The comfort of the Book

I just saw that I had twice alluded to the transition from a Spiderman series to a Justice League one within the space of a few weeks, which marks a new low in terms of me repeating myself.  Ah well. The ravages of age.

Now I will return to another theme I've touched upon recently, though from a different angle: I find that I am at my best when I have a book to which I return at the end of the day that I am really into, which pulls me along.  And why is that?  Precisely because the book gives me a comfortable story within which to ensconce myself, to protect myself of the uncertainty of the broader narrative of my life:  will I get that account?  Will the kids do well in life?  How long will I live?  Etc. The radical contingency of all that is unnerving.

So everybody's got their narrative fix that comforts them.  Sitcoms, TV crime shows, movies, pop songs, comedies and tragedies on stage, they all ultimately resolve in a way that is expected and comforting.  Except, of course, the ones that don't.  And I've written elsewhere about how I've gravitated over time towards happy endings because the unhappy ones upon which the most arch of avant-garde literatures focus so much of their energy do, in fact, mess with my head.

People who really have religion and/or are deeply embedded and invested in particular ideologies probably need fewer narrative prostheses because, after all, they feel they know how the big picture is going to end.  Alternately, one could say that the obsessively perseverate over the same stories (the Gospels, Socialist Realism, etc.) as a way of keeping other narratives out.

But of course this blog is quite the opposite of a well-constructed book.  It is instead something like a running Talmud on my life.




I was about to bring up the point Robert Belknap of Columbia once made about the piece-bien-faite, but then thought to see if I had mentioned it before.  Of course I had.  Not once, but thrice.

Thoughts on Russia

I don't know what it was, but something spurred in me the memory of a decade or so back, when I was doing a project out in St Louis.  As was often the case, there was a Russian programmer at the client site, and I struck up a conversation with him in Russian, in the never-ending quest to keep my Russian skills from disappearing forever off into the mists of forgetting (as they will one day, for sure, but I will forestall it as long as possible).

Sergei, I think his name was, was typically delighted and amazed to meet an American who spoke some Russian, and invited me out to his home to meet his wife in the evening after work.  When I got to their house, a perfectly respectable if nondescript ranch somewhere in some subdivision, there was one small problem:  their dog.  Not that he was a nasty dog, quite the contrary, he was a lovely dog, the friendliest ever, perhaps.  An Irish Setter, I thinnk. You would have thought I was his long-lost chum from kindergarten.  No sooner than I had come in the house, then he lept all over me and wanted to kiss and lick and cuddle.  He was absolutely irrepressible.

I can't recall if I had told Sergei I didn't drink before I went over there, at any case, at some point in time it became clear that the best activity for the two of us was to play ping pong. So we played some ping pong, and spoke some Russian, and then to leave I had to pass through the kitchen again, where they had tried to isolate their hyperpup.  More jumping and kissing.  Though I could have done without some of the puppy love, this was a reminder of the extreme hospitality one often finds amongst the Russians.

These days almost everything we read about Russia is negative.  Putin taking back Crimea, waging a proxy war in Ukraine.  Russians attacking gays and lesbians.  Parliament passing crazily restrictive laws on media. Zhirinovsky threatening use of tactical nuclear weapons in Poland or the "dwarf states" of the Baltic.

I was up at Columbia University for a memorial service in honor of one of my professors, Robert Belknap, this Friday.  At the reception afterwards, I was talking to other faculty from Columbia, Princeton, and elsewhere, and they were basically arguing that -- despite Putin's huge approval numbers -- things weren't as bad in Russia in general as they are made out to be.  That life is better, that people are not as nasty as our mass media make them out to be, that the real solution is for Putin to be gotten rid of, somehow.  And that Putin's control is not as absolute as it is made out to be.

It's hard for me to know.  I haven't been back to Russia since '98.  But it is hard for me to believe that they are all fascists.  They have suffered, yes.  There is homophobia, and racism, yes, but we've got that too.

Why Dinosaur Jr. still matters, or, talking to your children about distortion

 Every once in a while I go back and listen to classic Dinosaur Jr, and rightly so.  Today I was listening to Your Living All Over Me while taking Graham to JiuJitsu class, and at the end of "Tarpit", he asked me "what was that?"

So I tried to explain to him the concept of distortion and why it makes sense. As I think I've said before, Dinosaur Jr. is a landmark to me because, after many years where punk and post-punk really focused on the public, the political, the place of the young and the angry in the world, Jay Mascis all of a sudden turned it around and made it lyrical again. He sang about himself, and the pain of unrequited love, and loneliness, and he played guitar solos too, to make it sing.

And it hit home, it gave shape to the confusion and angst I was feeling at that point in time in my life, the what-the-fuck-am-I-up-to and why-doesn't-she-love-me of it all. And sometimes I think when I listen to it now that I'm just revisiting those times as an emotional tourist in my past.

In some course he taught about the European realist novel around 1995, Robert Belknap made a very profound point about the concept of the piece bien faite, or the "well-made play," a dramatic form in which everything gets wrapped up nice and tidily at the end, which tells the audience that there is order in the universe and that they can go home and sleep comfortably. I had never really thought about form like that. The same can actually be said of meter and rhyme in poetry, or harmony and melody in music. If it all sounds nice and neat, it's telling you that's how the world is.

And distortion is the opposite.  Dissonance too, and that's why Adorno riffed endlessly about how dissonance in Schoenberg exposed all the contradictions in capitalism.

But distortion and dissonance needn't necessarily be relentlessly negative. In the end, Dinosaur Jr. is a very hopeful band, it just reminds me that it ain't always easy, that shit is messy before it fertilizes.

It was Robert Belknap who pointed out to me that balance and order in a work of art -- the marriage at the end of a comedy, neatly rhymed iambic pentameter, harmony -- have a cosmological upshot: they tell us that the world is well-made. Discord and dissonance make the opposite point, hence the favor they find in the hands of youth and critics.

What the fuck, then, are we to make of a cappella singing? I was at an alumni event over the weekend which included an all-female (two named Natalie) singing group from ye olde alma mater. I was pre-cringing, but I decided I'd go anyway and see if there was anyone worth talking to there, anybody looking to hand me money or something. When the group came on, I had grabbed my coat and formulated an exit strategy, and not for naught. They led off, these 12 attractive young women in black evening wear in the afternoon, with a rousing rendition of "The Boogie-Woogie Bugle Boy of Company B." I'm sorry. It's 2007. It was wierd. They were swaying to the music, bugging their eyes out for emphasis, smiling from ear to ear like little Miss Americas (when not on coke). Back to the theme of order, it all hung together perfectly, smarmily, and yet it evoked a "methinks thou dost protest too much" from the kid. It reminded me that though a performance may try to tell you that all is well, it ain't necessarily the case.

Into the ether

Cheated today, probably spent 20 minutes mucking about with the grouse's look and feel, so I can't write much.

It's astonishing how much it sucks out of you to be continually hoisting emails out into the ether, to people you just met professionally, to people you haven't seen in a long time but are trying to reestablish contact with for whatever reason. When your net outflow of emails is high, there's a sense of tremendous exposure, of being all laid out for rejection. Particularly when you're trying to sell hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of services and you don't really know what the services are.

And then in comes an email out of nowhere. Lor Gould. Haven't talked to that guy in many years and here he is gonna fill me in on what's up down in Cary. Beautiful.

Robert Belknap once made a good point, s that the plot conventions of well-constructed comedies in particular (but really of any traditional genre) spoke to a general belief that there is order in the universe, and that instilling this belief was their function. Marxist critics said the same thing, but with a twist. It would appear that the internet has a similar sense of orderliness.