One-Way Street

Save the Sentence!

As part of my occasional series on the ongoing death of Western culture, today I'd like to warn you about the death of the English sentence.  This dire news comes from the Librarian of Congress, James Billington, who evidently doesn't have enough to do.  "I see creeping inarticulateness," he tells the Washington Post's Linton Weeks. He explains, "We are moving toward the language used by computer programmers and air traffic controllers. Language as a method of instruction, not a portal into critical thinking."

Uh, isn't that last clause a sentence fragment?

Anyway, evidence for the death of the English sentence can be found everywhere. In my job I expend more mental energy decoding emails than anything else I do.  My all-time favorite was this gem from a senior vice president. I'd emailed a request to purchase a piece of software that we needed to complete a project on time. There was some urgency to the matter, I stressed. Her response, in full, read as follows: "Decision=ASAP."

Spoken English is even worse. I work with a lot of computer programmers, many of them from Chennai. Developers, like most technically-oriented people, tend not to have strong language skills, even in their native language. Many of the Indian developers speak in a odd polyglot consisting in equal measures Britishisms ("I'm not going to the company Christmas party. I'm not doing any bum dancing!") and Americanisms (lots, and lots, of "likes"). One distinctive speech pattern is the present progressive tense, which appears most often at the end of a sentence: "Somewhere there is a problem we are having."

Still, from what I've seen the state of the sentence isn't as dire as the state of the proper noun. The enterprise edition of Microsoft Office contains a random capitalization feature in which ordinary Nouns are suddenly and Unpredictably converted into Proper Nouns.  Sometimes after reading a business case from an MBA I picture that person going home and telling her spouse, "I love you, First Husband!"

People have been complaining about the decline of English since the 18th century, when the language was first codified and standardized. Elizabethan England, one of the most glorious periods of speech and writing in the history of the English language, was almost entirely ignorant of standardize spelling and punctuation. The Jacobeans didn't fret over the decline of English from its 16th-century high point; they had no standardized version with which to compare their speech practices. Amelia C. Murdoch, president of the National Museum of Language in College Park, Maryland, reminds us, "Language, all language, undergoes constant change. And technological developments that impinge on language inevitably cause changes in language, all kinds of changes." 

Billington and the decline of English crowd aren't just ignoring the history of the language. Disparaging a particular language practice is the same as disparaging the people who practice it. The self-appointed guardians of culture are constantly warning us about the unlettered masses trying to deprive us of what makes us human--the ability to think. This belief leads to one conclusion: Only the guardians of culture know the proper way to think. But history shows that what binds us together as people is the varied, ever-changing, imprecise language of everyday speech.

Elegant Graffiti

Boyd Tonkin of The Independent finds a terrific metaphor for Arab writing: the Moorish citadel in Granada, its interior covered with ornamental poetry in Arabic. Tonkin calls it "Europe's most elegant graffiti," and like graffiti, its florid craftsmanship is illegible to the public at large. It is a crime of writing. Arab writing has long flouted the law; now it is being asked to exculpate real and imagined crimes.

Despite Arab governments' support for literature across the region, writers are still jailed. Western news feeds are full of tales of repression, like the arrest and conviction of an Egyptian blogger who writes under the name Kareem Amer (presumably, he was imprisoned under his real name). He was convicted of insulting President Hosni Mubarak and an Egyptian university in his blog. Interestingly, insulting the university carried the stiffer penalty. Religious militants lurk everywhere, ready to harass anyone who writes a single heterodox line.

When despotic Arab governments aren't throwing writers into jail, they're handing out lavish awards. Two major literary prizes have recently been established: the International Prize for Arabic Fiction, commonly known as the "Arab Booker," and the Sheikh Zayed Awards, which are part of the emirate of Abu Dhabi's determined attempt to create a new Granada on the Persian Gulf.  All cultural awards are promotional to one degree or another, and these awards are no exceptions. These awards have raised the profile of Arab writing internationally, but equally important, they provide official endorsement of the novel as a genre, something the novel hasn't always enjoyed in a culture that has long considered the novel an irredeemably Western form of writing. Unlike lyric poetry, which is closer to the Muslim tradition of oracular verse, the novel is prosaic and secular, two qualities still regarded with suspicion in a region plagued by bureaucratic disinformation and a religious fundamentalism that has replaced secular dissent as the most popular form of resistance against tyranny.

After describing the daunting obstacles Arab writers continue to face, Tonkin argues we need to pay attention to the new Arab writing. By beginning his discussion of Arabic writing in Granada, the site of a European victory in the clash of civilizations, Tonkin suggests that translated Arabic literature is important because of "the perpetually rocky relationship between the Arab and European worlds" in which "[i]mperial bureaucrats, soldiers and scholars on one side; radical nationalists, pious militants and oil-rich oligarchs on the other – all have had their various axes to grind, and to wield." These crimes will be exculpated by a writing that is itself outside the law. Arab literature is the new "elegant graffiti," both illegal and admired, cryptic yet expressive, collective but inscribed where it isn't welcome.

Archive Fever

Every year brings another pile of books on Walter Benjamin. As one might imagine, these volumes are of uneven quality and usefulness, but one new book stands out from the crowd. Walter Benjamin's Archive, a companion book to a 2006 exhibit in Berlin, presents samples from the vast number of notebooks, photographs, collectables, postcards, and manuscripts Benjamin left behind when he died in 1940.

Each chapter of Archive focuses on a different aspect of the archive. The most interesting chapter examines his notebooks, including his date book pictured above. Notebooks are now more of a metaphor than an everyday working tool--the MacBook Air is essentially a $3,000 Moleskine--and cheap digital storage allows us to see writing as almost infinitely extensible. It's surprising, and a little touching, to see Benjamin writing in his tiny, precise script over every square centimeter on every scrap of paper he could lay his hands on. He owned some Moleskine-like leather-bound notebooks, but sometimes he resorted to writing on both sides of a doctor's prescription pad.

The longest chapter in the book focuses on Benjamin's notes on his son's language acquisition. Benjamin's interest in children (another chapter is devoted to his collection of Russian toys) is one of the most incongruous aspects of his character. It's hard to imagine Hegel following his children around, recording their every utterance, as Benjamin did with his son. This section isn't especially interesting, except for the glimpses it offers into Benjamin's chaotic and troubled home life. Benjamin records, without a hint of self-consciousness, his son Stefan imitating his father by stomping around their Berlin apartment, yelling at everyone to be quiet because Daddy is trying to work.

The children's language chapter, as well as some of the brief and somewhat haphazardly assembled last chapters, expose the limits of the book's origins as an accompaniment to a museum exhibit. The edition's four editors were clearly primarily interested in rummaging through Benjamin's published work to find rubrics through which they could display the material in the archive. The book doesn't follow the familiar outlines of Benjamin's themes. The Trauerspiel book, for instance, is barely mentioned, and neglected altogether is Benjamin's early involvement with youth movements, which may explain his later interest in children. Still, Benjamin himself would have appreciated a representation of his career as a collection of things.

There's at least one unexpected gem in the book: a page from Benjamin's notes for the original essay on the Paris Arcades. (Disclosure: I did my dissertation on the Arcades Project, so I'm interested in everything to do with it.) Michael Schwarz explains Benjamin's working methods for the Arcades Project, which eventually grew to include 10,000 notes, most of them quotations from obscure nineteenth-century sources. A few pages of notes are reproduced, and another chapter contains Germaine Krull's evocative photographs of the Arcades, but otherwise the sampling from Benjamin's largest project--and his most intense exploration of the idea of the archive--is disappointingly slim.

But Walter Benjamin's Archive succeeds in conveying Benjamin's life-long interest in allowing things to speak for themselves. The Surrealists and the Baroque allegorists taught Benjamin to search for the buried life of culture, to pay attention to all those things we once thought were essential but later forgot about. By showing us two poles of Benjamin's life--the stable organization of the collection on the one hand, and the spontaneous, constantly evolving text of the notebook on the other--the book illustrates the drama of the life of the mind lived during a time of madness.   

Fauxbama

Tomorrow night Saturday Night Live will debut its new Fauxbama, played by Donald Glover. In terms of true misanthropic rage so crucial to the genre, SNL's political satire was surpassed long ago by The Daily Show. Nevertheless, the SNL presidential caricature is a tradition in American television, and the choice of the actor to play the president has more cultural importance than the president's choice to serve as, say, the Secretary of Energy.

Although SNL has always satirized the candidates in the presidential campaigns, Fauxbama seems to be debuting prematurely. Obama still seems like an undefined figure, and because he's the only Democratic presidential candidate with any wit (the usually wit-challenged Republicans have two witty guys on their side, McCain and Huckabee), Obama has already co-opted any comic foibles that may have emerged so far. Here in Illinois Obama has been visible as a workaday politician for years, and so far the comic material is pretty thin. In fact, Obama can be kind of boring. His acceptance speech after winning his seat in the US Senate in 2004, for instance, was notable mostly for poor Michelle Obama holding her exhausted daughter as Obama droned on about airport expansion, or whatever he was talking about. Michelle looked like she wanted to say out loud, "Let's wrap it up, Barack. This kid's getting heavy."

What hasn't emerged yet in Obama is that kernel  of identity around which a comic persona can be formed. By kernel of identity I mean something more existential than a mere foible. Rather, the basis of SNL political satire is usually some personality trait that can't be reduced any further: Gerald Ford's clumsiness, George H.W. Bush's unpredictable syntax, Bill Clinton's body. At first glance this trait functions to deflate an important political figure--a classic strategy in political satire. But on SNL this trait takes on a different dimension. Through repetition the trait becomes less familiar and more mysterious. Will Ferrell's George Bush prompts us to ask, What's that smirk really trying to tell us?

The deep structure of SNL's political satire becomes clearer when one considers its least typical presidential caricature, Phil Hartman's Ronald Reagan. Every other presidential caricature is built upon a minor but immediately visible quality. Only the faux Reagan appeared as somebody completely different from his public persona. Hartman played Reagan as both a vague, genial fool and, as soon as the cameras moved on, as a crack schemer, directing his underlings with all the gruff certainty of a mob boss. It's significant that the most genuinely transformative president we've had since 1975 had, as his SNL comic identity, a political figure who actually changed things.

By contrast, every other president's caricature expresses the futility of trying to change American political culture. Every joke starts off in a different place, but always comes back to that mysterious, unchanging kernel of selfhood: Gerald Ford always falls down. A Saturday Night Live broadcast is a microcosm of the modern presidency. A commanding figure dominates a very small stage for a brief period of time, offering the promise of something new when all we're looking for is the same joke repeated over and over again. Then it's cut to commercial, and the next cliché is trotted out and ridiculed for our reassurance.

Bricked

When I heard that Herbie Hancock's River: The Joni Letters won the album of the year Grammy, I was inspired to revisit two musicians that I've always admired more than truly enjoyed. I interested was piqued further after reading Ben Ratliff's thoughtful remarks about River and the whole idea of a jazz album winning such a high-profile award. Alas, the morning of the Grammy awards my iPod bricked. It now feebly alternates between the Apple logo and an image of a sick iPod, and now my iMac wants nothing to do with it. Without an iPod I can't buy anything on iTunes  because my iMac's hard drive is filled, so I've reached the physical limits of my music collection. I can't buy anything new.

I have another iPod, a 2 gig Nano I use almost exclusively for running, using the Nike + system to track my runs. But I have something like 3,000 songs in my collection, so using the Nano as my primary iPod requires some tiresome song management, which is precisely why I continued using my old 40 gig click wheel. Even though I couldn't take it out in public without a slight sense of shame at its monochromatic screen and bulky profile, I kind of liked the click wheel model: it was the last iPod with a perfectly proportioned interface. It's still the most elegant iPod.

Of course, a bricked iPod means a trip to the Apple store for a shiny new iPod Touch, but Apple's technology is temporarily ahead of itself. With the new 32 gig flash drive the iPod Touch finally has a practical storage capacity, but the new model is $500 and history shows that Apple lowers its prices after the initial buyer frenzy. As cool as the Touch is, I'm resentful about my click wheel bricking almost three years to the day after I purchased it. With its complex interface and feature overload, how long will a Touch last?

I wonder how many people still maintain iPod playlists a year or two after purchase. I did, but lately I've gotten lazy and relied on the shuffle feature and a manual free-association trip through my collection. Ironically, my iPod ceased working during a period in which I was consciously trying to use it regularly again. I hadn't grown bored with the unit itself; I'd grown bored with my music. That's why I've lost interest in selecting songs to go on my Nano and I haven't made a playlist in a long time. The same phenomenon has occurred in iPhoto. I can't remember the last time we published a photo album online.

Call me a gullible Mac Head, but I suspect that a new iPod will renew my enthusiasm for my music collection, just as a new iMac--another major purchase I need to make very soon--will revive my interest in digital photography. Apple detractors claim, with some justification, that the company's marketing strategy is mostly about making people junk their perfectly functional iPods and iMacs for incrementally better models. And yet I wonder if new technologies have a defamiliarization effect, making our old familiar content strange enough to force us to look at it again, as if we were seeing it for the first time. The Touch interface is genuinely new, and we'll be seeing a lot of that sort of thing in future computing devices, but for the most part the critics are right when they charge Apple's latest releases are more eye candy than anything substantively new. When genres become more and more dependent on the technologies of their mediums, they run the risk of suffering from the same obsolescence as the underlying technology. We cease to see (or hear) cultural objects very clearly. Maybe from time to time we need to change the window through which we access our content.

I just hope that the price of the 32 gig iPod Touch comes down before Jason Moran releases a new album, or I don't know what I'm going to do.

The Noughties

Now that there's only two years left in the decade, it's time to start thinking about the zeitgeist. The Guardian's John Harris looks at the Noughties from the point of view of our future selves and sees the 1990s. He writes, "the spirit of the age also revolves around a big paradox: that in an era of supposedly rapid change, our popular culture is defined by a mass refusal to let go of the past." He cites a number of examples of rampant nostalgia in British and American culture, including the Police's recent US tour, the highest-grossing in the nation in 2007, and the delirium surrounding the Led Zeppelin reunion concert in London.

Harris has a point: on a day when we're breathlessly awaiting Steve Jobs' keynote speech announcing the latest incremental improvement in Apple's product line, our cultural preferences are often mired in the recent past. Is the backward-looking culture of the 2000s caused by broad cultural exhaustion? A culture industry that puts predictable profit streams ahead of innovation? Or is it a symptom of unfocused dread, like the Happy Days nostalgia of the 1970s? Harris solves the technology-nostalgia paradox by arguing that technology itself enables nostalgia:

[F]ixating on the past is an in-built aspect of the human condition, but limited technology used to keep it in check. We had space and productive capacity only for so much stuff: a hidden hand cleared the cultural world of outdated clutter. And now? Bandwidth and memory grow exponentially, TV channels extend into the distance, and providing the means by which the classes of 77, 87 and 97 can get back in touch is a cinch. The same technology that we once thought would propel us into a fast-changing future stokes nostalgic appetites and condemns us to a present so laden with repetition that it's beginning to feed back on itself.

Let's assume for a moment that Harris is right, that nostalgia is the dominant cultural form of the 2000s. I'm not convinced that this is the case; I think he's placing too much emphasis on the first two terms in the dominant-residual-emergent process of culture. The whole new/nostalgia paradigm is too crude to describe broad cultural trends.

So we're too nostalgic for our own good--remind me again why nostalgia is such a bad thing.

What if nostalgia were really a means to make sense of what is first experienced as an isolated cultural phenomenon. What we're seeing may be a new way of interpellating ourselves into history. In traditional historiography there's a buffer zone between the present and the past of school textbooks. This buffer zone is the period of living memory, now preserved in vast databases, and constantly rewritten as vividly and spontaneously as lived life.

Imagine devoting hours developing one's Facebook profile only to have the next generation--and the generations now seem to be separated by five years rather than twenty--forsake the site as hopelessly passé, a mass movement fueled by mad texters and people with too busy to properly care for their own narcissism that's run its course. It's easy to imagine Facebook nostalgia sites popping up as people try to make sense of what the phenomenon was about.  Rather than endlessly revisiting one's online social network, people may be trying to figure out what they were looking for in the first place.  They may also be trying to convince themselves that Facebook was more than a meaningless cultural fad, more than a ghostly remnant of a culture of transience.

An entirely new culture every decade may be more than we want, need, or are able to make sense of. My own preliminary candidate for emergent cultural phenomenon that we'll later define as most fully representing the 2000s is political discourse itself--the bitter partisan divisions of the 1960s without the amelioration of the Beatles.  But I guess that would be backward-looking.

My 2007

This isn't a best of list. I wouldn't pretend to have read or seen or listened enough to designate anything as the best of its kind.  Rather, I've put together an idiosyncratic list of the books, films, buildings and technologies that I learned the most from in 2007.

Santiago Calatrava, The Chicago Spire. (Also here and here and here and here.)  Calatrava's 2,000-foot twisting tower is a high risk, high reward proposition. It could be the point around which the entire skyline coheres--what the Sears Tower was supposed to have been but never was. Or it could be an overweening presence that Chicagoans will be faintly embarrassed about, like an impulse purchase that we later regretted. Or it could be something in between, like the fat-man-in-the-bathtub renovation of Soldiers Field that we've learned to live with. Whatever it turns out to be, the Spire is emblematic of a renewed sense of architectural daring in the birthplace of modernist architecture.

The Kindle. Tech nerds have already dismissed Amazon's ebook reader based on a quick glance at Engadget (one wag said the Kindle looked like it was designed by the prop manager for Space 1999), but avid readers love it--at least those who have been lucky enough to get their hands on one. The furious debate about the Kindle has revealed how we read in 2007. It turns out that a lot of people are already reading on screens. It also turns out that people want to read more than books on an ebook reader. They want all the disparate material they read on a PC--HTML pages, PDFs, emails, Word documents, blogs--on a device that's as portable and easy on the eyes as a hardcover book. The Kindle has the potential to be not just the first commercially successful ebook reader, but an extension of the Internet as the new center of the public sphere. In other words, the Kindle isn't the death of the book, as some have feared, but the means to turn the Internet into a book.

John Armstrong, Love, Life, Goethe: Lessons of the Imagination From the Great German Poet. This was the year I started reading Goethe seriously, and he stands out from the vein of post-romantics, modernists, and post-modernists I usually read not just in the awe-inspiring equipoise of his prose and poetry, but in his exemplary life. Michel Foucault and many others have pondered how to break down the barriers between art and life, but Goethe actually did it. No wonder Nietzsche cited him as one of the prototypes of the Übermensch.

Daniel Kraus, Musician. Continuing with the theme of art and life, Daniel Kraus's documentary on the Chicago jazz musician Ken Vandermark is a clear-eyed look at the reality of a working artist's daily life. Most profiles of artists in the media arise from the appearance of an artwork and, as a result, tend to be little more than extensions of the publicity apparatus. Kraus's film doesn't try to get to the "real" person behind the work. Instead, Kraus takes a sociological approach by showing the prosaic struggles necessary to maintain a career as a creative artist in the early twenty-first century. And Kraus doesn't neglect the art: Musician also conveys the power of Vandermark's performances.

Michael Thomas, Man Gone Down. Junot Diaz's The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao was more fun to read, and Joshua Ferris's Then We Came to the End struck closer to home,  but Man Gone Down was the most moving novel I read all year. None of these novels were flawless: Wao had structural gaps, End resolved itself with a creaky plot device, and Man could have been 50 pages shorter. But each was distinguished by its narrative voice: Diaz's logorrheaic free indirect style, Ferris's innovative second person, and Thomas's realist first person. But of the three I think Thomas's novel will turn out to be the most influential and enduring. Plus, Thomas understands the vernacular of the tradition in which he's working better than Diaz or Ferris. Lots of novelists have tried to emulate the nineteenth-century novel form, usually by foisting all kinds of colorful minor characters upon the reader in misguided imitation of Dickens. Thomas takes an entirely different tack, combining Richard Wright with William Dean Howells--existentialist dread with a keen appreciation of New York City as spectacle. Man Gone Down is about seeing and invisibility as well as the city as a place of constant threat and unsuspected opportunity.

Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Berlin Alexanderplatz. Okay, so this is a DVD release of a made-for-TV miniseries, but Criterion's DVD package is a major event in the film world nevertheless. (Besides, this has been an extraordinarily busy year for me and I haven't seen nearly as many films as I wanted to. DVDs have pretty much been my cinema for 2007.) Fassbinder's 15-hour adaptation of Alfred Döblin's 1929 novel is demanding on several levels, not the least of which is Fassbinder's manic dramatic sensibility.  In its eccentric, excessive ambition, Berlin is one of the touchstones of modernist European cinema. Because of its formidable length and poor video transfers, it's never been accessible to a wide audience. The Criterion DVDs solved the poor video transfer problem, at least.

Alex Ross, The Rest Is Noise. I'll have more on this book in a future post--I'm nearly done reading it. It could have been called Everything You Want to Know about Modern Classical Music But Were Afraid to Ask Lest You Have to Sit Through a Clanking, Screeching Avant-Garde Work for Four Orchestras and a Barking Dog. This book has made a lot of "best of" lists because Ross managed to execute the daunting task he set before himself--tell the history of the twentieth century through its music, and make the history a pleasure to read. More importantly, he makes us actually want to listen to those unloved experimental pieces from classical music's post-Stravinsky period.

The Classicists Strike Back

The Chicago Tribune's Blair Kamin reports on an obscure battle in the endless war between the traditionalists and the modernists. Last year the U.S. General Services  Administration chose Thomas Gordon Smith, once the dean of the Notre Dame  School of Architecture, as its chief architect. Smith was a neo-classicist determined to put a stop to the rampant modernism infecting public buildings--the Thom Mayne Syndrome, if you will. Smith wanted government buildings to return to the classical style of the early Republic--forgetting not only twentieth-century modernism, but also nineteenth-century Beaux Arts style. However, the modernists won this particular skirmish, forcing the GSA to relegate Smith to an advisory role.

Then Carol Ross Barney (I seem to recall that she was the first woman to head up an architecture firm in Chicago, but I could be wrong about that) was chosen to design a federal building and courthouse in Tuscaloosa, Alabama. Republican Senator Richard Shelby objected to Barney's abstract take on classicism. Perhaps he found it too feminine. The job went to another Chicago architect, Thomas Beeby, whose Harold Washington Library Center is so aggressively classicist it's actually kind of lurid.

I don't know what Senator Shelby and the GSA had in mind for Tuscaloosa, but I would imagine they would be happy with an architectural version of the Roman legion classicism of Jean-Jacques David's Oath of the Horatii. There's nothing inherently wrong with classicism. As Richard Meier and Mies van der Rohe have both demonstrated, classicism and modernism aren't irreconcilable. But in the current context of our now tattered imperial ambitions and widespread cultural reaction, the GSA's turn toward the classical recalls an early flash point in the battle against the modern, Weimar Germany. Walter Benjamin dismissed Weimar neo-classicism as a "symptom of reaction," a revolt against modernity led by conservative elites. Benjamin regarded post-Renaissance classicism as inherently deceptive, flattering power with false totalities. Baroque allegory was one of several movements that tried to cut through its specious harmonies. Baudelairan proto-modernism was another.  Benjamin was heavily influenced by early modernism and the baroque as he refined his critical practice in the 1920's. Benjamin used a baroque eye to recognize how conservatives were using classicism to show "the compatibility of Weimar and Sedan," of  traditional German culture and militarism--years before Hitler made the combination the house style of the Reich.

The Weimar Republic existed in times even more politically charged than our own, and most likely the GSA classicists simply want people to trudge up marble steps before they do government business. But it's important to note that for all the objections voiced against modernism (ugliness, obscurity, reckless indifference to popular tastes and the messiness of history), classicism has its own baggage. It's not just a bunch of stately columns.

The Spectacular Transience of Dubai

The Washington Post's Philip Kennicott visits Dubai, the most spectacular, extravagant, tawdry, and dismaying construction project in the world. While Iran invests its petro-dollars in nuclear weapons to menace Norman Podhoretz and security forces to beat up university students, Dubai invests in giant buildings situated at the crossroads of the twenty-first and the ninth centuries.  Frank Gehry, Zaha Hadid, Jean Nouvel and Tadao Ando have all designed buildings for Dubai, and not one of their designs makes any sense. The city's most famous project is the Burj Dubai, the tallest free-standing structure in the world, which rises from the forest of construction cranes as gracefully and monstrously as a dragon. Kennicott is so overwhelmed by the profusion of galling forms in the emirate that he can only throw up his hands and declare the end of civilization as we know it, remarking it's "as if the whole trajectory of Western architecture, indeed, the project of Western civilization, is so yesterday. Dubai presents itself as a new crossroads of civilization and an unrepentant borrower and collector of the best. The dissonance is the aesthetic."

Dubai's wild hodgepodge of architectural forms--"globes atop boxes, teardrops mounted on pillars, bent slabs fastened to concrete goal posts"--and giganticism are hallmarks of a historical obscurantism typical of fascist enterprises. The city is paying attention to preserving local architectural styles (a handful of 100-year-old mud huts) and improving conditions for its masses of foreign workers (it's now mandatory to include one window per room). Mostly, though, as Kennicott points out, the government is trying to send a message to the world: "Look at what enlightened, corporate, efficient and non-democratic government can do."

Forget all the nonsense about Islamofascism. Dubai is a form of corporate fascism instantly recognizable to the West. Furthermore, the city's feverish desire to create "instantly iconic" buildings will result in eye-catching but transient forms. Hitler liked stadiums while Mussolini preferred ersatz Roman forums, but Dubai's fascist model is the airport. In place of roaring masses, Dubai showcases transience itself--the constant movement of corporate managers, despots, manual laborers, capital, and commodities--as the irresistible power in the globalized economy.

You Ain’t Heard Nothin' Yet

Warner Home Video digs deep into its corporate vault and releases a restored The Jazz Singer on DVD.  Dave Kehr reminds us that Al Jolson's famous line, "You ain't heard nothin' yet," didn't actually blow up the silent cinema all by itself. A year before The Jazz Singer's premiere a John Barrymore vehicle called Don Juan was released with a complete Vitaphone musical track. The program on August 6, 1926 featured a brief speech by Will H. Hays, then the president of the MPPDA. Kehr writes, "it was Hays's flat Midwestern voice that touched off the initial sensation, not Jolson's wildly emotive blackface balladeering."

The transition to sound was more complicated than popular histories of cinema would have it. Sound technology had been available to Hollywood since 1925. Color had been available since 1917, when the first color film (The Gulf Between) was released to popular indifference.  It's ironic that these technological innovations first appeared in absolutely retrograde cultural products. Jolson made a specialty of playing figures either caught between traditional folk culture and the new mass culture (the cantor's son in The Jazz Singer) or firmly planted in a nineteenth-century theatrical form (Jolson singing in blackface in the short "A Plantation Act"). This bit of Ungleichzeitigkeit, Ernst Bloch's term usually translated as "uneven development," was endemic to the time.  Instances of uneven development can be seen as battlegrounds in which older cultural practices (religious music, Vaudeville) are incorporated into newer ones (the cinema) in order to buttress prevailing ideologies. The sound cinema ushered in a new age of film while quashing an experimental cinema that exploited the non-natural storytelling possibilities of silent film. Dziga Vertov fought against the naturalizing tendencies of sound cinema in Enthusiasm (1931), but as soundtrack postsynchronization techniques were perfected in the late '20's and early '30's, the classical style consolidated its hold on American filmmaking.   

Living the Digital Life

Remember the days before the iPhone? Some indispensable part of our culture arrives at the same pace Apple releases major updates to OSX. Google, YouTube, MySpace, blogs, and the iPhone all arrived very recently, and while it's easy for most people over the age of 12 to remember a time before they became fixtures in the culture, there's hardly any point in doing so.  Le mode retro, as the French called the vaguely historical style of the '80's and '90's, has itself gone out of style. Appearing immediately before the Internet became a ubiquitous force, le mode retro now seems to reflect a period in which we'd grown bored with the pace of technological change. Now that the pace has picked up considerably, people seem to be taking a more forward-looking stance. We're looking forward to the next upgrade in our culture's operating system.

But how do we define this moment, right now? Is Fredric Jameson's Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism still of any help to us? Is this still a postmodern culture? Mark Poster's Information Please: Culture and Politics in the Age of Digital Machines isn't as ambitious as Jameson's landmark study, but Poster also attempts a symptomatic reading of contemporary culture in an attempt to identify exact what has changed since the days when we called information for phone numbers. Unfortunately, Poster is more comfortable reading Arjun Appadurai than he is surfing the Web, so he doesn't have many insights to offer about how life has changed now that we can watch The Office while sitting in our cubicles.

Poster's basic thesis about culture and politics in the age of digital machines is we're experiencing an intensification of the decentralization, deterritorialization, and flattening of the difference between high and low cultures that Jameson (and a whole lot of other people) identified as the salient qualities of postmodernist culture. His overall thesis isn't likely to send Cultural Studies students running back to the seminar rooms, but there are some useful insights in the book. Perhaps his most ground-breaking claim is that post-colonialism, as it's conventionally defined in the academy, is over with. The subaltern can now be found everywhere in the developed world, and she has a Gmail account. A claim with broader application is Poster's suggestion that culture is now "open source," which is a good way to think about how literary and film cultures are changing with the rise of the blogosphere.

Poster knows there's such a thing as blogs, but he gives no evidence that he's ever read one, or even done a Google search. His maladroit use of technical terminology is telling.  For instance, he insists on using the term "networked computer" to mean the Internet. While not every microprocessor is connected to the Internet, the networked/non-networked distinction isn't one that someone in e-commerce would make. Furthermore, Poster worries about things that aren't worth worrying about, such as private corporate networks. He warns darkly, "The massive flows of capital that course through the fiber-optic tentacles and radio waves are far more influential in undermining the power of the nation-state than the fledgling steps of netizen politics." Actually, the data that flows through extranets and other secure networks is the most regulated data on the Internet. It's your bank records and your medical files--the stuff you'd rather your fellow netizens didn't poke their noses into. The irony of launching into a discussion of identity theft only a few pages later is lost on Poster.

Granted, the academic publishing system (Poster's book is published by Duke University Press) is a hand-cranked press, and serious intellectual discussion about contemporary culture is tricky because insights can grow stale while waiting for peer reviews. The very few examples Poster cites from digital culture are actually pretty good, like the terrific Citibank ad campaign featuring ordinary people who appear to have made outrageously uncharacteristic purchases. Still, instead of devoting a chapter to identity theft, what about looking at a CEO's blog and comparing the identity constructed there with his identity constructed in the annual report?

What happens to us when we call up Firefox or open up Outlook? How can we describe the culture presented to us in a Google search? Is it fundamentally different than the one we watched on television when there were only three networks? Are our sentences still schizophrenic, our movies still made for glances, our music a collection of samples, our buildings citations of the past? Has YouTube changed anything important? These questions remain unanswered.

How Is Your Short Story Feeling Today?

It seems that we can no longer talk about the state of a cultural form without talking about its death. I can't think of a single cultural form in perfect health: rap is dead, rock is dead but doesn't know it, jazz has died a thousand deaths, classical musical will die as soon as its last band of listeners finally totters into the grave, the novel dies once a generation, movies can't last much longer, television should have been aborted at birth, and architecture is alive and well, which can only mean it will die soon.

The short story, Stephen King tells us, is alive, but not so well. Fresh from a stint as the guest editor for The Best American Short Stories 2007, King testifies that he read too many stories that were

airless, somehow, and self-referring. These stories felt show-offy rather than entertaining, self-important rather than interesting, guarded and self-conscious rather than gloriously open, and worst of all, written for editors and teachers rather than for readers.

King claims that the readership for these stories are

other writers and would-be writers who are reading the various literary magazines . . . not to be entertained but to get an idea of what sells there. And this kind of reading isn’t real reading, the kind where you just can’t wait to find out what happens next (think “Youth,” by Joseph Conrad, or “Big Blonde,” by Dorothy Parker). It’s more like copping-a-feel reading. There’s something yucky about it.

King, who doesn't seem to have an off switch, makes a valid point, then pushes it too far. Suspense has been out of fashion in high brow American fiction since at least the 1920's, when suspense in absence of any other literary value ceased to strike readers as artful. Sensitive readers will find suspense in the smallest clues, and those are the readers for whom the best writers create fiction.

That most of these readers are themselves writers is neither yucky nor surprising.  Reading and writing are not separable acts. The reader who doesn't write is a leaky vessel best suited for the unsubtle novels of King's "glamour pony" writers James Patterson and Danielle Steel.

Yes, workshopped fiction is weak tea, but most American literary magazines are sustained by it. Writing workshops provide the bulk of material and the majority of readers for independent fiction publishing.  Stephen King can publish high-impact short stories only after years of releasing the monsters of his id, and he's only now cultivating the favor of a literary establishment made up mostly of--uh oh--other writers trying to figure out what sells.

Play Ball

A few years ago Philip Roth caused a stir when he announced that he was giving up rooting for the Mets and switching to the Yankees. "Why should I continue to feel obligated to schoolyard allegiances?" he asked.

How do we choose which teams to root for? For many people, it's a matter of geographical fate. I was born and raised north of Chicago's Madison Avenue; therefore, I'm a Cub fan. Move my childhood only a few miles to the south, and I would be a White Sox fan. But I spent a good portion of my adulthood--eleven years--in Philadelphia, so I'm also a Philliies fan. When I walk around the Chicago area with my Phillies cap, especially downtown, I get a lot of mildly suspicious looks, as if I were flying the flag of a foreign nation. It's not quite like being a transplanted Chicagoan in Wisconsin, where Packers fans regard a Bears fan like he's in a terrorist cell, but the hostility pops up every so often. Walking around the Loop one day in my Phillies hat a grandmotherly type snapped at me, "You can't wear that around here."  Then my family complained when I gave my son a Phillies hat, a souvenir from a business trip to Philly. Finally, unwilling to interpellate my son into the vagaries of my own biography, I bought him a Cubs hat for his third birthday—interpellating him, of course, into another ideology. But I'm glad to see that he prefers wearing his Phillies hat.

My son knows what baseball is, but he has no concept of the Major Leagues or even teams. One trip to Wrigley Field will imprint the Cubs on his brain forever, just as it did me when I was six years old. But why should we get assigned our fandom identities before we choose a career or a life partner, and why can't we freely choose who we want to root for without having to explain our choice all the time? Why can't I be a Cardinals fan, a much more sensible choice given the histories of the Cubs and the Phillies? We think of America as a society of self-fashioning in which we freely create our identities in a particularly linear manner. Recall that Huckleberry Finn, generally regarded as the first truly American novel, is the story of a boy who leaves home and doesn't look back. So playground allegiances shouldn't be so hard to shake, but they are.

Maybe we need some identities that we don't choose, that are imposed upon us at birth and never leave us, for better or for worse. Maybe we all have a psychical bartering system that recognizes some immutable but unfortunate identities while allowing us to keep all of the other identities more provisional. I'm a Phillies fan partly to recognize a discontinuity in my life--the Chicago to which I returned a few years ago is different, and not altogether better, than the Chicago I left--and partly to keep open the possibility that I could move someplace else. To have the freedom to choose where one lives also means that there's always another, better, truer home someplace else. Sports team allegiances are a form of localized identity, and as such they're major markers in the narratives we construct about ourselves.

So yesterday was an interesting day: the Bears lost, badly, but the Phillies beat out the hated Mets for the Eastern Division crown. The Cubs clinched a few days ago in their typically diffident way, unlike the '93 Phillies, who charged right into the World Series. There's a realistic chance that the Cubs and the Phillies could meet for the NLCS, and should that happen, I'll suffer a lot of cognitive dissonance, but I know that my old playground allegiances will reassert themselves. Sorry Phillies.

Theater of Punishment

Now that the flayed bodies of Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay have faded from view, we're now turning our attention to the invisible masses of incarcerated bodies in American prisons--2.2 million of them now. The Boston Globe's Christopher Shea writes about how the broken American penal system is gaining an increasingly larger share of public policy debates, spurred by the bad conscience that comes from the sheer scale of the problem: currently there are seven times the number of inmates in prison than in the early 1970's, when American cities were thought to be in an irreversible slide into decrepitude and criminality.

Shea begins his article with a Foucaldian analogy: "What if America launched a new New Deal and no one noticed? And what if, instead of lifting the unemployed out of poverty, this multibillion-dollar project steadily drove poor communities further and further out of the American mainstream?" He points out that the prison system is contiguous with society as a whole, although he limits his discussion to the problem of recidivism. Society's disciplinary function, in effect, has become inefficient. The arbitrariness of power has become too transparent, separating out poor minorities from society for as long as possible while reintegrating the more economically successful back into society. The crack gap is the most infamous example of this imbalance: a white guy snorting cocaine habit is far less likely to be locked up for long periods of time than a black guy with a crack pipe. Also, America is dumping 700,000 prisoners a year back into society with few resources devoted to making sure they're functioning, productive members of society.

Shea argues that prison reform will become a major topic in the public sphere very soon as a series of new books are released documenting the inadequacy of our penal system. However, with a new spate of vengeance films in current release and unresolved debates about how the US should protect itself from terrorist attacks--not to mention a crime rate creeping back up--indicate that Americans still aren't in a mood to grant much clemency.  After all, Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay are still in operation.

The incipient prison reform movement may have less to do with genuine concern for the unfortunate than a consequence of a long economic expansion finally running out of gas. Citing Foucault's Discipline and Punish is irresistible in this context, and Foucault points out that prison reform is most likely to occur in affluent times, when criminality tends to turn toward crimes against property, causing in turn a broad harshening of penalties. Rather than just simply throwing every crack head burglar in jail for the rest of his life, as we're essentially doing now, reformers wanted not to soften the law but to lessen (or sometimes merely to hide) the arbitrariness of justice. Foucault himself was a member of the Groupe d'information sur les Prisons (GIP), a prison reform group, but that didn't prevent him from being suspicious of prison reform movements in general, which he regarded as agents in the redistribution of power.

The whole idea of prison reform appeared when Europe replaced its theaters of punishment (burning witches at the stake, for instance) with the penal system, with its combination of optimistic rhetoric and panoptic technologies of surveillance. But in the last few years it seems like we've reverted back to a theater of punishment. What were Abu Ghraib and the Fox series 24 about other than the flaying of bodies in the name of American power? Maybe we're ready for something a little more decorous, something more consistent with our ideas of liberty. Or maybe power has become so diffuse, so disconnected from democratic practices, that when the time comes for us to decide what to do about our dysfunctional and unfair prison system we'll find ourselves as helpless and powerless as the people in jail.

Atlas Retired

Ayn Rand, the pinup girl of libertarian supercapitalists everywhere, is in the news again because one of her most famous acolytes, Alan Greenspan, has published his memoir, The Age of Turbulence. Greenspan began his career with a "sideman psychology," tinkering with economic equations and playing the clarinet. Then his life changed one day when he met the "quite plain to look at" Ayn Rand, from whom he learned to assume the seigniorial viewpoint of the great egoist, or as Greenspan puts it in his flat, bureaucratic way, take a "macro view" of the world. Inspired by Rand, Greenspan went on to become the model of the acolyte as Übermensch, sucking up to six presidents while terrorizing Wall Street titans. Interestingly, he seems to have preferred the least Randian presidents for whom he worked--Ford and Clinton--and has nothing good to say about the most Randian of our recent chief executives, George W. Bush.

There are many CEO's who found their inner John Galt by reading Ayn Rand, and not simply because of the "greed is good" ethos she espoused.  I suspect her appeal has more to do with the ease with which her principles can be recast into standard business guru bromides, such as "only quality work counted, not who you are" and "excellence should be your goal." What I find interesting isn't that a dead novelist outsells Jack Welch, but that so many members of the Lear jet set entertain fantasies of being Howard Roark building his temple to the spirit of Man while slapping down all the second-handers who crave government regulation, which Rand regarded as one OSHA rule away from Stalinism.

Yet it's hard to reconcile the image of the contemporary CEO, that emblematic figure of risk-averse managerial capitalism, with Rand's brooding neo-Romantic artists. The world that these Rand-besotted CEO's helped create in the fifty years since Atlas Shrugged was published more closely resembles Adorno's totally administered society than Rand's egoist paradise. And for all her fear that the democratic herds would trample over the game-changing visions of her capitalist-artists, Rand's own tastes were decidedly populist. Her writing career began with Cecil B. DeMille, and she was said to be a fan of both the Romantic melodramas of Victor Hugo and Charlie's Angels. What would Rand think of American Idol and the way it ruthlessly chews up hapless strivers and heroizes preening conformists? For that matter, what would she think of the standard CEO retirement package, like the multi-million dollar set of perks (fresh flowers every day, a box at Fenway) Jack Welch enjoys in his lecherous old age? Richard Halley should have scrapped his Fifth Symphony and dedicated himself to cobbling together a conglomerate with a steadily eroding stock price.

Traces of the True

Yesterday I introduced Jacques Rancière's The Politics of Aesthetics. I'd like to take a closer look at his remarks about modernism, which, in all their ambivalence, bear a striking resemblance to Walter Benjamin's sometimes contradictory writings on modernism.

The full force of Rancière's claim that the political and the aesthetic are intricately related becomes clear when he takes up the issue of technology and the aesthetic. "The aesthetic regime of the arts," he writes, "is the true name for what is designated by the incoherent label 'modernity.'" Under the aesthetic regime the arts freed themselves from all the old rules, but, at the same time, neglected mimesis, the salient quality of the previous regime, the poetic. The loss of mimesis meant art cut itself off from the "spheres of collective experience." This appeal to the experiential nature of art and modernity is familiar from Benjamin, as well as Oakeshott and the British Marxists of the 1960's, when Rancière was an Althusserian. The Marxist tradition, in its Western European manifestation, mourned the general decline of experience in modernity, when cultural and economic forms had less and less to do with how people actually lived. Worse, the abstraction of economic relations--and modern art--drained ordinary experience of all substance and precluded most forms of collective political action.

And yet, virtually all of Rancière's examples of the aesthetic intervening in the political occur under the aesthetic regime of the arts, when art had supposedly retreated from collective experience into contemplation of its own perfect forms. In his discussion of Walter Benjamin's "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction" Rancière expresses some reservations about Benjamin's essay, as everyone does, then goes on to acknowledge how much he's learned from it--again, as everyone does. Rancière makes the startling claim that literature and painting were, in effect, the true leading edge of modernity. Following Benjamin, Rancière points out that literature discovered the subject matter of photography before photographers did. In fact, the great Realists Balzac, Hugo and Flaubert broke down the opposition between high and low culture long before reproductive technologies did. Rancière concludes,

On the one hand, the technological revolution comes after the aesthetic revolution. On the other hand, however, the aesthetic revolution is first of all the honour acquired by the commonplace, which is pictorial and literary before being photographic or cinematic.

This is where Rancière is far more interesting than his complaints about modernism. He says that literature conducted a symptomatic investigation of history long before historians or scientists did. By extension (Rancière himself doesn't make these claims), the economic theory of Adam Smith isn't possible without the rise of the pastoral tradition in English poetry during the eighteenth century, nor psychology possible without the Romantic poets. Freud himself once admitted that everything he discovered about the human psyche was already known to the Romantics. Stephen Greenblatt shows us in his study of Columbus's diaries in "Marvelous Possessions" that the entire conquest of the New World was made possible by writing.

Rancière concludes his remarks about technology's role in modernity with a Benjaminian flourish. As Benjamin knew, we can no longer see ordinary life directly because we no longer trust mimesis. Instead, as Rancière puts it, "the ordinary becomes beautiful as a trace of the true. And the ordinary becomes a trace of the true if it is torn from its obviousness in order to become a hieroglyph, a mythological or phantasmagoric figure." First of all, this is a pretty succinct description of Benjamin's critical practice. Second, the social sciences, with their dry empiricism and disdain for the figurative, were in fact founded upon the phantasmagoric nature of the true, only they've forgotten this origin. Rancière accuses modern art of just this type of forgetting, only to explain how we can't see ordinary life, the fertile ground of the political, unless we see it aesthetically.

Rancière's The Politics of Aesthetics

We've been taught that Richard III is a political play, but what about A Midsummer's Night Dream? Picasso's Guernica is obviously political, but can we say the same thing about Malevich's Black Square? If we were inclined to talk about Black Square as a political work, how would we do that?

Jacques Rancière's The Politics of Aesthetics: The Distribution of the Sensible gives us a way to talk about the political meaning of art that's both powerful and limited. He makes historical comparisons easy, but his theory of art and the political doesn't offer a means to read a work closely for its political implications, although he doesn't preclude such a reading. He also regards modernism as something of a historical dead end, a view I don't share. Rancière's theory of art and politics is worth considering, at the very least, because it's elegant and simple. According to Rancière, art is one means by which a culture determines what is perceived and what enters language, as well as who gets to do the perceiving and writing or painting. In short, art represents a distribution of the sensible. He says that art

is a delimitation of spaces and times, of the visible and the invisible, of speech and noise, that simultaneously determines the place and the stakes of politics as a form of experience. Politics revolves around what is seen and what can be said about it, around who has the ability to see and the talent to speak, around the properties of spaces and the possibilities of time.

Art has its own way of doing and perceiving, and changes in aesthetics cause epochal changes in ways people perceive and reflect upon the world around them.

In this short book Rancière provides few examples that exemplify this or that distribution of the sensible, but two examples stand out, each marking an important change in Western culture.

The first involves the arrival of Renaissance quattrocento painting, which introduced three-dimensional space in order to capture the immediacy of live speech and action. Giotto and those who followed him eschewed not only the iconic work of the Middle Ages, but also Plato's separation of art and living. The return of two-dimensional pictoral space in Modernism, Rancière claims, reflects a technology-saturated world of pages, screens, and interfaces between different media, including different artistic genres. Malevich's Black Square, for example, depicts the interface between typography and painting, a prevalent theme in a lot of explicitly political art in High Modernism. That this interface now strikes us as commonplace doesn't vitiate its initial impact or the political gesture of pointing to emergent forms of life.

Modernism not only broke down the neo-classical separation of the arts from each other, it also incorporated new subject matter into high art. The plein air painters of the mid-nineteenth century were one strain of the massive re-distribution of the sensible during the 1800's. Another was literary Realism, which emerged around the same time. Rancière discusses the proto-modernist Flaubert, who refused to give any particular emphasis to anything that found its way into his fiction. When Madame Bovary and Sentimental Education first appeared, they were hailed as democratic, even revolutionary works, "despite Flaubert's aristocratic situation and political conformism," Rancière dryly adds. For Rancière, Flaubert's indifference to the bourgeois material of his fiction

is the result of a poetic bias: the equality of all subject matter is the negation of any relationship of necessity between a determined form and a determined content. Yet what is this indifference after all if not the very quality of everything that comes to pass on a written page, available to everyone's eyes? This equality destroys all of the hierarchies of representation and also establishes a community of readers as a community without legitimacy, a community formed only by the random circulation of the written word.

This last remark, with which I disagree, points to an affinity Rancière has with Walter Benjamin, whom I also disagree with about the possibility of the novel as the basis for community, or less abstractly, of exchangeable experience. In my next post I'll talk more about Rancière's debt to Walter Benjamin.

MTV’s Poet Laureate

mtvU may have an irritating acronym and a dubious business plan, but at least it showed some imagination in selecting John Ashbery as its first poet laureate. mtvU will broadcast snippets of his poems  to 750 colleges across the US as part of an effort to expose students to poetry and provide some cultural cover for Viacom's expansion plans in the 18-24 demographic.

Ashbery has taken a what-the-hell approach to the project. He doesn't get paid, but one or two students somewhere may be paying enough attention to read some more poetry. For the students who already read poetry--and there are more than one would expect--the project will be yet another well-meaning but somewhat puzzling publicity campaign, much like the 1990's vogue for poems in subways.

The mtvU presentations are slick and minimalist, and, I suppose, it's beside the point to object that they're not accurate representations of the experience of reading a full Ashbery poem. The short mtvU films lend the poems a formal closure the full poems lack. For instance, "Soonest Mended" becomes aphoristic, and Ashbery is anything but an aphoristic writer. On the other hand, Ashbery's aesthetic has been likened to music, or, perhaps more accurately given the current context, a music video: scraps of discourse and images float by, each arresting in its own way but not adding up to anything coherently meaningful. It's also worth noting that Ashbery is the only major literary figure associated with the Abstract Impressionist movement in the 1950's. Ashbery is too reserved and cerebral to be a prosody version of Willem de Kooning, but Ashbery did pick up on the Abstract Expressionists' explorations of form and emotion--at the same time early rockers were forging the same connections. Maybe someday soon mtvU will designate Barnett Newman as its first court artist.

Veggie Crazy

Barbara Kingsolver took her family from sunny, parched Tucson to a vegetable patch in the hills of Virginia, then invited them to write a book with her about it. The result is Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life.

There are no miracles in the book, unless you consider the fact that her family didn't go at each other's throats with paring knives. Nor is there much real drama. Kingsolver is a hobby farmer, so she never faces the economic dangers full-time farmers do. However, there are some farm animals and lots, and lots, of vegetables. Kingsolver and her family resolved to live an entire year eating only food they've grown themselves, or at least eating as locally as they can. Now that the eat local ethos of Chez Panisse has merged with the green movement, it's a well-timed experiment. Besides, it's starting to look like Tucson is locked in an epochal drought, so it was time to head for the hills.

The family makes it through the year without starving to death, although the eldest daughter Camille departs for college after five months. They generally eat enviously well, but there are lean times, such as the first months in spring, when the Kingsolver/Hopp enterprise is still in start up mode and all they have to eat are asparagus. (Kingsolver correspondingly devotes an entire chapter to this vegetable.) Mid-winter is also rough, as one can imagine. Even mid-summer has its challenges. When the farm sprouts squash and weeds in overwhelming abundance, the family goes a little veggie crazy, so they take a hastily arranged trip up north, where, somewhat to Kingsolver's chagrin, she finds people engaged in the same venture as she is, only more successfully.

During the year we get lots of descriptions of vegetables, along with a matter of fact account of a chicken slaughter. Her daughter Camille offers asides that, in some ways, make for the best reading of the book. Camille writes with less flair than her mother, but also less cant. Kingsolver is a local food evangelist, and as such she can be wearisome at times, even when you agree with her. She's appalled at our eating habits, as well she should be, and you won't look at the vegetable aisle in the supermarket the same way again. She's at her best when she's the most local. A Kentucky native, Kingsolver knows that the small farms of Appalachia need high-value crops to make them viable--hence the tenacity to which Southern farmers clung to tobacco. After chopping the heads off a few chickens she's earned the right to take issue with the sanctimony of vegetarians. On the other hand, she ventures to Italy to tell us we should live like Italians, as if we needed to be told that. The picturesque agriturismo she visits grows its own food, but she never ventures into town where ordinary Italians shop. Every farmers market in Tuscany I've ever visited sold only tomatoes from the Netherlands. 

Kingsolver is less interested in turning us all into truck farmers than into better consumers, so it was interesting to read Animal, Vegetable, Miracle immediately after reading Tyler Cowen's Discover Your Inner Economist. Both authors are ardent foodies, but they're on opposite sides of the nature/culture divide.  Kingsolver is militantly local, trusting only the soil beneath her feet, while Cowen wants us to consume everything on the globe. And yet, in their own ways, they're both essentialists. For Kingsolver, the totemic object is a garden-grown spear of asparagus; for Cowen, it's a food cart in Singapore.

The "local" and the "authentic" are concepts that break down under analysis. Is red snapper prepared Veracruz style, for instance, authentic when it's served in a Mexico City restaurant? What about all those Dutch tomatoes in Tuscan pasta dishes? I had a revelatory bowl of black bean soup in Isla Mujeres, Mexico, but I've also had a pretty fantastic bowl of black bean soup at Rick Bayless's Frontera Grill in Chicago--prepared, like a lot restaurant food in the United States, by a Mexican kitchen staff. For thousands of years the local meant whatever you could squeeze from the earth; the authentic was whatever was available to you. Kingsolver herself dolefully notes that nowadays rural Americans eat the same junk suburbanites do.  Eating local and global are luxuries of an urbanized bourgeoisie. The local and the authentic are empty concepts unless you live near a well-stocked grocery store full of mass-produced food. That said, for all their absolutism, Kingsolver and Cowen offer a valuable lesson: there's a better way to eat. We should all eat local, and we should all eat global, but we should keep in mind that age-old advice about eating: everything in moderation.

Caught in the Matrix of the Housing Bubble

Cult films are a distinctive feature of post-modern cinema. In an earlier post I argued that Napoleon Dynamite is a recent example of the phenomenon. One could list others, of course, but one in particular stands out: the Wachowski Brothers' The Matrix. The cult film phenomenon involves, among other things, appropriating a public text for private, yet still shared, means, sometimes far beyond what the original filmmakers may have envisioned. The Matrix has inspired all kinds of speculation on the nature of reality--some of it interesting, some of it silly. The filmmakers themselves supposedly based the series on a misreading of a philosopher with a cult following, Michel Foucault.

Now the Matrix as metaphysics idea has come full circle. John Tierney reports in today's New York Times on an Oxford philosophy professor named Nick Bostrom who argues there's a good chance that we may be living in a computer simulation. Tierney explains,

This simulation would be similar to the one in “The Matrix,” in which most humans don’t realize that their lives and their world are just illusions created in their brains while their bodies are suspended in vats of liquid. But in Dr. Bostrom’s notion of reality, you wouldn’t even have a body made of flesh. Your brain would exist only as a network of computer circuits.

Bostrom's theory is unprovable, but Tierney goes so far as to claim he has a "gut feeling" there's a better than 20% chance that our world is just a computer simulation. I guess it takes a more sensitive gut to detect this possibility than the one I have, because my gut has no inkings about being trapped in a computer simulation.

It's probably just a coincidence that Tierney raises the virtual world question during a financial crisis in which vast sums of money were made based on the fiction that the housing market would expand well past Americans' means to pay for housing. Still, if one wants to conduct a thought experiment about the nature of reality, then this is the direction I'd head toward.

Although Foucault is well known for his musings on the constructed nature of reality, Jean Baudrillard is our most systematic theorist of simulated worlds. His most famous concept is the simulacrum, i.e., the endless repetition of copies with no originals. Contemporary culture, according to Baudrillard, consists of the free exchange of signs without any referents. In earlier stages of Western culture the place of the referent was occupied by nature--raw materials and direct industrial production (e.g., turning raw rubber into tires), as well as artisan and craft modes of production. Now cultural products refer to nothing more than the circulation of commodities in late capitalism.

The recent housing boom saw a new phenomenon: flipping a house. At one time a private home was a middle class person's last tie to a specific territory, a small, but very specific slice of nature. During the housing boom the home became just another commodity to be bought and sold on a global scale. The "California Dream" is now the LA housing market, where one's mortgage starts off as a signed contract but quickly ends up as a chit in some vast investment portfolio in New York, Paris, Frankfurt, or Tokyo. The tangible reality of the home, where Bachelard tells us houses our daydreams, is like the bodies suspended in liquid in The Matrix: just a husk, its intrinsic value is determined in some obscure and complex marketplace few people truly understand. Life in today's real estate market is a gut-wrenching experience that may very well account for the intuitive sense that somebody out there is controlling our lives, and doesn't really care what happens so long as the lindens pile up.

A Tale of Two Buildings

Today Chicago Tribune architecture critic Blair Kamin reports on some good news and some bad news. The good news is that the famous ornamental ironwork on Louis Sullivan's Carson Pirie Scott & Co. State Street store will be restored, with help from a grant from the city of Chicago's Department of Planning and Development. The bad news: wrecking crews suddenly descended on the Emmanuel Presbyterian Church (photo above, courtesy of this person's Flickr account) in the Pilsen section of the city. The 1965 modernist structure was designed by Edward Dart, who also designed Water Tower Place, which is where Oprah lives.

This tale of two buildings illustrates the precarious state of many modernist buildings, especially the smaller structures outside urban centers.  There are well-publicized instances of important modernist buildings being threatened with demolition. The Ameritrust Tower story turned out badly: it's going to be demolished. Other buildings enjoyed happier endings: Mies van der Rohe's Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial Library in Washington, DC, a glass steambox with broken elevators, will be renovated. Eero Saarinen's Bell Laboratories complex in Holmdel, NJ will retain most of its important architectural features in a redevelopment.

Smaller modernist structures have fared less well. Kamin warns that Chicago's preservation rules only reliably protect buildings built before 1939, leaving virtually all post-World War II structures vulnerable to a quick pull down. Part of the problem is our definition of the historical. Anything Victorian is indisputably historical. The pre-Victorian is positively sacred, as Philadelphia discovered when the Bookbinder's restaurant wanted to tear down a nondescript 18th-century building for a parking lot expansion. The threatened building was a homely little box of no historical or aesthetic interest except for being old. Nevertheless, there was a loud public outcry for its preservation. People were still squabbling about it when I moved from Philly a few years ago.

Mid-sized modernist commercial buildings find themselves in a Russian roulette of redevelopment. The Beekman Theater on the Upper East Side of New York was demolished in 2005. The previous year another important modernist theater was renovated beyond recognition. Modernist houses are even more vulnerable. They're often viewed as obsolete and, because the modernist domestic architecture aesthetic called for small houses on large lots--Philip Johnson's Glass House is only 1,700 square feet, but is surrounded by acres of property--they're tantalizing targets for tear-downs. Some municipalities are finally moving to preserve their mid-century houses. New Canaan, Connecticut is trying to save its 90 mid-century modern residences. My new home town, Wilmette, Illinois, supposedly has a program to preserve its mid-century modern structures, but judging from the obese McMansions wedged in among the mid-century houses in my neighborhood, the program hasn't been very effective.

Not only can they be beautiful objects in their own right, mid-century modern buildings were built during a pivotal era in the history of middle-class American life.  Modernism was already over a half-century old when the American middle classes introduced it to their main streets and welcomed it in their private homes. Mid-century modernism was the first design aesthetic that corresponded to the middle class's social and political position. Leaving behind the architectural styles of pre-capitalism, the American middle classes finally built structures that reflected the industrial, technological, and political changes their class had brought about. The endangered quality of these structures says a lot about our current historical consciousness.