ever passed an afternoon in London's Kensington Gardens, and stood before a certain bronze figure by Sir George Frampton, the pose, in all its boyish sternness, would have been familiar. At this most ruinous moment in his life, Michael Jackson was once again invoking the dazzling, unshamable spirit of Peter Pan. Michael and Peter go way back. The Peter Pan theme has been woven, with what in retrospect looks like considerable care and calculation, into the fabric of the Jackson image. His oft-reported dreams of flying, the wispy infantilism in interviews, his famous "stolen childhood," the endless talk of the "magic" of children, and of course Neverland, his 2,700-acre ranch near Santa Barbara with its carousels and private zoo — in the context of his current difficulties, these items make up what might be called his aesthetic alibi. In his 1991 biography Michael Jackson: The Magic and The Madness, J. Randy Taraborrelli reports a conversation that took place in the early ’80s between Jackson and Jane Fonda. The two stars were discussing "what kind of film property would be best for Michael" when Fonda suggested Peter Pan, a project that both Steven Spielberg and Francis Ford Coppola were then considering. "Tears," writes Taraborrelli, "began to well in Michael's eyes. He wanted to know why she suggested that character. She told him that, in her mind's eye, he really was Peter Pan, the symbol of youth, joy, and freedom. Michael started to cry. 'You know, all over the walls of my room are pictures of Peter Pan. I totally identify with Peter Pan,' he said, wiping his eyes, 'the lost boy of Never-Never Land.'" Myths have their own life, and the younger the myth the more trouble it can get into. Peter Pan is only a hundred years old. When the curtain came down on the first performance of Peter Pan, or The Boy Who Wouldn't Grow Up at the Duke of York's Theatre on December 27, 1904, the mostly adult audience went wild. Within days the play was a Star Wars-like sensation and Peter, played with blazing puerility by Nina Boucicault, had entered the permanent cosmology of childhood. He was sharp, daring, vicious, unstoppably creative. That Michael Jackson's simpering redaction represents a considerable distortion of the original is beside the point. In his weirdness and calculation the King of Pop may have reached deeper inside the myth than anyone else would care to, because the truth is that the same tensions and troubles that attend Peter's latest appearance, on the roof of Jackson's SUV, were present at his birth. J.M. Barrie, the tiny and solemn-eyed Scotsman who wrote the play, was quite as complex and arresting a figure as Michael Jackson. Born in 1860, Barrie was a household name by the time he reached his mid-30s; his distinctively forked literary style, sharp but whimsical, pithy yet somehow nostalgic, was developed through early efforts in journalism and then put to hugely commercial use in a string of plays and novels. Like Jackson he was slight, boyish, soft-spoken, unhappy. Like Jackson, too, he was childless — his marriage, which ended in divorce, appears to have been unconsummated — and he gravitated toward other people's children, particularly boys. Genius, he once wrote, "is the ability to be a boy again at will." Walking his enormous dog Porthos through Kensington Gardens in the 1890s, Barrie met and befriended a bright and forward 4-year-old named George Llewelyn Davies, who was there with his younger brother Jack and their nanny. George was wearing a red tam-o'-shanter; for Barrie, it was love at first sight. Barrie, Porthos, and the boys would meet regularly, and the spontaneous, compulsive, extraordinary fabulating began. Later he would stew up his feelings in a 1902 novel titled The Little White Bird, in which George becomes "David," Barrie becomes "Captain W" (a childless writer), but Porthos, with a St. Bernard's faithfulness, remains Porthos. David, wrote Barrie, "strikes a hundred gallant poses in a day, and when he tumbles, which is often, he comes to the ground like a Greek God." It was as nothing for Barrie to install himself in the boys' affections; his child-friends were numerous, and by now he had quite an arsenal of seduction. There was his ear-wriggling and what he called his "famous manipulation of the eyebrows," one going up and one going down "like two buckets in a well." There was also his habit of silence, the mysterious brooding pauses that so disconcerted adults but which children apparently found quite companionable. And above all there was his huge instinct for make-believe. George and Jack, and later their brothers Peter, Michael, and Nico, became delightedly embroiled in Barrie's ghost-world, a parallel-universe Kensington Gardens in which babies flew from their prams like birds and children who stayed in the Gardens after lockup were buried by an eager, ambiguous sprite named Peter Pan, always "ready with his spade." By the time he finally met the boys' parents, the glamourous Sylvia and Arthur Llewelyn Davies, at a high-society dinner party, Barrie was part of the family's dreamlife: They had no choice but to accept him. Soon he was a regular at their house at 31 Kensington Park Gardens. And the closer he drew to the boys, the higher his own imaginative temperature ran, as in this passage from The Little White Bird:

"Why, David," said I, sitting up, "do you want to come into my bed?"

"Mother said I wasn't to want it unless you wanted it first," he squeaked.

"It is what I have been wanting the whole time", said I, and then without more ado the little white figure rose and flung itself at me. For the rest of the night he lay on me and across me, and sometimes his feet were at the bottom of the bed and sometimes on the pillow, but he always retained possession of my finger, and occasionally he woke me to say that he was sleeping with me. I had not a good night. I lay thinking.

Barrie wrote wittily, on occasion satirically, but also straight from the roots of his brain, in floods of untempered fantasy. The Little White Bird was a smash hit in its day, a sentimental triumph whose success had the unlooked-for effect of driving Barrie from Kensington Gardens, so avidly was he pursued there by mothers who had read the book. But today the novel has a murky, somnambulist feel, as if its author were grappling unsuccessfully with an enthrallment, a bad dream, something to which he cannot find the key. The formula, as it were, still eluded him. [caption id="attachment_6072" align="aligncenter" width="500" caption="The Llewelyn Davies boys"][/caption] A post-Freudian age would come to regard Victorian spellbinders like Barrie and Lewis Carroll through narrowed eyes; surely this overheated attentiveness to children could not be without taint. And indeed the image of Carroll, obsessed photographer of little girls, writing to the mother of a potential subject to enquire "what is the minimum amount of dress in which you are willing to have her taken" is hard to shake. Was Barrie a pedophile? Nico Llewelyn Davies, youngest of the boys, swore in his old age to a biographer that he had "never heard one word or saw one glimmer of anything approaching homosexuality or pedophilia: Had he had either of these leanings in however slight a symptom I would have been aware." Whatever the sexual component may have been in Barrie's lifelong attachment to the boys, and whatever its strength, he never acted on it. Instead, with a celibate's tremendous energy and the half-conscious cunning of the artist, he displaced it. Peter Pan had already appeared in The Little White Bird, as part of a story told to "David," but after an ecstatic pirate-and-redskin-filled summer holiday with the Llewelyn Davies boys Barrie began work on a play with Peter as the central character. The sublimation was total, and totally purifying. The hard, golden, irreducible figure of Peter Pan — "gay and heartless," waving his dagger and tooting idly on his pipes, gnashing the "little pearls" of his baby teeth and bellowing orders in his "captain voice" — is the quintessence of Barrie's child-centered dreaming. Peter's cruelty counters the ooze of Barrie's sentimentality, his selfishness punctures Barrie's whimsy. He is not a symptom. He is the cure. Michael Jackson, quite obviously, is not Peter Pan, nor is he J.M. Barrie. The fact that Jackson named his home, now perhaps a crime scene, after Peter's island of fantasy-fulfilment produces ironies almost too barbarous to comment upon. Outside, the gilded lawns and the gambolling chimps; inside, the private room in its force-field of surveillance, guarded by floor-to-ceiling electric eyes, where Jackson conducts his "sleepovers." Barrie would never have whispered to a TV interviewer that "children are the face of God": He knew children too well for that. Barrie even proclaimed himself disappointed with the Kensington Gardens statue — which he had commissioned and paid for — because it failed to "show the Devil in Peter." But Barrie in his wildest flights could not have conceived of Michael Jackson — the black man whose skin turned white, the zillionaire changeling, the demonically powerful dancer, the alleged child molester who in 1993 performed at the Super Bowl halftime show, watched by over 120 million people, surrounded by 3,000 children singing "Heal The World." His rise was phenomenal, unbelievable. Guilty or not, his fall will be Luciferian. *** Originally published by the Boston Globe, July 2005. From 2004-08, our friend and colleague James Parker, currently a contributing editor at The Atlantic, was a culture critic for the Boston Globe's Ideas section and for Boston's alt-weekly, The Phoenix. Hilobrow.com has curated a collection of Parker's writings from this period. This installment is the second in a series of ten.

Hilo Hero: Leonard Cohen

Annie Nocenti — Mon, 21 Sep 2009 10:00:10 +0000

When LEONARD COHEN (born 1934) sings, it is at once a whisper, a prayer, a confession, a chant, a lullaby, a benediction in the ear. He has misplaced a secret. He yearns to tell us, but can’t. He keeps Boogie Street and an empty room nestled deep in his pockets where he can always get to them: “The ponies run, the girls are young, the odds are there to beat.” He moves at his own linger, paced by a honeyed metronome: “Give me back my broken night; my mirrored room, my secret life.” A self-proclaimed ladies’ man ("Oh let me see your beauty when the witnesses are gone"), Cohen spent five years in a Zen monastery (“Like pebbles in a bag, the monks polish one another,” he told NPR) only to have his manager steal his worldly goods. “It’s enough to put a dent in your mood,” he said — a survivor’s humor. His spiritual booziness bridges the sacred and the street. He is a noir cowboy, lazy in the saddle; his voice deepens every year. *** Each day, Hilobrow.com pays tribute to one of our favorite high-, low-, no-, or hilobrow heroes on that person's birthday. Click here for more Hilo Hero shout-outs.

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Joshua Glenn — Mon, 21 Sep 2009 12:01:05 +0000

LOS ANGELES- 1977- 1978: Joan Jett of The Runaways on Hollywood Blvd in Los Angeles, California. (Photos by Brad Elterman/BuzzFoto/FilmMagic) *** Local Caption *** Joan Jett

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Joshua Glenn — Mon, 21 Sep 2009 12:01:32 +0000

LOS ANGELES- 1977- 1978: Joan Jett of The Runaways on Hollywood Blvd in Los Angeles, California. (Photos by Brad Elterman/BuzzFoto/FilmMagic) *** Local Caption *** Joan Jett

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Joshua Glenn — Mon, 21 Sep 2009 12:01:46 +0000

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Joshua Glenn — Mon, 21 Sep 2009 13:15:00 +0000

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Joshua Glenn — Mon, 21 Sep 2009 13:48:01 +0000

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Joshua Glenn — Mon, 21 Sep 2009 13:52:54 +0000

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Joshua Glenn — Mon, 21 Sep 2009 13:53:23 +0000

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Joshua Glenn — Mon, 21 Sep 2009 13:56:55 +0000

The New Skrullicism

Joshua Glenn — Mon, 21 Sep 2009 13:59:14 +0000

When John Holbo — an assistant professor of Philosophy at the National University of Singapore, and impresario of The Valve — jokingly introduced the world to The New Skrullicism, an invented field of literary criticism whose practitioners are dedicated to outing Skrulls masquerading as characters in great works of literature, I took it seriously. (Referencing Hamlet, for example, Holbo suggests that Gertrude's lament concerning her "too much changed son," is "a clear reference to the protagonist's shape-changing abilities.") If such a thing as hilobrow lit crit were remotely possible, I decided, this is precisely what it would look like: ’pataphysics for the humanities. That was two years ago, but I keep running across Skrulls in literature. So I thought I'd reprint a version of the post that I published, at the time, on Brainiac (the Boston Globe Ideas section's blog), and ask Hilobrow.com readers to chime in with more examples. *** FOOTNOTES TO JOHN HOLBO'S "NEW SKRULLICISM" ESSAY * The Skrulls are militaristic, imperialistic, Earth-invading, shapeshifting humanoid aliens from the planet Skrullos, in the Andromeda Galaxy. Dreamed up by Stan Lee and Jack Kirby, they were introduced in the 2d issue of Fantastic Four, in January 1962. [caption id="attachment_6435" align="aligncenter" width="550" caption="Fantastic Four, no. 2 (1962)"]Fantastic Four, no. 2 (1962)" title="fantasticfour-skrull-550" width="550" height="688" class="size-full wp-image-6435" />[/caption] * The New Avengers is a Marvel comic book series launched in 2004. Written by Brian Michael Bendis, it concerns the adventures of a group of superheroes — some of whom were members of the original Avengers — whose number currently includes Doctor Strange, Echo, Iron Fist, Luke Cage, Hawkeye (as Ronin), Spider-Man, Spider-Woman, and Wolverine. In recent issues, they've been battling a mystical ninja assassin group called The Hand, whose leader at the moment is Elektra. * In New Avengers #31 (June 13, 2007), whose last page is billed as "the most important last page of any Marvel comic this year," it was revealed that Elektra was, in fact, a Skrull masquerading as Elektra. In subsequent issues, an atmosphere of paranoia has descended upon the New Avengers, who realize that they may have been infiltrated, too. According to Wikipedia: "Bendis has stated in interviews that the Skrull revelation is only the start of a wider story arc that indicates many Marvel heroes are actually Skrulls." Creepy! *** SKRULLS I'VE DISCOVERED IN LITERATURE. SO FAR. * Jake Blount, the itinerant social reformer with a penchant for violence, in Carson McCullers' The Heart is a Lonely Hunter: “There were many things about the fellow that seemed contrary. His head was very large and well-shaped, but his neck was soft and slender a boy’s. The mustache looked false, as if it had been stuck on for a costume party and would fall off if he talked too fast. It made him seem almost middle-aged, although his face with its high, smooth forehead and wide-open eyes was young…. There was something very funny about the man, yet at the same time another feeling would not let you laugh.” (Another feeling... warning you that Blount is a Skrull.) * "OBERON: And, gentle Puck, take this transformed scalp/From off the head of this Athenian swain..." * "MARK ANTONY: My good knave Eros, now thy captain is/Even such a body: here I am Antony:/Yet cannot hold this visible shape, my knave." * "FALSTAFF: ... I will tell/you: he beat me grievously, in the shape of a/woman; for in the shape of man, Master Brook, I fear/not Goliath..." * Buck Mulligan's "shaking gurgling face," in James Joyce's Ulysses; or the way that Joyce has Mulligan "put on a blithe broadly smiling face." (Why phrase it that way?) * "Daisy took her face in her hands, as if feeling its lovely shape..." — F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby * In Steinbeck's Of Mice and Men, the violent Lennie is described as “shapeless of face.” * My friend Jeff Severs draws attention to T.S. Eliot's 1917 poem "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock": “There will be time, there will be time/To prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet.” * What about Led Zeppelin ("Celebration"): "Her face is cracked from smiling, all the fears that she's been hiding,/And it seems pretty soon everybody's gonna know." * The title character of Thomas Mann's Confessions of Felix Krull, Confidence Man. Obviously.

The Best Book Ever

Matthew Battles — Mon, 21 Sep 2009 14:57:58 +0000

In the 1990s, the artists Komar and Melamid began polling art lovers to discover the world's ideal painting. I'm curious to learn whether we can use similar methods to discover the ideal book. The short survey below, which I put up over the weekend at library ad infinitum, is a start. The resulting data, I hope, will yield a picture of the ideal book sufficient to save the publishing industry as we know it. Check back or subscribe for the full report, to be delivered at a date to be determined. Thanks for contributing! Loading...

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Matthew Battles — Mon, 21 Sep 2009 15:00:08 +0000

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Matthew Battles — Mon, 21 Sep 2009 15:09:02 +0000

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Joshua Glenn — Mon, 21 Sep 2009 20:12:58 +0000

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Joshua Glenn — Mon, 21 Sep 2009 20:13:40 +0000

Middlebrow Bestsellers — this week

Joshua Glenn — Mon, 21 Sep 2009 20:14:24 +0000

A service that we may or may not continue to offer. Thanks to our friends at the New York Times for doing the primary research. 1) THREE CUPS OF TEA, by Greg Mortenson and David Oliver Relin. (Penguin, $15.) A former climber builds schools in villages in Pakistan and Afghanistan. Sentimental, uplifting, a favorite gift from compassionate conservatives to their liberal undergrad children. 2) FREAKONOMICS, by Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner. (Harper Perennial, $15.99.) A scholar and a journalist apply economic theory to nearly everything. Magical science! 3) JULIE & JULIA, by Julie Powell. (Back Bay/Little, Brown, $14.99;, Little, Brown, $7.99.) A memoir of trying every recipe in Mastering the Art of French Cooking Memoir. Cooking. Ur-middlebrow Nora Ephron directed the movie. Three strikes and you're out! NB: MY LIFE IN FRANCE, by Julia Child with Alex Prud’homme, currently #2 on the NYT paperback nonfiction bestseller list, is not middlebrow. 4) THE GLASS CASTLE, by Jeannette Walls. (Scribner, $15.) The author recalls a bizarre childhood during which she and her siblings moved constantly. If you've read Bill Mauldin's terrific autobiography, A Sort of a Saga (1949), you can't possibly have much patience with this sort of thing. Please see my blog post on "premature biographication." 5) THE TIPPING POINT, by Malcolm Gladwell. (Back Bay/Little, Brown, $14.95.) A study of social epidemics, otherwise known as fads. Magical science! 6) WHEN YOU ARE ENGULFED IN FLAMES, by David Sedaris. (Back Bay/Little, Brown, $15.99.) Humor essays on middle age, mortality, and giving up smoking. We have nothing against bullshit... as long as it's amusing. But we do have something against QUATSCH. 7) BLINK, by Malcolm Gladwell. (Back Bay/Little, Brown, $15.99.) Instinct in the workings of the mind. Magical science! 8 ) 90 MINUTES IN HEAVEN, by Don Piper with Cecil Murphey. (Revell, $12.99.) A minister on the otherworldly experience he had after an accident. Don't get us started on this stuff. 9) EAT, PRAY, LOVE, by Elizabeth Gilbert. (Penguin, $15.) A writer’s yearlong journey in search of self takes her to Italy, India, and Indonesia. Memoir. Cooking/Eating. Exotic Tourism. Strike three! 10) SWAY, by Ori Brafman and Rom Brafman (Broadway, $14). About the psychological forces that lead us to disregard facts or logic and behave in surprisingly irrational ways. Magical science!

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Joshua Glenn — Mon, 21 Sep 2009 21:10:56 +0000

Ambivalent about New Age?

Joshua Glenn — Mon, 21 Sep 2009 21:16:27 +0000

Hilobrow is superficially similar, as we've noted, to Middlebrow. So Hilobrow despises Middlebrow for the same reason that idlers detest slackers, and punks detest rockists: we're afraid that we're really just like them. No wonder, then, that hilo types are ambivalent — not apathetic, but torn in opposing directions — about New Age. "At its origins, New Age was about expanding consciousness to cosmic range, integrating humanity with nature at its vastest and most awesome," Camille Paglia wrote in Salon, once. "Alas, today's New Age has shrunk down to pampering the wounded 'inner child,' yet another in the endless American parade of victims." This statement might mark Paglia as a true highbrow — i.e., because she digs Lowbrow and despises Middlebrow. But Paglia's disposition is more complicated, less heimlich, than that. Whether we like it (or her) or not, it's possible that she's a hilobrow. The same can be said of Jeanette Winterson, who — writing in the NYT Book Review, yesterday — sounds an ambivalent note about a fictional New Age cult in Margaret Atwood's new novel, The Year of the Flood.

The Waterless Flood has long been predicted by God’s Gardeners, a back-to-nature cult founded by Adam One. Its members live simply and organically, sing terrible hymns, have no dress sense and peddle a bolted-together theology, difficult to think about if you think at all. With values diametrically opposed to those of the ruling CorpSEcorps, the Gardeners aren’t “the answer,” but at least they’ve asked enough questions to avoid a life of endless shopping and face-lifts.

Expanding consciousness to cosmic range — yes! Integrating humanity with nature at its vastest and most awesome — yes! Pampering the wounded inner child — no! Values diametrically opposed to those of the mainstream — yes! Asking enough questions — yes! Bolted-together theology — no! (“Difficult to think about if you think at all": good line.) What to make, then, of "Seeing Yourself in Their Light," the lead story in yesterday's NYT Fashion and Style section (illustration at top)? Of the New Gurus, "young women who are vegetarian, well versed in self-help and New Age spirituality, and who are finding a way to make a living preaching to eager audiences, mostly female"? Are we ambivalent about them, readers? We'd like to hear from you. Post your comments about the NYT story, and New Age, below.

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Joshua Glenn — Tue, 22 Sep 2009 12:20:31 +0000

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Joshua Glenn — Tue, 22 Sep 2009 12:21:44 +0000

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Joshua Glenn — Tue, 22 Sep 2009 12:31:03 +0000

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Joshua Glenn — Tue, 22 Sep 2009 12:57:26 +0000

Hilo Hero: Joan Jett

Lynn Peril — Tue, 22 Sep 2009 13:00:59 +0000

[caption id="attachment_6397" align="aligncenter" width="487" caption="Joan Jett 1977"][/caption] The time: 1977. The place: the hinterlands of Wisconsin. My friend Jacqué (pronounced “Jackie,” of course) and I are huddled together in her smoked-mirror-tiled bedroom listening to Queens of Noise, an album by all-girl band The Runaways. While I love their single, “Cherry Bomb,” I really wish we were listening to the Ramones’ newly released Rocket to Russia because even though I’m 16 and so are the Runaways, more or less, I can’t relate to either Cherie Currie’s sexy come-on tone or her lingerie get-up. But the following year, when I see pictures in Creem of guitarist/lyricist JOAN JETT (born 1958) bonding with Cheetah Chrome of The Dead Boys (on The Runaways’ first European tour), I am drawn to her. She is as clearly as interested in the burgeoning punk rock scene as I am; that year, she recorded with Steve Jones and Paul Cook of The Sex Pistols. Where Cherie Currie is blonde and girly, Joan is dark and tough — sexy, but without a shred of vulnerability. Later, her solo career would be a tribute to DIY independence — before her multi-platinum stardom, Jett and her manager sold her first LP out of the back of a car. Still touring today, Jett is a black-leather beacon in a world where lip-synching and product tie-ins all too often pass for real rock'n'roll. *** Each day, Hilobrow.com pays tribute to one of our favorite high-, low-, no-, or hilobrow heroes on that person's birthday. Click here for more Hilo Hero shout-outs.

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Joshua Glenn — Tue, 22 Sep 2009 13:08:10 +0000

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Joshua Glenn — Tue, 22 Sep 2009 14:39:13 +0000

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Joshua Glenn — Tue, 22 Sep 2009 14:40:37 +0000

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Joshua Glenn — Tue, 22 Sep 2009 16:40:16 +0000

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Joshua Glenn — Tue, 22 Sep 2009 16:41:14 +0000

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Joshua Glenn — Tue, 22 Sep 2009 16:44:27 +0000

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Joshua Glenn — Tue, 22 Sep 2009 17:13:20 +0000

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Joshua Glenn — Tue, 22 Sep 2009 17:13:48 +0000

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Joshua Glenn — Tue, 22 Sep 2009 19:49:02 +0000

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Joshua Glenn — Tue, 22 Sep 2009 19:51:51 +0000

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Joshua Glenn — Tue, 22 Sep 2009 20:07:44 +0000

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Joshua Glenn — Tue, 22 Sep 2009 21:18:23 +0000

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Joshua Glenn — Tue, 22 Sep 2009 21:32:45 +0000

Hilo Hero: John Coltrane

Patrick Cates — Wed, 23 Sep 2009 10:00:53 +0000

Until 1964, JOHN COLTRANE (1926-67) was a virtuoso, blasting out bebop as wing-man to the likes of Miles Davis and Thelonious Monk, and later leading his own hard bop lineups, where he is probably most famous for deconstructing sugar-coated classics like "My Favorite Things" and "Chim Chim Cher-ee." But beginning with Ascension in ’65, and continuing with Om, Meditations, and other exploratory albums, Coltrane stretched out his arms and, bathed in a heavenly glow, launched himself upwards in search of a different plane, one where music could be the "whole expression of one's being." He left many jazz fans behind, but this metaphysical act made him so much more than a great saxophonist and composer. In the frenetic mash of these recordings, against a primal rumble of bass and drums and a mid-register wall of piano (and whatever other instruments may have been ushered into the studio), his saxophone becomes the Coltranograph — a precision piece of medical apparatus that charts, in painful detail, the real-time emotional and spiritual state of Coltrane's heart and head. Listening to the impossible runs and unpredictable chord sequences, the spine-chilling screeches and winsome wails, the punctuation of pause and breath, you begin to believe in something, anything, that exists beyond the real.

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Joshua Glenn — Wed, 23 Sep 2009 11:25:31 +0000

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Joshua Glenn — Wed, 23 Sep 2009 11:26:30 +0000

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Joshua Glenn — Wed, 23 Sep 2009 11:47:03 +0000

Generations (9): Postmodernists

Joshua Glenn — Wed, 23 Sep 2009 12:00:42 +0000

Members of the generational cohort born from 1924-33 were in their teens and 20s during the Forties (1944-53, not to be confused with the the 1940s), and in their 20s and 30s during the Fifties (1954-63). Though this cohort is easily distinguished from their immediate juniors (born 1934-43), the influential generational periodizers William Strauss and Neil Howe have lumped the two distinct cohorts together and dismissively named their own awkward construct the “Silent Generation” (1925-42, a timespan that — despite its insane length — closely corresponds to my periodization scheme.) Why "silent"? Because after two noisily ideological, discourse-dominating, middlebrow-ized generations (the Partisans, the New Gods), the Postmodernists' relative imperviousness to Middlebrow, their deep skepticism about its discourse, must have made Middlebrow very nervous. In a November 1951 story, Time Magazine, Middlebrow's propaganda machine, opined: "The most startling fact about the younger generation is its silence. With some rare exceptions, youth is nowhere near the rostrum. By comparison with the Flaming Youth of their fathers & mothers, today's younger generation is a still, small flame. It does not issue manifestoes, make speeches or carry posters." It's impossible to read this sort of thing as a lament — why would Time want American youth to rebel? Instead, we should hear in such statements the tone of a complacent, if slightly apprehensive plantation overseer: "It's quiet... too quiet." Time tips its hand when the story suggests why the youth of 1951 (members of the Postmodernist cohort were between 18 and 27, at the time) might feel stifled:

The facts are that the U.S. is a highly organized society, must be, and will get more rather than less organized; that the big corporation is here to stay (and is a progressive instrument of U.S. capitalism). What is discouraging to some observers is not so much that youth has accepted life within the well-padded structure of organized society and big corporations, but that it seems to have relatively little ambition to do any of society's organizing.

In other words, the Partisans and New Gods built an invisible prison, under Middlebrow's direction — so why won't the Postmodernists play along? Why are they acting sullen and resentful, or merely passive and browbeaten? "Never had American youth been so withdrawn, cautious, unimaginative, indifferent, unadventurous — and silent," William Manchester, the gung-ho New God historian, recounted in 1974. Perhaps it's because the Postmodernist cohort were able to perceive, however dimly, the bars of their invisible prison. Theirs was a prisoner's sullen or passive silence. [caption id="attachment_6514" align="aligncenter" width="393" caption="The issue of Time Magazine that introduced the so-called Silents"][/caption] High-, low-, no-, and hilobrow members of the Postmodernist Generation include: Agnès Varda, Alex Toth, Alison Lurie, Allen Ginsberg, Andrei Tarkovsky, Andy Warhol, Anton LaVey, Charles Portis, Charles Taylor, Christopher Lasch, Chuck Barris, Chuck Berry, Claes Oldenburg, Clifford Geertz, Donald Barthelme, E.L. Doctorow, Ed Wood, Edward Abbey, Félix Guattari, Flannery O'Connor, François Truffaut, Frank Gehry, Frantz Fanon, George Maciunas, George Steiner, Gilles Deleuze, Guy Debord, Harold Bloom, Harvey Kurtzman, Hilary Putnam, Ivan Illich, J. G. Ballard, J. Hillis Miller, J.P. Donleavy, Jack Davis, Jacques Derrida, James Brown, Jasper Johns, Jean Baudrillard, Jean-François Lyotard, Jean-Luc Godard, Jerry Lewis, John Ashbery, John Barth, John Cassavetes, John Coltrane, Johnny Cash, Jürgen Habermas, Kenneth Anger, Lenny Bruce, Little Richard, Luce Irigaray, Martin Luther King Jr., Maurice Sendak, Michel Foucault, Miles Davis, Nam June Paik, Noam Chomsky, Ornette Coleman, Paul K. Feyerabend, Paul Krassner, Paul Virilio, Peter Sellers, Philip K. Dick, Philip Roth, Pierre Bourdieu, Richard Rorty, Robert Altman, Robert Rauschenberg, Robert Venturi, Roger Corman, Roman Polanski, Screamin' Jay Hawkins, Sergio Leone, Shel Silverstein, Susan Sontag, Sylvia Plath, Ted Hughes, Terry Southern, Umberto Eco, Ursula K. Le Guin, Wally Wood, and William Sloane Coffin. *** A reminder of my generational periodization scheme: 1844-53: [Progressive Generation] Prometheans 1854-63: [Progressive, Missionary Generations] Plutonians 1864-73: [Missionary Generation] Anarcho-Symbolists 1874-83: [Missionary Generation] Psychonauts 1884-93: [Lost Generation] Modernists 1894-1903: [Lost, Greatest/GI Generations] Hardboileds 1904-13: [Greatest/GI Generation] Partisans 1914-23: [Greatest/GI Generation] New Gods 1924-33: [Silent Generation] Postmodernists 1934-43: [Silent Generation] Anti-Anti-Utopians 1944-53: Boomers 1954-63: [Boomers, Late Boomers, Post-Boomers, Generation Jones] OGXers 1964-73: [Generation X, Thirteenth Generation] Constructivists 1974-83: [Generations X, Y] Revivalists 1984-93: [Millennial Generation] Throwbacks 1994-2003: [Millennial Generation] TBA *** The Postmodernist cohort came of age during the early Cold War era. The Soviet dominance over eastern Europe and the threat of apocalyptic nuclear war made it an anxious time; but during the Forties and Fifties, High Middlebrow — working closely with Highbrow (for example, the collaboration between the high-middlebrow American Congress for Cultural Freedom and the highbrow Congress for Cultural Freedom, both of which were funded by the CIA) — successfully encouraged most Westerners to keep the faith in fixed, universal categories, and in certainty. The most interesting figures of the 1924-33 cohort would diagnose and articulate a new sociocultural condition: one in which fixed, universal categories and certainty were troubled and replaced by difference, process, anomaly. An astonishing number of philosophers, scientists, and critics born from 1924-33 — including Jean-François Lyotard, Paul K. Feyerabend, Benoit Mandelbrot, Michel Foucault, Paul Baran, Clifford Geertz, Hilary Putnam, Jacques Derrida, Jean Baudrillard, Pierre Bourdieu, Luce Irigaray, Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari, Michel de Certeau, Louis Marin, Christian Metz, Guy Debord, Hélène Cixous, Umberto Eco, Paul Virilio, J. Hillis Miller, Geoffrey Hartman, and Richard Rorty — argued against scientific rationality and unitary theories of truth and progress; instead, they emphasized the ambivalence, indeterminacy, and undecidability of things. Lyotard, who was fiercely critical of many of the "universalist" claims of the Enlightenment, named a persistent opposition to universals, meta-narratives, and generality the "postmodern condition"... hence the moniker of this generation. NB: Susan Sontag may be an honorary Anti-Anti-Utopian. Meanwhile, the majority of those authors who pioneered what has been called "postmodern" fiction were also born from 1924-33: John Barth, Donald Barthelme, Robert Coover, William Gass, John Hawkes, Gilbert Sorrentino, Thomas Bernhard, J.G. Ballard, Philip K. Dick, E.L. Doctorow, Milan Kundera, Manuel Puig, plus honorary Postmodernists Italo Calvino, William Gaddis, and Kurt Vonnegut. As a group, postmodern authors discovered and celebrated the eclecticism and hybridity lurking just beneath the modernist illusion of conceptual unity and institutional integrity. In their writings we find, e.g., the author as character; plots which are self-contradicting or which blur reality and fiction; form and language being disrupted or played with; and fiction that overtly references other fictional works. Only a diehard agent of Middlebrow could fail to be convinced by the preceding paragraphs! The 1924-33 cohort is a distinct and well-defined one. Even non-postmodern members of the Postmodernist Generation grew up in a world in which two world wars, the Holocaust, the Stalinist Gulag, and Hiroshima demonstrated the carnage and destruction that the modernist rhetoric of progress is capable of creating. If their elders (the Partisans, the New Gods) abandoned utopianism (i.e., the dream of a momentous, rational, all-encompassing change in the human condition, achieved through the revolutionary transformation of society), then Postmodernists went further, and grew skeptical about Highbrow's either/or (utopian) claim that Modernity and the Enlightenment are archetypes of unmitigated progress. The most popular non-postmodern authors from this generation — John Updike, Toni Morrison, and Cormac McCarthy — agree with their postmodern peers that something's gone awry with the technologically advanced, prosperous, contented, triumphalist liberal democracy that is postwar America; they lack (and mock/mourn) the virile can-do spirit of the New Gods; and their protagonists are beset with anxiety-provoking tensions, uncertainties, and paradoxes that can never be resolved. NB: Philip Roth (whose The Counterlife is considered postmodern) is an honorary Anti-Anti-Utopian. *** A generation whose most interesting members struggled to destabilize and de-essentialize all orthodoxies might certainly look "silent" when compared with the Partisans and New Gods. From the Seventies onward, Postmodernists would be tempted by High Middlebrow's compelling compromise: the neoconservative both/and notion that Modernity and Enlightenment aren't perfect, but they're less imperfect than the alternatives. Nobrow offered the neither/nor consolations of irony, absurdism, and a kind of irreligious apocalypticism. Hilobrow insisted on something altogether more uncanny and eccentric: progressive, even utopian ideals and irony, absurdism, apocalypticism. Impossible! Nevertheless. The "silence" of these elder members of the so-called Silent Generation is the strategic silence of sappers and miners, undermining the enemy's fortress; or of prisoners tunneling their way to freedom. No coincidence: The Great Escape's Steve McQueen, James Garner, James Coburn, and David McCallum; Escape from Alcatraz's Clint Eastwood; The Fugitive's David Janssen; and The Prisoner's Patrick McGoohan are all Postmodernists. Members of this cohort are jailbreak artists of one kind or another. I don't find Strauss and Howe's justification for their identification of a "Silent Generation" convincing, but all too many journalists and historians do. During the most recent presidential campaign, New York Times Book Review editor Sam Tanenhaus argued in the NYT's Week in Review section that an understanding of "generational distinctions" explains why no American born in the 1930s has been elected president. (This is a key point that Strauss and Howe make in their 1991 book, Generations: members of the so-called Silent Generation make good facilitators, technocrats, and top presidential aides — but not presidents.) It might be, Tanenhaus writes, that "Americans born in the 1930s lack the particular qualities we look for in our national leaders" — because "they were the 'silent generation,' content to be guided by their elders." (As noted elsewhere in this post, I disagree with that notion.) Tanenhaus wanted to argue that John McCain (born 1936) does not exhibit the same weaknesses that the other so-called Silents who've mounted presidential campaigns — Ted Kennedy, Mike Dukakis — have supposedly exhibited. Unlike these uninspired and uninspiring Democrats, Tanenhaus insists, the Republican McCain somehow "defies the stereotype of the 'silent generation.'" How does he do so, exactly? Tanenhaus doesn't say — he only suggests that McCain is "skeptical toward the very expectations he stoically fulfills." (Somehow, this strikes me as an apt description of me of William Shatner's acting style; Shatner, of course, is also a Postmodern.) Tanenhaus isn't making a generational case, here; he merely suggests that McCain is a semi-idealistic, semi-cynical middlebrow, while Kennedy and Dukakis are idealistic highbrows. Note, however, that according to my periodization scheme, Kennedy and Dukakis are members of the Postmodern Generation, while McCain (not to mention presidential hopefuls Ralph Nader, Jesse Jackson, John Kerry, Larry Flynt, and Colin Powell) in the succeeding one: the Anti-Anti-Utopian Generation. Postmodernists can get elected president. The question is: why can't Anti-Anti-Utopians get elected? (We'll revisit this riddle, in the next installment of this series.) [caption id="attachment_6537" align="aligncenter" width="550" caption="John McCain — the prisoner who never tried to escape"][/caption] Middlebrow journalists are fanatically loyal to Strauss and Howe's periodization scheme, so it's too much to expect Tanenhaus to understand that the Thirties run from 1934-43. Too bad, because my scheme helps us comprehend the generational difference between two presidents who were born in 1924 — on the cusp between the New Gods and the Postmodernists. George H.W. Bush, at 18 the youngest naval aviator in US history to that date, is a gung-ho honorary New God. However, because he was born on the cusp of the Postmodernist Generation, he is less gung-ho than other New Gods; in fact, it was Bush who described Reagan's High Middlebrow theory of trickle-down economics as "voodoo economics." Jimmy Carter, meanwhile, is a Postmodernist, ever alert to ambivalence and indeterminacy and undecidability — which is why middlebrows consider him an uninspiring leader. Like Bush, however, Carter was born between two generations. In a famous 1979 speech, he spoke of "a fundamental threat to American democracy.... It is a crisis of confidence. It is a crisis that strikes at the very heart and soul and spirit of our national will. We can see this crisis in the growing doubt about the meaning of our own lives and in the loss of a unity of purpose for our nation." As a Postmodernist, Carter embraces doubt; as a New God, he rejects it. No surprise: middlebrows consider neither Bush nor Carter "great" presidents. If they admire anything about Bush or Carter, it's their New God-like qualities; if they scorn anything about the two, it's their Postmodernist-like qualities. The New Gods were a thoroughly Middlebrow-controlled generation. The Postmodernists are an anti-Middlebrow generation. *** A quick note about Neo-Dadaists and Pop Art. [caption id="attachment_6575" align="aligncenter" width="550" caption="Jasper Johns\'s \"Flag,\" 1954"][/caption] Neo-Dada artists Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg, Claes Oldenburg, and Yves Klein were born between 1924-33. Reacting against the highbrow aims of Abstract Expressionism (i.e., the search for a universal truth that might transcend political, social, ethnic and religious differences), Neo-Dadaists pioneered ironic/absurdist postmodern art, characterized by themes and techniques drawn from advertising, comic books, and other areas of pop culture. Other Neo-Dada artists born during this period include: Lee Bontecou, John Chamberlain, Bruce Conner, Edward Kienholz, Robert Morris, Nam June Paik, and Fluxus artists George Maciunas, Allan Kaprow, and Yoko Ono (who is an honorary Anti-Anti-Utopian). NB: Rauschenberg was the creator of the most notorious practical joke in art history, "Erased de Kooning Drawing" (1953), which poked fun at the brooding seriousness and majestic aspirations of Abstract Expressionists like de Kooning. Rauschenberg didn't just theorize about replacing fixed, universal categories and certainty with difference, process, and anomaly — he did it. In America, Pop Art — which was influenced by the Neo-Dadaists — used impersonal, mundane reality, irony, and parody, not to mention hard-edged composition and representational art, to defuse the personal symbolism and "painterly looseness" of Abstract Expressionism. However, Pop Art wasn't Dada-esque in the anarchic, hilobrow sense of the term; instead, Pop Art's brand of postmodern practice was indicated a detached affirmation of the artifacts of mass culture. Honorary Postmodernist Roy Lichtenstein (born in 1923) parodied comic-book art, but fetishized it at the same time. Much the same thing goes for Andy Warhol, Tom Wesselmann, Robert Indiana, James Rosenquist, and other Pop Artists born from 1924-33, who presented icons of pop culture and mass media in a nobrow way — i.e., without praise or condemnation, and by means of the same commercial techniques used by the media from which the iconography was borrowed. Middlebrow suborned nobrow Pop Art immediately. The difference between the Neo-Dadaists and Pop Art may come to the difference between engaged and disengaged irony. As I once wrote in the pages of Hermenaut, many years ago:

We here at Hermenaut are interested [in] a very particular irony — one which is philosophically detached but not emotionally disaffected or passive; perhaps humorously trivial but never emptily frivolous. Once this irony is understood, whether you use camp to describe the construction of the self or the construction of a Las Vegas supermarket, we'll at least be able to communicate. Yes, the real hurdle to understanding camp lies in our culture's ongoing inability to perceive irony as being anything but an emotionally disengaged, passive, "lite" reaction to a world gone sour; without a better appreciation of the rich emotional and creative possibilities of irony, camp will forever be regarded as a clique-ish, "anti-hip" hipsters' put-on — which is not camp, but that which is inferior to camp in even its most degraded form: cheese.

Obviously, this is not the place to discuss camp, cheese, and engaged vs. disengaged irony. However, please note that at Hilobrow.com we prefer the term quatsch to cheese, though we're pretty sure they describe the same things. *** ALSO: What do the satirical but largely unpolitical MAD Magazine and the highly political Situationist International have in common? They combined the sensibilities and worldviews of New Gods and Postmoderns; the productive tension between these dissimilar generational dispositions is what made those phenomena so extraordinary. [caption id="attachment_6593" align="aligncenter" width="550" caption="Wally Wood\'s take on Superman"][/caption] MAD, founded in 1952, was edited and created by New Gods (Will Elder, John Severin, Dave Berg, Al Jaffee, William Gaines) and Postmodernists (Wally Wood, Harvey Kurtzman, Jack Davis, Don Martin). Read more about postmodern humor here. The most influential members of the Situationist International, founded in 1957, were Guy Debord, Michèle Bernstein, Ivan Chtcheglov, and Alexander Trocchi (Postmodernists); and Asger Jorn, Jørgen Nash, and Constant Nieuwenhuys (New Gods). Attila Kotányi, who edited the journal Situationniste Internationale, was born in the cusp year of 1924 — more research is needed before we can assign him to one of these two generations. Situationists Ralph Rumney (one of the co-founders of the London Psychogeographical Association) and Belgian philosopher Raoul Vaneigem are honorary Postmodernists (born 1934). [caption id="attachment_6592" align="aligncenter" width="350" caption="A comic strip détourned by the Situationists"][/caption] No room, here, to get into the many points of similarity between the programs of MAD and Situationism; the two illustrations shown here will have to suffice. As for the difference between MAD and Situationism, it may — again — have much to do with the distinction between engaged and disengaged modes of irony. I'm going to go out on a limb and suggest that MAD was a nobrow production, while Situationism was hilobrow. When thinking about the "postmodern" generally, or the "silence" of the so-called Silent Generation, it's imperative to keep that distinction in mind. I should add, here, that Nobrow is always very impressive -- and quite similar to Hilobrow. I don't mean to be dismissive of nobrow productions like MAD or Pop Art; I enjoy them, very much! Nobrow can be very inspiring, and certainly nobrow productions serve to alert us to the limitations of the heimlich High/Low/Anti-High/Anti-Low matrix. Nobrow takes us to the edge of the abyss, but no further. As a result, it is all too easily suborned by Middlebrow. To paraphrase a Civil Rights anthem, "The only thing [Nobrow] done wrong/Stayed in the wilderness a day too long./Keep your eyes on the [Hilobrow] prize/Fight on, fight on." *** Meet the Postmodernists: HONORARY POSTMODERNISTS: Italo Calvino (Italian author, Invisible Cities, If on a winter's night a traveler), Roy Lichtenstein (all born 1923). Also: loathe as I am to make exceptions, let's do it for postmodern authors William Gaddis (JR) and Kurt Vonnegut (Slaughterhouse Five), who were almost born in ’23: December 29, 1922; and November 11, 1922, respectively. 1924: Jean-François Lyotard (philosopher, The Postmodern Condition), Paul K. Feyerabend (postmodern philosopher of science, Against Method), William H. Gass (postmodern novelist, The Tunnel), Harvey Kurtzman (founding editor, MAD magazine), Benoit Mandelbrot (fractal mathematician), William Sloane Coffin (civilly disobedient chaplain), Rod Serling (creator of The Twilight Zone), Ed Wood (director, Plan 9 From Outer Space), Jack Davis (cartoonist, EC and MAD), Terry Southern (novelist, Dr. Strangelove), Lauren Bacall (actor), James Baldwin (novelist, Go Tell It on the Mountain, Truman Capote (novelist, In Cold Blood), Jimmy Carter (39th US president), Jack Chick (anti-Catholic comics publisher), Doris Day (actor), Paul Fussell (historian, The Great War and Modern Memory), Alexander Haig (US Secretary of State), Lloyd Alexander (novelist, The Chronicles of Prydain), Benny Hill (comic), Lee Iacocca (Chrysler Corporation), Don Knotts (Barney Fife on The Andy Griffith Show), Sidney Lumet (director, Dog Day Afternoon), Grace Metalious (novelist, Peyton Place), Al Neuharth (founder of USA Today), Carroll O'Connor (Archie Bunker in All in the Family), Bud Powell (seminal bop pianist and composer), William Rehnquist (US Chief Justice), Nipsey Russell (comic), Phyllis Schlafly (opponent of women's liberation), Sonny Stitt (jazz saxophonist), Yma Sumac (vocalist), E. P. Thompson (historian, The Making of the English Working Class), Sarah Vaughan (singer), Dinah Washington (singer), William Webster (FBI director, CIA director). HONORARY NEW GODS: Marlon Brando, George H.W. Bush, Lee Marvin (Actor, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance), Rocky Marciano (undefeated heavyweight boxer), Audie Murphy (War hero turned cowboy actor), Max Roach (jazz drummer). 1925: Gilles Deleuze (postmodern philosopher), Michel de Certeau (postmodern, yet religious scholar), Robert Venturi (postmodern architect), Robert Altman (Director, Nashville), George Barris (King of Kustomizers), Lenny Bruce (comic), Frantz Fanon (psychiatrist, Black Skin, White Masks), John Hawkes (postmodern author, The Lime Twig), Al Feldstein (editor of MAD), Alexander Trocchi (Scottish novelist, Situationist), Edward Gorey (cartoonist, Amphigorey), Flannery O'Connor (author, A Good Man Is Hard To Find), Robert Rauschenberg (Neo-Dadaist sculptor and painter), Peter Sellers (actor), Pierre Boulez (modern composer and conductor), William F. Buckley (National Review), Richard Burton (actor), Charlie Byrd (jazz musician), Scott Carpenter (Mercury astronaut), Johnny Carson (longtime host of Tonight Show), Carlos Castaneda (The Teachings of Don Juan), Robert Cormier (author, I Am the Cheese), Tony Curtis (actor, Some Like It Hot), Sammy Davis, Jr. (singer), Mike Douglas (The Mike Douglas Show), Medgar Evers (civil rights activist murdered in 1963), Merv Griffin (The Merv Griffin Show and Jeopardy), Bill Haley (musician, "Rock Around the Clock"), Larry Harmon (Bozo the Clown), Harry Harrison (SF novelist), Nat Hentoff (critic, The Jazz Life), Rock Hudson (actor), George Kennedy (actor), Robert F. Kennedy (politician), B. B. King (King of the Blues), Kenneth Koch (poet), Jack Lemmon (actor, The Odd Couple), Elmore Leonard (crime novelist), Malcolm X (activist), Yukio Mishima (author, The Sea of Fertility), Paul Newman (actor), Donald O'Connor (actor), Sam Peckinpah (breakthrough director of ultraviolent films), Oscar Peterson (jazz musician, maharajah of the keyboard), Pol Pot (leader of the Khmer Rouge), Zoot Sims (tenor and soprano saxophonist), Jimmy Smith (jazz musician, master of the Hammond B3 organ), Roger Smith (General Motors), Rod Steiger (actor), William Styron (novelist, The Confessions of Nat Turner), Margaret Thatcher (UK Prime Minister), Mel Tormé (The Velvet Fog), Lee Van Cleef (actor), Dick Van Dyke (actor), Gore Vidal (author), Brian Aldiss (SF author). [caption id="attachment_6363" align="aligncenter" width="349" caption="Foucault"][/caption] 1926: Michel Foucault (philosopher, History of Sexuality), Paul Baran (scientist, early networking pioneer), Chuck Berry (singer), Stanley Cavell (philosopher), John Berger (English postmodern novelist, art critic, G), John Coltrane (jazz musician), Roger Corman (director/producer), Miles Davis (jazz musician), J. P. Donleavy (novelist, The Ginger Man), Clifford Geertz (anthropologist), Allen Ginsberg (poet, Howl!), Ivan Illich (philosopher, Deschooling Society), Jerry Lewis (comic, actor, director), Alison Lurie (author of campus novels), Hilary Putnam (philosopher, Philosophy of Mind), Don Rickles (comic), Don Adams (Maxwell Smart on Get Smart), A.R. Ammons (poet), Poul Anderson (SF & Fantasy author), Tony Bennett (singer), Robert Bly (poet), Mel Brooks (director, Blazing Saddles), R. L. Burnside (musician), Neal Cassady (Beat hero), Fidel Castro (dictator of Cuba), James S. Coleman (sociologist, Foundations of Social Theory), Robert Creeley (poet, founded Black Mountain Review), Dario Fo (Italian playwright), John Fowles (novelist, The French Lieutenant's Woman), Shecky Greene (comic), Alan Greenspan (economist), Andy Griffith (actor, The Andy Griffith Show), Gus Grissom (astronaut), Fred Gwynne (Herman on The Munsters), Hugh Hefner (founder, Playboy), Klaus Kinski (actor, Nosferatu the Vampyre), Tim LaHaye (author, Left Behind series), Cloris Leachman (actor), Harper Lee (novelist, To Kill A Mockingbird), Robert Jay Lifton (psychiatrist), George Martin (Beatles producer), Richard Matheson (SF author), James Merrill (poet), Marilyn Monroe (actor), Leslie Nielsen (actor, Airplane!), Frank O'Hara (poet), Harry Dean Stanton (actor, Repo Man), Charles Van Doren (won the rigged game show Twenty-One), Richard Yates (novelist, Revolutionary Road), Gil Kane (cartoonist, Green Lantern), Joe Kubert (cartoonist, Sgt. Rock, Hawkman). 1927: John Ashbery (poet, Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror), Wally Wood (cartoonist, EC and MAD), Allan Kaprow (Neo-Dadaist artist, performance art pioneer), Edward Abbey (author, Desert Solitaire), David Markson (postmodern author, Wittgenstein's Mistress), Leszek Kolakowski (Polish refugee philosopher), Harry Belafonte (Calypso singer), Edward Kienholz (Neo-Dadaist installation artist), Erma Bombeck (newspaper columnist), Otis Chandler (publisher of the L.A. Times), Cesar Chavez (labor leader), Roy Cohn (Joseph McCarthy's henchman), John Chamberlain (Neo-Dada artist), Gordon Cooper (Mercury 7 and Gemini 5 astronaut), Midge Decter (neoconservative maven), Steve Ditko (cartoonist, objectivist), Peter Falk (played Detective Columbo), Bob Fosse (choreographer), Stan Getz (jazz tenor saxophonist), Günter Grass (German novelist, The Tin Drum), Samuel P. Huntington (author, The Clash of Civilizations), Antonio Carlos Jobim (musician), Daniel Keyes (novelist, Flowers for Algernon), Eartha Kitt (singer, played Catwoman), Peter Matthiessen (novelist), W. S. Merwin (poet), Marvin Minsky (father of Artificial Intelligence), Roger Moore (played James Bond), Daniel Patrick Moynihan (neocon politician), Gerry Mulligan (jazz baritonist), Si Newhouse, Jr. (chairman of Condé Nast), George Plimpton (author, edited Paris Review), Sidney Poitier (actor), Ken Russell (director, Altered States), Mort Sahl (comic), George C. Scott (actor, Patton), Neil Simon (playwright, The Odd Couple), Carl Switzer (Alfalfa in Our Gang), Paul Volcker (economist). 1928: Philip K. Dick (postmodern SF novelist), J. Hillis Miller (postmodern literary critic), Andy Warhol (postmodern artist, Pop Art movement), Noam Chomsky (linguist, dissident intellectual), Cannonball Adderley (alto sax blower), Agnès Varda (director, Cleo from 5 to 7), Yves Klein (Neo-Dadaist artist), Maurice Sendak (author-illustrator, Where The Wild Things Are), Alex Toth (cartoonist, creator of Space Ghost), Edward Albee (playwright, Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?), John Stewart Bell (Bell's theorem of quantum physics), Hubert Selby (author, Requiem for a Dream), James Coburn (actor), Frank Frazetta (painted Conan paperback covers), Serge Gainsbourg (singer/songwriter), Gabriel García Márquez (One Hundred Years of Solitude), James Garner (Jim Rockford on Rockford Files), Che Guevara (revolutionary), Maya Angelou (poet), Donald Hall (poet), Michael Harrington (activist, The Other America), Robert Indiana (creator of the middlebrow "LO/VE" sculpture), Hilton Kramer (high-middlebrow or anti-lowbrow critic, The New Criterion), Stanley Kubrick (director), Tom Lehrer (comedic songwriter), Philip Levine (poet), Fats Domino (musician), Jim Lovell (astronaut, Apollo 13), Patrick McGoohan (Number Six on The Prisoner), Ennio Morricone (composer), Cynthia Ozick (author, critic), Alan J. Pakula (director), Robert Pirsig (author, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance), Jacques Rivette (director, La Belle Noiseuse), Nicolas Roeg (director, The Man Who Fell to Earth), Fred Rogers (Mister Rogers), Anne Sexton (poet), Alison Smithson (New Brutalist architect), Karlheinz Stockhausen (influential avant-garde composer), Shirley Temple (actor), Roger Vadim (director, Barbarella), Elie Wiesel (author, anti-Holocaust and human-rights activist). 1929: Jean Baudrillard (postmodern philosopher, Simulacra and Simulation), Chet Baker (jazz trumpeter), Chuck Barris (postmodern host of The Gong Show), John Cassavetes (actor, director), Len Deighton (lowbrow novelist), Jules Feiffer (cartoonist), Frank Gehry (postmodern architect), Ursula K. Le Guin (postmodern SF novelist, The Left Hand of Darkness), Jürgen Habermas (philosopher, The Theory of Communicative Action), Geoffrey Hartman (postmodern critic, The Unmediated Vision), Screamin' Jay Hawkins (musician), Martin Luther King Jr. (pacifist civil rights activist), Milan Kundera (Czech postmodern author, The Unbearable Lightness of Being), Sergio Leone (writer/director of spaghetti westerns), Staughton Lynd (historian of ideas), Joe Meek (innovative record producer), Bob Newhart (comic), Claes Oldenburg (Neo-Dadaist sculptor), Robert B. Silvers (editor, The New York Review of Books), George Steiner (critic, After Babel), Edward O. Wilson (father of Sociobiology), Yasser Arafat (Palestinian leader, former terrorist), Hal Ashby (Director, Harold and Maude), Ed Asner (actor), Burt Bacharach (composer of lounge music), Edgar Bronfman, Sr. (CEO of Seagram's), Gilbert Sorrentino (postmodern author, Mulligan Stew), June Carter Cash (Country singer, wife of Johnny Cash), Dick Clark (TV personality), Robert Coles (psychiatrist), Mort Drucker (Mad Magazine illustrator), Bill Evans (jazz pianist), Oriana Fallaci (journalist), Anne Frank (victim); Berry Gordy (founder of Motown Records), Lee Hazlewood (music producer, musician), Audrey Hepburn (actor), Peter Higgs (physicist, Higgs boson and Higgs field), John Hollander (poet), Carolyn Jones (Morticia on The Addams Family), Norton Juster (author, The Phantom Tollbooth), Grace Kelly (actress, American-born Princess of Monaco), X. J. Kennedy (poet), Sid Krofft (Film/TV Producer, H.R. Pufnstuf, Land of the Lost), Ira Levin (novelist, Rosemary's Baby), Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis (First Lady, fashion icon), Chaim Potok (novelist), William Safire (middlebrow language maven), Max von Sydow (actor), Cecil Taylor (avant-garde jazz pianist), Barbara Walters (journalist), Bernard Williams (leading moral philosopher), Milton Glaser (graphic designer), Thom Gunn (poet). [caption id="attachment_6557" align="aligncenter" width="485" caption="Jacques Derrida"][/caption] 1930: Jacques Derrida (postmodern philosopher), Félix Guattari (postmodern psychotherapist and philosopher), John Barth (postmodern novelist, Lost in the Funhouse, Giles Goat-Boy), Kenneth Anger (pioneer avant-garde filmmaker), Jasper Johns (Neo-Dadaist painter), J. G. Ballard (postmodern SF author, Crash), Harold Bloom (critic), Pierre Bourdieu (anthropologist, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste), Claude Chabrol (director, La Cérémonie), Ray Charles (musician), Ornette Coleman (free jazz innovator), Jesus Franco (director, Vampyros Lesbos), Jean-Luc Godard (director, Vivre sa Vie), Don Ho (Hawaiian crooner), Ted Hughes (poet), Anton LaVey (founder, Church of Satan), Harry Mathews (author, My Life in CIA), Joseph McElroy (postmodern author, Women and Men), Sonny Rollins (tenor sax master), Shel Silverstein (renaissance man, Where the Sidewalk Ends), Chinua Achebe (novelist, Things Fall Apart), Buzz Aldrin (astronaut), Allan Bloom (high middlebrow or anti-lowbrow philosopher, The Closing of the American Mind), The Big Bopper (musician), Marion Zimmer Bradley (lowbrow SF & Fantasy author), Jimmy Breslin (columnist), Warren Buffett (billionaire), Sean Connery (actor), Pete Conrad (astronaut), Gregory Corso (Beat poet), Clint Eastwood (actor), Stanley Elkin (novelist), Robert Evans (film/TV producer), Bob Guccione (founder, Penthouse magazine), Gene Hackman (actor), Buck Henry (comic), Clifford Irving (hoaxer), G. Gordon Liddy (Watergate criminal, talk-show-host), Frank McCourt (author, Angela's Ashes), Steve McQueen (actor), Odetta (Queen of American Folk Music), H. Ross Perot Business (eccentric presidential candidate), Harold Pinter (playwright), Norman Podhoretz (middlebrow/neocon author, propagandist), John Romita (comic book artist), Gena Rowlands (actor), Fred Saberhagen (SF novelist, Berserker series), Wilfrid Sheed (author, Office Politics), Gary Snyder (poet), Stephen Sondheim (middlebrow composer), George Soros (Hungarian financial speculator), Thomas Sowell (conservative economist), Derek Walcott (poet), Frederick Wiseman (documentarist). 1931: Guy Debord (French postmodern theorist, activist, Situationist), Richard Rorty (postmodern philosopher, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature), Donald Barthelme (postmodern author, 60 Stories), Algis Budrys (SF author, Rogue Moon), Sam Cooke (soul singer), James Dean (actor), E.L. Doctorow (postmodern author, City of God); George Jones (Country singer), Tom Laughlin, (actor, Billy Jack), George Maciunas (founder of Fluxus), Tom Wesselmann (Pop Art artist), Robert Morris (Neo-Dadaist artist), Lee Bontecou (Neo-Dada artist), Charles Taylor (philosopher, Sources of the Self), Tom Wolfe (high-middlebrow New Journalist), Thomas Bernhard (Austrian postmodern playwright and novelist, The Loser), John Le Carré (author), Ram Dass (guru), Angie Dickinson (actor), Robert Duvall (actor), Anita Ekberg (actor), Daniel Ellsberg (Pentagon Papers source), William Goldman (author), Mikhail Gorbachev (final leader of Soviet Union), Bill Graham (rock'n'roll promoter), Larry Hagman (actor), Johnny Hart (middlebrow cartoonist), David Janssen (actor, The Fugitive), Anne Bancroft (actor), James Earl Jones (actor), Jim Jones (led mass People's Temple suicide), Martin Landau (actor), Mickey Mantle (baseball player), Don Martin (MAD Magazine artist), Willie Mays (baseball player), John McPhee (author), Rita Moreno (actor), Toni Morrison (author), Alice Munro (author), Rupert Murdoch (founder and CEO, News Corp), Mike Nichols (director), Leonard Nimoy (actor), John Norman (lowbrow SF/Fantasy author), Robert Novak (conservative ideologue), Regis Philbin (TV personality), Dan Rather (TV journalist), William Shatner (actor), Rip Torn (actor), Ike Turner (musician), Fay Weldon (novelist), James Q. Wilson (high-middlebrow scholar, The Moral Sense). 1932: Luce Irigaray (Belgian postmodern philosopher), Paul Virilio (French postmodern theorist), Umberto Eco (Italian semiotician, philosopher, literary critic, novelist, The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana), Christopher Lasch (historian, social critic), Nam June Paik (Neo-Dadaist artist), Sylvia Plath (poet), Peter Blake (Pop Art designer), Robert Coover (postmodernn novelist, The Universal Baseball Association, Henry J. Waugh, Proprietor), Malcolm Bradbury (critic, campus novelist, The History Man), Johnny Cash (Country musician), Dian Fossey (anthropologist), Paul Krassner (Yippie, editor of The Realist), Loretta Lynn (Country musician), Louis Malle (director), Michael McClure (poet), Carl Perkins (musician), Manuel Puig (postmodern novelist), Little Richard (musician), Gay Talese (author), Andrei Tarkovsky (director), Tiny Tim (musician), François Truffaut (director), Melvin Van Peebles (director), Elizabeth Taylor (actor), Ben Bova (SF author), Patsy Cline (Country musician), Mario Cuomo (NY governor), John Gregory Dunne (author), Milos Forman (middlebrow director), Dick Gregory (comic), Rosey Grier (NFLer, RFKer), Monte Hellman (director, Two-Lane Blacktop), Richard Lester (director), V.S. Naipaul (author), Victor Navasky (publisher of The Nation), Roy Scheider (actor), Gene Shalit (film critic), Blaze Starr (stripper), John Updike (middlebrow novelist), Robert Anton Wilson (SF author, The Illuminatus Trilogy). 1933: Susan Sontag (novelist, critic, intellectual; but see below: she may be an honorary Anti-Anti-Utopian), James Brown (musician), Willie Nelson (Country musician), Roman Polanski (director), Charles Portis (author), Amartya Sen (economist), Jean-Paul Belmondo (actor), Carol Burnett (actor), Michael Caine (actor), Joan Collins (actor), James Rosenquist (Pop Art artist), Dom DeLuise (actor), Michael Dukakis (politician), John Gardner (novelist), Larry King (talk show host), Jerzy Kosinski (author, Being There), Jayne Mansfield (actor), David McCallum (actor), Cormac McCarthy (author, All the Pretty Horses), Bruce Conner (Neo-Dada artist), David McCullough (historian), Stanley Milgram (psychologist), Julie Newmar (actor), Kim Novak (actor), Jerry Pournelle (lowbrow SF author), Bob Rafelson (middlebrow director, Five Easy Pieces), Norman Rush (author), Oliver Sacks (doctor), Quincy Jones (musician, producer), Nina Simone (soul singer), Helen Vendler (critic), Gene Wilder (actor). HONORARY ANTI-ANTI-UTOPIANS: Philip Roth (author), Yoko Ono (performance artist, Fluxus), possibly Susan Sontag. HONORARY POSTMODERNISTS: Ralph Rumney (Situationist), Raoul Vaneigem (Belgian philosopher, Situationist), John Brunner (SF novelist), Harlan Ellison (SF novelist); possibly Joan Didion (journalist, author) and Fredric Jameson (theorist of postmodernity and SF) (all born 1934). PS: The Postmodernist Generation includes SF authors Philip K. Dick, J.G. Ballard, and Ursula K. Le Guin, and honorary members Kurt Vonnegut (born in the cusp year of 1923), John Brunner and Harlan Ellison, plus SF/postmodernity theorist Fredric Jameson (all born 1934). In his 2005 book, Archaeologies of the Future, Jameson persuasively argues that it requires a tremendous effort to imagine a daily life that is politically, economically, socially, and psychologically truly different from our own. And this effort, Jameson writes, warps the structure of the most interesting science fiction — he singles out Dick, Ballard, Le Guin, and Brunner. More about Jameson's theories in the next installment of this series, on the Anti-Anti-Utopians.

kweli-blackstar

Joshua Glenn — Wed, 23 Sep 2009 13:05:59 +0000

thompson-killer-550

Joshua Glenn — Wed, 23 Sep 2009 13:32:24 +0000

33isla

Matthew Battles — Wed, 23 Sep 2009 16:01:16 +0000

Survivor: The Island of Dr. Moreau

Matthew Battles — Wed, 23 Sep 2009 16:03:49 +0000

Imagine the scene of the Tribal Council if you can! We three blue-clad men, with our misshapen black-faced attendant, standing in a wide expanse of torchlit yellow dust under the blazing blue sky, and surrounded by this circle of crouching and gesticulating monstrosities,—some almost human save in their subtle expression and gestures, some like cripples, some so strangely distorted as to resemble nothing but the denizens of our wildest dreams; and, beyond, the reedy lines of a canebrake in one direction, a dense tangle of palm-trees on the other, separating us from the ravine with the huts, and to the north the muffled sound of the Pacific Ocean. “Sixty-two, sixty-three,” counted Moreau. “There are four more.” “I do not see the Leopard-man,” said I. Presently Moreau sounded the great horn again, and at the sound of it all the Beast People writhed and grovelled in the dust. Then, slinking out of the canebrake, stooping near the ground and trying to join the dust-throwing circle behind Moreau's back, came the Leopard-man. The last of the Beast People to arrive was the little Ape-man. The earlier animals, hot and weary with their grovelling, shot vicious glances at him. “Cease!” said Moreau, in his firm, loud voice; and the Beast People sat back upon their hams and rested from their worshipping. “Where is the Sayer of the Law?” said Moreau, and the hairy-grey monster bowed his face in the dust. “Say the words!” said Moreau. Forthwith all in the kneeling assembly began swaying from side to side and dashing up the sulphur with their hands,—first the right hand and a puff of dust, and then the left,— as the Sayer began once more to chant the strange litany. "This is part of the ritual of Tribal Council because fire represents life," he moaned. "As long as you have fire, you are still in this game." When he reached, “When your fire's gone, so are you," Moreau held up his lank white hand. “Stop!” he cried, and there fell absolute silence upon them all. I think they all knew and dreaded what was coming. I looked round at their strange faces. When I saw their wincing attitudes and the furtive dread in their bright eyes, I wondered that I had ever believed them to be men. “The time to vote has come!” said Moreau. “None escape,” from the faceless creature with the silvery hair. “None escape,” repeated the kneeling circle of Beast People. “Who is he?” cried Moreau cracking his whip as the votes were tallied. I fancied the Hyena-swine looked dejected, so too did the Leopard-man. Moreau stopped, facing this creature, who cringed towards him with the memory and dread of infinite torment. “Who is he?” repeated Moreau, in a voice of thunder. “Evil is he who breaks the Law,” chanted the Sayer of the Law. Moreau looked into the eyes of the Leopard-man, and seemed to be dragging the very soul out of the creature. “Who breaks the Law—” said Moreau, taking his eyes off his victim, and turning towards us (it seemed to me there was a touch of exultation in his voice). “Goes into Exile,” they all clamoured,—“goes into Exile, O Master!” “Exile—Exile,” gabbled the Ape-man, as though the idea was sweet to him. “Do you hear?” said Moreau, turning back to the criminal, “my friend—Hullo!” For the Leopard-man, released from Moreau's eye, had risen straight from his knees, and now, with eyes aflame and his huge feline tusks flashing out from under his curling lips—and produced the Immunity Idol. There was a furious yelling and howling all about us. The whole crowd seemed to swing round in the direction of the glint of fire, and I too was swung round by the magnetism of the movement. In another second I was running, one of a tumultuous shouting crowd, in pursuit of the escaping Leopard-man. Inspired by Warren Ellis (@warrenellis), author of the graphic novel series Fell and Transmetropolitan, who tweeted today: "Pitching my new tv show SURVIVOR: THE ISLAND OF DR MOREAU."

hoffman-steal

Joshua Glenn — Wed, 23 Sep 2009 17:30:53 +0000

Hilo Hero: John Brunner

Joshua Glenn — Thu, 24 Sep 2009 10:00:43 +0000

The popularity of apocalyptic fiction in the Sixties (1964-73), it has been suggested, indicates that SF writers had become bored and suspicious of utopian idylls promising that ameliorative reforms could right modern civilization's manifold wrongs; instead, they wanted to wipe the slate clean. The British SF author and left-wing activist JOHN BRUNNER (1934-95), whose overpopulation novel Stand on Zanzibar beat out Philip K. Dick's Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? for a Hugo in ’69, and whose terrific novel The Sheep Look Up (1972), imagined an Earth destroyed by pollution, was one such anti-anti-utopian. Brunner was prolific — in ’68, he published not only Zanzibar, but Bedlam Planet, Catch a Falling Star, Father of Lies, and Into the Slave Nebula, as well as a story collection. His proto-cyberpunk tale, The Shockwave Rider (1975), was the first to describe software that reproduces itself across a computer network as a "worm." (Hmm — burrowing worm-critters also wreak havoc in The Sheep Look Up.) Not merely an astute futurist, Brunner was a postmodern stylist whose best-known fictions employ multiple viewpoint storylines, interspersed newspaper headlines, and the like. Fredric Jameson claims, and I agree, that to read Brunner's apocalyptic novels is to experience, at the level of form, the noncoercive utopian social order that the author fervently believed was possible — even though he steadfastly refused ever to name or describe it. *** Each day, Hilobrow.com pays tribute to one of our favorite high-, low-, no-, or hilobrow heroes on that person's birthday. Click here for more Hilo Hero shout-outs.

Engaged vs. Disengaged Irony

Joshua Glenn — Thu, 24 Sep 2009 12:00:34 +0000

A quick note about Neo-Dadaists and Pop Art. [caption id="attachment_6575" align="aligncenter" width="550" caption="Jasper Johns\'s \"Flag,\" 1954"][/caption] This item is excerpted from yesterday’s essay on the Postmodernist Generation. Neo-Dada artists Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg, Claes Oldenburg, and Yves Klein were born between 1924-33. Reacting against the highbrow aims of Abstract Expressionism (i.e., the search for a universal truth that might transcend political, social, ethnic and religious differences), Neo-Dadaists pioneered ironic/absurdist postmodern art, characterized by themes and techniques drawn from advertising, comic books, and other areas of pop culture. Other Neo-Dada artists born during this period include: Lee Bontecou, John Chamberlain, Bruce Conner, Edward Kienholz, Robert Morris, Nam June Paik, and Fluxus artists George Maciunas, Allan Kaprow, and Yoko Ono. NB: Rauschenberg was the creator of the most notorious practical joke in art history, "Erased de Kooning Drawing" (1953), which poked fun at the brooding seriousness and majestic aspirations of Abstract Expressionists like de Kooning. Rauschenberg didn't just theorize about replacing fixed, universal categories and certainty with difference, process, and anomaly — he did it. In America, Pop Art — which was influenced by the Neo-Dadaists — used impersonal, mundane reality, irony, and parody, not to mention hard-edged composition and representational art, to defuse the personal symbolism and "painterly looseness" of Abstract Expressionism. However, Pop Art wasn't Dada-esque in the anarchic, hilobrow sense of the term; instead, Pop Art's brand of postmodern practice was indicated a detached affirmation of the artifacts of mass culture. Honorary Postmodernist Roy Lichtenstein (born in 1923) parodied comic-book art, but fetishized it at the same time. Much the same thing goes for Andy Warhol, Tom Wesselmann, Robert Indiana, James Rosenquist, and other Pop Artists born from 1924-33, who presented icons of pop culture and mass media in a nobrow way — i.e., without praise or condemnation, and by means of the same commercial techniques used by the media from which the iconography was borrowed. Middlebrow suborned nobrow Pop Art immediately. The difference between the Neo-Dadaists and Pop Art may come down to the difference between engaged and disengaged irony. As I once wrote in Hermenaut, many years ago:

We here at Hermenaut are interested [in] a very particular irony — one which is philosophically detached but not emotionally disaffected or passive; perhaps humorously trivial but never emptily frivolous. Once this irony is understood, whether you use camp to describe the construction of the self or the construction of a Las Vegas supermarket, we'll at least be able to communicate. Yes, the real hurdle to understanding camp lies in our culture's ongoing inability to perceive irony as being anything but an emotionally disengaged, passive, "lite" reaction to a world gone sour; without a better appreciation of the rich emotional and creative possibilities of irony, camp will forever be regarded as a clique-ish, "anti-hip" hipsters' put-on — which is not camp, but that which is inferior to camp in even its most degraded form: cheese.

Arneson

Joshua Glenn — Thu, 24 Sep 2009 12:15:15 +0000

800px-PerryFarrellJune07

Matthew Battles — Thu, 24 Sep 2009 20:18:50 +0000

RiderWaiteTarotDeckRegSize.Waite

Joshua Glenn — Fri, 25 Sep 2009 01:12:53 +0000

rider_waite_mini_tarot_deck

Joshua Glenn — Fri, 25 Sep 2009 01:18:52 +0000

Hilo Hero: Shel Silverstein

Sarah Weinman — Fri, 25 Sep 2009 10:00:26 +0000

One of my favorite children's books, the madcap Lafcadio: The Lion Who Shot Back (1963), by SHEL SILVERSTEIN (1930-99), is about loneliness, friendship, and the perils of too much success — all of which turn out to be common themes in Silverstein's work. The giddy silliness and attention to rhyming detail of Where the Sidewalk Ends, A Light in the Attic, and his other subversive books for children demonstrate that Silverstein stayed in touch with his inner grade-schooler. But what blows your mind is everything else he did, from traveling the world on Playboy's dime, to skewering American attitudes in one-act plays like The Lady and the Tiger, capturing the stubborn hope of a shackled prisoner still ready to whisper "Psst, now here's my plan" to his fellow cartoonified inmate, and penning songs that run the gamut from wistful reflection (“I Can't Touch the Sun," "The Ballad of Lucy Jordan," "The Things I Didn't Say") to knowing perversion (“Get My Rocks Off," "Freaking at the Freakers Ball") to chronicling the trappings of fame (“Cover of the Rolling Stone," "Sure Hit Songwriter's Pen"). Like Lafcadio, Silverstein — who died in bed, surrounded by unfinished projects — refused to abide anyone's expectations, categories, or labels.

himes-imbroglio-550

Joshua Glenn — Fri, 25 Sep 2009 19:56:44 +0000

himes-imbroglio-2

Joshua Glenn — Fri, 25 Sep 2009 19:57:36 +0000

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Joshua Glenn — Fri, 25 Sep 2009 19:57:49 +0000

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Joshua Glenn — Fri, 25 Sep 2009 20:40:31 +0000

iPhone iMbroglio

Joshua Glenn — Fri, 25 Sep 2009 20:44:44 +0000

Yesterday, my friends at Pazzo Books sold me the 1960 French edition ("traduit de l'Américain" — that's hilarious) of Chester Himes' Imbroglio negro (published in America, that same year, as All Shot Up), shown above. It's a noir novel featuring Himes' black Harlem cop characters Ed Cercueil (Coffin Ed Johnson) and Fossoyeur (Grave Digger Jones). I already knew that French culture was more advanced than ours, in those days. That's why Himes chose to live and work in France; and it's why the French embraced Poe, Dick, and Lewis. But who knew that French technology was so much more advanced than ours? Yes, that's right. Your eyes aren't deceiving you. The Harlem matron in green pictured on the cover of Imbroglio negro is scrolling through emails — or perhaps texting — on what can only be an Internet-connected, multimedia smartphone. Just look at her hand position — she's in danger of developing BlackBerry Thumb! We know there weren't smartphones in the US, back in 1960 — so this photo must have been shot in Paris, using American-style models and fashions. It makes sense that the French beat us to the punch, now that I think about it calmly. Until the 20th century, the French popular imagination was passionately engaged with the future, and future technology; but when Frenchmen like Tocqueville visited America, it was for the purposes of rustification — i.e., in a premodern, agrarian theme park. Rousseau 's notion of the Noble Savage? He was talking about Americans. Cyrano de Bergerac's The Other World: Comical History of the States and Empires of the Moon described interstellar travel and aliens way back in 1657. Bernard Le Bovier de Fontenelle's Entretien sur la Pluralité des Mondes appeared in 1686; Americans, around that same time, were reading Cotton Mather's Memorable Providences, Relating to Witchcratfs and Possessions. (I'm not being entirely fair: Mather also wrote a SF-like treatise arguing that since God would probably not have wanted to waste any space, the Earth was most likely hollow.) [caption id="attachment_6769" align="aligncenter" width="550" caption="Robida\'s \"La sortie de l’opéra en l’an 2000\""][/caption] One also thinks of Voltaire's 1752 SF story Micromégas, Louis-Sébastien Mercier's L'An 2440 (1771), and so on... through Camille Flammarion's La Pluralité des Mondes Habités (1862) and Albert Robida's remarkable Le Vingtième siècle. La vie électrique (1890; illustration, by Robida, shown above). Naturally, we mustn't leave out Jules Verne's seminal works of modern SF . Perhaps the French liked Poe because it was only with Poe's “Hans Phaall — A Tale,” a moon voyage penned with maximum verisimilitude, that American SF began to catch up to theirs. Now that we have the iPhone, perhaps the French will finally show us a little respect? Je l'espère. *** More SF-related posts on HILOBROW. Joshua Glenn is writing a series of posts for the SF blog io9.com about Pre-Golden-Age SF. Other SF-related essays and articles by Joshua Glenn include: "Post-Apocalyptic Kiddie Movies" (Brainiac) | "The Slacktivism of Richard Linklater" (Slate) | "Black Iron Prison" (n+1) | "Back to Utopia" (Boston Globe Ideas) | "In a Perfect World" (Boston Globe Ideas) | "Philip K. Dick: Hermenaut of the Month" (Hermenaut) | "Journeys to the Center " (New York Times Book Review/IHT) | "Climate of Fear" (Boston Globe Ideas) | "Pulp Affection" (Boston Globe Ideas) | "Eco-Spaceship Redux" (Brainiac) | "Post-Apocalyptic Juvie Lit" (Brainiac) | "Life Imitates Comic Book" (Brainiac) "Vintage Ads of Fictional Futures" (Brainiac) | "Dr. Strange vs. Dr. Craven" (Brainiac) | PS: As the Boston Phoenix pointed out, Joshua Glenn beat every other media outlet in Boston to the scoop that the Mooninite Invasion of 2007 was just a guerrilla marketing campaign.

dizzee11

Joshua Glenn — Fri, 25 Sep 2009 22:27:35 +0000

Hilo Hero: Winsor McCay

Joe Alterio — Sat, 26 Sep 2009 10:00:16 +0000

Like the pioneering stop-motion photographer Eadweard J. Muybridge, WINSOR MCCAY (1867(?)-1934) was brilliant at breaking down everyday life into a string of discrete moments; a great understanding of motion, and the role it plays in storytelling, underlies his still multi-dimensional animation and comics. McCay brought us serialized surrealist fancy (Dreams of a Rarebit Fiend), sequential fairy tales (Little Nemo in Slumberland), early experimental comedy (Little Sammy Sneeze), and comic adaptations (Pilgrim's Progress). He was also an important influence in pre-Disney animation (Gertie the Dinosaur). All of this was on top of illustrating for hire and creating editorial cartoons, in an increasingly corporatized newspaper world that fought him at every turn. Unfortunately, McCay's successes opened the floodgates for shit like Mutt and Jeff (I'm sorry, it's bad) and Disney's Steamboat Fucking Willie, and their successors. But know this: for those of us obsessed with the Gesture Arts — comics, cartoons, humorous illustration — McCay is everything.

Also see Joshua Glenn's 2007 audio slideshow about McCay's influence. *** Each day, Hilobrow.com pays tribute to one of our favorite high-, low-, no-, or hilobrow heroes on that person's birthday. Click here for more Hilo Hero shout-outs.

Hilo Manifesto (02): Highbrow

Joshua Glenn — Sat, 26 Sep 2009 12:31:59 +0000

The four heimlich dispositions bequeathed to us by the early modern, or Early Enlightenment, era can be plotted on a matrix of (mutually constitutive) paired oppositions and equations, otherwise known as analogical relationships, in which each term is aligned with a cluster of attributes. The four heimlich dispositions are alike in that they adhere in one way or another to what Lionel Trilling called the ideal of Sincerity, or noble acquiescence to social forms and norms. Most (not all) educated people did, until the early 19th century or so. Though Lowbrow is not inferior to Highbrow, nor a derivative or dependent "effect" of Highbrow, in an effort to reflect Highbrow's privileged status in western cultural history, we've situated the latter disposition in what some theorists would insist on calling our matrix's "positive" first position. In fact, there is much that is positive about Highbrow, and much to admire about highbrows from Newton to Stanley Cavell. The philosopher and the scientist, the paleface scholar or artist, and a very few of the more perspicacious intellectuals are Highbrow's ideal types. At their very best, such highbrows are Apollonian, empiricist, cool and abstracted, loyal to a vision of the unbiased intellectual life. Highbrows eschew bigotry and invective, and present their views in a balanced fashion and via polite debate in journals and symposia. In their quest for truth highbrows eschew (again, at their best) parochialism and chauvinism. Their style reflects Highbrow's rejection of the ignorant notion that there exists a universally known, accepted, and venerated consensus of truth. Highbrow is a heroic, noble disposition that prizes philosophical reason, which is to say: critical rationalism. Convinced that sweeping away ignorance and superstition, establishing toleration, and revolutionizing ideas, education, and attitudes (by means of critical rationalism and natural science) will confer immense benefits on humankind, highbrow philosophes have for centuries advanced the cause of Progress. Highbrow is a sympathetic, as opposed to empathetic disposition: sympathizing with the plight of society's weakest members, today's highbrow tirelessly works to ameliorate the flaws of classic liberalism and modern capitalism. (The earliest highbrows, of course, sought to reform the social order that they considered the worthiest: constitutional monarchy.) The separation of powers by constitutional means, anti-trust laws: Highbrow is not a radical, revolutionizing disposition, but instead a liberal, reformist one. Highbrow's priority is to support stable and enduring structures not only of authority, legitimacy, and knowledge, but also faith — which does not belong exclusively to Lowbrow, though the highbrow's faith is necessarily leavened with doubt. The highbrow's criticism is constructive; she may be skeptical, but never nihilistic. Highbrow is resistant to romanticism, and incapable of fanaticism; romantic and fanatical highbrows aren't highbrows at all. When it comes to the contest of faith and incredulity that marks both the early modern era and our own, the highbrow will either seek to accommodate experimental science to the authority of Scripture (the theory of Intelligent Design, for example, was invented by highbrows nearly 350 years ago), or stay mum. Historically, Highbrow played an important role in the general process of rationalization and secularization that overthrew theology's hegemony in the West. But historians of the Radical Enlightenment have conclusively demonstrated that Highbrow's accomplishments have always involved consolidating, popularizing, and annotating radical concepts introduced by... well, we'll get to that later. Weighing in on the "Battle of the Brows" debate in 1932, Virginia Woolf thrillingly characterized the highbrow as "the man or woman of thoroughbred intelligence who rides his mind at a gallop across country in pursuit of an idea." Yes! Despite their abstraction and coolness, highbrows are engaged men and women; despite their disinterested methods, they remain very interested. If galloping highbrows sometimes "come fearful croppers," as Woolf puts it, it's only because they've succumbed to a very un-empiricist (and therefore un-highbrow) temptation to develop a totalizing theory of everything. And if today's highbrows are too often guilty of occupationalism (symptoms include: jargon, disdain for amateurism), this is perhaps less their fault than academe's, since professionalization is now a rite of passage, and the Ph.D. program an implacable sorting-machine. Highbrow's enemy is Anti-Highbrow; it's dismissive of Nobrow and ambivalent about Anti-Lowbrow. Lowbrow isn't Highbrow's enemy; they're mutually respectful, and affectionately condescending to one another. The relationship of Highbrow and Anti-Lowbrow is a complementary but uneasy one, much like relationships between moderates and radicals within the same oppositional movement always are. Playing the good cop to Anti-Lowbrow's bad cop benefits Highbrow; but whenever Anti-Lowbrow goes rogue (to continue an imperfect metaphor), Highbrow pays a price. *** Highbrow as we know it today is a product of the Cold War. The prewar highbrow might hardly recognize his postwar counterpart. The CIA initiative during the cultural Cold War forced highbrows to collaborate uneasily with anti-lowbrows against Communism and Middlebrow.

Hilo Manifesto (05): Neo-Populist

Joshua Glenn — Sat, 26 Sep 2009 12:38:35 +0000

Anti-Highbrow is the fourth of four heimlich dispositions. Like Anti-Lowbrow (its contradictory disposition), Anti-Highbrow is romantic, extremist, fanatical, utopian. However, where the anti-lowbrow is icily aristocratic and snobbish, the anti-highbrow is torridly populist and reverse-snobbish (which is still a form of snobbery). Therefore, if the Anti-Lowbrow utopia is one in which the talented few dominate the laboring many, then the Anti-Highbrow utopia reverses things: the multitude (in theory) calls the shots. Anti-Highbrow, as we know it today, is descended from an early modern disposition which prized credulity, bigotry, even superstition. In its earliest form, Anti-Highbrow preferred a theocracy to a monarchy; when it came to monarchies, Anti-Highbrow wanted them to be absolutist. For Anti-Highbrow, in its earliest phase, constitutional monarchy is an impossibility: a monarch owes his crown to God, and not to the people, and is answerable only to Him. But Anti-Highbrow's baroque impulse — i.e., restoring unity and cohesion through a rigorous assertion of authority and confessional doctrine — is a modern one. Lowbrow may prize traditional structures of authority, thought, and belief, but Anti-Highbrow is forever reorganizing and revitalizing these structures. Although it's temperamentally radical, then, Anti-Highbrow is über-heimlich. It employs newly devised or reinforced mechanisms of spiritual and intellectual control in an effort to shore up the power and influence of traditional authorities — or, if necessary, to restore them to power and influence. If Anti-Lowbrow spearheaded the Enlightenment, particularly in the early modern era, and Highbrow popularized and legitimized it, then Anti-Highbrow's response was (and is) a counter-offensive — in fact, a Counter-Enlightenment. Anti-Highbrow negates or denies everything that Highbrow prizes: critical rationalism and skepticism, liberalism, sometimes science. Anti-Highbrow downgrades reason and exalts (religious) emotion. If the lowbrow is passionate, then the anti-highbrow hysterical. If the mildly illiberal lowbrow prizes faith, tradition, and authority, then the anti-highbrow intensifies these — she prizes credulity and tractability. Anti-Highbrow is thoroughly metaphysical in orientation; its intellectuals are anti-intellectual. This does not mean that Anti-Highbrows are irrational — just irrationalist. Blaise Pascal's Pensées, for example, firmly separated the world of science from religion, claiming that the one, the sphere of reason, is no guide to the other, a realm which we "know" only through the heart and our emotions. Despising Descartes, Pascal insisted that reason and science have their place but only represent one sphere of truth: there here is another and higher sphere which reason and science cannot penetrate. Pascal's irrationalist, anti-philosophical philosophy expresses the credo of Anti-Highbrow: "se moquer de la philosophie, c'est vraiment philosopher." Anti-Highbrow's conception of faith is an emotional, unreasoning, authority-based one. In some parts of the world, and at various ties in modern history, the anti-highbrow has been a fundamentalist or cultist, a Dear Leader who proclaims the dictatorship of the general will, the proletariat, the "people." Theirs is a rapturous eschatology that would not merely level but compact all distinctions into a singularity of pure energy. At the very least, the anti-highbrow is convinced that the inner harmony of the Christian state depends on uniformity of doctrine, faith, and sacraments — and is attained only when enforced by the absolutist prince. If Lowbrow is empathetic, Anti-Highbrow is ultra-empathetic: the collective doesn't merely think but feels as one. (In science fiction, George Orwell's Hate Week is a negative example of an ultra-empathetic ritual; Philip K. Dick's Mercerism is a positive one.) Lowbrow works to ameliorate the flaws of classic liberalism and modern capitalism in the name of empathetic religious or "family" values, but Anti-Highbrow (though a modern phenomenon) rejects these modern phenomena — entirely unsympathetic anti-highbrows would like to turn back the clock to a prelapsarian era. If fascism and the concentration camp are anti-lowbrow inventions, Stalinism (not to be confused with communism) and the gulag are anti-highbrow. Anti-Highbrows are thrilled by apocalyptic and millenarian science fiction, in which civilization is wiped out, and anti-feminine men are restored to their rightful place in the social order. There is nothing the anti-highbrow would rather witness than the sudden transformation of our modern world into either a neo-medieval, collectivist idyll — or else, perhaps, a shattered cityscape divided into warring fiefdoms roamed and raided by tribes of leather-clad punks. Unsettled by the spectacle of angry white men gathering on the Mall to protest Obama's health care plan, vociferously insisting that government intervention equals tyranny, that liberalism is a form of despotism-in-waiting? We like to think it "can't happen here"; but Elia Kazan's A Face in the Crowd, not to mention Ayn Rand's anti-populist potboilers, beg to differ.

Hilo Hero: Jim Thompson

Luc Sante — Sun, 27 Sep 2009 10:00:23 +0000

JIM THOMPSON (1906-77) was born in Anadarko, Oklahoma, in a room above the jail, the son of a crooked sheriff. A good part of his destiny was cemented then and there. Early on he became both a writer and a drunk, completing the picture, but while his alcoholism matured precociously, the literature had to wait awhile. His muse didn’t appear until 1952, in the form of employment by a paperback factory called Lion Books, where the synopsis came with the word count and the deadline. That set of strictures produced, in little more than a year, all but a few of his best books: The Killer Inside Me, A Hell of a Woman, Savage Night, After Dark, My Sweet.... Thompson embodies the myth of the desperado from nowhere who invents a species of jagged modernism in a vacuum, and perhaps also the one of the borderline psychotic who vents himself by writing rather than by aiming a rifle out the window. He was episodically employed by Sam Peckinpah and periodically rediscovered by the French, but he wasn’t really recognized until he’d been dead a decade. Only then could he safely be compared to Dostoevsky and Céline, not to mention kept in print. Also see Hilobrow.com's notes on Noir fiction as a Partisans Generation phenomenon. *** Each day, Hilobrow.com pays tribute to one of our favorite high-, low-, no-, or hilobrow heroes on that person's birthday. Click here for more Hilo Hero shout-outs.

jerryleelewissmashep

Joshua Glenn — Sun, 27 Sep 2009 12:17:30 +0000

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Matthew Battles — Sun, 27 Sep 2009 12:54:35 +0000

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Matthew Battles — Sun, 27 Sep 2009 12:59:18 +0000

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Matthew Battles — Sun, 27 Sep 2009 13:00:28 +0000

Winds of Magic (3): Oral or Anal?

James Parker — Sun, 27 Sep 2009 20:00:33 +0000

The first thing to be said about the concept of the "oral history," as it applies to rock biography, is that Sigmund Freud — damn him! — has triumphed again. For what purer display of Freudian oral fixation could there be than that provided by an assemblage of gobby, gossipy, wilful, indulged and pleasure-craving musicians all spewing off into the mike of some gratefully enabling recorder? American Hardcore: A Tribal History, Please Kill Me: The Uncensored Oral History Of Punk, We Got The Neutron Bomb: The Untold Story Of LA Punk — the din of colliding ego-trips rises from all these books. The second thing to be said is that the oral history is a sign of the times; a racy, trashy, sub-artistic form, in which the author has become a producer — marshaling his oodles of raw content, generating his pseudo-narratives in the editing suite — and the book has become, not a text, but a spectacle: reality TV, if you like, for rock fans who can read. The current maestro of rock’n’roll oral is the transplanted Scotsman Brendan Mullen, who with Whores: An Oral Biography of Perry Farrell and Jane’s Addiction is making his third contribution to the genre. (The first two were Lexicon Devil, a history of the Germs, and We Got The Neutron Bomb.) Whores is highly entertaining, basely fascinating and — almost despite itself — rather informative. Mullen, founder of famous LA punk rock hole the Masque and seasoned hipster, clearly knows how to talk to musicians — both the rockstars and the fuming failures — and he gets the good stuff out of them. Unguardedly, his subjects preen and bitch and justify. They tell their stories. Crack pipes, blowjobs, see-through unitards, it’s all here; the eldritch light of decadence plays gleefully across the pages of Whores. But there’s also a surprising amount of insight on offer. The music of Jane’s Addiction, for example, stands freshly revealed to us when we learn the details of the band’s formation; how Eric Avery came up with those elementally brooding bass lines all by himself, in a garage; how drummer Stephen Perkins and guitarist Dave Navarro were plucked, enormous-haired, from a high school heavy metal act called Dizastre; and how Perry Farrell, ten years older than his bandmates, was a fashion mutant besotted with English Gothdom — Bauhaus, Siouxsie and the Banshees, the Cure. Put it all together, pour on the drugs, and what do you get? A creepy shamanistic rumble, shot through with metal licks, underpinned by a majestically lonely bass: Jane’s Addiction! No amount of background, of course, could explain the effect of Perry Farrell’s voice, that sound piped down from halls of celestial orgy, that thin, witchy tone singing about oceans and mountains and three-way sex. The information that his dad was a groovy jeweler named Al Bernstein who spent the ’70s "walking around Miami Beach... with a Fila headband and a bikini bathing suit with gold around his neck" seems helpful, as do Farrell’s accounts of his own fashion experiments (“I was in a Paisley Underground band for about a minute. I got a Paisley shirt and I combed my hair down into bangs, and then I thought, 'Shit, this is pretty shortsighted.'") But Farrell is ingredient x, the point at which biography falls down.... In the opposite corner, as it were, from Mullen and his method stands Clinton Heylin, whose From The Velvets To The Voidoids: The Birth Of American Punk Rock (Chicago Review Press), originally published in 1993 but now making the rounds in an updated edition, is very much NOT oral history. From The Velvets may include great fat chunks of direct-speech testimony from Lou Reed, Richard Hell, and so on, but the voice of the Author — the mighty, synthesizing intelligence that has brought it all together — is supreme. "Like other forms of ‘art’, high and low, the history of popular music contains its fair share of fractures..." drones the opening sentence. From The Velvets makes quite a to-do of its own thoughtfulness, its own grasp of nuance; every second paragraph begins "If...," "Yet...," "Although...," "Despite...," or "However...," as Heylin pirouettes sweatily between idea and counter-idea. And in a lengthy "Postlude" to the new edition he puts on a pedagogic frown and takes the oral historians to task for their various cop-outs and improprieties. In particular, and for obvious reasons, Heylin is dissatisfied with Legs McNeil and Gillian McCain for 1997’s Please Kill Me. I was once taught Latin by a withered old man whose delight it was to punish classroom misbehavior by bringing down an enormous dictionary on the head of the offender; this, more or less, is Heylin’s tactic as he lays into Please Kill Me. "The lack of any authorial introduction..." he writes, “[or] bibliography of debt or discography of sounds — nope, not even an index — makes this a true exemplar of postmodern nonfiction — small-h history, and sod the context. Adrift in an ocean of opinions, the reader must decide what to believe from the whole jumble of lies and damned lies. No qualifying phrases here, no messy historical inter-relationships, just one misunderstood maverick after another..." Heylin is obviously right about most of this; the oral history tends to lack context; sloppiness and subjectivity abound; the afflicted ramblings of some muso are no substitute for the facts, etc. "In my original interviews," he writes, "I was frequently obliged to correct musicians in mid-interview, lest the order of things become inverted." (How they must have loved that!) The problem is that big-H History, even when written by one so stringent as Clinton Heylin, is just as unreliable, just as susceptible to ego-driven error. Getting the facts straight, filling in the background, knitting your theorems together, you can still miss the story completely. Here’s Heylin, for example, on late-period Stooges: "They unwisely reassembled in London in the summer of 1972, after David Bowie offered to produce an Iggy Pop album. They continued to produce music of stark primitivism but recorded only one more studio album, the disappointingly restrained (indeed ill-named) Raw Power, which suggested that Bowie’s main forte was sanitizing genuine innovators for public consumption, particularly when taken in association with the results he achieved on Lou Reed’s Transformer. This, I think, turning back to our Freud, we can justly call "anal" history — that is, history in which all the facts, whatever their shape, are squeezed through a single, jealously pinched aperture of authorial perspective. The signature style is one of mincing and incessant judgment; what a shame that the Stooges were deprived of the benefit of Mr Heylin’s counsel in 1972, when they "unwisely reassembled." Heylin gets it wrong about Raw Power — an album which a three-year-old could tell you is not "restrained" — because he is too busy making his case against David Bowie. Committed to this argument, to this display of analytical muscle, he is led to his final loony act of equivalence, in which the gay chamber rock of Transformer, tart and bejeweled, is given the same sonic value as the shrieking, bacon-fat-on-the-tape-reel high end barrage of Raw Power. (If it proves anything, the fact that David Bowie worked on these two records within months of each other proves that he is a solid-gold GENIUS.) Which, then, is to be preferred? The weightlessness of the oral history, with its fluff and noise and trivialities, or the gravity of the critical work, with its tendency to land heavily in the wrong place? As my shrink used to say, "I think what we’re looking for here is a balance." Clinton Heylin has undoubtedly performed a historical service with his monastic dedication to "the order of things," just as Brendan Mullen, juggling his quotes, has fluked his way to certain fugitive truths; the awful fate of Alternative Rock, for example, is presaged in the final pages of Whores when Dave Navarro’s cousin burblingly recounts how Dave first met Carmen Electra. "There’s a call on his cell phone and he’s like, 'Dude, it’s a fucking friend of Carmen’s right now and they’re all together and they want me to come down and meet her. Should I go?'" Go, Dave Navarro, go, and take our childish dreams with you. *** Originally published by the Boston Phoenix, July 2005. From 2004-08, our friend and colleague James Parker, currently a contributing editor at The Atlantic, was a culture critic for the Boston Globe's Ideas section and for Boston's alt-weekly, The Phoenix. Hilobrow.com has curated a collection of Parker's writings from this period. This installment is the third in a series of ten.

bruce-lee3

Joshua Glenn — Mon, 28 Sep 2009 01:55:03 +0000

Hilo Hero: Brigitte Bardot

Peggy Nelson — Mon, 28 Sep 2009 10:00:03 +0000

[caption id="attachment_6485" align="aligncenter" width="318" caption="Bardot in Contempt"]Contempt" title="contempt1" width="318" height="475" class="size-full wp-image-6485" />[/caption] Blonde bombshell BRIGITTE BARDOT (born 1934) exploded onto the world stage in the 1950s. A woman with the neotenic features of a child, Bardot's Bézier curves measured pure sex appeal, and have been templatized by generations of heat-seeking starlets since. It was no coincidence when in 1953 she caused a sensation at Cannes by wearing a bikini: named for the barely there Pacific atoll destroyed by nuclear testing, the bikini represented the sartorial id, and Bardot's appearance caused a corresponding eruption of libido in a buttoned-down world. But she was not merely the passive recipient of all this energy; Bardot played with and against her image. Cast, in Godard's critically acclaimed Contempt (1963), as the trophy wife of a screenwriter pimping her up the food chain, Bardot's character rebelled against the naked power dynamics and would not play to lose. Especially in film, Bardot reminds us, we become what we project. *** Each day, Hilobrow.com pays tribute to one of our favorite high-, low-, no-, or hilobrow heroes on that person's birthday. Click here for more Hilo Hero shout-outs.

allen-bananas

Joshua Glenn — Mon, 28 Sep 2009 13:22:30 +0000

Bananas (1971) Directed by Woody Allen Shown center foreground: Woody Allen (as Fielding Mellish)

sudoku25x25

Matthew Battles — Mon, 28 Sep 2009 16:08:18 +0000

Will Shortz & the Death of the Author

Matthew Battles — Mon, 28 Sep 2009 16:13:13 +0000

[caption id="attachment_6860" align="aligncenter" width="801" caption="great plot, but little by way of character development"]great plot, but little by way of character development" title="sudoku25x25" width="550" height="446" class="size-full wp-image-6860" />[/caption]

Listening to NPR yesterday morning for the first time in a month of Sundays, I caught the puzzle segment with Will Shortz. While Will and Liane engaged in their smile-weary repartée and my wife sorted Us and Ps into the names of world leaders with astonishing speed, my own mind wandered back to the Barnes & Noble I desultorily frequented when I worked in Copley Square. Swimming into my vision came the repressed memory of a table near the front of the store groaning with books "by" Will Shortz. I remember being staggered as I counted the titles with Shortz's name on them—the limp covers, the rheumy gray of the pages. There were seventeen separate crossword puzzles books and Sudoku compilations, all with the same preface.

At the time, it seemed like a strange kind of comic riff was being played on the whole notion of "author." Could he really have had seventeen books out at once, I wondered? and revved up the quantitative bibliographer in me. I paid a quick visit to Amazon and plugged the maestro's name into the "author" field of the advanced search page. The results were astounding: for 2009, 67 (SIXTY-SEVEN) books are listed on Amazon with Shortz's name in the author field. To date! His complete Amazon bibliography runs to 763 separate titles. To be fair, Shortz is typically billed on the cover as "editor." But the Sudoku books would seem to flatten even the concept of "editor": the puzzles are generated by simple software applications.

Authorship here is entirely meta; there's a sense in which the Shortz corpus seems like a grand publishing performance-art piece. Shortz's bibliography is like a model-railroad-size recreation of the entire publishing world in puzzle-addled miniature. He's the "author" of horror puzzle books (The Little Orange Book of Harrowing Sudoku: 335 Frighteningly Fierce Puzzles), business performance & productivity puzzle books (KenKen for your Coffee Break: 100 Logic Puzzles to Make You Smarter), highbrow puzzle books (The New York Times Forever Sunday Crossword Puzzle Book), puzzles-for-dummies books (Will Shortz Presents Everyday Easy Sudoku), even New-Agey self-help puzzle books (The New York Times Soul-Soothing Crosswords: Seventy-Five Relaxing Puzzles). The only genre that seemed to be missing was the novel—now that's a puzzle book I'd like to see.

the-tipping-point

Joshua Glenn — Tue, 29 Sep 2009 00:26:20 +0000

freakonomics-bookcover

Joshua Glenn — Tue, 29 Sep 2009 00:37:28 +0000

MIDDLEBROW BESTSELLERS — THIS WEEK

Joshua Glenn — Tue, 29 Sep 2009 00:38:46 +0000

Same as last week, except Gladwell Moore's Clunk enters the list at no. 8, knocking out Don Piper's 90 Minutes in Heaven. 1) THREE CUPS OF TEA, by Greg Mortenson and David Oliver Relin. (Penguin, $15.) A former climber builds schools in villages in Pakistan and Afghanistan. Sentimental, uplifting, a favorite gift from compassionate conservatives to their liberal undergrad children. 2) FREAKONOMICS, by Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner. (Harper Perennial, $15.99.) A scholar and a journalist apply economic theory to nearly everything. Magical science! 3) JULIE & JULIA, by Julie Powell. (Back Bay/Little, Brown, $14.99;, Little, Brown, $7.99.) A memoir of trying every recipe in Mastering the Art of French Cooking Memoir. Cooking. Ur-middlebrow Nora Ephron directed the movie. Three strikes and you're out! NB: MY LIFE IN FRANCE, by Julia Child with Alex Prud’homme, currently #2 on the NYT paperback nonfiction bestseller list, is not middlebrow. 4) THE GLASS CASTLE, by Jeannette Walls. (Scribner, $15.) The author recalls a bizarre childhood during which she and her siblings moved constantly. If you've read Bill Mauldin's terrific autobiography, A Sort of a Saga (1949), you can't possibly have much patience with this sort of thing. Please see my blog post on "premature biographication." 5) THE TIPPING POINT, by Malcolm Gladwell. (Back Bay/Little, Brown, $14.95.) A study of social epidemics, otherwise known as fads. Magical science! 6) WHEN YOU ARE ENGULFED IN FLAMES, by David Sedaris. (Back Bay/Little, Brown, $15.99.) Humor essays on middle age, mortality, and giving up smoking. We have nothing against bullshit... as long as it's amusing. But we do have something against QUATSCH. 7) BLINK, by Malcolm Gladwell. (Back Bay/Little, Brown, $15.99.) Instinct in the workings of the mind. Magical science! 8 ) CLUNK, by Gladwell Moore (Threshold Editions, $14.99.) The neuroscience of car accidents. Magical science! 9) EAT, PRAY, LOVE, by Elizabeth Gilbert. (Penguin, $15.) A writer’s yearlong journey in search of self takes her to Italy, India, and Indonesia. Memoir. Cooking/Eating. Exotic Tourism. Strike three! 10) SWAY, by Ori Brafman and Rom Brafman (Broadway, $14). The psychological forces that lead us to disregard facts or logic and behave in surprisingly irrational ways. Magical science!

sway

Joshua Glenn — Tue, 29 Sep 2009 00:42:14 +0000

Hilo Hero: Jerry Lee Lewis

Franklin Bruno — Tue, 29 Sep 2009 10:00:41 +0000

The last man standing of Sun Records’ early roster has been known to set himself among even loftier company. "Al Jolson, Jimmie Rodgers, Hank Williams, and JERRY LEE LEWIS [born 1935].... That’s your only four fuckin’ stylists that ever lived.” A typically outsized boast, but there’s something to it. His monomaniacal singing and gliss-happy church-meets-cathouse piano-pounding make him the personification of the priapic, parent-scaring side of rock-and-roll. (Little Richard is his main competition, with one difference; Lewis is as sexually ambiguous as a codpiece.) After his early hits and disastrous 1959 tour on which the press got wind of his marriage to 13-year-old cousin Myra Gale Brown, the Ferriday Flyer spent years in the wilderness before rebranding himself, at least in the studio, as a country balladeer in the ’60s and ’70s. Live, he was (and is) happiest churning anything from “In the Mood” to “Me and Bobby McGee” to any number of Hank standards into demented rockabilly, often sacrificing the tune, the beat, and his backing bands to the imperatives of his own performance. The great paradox of his career is how long an approach that has barely changed over five decades could manage to conjure the sound of perpetual revolution. *** Each day, Hilobrow.com pays tribute to one of our favorite high-, low-, no-, or hilobrow heroes on that person's birthday. Click here for more Hilo Hero shout-outs.

lewis-jerry-lee

Joshua Glenn — Tue, 29 Sep 2009 11:47:42 +0000

Joe_hill002

Joshua Glenn — Tue, 29 Sep 2009 19:49:24 +0000

davis-angela

Joshua Glenn — Tue, 29 Sep 2009 22:43:19 +0000

Picture 1

Joshua Glenn — Wed, 30 Sep 2009 01:25:11 +0000

lennon-ono-550

Joshua Glenn — Wed, 30 Sep 2009 01:38:30 +0000

Hilo Hero: Dave Arneson

Joe Alterio — Wed, 30 Sep 2009 10:00:31 +0000

"Who am I?" "You're DAVE ARNESON (1947-2009), who some claim was the true visionary behind modern role-playing games — though your partner, the more business-minded Gary Gygax, has superceded you in RPG mythology." "OK, I try to develop the first fantasy role-playing game." "Roll to see if your INT score is high enough. You made it! Using rock-paper-scissors, and later dice, to resolve challenges in the game, you develop Blackmoor, a fantasy RPG which you take to Gygax, whom you'd met at his annual gaming convention. Together, you develop a set of rules that becomes Dungeons & Dragons. In ’74, Gygax incorporates TSR to publish it. Now roll a saving throw against a Spell of Betrayal." "Oh, no. I fail!" "Rough luck. Two years later, you leave TSR, and later sue them for royalties on Advanced Dungeons & Dragons. Despite going on to write early computer role-playing games, you've garnered only enough XP to level up to Forgotten Cultural Icon." *** Each day, Hilobrow.com pays tribute to one of our favorite high-, low-, no-, or hilobrow heroes on that person's birthday. Click here for more Hilo Hero shout-outs.

martyn3/syssym/ssh76

Joshua Glenn — Wed, 30 Sep 2009 11:40:09 +0000

John Lennon (1940 - 1980) and Yoko Ono pose on the steps of the Apple building in London, holding one of the posters that they distributed to the world's major cities as part of a peace campaign protesting against the Vietnam War. 'War Is Over, If You Want It'. (Photo by Frank Barratt/Getty Images)

GLORIA STEINEM

Joshua Glenn — Wed, 30 Sep 2009 12:54:31 +0000

Feminist Gloria Steinem pets her cat in her New York apartment on March 18, 1970. (AP Photo)

jimi-hendrix-the-jimi-hendrix-192917

Joshua Glenn — Wed, 30 Sep 2009 12:56:05 +0000

dylan-subterranean

Joshua Glenn — Wed, 30 Sep 2009 12:59:16 +0000

bananas

Joshua Glenn — Wed, 30 Sep 2009 13:02:56 +0000

Generations (10): Anti-Anti-Utopians

Joshua Glenn — Wed, 30 Sep 2009 13:30:47 +0000

Members of the generational cohort born from 1934-43 were in their teens and 20s during the Fifties (1954-63, not to be confused with the the 1950s), and in their 20s and 30s during the Sixties (1964-73). Though this cohort is easily distinguished from their immediate elders (the Postmodernists, born 1924-33), William Strauss and Neil Howe lumped the two cohorts together and dismissively named them the “Silent Generation” (1925-42). It's certainly possible to understand why the Postmodernists, whose emphasis on the ambivalence, indeterminacy, and undecidability of everything did not lend itself to protesters' slogans, were considered "silent" by their ideological and gung-ho elders, the Partisans and New Gods. "Silent," however, is surely a wrong-headed descriptor for the 1934-43 cohort — whose number includes Abbie Hoffman, Gloria Steinem, Eldridge Cleaver, Bernardine Dohrn, Jesse Jackson, Mario Savio, Todd Gitlin, Kate Millett, Vaclav Havel, Stokely Carmichael, and Ken Kesey, not to mention folk singers Bob Dylan, Joan Baez, and Joni Mitchell. Do you still buy into Strauss & Howe's generational periodization scheme, or the middlebrow notion of a Silent Generation? Then Middlebrow has got its hooks into you deep. Borrowing Sartre's slogan, coined after the Soviet invasion of Hungary, about being neither communist nor anticommunist but ''anti-anticommunist," the American literary theorist Fredric Jameson (born on the cusp of this generation and the Postmodernists) coined the phrase "anti-anti-utopian" to describe the only form of utopianism available after the triumph of anti-utopianism during the early Cold War. Jameson claims that certain SF authors — Philip K. Dick, Ursula K. Le Guin — who belong to what I've named the Postmodernist generation are anti-anti-utopians; he also names Samuel R. Delany, who was born in ’42. In honor of Delany, and following Jameson's productive line of theorizing, I've named this generational cohort: the Anti-Anti-Utopians. [caption id="attachment_2755" align="aligncenter" width="550" caption="Stokely Carmichael, 1967"][/caption] High-, low-, no-, and hilobrow members of the 1934-43 generation include: Abbie Hoffman, Barbara Ehrenreich, Bob Dylan, Brian Wilson, Brigitte Bardot, Bruce Dern, Bruce Lee, Buddy Holly, the Dalai Lama, David Cronenberg, Don DeLillo, Eddie Cochran, Edward Said, Eldridge Cleaver, Elvis Presley, Evel Knievel, Georges Perec, Giorgio Agamben, Hasil Adkins, Hunter S. Thompson, Iaian Sinclair, Ian Dury, Jerry Lee Lewis, John Crowley, John Kennedy Toole, John Lennon, Joseph Brodsky, Joseph E. Stiglitz, Julia Kristeva, Ken Kesey, Leonard Cohen, Mama Cass, Margaret Atwood, Michael Moorcock, Michael O'Donoghue, Morris Dickstein, Oscar Zeta Acosta, Otis Redding, R. Crumb, Ralph Bakshi, Richard Pryor, Roy Orbison, Rudy Ray Moore, Samuel R. Delany, Stewart Brand, Stokely Carmichael, Thomas Pynchon, Tom Stoppard, Tony Hendra, Tura Satana, Valerie Solanas, Vito Acconci, Vivienne Westwood, Wanda Jackson, Wendell Berry, Willie Morris, Woody Allen, and Yvonne Craig. Angela Davis, Martin Jay, Yoko Ono, and Bill Griffith are honorary members; and Susan Sontag might be one. *** A reminder of my generational periodization scheme: 1844-53: [Progressive Generation] Prometheans 1854-63: [Progressive, Missionary Generations] Plutonians 1864-73: [Missionary Generation] Anarcho-Symbolists 1874-83: [Missionary Generation] Psychonauts 1884-93: [Lost Generation] Modernists 1894-1903: [Lost, Greatest/GI Generations] Hardboileds 1904-13: [Greatest/GI Generation] Partisans 1914-23: [Greatest/GI Generation] New Gods 1924-33: [Silent Generation] Postmodernists 1934-43: [Silent Generation] Anti-Anti-Utopians 1944-53: Boomers 1954-63: [Boomers, Late Boomers, Post-Boomers, Generation Jones] OGXers 1964-73: [Generation X, Thirteenth Generation] Constructivists 1974-83: [Generations X, Y] Revivalists 1984-93: [Millennial Generation] Throwbacks 1994-2003: [Millennial Generation] TBA *** Why does Middlebrow insist on calling the 1934-43 cohort "silent," despite all evidence to the contrary? To Middlebrow, there are only two legitimate, and three possible modes of action. It's legitimate to work contentedly within the status quo — though contentment might involve adjustment, as in: becoming "well-adjusted." And it's legitimate to agitate vociferously for reform — i.e., it's legitimate for a group that's been denied entrance to the middle class, or denied recognition or respect by mainstream culture, to agitate for membership, recognition, and respect. These legit modes of action are heimlich and gemütlich. Middlebrow also recognizes, and, in a guarded way, applauds a third, unheimlich (nobrow) mode of action: dropping out of the middle class and mainstream culture. The Hardboiled, Partisan, and New God generations aren't considered "silent" because their notable members tended to adopt one of these three modes of action. Notable Postmodernists, however, regarded this tripartite model as an invisible prison, and themselves as prisoners — sullenly close-mouthed, or sneakily tunneling under the walls. Notable members of the 1934-43 cohort weren't silent in the same way. Although they agreed with their Partisan, New God, and Postmodernist elders that utopian blueprints are inherently totalitarian, or at least proto-totalitarian, they vociferously and articulately refused to accept the postwar consensus that there was no longer any alternative to liberal capitalism. So were they reformers? Some were, perhaps, but others simultaneously refused to renounce a utopian faith in the possibility of another world. They were neither utopian nor anti-utopian. This double-negative worldview is difficult to articulate, and nearly impossible to translate into action! It's not as pessimistic a worldview, perhaps, as the Postmodernist vision of the liberal capitalist social order as an invisible prison — but to Partisans and New Gods, it might seem a "silent" one. Middlebrows, of course, call members of this neither-nor generation "silent" because they'd like to muzzle their canniest foes. [caption id="attachment_6968" align="aligncenter" width="539" caption="Trial scene from Bananas"]Bananas" title="bananas" width="539" height="348" class="size-full wp-image-6968" />[/caption] Woody Allen is an avatar of this neither-nor generation, which (most notably during the Sixties) looked upon the competing ideologies and discourses of older and younger generations with a Postmodernist's detachment, yet which was also ferociously idealistic and outspoken. Allen's comedies of the Sixties (1964-73), particularly Bananas, Sleeper, and Love and Death, seriously critique the excesses of the Establishment and the revolutionary underground alike. Thomas Pynchon's entire oeuvre also criticizes both the Establishment and the revolutionary underground, or counterculture. John Lennon's "Revolution" also has an idealistic neither-nor message: "When you talk about destruction/Don't you know that you can count me out (in)." Bob Dylan's refusal to conform to the New God-era model of a folk singer might be considered an idealistic neither/nor mode of action. Eldridge Cleaver articulated a version of this non-reformist utopianism when he told an interviewer: “I believe that there are two Americas. There is the America of the American dream, and there is the America of the American nightmare. I feel that I am a citizen of the American dream, and that the revolutionary struggle of which I am a part is a struggle against the American nightmare, which is the present reality.” And then there's Bruce Lee's neither-nor fighting style. "Styles require adjustment, partiality, denials, condensation, and a lot of self-justification," he wrote, in one of his philosophical martial arts treatises. "The man who is really serious, with the urge to find out what truth is, has no style at all. He lives only in what is." *** If Middlebrow is forever working to naturalize the unnatural, eternalize the temporary, and make the contingent seem inevitable, performance art does the opposite. Performance art is an anti-middlebrow artform, one which (in more or less compelling and engaging ways) signals the artist's rejection of the terms and conditions of modern life by treating everyday reality as though it were theater. Performance art emerged in the Sixties with the work of Postmodernist artists such as Yves Klein, Wolf Vostell, and Allan Kaprow, as well as Anti-Anti-Utopian artists like Vito Acconci (pictured below, in a 1970 performance), Hermann Nitsch, Carolee Schneemann, and honorary Anti-Anti-Utopian Yoko Ono. (Joseph Beuys is a New God, which explains why he fell out with Fluxus, if you ask me; and Chris Burden is a Boomer.) Gilbert and George are also Anti-Anti-Utopians. Middlebrows despise performance art, and mock it viciously whenever possible. Two years ago this month, for example, when Star Simpson, an electrical engineering major at MIT, was arrested for innocently walking into Boston's Logan Airport (where she was meeting her boyfriend's plane) wearing a sweatshirt adorned with a plastic circuit board on which a handful of glowing green lights in the shape of a star were wired to a 9-volt battery, middlebrow pundits snarkily accused Simpson of the crime of performance art. The Boston Globe columnist Jeff Jacoby described Simpson's actions as a "public display," an "immature stunt," and a "juvenile prank." Meanwhile, Boston Herald columnist Howie Carr wrote: "The First Amendment does not give you the right to yell fire in a crowded theater. Or don't bring what looks like a bomb into Logan Airport...." Carr's Herald colleage Peter Gelzinis scoffed: "Maybe Star Anna Simpson thought she could saunter through Logan and return to Cambridge with a helluva tale about how no one said a word to her." The Herald's Michele McPhee agreed 110%: "There is absolutely nothing artistic about scaring people in public places." [caption id="attachment_7007" align="aligncenter" width="384" caption="Star Simpson\'s sweatshirt"][/caption] A blogger at the grassroots-conservative website Free Republic, sarcastically ventriloquizing (nonexistent) supporters of Simpson's (unintentional) performance art, articulated the anxiety expressed in slightly more subtle ways by these middlebrow critics: "Lighten up! It was performance art, everybody! It was a brilliant illustration of the gestapo tactics of the Bush Administration to any law-abiding citizen strolling through an airport with something that looks like a bomb.... It was a stunning performance and I hope she gets an 'A.'" Though Simpson wasn't doing any such thing, middlebrows are apparently so afraid that a performance artist might succeed in waking us up to the possibility of radical change that they responded instinctively with a tsunami of mocking hostility. Performance art, in which so many (Lennon, Dylan, Cleaver, Hoffman, Kesey, Thompson, Crumb, Pynchon, Solanas, Allen) of our favorite Anti-Anti-Utopians engaged, is — like Dada and Neo-Dada — unheimlich. Whenever possible, Middlebrow seeks to coopt and suborn the unheimlich, transforming it into something cuter and cuddlier: cheese, quatsch. If unable to do so, Middlebrow turns performance art's japery back on itself, a thousand-fold. Ask yourself why we've all been persuaded to hate Yoko Ono — that's right. She's anti-middlebrow. *** I claimed, above, that Anti-Anti-Utopians are easily distinguishable from their immediate elders, the Postmoderns. But I went on to note that Anti-Anti-Utopians looked upon the competing ideologies and discourses of New Gods, Partisans, and Boomers with a Postmodernist's detachment. Though certain influential Anti-Anti-Utopians can be called performance artists (whether or not they called themselves that), the performance art of the Sixties was pioneered in part by Postmodernists. So how, exactly, are the Anti-Anti-Utopians distinct, as a generation, from the Postmodernist cohort? Compare Don DeLillo, Thomas Pynchon, Thomas McGuane, John Kennedy Toole, and Hunter S. Thompson, all of whom were born from 1934-43, to similar novelists from the preceding generation: John Barth, Donald Barthelme, Robert Coover, William Gass, E.L. Doctorow. OK, Barth's Lost in the Funhouse is pretty amusing, but in general, Anti-Antis are funnier — not less serious, but perhaps less earnest — than Postmodernists. They derive an unseemly amount of anarchistic amusement from the tensions, uncertainties, and paradoxes of postwar American life. It's for this reason that I've named Philip Roth (born in the cusp year 1933) an honorary Anti-Anti. Anti-Antis didn't consider themselves postmodern; they were generally less pessimistic than Postmodernists; and even though they were unwilling to articulate what utopia might look like, their anti-anti-utopianism expressed a hopefulness not seen since the Modernists. Speaking of whom, it seems fair to say that Woody Allen rebooted Charlie Chaplin and Groucho Marx; John Lennon and Yoko Ono — Hugo Ball and Emmy Hennings; Michael Moorcock — H.P. Lovecraft; R. Crumb — Henry Miller; Samuel R. Delany and Margaret Atwood — Olaf Stapledon, Karel Čapek, Yevgeny Zamyatin. Meanwhile, the Yippies (Hoffman), Merry Pranksters (Kesey), even the Beatles (Lennon) can be seen as dissensual organizations of talented misfits — like Dada, or D.H. Lawrence's plan for the colony of Rananim. Such Argonaut Follies are non-totalizing organizations that serve as inspirations for an un-blueprintable utopian society. *** The Sixties (1964-73) belonged to the Anti-Anti-Utopians. When we think of the Sixties, we think of feminists (Gloria Steinem), Yippies (Abbie Hoffman), Black Panthers (Eldridge Cleaver), gentle bearded freaks (Jim Henson) and violent ones (Charles Manson, Theodore Kaczynski), gonzo journalists and far-out novelists (Hunter S. Thompson, Ken Kesey, Don DeLillo, Thomas Pynchon). The Sixties were about the films of Woody Allen; the comedy of George Carlin and Richard Pryor; and the songwriting of Gerry Goffin, Sonny Bono, and Carole King. All of whom were Anti-Anti-Utopians. Pop music in the Sixties was an Anti-Anti-Utopian thing. That era saw the triumphant comeback of Elvis; the success of soul and funk (Marvin Gaye, Smokey Robinson, Tina Turner, George Clinton, Otis Redding, Aretha Franklin, Curtis Mayfield, Isaac Hayes); and the apotheosis of folk and folk rock (Joan Baez; Bob Dylan; Joni Mitchell; Peter, Paul & Mary; also members of the Mamas and the Papas, Simon and Garfunkel, The Byrds, The Grateful Dead). The world-historical triumph of rock, of course, was also a Sixties phenomenon: Besides the Beatles and the Rolling Stones, members of The Doors, The Velvet Underground, The Beach Boys, and Jefferson Airplane were born from 1934-43; so were Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, Captain Beefheart, and Frank Zappa. The Boomers, who want to claim the Sixties as their own, merely went along for the ride. The modes that we associate with Boomers during the Sixties — i.e., dropping out of the middle class and mainstream culture, or vociferously agitating for reform (as opposed to insisting, anarchistically, that another world is possible) — are ones that Middlebrow encourages and applauds. As for the Boomers' antiwar activism, well, one of their leaders — John Kerry — was born on the cusp of the two generations. The March on the Pentagon was organized by older pacifists; and Hoffman organized the "levitation" stunt. Also, Boomer activism ceased once the draft ended. 'Nuff said. *** Meet the Anti-Anti-Utopians: HONORARY ANTI-ANTI-UTOPIANS: Philip Roth, Yoko Ono, possibly Susan Sontag (all born 1933). 1934: Leonard Cohen (singer/songwriter), Brigitte Bardot (actor, sex symbol), Willie Morris (highbrow Harper's editor, middlebrow author), Wendell Berry (farmer, theorist), Don Kirshner (mastermind behind The Monkees), Rip Taylor (TV personality), Piers Anthony (goofy SF author), Alan Arkin (actor), Amiri Baraka (Leroi Jones, author), Ted Berrigan (poet), Bill Bixby (played the Incredible Hulk on TV), Judi Dench (actress), Barbara Eden (actor), Brian Epstein (Beatles manager), Yuri Gagarin (cosmonaut), David Halberstam (middlebrow journalist), Florence Henderson (actor), Barry Humphries (actor, Dame Edna), Shirley Jones (actor), Jim Lehrer (middlebrow journalist), Audre Lord (author), Sophia Loren (actor), Tina Louise (Ginger on Gilligan's Island), Shirley MacLaine (actor), Charles Manson (criminal), Garry Marshall (middlebrow director, Happy Days, Laverne & Shirley), Jackie Mason (comic), Ved Mehta (author), Eugene H. Methvin (middlebrow editor, Reader's Digest), Kate Millett (feminist activist, Sexual Politics), N. Scott Momaday (author), Robert Moog (invented synthesizer), Bill Moyers (middlebrow journalist), Ralph Nader (activist), Sydney Pollack (director), John Rechy (author, City of Night), Carl Sagan (popular astronomer), George Segal (actor), Maggie Smith (actress), Gloria Steinem (feminist activist, founding editor of Ms. Magazine), Stephan Thernstrom (high-middlebrow historian, neocon ideologue), Frankie Valli (musician), Jackie Wilson (musician), Del Shannon (songwriter), Paul W. MacAvoy (neocon economist). HONORARY POSTMODERNISTS: Ralph Rumney (Situationist), Raoul Vaneigem (Belgian philosopher, Situationist), John Brunner (SF novelist), Harlan Ellison (SF novelist); possibly Joan Didion (journalist and author, Slouching Toward Bethlehem) and Fredric Jameson (theorist, The Political Unconscious). 1935: Woody Allen (comic, author, director), Elvis Presley (the King of rock'n'roll), Dalai Lama (religious leader), Ken Kesey (Merry Prankster, author, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest), Edward Said (intellectual, Orientalism), Jerry Lee Lewis (musician), Michael Walzer (philosopher), Oscar Zeta Acosta (attorney, activist, performance artist), Richard Berry (musician, wrote "Louie, Louie"), Richard Brautigan (author), Eldridge Cleaver (activist, author), Tura Satana (actor, Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill!), Owsley Stanley (LSD activist), Gene Vincent (musician), Erich von Däniken (crank), Herb Alpert (musician), Julie Andrews (actress, singer), Sonny Bono (songwriter, musician), Peter Boyle (actor), Susan Brownmiller (feminist, author), Seymour Cassel (actor), Christo (artist), Robert Conrad (actor), Harry Crews (author), Alain Delon (actor), Bob Denver (played Gilligan on Gilligan's Isle), Phil Donahue (middlebrow talk show host), Werner Erhard (middlebrow guru, est), Geraldine Ferraro (politician), William Friedkin (director), Charles Grodin (actor), Pete Hamill (journalist), Judd Hirsch (actor), Lewis Lapham (Harper's editor), David Lodge (author), Dudley Moore (comic actor), John Phillips (musician, The Mamas & The Papas), E. Annie Proulx (middlebrow author), Anne Roiphe (feminist author), Françoise Sagan (author), Robert Silverberg (SF & Fantasy author), Donald Sutherland (actor), Jimmy Swaggart (televangelist), Jack Welch (CEO of GE), William Julius Wilson (sociologist). 1936: Abbie Hoffman (Yippie, author), Don DeLillo (author, White Noise), Bruce Dern (actor), Carol Gilligan (psychologist, In a Different Voice), Vaclav Havel (playwright, president of Czechoslovakia), Buddy Holly (musician), Roy Orbison (musician), Georges Perec (Oulipo author), Lee "Scratch" Perry (music producer), Valerie Solanas (activist, author, The SCUM Manifesto), Alan Alda (middlebrow actor), Stephen E. Ambrose (historian), Ursula Andress (actor), Jean M. Auel (middlebrow author), Richard Bach (middlebrow author, Jonathan Livingston Seagull), Joe Don Baker (actor), Marion Barry (politician), James Bridges (director), Jim Brown (actor, athlete), Ruth Buzzi (comic), Glen Campbell (Country musician), David Carradine (actor, Kung Fu), Dick Cavett (talk show host), Wilt Chamberlain (athlete), Don Cherry (jazz musician), Bobby Darin (singer, actor), Albert Ayler (jazz saxophonist), A.S. Byatt (author, critic), Troy Donahue (actor), Albert Finney (actor), Al Goldstein (founder of Screw), Jim Henson (middlebrow puppeteer), Dennis Hopper (actor), June Jordan (poet), Philip Kaufman (director), Jonathan Kozol (educator), Kris Kristofferson (actor, Country musician), Ken Loach (director), Larry McMurtry (author), Roger Miller (Country musician), Mary Tyler Moore (actor), Marge Piercy (middlebrow author), Juliet Prowse (dancer), Robert Redford (actor, Sundance Film Festival), Burt Reynolds (actor), Tom Robbins (author), Bobby Seale (activist, cofounded Black Panthers), Ralph Steadman (artist), Frank Stella (Minimalist artist), Dean Stockwell (actor), John McCain (politician), Richard John Neuhaus (neocon priest, First Things), Antonin Scalia (neocon justice). 1937: Thomas Pynchon (author, Gravity's Rainbow), Hasil Adkins (rockabilly musician), Yvonne Craig (played Batgirl), Wanda Jackson (rock'n'roll singer), Rodd Keith (song-poem composer), Rudy Ray Moore (actor, Dolemite), Thomas Nagel (philosopher), Edward Ruscha (nobrow Pop artist), Robert Stone (author, Dog Soldiers), Tom Stoppard (playwright, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead), Hunter S. Thompson (gonzo journalist and author, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas), John Kennedy Toole (author, A Confederacy of Dunces), Sergio Aragones (MAD cartoonist), Shirley Bassey (singer), Warren Beatty (actor), Dyan Cannon (actor), George Carlin (nobrow comic), Jackie Collins (author), Bill Cosby (comic loved by middlebrows), Dick Dale (surf music guitarist), Robert Downey Sr. (director, Putney Swope), Jane Fonda (actor, Vietnam War protester), Colin Powell (government), Morgan Freeman (actor loved by middlebrows), Merle Haggard (Country musician), Seymour Hersh (journalist), David Hockney (nobrow Pop artist), Dustin Hoffman (actor loved by middlebrows), Anthony Hopkins (actor loved by middlebrows), Saddam Hussein (despot), Waylon Jennings (Country musician), Marty Krofft (TV and film producer, H.R. Pufnstuf), Lois Lowry (Juvenile SF author), Peter Max (psychedelic artist), Garrett Morris (comic), Jack Nicholson (actor loved by middlebrows), Renzo Piano (architect), Ridley Scott (director, Alien), Marlo Thomas (actor), Billy Dee Williams (actor), Roger Zelazny (SF author, Damnation Alley). [caption id="attachment_2612" align="aligncenter" width="550" caption="Merry Pranksters Ken Kesey (right) and Stewart Brand, in October 1966."][/caption] 1938: Stewart Brand (Merry Prankster, Whole Earth Catalog), Ralph Bakshi (cartoonist), Eddie Cochran (musician, "Summertime Blues"), Stanley Fish (literary critic), Evel Knievel (daredevil), Jerry Rubin (Yippie), Hermann Nitsch (performance artist), Renata Adler (journalist), Judy Blume (author), Pat Buchanan (conservative pundit), Raymond Carver (author loved by middlebrows), Alan Dershowitz (lawyer), Bob Eubanks (TV game show host), Sherman Hemsley (George on The Jeffersons), Etta James (singer), Peter Jennings (journalist), Phil Knight (cofounded Nike), Christopher Lloyd (character actor), Ali MacGraw (actor), Bernie Madoff (con artist), Nico (musician), Larry Niven (SF author), Robert Nozick (libertarian philosopher), Joyce Carol Oates (author), Gary Gygax (co-crrator of Dungeons & Dragons), Charley Pride (Country musician), Rex Reed (film critic), Diana Rigg (Mrs. Peel on The Avengers), Kenny Rogers (Country music), Jean Seberg (actor), Charles Simic (poet), Paul Verhoeven (director, Robocop), Jon Voight (actor), Natalie Wood (actor). 1939: Margaret Atwood (SF author), Stew Albert (Yippie), Fritjof Capra (physicist), Tom Hayden (activist, SDS), Michael Moorcock (anti-middlebrow SF/Fantasy author), F. Murray Abraham (played an Abbie Hoffman figure in The Big Fix), Carolee Schneemann (performance artist), Ginger Baker (musician), Jim Bakker (televangelist), Peter Bogdanovich (director), Michael Cimino (director), John Cleese (Monty Python), David Frost (journalist), Judy Collins (folk singer), Francis Ford Coppola (director, The Godfather), Margaret Drabble (author), Roberta Flack (singer), Marvin Gaye (singer), George Gilder (technological futurist, high-middlebrow pundit), Germaine Greer (feminist activist), Seamus Heaney (poet), Harvey Keitel (actor), Louise Lasser (actor), Ralph Lauren (fashion designer), Lee Majors (actor), Ray Manzarek (musician, The Doors), Thomas McGuane (author), Sal Mineo (actor), Harvey Pekar (author, American Splendor), Michael J. Pollard (actor), Joel Schumacher (director), Neil Sedaka (singer/songwriter), Grace Slick (singer, Jefferson Airplane/Starship), Dusty Springfield (singer), Lily Tomlin (comic actress), Tina Turner (singer), Joel-Peter Witkin (photographer/artist) 1940: Bruce Lee (actor, philosopher), Joseph Brodsky (poet), John Lennon (Beatle), Ringo Starr (Beatle), Richard Pryor (comic), Vito Acconci (perfomance artist), Michael O'Donoghue (comic, National Lampoon, Saturday Night Live), George Romero (director), Frank Zappa (musician), Terry Gilliam (Monty Python, cartoonist, director), Roger Ailes (CEO, Fox News), Dario Argento (director), Frankie Avalon (singer, actor), Russell Banks (author), Tom Brokaw (TV journalist), James Caan (actor), Angela Carter (author), George Clinton (musician), Brian De Palma (director), Peter Fonda (actor), Herbie Hancock (jazz musician), Tom Jones (singer), Raul Julia (actor), Anna Karina (actor), Jorma Kaukonen (musician), Maxine Hong Kingston (author), Ted Koppel (TV journalist), Chuck Norris (actor), Phil Ochs (singer/songwriter), Abbas Kiarostami (director), Al Pacino (actor), Smokey Robinson (singer), Pharoah Sanders (jazz saxophonist), Martin Sheen (actor), Nancy Sinatra (singer), Phil Spector (music producer), Norman Spinrad (SF author), Patrick Stewart (actor), Alex Trebek (gameshow host), Raquel Welch (actress), Edmund White (author), Morris Dickstein (historian, critic), James L. Brooks (director, producer). 1941: Stokely Carmichael (activist), Mama Cass (singer), Alexander Cockburn (columnist, The Nation), Bob Dylan (musician), Barbara Ehrenreich (activist author), Stephen Jay Gould (evolutionary biologist), Tony Hendra (comic, National Lampoon), Julia Kristeva (poststructuralist philosopher, psychoanalyst), Hayao Miyazaki (anime director), Daniel Pinkwater (anarchistic author of juvenile lit), Otis Redding (singer/songwriter), Vivienne Westwood (fashion designer), Graham Chapman (Monty Python), Aldrich Ames (spy), Ann-Margret (actor), Michael Apted (director), Joan Baez (singer), Captain Beefheart (musician), Gregory Benford (physicist, SF author), Bernardo Bertolucci (director), Lester Bowie (jazz trumpeter), Ed Bradley (TV journalist), Beau Bridges (actor), John Brockman (editor of Edge.org), Eric Burdon (musician), Chubby Checker (singer), Dick Cheney (politician), Lynne Cheney (Dick Cheney's wife, neocon, NEH), Chick Corea (jazz keyboardist), David Crosby (musician), Desmond Dekker (musician), Dr. Demento (novelty DJ), Neil Diamond (singer/songwriter), Faye Dunaway (actor), Nora Ephron (middlebrow author, director), Stephen Frears (director), Art Garfunkel (musician), Spalding Gray (monologist beloved of middlebrows), Robert Hass (poet), David Hemmings (actor), Jesse Jackson (activist), Krzysztof Kieslowski (director), Mike Love (Beach Boys), Harry Nilsson (singer/songwriter), Nick Nolte (actor), Ryan O'Neal (actor), Richard Perle (neocon, "Prince of Darkness," Project for a New American Century), James Woolsey (neocon, CIA director), James P. Hoffa (labor leader, neocon), Wolfgang Petersen (director), Wilson Pickett (singer/songwriter), Anne Rice (middlebrow horror author), Paul Theroux (novelist), Anne Tyler (author), Ritchie Valens (musician), Bors Vallejo (fantasy artist), Charlie Watts (Rolling Stones), George Will (neocon), Chuck Woolery (game show host), Samuel Zell (billionaire), Michael Ledeen (neoconservative activist), Richard Dawkins (biologist), Paul Simon (middlebrow musician). 1942: Samuel R. Delany (SF author), Paul McCartney (Beatle), Giorgio Agamben (philosopher), Daniel Dennett (philosopher), Chris Miller (National Lampoon, Animal House), John Crowley (author, Little, Big), Bernardine Dohrn (activist, Weather Underground), Ian Dury (musician), Lou Reed (Velvet Underground), Gloria Anzaldua (author), Martin Scorsese (director), Gayatri Spivak (postcolonial theorist), Brian Wilson (Beach Boys), Terry Jones (Monty Python), Robert Christgau (rock critic), Barry McCaffrey (neocon), David Gergen (neocon columnist, presidential advisor), Muhammad Ali (boxer), Isabel Allende (author), Tammy Faye Bakker (televangelist), Marty Balin (Jefferson Airplane), Karen Black (actor), John Cale (Velvet Underground, producer), C.J. Cherryh (SF author), Michael Crichton (middlebrow thriller author), Sandra Dee (actor), Roger Ebert (film critic), Michael Eisner (low-middlebrow CEO, Disney), Mick Fleetwood (Fleetwood Mac), Larry Flynt (publisher, Hustler), Harrison Ford (actor), Aretha Franklin (singer), Annette Funicello (actor), Jerry Garcia (Grateful Dead), Peter Greenaway (director), Barry Hannah (author), Stephen Hawking (physicist), Isaac Hayes (musician), Jimi Hendrix (musician), Werner Herzog (director), John Irving (middlebrow author), Brian Jones (Rolling Stones), Erica Jong (author), Ted Kaczynski (criminal), Madeline Kahn (actor), Garrison Keillor (middlebrow radio personality), Carole King (singer/songwriter), Calvin Klein (fashion designer), Barry Levinson (director), Penny Marshall (Laverne and Shirley), Curtis Mayfield (musician), Country Joe McDonald (musician), Roger McGuinn (The Byrds), Graham Nash (musician), Mike Nesmith (The Monkees), Huey Newton (activist), Tom Peters (management guru), Robert Quine (punk guitarist), Richard Roundtree (actor), Mario Savio (activist, Free Speech Movement), Barbara Streisand (actor), Andy Summers (The Police), Peter Tork (The Monkees), Gabriele Veneziano (physicist, string theory), Andrew Weil (New Age guru), Paul Weyrich (conservative activist), Tammy Wynette (Country musician), Steve Wynn (middlebrow Las Vegas billionaire). 1943: R. Crumb (cartoonist), George Harrison (Beatle), David Cronenberg (director), Iaian Sinclair (psychogeographer), Joseph E. Stiglitz (economist), Michael Palin (Monty Python), Eric Idle (Monty Python), Newt Gingrich (neocon), Charles Murray (neocon author, The Bell Curve), Frederick Barthelme (author), Steven Bochco (TV director), H. Rap Brown (activist), Nolan Bushnell (co-founded Atari, founded Chuck E. Cheese), Peter Carey (author), Larry Clark (photographer, director), Robert De Niro (actor), Catherine Deneuve (actor), John Denver (musician), Bobby Fischer (chess player), Nikki Giovanni (poet), Louise Glüick (poet), Doris Kearns Goodwin (historian), Hendrik Hertzberg (New Yorker), Mick Jagger (Rolling Stones), Terrence Malick (director), Barry Manilow (singer-songwriter), Michael Mann (director), Malcolm McDowell (actor), Christine McVie (Fleetwood Mac), Steve Miller (musician), Joni Mitchell (singer-songwriter), Jim Morrison (The Doors), Randy Newman (songwriter), Oliver North (neocon), Joe Pesci (actor), Keith Richards (Rolling Stones), Geraldo Rivera (TV journalist), Cokie Roberts (TV journalist), Edie Sedgwick (Warhol factory girl), Ronnie Spector (singer), R.L. Stine (juvenile horror author), Sharon Tate (actor), Christopher Walken (actor), Roger Waters (Pink Floyd), Paul Wolfowitz (neocon). HONORARY BOOMERS: Chevy Chase (comic), Todd Gitlin (activist), Don Novello (comic), Michael Ondaatje (author), Harry Shearer (comic, actor), Sam Shepard (playwright, actor), John Kerry (antiwar activist, politician), George W.S. Trow (author, social critic), David Denby (middlebrow film critic). HONORARY ANTI-ANTI-UTOPIANS: Angela Davis (activist, scholar), Sly Stone (musician), Martin Jay (intellectual historian), Bill Griffith (cartoonist), Jonathan Demme (director), Patti LaBelle (soul singer-songwriter), maybe Rem Koolhaas (architect) (all born 1944).

sagan

Matthew Battles — Wed, 30 Sep 2009 13:53:07 +0000

Autotune the Universe

Matthew Battles — Wed, 30 Sep 2009 13:54:40 +0000

Electronica composer John Boswell remixes the preambles and perorations of Carl Sagan for a groovy take on the wonder-struck spiritual cosmology at the heart of the landmark PBS series Cosmos. With a guest appearance by Stephen Hawking, who rawks the auto-tuner oldskool. —via Don Share

star

Joshua Glenn — Wed, 30 Sep 2009 15:12:55 +0000

acconci-1970

Joshua Glenn — Wed, 30 Sep 2009 15:16:55 +0000

Hilo Hero: Dizzee Rascal

Patrick Cates — Thu, 01 Oct 2009 10:00:03 +0000

DIZZEE RASCAL (born 1985) grew up in Bow, an East London ghetto of burnt-out mopeds, stabbings, pitbulls, and postcode turf wars between gangs of angry teenagers. After a prescient teacher gave him the know-how to produce his own music from this bleak well of inspiration, he dragged the London grime scene into the mainstream in 2003 with "I Luv U," a darkly comic duet that told a tale of teenage pregnancy against a backdrop of simple, dirty beats and beeps. But it was the second single from his award-winning Boy In Da Corner album, "Fix Up, Look Sharp" that exemplified the wholly original and grimly eclectic Rascal style: vocals that simultaneously imply bellowing Cockney barrow boy, crowd-inciting garage MC, and sleek-tongued rapper; lyrics that recount East London gang retribution with an evil smile (“Stay sweet as a nut, sweet like Tropicana/When the hammer hits, your head splits like banana"); and catchy but highly unlikely samples, in this case the high-pitched cod-rock singing and bombastic drumming of Billy Squier's "The Big Beat." With his latest album, Tongue N' Cheek, Dizzee admits that he has made a career move away from grime towards something much more poppish (and lucrative). But he will always be remembered as an innovative street urchin who shook up the urban music world like a snow globe. *** Each day, Hilobrow.com pays tribute to one of our favorite high-, low-, no-, or hilobrow heroes on that person's birthday. Click here for more Hilo Hero shout-outs.

367px-FatuHiva

Matthew Battles — Thu, 01 Oct 2009 13:22:58 +0000

Middlebrow vs. Performance Art

Joshua Glenn — Thu, 01 Oct 2009 14:00:26 +0000

If Middlebrow is forever working to naturalize the unnatural, eternalize the temporary, and make the contingent seem inevitable, performance art does the opposite. Performance art is an anti-middlebrow artform, one which (in more or less compelling and engaging ways) signals the artist's rejection of the terms and conditions of modern life by treating everyday reality as though it were theater. This post is excerpted from yesterday's post on the Anti-Anti-Utopian Generation. Performance art emerged in the Sixties with the work of Postmodernist artists such as Yves Klein, Wolf Vostell, and Allan Kaprow, as well as Anti-Anti-Utopian artists like Vito Acconci, Hermann Nitsch, Carolee Schneemann, and honorary Anti-Anti-Utopian Yoko Ono. (Joseph Beuys is a New God, which explains why he fell out with Fluxus, if you ask me; and Chris Burden is a Boomer.) Gilbert and George are also Anti-Anti-Utopians. Middlebrows despise performance art, and mock it viciously whenever possible. Two years ago this month, for example, when Star Simpson, an electrical engineering major at MIT, was arrested for innocently walking into Boston's Logan Airport (where she was meeting her boyfriend's plane) wearing a sweatshirt adorned with a plastic circuit board on which a handful of glowing green lights in the shape of a star were wired to a 9-volt battery, middlebrow pundits snarkily accused Simpson of the crime of performance art. The Boston Globe columnist Jeff Jacoby described Simpson's actions as a "public display," an "immature stunt," and a "juvenile prank." Meanwhile, Boston Herald columnist Howie Carr wrote: "The First Amendment does not give you the right to yell fire in a crowded theater. Or don't bring what looks like a bomb into Logan Airport...." Carr's Herald colleage Peter Gelzinis scoffed: "Maybe Star Anna Simpson thought she could saunter through Logan and return to Cambridge with a helluva tale about how no one said a word to her." The Herald's Michele McPhee agreed 110%: "There is absolutely nothing artistic about scaring people in public places." [caption id="attachment_7007" align="aligncenter" width="384" caption="Star Simpson\'s sweatshirt"][/caption] A blogger at the grass-roots conservative website Free Republic, sarcastically ventriloquizing (nonexistent) supporters of Simpson's (unintentional) performance art, articulated the anxiety expressed in slightly more subtle ways by these middlebrow critics: "Lighten up! It was performance art, everybody! It was a brilliant illustration of the gestapo tactics of the Bush Administration to any law-abiding citizen strolling through an airport with something that looks like a bomb.... It was a stunning performance and I hope she gets an 'A.'" Though Simpson wasn't doing any such thing, middlebrows are apparently so afraid that a performance artist might succeed in waking us up to the possibility of radical change that they responded instinctively with a tsunami of mocking hostility. Performance art, in which so many (Lennon, Dylan, Cleaver, Hoffman, Kesey, Thompson, Crumb, Pynchon, Solanas, Allen) of our favorite Anti-Anti-Utopians engaged, is — like Dada and Neo-Dada — unheimlich. Whenever possible, Middlebrow seeks to coopt and suborn the unheimlich, transforming it into something cuter and cuddlier: cheese, quatsch. If unable to do so, Middlebrow turns performance art's japery back on itself, a thousand-fold.

Hilo Hero: A. E. Waite

Erik Davis — Fri, 02 Oct 2009 10:00:35 +0000

Within the western current of occult mysticism, A. E. WAITE (1857–1942) stands out as a prototype of the modern scholar-practitioner — an initiate and seeker who was nonetheless devoted to mapping and organizing the occult as an object of historical knowledge rather than a field of creative elaboration (or mystification). Born in America but raised in humble circumstances in the UK, Waite was a member of the famous Order of the Golden Dawn (with the motto Sacramentum Regis Abscondere Bonum Est) and, as a mystical Christian always wary of the Order’s more magical leanings, was also instrumental in its demise. His many books helped lay the foundation for the modern understanding of alchemy, Rosicrucianism, black magic, and other zones of arcana, but he made his biggest mark with the Rider Waite Tarot deck he produced with GD initiate Pamela Colman Smith (motto: Quod Tibi id Aliis) at the end of the Belle Epoque. Influenced by Eliphas Levi’s brilliant 19th-century over-reading of the Tarot’s esoteric correspondences, Waite directed Smith to produce a deck “with an appeal in the world of art and a suggestion of significance behind the Symbols.” The art world didn’t care much for Smith’s charming and potent Art Nouveau cartoons, but popular culture did. Today the Rider-Waite — which was the first to provide images for all 78 cards — remains hands-down the most popular of Tarot decks, and the "archetypal" template for numerous clones. *** Each day, Hilobrow.com pays tribute to one of our favorite high-, low-, no-, or hilobrow heroes on that person's birthday. Click here for more Hilo Hero shout-outs.

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Joshua Glenn — Sat, 03 Oct 2009 02:50:21 +0000

Hilo Hero: Talib Kweli

Tom Nealon — Sat, 03 Oct 2009 10:00:13 +0000

No anti- middlebrow in recent memory has gotten more mileage (and grief) because of Middlebrow's coopting efforts than TALIB KWELI (born 1975). Anointed the savior of hip hop after 1998's brilliant Mos Def and Talib Kweli Are Black Star and his nearly brilliant 2000 follow-up with DJ Hi-Tek, Reflection Eternal, Kweli has had a curious career at mainstream culture's fringes. Facing enormous pressure to be the next Arrested Development, Digable Planets, the next Guru or Mos Def (a trick that has confounded Mos himself), Kweli has instead forged his own meandering path through a minefield of modest popular acclaim. Though singled out as the antidote to everything the mainstream despises/loves about mainstream rap, he's resolutely ignored the zirconia of fake authenticity:

Not strong, only aggressive Not free, we only licensed Not compassionate, only polite Not who the nicest? Not good, but well-behaved Chasin' after death So we can call ourselves brave?

His path has had its ups and downs musically, and he still hasn't done anything to equal the effortless genius of Black Star. But Kweli has continued to make thoughtful music you can dance to. *** Each day, Hilobrow.com pays tribute to one of our favorite high-, low-, no-, or hilobrow heroes on that person's birthday. Click here for more Hilo Hero shout-outs.

Hilo Hero: Buster Keaton

Joe Alterio — Sun, 04 Oct 2009 14:00:23 +0000

At one point in Billy Wilder's Sunset Boulevard (1950), we find washed-up silent film stars literally and figuratively playing out their last hands. A small ashen-faced man declines to bid on consecutive hands, and with just a small movement of the head and a wrinkled brow, he manages to signal that he's a former film giant reduced to playing for his keep. When he was a star, BUSTER KEATON (1895-1996) played the ingenue and the boyscout with heartbreaking aplomb. That signature Keaton look — brow furrowed, big eyes looking desperately to the heavens — is a perfect manifestation of his appeal. Where Chaplin was the coy clown, Keaton was the believable underdog. Where Lloyd was a show-off, Keaton was a craftsman. He was supposedly hardest on himself, and worked endless hours to get things exactly right. In the end, far from his showy tumbling antics and daring risks as a performer — he was the original Jackie Chan — Keaton's genius lay in small, seemingly effortless movements made possible by a lifetime of ceaseless labor. Text and illustration by Joe Alterio *** Each day, Hilobrow.com pays tribute to one of our favorite high-, low-, no-, or hilobrow heroes on that person's birthday. Click here for more Hilo Hero shout-outs.

Winds of Magic (4): "We see you, Lee. We see you."

James Parker — Sun, 04 Oct 2009 21:00:07 +0000

Sprezzatura. If there's a word guaranteed henceforth to discomfit the editors of The New Republic, that'll be it. For it was under this romantic alias that Lee Siegel, TNR's television critic, made some now-notorious appearances in the comments section of his blog, Lee Siegel On Culture, pseudonymously engaging his many opponents, heaping slurs upon his detractors, and praising himself to the skies. Visit the blog now and you will find it purged: in place of Siegel's prose, and the long and generally abusive thread of reader postings that always followed it, is a bleak little notice from TNR editor Franklin Foer. "After an investigation, The New Republic has determined that the comments in our Talkback section defending Lee Siegel's articles and blog under the username 'sprezzatura' were produced with Siegel's participation. We deeply regret misleading our readers. Lee Siegel's blog will no longer be published by TNR, and he has been suspended from writing for the magazine." The long-faced piety on display here is interesting — the "investigation" (what, bright lights in the face? good cop/bad cop?) and the "deep regret." Siegel, by implication, is guilty of a grave lapse in ethics — but what is it, exactly? And who are these readers who have been so misled? In the two online discussions where Sprezzatura most prodigiously manifested himself, he was, both times, busted by his fellow posters. "I would say with 99% confidence that 'sprezzatura' is a Siegel alias," declared a poster on one thread, while another crowed, "We see you, Lee. We see you." Sprezzatura's haughty, intemperate, somewhat panicked tone was a dead giveaway, particularly when coupled with his eerie allegiance to the blog-master ("You couldn't tie Siegel's shoelaces"). The deception, such as it was, was transparent, and we can be sure that any feelings injured by Sprezzatura have been more than soothed by his unmasking. Nonetheless Siegel has been cast beyond the pale of The New Republic, as if he had murdered someone. Tut-tut, you might say: a storm in a teacup. Harvard types in a tizzy. Who cares? But I have a feeling that the Siegel affair will come to be seen as something of an exemplary moment in journalism: a tiny, perfect crystallization of an enormous historical shift. The high patrician manner — the voice of the cultural arbiter, handed down on tablets of print — was detectably superseded, and something newer and rougher came in. Siegel was really the last person to whom a blog should have been given: an old-school stylist, highly suspicious of the online world to begin with (he blamed the Internet — on his blog, naturally — for producing "a vortex of self-obsessed writing"), he could never accommodate himself to the harsh manners of the blogosphere — the instant comebacks, the pile-ons, the exposure to what can feel like a universe of animus. Stung by Netwide barracking at TNR's support of Joe Lieberman, he coined the unhappy term "blogofascism" — by which he meant, more or less, mass disrespect for Lee Siegel. It is possible to get satisfaction through an assumed identity, as has been recently demonstrated in Britain by the author Bevis Hillier. Having spent 25 years in the production of an enormous three-volume biography of the poet John Betjeman, only to see it airily trashed in a 2002 book review by literary all-rounder A.N. Wilson, Hillier was then driven beyond endurance by the news that Wilson had been paid a large advance to write a Betjeman biography of his own (to be published in the US next year). So while Wilson was doing his research, Hillier — as he admitted last week — forged a letter purporting to be from Betjeman to an extra-marital amour, and circuitously brought it to Wilson's attention. Wilson fell for it and included the letter in his book, unaware that it contained an acrostic spelling out "A-N-W-I-L-S-O-N-I-S-A-[expletive]." But Hillier was working his hoax in the ancient realm of print. Siegel, when he devised the avenging persona of Sprezzatura, was on strange ground. Attempting to lay his enemies low in their own medium, he fell right into the technological and cultural fissure between virtual and print journalism. And there he sprawled, disgraced, while the blue-lit bloggers wolved around. Feedback, "Talkback": This is not the world of the Letters page anymore. The vulnerability to being buttonholed by one's readers — to feeling their cyber-breath on one's face, as it were — has made new demands on thin-skinned journalists everywhere. Let the columnist who never winced to find a suppurating trove of invective in his in-box pretend to have no sympathy for Siegel. Even at their most bonkers, the Sprezzatura postings were nothing more than the untreated splurge of the authorial Id: I am great! You're all fools! etc. Siegel's crime has been to make himself laughable, to make himself the sport of nonexperts and noncritics, and the hasty expunging of his memory by his editors at The New Republic suggests that it is this laughter — general, irreverent, lapping across the Internet — that they are most afraid of. *** Originally published by the Boston Globe, September 2006. From 2004-08, our friend and colleague James Parker, currently a contributing editor at The Atlantic, was a culture critic for the Boston Globe's Ideas section and for Boston's alt-weekly, The Phoenix. Hilobrow.com has curated a collection of Parker's writings from this period. This installment is the fourth in a series of ten.

FlannO_BrianAtSwimTwoBirds

Joshua Glenn — Sun, 04 Oct 2009 23:55:13 +0000

Hilo Hero: Flann O'Brien

James Parker — Mon, 05 Oct 2009 10:00:33 +0000

The myth of FLANN O'BRIEN (Brian O'Nolan, 1911-66) is that he squandered himself in the smalltime, wrote too much for the newspapers and not enough for the ages, gassed off his libido in puffs of wit or washed it away under black smotherings of drink. But his art, like his life, was an experiment in dead ends: a paradigmatically dull career and a production-line writing schedule provided ideal circumstances for his strange, back-of-the-classroom creativity. The man who would be private secretary to three successive Ministers for Local Government wrote a novel about monstrous policemen who talk in surreal pedantries and are obsessed with bicycle maintenance. A five-times-a-week newspaper column, often typed on Civil Service stationery, became the occasion for flights of comic avant-gardism. But the wildest of his fancies retained a quality of being improvised against tedium, even against despair. “Tiny periods of release from intolerable suffering is the most that any individual has the right to expect,” he wrote in a 1958 column. The question that remains, then, is one he posed himself in his column: “How can you always write so interestingly?... Seldom, I mean, have... so many things been written for so many people... by so few a man.” *** Each day, Hilobrow.com pays tribute to one of our favorite high-, low-, no-, or hilobrow heroes on that person's birthday. Click here for more Hilo Hero shout-outs.

tati-hulot-screen-550

Joshua Glenn — Mon, 05 Oct 2009 18:21:58 +0000

wood-ed-bela

Joshua Glenn — Mon, 05 Oct 2009 18:30:30 +0000

conrad-secret

Joshua Glenn — Mon, 05 Oct 2009 20:59:40 +0000

chesterton-thursday

Joshua Glenn — Mon, 05 Oct 2009 21:02:30 +0000

Abu-Hamza_280_548035a

Joshua Glenn — Mon, 05 Oct 2009 21:04:18 +0000

conrad-secret1907

Joshua Glenn — Mon, 05 Oct 2009 21:06:13 +0000

Gilbert_Keith_Chesterton

Joshua Glenn — Mon, 05 Oct 2009 21:07:11 +0000

analog-dec63-herbert

Joshua Glenn — Mon, 05 Oct 2009 21:26:30 +0000

mortensen-threecups

Joshua Glenn — Mon, 05 Oct 2009 22:15:28 +0000

Middlebrow Bestsellers — Week of 9/27/09

Joshua Glenn — Mon, 05 Oct 2009 22:23:51 +0000

1) THREE CUPS OF TEA, by Greg Mortenson and David Oliver Relin. (Penguin, $15.) A former climber builds schools in villages in Pakistan and Afghanistan. Sentimental, uplifting, a favorite gift from compassionate conservatives to their liberal undergrad children. 2) THE GLASS CASTLE, by Jeannette Walls. (Scribner, $15.) The author recalls a bizarre childhood during which she and her siblings moved constantly. If you've read Bill Mauldin's terrific autobiography, A Sort of a Saga (1949), you can't possibly have much patience with this sort of thing. Please see my blog post on "premature biographication." 3) FREAKONOMICS, by Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner. (Harper Perennial, $15.99.) A scholar and a journalist apply economic theory to nearly everything. Magical science! 4) THE TIPPING POINT, by Malcolm Gladwell. (Back Bay/Little, Brown, $14.95.) A study of social epidemics, otherwise known as fads. Magical science! 5) JULIE & JULIA, by Julie Powell. (Back Bay/Little, Brown, $14.99;, Little, Brown, $7.99.) A memoir of trying every recipe in Mastering the Art of French Cooking Memoir. Cooking. Ur-middlebrow Nora Ephron directed the movie. Three strikes and you're out! NB: MY LIFE IN FRANCE, by Julia Child with Alex Prud’homme, currently #2 on the NYT paperback nonfiction bestseller list, is not middlebrow. 6) CLUNK, by Gladwell Moore (Threshold Editions, $14.99.) The neuroscience of car accidents. Magical science! 7) THE P WORD, by Julee Schlesinger. (HarperOne, $13.99.) Subtitle: "How I Ate Myself Into a Deeper, Richer, and Fuller Postpartum Sex Life." ’Nuff said. 8 ) WHEN YOU ARE ENGULFED IN FLAMES, by David Sedaris. (Back Bay/Little, Brown, $15.99.) Humor essays on middle age, mortality, and giving up smoking. We have nothing against bullshit... as long as it's amusing. But we do have something against QUATSCH. 9) EAT, PRAY, LOVE, by Elizabeth Gilbert. (Penguin, $15.) A writer’s yearlong journey in search of self takes her to Italy, India, and Indonesia. Memoir. Cooking/Eating. Exotic Tourism. Strike three! 10) SAME KIND OF DIFFERENT AS ME, by Ron Hall and Denver Moore with Lynn Vincent. (Nelson, $14.99.) "The unlikely friendship between a homeless drifter and a successful art dealer who meet at a shelter in Texas." There's that word, again: unlikely.

Hilo Hero: Thor Heyerdahl

Matthew Battles — Tue, 06 Oct 2009 10:00:45 +0000

THOR HEYERDAHL (1914–2002) lived a long life, but so much was left undone: he might have piloted an ice floe from Porvoo to Hokkaido to prove Finland's nomadic Sami peopled Japan; he might have shown how Mexico's Tarahumara Indians settled Alaska by surfing there on the back of a humpback whale. It's easy to poke fun at Heyerdahl's attempts to reverse-engineer history, but his humane spirit stands out among the experimental archaeologists, psychic voyagers, and golden astronauts of the twentieth century. Historians formerly relegated the unlettered and powerless peoples of the world to the status of also-rans in the march of progress; Heyerdahl's view encompassed all peoples and reached back to the dawn of the species. Beloved in the Norway of his birth, his statue also stands in such far-flung locales as Tenerife and Baku, Azerbaijan, which to him weren't cultural backwaters but waypoints on our species' restless, speculative march to populate the globe. Today, a new synthesis draws on archaeology, genetics, linguistics, and ethnography to comprehend history as the whole of the human career. This knowledge of deep time depends on a rigorous empiricism Heyerdahl eschewed; that it lacks the enthusiasm and antic courage of Kon-Tiki's captain can be counted a loss. Each day, Hilobrow.com pays tribute to one of our favorite high-, low-, no-, or hilobrow heroes on that person's birthday. Click here for more Hilo Hero shout-outs.

eat_pray_love

Joshua Glenn — Tue, 06 Oct 2009 11:16:38 +0000

mcbain-lady

Joshua Glenn — Tue, 06 Oct 2009 15:17:34 +0000

The Book is a Weapon (2)

HILOBROW — Tue, 06 Oct 2009 15:19:22 +0000

From John Holbo's Pulp Mystery photostream on Flickr. *** Second in an occasional series.

Hilo Hero: Joe Hill

Luc Sante — Wed, 07 Oct 2009 10:00:39 +0000

JOE HILL (Joel Emmanuel Haaglund, 1882-1915) immigrated from Sweden in 1902 and not long after joined the Industrial Workers of the World. He became an organizer, fought in the Mexican Revolution, and was celebrated for fitting new lyrics to old songs; in one of them he coined the phrase “pie in the sky.” He turned up in Salt Lake City in 1913, and the following January was arrested and charged with the killing of a shopkeeper and his son in the course of a robbery. The trial was notable for the enormous holes in both sides’ cases. Hill was convicted, and despite a massive worldwide campaign was executed by firing squad in November 1915. His farewell letter to IWW founder Big Bill Haywood jumped him from beatified to sainted: “I die a true blue rebel. Don’t waste time in mourning. Organize.” His ashes were divided into many envelopes, which were scattered around the world, and for decades his name was invoked by the faithful. “I dreamed I saw Joe Hill last night, alive as you or me,” was sung on real and imagined barricades everywhere. The disappearance of the left in recent years has endangered his memory, and that of his cause. *** Each day, Hilobrow.com pays tribute to one of our favorite high-, low-, no-, or hilobrow heroes on that person's birthday. Click here for more Hilo Hero shout-outs.

the best book ever (results)

Matthew Battles — Wed, 07 Oct 2009 14:27:41 +0000

I asked you to describe the ideal book, one that would save the publishing world and the public sphere in one stroke. And with responses pouring in—nearly three dozen of them—it's time to take stock of the results.

A large plurality of respondents, 38%, chose "paper" as the ideal cover material. Pretty innovative! Interestingly, the second-most popular binding choice was leather, at 28%. I'd suggest we split the difference: a paper cover embossed with leather texture. Rawhide!

Serif type carried the day for 59% of respondents. A tiny fraction, however, took the more daring choice of "manuscript hand." Another compromise: what we want is a serif text face with handwritten marginalia. Pre-defaced books—another example of how to think our way out of the box of mainstream publishing.

As for sourcing and locale, results were pretty nearly split evenly among a bookshop, a library, and a labyrinth. The one place I know of that meets all these requirements, perhaps, is the Seminary Coop Bookstore (@SeminaryCoop, tweeps!) in Chicago's Hyde Park.

Although the overwhelming majority of respondents (72%) prefer fiction, a slight plurality (34%) want copious illustrations throughout (only 22% of booklovers eschew illustration altogether). Perhaps not surprisingly, my cohort believes the work of the late W. G. Sebald will save the book as we know it.

As for the contents of the book to rule them all? Google docs provides a helpful summary of responses, as follows:

Dreams and felicitations. Vague harkenings. Veiled threats about love and creativity. The two activities we human being can truly be proud of. The rest is crap. Historical secrets, prophecy, explanations of how nature and the human mind works, plans for fantastically effective practical devices. Recovery from abuse. Basically just a bunch of descriptions of cool stuff. Also, this time he's teamed up w/ Paul Pope so every fourth page, there's an image. Black and white, strong lines. Doesn't so much illustrate as extend. Wait, these are supposed to be imaginary, right?

An axe for the frozen sea within us, indeed.

Posted via email from library ad infinitum

margaret-seltzer-395

Joshua Glenn — Wed, 07 Oct 2009 17:21:27 +0000

frankfurt-bullshit

Joshua Glenn — Wed, 07 Oct 2009 17:23:28 +0000

leroy-knoop

Joshua Glenn — Wed, 07 Oct 2009 17:25:35 +0000

Nolte-tropic

Joshua Glenn — Wed, 07 Oct 2009 17:29:07 +0000

roger_clemens_liar

Joshua Glenn — Wed, 07 Oct 2009 17:32:02 +0000

Aleister_Crowley

Joshua Glenn — Wed, 07 Oct 2009 19:04:57 +0000

glasscastle

Joshua Glenn — Wed, 07 Oct 2009 19:23:11 +0000

hall-same-kind-of-different

Joshua Glenn — Wed, 07 Oct 2009 19:28:49 +0000

Jung's vade mecum

Matthew Battles — Wed, 07 Oct 2009 21:23:00 +0000

The first published edition of Jung's celebrated Red Book goes on sale today, translated by TK with the support of the Philemon Foundation and published by W. W. Norton.

It's an extraordinary book with an extraordinary story, told most evocatively by Sara Corbett in the New York Times Magazine. With the buzz about Dan Brown's latest already fizzling out in a murmur of disappointment, Corbett's tale furnishes all the literary mystery one could ask for.

As published by W. W. Norton (my imprint), it's also an extraordinarily expensive book, retailing for almost two hundred dollars (it can be had online for about $115). That price is for the "standard edition," mind you; a "deluxe edition," which has sold out, was prepared as well. I've seen a price of $2500 mentioned online, but can't confirm it.

Beginning in his 30's, Jung recorded his intellectual, personal, and psychological battle with—with what?—with madness, with the infernal, with his drives and desires. The result of this process—well, the result was Jungian analysis, I suppose; the immediate product, in any case, was the Red Book. A manuscript of remarkable beauty, full of rich art and calligraphy that balance scribal control with psychological torment, the Red Book evokes medieval illuminated manuscripts. But in its rigorous apotheosis of personal experience, its fearlessness and baroquely figured solipsism, it's like no medieval book I know.

I've only seen page views available on Amazon and those printed with excerpts in the Times, but those glances already goad thoughts on what the Red Book has to tell us not only about Jung, but about the place of the book in culture. It strikes me that the Red Book became not only Jung's means of documenting his psychic journey, but a kind of vade mecum—a book that serves as a personal guide, a sort of owner's manual for the soul. The notion of the vade mecum hearkens back to the manuscript age, when a book was a always a personal work, not a commodity or a necessarily communal experience. Although most medieval books contained texts of profound communal significance—scripture and devotional works, romances and works of moral or spiritual instruction—the divide between personal and public was constructed along much different lines. And it was out of that much different set of notions about public and private that the book as a metaphor for the person grew, albeit with much modulation in the modern era.

In his essay "A Conversation with Einstein's Brain," Douglas Hofstadter imagines a book of one hundred billion pages, each of which carries a representation of a neuron of Einstein's brain. If the relevant data were somehow imposed and printed, Hofstadter wonders, would the book be the real Einstein? Even if the turning of pages to follow the synaptic firings of any fleeting thought might take unbearably long when compared to the speed of the actual brain, he wants to say, the phenomenon that results would be Einstein thinking.

Of course it's nonsense. The brain's speed is an ineluctable part of it—as is the world outside of it, with which it's always interacting and responding to, transforming, changing. The book presents a powerful metaphor for the human personality, and yet Hofstadter pushes it to the breaking point.

A book may offer a window on a virtual world, but it's first and foremost an encounter with the world. Not a model of the world, a simulacrum or subcreation, but a part of the world, a prism that alters it across its spectrum. This is not the book's limitation, but its power.

It's worth mentioning that the original Red Book may be seen in its first public exhibition at New York's Rubin Museum of Art until 25 January 2010. Next year it will be on display at the Library of Congress from 17 June to 31 July.

Posted via email from library ad infinitum

book-weapon

Joshua Glenn — Thu, 08 Oct 2009 00:22:32 +0000

book-weapon-4

Joshua Glenn — Thu, 08 Oct 2009 00:25:38 +0000

Hilo Hero: Frank Herbert

Joshua Glenn — Thu, 08 Oct 2009 10:00:25 +0000

Alia, a telepathic four-year-old girl who, in the bestselling science fiction novel of all time, roams the battlefields of Arrakis slitting the throats of imperial stormtroopers, gained her powers in utero because her mother drank the "Water of Life" — i.e., the bile of a drowned sandworm. Was there something in the water the year FRANK HERBERT (1920-86), author of Dune (1965) and its five sequels, was born? After all, his exact contemporaries Mario Puzo, Isaac Asimov, and Richard Adams also wrote — respectively — a violent potboiler about one family's declining empire, an epic SF series spanning thousands of years of future history, and a mythology-saturated fantasy about the founding of a new social order. The superheroic Paul Muad'Dib might have been invented by any number of members of Herbert's generational cohort, which gave us Superman, Captain America, and the Silver Surfer; while Paul's ragtag band — Thufir Hawat, the human computer; Gurney Halleck, the troubadour warrior; and master swordsman Duncan Idaho — are straight out of The Great Escape or The Magnificent Seven. However! The influence of Herbert's secret muse — environmentalist Rachel Carson, whose Silent Spring appeared shortly before Analog began serializing Dune — distinguishes his own from these other entertainments. Inspired by Carson's defense of the balance of nature, her criticism of man's despoliation of the planet in the name of progress, the desert ecosystem portrayed in Herbert's Dune is far more than a setting: it's a mise en scène, a worldview. Click here for more science fiction on Hilobrow.com. *** Each day, Hilobrow.com pays tribute to one of our favorite high-, low-, no-, or hilobrow heroes on that person's birthday. Click here for more Hilo Hero shout-outs.

Senor-Howyadoin

Joe Alterio — Thu, 08 Oct 2009 12:33:18 +0000

althusser-550

Joshua Glenn — Thu, 08 Oct 2009 16:36:32 +0000

R+M (1): Spicy, green, outgoing

Joe Alterio — Thu, 08 Oct 2009 17:00:08 +0000

MONSTER: "SPICY, GREEN, OUTGOING" by JOE ALTERIO *** Robots and Monsters, a website that swaps custom-designed cartoons and pop art in exchange for a donation to charity, was field-tested in May 2007 by our friend and colleague Joe Alterio. Earlier this fall, Alterio and other artists relaunched the site as a going concern. This is the first in a ten-part series of cartoons and artworks created by R+M artists to raise money for the charity water.org.

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Joshua Glenn — Thu, 08 Oct 2009 17:43:34 +0000

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cohen-sb

Joshua Glenn — Thu, 08 Oct 2009 17:44:58 +0000

H-F-Stone-appearing-before-Senate-Judiciary-Committee2

Tor Aarestad — Thu, 08 Oct 2009 18:14:49 +0000

lucas_speilberg

Joshua Glenn — Thu, 08 Oct 2009 18:37:34 +0000

Incontro con Italo Calvino

Joshua Glenn — Fri, 09 Oct 2009 01:06:40 +0000

Hilo Hero: Jacques Tati

David Smay — Fri, 09 Oct 2009 10:00:55 +0000

[caption id="attachment_7081" align="aligncenter" width="550" caption="A scene from Jacques Tati\'s Playtime"]Playtime" title="tati-hulot-screen-550" width="550" height="366" class="size-full wp-image-7081" />[/caption] Buster Keaton begat two great cinematic heirs, both of whom embraced the elaborately set-up visual gag: Jackie Chan and JACQUES TATI (1907-82). Like so many French icons of the 1950s and ’60s (Serge Gainsbourg, Anna Karina, Yves St. Laurent), Tati — born to Russian and Dutch parents — was an outsider. It's almost as if in the post-Vichy era, France didn't trust itself, and required others to define its virtues. In his earlier movies, Mr. Hulot's Holiday (1953) and Mon Uncle (1958), Tati contrasted a humane and balky France against various modernizing trends, but it is in Playtime (1967) that he distilled his vision to its essence: Harold Lloyd versus the International Style. While Jackie Chan translated the undercranked silent camera into real-life speed and danger, Tati refined the mechanism, letting the gags unspool slowly as plot gears meshed — with the result that his films pay off like a Rube Goldberg contraption. MORE HILO HEROES: Buster Keaton | Rube Goldberg *** Each day, Hilobrow.com pays tribute to one of our favorite high-, low-, no-, or hilobrow heroes on that person's birthday. Click here for more Hilo Hero shout-outs.

Add significance — today!

Joshua Glenn — Fri, 09 Oct 2009 17:39:42 +0000

[caption id="attachment_1625" align="aligncenter" width="495" caption="Go ahead -- make it Significant. "][/caption] I'm thrilled to announce the Significant Objects Story Contest. In partnership with the editors of Slate, Rob Walker and I (who are running an experiment called Significant Objects) invite submissions of a 500-word story featuring the object pictured above (a barbecue sauce jar) by next Friday (Oct. 16) at 5 p.m. All stories must be submitted to Slate (details below). The winning entry will be published on both websites — and, of course, on eBay, where it will serve as the item description for the BBQ Sauce Jar. Proceeds from the eBay auction will go to the story's author. Here's your chance to join the likes of William Gibson, Curtis Sittenfeld, Nicholson Baker, Myla Goldberg, Colson Whitehead, and many other talents who've transformed an insignificant (or shall we say: pre-significant) object into a significant one. Slate explains the contest parameters here:

You'll write a short story (500 words or fewer) in which this object plays an important role. (Please do not make reference to the fact that the object is being sold on eBay, and do not mention the penny that appears in the photo for scale — the story's plot should be independent of the project's context.) The stories must be e-mailed to Slate (slatesignificantobjects@gmail.com) by Oct. 16 at 5 p.m. Please also tell us your full name and the city and state you're writing from. All submissions may be quoted — and attributed to their author — in a follow-up article on Slate announcing the winning entry.

Please click on the link above to read the contest entry at Slate before you start writing. And then start writing!

Hilo Hero: Ed Wood

Greg Rowland — Sat, 10 Oct 2009 10:00:49 +0000

[caption id="attachment_7084" align="aligncenter" width="550" caption="Ed Wood and Bela Lugosi"][/caption] As the lonely freelancer sat in his bleak apartment, contemplating a poorly paid piece on the life of small-time Hollywood director-producer-actor ED WOOD (1924-78), a most unexpected event occurred. Through his open window fluttered a newspaper clipping from the Nashua (N.H.) New Age. Dated July 1961, the clipping featured a startling prediction of future events from The Amazing Criswell. Here's what Criswell foresaw:

* I predict that there shall be an era — call it "the 1990s" — when a mighty electric brain shall join all human minds as one, thus depicting man both at his greatest and his most shameful, blistering thru a single simmering solenoid. * And from this Gigantic Electric Brain, the cry shall go out. “Ed Wood was so bad he was good!” the browless shall snark, sipping on the foul cocktails of false irony. * And yet then, ultimately and in the last instance, there shall come the people whose brows are both high and low. They shall issue a clarion call: “Good is good, and Wood wasn't good. But because Wood was Wood, staying resolute to his filmic vision, ignoring any petty obstacles that might lie before him, like a lesser man stays true to his flawed but homemade raincoat, helplessly yet heroically flailing his arms at the infinite stupidity of weather, we can also say: good was Wood.

As the hapless freelancer knew, The Amazing Criswell was not only Wood’s confidant and colleague — he appears in Wood's Plan 9 from Outer Space (1959) and Orgy of the Dead (1965) — but a 100% totally accurate prophet of things to come. *** Each day, Hilobrow.com pays tribute to one of our favorite high-, low-, no-, or hilobrow heroes on that person's birthday. Click here for more Hilo Hero shout-outs.

Hilo Hero: Harlan Stone

Tor Aarestad — Sun, 11 Oct 2009 10:00:04 +0000

Along with Justices Brandeis and Cardozo, Justice (later Chief Justice) HARLAN STONE (1872-1946) was counted among the Three Musketeers — the progressive minority of the Supreme Court during the early years of FDR's presidency. Since Lochner v. New York, decided in 1905, in which the Supreme Court had struck down a New York state law capping the number of hours bakers could work (as an unreasonable interference in the individual right to contract), state and federal laws that affected business owners (even tenuously) had not fared well; after 1937, however, allegiances shifted, and Stone often led the Court in supporting New Deal legislation. His most important legacy, though, rests on a single footnote in an otherwise unremarkable case, United States v. Carolene Products (1938). In it, Stone noted that although in the instant case the Court merely reviewed the legislation deferentially (known generally as rational-basis review), that in cases where legislation prima facie runs counter to constitutionally guaranteed rights, or unduly affects equal participation in the political process, or targets "discrete and insular minorities," it will be subject to a higher standard of judicial review (strict scrutiny). This footnote expressed a theory of judicial review in a democratic system that formed the basis for many of the Warren Court's most significant decisions protecting First Amendment rights and the rights of minorities — notably, Brown v. Board of Education. Although highbrows are often called self-indulgent or pedantic for their use of footnotes, Stone's explosive Footnote 4 proves the anti-highbrows wrong. *** Each day, Hilobrow.com pays tribute to one of our favorite high-, low-, no-, or hilobrow heroes on that person's birthday. Click here for more Hilo Hero shout-outs.

Winds of Magic (5): Pants afire

James Parker — Sun, 11 Oct 2009 21:00:57 +0000

If your father presided over a blood-drinking sex cult whose membership also included the mailman, the doctor, the town drunk, and representatives of the local judiciary; if you ran with wolves as a young person, and had your cuts and grazes healed by their antiseptic saliva; if you have Multiple Personalities, one of which (the Countess of Orzabal) is allergic to strawberries and one of which (Lil’ Pete) is not; if you’ve been abducted by aliens; if you believe that the Twin Towers were brought down, not by the impact of two enormous airplanes and the subsequent 1400-degree fire, but by a sequence of controlled explosions engineered by Mossad; if The Da Vinci Code made you think again about Christianity; if you’re a Boston firefighter who cheated on his promotional exam by sending text-messages from the bathroom; if you’re Eliot Spitzer; if you’re James Frey; if you’re Jonny Fairplay; if you’re Roger Clemens; if you’re Mitt Romney: congratulations! You’re a fully accredited and paid-up citizen of Fabrication Nation — and history is on your side. False Memory Syndrome, False Memoir Syndrome, False Syndrome Syndrome...The ratio of falsehood to truth in the universe has not, of course, altered one jot since the world began. From the day we learned how to talk, by and large, we’ve been lying our heads off. Nor can it be said that we have grown more credulous. To us, the most precious certainties of our gaping and rustic predecessors are a great joke: they believed what?! Those idiots! But something’s afoot. Fakery has a new license, a new swagger. Who is responsible for this? Who did this to Truth? Was it postmodernism? Blame the French. Was it New Journalism? Blame Tom Wolfe. Blame Google! Or better yet, gentle reader, blame yourself, because I know you feel it, too: reality — it’s just not good enough anymore. Ashbrook agonistes Yes, if you’re impatient with the facts, if you feel they require enhancement, colorization, or “jazzing up,” now’s your moment. If you’re Tom Ashbrook, on the other hand, the times are vexed. “A program note,” announced the host of WBUR’s On Point on Tuesday, March 4, sounding unwontedly small-voiced and glum. “In our second hour on Friday, you may recall we talked with an author. Thought her name was [slight spin of sarcasm] Margaret B. Jones. Her new memoir was Love and Consequences, it was about life in South Central Los Angeles, growing up half-white, half–Native American, uh, running with gangs there, selling drugs for the Bloods....” A sigh. “Well, it comes out today the whole thing was a fraud.... Story a complete, uh, fraud, the publisher now says. We’re learning this along with everybody else. It is embarrassing, it is frustrating, it’s kind of infuriating. Don’t know what to make of the memoir business in this country.... Going to have to be a little warier in the future, and I trust you will, too.” [caption id="attachment_7193" align="aligncenter" width="395" caption="The author of Love and Consequences"]Love and Consequences" title="margaret-seltzer-395" width="395" height="307" class="size-full wp-image-7193" />[/caption] Poor old Ashbrook. Sing-songing his way through the Great American Conversation, with the grandest themes of the culture constellated around him in Newtonian splendor, he had collided head-on with Planet Bullshit. The deconstruction of Margaret B. Jones had been swift: a week after the publication of Love and Consequences, following a profile in the House & Home section of the New York Times (“One of the first things I did once I started making drug money was to buy a burial plot”), her real-life older sister dropped the dime on her. Margaret B. Jones, gifted ghetto survivor, was actually Margaret Seltzer, well-educated Valley Girl, and everything in her book — the guns, the drugs, the foster care — was fiction. Or rather, it wasn’t fiction, because it had been advertised as truth: it was bullshit. And the weird thing is, if you listen to her original On Point interview, you can hear it. You can hear the conditions for bullshit being created in the ardent queries of the duped Ashbrook — “How old was Terrell when he got ‘jumped in’?”, “And how did Big Momma feel about that?” — and you can hear bullshit grooming itself in her sketchy, improvisational replies. The philosopher Harry G. Frankfurt, in his lapidary little primer On Bullshit, taught us that the focus of the true bullshitter is “panoramic rather than particular. He does not limit himself to inserting a certain falsehood at a specific point, and thus he is not constrained by the truths surrounding that point or intersecting it. He is prepared, so far as required, to fake the context, as well.” Or as Margaret B. told Ashbrook, parrying one of his more direct questions, “You have to take that artistic vision.” Et tu, Billy Corgan? So Oprah got taken by Frey, and Ashbrook gets taken by Seltzer. And we — the finger-poppin’ daddies of the alternative press — are amused: these middlebrows, crowing their empathy, they had it coming. Right? Wrong. Hipsters are a significant constituency in Fabrication Nation; we may dwell on its East Coast, so to speak, but we’ll eat up that bullshit just like anyone else. Indeed, our pessimism and taste for the aberrant make us easy marks. Remember Laura Albert, moonlit mastermind of the JT Leroy con? [caption id="attachment_7195" align="aligncenter" width="560" caption="Savannah Knoop as JT LeRoy"][/caption] She played the celeb/lit demimonde like a frigging dulcimer. Carrie Fisher, Billy Corgan, Dennis Cooper, Mary Karr — all brought offerings to the altar of JT, Albert’s invented male-truckstop-prostitute-shrinking-violet-turned-author. Seldom venturing from the womb of his pathology, arrested at some indeterminate point mid-sex-change, JT (Albert) would gasp and gush for hours on the phone to his groovy showbiz admirers. In public he was played with wig and shades by the half-sister of Albert’s partner, Geoffrey Knoop. “For the most part,” Albert told The Paris Review in 2006, “those star types were approaching me. Or they would mention my work in a magazine article, and then I would write to thank them. I found out that Sheryl Crow had talked about my book on her website, and I was floored. Someone told me that Winona Ryder was into my work, and Drew Barrymore was, too, and I was put in touch with them. Lou Reed read the books and he was really supportive.... I remember Courtney Love told me, ‘You’re an iconoclast, JT.'" Quite. [caption id="attachment_7197" align="aligncenter" width="550" caption="Nick Nolte as a bogus Vietnam vet and memoirist in Tropic Thunder"]Tropic Thunder" title="Nolte-tropic" width="550" height="366" class="size-full wp-image-7197" />[/caption] Then there’s Bill Shields. I used to read Bill Shields. I’m on record somewhere describing his poetry as “brutal, damaging.” Or maybe it’s “relentless, pulverizing.” Henry Rollins’s company 2.13.61. published several books by this former Navy SEAL and veteran of three tours in ’Nam, in which his hellish flashbacks and failed attempts at social re-entry are explored in language of uncommon brutality, damage, relentlessness, and pulverization. “I was a young man,” he wrote in The Southeast Asian Book of the Dead, “18 years old, before I saw my first dead body. Might as well been a carp, for all I felt, a carp w/one eye out and mutilated fins. A small girl in a nameless Vietnamese town, all of six homes and six fireplaces... everything coated in mud and war. A thin pig was chewing on her leg, grunting as it tore into her. The guy next to me had been in Nam for five months. He killed the pig; we all ate it later & it tasted fine.” Ouch! Surely these are the darkest reaches of the human soul. One small problem, though: Bill Shields (as a superior piece of reporting by Seth Gotro, published in the zine Verbicide in 2004, established beyond doubt) was never a SEAL, and he was never in Vietnam. Nothing pisses off an ex-SEAL more than a SEAL impersonator: Shields’s name can now be found in the “Hall of Shame” on the wesite of the authentication service VeriSEAL, alongside those of a shady Floridian scuba instructor and a man who “appeared to be smuggling watermelons.” The flaming trousers of humiliation Everybody gets busted in the next world, and most of us, sooner or later, get busted in this one. It is a paradox of Fabrication Nation that its chief producers, even as they spew cynical fountains of BS, exhibit a strange innocence as to the possibility of ever getting called on it. What did Margaret Seltzer think was going to happen after the Times took her picture? Did Mitt Romney, as his claims mounted in outrageousness (no lobbyists in my campaign! Dad marched shoulder-to-shoulder with MLK!), imagine that no one would bother to check them out? Roger Clemens, blustering denials, appears to have perjured himself beyond repair. And just picture one of those naughty Boston firefighters in the bathroom, thumbing multiple-choice answers into his cell phone, eyes a-glint and tongue-tip protruding as the urinals hiss behind him. The other salient paradox is the one expressed by British humorist GK Chesterton: “When people stop believing in God, they don’t believe in nothing — they believe in anything.” In a spiritual vacuum, that is, our bullshit detectors are traumatized. They go haywire. “So give me something to believe!” blubbers the Bravery’s lead-singer dude. “Cause I am living just to breathe/And I need something more/To keep on breathing for....” We feel unreal, half-baked, so we become obsessed with authenticity. If James Thurber wrote "The Secret Life of Walter Mitty" today, his overshoe-wearing nonhero wouldn’t be dreaming about sang-froid in an eight-engined Navy hydroplane, nor beautiful women falling into his arms: he’d be dreaming about victimhood, tribulation, overcoming, uniqueness. The aggrieved spirit rising, and so forth. Perpetually starved of the real deal, we are gobbling down these stories at such a rate that the available stock must be resupplied by fakers. So let’s review. An addict (Frey), a gangbanger (Seltzer), a rent boy (Albert), and a Vietnam vet (Shields). To this list we can add a Navajo memoirist whose son died of fetal-alcohol syndrome (Nasdijj, unmasked in 2006 by the LA Weekly as Tim Barrus, purveyor of gay erotica) and a Jewish woman haunted by her childhood flight from the Nazis (Misha Defonseca, whose 1997 Misha: A Memoire of the Holocaust Years would appear to have been somewhat compromised by her confession this past month that she isn’t Jewish). For good measure, let’s throw in a steroid-enlarged athlete and a fabricating politician. You can see where this is going, I’m sure — the comic variousness, the common denominator... what we have here, my friends, is the makings of a top-notch reality TV show. And a fitting punishment, perhaps. This is where we’ll send them, with their pants engulfed by fire: we’ll send them onto Something to Believe (host: Ashton Kutcher, theme tune by the Bravery), to compete in the production of fantastical whoppers, switching narratives, genders, and accents, until, one by one, they are bamboozled to a catatonic standstill. I’d watch it — wouldn’t you? *** Originally published by the Boston Phoenix, March 2008. From 2003-08, our friend and colleague James Parker, currently a contributing editor at The Atlantic, was a culture critic for the Boston Globe's Ideas section and for Boston's alt-weekly, The Phoenix. Hilobrow.com has curated a collection of Parker's writings from this period. This installment is the fifth in a series of ten.

Hilo Hero: Aleister Crowley

Erik Davis — Mon, 12 Oct 2009 10:00:32 +0000

ALEISTER CROWLEY (1875–1947) Mountaineer, fiendish hedonist, and magus incandescent, ALEISTER CROWLEY (1875–1947) remains one of the more remarkable figures of Edwardian letters, though his peculiar reputation makes a frank assessment of the man a rare thing. Between his public infamy as an obscene heretic — the “wickedest man in the world” — and the claustrophobic subcult of antinomian occultists that continue to adore him as the prophet of the magickal religion of Thelema, Crowley remains a man set too far apart from the central currents of his age. Whatever else he did, Crowley was a productive, powerful, and often brilliant writer; his essays, rituals, and almost Imagist invocations (not to mention his porno poetry) reflect a potent if often purple blend of late Romanticism, Nietzschean swagger, shadow pulp, and modernist disenchantment (his earlier forays into Buddhism and magic, for example, were matched with a surprising philosophical materialism). Crowley’s later experiments in communal living, bisexuality, and drug gobbling mark him as a prototype of the postwar world’s wayward counterculture and its emphasis on hedonic personal alchemy. In Crowley's The Book of the Law, a visionary and sometimes violent scripture channeled in Cairo during the peak of the Belle Epoque, we read that "Every man and woman is a star." It remains a startlingly poetic prophecy of the obsessive transmutations to come. *** Each day, Hilobrow.com pays tribute to one of our favorite high-, low-, no-, or hilobrow heroes on that person's birthday. Click here for more Hilo Hero shout-outs.

Middlebrow Bestsellers — Week of 10/11/09

HILOBROW — Mon, 12 Oct 2009 13:00:57 +0000

1) THREE CUPS OF TEA, by Greg Mortenson and David Oliver Relin. (Penguin, $15.) A former climber builds schools in villages in Pakistan and Afghanistan. Sentimental, uplifting, a favorite gift from compassionate conservatives to their liberal undergrad children. 2) THE GLASS CASTLE, by Jeannette Walls. (Scribner, $15.) The author recalls a bizarre childhood during which she and her siblings moved constantly. "Bizarre" — a middlebrow keyword. Also, see Joshua Glenn on "premature biographication." 3) FREAKONOMICS, by Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner. (Harper Perennial, $15.99.) A scholar and a journalist apply economic theory to nearly everything. Magical science! 4) THE TIPPING POINT, by Malcolm Gladwell. (Back Bay/Little, Brown, $14.95.) A study of social epidemics, otherwise known as fads. Magical science! 5) CLUNK, by Gladwell Moore (Threshold Editions, $14.99.) The neuroscience of car accidents. Magical science! 6) JULIE & JULIA, by Julie Powell. (Back Bay/Little, Brown, $14.99;, Little, Brown, $7.99.) A memoir of trying every recipe in Mastering the Art of French Cooking Memoir. Cooking. Ur-middlebrow Nora Ephron directed the movie. Three strikes and you're out! NB: MY LIFE IN FRANCE, by Julia Child with Alex Prud’homme, currently #2 on the NYT paperback nonfiction bestseller list, is not middlebrow. 7) BLINK, by Malcolm Gladwell. (Back Bay/Little, Brown, $15.99.) Instinct in the workings of the mind. Magical science! 8 ) EAT, PRAY, LOVE, by Elizabeth Gilbert. (Penguin, $15.) A writer’s yearlong journey in search of self takes her to Italy, India, and Indonesia. Memoir. Cooking/Eating. Exotic Tourism. Strike three! 9) THE P WORD, by Julee Schlesinger. (HarperOne, $13.99.) Subtitle: "How I Ate Myself Into a Deeper, Richer, and Fuller Postpartum Sex Life." ’Nuff said. 10) SAME KIND OF DIFFERENT AS ME, by Ron Hall and Denver Moore with Lynn Vincent. (Nelson, $14.99.) "The unlikely friendship between a homeless drifter and a successful art dealer who meet at a shelter in Texas." There's that word, again: unlikely.

Hilo Hero: Sacha Baron Cohen

David Smay — Tue, 13 Oct 2009 10:00:34 +0000

The world's foremost contemporary comic theorist led a teenage breakdance crew, and wrote his Cambridge thesis on the American Civil Rights movement before he planted his ass in Eminem's face. After university SACHA BARON COHEN (born 1971) supported himself as a model and developed a series of characters — Ali G, Borat, Brüno — that draw on his erratic resume as a suburban hip hop fan, a student of antisemitism, and a fashion industry hanger-on. Like Andy Kaufman, Baron Cohen explores that squirm-inducing place where comedy might not be funny at all. Whereas most comedy reflects a comic distortion, Baron Cohen doesn't work as a mirror, but as a blank screen. His unwitting participants project their anxiety about class, race, antisemitism, misogyny, homophobia, and celebrity onto his characters. That's the genius of his particular, discomfiting method. *** Each day, Hilobrow.com pays tribute to one of our favorite high-, low-, no-, or hilobrow heroes on that person's birthday. Click here for more Hilo Hero shout-outs.

knievel-evel-si-550

Joshua Glenn — Tue, 13 Oct 2009 13:16:35 +0000

The Book is a Weapon (3)

HILOBROW — Tue, 13 Oct 2009 14:00:44 +0000

Artist: Broder, S. Title: "Books are weapons in the war of ideas : books cannot be killed by fire" Publisher: Washington, D.C. : U.S. G.P.O. : Distributed by Division of Public Inquiry, O.W.I., Date: 1942. *** Third in an occasional series.

lotte-lenya

Joshua Glenn — Tue, 13 Oct 2009 17:38:00 +0000

coogan-steve-tristram

Joshua Glenn — Wed, 14 Oct 2009 02:44:54 +0000

waters-femaletrouble

Joshua Glenn — Wed, 14 Oct 2009 03:39:53 +0000

Hilo Hero: Steve Coogan

James Parker — Wed, 14 Oct 2009 10:00:15 +0000

As the trickster-philosopher Tony Wilson in Michael Winterbottom’s 24 Hour Party People Steve Coogan was jaunty, vulnerable, inspired, and frequently full of shit. It was a part only he could have played. When thwarted or confronted in character, Coogan submits his face to a kind of G-force of moral pressure: the cheeks slacken, the eyes loll, the nostrils dilate terribly while the brain seems to bulge visibly with expiatory noise — excuses, confessions, pleas, whatever. And then he recovers, like a gymnast. Swaggers a little, even. In Winterbottom’s Tristram Shandy: A Cock and Bull Story, he was Laurence Sterne. To the marrow! That ponderously sensual mouth, suspended between a leer and a piety — that strutting pear-shaped body... Tristram Shandy was Sterne’s literary debut, and when it became a bestseller in 1760 the 47-year-old Yorkshire parson rushed down to London and abandoned himself to Society: there were salons, balls, meetings with Dr. Johnson (who apparently never forgave Sterne for showing him a dirty picture) and scandalous dalliances with a Mrs. Vesey, a Lady Percy, and a music-hall singer named Kitty de Fourmantelle. Coogan, too, has known erotic infamy: in 2005 his wife divorced him following tabloid reports of an evening spent amid two lapdancers (an episode referred to in Winterbottom’s film), and shortly thereafter — in what may be the ultimate Shandean misadventure — Courtney Love announced that she was carrying his baby. (Love has since withdrawn this claim). If Sterne’s bones had not been disinterred and stolen by eighteenth-century bodysnatchers, they would have been wriggling with glee in their grave. *** Each day, Hilobrow.com pays tribute to one of our favorite high-, low-, no-, or hilobrow heroes on that person's birthday. Click here for more Hilo Hero shout-outs.

Chatsworth

Joe Alterio — Wed, 14 Oct 2009 11:28:25 +0000

gbooks

Joshua Glenn — Wed, 14 Oct 2009 16:47:07 +0000

pannapacker

Joshua Glenn — Wed, 14 Oct 2009 16:49:23 +0000

madlib-records

Joshua Glenn — Wed, 14 Oct 2009 20:05:51 +0000

waters-femaletrouble

Joshua Glenn — Wed, 14 Oct 2009 20:44:55 +0000

Hilo Hero: Italo Calvino

Tom Nealon — Thu, 15 Oct 2009 10:00:12 +0000

[caption id="attachment_7286" align="aligncenter" width="440" caption="A doodle of the Baron, by Calvino"][/caption] It is as impossible to think of the 20th century absent Cosimo from The Baron in the Trees (1957), by ITALO CALVINO (1923-1985), as it is to think of the 19th without Raskolnikov, the 18th without Gulliver, or the 17th without Don Quixote. The boy who took to the trees, never to return to earth, rather than eat more of the snails forced upon him by a malicious sister and his authoritarian, pre-Enlightenment father, prefigures and explodes every half-hearted compromise that has been made in the decades since. In choices between snails and no snails, we have so often chosen a few snails and called it progress, or no snails and called it open rebellion, when it was nothing of the sort. The Baron is a constant reminder that there is always a third choice: the path of greatest resistance. The irony (and what is more 20th century than irony) is that a novel about conviction and a strange sort of earnestness at the turn of the 19th century, rather than his later works of tantalizing fragments and carefully orchestrated metafictions, is his quintessential work, and still succeeds in leading our gaze ever upwards. *** Each day, Hilobrow.com pays tribute to one of our favorite high-, low-, no-, or hilobrow heroes on that person's birthday. Click here for more Hilo Hero shout-outs.

book-weapon

Joshua Glenn — Thu, 15 Oct 2009 13:11:16 +0000

R+M (2): ENORMOUS, RETRO, SNOB

Joe Alterio — Thu, 15 Oct 2009 17:00:44 +0000

ROBOT: "ENORMOUS, RETRO, SNOB" by Joe Alterio *** Robots and Monsters, a website that swaps custom-designed cartoons and pop art in exchange for a donation to charity, was field-tested in May 2007 by our friend and colleague Joe Alterio. Earlier this fall, Alterio and other artists relaunched the site as a going concern. This is the second in a ten-part series of cartoons and artworks created by R&M artists to raise money for the charity water.org.

album-Weird-Al-Yankovic-Dare-to-Be-Stupid

Joshua Glenn — Thu, 15 Oct 2009 17:27:09 +0000

wwii-poster-1943-usowi

Joshua Glenn — Thu, 15 Oct 2009 17:39:52 +0000

Givemorebooks-550

Joshua Glenn — Thu, 15 Oct 2009 17:53:29 +0000

TheLeftHandOfDarkness1stEd

Joshua Glenn — Thu, 15 Oct 2009 18:59:29 +0000

Hilo Hero: Louis Althusser

Mark Kingwell — Fri, 16 Oct 2009 10:00:07 +0000

Like Camus and Derrida, LOUIS ALTHUSSER (1918-90) came from Algeria. Unlike them, he murdered his wife — taking his philosophy of anti-humanism a little too far, as the clunky grad-seminar joke has it. (In court he was judged not guilty by reason of insanity.) Althusser's intellectual fame is based on one powerful idea: interpellation, or the "call" that the state sounds out of its pervasive power. This is the policeman's "Hey, you there!" that makes us all turn, in our unconscious guilt, to face the music. Althusser derived the notion from a close reading of Marx's critique of ideology: ideology is most successful when it is internalized by each subject, robbing us of agency even as we imagine we are free to do as we wish. Such purely theoretical Marxism, argued E.P. Thompson, revealed an author "who has only a casual acquaintance with historical practice." Certainly Althusser had only a casual acquaintance with the theoretical materials he cited; in a posthumous 1992 memoir, he confessed to fabricating quotations and discussing works he had not read. Still, his close attention to "ideological state apparatuses" or ISAs has no peer, and he reminds us even now, when more doctrinaire Marxists have proven fatally irrelevant, how difficult it is act responsibly, or even to be a subject, under conditions of self-surveillance and over-determination. *** Each day, Hilobrow.com pays tribute to one of our favorite high-, low-, no-, or hilobrow heroes on that person's birthday. Click here for more Hilo Hero shout-outs.

ted_20091009b

Joshua Glenn — Fri, 16 Oct 2009 21:42:41 +0000

1952-broome-1

Joshua Glenn — Fri, 16 Oct 2009 21:46:11 +0000

broome-2

Joshua Glenn — Fri, 16 Oct 2009 21:51:15 +0000

broome3

Joshua Glenn — Fri, 16 Oct 2009 21:54:24 +0000

Mad househusbands

Joshua Glenn — Fri, 16 Oct 2009 21:56:15 +0000

According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, women will likely overtake men in the American workforce some time this month or next. In August, women held 49.9 percent of the nation’s 132 million nonfarm jobs. Why? Because 80 percent of the 5.1 million people who have lost their jobs in this recession are men; and women are gaining the vast majority of jobs in the few sectors of the economy that are growing. Doesn't having, then raising children keep many women out of the workforce? Not so much. A chart posted yesterday to the NY Times' Economix blog notes that women across the board have entered the labor market in higher numbers over the last three decades, but the biggest increases have been among mothers with young children: What does this mean for men, you ask? John Broome, author of "It's a Woman's World," a science fiction story that appeared in the DC comic book Mystery in Space (#8), asked the same thing way back in July 1952. As the panels shown here demonstrate, Broome predicted that women would one day cruelly discriminate against men — force them to work in the home, while women ran businesses and fought wars. That actually sounds pretty good, to me. Broome, apparently, wasn't so sanguine about the prospect of being a househusband. Check out his story's happy ending: *** Click here for more science fiction on Hilobrow.com.

Bakshi_Side

Joshua Glenn — Sat, 17 Oct 2009 03:53:22 +0000

Bakshi_Top

Joshua Glenn — Sat, 17 Oct 2009 03:53:25 +0000

Bakshi_Top

Joshua Glenn — Sat, 17 Oct 2009 03:57:24 +0000

Hilo Hero: Evel Knievel

Annie Nocenti — Sat, 17 Oct 2009 10:00:16 +0000

Star-spangled motorcycle daredevil EVEL KNIEVEL (1938 –2007) showed the world you can be fearless and self-destructive and — if you understand hype — become an American icon. He stole his first bike. He jumped a crate of rattlesnakes, fourteen buses, fifty stacked cars, broke thirty-eight bones. He jumped the fountains at Caesar’s Palace, crash-landing into a 30-day coma. His most spectacular miss was halfway across Snake River Canyon in a rocket-powered Skycycle. He was in a brawl that sent fifteen Hells Angels to the hospital. He lost one liver and got a new one from a boy who died in a motorcycle crash. His FBI file is 290 pages long. He was baptized at 68 years old and had a pump implanted in his belly to shoot morphine into his back 24/7. His antics spawned $300 million worth of Evel Knievel toys, a Simpsons parody, a roller-coaster ride, and ten grandchildren. He inspired future daredevils, from David "Impact Addict" Leslie to Jackass to thousands of backyard wannabes. The facts of his life vary in the telling — but the truest thing ever said about Knievel? He said it himself: “If the world had more people like me, it would be a more interesting place.” *** Each day, Hilobrow.com pays tribute to one of our favorite high-, low-, no-, or hilobrow heroes on that person's birthday. Click here for more Hilo Hero shout-outs.

The Book is a Weapon (4)

HILOBROW — Sat, 17 Oct 2009 17:00:16 +0000

Sculpture by unknown artist — image found on Flickr and sent into us. If you have info, please drop us a line. *** Fourth in an occasional series.

BakshiSide

Joshua Glenn — Sat, 17 Oct 2009 23:09:09 +0000

BakshiTop

Joshua Glenn — Sat, 17 Oct 2009 23:09:11 +0000

3eb7ea1b

Joshua Glenn — Sat, 17 Oct 2009 23:24:12 +0000

back to the future

Matthew Battles — Sun, 18 Oct 2009 04:52:57 +0000

Hilo Hero: Lotte Lenya

Lynn Peril — Sun, 18 Oct 2009 10:00:52 +0000

LOTTE LENYA (1898-1981) once described her voice as “an octave below laryngitis.” With her quavering vibrato and what's been described as her "cavalier" approach to key, no one would mistake Lenya for a trained singer — but neither could anyone with ears miss what one enraptured reviewer called “the hint of long experience of sorrow in her voice.” Given the name of an older sister who died before she was born (Karoline Blamauer; she changed her name as a young adult), Lenya’s Viennese childhood was the stuff of Gothic nightmares. Her alcoholic father frequently snatched her out of bed, demanded she sing for him, then beat her for not living up to the performances of her dead sibling. As a teenager, she briefly worked as a prostitute. Later there would be four marriages, the best-remembered of which (to composer Kurt Weill) incorporated a divorce, remarriage, and multiple affairs by both partners. Perhaps it’s no surprise that Lenya found a place of refuge in the theater. “As soon as my feet hit the stage — I am safe,” she wrote. *** Each day, Hilobrow.com pays tribute to one of our favorite high-, low-, no-, or hilobrow heroes on that person's birthday. Click here for more Hilo Hero shout-outs.

450px-CERN_CMS_endcap_2005_October

Matthew Battles — Sun, 18 Oct 2009 16:57:17 +0000

The Future Thinks We Suck

Matthew Battles — Sun, 18 Oct 2009 17:03:46 +0000

As reported in the New York Times and elsewhere, a pair of physicists have offered a novel theory to explain the troubles bedeviling the Large Hadron Collidor, the world's most powerful—and to date, least effective—scientific instrument. In the online physics journal arXiv, Holger B. Nielsen and Masao Ninomiya suggest that the particle the LHC was built to discover—the Higgs Boson, which the so-called "Standard Model" of physics postulates makes mass possible—actually acts from the future to prevent its discovery in the present. Or maybe it's the universe itself that's trying to keep us mired in Higgs ignorance. In fact, maybe it's god. To help establish a proof of their theory, Nielsen and Ninomiya suggest a test: a game of cards. Using a random number generator, they offer, administrators at CERN (the Geneva-based institution responsible for the LHC) could make the decision to shut down the LHC dependent on drawing an ace out of a virtual deck of one hundred million hearts. If the ace comes up against such long odds, the future must be watching us. Many physicists find Nielsen and Ninomiya's notion outrageous. Some suggest that they're pursuing a hoax. But if it's the case, this is a hoax far more elaborate than the last great physicist-run scam, the infamous Sokal affair of 1996. Nielsen and Ninomiya have developed their theory in no fewer than seven papers published on arXiv, dating back to 2007; their work has attracted at least one paper building on the model they propose. (Perhaps tellingly, the arXiv administrators have reclassified the papers as general-audience reports, not professional work.) The authors make bold claims for the ideas advanced in the papers—they assert the work may explain not only the malfunctioning of the LHC, but suggest explanations of such mysteries as the origin of the cosmological constant and the equations of motion. One thing is certain: the alleged hoaxers are at the top of their field. Nielsen, who currently works at CERN, is considered one of the fathers of string theory. That said, and confessing total illiteracy before the physics involved, I must confess I find the theory both wildly intriguing and wonderfully cracked. It should be obvious to logic-choppers out there that to detect the influence of the future and the Higgs Boson, the card game—and even the LHC itself—may not even be necessary. The instrument's continued malfunctioning in the face of massive intellectual and engineering support could be taken as proof that the particle is out there hiding from us in the future, passing judgement on our present acts and theories. (In one of their papers, in fact, Nielsen and Ninomiya seem to suggest this conclusion.) Einstein's god may not play dice with the universe, but he may expect us to do so.

Winds of Magic (6): Anarchy in the UK

James Parker — Sun, 18 Oct 2009 21:00:30 +0000

Fiction being (if you’re doing it right) a slower and more ponderous process than journalism, it’s generally the novelists who arrive last at an epochal scene. In Britain, the publication this year of Ian McEwan’s Saturday and Chris Cleave’s Incendiary [neither of which I had read, interestingly enough, when I wrote this piece. Still haven’t, actually. Author’s Note.] marks the beginning of an imaginative response to 9/11. McEwan’s book begins with a flaming airplane over Heathrow (a false alarm, as it turns out) and proceeds to weave its narrative in and out of the enormous anti-war demonstration that took place in London on Saturday 15 February, 2003. The first line of Cleave’s Incendiary is “Dear Osama”: it is written in the form of a letter to bin Laden by a woman whose son and husband have just perished in a terrorist attack on London. Incendiary was published in July, during a week in which 52 Londoners were murdered and 700 injured in a coordinated terrorist bombing. Two weeks later London was paralysed again: four bombs, unexploded this time — three on the Underground, one on a bus. A century ago, Britain’s novelists were in a similar place. Joseph Conrad’s The Secret Agent and GK Chesterton’s The Man Who Was Thursday (published within six months of one another) both concerned themselves with London and with terror. The champion bombthrowers of Conrad’s and Chesterton’s time, unlike our own divine warriors, made no claims to godliness; on the contrary, they were militant atheists. They were, to be precise, anarchists, and in the last decade of the nineteenth century they managed to assassinate the heads of state of France, Spain, Austria, Italy and the US. Anarchist bombs had also gone off in the London Underground, the Paris stock exchange and a Madrid theatre. By 1908, when The Man Who Was Thursday was published, the worst of what the London Times called “the anarchist epidemic” was over; the movement was riddled with police infiltrators, and subsequent to the Aliens Act of 1905 Great Britain — regarded internationally as an asylum for anarchists — had begun to deport agitators and undesirables. In the popular imagination, however, the caped and stalking anarchist, cradling bombs that (as Chesterton wrote) “looked like the bulbs of iron plants, or the eggs of iron birds," remained vivid. The theme of The Secret Agent — a botched bombing and its consequences — had been suggested to Conrad by events in 1894, when an anarchist named Martial Bourdin accidentally blew himself up in an attempt to dynamite London’s Greenwich Observatory. Terror is rarely efficient: the bungling jihadis of the 21st July, 2005, whose casualty-free attacks on the London transport system reprised as farce the lethal events of two weeks before, would have been familiar figures to Conrad. As Ramzi Mohamed, Hussain Osman et al fled into history with their misfired devices fuming idly behind them, the words of The Secret Agent’s Professor hung mockingly in the air: “You can’t expect a detonator to be absolutely foolproof.” The Chestertonian terrorist is another thing again: he is a figure in a cosmic comedy. Chesterton, a prolific journalist, poet and critic, was never afraid to take a serious subject unseriously — it was part of his metaphysic, as it were. “There seems to be some sort of idea,’ he wrote in 1908, “that you are not treating a subject properly if you eulogise it with fantastic terms are defend it by grotesque examples. Yet a truth is equally solemn whatever figure or example its exponent adopts. It is an equally awful truth that four and four make eight, whether you reckon the thing out in eight onions or eight angels...” The grotesquerie at the heart of The Man Who Was Thursday, the animating gag, is that the London-based deadly-secret conclave of European Dynamiters is in fact made up entirely of police double agents, none of whom is aware of the others. The enigmatic and monumentally huge Sunday (each member of the conclave is named for a day of the week) has a deeper kind of doubleness. Simultaneously, he is the president of the Central Anarchist Council and he is an important policeman — perhaps the most important policeman of all. [caption id="attachment_7111" align="aligncenter" width="468" caption="G.K. Chesterton"][/caption] The Man Who Was Thursday is uncategorizable: a wild hash of allegory, theology, social philosophy and cultural criticism, all delivered with the skill of a vintage epigrammist. (“Thieves respect property,” declares one character. “They merely wish the property to become their property that they may more perfectly respect it.”) But we should pause before declaring it unreal. A London which permitted the extremist cleric Abu Hamza al-Masri (currently on trial for terrorism) to stand in the street and preach holy war might be interested in the conduct of Chesterton’s anarchist Central Council, which conceals itself by having breakfast on a sunlit balcony in Leicester Square. “You want a safe disguise, do you?” Sunday asks a prospective terrorist. “You want a dress which will guarantee you harmless; a dress in which no one would ever look for a bomb?... Why then, dress up as an anarchist, you fool!” If anything, Chesterton might have felt that Hamza — who lost a hand and was partially blinded on mujahideen manoeuvres in Afghanistan — was too theatrical in his disguises: the combination of the hook and the one milky eye creates an effect almost vulgarly villainous. (In the world of The Man Who Was Thursday Hamza would of course be working for Scotland Yard.) [caption id="attachment_7109" align="aligncenter" width="280" caption="Abu Hamza al-Masri"][/caption] *** Much was made, in the wake of the London bombings, of the spirit and spunk of Londoners, their business-as-usual stalwartness, their deadpan defiance and will to “carry on”. London, says the narrator of Incendiary, has had “more comebacks than The Evil Dead”; faced with disaster, its people “take a deep breath and put the kettle on.” The true Chestertonian note, however, was struck quietly and impeccably in a letter to the Times, published shortly after the attacks. “Yesterday,” wrote a citizen called Bryan Thwaite, “I boarded a No. 38 bus, not as ‘a small act of courage and defiance’ but because I wanted to go from Piccadilly Circus to Tottenham Court Road.” *** Originally published by The Boston Globe's Ideas section on Sept. 11, 2005. From 2003-08, our friend and colleague James Parker, currently a contributing editor at The Atlantic, was a culture critic for the Boston Globe's Ideas section and for Boston's alt-weekly, The Phoenix. Hilobrow.com has curated a collection of Parker's writings from this period. This installment is the sixth in a series of ten.

jackson-wanda-queen-of-rockabilly

Joshua Glenn — Mon, 19 Oct 2009 00:21:44 +0000

ditko4

Joshua Glenn — Mon, 19 Oct 2009 00:54:56 +0000

Hilo Hero: Divine

Mimi Lipson — Mon, 19 Oct 2009 10:00:52 +0000

“Just because you got them big udders don’t make you something special.” So says Earl Peterson (DIVINE, born Harris Glenn Milstead, 1945-88) to Dawn Davenport (Divine, again) in two of her greatest roles. And Earl was right — the udders were almost beside the point. That is, Divine had about as much in common with other drag queens as Ernie Kovaks had with other variety show hosts. Divine did not impersonate weary cocktail singers or randy housewives, or any females you’d meet outside of a John Waters movie. Her characters in Multiple Maniacs, Pink Flamingos, and Female Trouble, to name three great early Waters films, didn’t have attitude or sass: they ate dog turds and sprayed bullets into crowds and rubbed their privates with dead fish, all the while maintaining a pitch of glee that veered dangerously close to hyperventilation. And at the very moment when the mainstream threatened to swallow her up, a week after the premier of her crossover performance in Hairspray, she succumbed to the weight of her abnormally large heart. *** Each day, Hilobrow.com pays tribute to one of our favorite high-, low-, no-, or hilobrow heroes on that person's birthday. Click here for more Hilo Hero shout-outs.

Joshua Glenn — Mon, 19 Oct 2009 12:46:11 +0000

Middlebrow Disinfo

Joshua Glenn — Mon, 19 Oct 2009 18:40:13 +0000

Every now and then, a well-meaning intellectual mounts a three-quarters-hearted defense of Cold War-era High Middlebrow — i.e., the Great Books of the Western World collection, the Book-of-the-Month Club, Masterpiece Theatre, the arts magazine Horizon, the B.B.C.'s Home Service programs. [caption id="attachment_7363" align="aligncenter" width="398" caption="The Great Books"][/caption] As previously noted, Russell Lynes mounted such a defense in 1949; his “Highbrow, Lowbrow, Middlebrow" described America as a caste system presided over by proto-authoritarian highbrows who've failed to keep the benighted lowbrows in their place only because of the courageous efforts of virtuous, value-creating "upper middlebrows." Andrew Ross did it in 1989; his No Respect: Intellectuals and Popular Culture argued that postwar highbrows latched onto the term "middlebrow" as a "containing structure," i.e., in order to protect their own cultural and intellectual authority. Susan Jacoby did it just last year; in The Age of American Unreason, she recounts: "I look back on the middlebrow with affection, gratitude, and regret rather than condescension, not because the Book-of-the-Month Club brought works of genius into my life, but because the monthly pronouncements of its reviewers encouraged me to seek a wider world." (Low Middlebrow also has its intellectual defenders: in his 2007 book Let's Talk About Love: A Journey to the End of Taste, Carl Wilson makes a parallel case on behalf of schmaltz, kitsch, and Céline Dion.) *** Why have Lynes, Ross, and other intellectuals forced themselves to appreciate (though not actually enjoy) Cold War-era High Middlebrow productions? For the noblest of reasons. Because they approve of the populist mission (equal educational opportunity, social mobility, self-improvement) that we've all been encouraged to believe was High Middlebrow's; and because they disapprove of what we've all been encouraged to believe was/is the snobbishness of High Middlebrow's critics. "Two cheers for Middlebrow!" the well-meaning intellectual, who appreciates High Middlebrow productions, though (again) she doesn't enjoy them, bravely insists. The mandarins be damned! It's not so courageous, though, defending Middlebrow. Sure, the canon-protecting highbrows and above-it-all nobrows might mock you for doing so — but so what? They have neither power nor much influence, any longer. Middlebrow has a lock on the power (New York and Hollywood are middlebrow towns), and (thanks to Quatsch) on most of the influence, too. Middlebrow has managed to persuade us that there are three dispositions: Highbrow vs. Lowbrow, with Middlebrow mediating. For example, reviewing the latest New York Film Festival early this month in The New York Times, middlebrow critic A.O. Scott laments that

What was once a wide and crowded middle ground between popular taste and high art has eroded.... Ideally and at its best, the kind of high-minded middlebrowism represented by the New York Film Festival could provide a bridge for curious patrons, a path from the familiar and the fun toward the rarefied and the difficult, as well as a yearly sampling of world cinema in all its protean abundance.

Also, Middlebrow has persuaded us that this tripartite model of the dispositions maps closely onto our class system: the upper class vs. the lower class, with the middle classes (upper and lower) mediating between them. The promise of social mobility, from lower to upper class, hinges on the existence of the middle classes; or so we're led to believe. Who or what has encouraged us to believe that High Middlebrow's aim is to bridge the cultural gap between Lowbrow (identified with the lower classes) and Highbrow (identified with the upper), and in so doing somehow prevent our freedom-loving liberal capitalist social order from hardening into an undemocratic caste system? Middlebrow. Who or what has encouraged us to believe that anti-Middlebrow critics are assholes? Middlebrow. So these supposedly contrarian defenders of Cold War-era High Middlebrow merely parrot the dominant discourse's propaganda; worse, they're misreading — or disreading — High Middlebrow's brilliant critics. *** The most recent misfire comes from W.A. Pannapacker, who reviewed Alex Beam's A Great Idea at the Time: The Rise, Fall, and Curious Afterlife of the Great Books in The Chronicle of Higher Education earlier this month. (Beam is a friend, but I'd recommend this book — though it falls into the Lynes/Ross/Jacoby category — even if he weren't.) In "Confessions of a Middlebrow Professor," Pannapacker stops short of comparing High Middlebrow's critics to Hitler or Stalin — which was Lynes' specialty. However, he does trot out the same old arguments in defense of High Middlebrow productions like Masterpiece Theatre, PBS documentaries on science and culture, the Time-Life Library of Art, and (yes) the Great Books. "For all their shortcomings, the Great Books — along with many other varieties of middlebrow culture — reflected a time when the liberal arts commanded more respect," writes Pannapacker. "They were thought to have practical value as a remedy for parochialism, bigotry, social isolation, fanaticism, and political and economic exploitation. The Great Books had a narrower conception of 'greatness' than we might like today, but their foundational ideals were radically egalitarian and proudly intellectual." Pannapacker approvingly quotes Beam:

"The animating idea behind publishing the Great Books, aside from making money for Britannica and the University of Chicago," Beam observes, "was populism, not elitism." The books were household gods. They shared the living room with the television, and they made you feel guilty for being intellectually passive, for not taking control of your own mental development, for putting democracy at risk. "And thousands of copies, perhaps tens of thousands, were actually read, and had an enormous impact on the lives of the men, women, and children who read them."

He quotes Susan Jacoby:

The Great Books — along with all those Time-Life series — were often "purchased on the installment plan by parents who had never owned a book but were willing to sacrifice to provide their children with information about the world that had been absent from their own upbringing," Jacoby writes. They represented an old American belief — now endangered — that "anyone willing to invest time and energy in self-education might better himself."

And he references Lynes' take-down of one of the earliest, most ferocious anti-middlebrows, Virginia Woolf:

As the Harper's Magazine editor Russell Lynes argued in his 1949 essay "Highbrow, Lowbrow, Middlebrow," the ideal world for Woolf is a caste system in which billions of bovine proles produce the raw materials for a coterie of sensitive, highbrow ectomorphs who spring fully formed from the head of Sir Leslie Stephen. At the very least, lowbrows with upward aspirations should have the courtesy to keep themselves out of sight until they complete their passage through the awkward age of the middlebrow.

Pannapacker would have us believe, in other words, that Middlebrow is the solution — the dialectical synthesis of Highbrow and Lowbrow, the happy ending to America's struggle between aristocratic and democratic ideals. Cold War-era High Middlebrow was egalitarian/populist/democratic. It aided regular folks who wanted to educate and improve themselves, who aspired to greater things (intellectual or economic). High Middlebrow's critics aren't merely upper-class snobs and twits — they're un-American! Pannapacker, who describes his own family as working or lower middle-class, has an axe to grind when it comes to elitist snobs who sneer at Middlebrow. He criticizes the upper-class types he met in college who "took the intellectual life for granted — who didn't think reading was praiseworthy in itself — and who looked down on the striver's culture from which I emerged as 'middlebrow.'" Critics of Middlebrow (Woolf and Dwight Macdonald are named) want to keep upwardly mobile strivers in their place, claims Pannapacker. If you believe in the tripartite model described above (Highbrow vs. Lowbrow, with Middlebrow mediating), and if you believe that this model maps neatly onto our class system, then it's difficult — perhaps impossible — to disagree with Pannapacker. But this model is wrong, wrong, wrong!

makhno

Joshua Glenn — Mon, 19 Oct 2009 22:15:30 +0000

Hilo Hero: Wanda Jackson

Ingrid Schorr — Tue, 20 Oct 2009 10:00:14 +0000

[caption id="attachment_7565" align="aligncenter" width="550" caption="Wanda Jackson, painting by Laura Levine from her book Shake, Rattle & Roll: The Founders of Rock & Roll"]Wanda Jackson, painting by Laura Levine from her book Shake, Rattle & Roll: The Founders of Rock & Roll" title="wanda jackson smallframe© laura levine" width="550" height="626" class="size-full wp-image-7565" />[/caption] A straight line runs from rockabilly pioneer WANDA JACKSON (born 1937) to Jason and the Scorchers and the Cramps. Watch a 1958 performance of “Hard Headed Woman": Jackson juts her guitar in a most unladylike fashion, setting in motion her fringed sheath dress — no puffy gingham or calico for Wanda — and her warm country soprano swoops gleefully into a sawtooth timbre that might draw blood from the toughest bearded cheek. She had her first country hit at age 17, toured with Elvis at 18, and in ’57 covered a sedate R&B song called “Fujiyama Mama.” I don’t know what ignited Jackson’s vocals — sexual hunger, Cold War fury? — but they produce one explosion after another, the swift, drumming penultimate section of a fireworks display. “I've been to Nagasaki, Hiroshima too/The things I did to them baby, I can do to you.” *** Each day, Hilobrow.com pays tribute to one of our favorite high-, low-, no-, or hilobrow heroes on that person's birthday. Click here for more Hilo Hero shout-outs.

Allenwrench-Airheart

Joe Alterio — Tue, 20 Oct 2009 12:58:11 +0000

roboalfred

Matthew Battles — Tue, 20 Oct 2009 15:01:57 +0000

Domesticating the Uncanny Valley

Matthew Battles — Tue, 20 Oct 2009 15:38:35 +0000

In one version of an oft-repeated thought experiment, Douglas Hofstadter famously wondered if Albert Einstein's brain (well, anyone's brain, really) could be reformatted as a book, with each neuron represented by a page printed with data documenting synaptic connections, threshold excitations, and the other "technical data" required to "run" the mind. This cumbersome vade mecum would have one hundred million pages. But philosophers wonder if the resulting tome would truly constitute Albert himself (albeit one whose mind operates much slower than the wetware model). [caption id="attachment_7603" align="aligncenter" width="454" caption="quick: which one\'s the robot?"]quick: which one's the robot?" title="roboalfred" width="454" height="237" class="size-full wp-image-7603" />[/caption] Roboticist David Hanson plans a different route to his alterna-Einstein. Through next-generation materials, ultra-lightweight power supplies, and sophisticated facial expression recognition software, Hanson's Einstein will mimic its way to a simulacrum of human empathy. This Einstein can't produce new theories about the time-space continuum, but it can respond when you smile, frown, or stare at it in puzzled disbelief. Hanson discussed the project in a recent TED talk. Although he didn't mention the connection, Hanson's approach seems to follow an interest among brain researchers in so-called "mirror neurons," which fire both when we make certain facial gestures and when we witness those of others. Mirror neurons are believed to play a role in the production of consciousness. Lower primates have a few of them; we have a lot. The implied question is, if David Hanson's robots eventually mimic human empathy in every outward detail, do they actually have empathy? Hanson is best known for his Philip K. Dick android project, in which an empathic facial robot skinned to look like PKD was hooked up to a database filled with Dick's works, allowing the robot to converse knowledgeably with human interlocuters. In a mystery worthy of the uncanny science fiction master, the robot's head went missing while en route to a show. As a result, Hanson never tested the possibility that an android copy of an author loaded with the author's works might actually violate that author's copyright. (Presumably, Hofstadter's Einstein Codex would be a form of piracy as well.) We're inclined to believe that there's something ineluctable about consciousness that can't be captured in hardware, no matter how sophisticated. (We're nearly equally prepared to have this highbrow stance overthrown.) But Hanson wants to imbue robots with a version of consciousness not merely because it would be cool to do so. In his TED talk, he points out that robots are being developed to kill efficiently and remorselessly with over great distances with little oversight or control. By bringing empathy to robots, Hanson believes, we can ensure an emotional check on their destructive potential.

Stiv Bators

Tor Aarestad — Tue, 20 Oct 2009 17:52:47 +0000

Hilo Hero: Ursula K. Le Guin

Joshua Glenn — Wed, 21 Oct 2009 10:00:49 +0000

Her Earthsea fantasy novels — most signally, A Wizard of Earthsea (1968), The Tombs of Atuan (1971), and The Farthest Shore (1972) — concern the education of a young wizard, and are recommended for those who labor under the delusion that the middlebrow Harry Potter series is any good. However, URSULA K. LE GUIN (born 1929) is particularly talented as an author of science fiction, a genre she uses better than most to criticize gender roles, capitalism, and the Western shibboleth of "progress." Long before Iain M. Banks set his "Culture" series in an egalitarian, galaxy-spanning social order, there was Le Guin's Hainish Cycle — The Left Hand of Darkness (1969), The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Utopia (1974), and The Word for World is Forest (1976) are the must-reads — in which an egalitarian social order, the Ekumen, explores the outposts of a collapsed Galactic Empire. These outposts include (respectively) Gethen, whose inhabitants can become male or female each month; Anarres, an anarcho-syndicalist moon orbiting around a capitalist planet; and Athshe, a forest-world whose aboriginal natives are brutalized by Earth's military-industrial complex. NB: The Lathe of Heaven (1971), a PKD-esque epistemological workout, appears more or less between the two series — and it appealed, at the time, to fantasy and SF fans alike. Click here for more science fiction on Hilobrow.com. *** Each day, Hilobrow.com pays tribute to one of our favorite high-, low-, no-, or hilobrow heroes on that person's birthday. Click here for more Hilo Hero shout-outs.

sefirot-cordovero-500

Joshua Glenn — Wed, 21 Oct 2009 13:28:09 +0000

Whence Middlebrow?

Joshua Glenn — Wed, 21 Oct 2009 13:28:36 +0000

Here at Hilobrow.com, we agree with Bourdieu that aesthetics and lifestyle choices aren't entirely independent of social class. Though (along with Carl Wilson) we reject the reductionism of his Distinction, we do rely on Bourdieu's notion of the "disposition" (a tendency to act in a specified way, to take on a certain position in any field) and the "habitus" (the choice of positions in a field, according to one's disposition). We've named and located 10 bourdieuian dispositions — 4 heimlich (Highbrow, Lowbrow, Neo-Aristocratic (Anti-Lowbrow), Quasi-Populist (Anti-Highbrow)); 2 gemütlich (High Middlebrow, or what Dwight Macdonald called Midcult; and Low Middlebrow, which Macdonald, following Adorno, called Masscult); 2 unheimlich (Nobrow, not to be confused with John Seabrook's confused use of the term; and Hilobrow, our own coinage); and then there's Unbrow, which Van Wyck Brooks confusingly called Lowbrow. There are various habituses possible within each of these dispositions, but since the mid-17th-century, these dispositions have formed into an invisible matrix of influence. [This is a version of comment that I posted, earlier this morning, to John Holbo's recent post at Crooked Timber about Russell Lynes, Virginia Woolf, and Carl Wilson. Holbo is brilliant, but — like Wilson, whom we also consider a friend — he seems to be pro-Lynes and anti-Woolf, whereas Hilobrow.com is anti-Lynes and pro-Woolf. Too bad! But perhaps we can change their minds.] *** Our hypothesis is that the 4 heimlich dispositions formed in the mid-17th century and after because of Spinoza and the so-called Radical Enlightenment. Before that time, Highbrow and Lowbrow were united, e.g., in a figure like Shakespeare. For two centuries after this Shevirat HaKeilim-like moment of shattering, Highbrow and Lowbrow remained fond of one another, copacetic and complementary; but as recounted by historians like Lawrence W. Levine, in the late 19th century a wedge was driven between High and Low. Virginia Woolf's essay is a lament about this suddenly widening gap; unlike those intellectuals of her time who celebrated Middlebrow for bridging High and Low, she blamed Middlebrow for the divide. Writing a decade earlier than Woolf, Van Wyck Brooks also deplored what was happening to Highbrow as it lost contact with Lowbrow. However, Brooks made two major errors: he confused Lowbrow with Unbrow (philistinism), and he called for Middlebrow to close the divide. Whence Middlebrow, the uncanniest of guests? We're still trying to track it down — we're pretty sure it existed before it was named in the Twenties. It might have been born in the very late 19th or very early 20th century, per Woolf and Brooks. I think Christopher Lasch is likely analyzing the disposition High Middlebrow — though he mostly isn't discussing taste — in his The New Radicalism in America, 1889-1963. But in "Masscult & Midcult," Dwight Macdonald blames Low Middlebrow on the industrial revolution, and traces its origins back to mid-18th-century England. At Hilobrow.com we're interested in tracking Middlebrow's origins, but the critical thing is our discovery of its true role and position within the matrix of modern dispositions: Middlebrow does not mediate between Highbrow and Lowbrow; and therefore it should not be championed by those who are attempting to champion social mobility (i.e., from lower to upper class) in the sphere of culture. Lynes was misguided in this effort — and, as previously mentioned, so are Andrew Ross, Susan Jacoby, A.O. Scott, the author of a recent Chronicle of Higher Ed essay titled "Confessions of a Middlebrow Professor," and even our friends Alex Beam (author of a recent history of the Great Books series) and Carl Wilson. Despite what sounds — to our ears — like her snobbery, Woolf was dead-on when she claimed that Middlebrow was only making it more difficult for Highbrow and Lowbrow to reunite; and Macdonald and Adorno (also branded as mandarins) were also correct about this. Where does Middlebrow sit on the matrix of modern dispositions — and where do all these other "brows" that I've named sit? We've got it mapped out, and we're revealing the answer slowly, whenever we get a spare moment (because we have day jobs) right here, on this website. PS: Hilobrow may not actually be a disposition that anyone can actually inhabit; it might be more of an ideal — Highbrow and Lowbrow, reunited and it feels so good — that can only be articulated negatively, by saying what it isn't. "Let me admit frankly that I have not in my experience encountered any certain specimen of this type; but I do not refuse to admit that as far as I know, every other person may be such a specimen. At the same time I will say that I have searched vainly for years…."

bacon-studio

Joshua Glenn — Wed, 21 Oct 2009 17:09:22 +0000

WalkerEvans

Joshua Glenn — Wed, 21 Oct 2009 17:16:32 +0000

bators-550

Joshua Glenn — Wed, 21 Oct 2009 18:03:29 +0000

snowcrashSL

Joshua Glenn — Wed, 21 Oct 2009 19:22:57 +0000

Hilo Hero: Stiv Bators

Tor Aarestad — Thu, 22 Oct 2009 10:00:00 +0000

Though Iggy Pop did Iggy first (and better), STIV BATORS (1949-90) did Iggy with a striver's zeal in the right place and at the right time. The arrival of the Dead Boys in 1977 marked the transition of CBGBs from a highbrow/lowbrow DMZ that hosted Television and the Ramones to a lowbrow rawk club. Of course, the greatest Dead Boys songs — "Ain't it Fun," "Sonic Reducer" — had their origins in the hilo Dead Boys precursor Rocket from the Tombs, the highbrow half of which went on to form Pere Ubu. Soon after playing with the Damned in a tour-cum-battle of the bands, the Dead Boys disbanded, ceding the field to the superior force (whose tempo was faster, songs better, and lyrics and pseudonyms smarter). Bators next formed The Wanderers and released a paranoid conspiracy concept album, Only Lovers Left Alive; and later collaborated with former Damned guitarist Brian James as the Lords of the New Church, which took The Wanderers' lyrical themes further, but with a bit of the crazy sanded off — thus helping to usher in low-middlebrow hard rock. No wonder Axl Rose has claimed Bators, who always did have some David Lee Roth in him, as a spiritual kinsman. *** Each day, Hilobrow.com pays tribute to one of our favorite high-, low-, no-, or hilobrow heroes on that person's birthday. Click here for more Hilo Hero shout-outs.

R+M (3): PILOT, HAPPY, BALANCED

Joe Alterio — Thu, 22 Oct 2009 17:00:17 +0000

ROBOT: "PILOT, HAPPY, BALANCED" — art by ADAM "APELAD" KOFORD *** Robots and Monsters, a website that swaps custom-designed cartoons and pop art in exchange for a donation to charity, was field-tested in May 2007 by our friend and colleague Joe Alterio. Earlier this fall, Alterio and other artists relaunched the site as a going concern. This is the third in a ten-part series of cartoons and artworks created by R&M artists to raise money for the charity water.org.

Fran-L

Joshua Glenn — Thu, 22 Oct 2009 17:48:35 +0000

Hilo Hero: "Weird Al" Yankovic

Sarah Weinman — Fri, 23 Oct 2009 10:00:22 +0000

To call "WEIRD AL" YANKOVIC (born 1959) a parodist is to understate his technical proficiency and artistic skill. Anyone can satirize a song or a movie and upload it to YouTube, but Weird Al is a craftsman, first finding the comedic nut graf of his chosen song (from "My Bologna" to "Amish Paradise") and then, line by line, rhyme by rhyme, polka riff by polka riff, matching song and parody down to the last semiquaver. Had Weird Al stopped there, he would have remained a regular staple on the Dr. Demento Radio Show, merely a curious oddity. His career coincided with the rise of the music video, however, and he extended his parodic gifts into that medium. Now not only was he turning the hyperkinetic rhythms of Michael Jackson's "Bad" into the embrace of corpulence that is "Fat," but his "Fat" video mirrored every detail, from the wristbands to the dance moves to the set, of the Scorsese-directed Jackson video. Even in today's user-generated sea of funny, Yankovic has demonstrated to a younger, more jaded generation that is it possible for one and all to embrace being "White and Nerdy." *** Each day, Hilobrow.com pays tribute to one of our favorite high-, low-, no-, or hilobrow heroes on that person's birthday. Click here for more Hilo Hero shout-outs.

The Book is a Weapon (5)

HILOBROW — Fri, 23 Oct 2009 18:00:49 +0000

A Kindle just wouldn't work as well in this propaganda poster, would it? *** Fifth in an occasional series.

Hilo Hero: Madlib

Douglas Wolk — Sat, 24 Oct 2009 10:00:02 +0000

The hip-hop producer MADLIB (born 1973) is also a helium-voiced rapper (Quasimodo) and a one-man jazz "quintet" (Yesterday's New Quintet), among other alter egos. Since 1993, he's contributed to dozens of recordings, and his breed of crate-digging favors bizarre timbres and explosive individual notes over prefabricated beats — the funk is the part he can add himself. If there's a particular album that's his ticket into heaven, though, it's probably Madvillainy, his 2004 team-up with rapper MF DOOM: a lurching, thick-bassed golem built out of Madlib's off-center samples of jazz oddities and horror movies and video games and Steve Reich records, brought to life by blowing pot smoke in its face. Madlib's instrumentals mostly eschew choruses, which works just fine with DOOM's habit of delivering one long verse of rhymed couplets without doubling back. He also gets points for economy: when DOOM didn't come through with rhymes for a proposed second Madvillain album, Madlib simply put together an entirely new set of instrumental tracks to go along with the original album's vocals and released it as Madvillainy 2. *** Each day, Hilobrow.com pays tribute to one of our favorite high-, low-, no-, or hilobrow heroes on that person's birthday. Click here for more Hilo Hero shout-outs.

Ezra_Pound_1945_May_26_mug_shot

Matthew Battles — Sat, 24 Oct 2009 17:54:04 +0000

Hilo Hero: Pablo Picasso

Ingrid Schorr — Sun, 25 Oct 2009 10:00:51 +0000

Those who question or resist PABLO PICASSO (1881-1973) are overthinking. No need. The man did all the thinking for you. He could have been an immensely appealing sentimental artist, but he forced himself to be an awkward one. Look at his Two Nude Women, a series of twenty-one increasingly abstract images made from a single lithographic stone. In the final state [shown above], he twists the women — one watching, one sleeping (a classical tableau he returned to over and over) — into an equipoise of something vegetal and animal, barbed and sensual. To paraphrase Frank O’Hara, you look at a Picasso and you know how wonderful the 20th century can be. *** Each day, Hilobrow.com pays tribute to one of our favorite high-, low-, no-, or hilobrow heroes on that person's birthday. Click here for more Hilo Hero shout-outs.

picasso-nude-xxi

Joshua Glenn — Sun, 25 Oct 2009 14:33:29 +0000

Winds of Magic (7): Presidency of the Absurd

James Parker — Sun, 25 Oct 2009 21:00:12 +0000

The owl and the pussycat went to jail, for something the piggy-wig said. They sat for a while with no hope of a trial, and paper bags over their heads, Till a man with dark glasses belabored their asses. Puss went where the Bong Tree grows, And the owl was put in a stress position and water was poured up his nose....

That’s the Bush era remix of “The Owl and the Pussycat.” Not quite right, is it? But not wrong either. In the literature of absurdity, torture is never far away. The baked, rolled, and smashed protagonists of Edward Lear’s limericks; Père Ubu’s Debraining Machine; the nightmare apparatus of Franz Kafka’s "In the Penal Colony"; Lucky on his leash in Waiting for Godot. When the goblins of the absurd are let loose, it seems to follow with biological inevitability that a man will become his brother’s torturer. Who’s to stop him? Morals are arbitrary, God’s in his grave, and space rings us like an iron perimeter. Nothing matters. Why not have a bit of fun? History will have trouble digesting the irony of it — that George W. Bush, a man who claims Jesus as his favorite political philosopher and the Lord as his warrant, has presided over the transformation of US foreign policy into a God-destroying juggernaut of absurdity. “If you want to study the social and political history of modern nations,” wrote Thomas Merton in 1961, “study hell.” Merton was a Trappist monk, but he knew the world. In its relentless, chaotic sponsorship of torture, the Bush Administration has created many little chambers of hell, many places where reason is overthrown and sanctity denied. In such places — in Abu Ghraib, or Guantánamo, or Camp Cropper, or Bagram Air Base — human rights evaporate: there are no rights, no principles or precedents. There is only the despotism of the present tense, whose sole limit is the fact that you might die before it has exhausted its capacity for torment. It doesn’t get more absurd than that. Fruit loops and freedom Edward Lear didn’t invent the limerick, but he might as well have. The form had existed for centuries before this shy Victorian landscape painter — tormented privately by epilepsy, which he called “my terrible demon” — made his name by turning it into a vehicle for violent irrationality:

There was a Young Person of Smyrna Whose grandmother threatened to burn her; But she seized on the cat, and said, “Granny, burn that! You incongruous old woman of Smyrna!”

Lear was a post-Romantic who disliked getting carried away: he described his own mind as “concrete and abstemious,” and he knew that the key to successful nonsense (as he called his verse) lay in a crooked balancing of order and chaos. Without the punctilious containment of the limerick — its mirrored first and last lines creating a sense of psychotic circularity (literally, of loopiness) — his strange animalistic jokes would have had no punch line.

There was an old man who screamed out Whenever they knocked him about; So they took off his boots, and fed him with fruits, And continued to knock him about.

Insisting that his nonsense was simple entertainment, written for the nursery, Lear was in fact one of the fathers of absurdity, of Kafka, Samuel Beckett, and Eugène Ionesco, unwilling herald of a universe “freed” — in the words of Martin Esslin, scholar of absurd theater — “from the shackles of logic,” where “wish-fulfillment will not be inhibited by considerations of human kindness.” The old man is fed with fruits to stop him screaming: once he’s quiet, the abuse can resume. The Bush-era analogue to this situation would be the one in which the doctor stands by during the torture session, ensuring that the prisoner doesn’t die. During the course of one interrogation at the detention center in Guantánamo Bay, for example, as reported by Time magazine, prisoner 063 — Mohamed al-Qahtani, the so-called 20th hijacker of 9/11 — grew dangerously dehydrated. Medical corpsmen intervened, and al-Qahtani was pumped with three bags of saline. For the duration of the procedure, however, he remained strapped to his chair, and loud music (possibly Christina Aguilera, which had been used before) was played to keep him awake. Nonsense is its own insurance. In the unhappy event that a prisoner expires before realizing his full potential as a source of intelligence, his corpse can be kept safely in the realm of meaninglessness — pickled, as it were, in absurdity. Steven H. Miles, in his 2005 book Oath Betrayed: Torture, Medical Complicity, and the War on Terror (Random House) describes the case of the detainee at Camp Cropper, near Baghdad International Airport, who was killed by a blow to the head. Two weeks later his body, complete with pre-prepared death certificate, was dropped at a local hospital. Cause of death: “sudden brainstem compression.” That unfortunate young man of Camp Cropper.... Duck, duck, goosed Michael Tucker and Petra Epperlein’s extraordinary documentary The Prisoner, or: How I Planned to Kill Tony Blair, which was released on DVD this past month, is a primer in the absurdity of the Iraq war. Elegant, soft-spoken Iraqi journalist Yunis Abbas falls victim to the process known as “cordon and capture” — in which US troops, acting sometimes on mere wisps of intelligence, round up suspects in nighttime sweeps — and is arrested at a wedding party. Somehow he and his brothers have been implicated in a bomb plot against visiting British Prime Minister Tony Blair, and, despite the fact that no bomb-making equipment is found at their house, they are taken into custody. “They [terrorists] are very good about it,” explains US Lieutenant Colonel Bill Rabena, Commander of the 2/3 Field Artillery Capturing Unit. “They bring the material and they make the bomb there at the house, and then there’s basically not much material to find as evidence.” The cleaner and more harmless-looking the kitchen, in other words, the more likely it is that expert bomb makers have recently been at work in it. This mania for culpability is pervasive. As soon as Yunis and his brothers arrive at the detention site at Camp Ganci, a subdivision of Abu Ghraib, they are enveloped in an almost Calvinist miasma of guilt: if you’re here, you must have done something. A female American interrogator spits in Yunis’s face and calls him a terrorist. When told of his starring role in a plot to kill Blair, Yunis laughs — one reaction to absurdity. The other is despair, which soon overwhelms him. (Del Rey has just published a novel called Harm, by veteran science-fiction author Brian Aldiss, on this exact theme.) “All is imaginary,” wrote Kafka in his diary in 1921. “Family, office, friends, the street, all imaginary, far away or close at hand, the woman; the truth that lies closest, however, is only this: that you are beating your head against the wall of a windowless and doorless cell.” (A year later, with no explanation, Yunis and his brothers are released.) Another key document is Tony Lagouranis’s memoir Fear Up Harsh, just published by Penguin imprint NAL. Lagouranis was an Army interrogator with the US 513th Military Intelligence Brigade, and in 2004 he was sent to Iraq to participate in the ongoing intelligence-gathering operation at Abu Ghraib. The abuse scandal was already percolating, under military investigation, and would explode into the media inside four months — all Lagouranis knew was that “something bad” had happened on the nightshift over at the so-called Hard Site, and that it had been dealt with. The worst, then, might have been assumed to be over. Not so. Fear Up Harsh is a painful and deeply moral account of the vitality of torture: its entropic ability, once the door has been opened to it, to shift, mutate, and intensify. Legalized abuse is a contagion: it begins with Alberto Gonzalez musing in a memo to the president that the Geneva Convention has been rendered “quaint” and “obsolete” by the new facts of war, and it ends with a prisoner’s body packed in ice. All this has been well-documented, but Lagouranis is the first to record in such diagnostic detail its effects on individual interrogators in the field — to provide us with a portrait, if you will, of the torturer as a young man. Absurdity is staring him in the face: again and again he comes to the sickening conclusion that the men he is interrogating are innocent, or at least non-insurgent, but finds to his horror that he cannot extricate them from the system. The flawed logic of the interrogation program, by which coherent items of “actionable intelligence” are expected from men whose bodies and minds have been broken by torture, is inescapable. Admitting to a fellow soldier that he is feeling sorry for some of his more hapless cases, Lagouranis is mocked: “Can’t you see through these guys? They’re just trying to manipulate you.” Any pitiable human aspect displayed by a detainee is a result of training in sophisticated counter-interrogation techniques: the sorrier you feel, the harder you must work. The circularity is perfect, limerick-like, hellish. Lagouranis refers to this as his “problem with compassion.” Nonetheless, within a few months he is a torturer. Transferred to Mosul, and frustrated at the intractability — the unbreakability — of a prisoner named Jafar, he confines him in a shipping container, bombards him with death metal and strobe lights, and puts dogs in his face until he wets himself. “These techniques,” writes Lagouranis, “were propagated throughout the Cold War, picked up again after 9/11, used by the CIA, filtered down to army interrogators at Guantánamo, filtered again through Abu Ghraib, and used, apparently, around the country by Special Forces. Probably someone in this chain was a real professional, and if torture works — which is debatable — maybe they had the training to make sure it worked. But at our end of the chain, we had no idea what we were doing.” Days later, after a prisoner named Khalid has proved impervious to the dogs, the lights, the stress positions, and the sound — in this case, an audio version of Ben Stiller and Janeane Garofalo’s Feel This Book — Lagouranis is only mildly surprised to find himself with a single thought in his head: chop his fucking fingers off! Ubu ghraib Alfred Jarry’s Ubu Roi opened and closed, triumphantly, on the same night in Paris in 1896. Jarry, described by one biographer as a “pistol-packing midget bicyclist,” was a maestro of shock. Having lit the fuse of boredom in his audience with a long pre-show harangue, he blew them up with his play’s dynamite first syllable: Merdre! This was his little twist, his touch of reverb, on the word merde, which is, of course, French for “shit”: I have seen it translated as “shittr,” “pshit,” and (my favorite) “shitski!” In any event, it caused a riot, the performance was over, and Père Ubu, Jarry’s potty-mouthed and tyrannical anti-hero, passed immediately into legend. Ubu is greedy, sloppy, querulous, power-mad, imbecilic, nonsensical: his governing urge is to be king of Poland (“that is to say, Nowhere,” as Jarry explained in his introduction), to which end he conspires and slaughters with Rabelaisian glee. “Into the trap!” he howls, tossing noblemen, financiers, and the chief of police through a trapdoor and into the “sub-cellars” of his Debraining Machine. There is nothing symbolic about him — his ludicrous carnality defies all symbolism. And yet he contrives to represent both Nature and Man in an absurd world. Writing in the literary magazine Horizon, in 1945, Cyril Connolly hailed Ubu as “the Santa Claus of the Atomic Age”: we might better understand him as a sort of reviled grandfather to Raw Power–era Iggy Pop. Ubu Roi, the play, has dated. Read today, it has the rude and jittery eccentricity of a vintage stag film. But Ubu himself is more with us than ever. The Abu Ghraib photos, with their obscene raptures, their drunken, sadistic pride, and above all their demented aesthetic sense, are a gallery of Ubu-isms. Tony Lagouranis was in the grip of Ubu when it occurred to him to amputate Khalid’s fingers, as were those torturers who, for the benefit of their Islamic captives, desecrated the Koran with a truly Surrealist gusto. (Newsweek was forced to retract its 2005 story about the use of this technique at Guantánamo Bay, but plenty of other credible accusations are outstanding.) The prophets of the absurd saw all of this coming. As the Bush era collapses into ignominy, we find ourselves somewhat in the position of the explorer in Kafka’s "In the Penal Colony," watching in a kind of dissociated abhorrence as a Gonzalez-style flunky tightens the screws for one last ride on the torture machine: “Have you ever heard of our former Commandant? No? Well, it isn’t saying too much if I tell you that the organization of the whole penal colony is his work.” And if Gonzalez, in all the blandness of his fanaticism, can be found in Kafka, then those two beasts Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld can be found in Ionesco — in his play Rhinoceros, where humans are changing one by one into brutal, hard-charging pachyderms. “Moral standards!” bellows one such man/rhino, as his hide thickens and the beginnings of a horn bulge out of his forehead, “I’m sick of moral standards! We need to go beyond moral standards!” Chop his fucking fingers off. As for the rest of us, faced with this inconvenient problem, we seem to have learned well the lesson enacted by Père Ubu in Jarry’s sequel, Ubu Cocu: take your conscience out of its suitcase, consult it briefly and then flush it — like the Koran — down the toilet. *** Originally published by The Boston Globe's Ideas section on Sept. 11, 2005. From 2003-08, our friend and colleague James Parker, currently a contributing editor at The Atlantic, was a culture critic for the Boston Globe's Ideas section and for Boston's alt-weekly, The Phoenix. Hilobrow.com has curated a collection of Parker's writings from this period. This installment is the seventh in a series of ten.

Hilo Hero: Nestor Makhno

Luc Sante — Mon, 26 Oct 2009 10:00:13 +0000

No one has come closer than NESTOR MAKHNO (1888-1934) to establishing that paradox, the anarchist nation. Born in rural poverty in the Ukraine, he got his education as a teenager in prison, where he had been sentenced to life for killing a policeman. Upon his release in the amnesty of 1917 he led armed peasants in expropriating landowners, and within months had organized an autonomous region of some 400 square miles in which farms and factories were collectively run and goods traded directly with collectives elsewhere. After the Bolsheviks handed the Ukraine to the Germans and Austrians in the treaty of Brest-Litovsk in 1918, Makhno’s guerrilla units managed to expel the interlopers within a year. His reconstructed libertarian society then covered most of the Ukraine; it lasted six months in the face of opposition from Moscow. In the ensuing chaos his Black Army fought a bewildering two-front war, sometimes against the Reds, sometimes with the Reds against the Whites. At the end of his rope, Makhno fled to Romania in 1921. Slandered by the Bolsheviks as a rapist and a conductor of pogroms, he died in Paris of heartbreak and drink. *** Each day, Hilobrow.com pays tribute to one of our favorite high-, low-, no-, or hilobrow heroes on that person's birthday. Click here for more Hilo Hero shout-outs.

england

Joshua Glenn — Mon, 26 Oct 2009 12:46:55 +0000

abu-g

Joshua Glenn — Mon, 26 Oct 2009 12:47:24 +0000

Ubu

Joshua Glenn — Mon, 26 Oct 2009 12:51:46 +0000

351px-Whitman,_Walt_1849

Matthew Battles — Mon, 26 Oct 2009 20:51:22 +0000

I Sing the Trousers Electric

Matthew Battles — Mon, 26 Oct 2009 21:05:31 +0000

A new Levi's advertisement uses a wax-cylinder recording of what is believed to be Walt Whitman reciting his own poem. Of course, it's by no means Whitman's first trousers ad—

O soul in general! Loafe! Proceed through space with a hole in your trousers! O tattered flag of freedom! not national free- dom, nor any of that sort of infernal non- sense, but individual freedom, freedom to do just as you d—n please!

peanut62a

Joshua Glenn — Tue, 27 Oct 2009 04:00:09 +0000

reubens-pee-wee

Joshua Glenn — Tue, 27 Oct 2009 04:07:54 +0000

Hilo Hero: Fran Lebowitz

David Smay — Tue, 27 Oct 2009 10:00:49 +0000

Once there was a mythical land, my dreamlets, called Manhattan-in-the-Seventies where the most glamorous drag queens, the most dangerous jazzbos, and, in a sharp Brooks Brothers ensemble, the world's laziest curmudgeon dwelled. FRAN LEBOWITZ (born 1950) started out writing for inter/VIEW: A Monthly Film Journal (at the time a black-and-white quarter-fold composed primarily of movie stills). After seven years she became an overnight sensation with Metropolitan Life (1978), the defining humor book of the decade. The three most telling artifacts of an era's sensibility are its humor, its pornography, and its advertising, each a precariously balanced mobile of desires and fears. What Lebowitz delineated— something anti-utopian and anti-careerist — was not beholden to the Sixties, nor did it anticipate the Eighties. Surprisingly for a woman who foreswore sex as more effort than it was worth, and quit drinking before she was 20, her subject was the same as that of the Rolling Stones: pleasure. She lacerated the enemies of pleasure, the bores and boors and the anti-smoking leagues, until the boorish, careerist Eighties quite sapped her will to write. I see her Bartleby-esque non-writing career since then as a moral stance. Lebowitz is the exemplary idler: a writer who would prefer not to write. *** Each day, Hilobrow.com pays tribute to one of our favorite high-, low-, no-, or hilobrow heroes on that person's birthday. Click here for more Hilo Hero shout-outs.

lipton

Joshua Glenn — Tue, 27 Oct 2009 15:43:07 +0000

Everything is a text (1)

HILOBROW — Tue, 27 Oct 2009 15:50:45 +0000

[caption id="attachment_7776" align="aligncenter" width="550" caption="Lipton ad from November 09 issue of Real Simple"]Real Simple" title="lipton" width="550" height="705" class="size-full wp-image-7776" />[/caption] And now, everybody knows it.

"I often describe deconstruction as something which happens. It's not purely linguistic, involving text or books. You can deconstruct gestures, choreography. That's why I enlarged the concept of text." Mr. Derrida did not seem angry at having to define his philosophy at all; he was even smiling. "Everything is a text; this is a text," he said, waving his arm at the diners around him in the bland suburbanlike restaurant, blithely picking at their lunches, completely unaware that they were being "deconstructed."

— from Dinitia Smith, "Philosopher Gamely in Defense of His Ideas," New York Times, May 30, 1998. *** First in an occasional series.

KeepOnTruckin'

Matthew Battles — Tue, 27 Oct 2009 18:57:04 +0000

Groovy Robot Myrmidons

Matthew Battles — Tue, 27 Oct 2009 19:03:34 +0000

Boston Dynamics, creators of the quadrupedal robot "BigDog," bring you "Petman," a robot modeled on the gait of Mr. Natural. Unlike Mr. Natural, Petman is stable when pushed. They say that the robot is designed to test military chemical protection garb. To which I can only say, right! But at least when the androids materialize out of the mist to exterminate us, they won't be lurching—they'll be grooving.

Hilo Hero: Francis Bacon

Patrick Cates — Wed, 28 Oct 2009 10:00:02 +0000

Unlike his namesake and ancestor, FRANCIS BACON (1909-92) was never granted a knighthood for his services to educated society. Nor should he have been. He deserved a title much loftier and more distinguished: Grand Horrifier of the 20th Century, perhaps. Bacon spent a lifetime terrifying anybody who chose to step, even for a moment, into his warped world of deformed, barely human figures and screaming faces. Frequently locked up as a child, Bacon was abused and cast out by his homophobic father, and he endured a number of painful relationships — the most famously tempestuous of which ended in his lover's suicide. He wore all of this suffering on the distorted geometry of his face: to see a photographic portrait of him in his apocalyptically messy studio and staring at the viewer with a thunderous, undulating brow and deep, cold wells for eyes is enough to scorch Bacon's visage permanently onto your retinas. Though he did have optimistic and uplifted moods, the Grand Horrifier poured his suffering into his art, and left us with a canon of canvas screams that memorializes the terrors and agonies of the 20th century. *** Each day, Hilobrow.com pays tribute to one of our favorite high-, low-, no-, or hilobrow heroes on that person's birthday. Click here for more Hilo Hero shout-outs.

image_thumb3

Matthew Battles — Wed, 28 Oct 2009 12:45:56 +0000

belushi-snl

Joshua Glenn — Wed, 28 Oct 2009 13:42:41 +0000

A Wholly Remarkable Book

Matthew Battles — Wed, 28 Oct 2009 13:43:57 +0000

Kindle, iPhone: both are cool/irksome. But which device is the harbinger of Things to Come? Pointing out that "the Kindle is more like a 7-Eleven than a book," Jason Kottke urges us to think of reading, and not shopping, as the focal activity of an e-reader. In any ideal e-reader, he argues, blogs, magazines, web sites, PDFs, and email, along with books of all kinds, would be accessible and interpenetrating. In a discussion of single-use devices at Snarkmarket, Tim Carmody suggests splitting the difference between e-readers and digital Swiss Army knives like the iPhone. "Tear down the walls between the 'separate' functions on multi-function devices," he writes. "It should feel like a device that has one function — just that the function is complex, multilayered, integrated." Carmody and Kottke remind me of one of the greatest fictional single-use devices ever:

"What is it?" asked Arthur. "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. It's a sort of electronic book. It tells you everything you need to know about anything. That's it's job." Arthur turned it over nervously in his hands. "I like the cover," he said. "'Don't Panic.' It's the first helpful thing anybody's said to me all day." "I'll show you how it works," said Ford. He snatched it from Arthur, who was still holding it as if it were a two-week-dead lark, and pulled it out of its cover. "You press this button here, you see, and the screen lights up, giving you the index." A screen, about three inches by four, lit up and characters began to flicker across the surface.... Ford pressed a large red button at the bottom of the screen and words began to undulate across it. At the same time, the book began to speak the entry as well in a still, quiet, measured voice....

Fortunately for Ford Prefect, the Earth had just been destroyed by the Vogons, so he didn't need to worry about getting a takedown notice from the Author's Guild over the question of audio rights. A notable, dark-horse entry in the race to create the RL version of the Hitchhiker's Guide is the Wikireader. It's a small gray-screened device with three buttons, two AAA batteries, and an SD card with the entire contents of Wikipedia loaded for browsing anywhere. There's something appealingly quixotic about the Wikireader. It's less like the Hitchhiker's Guide than one of those "20 Questions" games—more of a hardware stunt than a product with real commercial appeal. But at $99, it seems way too expensive. It should retail for something like $29 tops. And come with a towel.

Little-One

Joe Alterio — Wed, 28 Oct 2009 14:31:01 +0000

kaufman-snl-77

Joshua Glenn — Wed, 28 Oct 2009 15:03:03 +0000

warhol_dh

Joshua Glenn — Wed, 28 Oct 2009 15:10:40 +0000

withsam2-1

Joshua Glenn — Wed, 28 Oct 2009 20:13:40 +0000

adaptation

Joshua Glenn — Thu, 29 Oct 2009 01:01:30 +0000

Hilo Hero: Ralph Bakshi

Joe Alterio — Thu, 29 Oct 2009 10:00:02 +0000

If the sexualized children's gardens of white gloves and dildos sharing the same animation cel are old hat to today's otaku-obsessed hipsters roaming the pop-surrealist galleries, we have auteur animator RALPH BAKSHI (born 1938) to thank, in part. Pulling himself up through the traditional TV animation ranks, Bakshi first gave us a glimpse of what was going on in his mind with the adult (read: inappropriate and often misogynistic) subject matter in 1972's adapted R. Crumb comic, Fritz the Cat. Bakshi's style was unique: extensive rotoscoping, loose, nearly sloppy line work paired with brilliant framing, and cinematic transitions that bordered on the hallucinogenic. All this was most apparent in the post-apocalyptic-cum-fantasy tale Wizards (1977), still his most notorious work. His subsequent films, such as the ludicrous American Pop (1981) and the unwatchable Cool World (1992), put Bakshi into a corner of animation all his own, one associated more with pot-smoking wizards and fairy prostitutes than lunchbox merchandising. His vision may be debatable, but unlike the monstrous entities that straddle Burbank like animation leviathans, pumping the world full of boring garbage, Bakshi is a visionary.

Text and illustration by Joe Alterio. *** Each day, Hilobrow.com pays tribute to one of our favorite high-, low-, no-, or hilobrow heroes on that person's birthday. Click here for more Hilo Hero shout-outs.

minutemaidn

Joshua Glenn — Thu, 29 Oct 2009 11:53:48 +0000

minutemaidn

Joshua Glenn — Thu, 29 Oct 2009 11:57:03 +0000

moon

Joshua Glenn — Thu, 29 Oct 2009 11:58:41 +0000

allbran

Joshua Glenn — Thu, 29 Oct 2009 12:13:05 +0000

shredded-thanks

Joshua Glenn — Thu, 29 Oct 2009 12:32:27 +0000

shredded2

Joshua Glenn — Thu, 29 Oct 2009 12:45:07 +0000

Double Exposure (8): Soul Food

Joshua Glenn — Thu, 29 Oct 2009 13:16:50 +0000

[caption id="attachment_7869" align="aligncenter" width="400" caption="Minute Maid ad from Family Circle, 10/17/08"]Family Circle, 10/17/08" title="minutemaidn" width="400" height="552" class="size-full wp-image-7869" />[/caption] A cherubic angel heralds the advent of Minute Maid Heart Wise orange juice, which miraculously — note how the bottle glows — resolves the tension between thesis ("It helps lower cholesterol") and antithesis ("It tastes great"). What's not to love about this synthesis? Middlebrows love them some dialectical synthesis. In their world, you can have your coffeecake and eat it, too. Skeptical highbrows and lowbrows will tell you that this is impossible. Neo-aristocratic anti-lowbrows and pseudo-populist anti-highbrows are idealists; they know what they know. But Middlebrows believe! [caption id="attachment_7870" align="aligncenter" width="400" caption="Over the Moon ad from Oprah, 7/09"]Oprah, 7/09" title="moon" width="400" height="512" class="size-full wp-image-7870" />[/caption] BELIEVE: in subtle and not-so-subtle ways, this is what Middlebrow is forever persuading us to do. High Middlebrow mediates between Highbrow and Anti-Lowbrow, while Low Middlebrow mediates between Lowbrow and Anti-Highbrow. So middlebrows are semi-skeptical, semi-idealistic. Which explains, for example, why Leo Strauss and his neocon students were forever insisting upon the importance of religion in a liberal capitalist society, though they themselves were irreligious. They weren't hypocrites, that is; they were middlebrows. Neocons are utopians who don't believe in progress; they're millennialists convinced that we're already living in the End Times — i.e., the end of history. Believe it. [caption id="attachment_7873" align="aligncenter" width="400" caption="Kellogg\'s All-Bran ad from Real Simple, 9/09"]Real Simple, 9/09" title="allbran" width="400" height="520" class="size-full wp-image-7873" />[/caption] "I feel great... body and soul!" says All-Bran eater Michele H. It's very important to Middlebrow that we take "care of the soul" (the title of Thomas Moore's bestselling 1992 religious-psychological self-help book), whether we're at work (cf. Moore's The Joy of Discovering What You Were Born To Do), having sex (Cultivating Life as an Act of Love), or — as demonstrated in this post — simply eating breakfast. The ideal of "wellness" insists that psychological health cannot be separated from physical health; but soul health? The soul, to Middlebrow, is both something ineffable and a muscle that can be trained and nourished. Again — Middlebrow has it both ways. It's rendered the uncanny notion of the soul gemütlich: cozy. [caption id="attachment_7875" align="aligncenter" width="400" caption="Post Shredded Wheat ad from Real Simple, 9/09"]Real Simple, 9/09" title="shredded-thanks" width="400" height="505" class="size-full wp-image-7875" />[/caption] At what point does Middlebrow's semi-skeptical, semi-idealistic spirituality transmogrify into, you know, the R-word? Not to worry. It will probably never happen. (Earlier this week, a Paris court ruled that one so-called religion that first started out as a semi-skeptical, semi-idealistic spiritual practice is a fraud.) Although the Shredded Wheat ad shown above might seem to be religious in nature — "give thanks" is a religious phrase, right? — the fine print reveals that it's actually spiritual. We're encouraged to start the day by "thinking" (not praying) of "simple, natural things to be thankful for" (not thanking God, or not necessarily doing so); we're instructed to get a "daily dose of gratitude" — this is wellness-speak, again. PS: It's amusing to note that this ad is so focused on thanksgiving, as opposed to breakfast cereal, that it was deemed necessary to append an "advertisement" label to the top of the page. Or maybe it's frightening. [caption id="attachment_7877" align="aligncenter" width="400" caption="Post Shredded Wheat ad from Real Simple, 11/09"]Real Simple, 11/09" title="shredded2" width="400" height="513" class="size-full wp-image-7877" />[/caption] Uh-oh! Those of us who grew up with the (controversial) Good News Bible in the 1960s and ’70s recognize this headline as a coded message. Perhaps Post advertising — which, after all, started off as a cultist's foodstuff — is religious in nature? (Post Toasties' original name: Elijah’s Manna; would you believe me if I told you that Mickey Mouse, the icon of midcentury Middlebrow, later became this cereal's mascot?) But then there's a non-religious tagline, at the very bottom of the page: "Post Shredded Wheat. Thank Goodness." Or thank Wellness. As long as we're giving thanks, I'd like to thank Emma Westling for finding several of these breakfast ads. Thomas Moore preaches the Re-Enchantment of Everyday Life — which is all too similar to Hilobrow's mission. As Hilobrow.com freely admits, it's this vexed similarity that makes hilobrows despise middlebrow so fiercely. Unlike Middlebrow, Hilobrow doesn't have a pat answer: it prescribes no rituals, no daily affirmations, no breakfast food. The only thing Hilobrow can say for certain about re-enchanting everyday life is that Middlebrow is a mistake. In Max Weber's 1918 lecture, "Science as a Vocation," he explores the question of how a highbrow (e.g., a scientist, an intellectual, a scholar) might have (lowbrow) faith. Concerned to bridge the divide between Highbrow and Lowbrow (which, according to our research thus far, began in the mid-17th century but was exacerbated by the industrial revolution and the triumph of modern capitalism — Weber's great topic), this hilobrow pioneer's answer is tentative: a highbrow who makes "an intellectual sacrifice in favor of an unconditional religious devotion" ought not to be rebuked. However, Weber is dead certain that highbrows should avoid straying into the quagmire of middlebrow spirituality. Weber excoriates highbrows who've cobbled together spiritual practices (“they play at decorating a sort of domestic chapel with small sacred images from all over the world, or they produce surrogates through all sorts of psychic experiences to which they ascribe the dignity of mystic holiness") and who espouse "feeble relative value judgments" (what Baudrillard would later call "soft ideologies"). The fate of the times is disenchantment, and a man [sic] must face up to that, Weber says. He continues:

To the person who cannot bear the fate of the times like a man, ... the arms of the old churches are opened widely and compassionately for him. After all, they do not make it hard for him. It is true that one way or another he has to bring his “intellectual sacrifice” — that is inevitable. But if he can really do that, we shall not rebuke him. For an intellectual sacrifice in favor of an unconditional religious devotion is ethically quite a different matter than the evasion of the plain duty of intellectual integrity which sets in if one remains in the academy but there offers feeble relative value judgments.

To which I say, with all the ambivalent fervor (which is not the same thing as being semi-skeptical, semi-idealistic; yet it's so close) that I can muster, "Amen."

R+M (4): Petite, red-haired, observant

Joe Alterio — Thu, 29 Oct 2009 17:00:34 +0000

Monster: "Petite, red-haired, observant" — art by David Huyck *** Robots and Monsters, a website that swaps custom-designed cartoons and pop art in exchange for a donation to charity, was field-tested in May 2007 by our friend and colleague Joe Alterio. Earlier this fall, Alterio and other artists relaunched the site as a going concern. This is the fourth in a ten-part series of cartoons and artworks created by R&M artists to raise money for the charity water.org.

Hilo Hero: Ezra Pound

Matthew Battles — Fri, 30 Oct 2009 10:00:02 +0000

In a wire cage in the Pisan sun at the end of the Second World War, the forces of chaos and order clashed for EZRA POUND (1885–1972) more keenly than ever. With the accusation of treason aimed squarely at him, and before the madness that had long lapped at his lyric burst its dams, Pound composed the Pisan Cantos. Perhaps it was the bounty of sunlight combining with the intractability of the cage that finally brought to a head the struggle between the Eleusinian and the Confucian, between fecundity and the fasces, between profusion and probity— Learn of the green world what can be thy place In scaled invention or true artistry, Pull down thy vanity ... The green casque has outdone your elegance. In The Gift, Lewis Hyde argues that Pound's pernicious economic ideas had their origins in the poet's commitment to an artistic economy—in which the plenitude of the imagination bears no mere interest but waxes comprehensively, even vegetally. That this might be the whole of economic life was Pound's error; that something like the opposite reigns instead is our folly. *** Each day, Hilobrow.com pays tribute to one of our favorite high-, low-, no-, or hilobrow heroes on that person's birthday. Click here for more Hilo Hero shout-outs.

The Book is a Weapon (6)

HILOBROW — Fri, 30 Oct 2009 17:00:17 +0000

Title: "This is the enemy." Publisher: [Washington, D.C.] : U.S. G.P.O. : Distributed by Division of Public Inquiry, Office of War Information Date: 1943. *** Sixth in an occasional series.

Hilo Hero: Neal Stephenson

Peggy Nelson — Sat, 31 Oct 2009 10:00:35 +0000

No one writes edge-of-your-seat, action-packed, cinematic cliffhangers better than NEAL STEPHENSON (born 1959), and that's just the talking-heads parts of his novels of ideas. He mashes up solid theoretical discourse (physics, cryptography, philosophy, semiotics) with old-school "adventure tales for boys," leavened by a comic sensibility. If Stephenson's encyclopedic enthusiasms can be said to converge, it's in virtual reality, which he finds everywhere: the past, the future, the interwebs, environmentalism, theater, ebooks, quantum physics, corporate espionage — and, especially, the money. Ignoring the alleged limitations of genre, his science fictions have reached out to enmesh even the books themselves: 1992's best-selling Snow Crash became a how-to manual for the 3D web, as tech-boom era developers set to work creating Stephenson's "Metaverse." He's also set fashion trends: cyberpunk (Snow Crash), steampunk (The Diamond Age), even an ambitious attempt at nanotech monastery minimalism (Anathem). Sackcloth may be a hard sell, but our smart fabric future is imminent, as makers from Hussein Chalayan to The North Face will attest. Accessories included: who dared shave after Cryptonomicon’s rehabilitation of the beard? Click here for more science fiction on Hilobrow.com. *** Each day, Hilobrow.com pays tribute to one of our favorite high-, low-, no-, or hilobrow heroes on that person's birthday. Click here for more Hilo Hero shout-outs.

Hilo Hero: Charlie Kaufman

Annie Nocenti — Sun, 01 Nov 2009 10:00:31 +0000

[caption id="attachment_7858" align="aligncenter" width="550" caption="Nicolas Cage as Charlie Kaufman in Adaptation."]Adaptation." title="adaptation" width="550" height="359" class="size-full wp-image-7858" />[/caption] CHARLIE KAUFMAN (born 1958) writes film scripts that zig when you expect a zag. Fantastic notions are met with deadpan nonchalance, creating comedy of simmering delirium. He redefined the screwball comedy as more of a corkscrew comedy in Being John Malkovich, in which a triangle of lovers pursue their obsessions via the body of a fourth. Kaufman’s narrative impulses inject refreshing loop-de-loops into the art of screenwriting. His protagonists are hapless, his philosophical bent is self-exposure (Adaptation and Synecdoche, New York) and fractured identity (Confessions of a Dangerous Mind). He flirts with surrealism, traffics in Beckett, glances at existentialism, sideswipes sci-fi, but mostly, Kaufman is an original. Anything is possible in his world. (Ever want to wipe a love affair out of your mind? Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind obliges.) “I like taking the truth,” Kaufman says, “and screwing with it.” He derails expectation while satisfying needs you didn’t even know you had. *** Each day, Hilobrow.com pays tribute to one of our favorite high-, low-, no-, or hilobrow heroes on that person's birthday. Click here for more Hilo Hero shout-outs.

hughes460

Joshua Glenn — Mon, 02 Nov 2009 02:17:36 +0000

hughes-collected

Joshua Glenn — Mon, 02 Nov 2009 02:19:59 +0000

Winds of Magic (8): The wild poet

James Parker — Mon, 02 Nov 2009 02:20:48 +0000

In December 1984 a small but memorable press conference was held in an English pub. It had just been announced that Ted Hughes was to be the new Poet Laureate, and a media reception had been arranged in Hughes' local hostelry. What a figure he cut, the honored poet! Sage, tangle-browed, regarding the TV cameras with a sort of cultivated primitivist gloom. (Would they steal his soul? His views on "the imprisonment of the lens" were well known.) Overlit and discomfited, trapped in a chair, he seemed to be guarding his mood against the heightened vacancy of the moment. Questions popped around him. In his new capacity as the queen's official poet (one journalist wanted to know), was he up to the production of occasional verse? The idea was almost comic. Hughes was, notoriously, the poet of overkill, of skulls and jaguars and slaughtered bulls. Now, he was suddenly placed in direct succession to the melodious Tennyson and, further back, the exquisite Dryden. Could we expect to see from him a "Charge Of The Light Brigade" or an "Annus Mirabilis"? Low-voiced, Hughes replied that he would produce "as the muse dictates." There was a glint of wryness in the remark, but for Hughes it was also the gravest of puns, a flash from his poetic core. Yes, he had a muse, and yes, she was a dictator. She spoke the words, and she made the rules. She was the Goddess, Nature, Imagination, Being, source of life and Queen of the Earth, and the penalty for disobeying her was always, in one form or another, death. "Stare at the monster..." began Hughes' 1957 poem "Famous Poet," a nightmare of literary obsolescence whose protagonist becomes a "stegosaurus," sealed beneath the "gigantic horn and plate" of his achievement and repute. And now, five years after his death, fossilhood beckons for Hughes himself with the publication of his Collected Poems (Farrar, Straus and Giroux) — thirteen hundred pages thick, heavy as dinosaur bones. Collected Poems arrives in the same season as the biopic Sylvia, starring the rugged Daniel Craig as Hughes and Gwyneth Paltrow as Sylvia Plath, and Diana Middlebrook's Her Husband (Viking), an excavation of Ted and Sylvia's doomed marriage and poetic partnership. *** Can Hughes the poet escape these encrustations? The answer is yes. A glance at the Collected Poems brings it all back. To read Ted Hughes as a young person was pure heavy metal. The humped strength of his lines, the brain-jamming immediacy of his images, the darkness of his concerns: there was nothing else like it. "The apes yawn and adore their fleas in the sun./The parrots shriek as if they were on fire..." ("Jaguar"). For all its novelty, it felt like something old, something recognized. Its intensity was literally childlike — steady-gazing and unsentimental, with touches of grave comedy, of playground solemnity: "A flustery hen-bird with her knickers torn/Tries to escape through the rhubarb" ("Sparrow"). Children were among his most loyal readers, drawn to his poems as to some fierce and unequivocal spectacle, and Hughes returned the compliment with magical books of children's stories and poems. Education was of concern to him: he saw the culture at large as one deadening act of miseducation, and wrote of "the pressure of preconception" that "descends, like a space helmet, to cover the entire head and face." The way out was to concentrate, to clear your head and look. He wrote a guide for children called Poetry In The Making: "You keep your eyes, your ears, your nose, your taste, your touch, your whole being on the thing you are turning into words." This was the poetic action, the moment of capture rehearsed and repeated a thousand times in his poetry: the thrush's "bounce and stab" at the worm-rich ground. He was at war with conventional ways of seeing, with the entire baggage and build-up of civilization that blocked the eye and thwarted the nerve — that denied the Goddess-world "its one true health: acceptance into life." He was not alone in this, of course: good poets are always trying to cut through the crap, and Hughes's arsenal of Tarots and spells and Ouija boards and energy-channelers was, at the time, a very fashionable way of engaging with the so-called cosmic forces. But Hughes was no faddist. He didn't dabble: he probed and plumbed and fathomed the worlds of lore and magic until his writing, on just about any subject, took on an almost eerie submarine authority. Besides, for him and Plath such pursuits were eminently practical — tools of the trade, ways past the blockading cerebrum and into poetry. "The small piloting consciousness of the bright-eyed objective intelligence [has] steered its body and soul into a hell.... We are disconnected," he wrote in 1976. The deposition and attempted murder of the Goddess by the lesser gods of Science and Rationalism became his grand theme, sounded throughout his work, enforcing unity. Certainly he was obsessed, but his obsessions did not whirl him before them. In fact, they shed a singular light. His readings of English history are the readings of an empath or a medicine man: he dealt in the nation's health. The catastrophe of the Great War, from which his father came back as one of 17 survivors from an entire regiment that went against the guns at Gallipoli, was a psychic fact to him. He wrote of "the shock of machine guns, armies of millions, and the plunge into the new dimension where suddenly and for the first time Adam's descendants found themselves meaningless." He was a Shakespearian par excellence. To the playwright's Complete Works Hughes applied the same huge power of retention that could capture the mood of a landscape in a line or two of poetry; able to hold the entire thing in his head at one time, he watched, as if at his leisure, the play of forces between its elements. From this process emerged, in 1992, his enormous, almost insanely ambitious critical work, Shakespeare and the Goddess of Complete Being, which signed up the Bard as — predictably enough — chief shaman and prophetic arbitrator in the battle between the Goddess and the Goddess-destroying God. Hughes envisioned Elizabethan England as a "police state" in which the old Catholicism was suppressed, and the new Puritanism held off, with torture and repression. "The passion and paranoia of internationalized civil war," he wrote, "were pushed down into the private theater, the fiery crucible, behind every English citizen's navel." And it was Shakespeare, with his hauntings of regicide and twisted mother-love, who got to the bowels of it, dramatizing the ongoing conflict, unable to resist its images, condemned by his dreamer-like genius to explore its consequences. *** So the laureateship, for this peculiarly deep and dark version of an Englishman, was an interesting proposition. Offered first to the diffident spectre Philip Larkin (who refused it), it passed to Hughes, who accepted the post with sacerdotal gravity. To serve a mortal queen, his country's queen, in the role of bard — how could he say no? Her views might be insignificant, her executive powers negligible, her hats the ridicule of society, but to Elizabeth II he would dedicate at least a portion of his gift. The goddess-muse, luckily, went along with it. Hughes' first poem as laureate was a smash hit — the magnificent "Rain Charm for the Duchy," in which he credited the birth of Prince Harry (now a stoatish teenager) with ending a months-long drought. Other occasions followed, and were duly risen to. In the wake of Princess Diana's death, when the streets of central London were a pageant of swaying, milling, near-medieval mass hysteria, carpeted with flowers and dreamily supervised by wonderstruck policemen, Hughes wrote the commemorative "6 September 1997": "Holy Tragedy and Loss/Make the many One./Mankind is a crowned, Holy/Mother and her Son." His point was clear: Di-mania was nothing new, not some freak of media-driven magnification, but rather something ancient, a spasm or blowback from England's buried Catholic memory. Di-mania was Mother-worship, Mariolatry, one of the aspects worn by the Goddess as she passes through history. The Collected Poems give us a chance to observe Hughes's career in its full arc, from the prizewinning showing-off of his first volume, The Hawk In The Rain, through the cabalistic doldrums of Cave Birds and "Prometheus On His Crag," to the laureate poems and the wonderful rediscovered energy of his translations from Ovid. Hughes was never in any doubt that the great poet was a shaman, a healer of the spiritual hurts of his tribe. Shakespeare was one, as were Yeats and Eliot. Did he himself qualify, in his own words, "for the magic drum"? His words never attempted the vatic height of the Four Quartets or of "Sailing to Byzantium" — they are too switched-on, too low to the ground, for that. Bounce and stab, bounce and stab — this is Hughes' simplicity. But beneath it lies his profundity: the buzzing, buried continuum of magical awareness to which he gained (earned) access, the immensity of his erudition, his bone-deep availability to insight. This is greatness. The weight of his Collected Poems sends them straight to the bottom of that quiet, hair-raising pond in "Pike," whose dark water is "as deep as England." *** Originally published by The Boston Globe's Ideas section on Dec. 21, 2003. From 2003-08, our friend and colleague James Parker, currently a contributing editor at The Atlantic, was a culture critic for the Boston Globe's Ideas section and for Boston's alt-weekly, The Phoenix. Hilobrow.com has curated a collection of Parker's writings from this period. This installment is the eighth in a series of ten.

hughes-hawk

Joshua Glenn — Mon, 02 Nov 2009 02:22:09 +0000

mapplethorpe-robert

Joshua Glenn — Mon, 02 Nov 2009 02:39:44 +0000

musil-1930

Joshua Glenn — Mon, 02 Nov 2009 02:45:55 +0000

Hilo Hero: Steve Ditko

Greg Rowland — Mon, 02 Nov 2009 10:00:00 +0000

[caption id="attachment_7551" align="aligncenter" width="326" caption="Steve Ditko — 1965 self-portrait"][/caption] Spider-Man and Dr. Strange co-creator STEVE DITKO (born 1927) is the third member of the triumvirate of genius that originally conceived the Marvel Universe. Yet while Stan Lee and Jack Kirby reflected aspects of the New York Jewish psyche, Ditko hailed from a small (Johnstown, PA) Czech-American community. In fact, Ditko's work is suffused with the paranoia of a small Middle European nation forever bullied by Empires on all sides (J. Jonah Jameson's toothbrush moustache is no coincidence.) This paranoia is shared by another Czech who wrote a famous story about an ordinary man's troubling insectoid transformation. But while Kafka's The Metamorphosis leaves poor Gregor powerless, the put-upon Peter Parker is empowered to explore a heroic, yet problematic, narrative as Spider-Man. In Ditko's elegantly moody work, we also find Mitteleuropean mysticism: the frozen spectre of the shadow, the intricacies of the web, and the topography of Doctor Strange's mystic landscapes are a language both of impossible hope and enveloping voids. *** Each day, Hilobrow.com pays tribute to one of our favorite high-, low-, no-, or hilobrow heroes on that person's birthday. Click here for more Hilo Hero shout-outs.

Barthes3

Joshua Glenn — Mon, 02 Nov 2009 14:12:47 +0000

dylan3

Joshua Glenn — Mon, 02 Nov 2009 14:25:16 +0000

dylan2

Joshua Glenn — Mon, 02 Nov 2009 14:26:08 +0000

dylan-1

Joshua Glenn — Mon, 02 Nov 2009 14:27:27 +0000

Hilo Hero: Walker Evans

Joe Alterio — Tue, 03 Nov 2009 10:00:02 +0000

I lived in California for nearly ten years, and whenever I would take the interminable ride up or down The Five, I would stick my old Nikon F1 out the window and try to play WALKER EVANS (1903-75) with those brown and orange streaks topped with the high desert sky that occupy the middle of the state. Evans' photos are dioramas, meticulously assembled and finally brought out into the light, each frozen moment as particular and delicate as a toothpick house. A rich kid riding the rails, Evans was inured to the devastation of the Depression; his work at times feels like a safari of poverty, but it doesn't feel pedantic or arrogant. He was in love with his subjects, though from a distance: there's a separation within his work that engenders a window-like aesthetic. Each image has an invisible frame, and thanks to Evans' conscious line work, foreground objects slice each frame into comic-book panels that force you to read the image like a story. A story titled "America." *** Each day, Hilobrow.com pays tribute to one of our favorite high-, low-, no-, or hilobrow heroes on that person's birthday. Click here for more Hilo Hero shout-outs.

Hilo Hero: Robert Mapplethorpe

Lynn Peril — Wed, 04 Nov 2009 10:00:48 +0000

By the time I met photographer Robert Mapplethorpe (1946-89) in the late 1980s, his body was wracked with AIDS and only faint traces of his bad-boy beauty remained. Many art stars traipsed through the not-for-profit art gallery at which I worked in San Francisco’s not-quite-yet hip SOMA neighborhood, several of whom, like Mapplethorpe, were caught up in the mid-’80s culture wars when it was discovered that the National Endowment for the Arts had funded exhibitions of their naughty artworks. “Is Mapplethorpe only out to shock?” asked the New York Times in a 1983 review of what it termed his “for-adults-only” photographs, many of which featured classically chiseled male bodies with various items and appendages inserted in one or another of several surprisingly elastic orifices, all photographed in sumptuous black and white. My knees shook when I asked Mapplethorpe if I could get him anything — but not because of the X-rated work that would leave a trail of censorship and litigation even after his premature death from AIDS. It was the photos of his roommate back in the ’70s that turned me into a starry-eyed fan girl. Although I longed to say, “You took the pictures of Patti Smith for her Horses album!” after he graciously accepted the soda I delivered to him, my shyness made me scuttle away. *** Each day, Hilobrow.com pays tribute to one of our favorite high-, low-, no-, or hilobrow heroes on that person's birthday. Click here for more Hilo Hero shout-outs.

Hilo Hero: Sam Shepard

Jason Grote — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 10:00:04 +0000

Writing in 1949, Philip Rahv divided American literature into volatile, rebellious "redskins" and puritan, effete "palefaces." Although Rahv was dividing the lowbrow from the high, I would assert that, today, our "redskins" are intellectually restless hilobrows, while our "palefaces" are middlebrow: safe, palatable, and familiar. No dramatist personifies the hilobrow redskin like SAM SHEPARD (born 1943). Stage and film actor, screenwriter of Antonioni's Zabriskie Point, friend of Patti Smith [above, with Shepard in their 1971 play, Cowboy Mouth] and drummer for The Holy Modal Rounders, the Shepard of the late ’60s was the archetypal Western cowboy in downtown New York (though, in a Shepardian twist, he was in fact Midwestern). In the ’70s, Shepard — now living in San Francisco — dreamed up the rural demons of Buried Child (1978), the simulacra-made-real of True West (1980), and the romantic brutality of A Lie of the Mind (1985). These great plays forever stamped our collective unconscious with haunting images of weird Americas old and new. *** Each day, Hilobrow.com pays tribute to one of our favorite high-, low-, no-, or hilobrow heroes on that person's birthday. Click here for more Hilo Hero shout-outs.

Generations (11): Boomers

Joshua Glenn — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 15:00:59 +0000

Members of the generational cohort born from 1944-53 were in their teens and 20s during the Sixties (1964-73, not to be confused with the the 1960s), and in their 20s and 30s during the Seventies (1974-83). Though this cohort is easily distinguished from their immediate juniors (the Original Generation X, born 1954-63), the influential pop demographers William Strauss and Neil Howe lumped the two cohorts together and called them the Baby Boomers. Let's get the knee-jerk counter-argument out of the way: "OK, you've convinced me that Strauss and Howe are mistaken when it comes to previous generations, but in this instance there's no room for interpretation! 'Baby boomer' is a term used to describe a person who was born during the demographic Post-World War II baby boom. The United States Census Bureau considers a baby boomer to be someone born during the birth boom between 1946 and 1964. So why do you foolishly insist that the Boomer generation (a) begins before WWII ended, and (b) ends in ’54 — i.e., a decade before the postwar birth boom ends?" It's important to note that the Census Bureau does not involve itself in defining cultural generations. I'm hardly alone in arguing that two culturally distinct generations were born during the demographic birth boom of 1946-1964. A marketing consultant named Jonathan Pontell has claimed that a "Generation Jones" was born from 1954-65; and, as you'll recall, during his election campaign, Barack Obama (born 1961) got pundits debating the Boomer Generation's parameters when he insisted that he didn't feel like a Boomer. Many others have made similar arguments. As we'll see, the term "Generation X" was originally appropriated and popularized by others born from 1954-63 who didn't feel like Boomers. [caption id="attachment_2718" align="aligncenter" width="550" caption="Barack Obama: not a Boomer."][/caption] Nor am I alone in attempting to balance demographics with cultural factors when it comes to defining the parameters of the Boomer generation. As a matter of fact, Howe and Strauss claim the Boomers were born from 1943-60. Yes, you heard right: their start and end dates don't adhere slavishly to the Census Bureau's birthrate statistics; in fact, their start date is earlier than mine. So much for the knee-jerk argument against my reinterpretation of the Boomers. I think there is a half-decent case to be made for Howe and Strauss's start date: Chevy Chase, Todd Gitlin, John Kerry, David Geffen and a few others born in ’43 do seem more like Boomers than Anti-Anti-Utopians. But ’43 is a cusp year in my generational periodization scheme, so there's bound to be some overlap. And I'd argue that R. Crumb, George Harrison, Michael Palin, Eric Idle, and H. Rap Brown (born in ’43) seem much more like Anti-Anti-Utopians than Boomers. Less convincing is Strauss and Howe's Boomer end date: 1960. The Boomers pioneered punk rock and New Wave, it's true; but are we also supposed to credit them with alternative rock and post-punk? Born from 1953-60: members of The Cure, The Mekons, Siouxsie & the Banshees, U2, Wire, X, Public Image Ltd., Hüsker Dü, R.E.M., plus Elvis Costello, Green Gartside, and D. Boon. No, a generational split accounts for the stark difference between post-punk and its predecessors. Are we supposed to believe that rap and hip hop pioneers like Kool DJ Herc, Russell Simmons, Grandmaster Flash, Kurtis Blow, Flavor Flav, and Chuck D (all born 1953-60) are Boomers? Sure, the original cast of Saturday Night Live were Boomers — but Jerry Seinfeld? According to my periodization scheme, the break between the Boomer and post-Boomer generations happens in the mid-’50s (which is to say, at the very beginning of the Fifties), which explains the heightened generational consciousness and often outspoken anti-Boomerness of influential figures like Kurt Andersen (’54), Jay McInerney, and Generation X's Billy Idol (’55). Not to mention Johnny Rotten and Ian Curtis (’56); Spike Lee, Sid Vicious, and Cameron Crowe (’57); Todd Solondz and Jonathan Franzen (’59); Richard Linklater (’60); Todd Haynes, Barack Obama, Rick Moody, and Generation X author Douglas Rushkoff (’61). Like the rest of their generational cohort, these post-Boomers were indoctrinated from an early age into believing they were members of a generation who'd been in their teens and 20s during the Sixties (1964-73). But the only thing they remember about the Sixties is watching their older siblings enjoy themselves. I'm getting ahead of things, though. We'll discuss the Original Generation X in this series' next post. Back to the Boomers. What makes their generation tick? High-, low-, no-, and hilobrow members of the 1944-53 generation include: Alan Moore, Alex Chilton, Andy Kaufman, Art Spiegelman, Ben Katchor, Bill Murray, Brian Eno, Camille Paglia, Christopher Hitchens, David Bowie, David Byrne, David Lynch, Debbie Harry, Denis Johnson, Divine, Donovan, Douglas Adams, Fran Lebowitz, Gary Panter, Geezer Butler, Genesis P-Orridge, Gil Scott-Heron, Gilda Radner, Gus Van Sant, Hakim Bey, Iggy Pop, Jim Woodring, Jimmy Page, Joey Ramone, John Belushi, John Bonham, John Carpenter, John Waters, Jonathan Richman, Kathy Acker, Kim Deitch, Larry David, Lemmy, Lester Bangs, Lux Interior, Marc Bolan, Mark Beyer, Mark Mothersbaugh, Martha Nussbaum, Martin Amis, Octavia Butler, Paul Reubens, Philippe Petit, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Reverend Billy, Richard Hell, Robert Plant, Slavoj Zizek, Steve Wozniak, Stiv Bators, Suzi Quatro, Syd Barrett, Tom Verlaine, Tony Wilson, and William Gibson. Plus Honorary Boomer George W.S. Trow (Within the Context of No Context), born in the cusp year of ’43 — talk about heightened generational consciousness! *** A reminder of my generational periodization scheme: 1844-53: [Progressive Generation] Prometheans 1854-63: [Progressive, Missionary Generations] Plutonians 1864-73: [Missionary Generation] Anarcho-Symbolists 1874-83: [Missionary Generation] Psychonauts 1884-93: [Lost Generation] Modernists 1894-1903: [Lost, Greatest/GI Generations] Hardboileds 1904-13: [Greatest/GI Generation] Partisans 1914-23: [Greatest/GI Generation] New Gods 1924-33: [Silent Generation] Postmodernists 1934-43: [Silent Generation] Anti-Anti-Utopians 1944-53: Boomers 1954-63: [Boomers, Late Boomers, Post-Boomers, Generation Jones] OGXers 1964-73: [Generation X, Thirteenth Generation] Constructivists 1974-83: [Generations X, Y] Revivalists 1984-93: [Millennial Generation] Throwbacks 1994-2003: [Millennial Generation] TBA *** IMAGE * A bizarrely susceptible group. Contemporary hypnotism makes use of a wide variety of different forms of suggestion including: direct verbal suggestions, "indirect" verbal suggestions such as requests or insinuations, metaphors and other rhetorical figures of speech, and non-verbal suggestion in the form of mental imagery, voice tonality, and physical manipulation. A distinction is commonly made between suggestions delivered "permissively" or in a more "authoritarian" manner. Some hypnotic suggestions are intended to bring about immediate responses, whereas others (post-hypnotic suggestions) are intended to trigger responses after a delay ranging from a few minutes to many years in some reported cases. Kirsch proposes that responsivity to suggestion without hypnosis be termed 'imaginative suggestibility', that responsivity to suggestion following a hypnotic induction be termed 'hypnotic suggestibility', and that the difference between the two be termed 'hypnotizability'. Measures which may correlate with hypnotic susceptibility Absorption (Tellegen & Atkinson, 1974; de Groh, 1989) Fantasty proneness (Lynn & Rhue, 1988) Reaction time (Braffman & Kirsch, 2001) Empathy (Wickramasekera II & Szlyk, 2003) Self-directedness (one component of the Temperament and Character Inventory, Cloninger et al, 1993) (Laidlaw et al, 2005) Hypnotists who believed that responses are mediated primarily by an "unconscious mind", like Milton Erickson, made more use of indirect suggestions, such as metaphors or stories, whose intended meaning may be concealed from the subject's conscious mind. The concept of subliminal suggestion also depends upon this view of the mind. * Prone to hysteria. See: British Invasion, second wave. The Who, The Zombies, The Kinks. *** Encouraged to see themselves as superheroes. Richard Donner's Superman (1978), starring Christopher Reeve, the first major superhero feature film, proved a critical success and a commercial hit. Tim Burton's Batman (1989), starring Michael Keaton and Kim Basinger. [5] Other films were released during the 1980s and 1990s including Swamp Thing (1982), starring Adrienne Barbeau. Superman III (1983), Supergirl (1984), The Toxic Avenger (1985), Superman IV: The Quest for Peace (1987), The Punisher (1989), Dick Tracy (1990), The Rocketeer (1991), Batman Returns (1992) with Danny DeVito, The Shadow (1994), Batman Forever (1995) with Tommy Lee Jones, and The Phantom (1996).[6][7][8] Marvel Comics' Captain America (1991) didn't have a theatrical release and Roger Corman's The Fantastic Four (1994) was released neither theatrically nor on home video.[6] Alex Proyas' The Crow (1994) became the first Image Comics superhero film that established a franchise.[6] As Joel Schumacher's Batman & Robin (1997), with Arnold S. as Mr. Freeze was critically panned for being too jokey and tongue-in-cheek,[9] The Crow brought in a new realm of violence absent in previous popular superhero films targeted at younger audiences and bridging a gap to the more modern action film.[10] The success of The Crow catalyzed the release of a film version of Spawn (1997), Image Comics' leading character. The success of the "darker" Image Comics characters shifted the direction of comic book movies. Marvel soon released the first film to become a franchise, Blade (1998). Blade was also a mix of a more traditional action film as well as darker superhero film with the title character having superpowers as well as carrying an assault of weaponry.[10] *** BIG CHILL. The Big Chill is a 1983 film about a group of baby boomer college friends who reunite after many years and explore the aftermath of the 1960s. It stars Tom Berenger, Glenn Close, Jeff Goldblum, William Hurt, Kevin Kline, Mary Kay Place, Meg Tilly, and JoBeth Williams. fter the funeral, the rest of their college friends spend the weekend with Harold and Sarah. They turn to each other as a means of trying to figure out not only why Alex committed suicide but also to explore what happened to the ideals of their youth. This includes the now-divorced Sam (Tom Berenger) who has gone from leading protests to becoming a Hollywood star bearing a close resemblance to Tom Selleck (he also starred in a television series similar to Selleck's hit series, Magnum, P.I.) Sam continues to harbor romantic feelings for Karen (Jo Beth Williams) who is now living an affluent lifestyle with her conservative husband Richard. Nick (William Hurt) is an injured Vietnam War veteran who suffers from impotence. He was a radio psychologist in San Francisco who questions the ethical nature of what he does and now supports himself as a small time drug dealer. He eventually becomes involved with Chloe whose aimlessness finds greater purpose through this relationship. Michael (Jeff Goldblum), once a radical journalist, now works for People Magazine and is perpetually unfaithful to his (offscreen) girlfriend, the only person who still subscribes to the ideals of her youth. Meg (Mary Kay Place) is a successful but unmarried lawyer who is desperate to have a child. She decides to ask one of the men in the group to have a child with her and spends the weekend trying to determine whom she should ask. It is also revealed that Sarah had had an affair with Alex at some point in her marriage to Harold. While they do not fully resolve the issue of Alex's suicide, the bonds of their youth serve as a method of healing for the current issues in their lives. Roger Ebert stated, "The Big Chill is a splendid technical exercise. It has all the right moves. It knows all the right words. Its characters have all the right clothes, expressions, fears, lusts and ambitions. But there's no payoff and it doesn't lead anywhere. I thought at first that was a weakness of the movie. There also is the possibility that it's the movie's message."[4] The television show thirtysomething was influenced by The Big Chill. IMAGE Meet the Boomers. HONORARY BOOMERS (BORN 1943): Chevy Chase (comic, SNL), Todd Gitlin (activist), Don Novello (comic, SNL), Michael Ondaatje (author), Harry Shearer (comic, actor, The Simpsons), Sam Shepard (playwright, actor), John Kerry (antiwar activist, politician), George W.S. Trow (author, social critic), David Denby (middlebrow film critic), Bob Woodward (journalist, Watergate), Linda Wertheimer (middlebrow NPR host), David Geffen (middlebrow tycoon). Perhaps R. Crumb? Would also like to add Garrison Keillor (middlebrow NPR host), who was born in August ’42... [caption id="attachment_7271" align="aligncenter" width="308" caption="George Lucas and Steven Spielberg"][/caption] 1944: George Lucas (middlebrow director), Jimmy Page (Led Zeppelin), Kim Deitch (cartoonist, RAW), Erno Rubik (inventor), Ben Stein (middlebrow game show host, pundit), Lorne Michaels (SNL producer), Richard Ford (novelist), Gary Glitter (musician), Roger Daltrey (The Who), Ray Davies (The Kinks), Jeff Beck (rock guitarist), Carl Bernstein (journalist, Watergate; married to middlebrow Nora Ephron), Diana Ross (singer), Rudy Giuliani (politician), Pattie Boyd (model, married George Harrison and Eric Clapton), Terry Brooks (fantasy author), James Carville (political strategist), Joe Cocker (singer/songwriter), Danny DeVito (actor, The Penguin in Batman Returns), Michael Douglas (middlebrow actor), Sam Elliott (actor), John Entwhistle (The Who), Joe Eszterhas (director), Bobbie Gentry (singer), Lauren Hutton (model), Mick Jones (Foreigner), John Milius (director), Frank Oz (middlebrow puppeteer), Robbie Robertson (The Band), Jeffrey Tambor (actor), Peter Tosh (musician), Alice Walker (middlebrow author), Peter Weir (director), Bobby Womack (singer), Barry White (singer), Bernie Worrell (Parliament-Funkadelic), Nina Totenberg (middlebrow NPR host). HONORARY ANTI-ANTI-UTOPIANS: Angela Davis (activist, scholar), Sly Stone (musician), Martin Jay (intellectual historian), Bill Griffith (cartoonist, Zippy the Pinhead, RAW), Jonathan Demme (director), Patti LaBelle (soul singer-songwriter), Bill Ayers (Weather Underground), maybe Rem Koolhaas (architect). 1945: Steve Martin (nobrow-middlebrow comic), Hakim Bey (Peter Lamborn Wilson, author, TAZ), Divine (actor), Rainer Werner Fassbinder (director), Debbie Harry (Blondie), Susan Jacoby (author), Justin Green (cartoonist, RAW), Lemmy (Motorhead), Pete Townshend (The Who), Eric Clapton (middlebrow rock guitarist), Pat Conroy (middlebrow author), Wim Wenders (director), Peter Criss (KISS), Stanley Crouch (jazz critic), Terence Davies (director), Jim Davis (middlebrow cartoonist, Garfield), Annie Dillard (author, lyricist of the quotidian), Barry Lopez (author, lyricist of the quotidian), Mickey Dolenz (Monkees), Davy Jones (Monkees), Mia Farrow (actor), Bryan Ferry (musician), Thomas King Forcade (founded High Times), Goldie Hawn (actor), Douglas Hofstadter (author), Gabe Kaplan (comic), Tracy Kidder (journalist), Dean R. Koontz (horror author), Arthur Lee (Love), John Lithgow (actor), Kurt Loder (MTV journalist), Anni-Frid Lyngstad (ABBA), Björn Ulvaeus (ABBA), Milo Manara (erotic comic book artist), Bob Marley (musician), Don McLean (singer-songwriter), John McVie (Fleetwood Mac), Bette Midler (singer), George Miller (director, Mad Max), Van Morrison (musician), Question Mark (? and the Mysterians), Charlotte Rampling (actor), Tom Selleck (actor), Carly Simon (singer-songwriter), Rod Stewart (singer), Stephen Stills (Crosby, Stills, and Nash), Henry Winkler (middlebrow actor), Neil Young (musician), Adrienne Barbeau (actor, Swamp Thing, voice of Catwoman on Batman: The Animated Series and subsequent Batman cartoon series). 1946: John Waters (nobrow-turned-quatsch director), George W. Bush (US president), Steven Spielberg (middlebrow director), Julian Barnes (author), Syd Barrett (Pink Floyd), Donovan (musician), André the Giant, Lux Interior (The Cramps), Jann Wenner (founder, Rolling Stone), Joanna Lumley (actor, Absolutely Fabulous), David Lynch (director), Robert Mapplethorpe (photographer), Malcolm McLaren (music impresario), Freddie Mercury (Queen), Gram Parsons (Flying Burrito Brothers), Gilda Radner (comic, SNL), Peter Singer (philosopher), Patti Smith (singer), Bill Clinton (US president), Craig Venter (scientist, genome sequencing), Duane Allman (Allman Brothers), Benny Andersson (ABBA), Robert Asprin (SF/Fantasy author), Candice Bergen (actor, Murphy Brown), Jimmy Buffett (middlebrow musician), Richard Carpenter (The Carpenters), Cher (singer, middlebrow actor), Deepak Chopra (middlebrow guru), Andrei Codrescu (middlebrow author, radio personality), Tim Curry (actor), Joe Dante (director), Patty Duke (actor), Marianne Faithfull (musician), Sally Field (middlebrow actor), Bill Forsyth (director), Barry Gibb (Bee Gees), Barry Gifford (author), Danny Glover (actor), Lesley Gore (singer), Al Green (singer), Gregory Hines (dancer), John Paul Jones (Led Zeppelin), Tommy Lee Jones (actor, Two-Face in Batman Forever), Diane Keaton (middlebrow actor), Joe Klein (journalist), Robby Krieger (The Doors), Peggy Lipton (actor), Susan Lucci (actor), Terence McKenna (far-out author), Liza Minnelli (singer), Keith Moon (The Who), Michael Ovitz (middlebrow CEO, Disney), Dolly Parton (musician), Philip Pullman (author), Pat Sajak (game show host), Paul Schrader (director), Sylvester Stallone (action-movie actor), Oliver Stone (director), Donald Trump (businessman, TV personality), Robert Urich (actor), Peter Wolf (J Geils Band), Linda Ronstadt (singer). 1947: Kathy Acker (author), Paul Auster (author), Marc Bolan (T-Rex), David Bowie (musician), Octavia Butler (SF author), Larry David (TV producer, actor, Seinfeld, Curb Your Enthusiasm), David Letterman (nobrow talk show host), Martha Nussbaum (philosopher), Camille Paglia (critic), Camille Paglia (musician), Gregg Allman (Allman Brothers), Ian Anderson (Jethro Tull), Andrew Bacevich (middlebrow historian), John Perry Barlow (EFF cofounder, Grateful Dead lyricist), Dave Barry (middlebrow columnist), Ann Bettie (middlebrow author), Hillary Clinton (politician), Albert Brooks (actor), Tom Clancy (thriller author), Glenn Close (actor, The Big Chill), Paulo Coelho (author), Billy Crystal (middlebrow comic), Jane Curtin (actor, SNL), Ted Danson (middlebrow actor), Stephen R. Donaldson (SF/Fantasy author), Richard Dreyfuss (middlebrow actor), Bob Edwards (middlebrow NPR host), Farrah Fawcett (actor), Teri Garr (actor), Arlo Guthrie (singer/songwriter), Mark Helprin (author), Don Henley (middlebrow musician, The Eagles), Michael Ignatieff (author, politician), Elton John (middlebrow musician), Lynn Johnston (middlebrow cartoonist, For Better or Worse), Stephen King (middlebrow horror novelist), Kevin Kline (actor, The Big Chill), Richard Lewis (comic), David Mamet (author), Joe Mantegna (actor), Brian May (Queen), Michael McKean (actor, musician, Spinal Tap), Mitch Mitchell (Jimi Hendrix Experience), Jonathan Pryce (actor), Rob Reiner (middlebrow actor, director, producer), Peter Riegert (actor), Marilynne Robinson (novelist), Salman Rushdie (novelist), Carlos Santana (Santana), John Ralston Saul (essayist), Laura Schlessinger (middlebrow radio personality), Arnold Schwarzenegger (action-movie actor, Mr. Freeze in Batman & Robin, Conan; politician), Robert Siegel (middlebrow NPR host), Jimmie Walker (comic), Joe Walsh (middlebrow musician, Eagles), Peter Weller (actor), Ron Wood (Rolling Stones), James Woods (actor), Warren Zevon (musician), Jon Landau (middlebrow music critic, producer), Dan Quayle (politician), Mitt Romney (politician), Don Felder (middlebrow musican, The Eagles). Also: middlebrow generational periodizer William Strauss. 1948: Brian Eno (music producer, Here Come the Warm Jets), Lester Bangs (critic, Psychotic Reactions and Carburetor Dung), John Bonham (Led Zeppelin), John Woo (director), John Carpenter (director, They Live), Gerald Casale (Devo), Nick Drake (singer/songwriter), Donald Fagen (Steely Dan), William Gibson (SF novelist), Al Gore (Vice President), Christopher Guest (actor, Spinal Tap), Phil Hartman (comic), S.E. Hinton (YA novelist), Ozzy Osbourne (Black Sabbath), Ricky Jay (magician), Ray Kurzweil (inventor), Errol Morris (documentary filmmaker), Robert Plant (Led Zeppelin), Art Spiegelman (cartoonist, editor of RAW), Lewis Black (comic), Glenn Frey (middlebrow musician, Eagles), Lynn Abbey (Fantasy author), Allan Arkush (director, Rock'n'Roll High School), Ron Asheton (The Stooges), Wolf Blitzer (TV journalist), T.C. Boyle (author), Jackson Browne (middlebrow singer/songwriter), Jimmy Cliff (musician), Alice Cooper (musician), Bud Cort (actor), Gerard Depardieu (actor), James Ellroy (crime novelist), Glenn Frey (middlebrow musican, The Eagles), Squeaky Fromme (assassin), Tony Iommi (Black Sabbath), Jeremy Irons (actor), Samuel L. Jackson (actor), Rick James (musician), Bernard-Henri Lévy (author, philosopher), Andrew Lloyd Webber (middlebrow composer), Janet Maslin (middlebrow film critic, dated middlebrows Steven Spielberg and Jon Landau), Ian McEwan (novelist), Jerry Mathers (Beaver in Leave it to Beaver), Michael Medved (traditional values pundit, film critic), Olivia Newton John (singer, actor), Stevie Nicks (singer/songwriter, Fleetwood Mac), Ted Nugent (musician), Bernadette Peters (actor), Kate Pierson (B-52s), Faith Popcorn (trend-spotter), Terry Pratchett (SF novelist), Phylicia Rashad (actor, The Cosby Show), Ruth Reichl (food critic), John Ritter (actor, Three's Company), Todd Rundgren (musician), Rudolph Schenker (The Scorpions), Cat Stevens (singer/songwriter), Donna Summer (singer), James Taylor (middlebrow singer-songwriter), Eckhart Tolle (middlebrow guru), Garry Trudeau (cartoonist), Steven Tyler (Aerosmith), Ronnie Van Zant (Lynyrd Skynyrd), Steve Winwood (musician). 1949: Andy Kaufman (comic, prankster), Bruce Springsteen (middlebrow rock star), Geezer Butler (Black Sabbath), Martin Amis (novelist), John Belushi (actor, comic, SNL), Graydon Carter (editor, Vanity Fair), Elvira (actor), Christopher Hitchens (journalist), Pam Grier (actor), Richard Hell (musician, Voidoids), Paul Berman (intellectual), Slavoj Zizek (intellectual), Tom Herman (Pere Ubu), Denis Johnson (novelist), Stiv Bators (Dead Boys), Fred "Sonic" Smith (musician), Philippe Petit (funambulist), James Atlas (author), Gil Scott-Heron (poet), Garry Shandling (comic), Tom Verlaine (punk, Television), Wendy O. Williams (Plasmatics), Terry Zwigoff (director, Ghost World), Neal Conan (middlebrow NPR host), Ed Begley Jr. (actor), Jeff Bridges (actor), Lindsey Buckingham (Fleetwood Mac), Shelley Duvall (actor), James Fallows (journalist), Richard Gere (actor), Tom Berenger (actor, The Big Chill), Robin Gibb (Bee Gees), Russell Hitchcock (Air Supply), Billy Joel (middlebrow musician), Don Johnson (actor), Lawrence Kasdan (director, The Big Chill), Jamaica Kincaid (novelist), Mark Knopfler (Dire Straits), Jessica Lange (actor), Jerry Lawler (wrestler), Annie Leibovitz (photographer), Shelley Long (actor), Nick Lowe (musician), John Madden (middlebrow director, Shakespeare in Love), Haruki Murakami (novelist), Bill O'Reilly (talk show host), Ric Ocasek (The Cars), Robert Palmer (singer), Steve Perry (Journey), Daniel Pipes (neocon), Bonnie Raitt (musician), Michael Richards (Kramer, on Seinfeld), Lionel Richie (singer-songwriter), Louis Rossetto (Wired co-founder), Gene Simmons (KISS), Jane Smiley (novelist), Sissy Spacek (actor), Rick Springfield (musician), Meryl Streep (talented middlebrow actor), Dave Thomas (comic), Scott Turow (middlebrow thriller author), Tom Waits (nobrow musician), Sigourney Weaver (actor), Anna Wintour (editor, Vogue), Pedro Almodovar (director) 1950: Mark Mothersbaugh (Devo), Gary Panter (illustrator, designer, cartoonist, Jimbo, Pee-Wee's Playhouse), Mark Beyer (cartoonist, RAW), Fran Lebowitz (social satirist), Alex Chilton (Big Star), Genesis P-Orridge (Throbbing Gristle, Psychic TV), Bill Murray (actor, comic, SNL), Suzi Quatro (musician), David Johansen (New York Dolls), Tony Wilson (Factory Records), Steve Wozniak (cofounder, Apple), William Hurt (actor, The Big Chill), Agnetha Fältskog (ABBA), Richard Dean Anderson (actor, MacGyver), Martin Short (SNL), Joan Armatrading (singer/songwriter), Walter Becker (Steely Dan), Richard Branson (businessman), Gabriel Byrne (actor), Karen Carpenter (The Carpenters), Jim Carroll (author), David Cassidy (singer), Carolyn Forché (poet), Peter Gabriel (musician, Genesis), Henry Louis Gates, Jr. (scholar), Lani Guinier (scholar), Cathy Guisewite (middlebrow cartoonist, Cathy), Arianna Huffington (columnist), John Hughes (director), Neil Jordan (director), Jeffrey Katzenberg (middlebrow tycoon, Disney, Dreamworks SKG), John Landis (nobrow director, Animal House), Jerry Zucker (nobrow director, Airplane!), Gary Larson (cartoonist, The Far Side), Jay Leno (TV host), William H. Macy (actor), Leonard Maltin (film critic), Ron Perlman (actor, Hellboy), Tom Petty (musician), Joe Queenan (author), James Redfield (novelist, The Celestine Prophecy), John Sayles (director), Cybill Shepherd (director), Billy Squier (musician), Sean Wilentz (historian), Stevie Wonder (musician). 1951: Terry Gross (middlebrow NPR host), Wendy Pini (cartoonist, Elfquest), Joey Ramone (The Ramones), Sue Coe (illustrator, Raw), Johnny Ramone (The Ramones), Jonathan Richman (The Modern Lovers), Zhang Yimou (director), Ben Katchor (cartoonist, RAW), Morris Albert (middlebrow soft-rock singer/songwriter, "Feelings"), Fred Schneider (B-52s), Rush Limbaugh (pundit), Pedro Almodóvar (director), Pierce Brosnan (actor), Orson Scott Card (SF novelist), Lynda Carter (actor, Wonder Woman), Cicciolina (Italian pornstar and politician), Ben Cohen (Ben & Jerry's), Jerry Greenfield (Ben & Jerry's), Bootsy Collins (P-Funk), Phil Collins (middlebrow rock/pop star), Chris Cooper (actor), Christopher Cross (middlebrow singer, "Sailing"), Beverly D'Angelo (actor), Tony Danza (actor), Brad Delp (Boston), Abel Ferrara (director), Lou Ferrigno (actor, The Incredible Hulk), Ace Frehley (KISS), Bob Geldof (Boomtown Rats), Rob Halford (Judas Priest), Mark Hamill (actor, Star Wars), Oscar Hijuelos (author, The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love), Tommy Hilfiger (fashion designer), Li Hongzhi (founder, Falun Gong), Anjelica Huston (actor), Chrissie Hynde (The Pretenders), Dean Kamen (inventor, Segway), William Katt (actor, Greatest American Hero), Michael Keaton (actor, Batman), Michael Kinsley (pundit, founding editor of Slate), Rush Limbaugh (pundit), Merrill Markoe (comic), Terry McMillan (middlebrow author), John Cougar Mellencamp (singer/songwriter), Suze Orman (middlebrow self-help author), Kurt Russell (actor), Julian Schnabel (director), Steven Seagal (action movie actor), Sting (middlebrow rock star, The Police), Arthur Sulzberger, Jr. (New York Times publisher), Treat Williams (middlebrow actor), Sven Birkerts (middlebrow intellectual), Brian Grazer (middlebrow film/TV producer), Robin Williams (nobrow-middlebrow comic, actor). 1952: Paul Reubens (actor, Pee-wee Herman), David Byrne (Talking Heads), Douglas Adams (SF novelist, Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy), Reverend Billy (activist, church of Stop Shopping), John Lurie (nobrow musician, actor), Gus Van Sant (director), Jim Woodring (cartoonist), Dan Aykroyd (actor, comic, SNL), Clive Barker (thriller author), Jeff Goldblum (actor, The Big Chill), Christopher Reeve (actor, Superman), Patrick Swayze (action-movie actor), Roseanne Barr (actor), Roberto Benigni (actor), Stewart Copeland (The Police), Michael Cunningham (author), Rita Dove (poet), Maureen Dowd (middlebrow New York Times columnist), Francis Fukuyama (neocon pundit), John Goodman (actor), David Hasselhoff (actor), bell hooks (scholar), Sammo Hung (actor), Bill Kristol (conservative editor, pundit), Louis Menand (critic), Liam Neeson (actor), Laraine Newman (comic, Saturday Night Live), Dee Dee Ramone (The Ramones), Tommy Ramone (The Ramones), Kim Stanley Robinson (SF novelist), Isabella Rossellini (actor), Mickey Rourke (actor), Paul Stanley (KISS), Joe Strummer (The Clash), Mr. T (actor), Amy Tan (middlebrow author), Johnny Thunders (New York Dolls), Harvey Weinstein (middlebrow movie producer), Leon Wieseltier (critic), Mark Sandman (musician). 1953: Tina Brown (middlebrow magazine editor, Vanity Fair and New Yorker), Alan Moore (writer, The Watchmen), Tim Allen (middlebrow actor, Home Improvement), Pat Benatar (musician), Kim Basinger (actor, Batman), Tony Blair (UK prime minister), Michael Bolton (middlebrow singer-songwriter), Michael Chertoff (US Homeland Security Czar), Eve Ensler (playwright), Thomas Friedman (middlebrow New York Times columnist), Mary Harron (director), Carl Hiaasen (author), Ron Jeremy (porn star), Sam Kinison (comic), Paul Krugman (New York Times columnist), Geddy Lee (Rush), John Malkovich (actor), Rick Moranis (actor), Mary Gross (SNL), Howard Schultz (founded Starbucks), Cornel West (scholar), Anne Fadiman (middlebrow writer), Jeffrey Skilling (Enron), Jerry Stahl (screenwriter), Malcolm Young (AC/DC). HONORARY OGXers: Kim Gordon (Sonic Youth), Jim Jarmusch (director), Mark Pauline (Survival Research Labs), John Zorn (avant-garde composer), Cyndi Lauper (pop star), David Thomas (Pere Ubu), Midge Ure (Ultravox). HONORARY BOOMERS (BORN 1954): Ron Howard (middlebrow film director), Oprah Winfrey (middlebrow TV host), Bob Weinstein, (middlebrow film producer). Would also like to include Kelsey Grammer (born February 1955) and Michiko Kakutani (born January 1955). [caption id="attachment_7763" align="aligncenter" width="550" caption="Charles Schulz\'s Lucy Van Pelt is a Boomer. She first appears as a toddler in April 1952. This strip, in which she articulates the Boomers\' credo, was published in 1962 — i.e., when the oldest Boomers were 18."][/caption]

Ortelan

Joe Alterio — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 15:47:43 +0000

mittelmassg

Joshua Glenn — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 16:28:31 +0000

R+M (5): CHICKEN, ORCHID, CHAMPAGNE

Joe Alterio — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 18:00:06 +0000

Robot: Chicken, orchid, champagne — art by Matt Rebholz *** Robots and Monsters, a website that swaps custom-designed cartoons and pop art in exchange for a donation to charity, was field-tested in May 2007 by our friend and colleague Joe Alterio. Earlier this fall, Alterio and other artists relaunched the site as a going concern. This is the fifth in a ten-part series of cartoons and artworks created by R&M artists to raise money for the charity water.org.

Hilo Hero: Robert Musil

Peggy Nelson — Fri, 06 Nov 2009 10:00:12 +0000

What do you do when you’re ROBERT MUSIL (1880-1942), when you’ve been nominated for a Nobel prize, when you live in abject poverty because you refuse to compromise, when you’re plagued by the success of "mediocrities" like Thomas Mann, when said mediocrities ignore your moods and set up your fan clubs, when you capture turn-of-the-century Vienna at its most contradictory and brilliant, when the world you’re writing sweeps past you, eradicating your beautiful, complicated, many-chaptered dance of possibilities with blood, steel, and the terrible weight of modernism’s negative spaces — all which were absolutely predicted and embodied by your magnum opus? Maybe you call Hollywood. Featuring the nobrow dyad of Ulrich and his sister Agathe, Musil’s Man Without Qualities is a musical comedy of ideas. Characters break out into a lecture every other chapter; the different positions swirl around like Julie Andrews in a mountain meadow. Ulrich works on the Parallel Campaign, a government project of Seinfeldian absurdity, which ultimately remains as unfinished as the book, its multiple options tailing off into parallel campaigns of their own, its intended conclusion reaching back to the past and preventing its own discovery. I’m thinking Baz Luhrmann. But Aaron Sorkin, let’s talk. *** Each day, Hilobrow.com pays tribute to one of our favorite high-, low-, no-, or hilobrow heroes on that person's birthday. Click here for more Hilo Hero shout-outs.

camus-550

Joshua Glenn — Fri, 06 Nov 2009 16:05:12 +0000

ParkerPosey

Joshua Glenn — Fri, 06 Nov 2009 17:34:41 +0000

The Book is a Weapon (7)

HILOBROW — Fri, 06 Nov 2009 20:00:18 +0000

[caption id="attachment_7509" align="aligncenter" width="400" caption="Gregory Green, Book Bomb #8 (1994)"]Book Bomb #8 (1994)" title="3eb7ea1b" width="400" height="274" class="size-full wp-image-7509" />[/caption] Gregory Green's Book Bomb #8 (1994). From the artist's gallery's website:

Since the mid-1980's Gregory Green has created performances and artworks exploring the evolution of empowerment, which consider the use of violence, alternatives to violence and the accessibility to information and technology as vehicles for social or political change. Many of Green's artistic investigations have focused on terrorism and the possibilities for sabotage of the physical infrastructure, and the ease in which individuals, armed with readily available information, can endanger the status quo. Green thoroughly researched and produced a series of pipe, book, suitcase and nuclear bomb sculptures. He also created several guided missiles that could be armed with conventional, bio-chemical or nuclear devices. These artworks, although containing no explosives, are otherwise carefully designed to be mechanically complete and potentially functional-including a 10-Kiloton nuclear device, minus only the needed plutonium.

*** Seventh in an occasional series.

Hilo Hero: Albert Camus

Joshua Glenn — Sat, 07 Nov 2009 10:00:53 +0000

In a 1945 essay, the French-Jewish author, philosopher, and journalist ALBERT CAMUS (1913-60) asked, "What is a man who revolts?" His answer: "First of all, it’s a man who says no. But if he refuses, he does not only renounce something, he is also saying yes." If it's at all possible to articulate the disposition that we've dubbed Hilobrow, then this hardboiled, self-contradicting aphorism might do the trick; and Camus himself was a nay-sayer and dissenter who nevertheless affirmed his fervent beliefs and engaged with issues of the day. Though his editorship of the wartime journal Combat made him a symbol of the French Resistance, he resigned after the war because he mistrusted mass politics. He was lumped in with nobrow contemporaries similarly hostile to a priori conceptions, yet he fell out with the Surrealists and the Existentialists because he regarded their romanticism as deluded. Camus pissed everyone off: the Nietzschean, neo-aristocratic themes of his 1951 philosophical treatise, The Rebel (which should be required reading for would-be hilobrows), upset his progressive comrades; meanwhile, the heroic absurdism of The Myth of Sisyphus (1942) and fictions such as The Stranger (1942) and The Plague (1947), offered no purchase to Cold War proto-neocons. An anarchist sympathizer, Camus renounced dehumanizing worldviews, whether fascist, socialist, or capitalist-triumphalist. Yet he remained a utopian thinker who, in 1947, around the time that he fell in with a dispersed Argonaut Folly (whose members included George Orwell, Hannah Arendt, and Simone Weil in absentia) eccentrically orbiting Dwight Macdonald's magazine Politics, declared that "We must all of us create outside of parties and governments communities of thought which will inaugurate a dialogue across the boundaries of nations; the members of these communities should affirm through their lives and their words that this world must cease to be a world of policemen, of soldiers and of money, and become a world for man and woman, of fruitful work and reflective leisure.” Can I get an AMEN, somebody? *** Each day, Hilobrow.com pays tribute to one of our favorite high-, low-, no-, or hilobrow heroes on that person's birthday. Click here for more Hilo Hero shout-outs.

Reverse-engineering the book

Matthew Battles — Sat, 07 Nov 2009 19:27:03 +0000

As a child, John Carrera was fascinated by the trove of yellowing pages of Webster's Pictorial Dictionary he found beneath his grandfather's chair. As a fine-press printer, he has painstakingly brought the book back to life as a bespoke letterpress production and a trade edition for Chronicle Books. In the video below, Carrera narrates the process of reverse-engineering the Pictorial Webster's. As you'll see (and as Carrera makes clear on the web site of the Quercus Press), the result is no mere recreation, but a tearing-down-and-putting-together-again—a reinvention—a postmodern dreaming of the Dictionary. Especially compelling to me is Carrera's use of a Linotype machine rather than handset moveable type. This machine, appropriate to the era of the original Webster's Pictorial, straddles the ways of the engineer and the bricoleur. In The Mechanic Muse, Hugh Kenner writes evocatively of the Linotype and its impact on modernist literature, which is of a piece with the role of technology in machine-age culture. Kenner describes how the keyboard of the Linotype was arranged to offer the greatest efficiency not to the operator, but to the machine. Frequently-used letters were grouped on the left side of the keyboard, under the operator's weakest fingers, because it gave the Linotype mechanism a shorter distance to travel with them. Kenner guesses that Linotype operators didn't know why the keyboard was set up this way, but I think he's likely wrong: press workers then knew the ins and outs of their machines in a way that's quite foreign to us in the post-machine age, in which we've become fluent orchestrators of black boxes. Do many keyboard users today beyond a lettristic few know why their keyboards say QWERTY? And yet we use those keyboard to mobilize great streams and blocks of information, and to create objects of great beauty as well—some of them made of matrices of letters. In its time the Linotype was a marvel of technology, not a thing of craft but of manufacturing. Kenner notes that through its agency, twentieth century publishers turned text into "reading matter," books into consumer products. Whenever we wax nostalgic for those books of the high machine age, we should remember that they were the fruit of technologies that in their time could be as alienating as any today. And yet under right and knowing hands, the spirit of craft may be awakened afresh. Carrera has done what Borges's Pierre Menard tries to do with the Quixote, striving to exactly reproduce a book from another era from a consciousness formed by his own time—only with the Pictorial Webster's this is a consciousness expressed in hands and things.

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Matthew Battles — Sat, 07 Nov 2009 19:31:19 +0000

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Matthew Battles — Sat, 07 Nov 2009 19:32:18 +0000

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Matthew Battles — Sat, 07 Nov 2009 21:23:55 +0000

Hilo Hero: Parker Posey

Joe Alterio — Sun, 08 Nov 2009 10:00:49 +0000

Her unimpeachable acting career has garnered PARKER POSEY (born 1968) the moniker "Queen of the Indies," but she deserves an upgrade. In the fantasy life of the young suburban boys who actually grow up to be interesting human beings, Posey is the best friend you want to fuck, the girl in art class who doesn't care if she gets sent to the principal, the diametric opposite of those awful blondes in high school who sneer at you. She plays Television in her car when she gives you a ride to school that one time, and is the first one to show you Charles Burns comics. When she gets older, she's the first to have a weird beatnik marriage, and the first to get divorced. She shows up at your apartment at 1 a.m. with a bottle of blackberry wine and an ounce of hash. (True, this Posey does not exist, she's a will o' the wisp conjured up by those of us susceptible to her thespian skills — but who cares?) Posey isn't merely a queen; she's the Misfit Empress. Nay, she's an archetype unto herself. She is the Parker Posey of Parker Poseys. *** Each day, Hilobrow.com pays tribute to one of our favorite high-, low-, no-, or hilobrow heroes on that person's birthday. Click here for more Hilo Hero shout-outs.

Winds of Magic (9): Endless Rhapsody

James Parker — Sun, 08 Nov 2009 21:00:23 +0000

If Queen had not existed, it would by no means have been necessary to invent them. Sweaty old 1973, the year of their debut album (the campily Tolkien-rocking Queen) was also the year of Elton John’s Goodbye Yellow Brick Road, Roxy Music’s For Your Pleasure, Led Zep’s Houses of the Holy, King Crimson’s Lark’s Tongues in Aspic, and Bowie’s Aladdin Sane. The teen delirium known as T.Rextasy had just peaked, and Black Sabbath were chewing up stadia worldwide. Gender bending was part of the pop vernacular; vaudeville was in the air; the riff had already been turned inside out. There was no pressing need, in other words, for a new hard-strutting art-prog outfit with folk/pastoral pretensions and an estrogen-laced frontman in a silver catsuit. Yet here they were, garishly inessential and climbing like tarts toward superstardom. Listen to 1973’s “My Fairy King,” to Freddie Mercury’s tittering falsetto: “Dragons fly like sparrows through the air/And baby lambs where Samson dares...” Now listen to it as if were a Ween song. Twice as good, right? The flourishes of minstrelly doo-wop, the wry formal mastery, the preposterous superfluity of invention... That was always the thing about Queen — they were a luxury. IMAGE Music Video Distributors has just released a two-DVD set containing Queen: Under Review 1973-80 and Queen: Magic Moments. The magic moments — a collection of reminiscences from rather raddled ex-members of the Mercury entourage — you can forget about. Under Review, on the other hand, is quite educational. Did you know, for example, that long-fingered guitar boffin Brian May always used an old English sixpence for a pick? Or that Freddie himself once called Sid Vicious “Simon Ferocious” and then lispingly challenged him to a fight? (Now that’s a contest I would have paid good money to see.) As in the rest of MVD’s now-extensive Under Review series, a collection of rock experts — roxperts, if you will — opine with varying degrees of acuity on the music, between random bits of footage (some live performances, some interviews) and the somber pronouncings of a voiceover. It’s not a format that pushes the boundaries of documentary making, but if you love Queen, you’ll be lapping it up. Under discussion here is the fiery arc of Queenhood from ’73’s Queen to 1980’s The Game: the glory years. The initial ascent was steep. There were some very fancy moves on ’74’s Sheer Heart Attack — notably “Killer Queen” and the slow-pistoned rush of Brian May’s “She Makes Me,” as narcotically pretty as a Brian Jonestown Massacre song — but it was with A Night at the Opera (1975) that Queen really Queened out. This was their Kid A: an explosive broadening of range from which the band, though much success awaited them, never really recovered. What an album! Mercury, a daredevil of kitsch, tumbles through the styles (show tune, gonad rock, saucy seaside sing-along) while the mad Queen choir shrieks around him and May’s guitar impinges ironically in little stabs and flutters and the occasional dinosaur riff. The DVD leaves unexplored the relationship between these two men, which is a shame, because Freddie and Brian were a whole new twist on the sexual dyad of the hard-rock singer/guitarist. When Jimmy Page solo’d, Robert Plant would arc his back and whoop like Maid Marian having her bottom pinched; Pete Townshend could force a sort of orgasmic bluster from Roger Daltrey; Bowie fellated Mick Ronson’s fretboard; even AC/DC’s Bon Scott, the hardest of them all, would gurgle like a randy old woman over Angus’s chop-chop riffing. May and Mercury, by contrast, were not do-er and do-ee but some kind of Venusian perv conspiracy, otherworldly and mutually titillating, an erotic in-joke. Night at the Opera’s most prominent feature, of course, was the masterpiece “Bohemian Rhapsody,” Freddie’s suicide ballad/nonsense operetta/metal rave-up, in which (or so the roxperts speculate) his increasingly undeniable no-prizes-for-guessing homosexuality is grappled with as if in a shamanic dream state — “Bis-mill-ah NO! We will not let you go!” — and so on. The pure pop counterweight to all this on Night at the Opera was bassist John Deacon’s “You’re My Best Friend” — a song to rival the finest of Paul McCartney in its clear and passionate uxoriousness. (It takes a real man, pop kids, to write a line like “I’m happy at home.”) When 1976 let slip the dogs of punk, Queen’s future — for about a minute — looked shaky. The critics had been out for them since Nick Kent, in the NME, described Queen II as “a bucket of urine,” and as the most disgracefully ostentatious of the mega-bands (Freddie’s “lifestyle” was a legend), they were freshly reviled by this urchin generation. Things grew moody in the Queen camp: ostrich feathers wilted, catamites dozed on their leashes, magnums of Moët & Chandon were left unquaffed. “I really thought that might be it for us,” confided Freddie to an interviewer later. But no! Queen would not be punked, and in 1977 they came back with the one-two knockout of “We Will Rock You”/“We Are the Champions,” a totalitarian marching song and a hymn to the gay übermensch, stamping their dominance forever on the face of pop. And sports. Still to come were the timeless Chic ripoff “Another One Bites the Dust” and the magnificent Bowie collaboration “Under Pressure” (“It’s the terror of knowing what this world is about...!”), but with this double-A-side smash, Queen proved themselves impervious to history. It was their finest hour. Naturally they followed it with “Fat Bottomed Girls.” Freddie Mercury (real name: Farokh Bulsara; country of origin: Zanzibar) died of AIDS in November 1991. His funeral service, according to the traditions of his family, was conducted in the ancient language of Avestan, and prayers for the salvation of his soul were offered to the God of the Zoroastrians, Ahura Mazda. To say the man was one in a million is to understate it by a factor of 10. Listening back, one hears that the dominant tone in his voice, curiously enough, was rage: a thin, tearing snarl, and a teeth’s-edge clarity of enunciation. Rage, perhaps, was the real engine of his caprice: like Ming the Merciless in 1980’s Flash Gordon (for which Queen provided the soundtrack), Freddie liked “to play with things a while before annihilation.” The more Apollonian Brian May, meanwhile, only last week completed his doctorate in astrophysics at Imperial College, London — more than 30 years after he set it aside to form Queen. His dissertation is titled “Radial Velocities in the Zodiacal Dust Cloud.” I couldn’t have put it better myself. *** Originally published by The Boston Phoenix on August 7, 2007. From 2003-08, our friend and colleague James Parker, currently a contributing editor at The Atlantic, was a culture critic for the Boston Globe's Ideas section and for Boston's alt-weekly, The Phoenix. Hilobrow.com has curated a collection of Parker's writings from this period. This installment is the ninth in a series of ten.

anatoi

Joshua Glenn — Sun, 08 Nov 2009 22:21:28 +0000

Hilo Hero: Ti-Grace Atkinson

Lynn Peril — Mon, 09 Nov 2009 10:00:35 +0000

[caption id="attachment_8058" align="aligncenter" width="375" caption="Ti-Grace Atkinson, left, with members of the Feminists, demonstrates at Manhattan\'s Marriage License Bureau. \"Sex is overrated,\" she says. \"If someday we have to choose between sex and freedom, there\'s no question I\'d take freedom.\""][/caption] On September 23, 1969, a group of women, conspicuous among them a tall, patrician blonde, handed out mimeographed leaflets to passersby and newlyweds alike at New York City’s marriage bureau. Rather than wedding-day platitudes, the pamphlets offered incendiary prose: “Do you know that you are your husband’s prisoner? ... We can’t destroy the inequities between men and women until we destroy marriage. We must free ourselves. And marriage is the place to begin.” The tall woman handing out leaflets was TI-GRACE ATKINSON (born 1938), former president of the New York chapter of NOW, and a founding member and de facto leader of THE FEMINISTS [shown above, with Atkinson at left], the radical organization behind the marriage bureau action. To Atkinson, any contact with men — even those who claimed solidarity with the women’s movement — was an act of collaboration. At various times during her career, the New York Times described her as “softly sexy,” a “tigress,” and the “haute thinker” of the women’s movement. But while the press loved Atkinson's combination of good looks and militant rhetoric, many of those who worked directly with her were less affectionate. Atkinson “wanted chaos,” according to the first executive secretary of NOW. To feminist critic Susan Brownmiller, Atkinson was “bad news through and through.” Even author Kate Millett, who respected her long after she had become a pariah to others, eventually called Atkinson “too elitist to join the elite.” Atkinson knew she was considered uncompromising and unreasonable. But she also knew, as she put it in her 1974 essay collection, Amazon Odyssey, that “the only way to reach people on feminism is to go for their jugular.” A longer version of this essay appeared in Hermenaut #16. *** Each day, Hilobrow.com pays tribute to one of our favorite high-, low-, no-, or hilobrow heroes on that person's birthday. Click here for more Hilo Hero shout-outs.

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Matthew Battles — Mon, 09 Nov 2009 12:46:40 +0000

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Matthew Battles — Mon, 09 Nov 2009 12:51:10 +0000

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Joshua Glenn — Mon, 09 Nov 2009 15:40:18 +0000

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Joshua Glenn — Mon, 09 Nov 2009 15:51:52 +0000

Hilo Hero: Screaming Lord Sutch

Patrick Cates — Tue, 10 Nov 2009 10:00:10 +0000

If you grew up glued to a television set in England in the ’80s, as I did, nothing was more irritating than the preemption of The Sweeney, The Professionals, and other cop dramas full of violence and swearing by the local and general election broadcasts. The only ray of light peeking through this dark televisual cloud was provided by SCREAMING LORD SUTCH, 3RD EARL OF HARROW (1940-99) and his Official Monster Raving Loony Party. On election night, decked out in gold spangly suit, top hat, and a panoply of badges, rosettes, and other paraphernalia, he would take up position on the podium next to his electoral rivals and cause colorful uproar; he was the political equivalent of a loud fart emitted in a two-hour church service. It's easy to write Sutch off as nothing more than an attention-hungry nutter — however, not only was he a very influential enabler in England's ’60s music scene (he nurtured the likes of Jimmy Page, Jeff Beck, and Noel Redding at the bosom of his schlock-horror combo, The Savages), he was also a catalyst of genuine political change. Thanks to Sutch's campaigning, 18-year-olds were given the vote, commercial radio was legalized, and Carnaby Street was pedestrianized. When he hanged himself in 1999, after a life spent suffering silently from severe depression, British music lost a grandfather and British politics a splash of technicolor. *** Each day, Hilobrow.com pays tribute to one of our favorite high-, low-, no-, or hilobrow heroes on that person's birthday. Click here for more Hilo Hero shout-outs.

Hilo Hero: Hans Magnus Enzensberger

Luc Sante — Wed, 11 Nov 2009 10:00:47 +0000

HANS MAGNUS ENZENSBERGER (born 1929) is a poet, critic, playwright, translator, magazine editor, and author of children’s books about science and mathematics. He has often been called Germany’s greatest living poet. T. W. Adorno, introducing him in 1964, said, “All we have in German literary criticism, nay, in criticism as such, is Hans Magnus Enzensberger... and a few scattered attempts.” He nevertheless remains largely unknown to English-language readers, and if he were somehow given the Nobel Prize there would be the usual outcry. That is in part because he has covered so much ground in so many different fields that he cannot be characterized in a paragraph, let alone a phrase. He is a clear, hard thinker with a deep understanding of contradiction and a dark sense of humor, who writes clear, spare aphoristic prose. Some of his most striking work has addressed progress (the poem cycle Mausoleum, 1975), the media (The Consciousness Industry, essays, 1974), terrorism (“Dreamers of the Absolute,” 1964, and “The Radical Loser,” 2005), apocalypse (“Two Notes on the End of the World,” 1978), and the security state (“Towards a Theory of Treason,” 1964, and “Secrets of German Democracy,” 1979). In that last one, he optimistically predicts the downfall of the security state by “erosion, with its four slow, irresistible riders: laughter, muddle, accident, and entropy.” *** Each day, Hilobrow.com pays tribute to one of our favorite high-, low-, no-, or hilobrow heroes on that person's birthday. Click here for more Hilo Hero shout-outs.

R+M (6): TK

Joe Alterio — Thu, 12 Nov 2009 07:00:56 +0000

IMAGE TK — art by TK *** Robots and Monsters, a website that swaps custom-designed cartoons and pop art in exchange for a donation to charity, was field-tested in May 2007 by our friend and colleague Joe Alterio. Earlier this fall, Alterio and other artists relaunched the site as a going concern. This is the sixth in a ten-part series of cartoons and artworks created by R&M artists to raise money for the charity water.org.

Hilo Hero: Roland Barthes

Mark Kingwell — Thu, 12 Nov 2009 10:00:29 +0000

ROLAND BARTHES (1915-80) invented cultural criticism. His 1957 book Mythologies, a collection of short essays written for a monthly magazine, showcased an exciting new way to examine cultural effluvia: close critical attention to things like pro wrestling and steak frites, revealing their place in larger ideological structures, or exposing the economic presuppositions of a novelty-driven fashion system. Barthes’s method, rooted in structuralist semiotics, influenced generations of critics, and helped spawn the contemporary cultural studies academic for whom no television show or celebrity outfit is too trivial. But Barthes is more searching, and more brilliant, in other works. His 1968 essay “The Death of the Author” marked a transition toward post-structuralist insights: there is no master-code to the world of meaning; and writing is ever destabilizing itself. Barthes both exemplified this destabilization — his beautiful 1977 book A Lover’s Discourse is fragmentary and refracted — and argued for it, as in The Pleasure of the Text (1975). Popular culture generates doxa, or fixed beliefs — "the symbolic representation of what we already believe,” as David Foster Wallace put it. Literature, by contrast, creates a parallel meaning system, para-doxa, in which the reader is no longer a consumer but a producer. Now the reader can get lost in the text, let go of selfhood, and finally achieve cathartic jouissance, blissful climax — a lush, and liberating, sentiment from a humane writer whose wisdom transcends fashion.

Hilo Hero: George V. Higgins

Sarah Weinman — Fri, 13 Nov 2009 10:00:01 +0000