On this afternoon the weather was inclement, but there were compensations. (via Photophobia; larger).
mills
My name is Mills Baker; I write about love, culture, art, religion, mental illness, philosophy, memory, politics and the rather random.
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That Fear of the False
“Janine had taken an intense personal interest in the scruples which dogged Flaubert’s writing, that fear of the false which, she said, sometimes kept him confined to his couch for weeks or months on end in the dread that he would never be able to write another word without compromising himself in the most grievous of ways. Moreover, Janine said, he was convinced that everything he had written hitherto consisted solely in a string of the most abysmal errors and lies, the consequences of which were immeasurable. Janine maintained that the source of Flaubert’s scruples was to be found in the relentless spread of stupidity which he had observed everywhere, and which he believed had already invaded his own head.”
-W.G. Sebald, The Rings of Saturn. (See also: authorial shame, childhood shame, Sebald).
“The stupidity of people comes from having an answer for everything.”
Milan Kundera in The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, quoted by the brilliant Slaughterhouse 90210.
Werner Herzog’s Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans
Linked above is my aforementioned review of Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans, a poorly-titled but richly enjoyable Werner Herzog film I saw in Telluride. I hope you enjoy it. Incidentally, Cage and New Orleans combined to form some of my favorite scenes in David Lynch’s Wild at Heart.
I was just rows from Herzog and from Cage, and later tried -and failed- to approach and thank Herzog for working in New Orleans. I think I must have been star-struck, as they say.
Despite not understanding movies very well, I’ve previously reviewed District 9 for Filmosophy.
Through the absurd kindness of super-duo Chris and Alexi, Abby and I went to the Telluride Film Festival this weekend. It was a purely wonderful experience, entirely happy and thrilling and engaging, and Chris’ synopsis -as we all lamented our return to ordinary life- will be the coda:
On a thanatotic, bureaucratically burdened morning like today’s, memories of Alaskan Ale, Millsner’s challenges, gigantic-breasted cartoon women, reluctant maturation (!), cookies on the sidewalk, cracking up on multiple gondola rides, arguing about grossly misleading jazz documentaries, women seducing boat captains in highly unusual silk pajama pants, rain-soaked hot-tubs, pee-soaked shirts, unadulterated cranberry juice, full-bore gaffling on cycling and various nuts (sorry Alexi, sorry Abby!), jeeps with snorkels, orca-hating young Louisiana men, jort-wearing cinephiles, basketball trees and eagles in drag, bring to bear to the full power of nostalgia, the sense of pain and lost homeland already made a dolorous pleasure.
There’s nothing for it but to do it again. Hopefully it won’t be too long before Abby and I again see the fittest brainiacs since intellectualism lost its interest in physical vitality (a date which I’ll leave to others to fix).
If possible, I’ll be contributing some reviews -despite my pitifully poor grasp of cinema- to Filmosophy. I’ve already sent in some thoughts on Werner Herzog’s Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans, and may add my inexpert views of Das weiße Band, Breaking Point, An Education, or Vincere.
The photos are here; I hope some of them are interesting to you, and I’ll post a few I liked later.
[Flash 9 is required to listen to audio.]
Nick Drake - Black Eyed Dog
This song hasn’t yet been ruined for me by the incredible lunacy of my own black-eyed dog, whom I caught two nights ago chewing on my zoom lens.
Long before I had the chance to photograph the moon through B’s telescope, Abby sent me the homemade book above; I found it amusing, striking, touching. In it, the moon is variously described as
- a clever little sliver
- the ruminating rind of albino orange, with no ballast
- a mischievous melon; an obtuse milkdrop
and more, and it is illustrated in its phases. I particularly loved the binding and the back cover, with its question (the answer, of course: the maria).
Today I am going to see Abby again, thanks to the generosity of the wonderful friends I photographed in London; they’ve invited us to see them in Colorado, so after some exciting air travel I’ll be out of touch for a bit. Take care!
“Sint sane superbi: quid id ad nos attinet? Idne irascimini, siquis est superbior quam nos?”
Cato, quoted by Superfluidity. “So let them be arrogant: what does it matter to us? Or is it infuriating if someone is more arrogant than we?”
In November 1971, a man traveling under the name Dan Cooper hijacked a Boeing 727 en route from Portland to Seattle. After communicating to the flight attendant that he had a bomb in his briefcase, he demanded $200,000 and four parachutes, to be delivered after the plane landed. After receiving his ransom and releasing the passengers, Cooper ordered the pilots to take off and fly to Mexico, but while in the air over Washington state he lowered the rear stairs of the aircraft and jumped out, never to be seen again.
As if his story, with too many astonishing details to mention here, weren’t enough, four months later a man named Richard McCoy Jr. copied Cooper’s crime, but demanded $500,000. Because he bragged, and because he hitchhiked wearing a flightsuit afterward, McCoy was captured. He later escaped from prison and spent three months on the lam before being killed in a shoot-out with the FBI.
That these men successfully carried out skyjackings of commercial Boeing jets and bailed out over the United States strongly suggests to me that the 1970s were awesome.
“…all literature, highbrow or low, from Aeneid onward, is fan fiction. That is why Harold Bloom’s notion of the anxiety of influence has always rung so hollow to me … All novels are sequels; influence is bliss.”
Michael Chabon, quoted by Alan Jacobs in this excellent piece: Choose Your Own Adventure: Jews with Swords.
Dust gives substance to the streaming sunlight at dusk; after a childhood of playing in the spaces it creates, I’ve come to consider it beautiful, its silent speeding within beams of light a kind of model of matter: frantic vibrations forming the shapes and colors we see.
“…these philosophies have their perverse charms. If you look at it in the right way, it’s liberating that, as Derrida believes, there is no experience that precedes language, or that poems, as de Man says, are just persistant namings of the void, or that knowledge, as Foucault argues, is a function of a diffuse and vaguely malevolent ‘power.’… From the point of view of an english major, it was intoxicating because it promised to replace art. Why was that attractive? I think because I was impatient. Art was messy and small, reeking of lies and mistakes and humanity. Theory was clean and huge, like a memory, like heaven. Theory was power. Theory was war. And theory exalted the critic. No longer was I a lowly grad student parasite clinging desperately to Joyce’s belly fur; now I was a carnivore, hunting down the text and killing it. It was kind of like making art yourself, except you didn’t.”
Gary Kamiya, quoted by Little Potato. I am hostile towards theory for many reasons, not least being its unintelligibility and its falsity, but I think this precisely exposes what is worst about it: it exists as a means for the suppression of the artist by those who claim to love art.
Indeed, I think most theory serves this role: masses of gnostic, oppressive, symmetrical, self-referential language smothering whatever natural and human life exists beneath it. Political theory: a means of subordinating the individual to the striking diagrams of some universal set of ideas and logic. Literary theory: a means for denying the import of the author (through the absurd ‘intentional fallacy’) and establishing narcissistic “readings” of “texts” that “explode” meanings and position the tracer of lexical lines as some kind of creator. Explode is a nicely violent word for it, too.
The very clever resent art just as we resent the world; we want to control it, reduce it, bring it to heel with our fine phrases and semicolons and footnotes. Thus we must establish that art isn’t what it claims to be but some secret cipher only we can decode, a hidden message about the sexual anguish of the painter or the unreconstructed bourgeosie sentimentality of the composer or the imperialism of the poet; just as we say to the world: you’re not really happy, with your false consciousnesses!
“Theory was clean and huge, like a memory, like heaven. Theory was power. Theory was war. And theory exalted the critic.” When reading Chomsky’s infamous assessment of literary theory -that it is all idiotic- one might wonder: how did it come to dominate our intellectual landscape? I agree with Kamiya: what exalts will win favor, and in a world dense with people eager to be involved with art but, unfortunately and undemocratically, without talent, there existed this need: to justify the labors of the academic and critical class.
Now we have an unending rain of essays on how Kafka’s Odradek is about sodomy and need of an army of graduate students to parse and respond to them in their own jargon. This is part of the academic-industrial complex! Complexity of language is their technique for obscuring how little is really being said, and I think many of the participants can even recognize how astray we’ve gone; but just as with the military-industrial complex, there are forces at work here that none can contain: ego, pride, student loan debt, etc.
Update: with apologies for the polemical nature of this post, I want to note that this is what I did with most of my education. I don’t mean to offend.
[Flash 9 is required to listen to audio.]
Toots & the Maytals - It’s You.
I think this song is fun, even if it lodges itself in my mind and won’t depart for anything.
Excerpts from "There Is No Natural Religion," part two, by William Blake
Man’s perceptions are not bound by organs of perception; he perceives more than sense can discover. Reason, or the ratio of all we have already known, is not the same that it shall be when we know more. The bounded is loathed by its possessor: the same dull round, even of the universe, would soon become a mill with complicated wheels.
Application: He who sees the infinite in all things sees God. He who sees the ratio (reason) only sees himself only. Therefore God becomes as we are, that we may be as he is.
