As someone whose academic and artistic work tends to revolve around various critical concepts of intermediality, with a general and passionate fixation on the blurring of mediums and boundaries between disciplines, I have a somewhat awkward confession to make.
Honestly, there are times when pop-culture's (and particularly consumer-culture's) emphasis on the "multi-media" weirds me the hell out.
I feel like a bit of a hypocrite saying this, back-pedalling, trying to explain how what I'm referring to is somehow different from what "I" do, as I research the role of music in Literature or vice-versa, or stress the importance of videos I make for a more thorough understanding of my musical-output that they accompany... (I know. How very un-post-modern [or un-post-post-modern/ un-"reconstructionist"] of me to try to distance my own work from pop-culture. This is an observation, not a theory, so I offer no direct apology). It is what it is.
I first jotted some of these thoughts down in a notebook a few years ago, while I was searching for a gift for a family-member. I was looking for an electronic-device that performed a single task in a simple, easy-to-use manner. I had owned a similar device years prior, so I knew that the technology existed... and honestly, as a musician who's a bit of a gear-nerd, I knew of quite a few ways to accomplish the task in question. Problem was, at the time, there were plenty of devices on the market that could handle this simple audio task.... in addition to a plethora of other far more complicated tasks that wouldn't be used and would render the device far too uselessly complex for the person it was intended for. Poking around in the stereo-equipment section, I was invariably directed to the "home theatre" section, to which I groaned. "Oh, we have plenty of things that do that... as a side-effect of all this neat video-stuff that they can also do!" Another groan. "No, those features will not be used." I wanted a device that accomplished a strictly-audio task simply and efficiently. There was nothing on the market at the time that did what I wanted it to (outboard, without needing to be plugged into a computer) that didn't also have a visual-component.
For some reason, these frustrations led me to think of how distasteful I found the "Bohemian Rhapsody" sequence of "Wayne's World" the first time I saw it. The Queen song had long-conjured its own set of mental images for me. The aesthetics associated with that song in the film, Garth and Wayne headbanging, provided such a harsh juxtaposition with my own imaginative constructs for the song. Afterward, it irked me irrationally and uncontrollably to no end that, among kids my age, whenever that song came on, the point-of-reference was inevitably "Wayne's World," rather than the dense operatic aesthetic landscape I'd constructed in my mind. {for the record, this no longer bothers me in the least. I was pretty young when that movie came out, and "A Night at the Opera" was the first record I ever purchased, so childhood feelings about this subject were rather biased and passionate.}
{contrast audio-associated aesthetic imagery and perceive intermedial dischord.}
{On a somewhat unrelated note, I'm developing an ever-more-detailed theory about how much you can tell about a person based on their opinion of Queen. I'm only partially kidding.}
Similarly, around the same time, I heard an article on NPR about how Disney's "Fantasia" shaped the way that entire generations qualified classical music with aesthetic imagery. (I think it was this article.) Although I found this story/ review fascinating, it also made me feel somewhat dirty. There's something deeply strange about how this classical content, works by Tchaikovsky, Beethoven, Stravinsky, etc, was reshuffled, repurposed, re-imagined, and re-aestheticized forever in the collective consciousness.... by a cartoon.
As Lloyd Schwartz says in his NPR review of the Fantasia rerelease, "for kids, it's a delightful introduction to classical music. But bothFantasiafilms reveal how difficult it is to arrive at convincing images. Visual artists have to be deeply sensitive to music not to oversimplify, or betray, what's so deeply in the music." Maybe that's part of my discomfort, and the distinction I can't help but draw in my mind- pop-culture's use of "multi-media" tends to super-impose and interpret between mediums, whereas "intermediality" perceives and utilizes multiple mediums as components of an over-arching whole, multiple ways of understanding the same content, an ability for aspects of one medium to say things unable to be expressed with another, rather than a botched-translation from one format to another as if the vocabularies were entirely and seamlessly congruent? (See Deleuze and Guattari on mimicry versus Becoming?)
{I'm using this particular example not because it's the best-known and most narratively-accessible sequence from the film, but because the source-material for the musical-composition is literary [Goethe], which provides an additional layer of multi-media/ intermedial complication.}
I'll be the first to admit that, in all of these examples, the role of capitalism in our cultural reception of art is a large aspect of what I find off-putting... "You NEED more features... Why WOULDN'T we want our stuff to do more stuff??"... classic works of art repackaged and resold in more digestible forms to cater to a larger swath of the consumer population, scarring the new image-associations simultaneously to the parts of our brains receptive to the music, blocking our cognitive ability to let the music speak its own language... etcetera... {Breathe.}
Are these the only distinctions, though? As always, the line between audio (or any other medium) as product and audio as art is really blurry. I'm constantly trying to figure out where that line is, and how to most effectively discern and distinguish the force-fed "multi-media" that makes me feel like a dirty manipulated consumer from the uses of intermediality and the blurrings of boundaries between disciplines and distinctions that I find so vital and mentally-invigorating... Yet at the same time I'm entirely unsure as to why this line needs to be drawn or clarified at all.
In the meantime, exploring observational knee-jerks is always something I find important.
{Now, to cleanse your pallet, a bit of multi-media mind-candy I stumbled on while writing.}
There's something odd about the various forms of late-'90's/ early '00's "indie-rock." Something that reminds me a bit of the "where do we go now?" in critical-dialogues post- post-structuralism and post- deconstruction? This seems to me to be a bit of an "elephant-in-the-room" right now in the current vogue media-conversation about "what is the hipster"... where does the lethargy, near-fetishistic interest in irony, "lost-generation"-esque nihilistic pompous-non-chalance come from, particularly for the late-20's/ early-30's demographics that most closely fit the stereotypes of that label, yet most fervently hate being associated with it? I'll give you a hint- most of those people, between '97 and '03, were all either playing or avidly listening to some form or another of the "indie-rock" of the time... emo, screamo (before those terms meant what they do now), post-punk, the early-incarnations of "metal-core," melodic-pop-punk... etc. And prior to that? Most of those kids were in punk and hardcore bands in high-school, witnessing the final death-kicks of (the pre-commercially-viable later-incarnations of) those scenes.
I'm reminded of this by quite a few things lately that are unrelated, but tend to weave in and out of each other, nostalgia-wise.
First, there's been a strange superfluity of seminal bands the we all listened to in that era either suddenly getting back together or releasing their first record in countless years within the past couple of months. And there's the constant question at play with all such projects- what SHOULD the new record sound like, when all of the current "hipster" acts are all influenced by your back-catalog, but your "sound" is very conspicuously date-stamped.
I present as example two acts that chose very different answers to this problem.
1) The Get Up Kids are back together. If the handful of tracks that I've heard are any indication, they've taken the "extreme-update" approach-
Sure, this sounds like a whole bunch of what I listen to in 2011. But it certainly doesn't sound like the Get Up Kids... so I'm totally torn on it. There's definitely a bit of the odor of "trying too hard" lingering around this one.
2) The new Bright Eyes record is coming out soon. It's currently streaming in its entirety via NPR- http://www.npr.org/2011/01/31/133278431/first-listen-bright-eyes-the-peoples-key . I'm not sure yet that it lives up to the tall-order tag-line the NPR blurb bestows on it: "This is the best record Bright Eyes has ever made".... but it's pretty good (it always takes me a few listens for a Bright Eyes record to REALLY sink in). And there seems to be a complete indifference to the date-stamp issue here, either in terms of recreating past records (which they certainly don't do) or "updating" too conspicuously or exaggeratedly.
Other things that bring this disconnect to mind include the occasional random flare-ups of sudden nostalgic interest in online content related to an emo-pop-punk band I used to play bass for, called Rusted Tricycle... or that, still, for some reason, regardless of how many projects I've played with since, when I go out at night in New Hampshire, I'm most likely to get "aren't you the guy from Rusted Tricycle?" than any other recognition (If anything, I would expect it to be the high-visibility management position I held with an unnamed adolescent-targetted retail store for years prior to moving to Arizona and going to college, but nope. It's that random band that never toured, never recorded a real album, and broke up ten years ago. Strange.)
For some reason recently, I had a strange impulse to download a whole lot of old Saves The Day material. I have no idea why. And I'm thinking about throwing a random throwback-emo/ pop-punk track into the middle of my forthcoming ironic-"hip-hop" record with LeVautourEnsemble... just for fun. There's something odd about the music of that time (maybe that time in general?) for us, for sure.
My time is limited, since I'm knee-deep in research, so I have to make this quick... but there are a couple brief things that I wanted to point out.
First, you may remember a couple of months ago, provoked by a comment to a prior entry, I dove headlong (at least temporarily) into the heated ongoing debate about the name of the "era of thought" that we currently reside within, and what might come next, with a belated critique of Alan Kirby's 2006 essay "The Death of Postmodernism and Beyond." (follow that link if you don't recall). Well, due (I presume) to the wonders that are Google, another blogger/ artist (with whom I am not personally acquainted) stumbled onto my piece while engaging in the conversation from his own angle. I am flattered to be cited on the reading-lists/ bibliographies for two consecutive entries of his blog, along-side such names as Derida and Lyotard. He has some really interesting things to say on the topic; I strongly encourage you all to head on over and take a read- The Art of John Bittinger Klomp.
Second, I want to congratulate Mr. Macalastair Ming (slide-guitarist for Tipsy Cougar, etc.) for currently having the most views on the new Asbjorn Collective Youtube Channel. One night recently, I really wanted to make some music, but didn't have time... so I challenged Ming to record something weird and post it. I'm not sure that I'd call what he posted "weird," but I would call it "good." Check it out. I'm glad to see there's finally content up on that channel that I'm not in, which is definitely one of the goals. While you're there, I just posted a new acoustic track tonight, and Wes Hopeless stopped by to add some old footage from The Green Sea days in Phoenix. If you're interested in contributing some material to our little odd-ball museum-collection, please be in touch. My friends be warned- I've now discovered that challenging talented people to produce content on short-notice is productive and fulfilling for all involved... so it WILL be happening on a more regular basis.
(I spent some time tossing around ideas about which of the numerous potential angles I should approach this from… and eventually threw up my hands and started writing, deciding to just run at it bull-in-china-shop style. So, if you’re interested in this debate, please bear with the length of this post, my occasional use of literary/ theory jargon, the possible failures of my attempt to keep this from devolving into a rant at times… etc. If any of this inspires a rebuttal, or ideas of any sort continuing the dialogue, I would LOVE to post them here. So, if you have something to say on this topic, be in touch .)
Ihab Hassan ended his 1987 essay “Toward the Concept of Postmodernism” by saying “One may wonder: Is some decisive historical mutation- involving art and science, high and low culture, the male and female principles, parts and wholes, involving the One and the Many- as pre-Socratics used to say- active in our midst? Or does the dismemberment of Orpheus prove no more than the mind’s need to make but one more construction of life’s mutabilities and human morality? And what construction lies beyond, behind, within, that construction?”
Contrasting these thoughts (which were presented as part of an attempt to define present and future parameters for the term “postmodernism”) with those suggested by Dr. Alan Kirby’s 2006 essay “The Death of Postemodernism and Beyond” that I linked in my last entry, suggests a rather troubling disconnect.
Frankly, the problem becomes that, as much as his cynical observations are often apt, the conclusions that Dr. Kirby draws from these conflict vastly with the prior works of Hassan and his critical peers that defined and refined the genre/ movement that Kirby so bombastically attempts to declare the death of.
The problem is, none of the observations that Kirby makes sit outside, as the changing cultural forces that he insists that they are, of the general parameters of the movement that he’s using them as validation for the disavowal and decease of.
Most solid theories of “postmodern thought” that I have read (including several of those that Kirby cites, in parts that he understandably yet problematically overlooks) leave plenty of room (and even often foresee) the cultural changes that Kirby asserts have rung its death-knoll.
As Hassan says, “Postmodernism implies a movement toward pervasive procedures, ubiquitous interactions, immanent codes, media, languages.” Oddly, if boiled into essential categories, these are all of the things that Kirby asserts as proof that contemporary culture is NOT a postmodern one.
Sure, I understand that there’s a bit of a time-period disconnect here as well. Kirby seems to be extremely willing to admit that our contemporary culture morphs astoundingly quickly, and unfortunately, this quickness proves the larger-scale undoing of his own points. The article that I’m referring to, “The Death of Postmodernism and Beyond,” was published in 2006, and by his own standards, a lot has changed culturally in the three years since then.
Perhaps the most telling demonstration of the changes that those three years have made (particularly in terms of making his own conclusions seem cynical, short-sighted, self-defeating, and, in general, off-putting) comes from his own references to ‘living in a post-9/11 world’ (“pseudo-modernism was not born on 11 September 2001, but postmodernism was interred in it’s rubble,” etc).
In 2006, it was FAR more acceptable (although barely… I’m pretty sure this was pretty close to the final throws of this cultural excuse) to write-off paranoia, surface-level-thinking, abhorrence of abstraction of any sort, over-moralizing, and ‘buckle-down-and-focus-on-“reality”’ sort of thought than it is to admit these sort of sentiments in civilized print (I.e. PhilosophyNow magazine, where the article initially ran) in mid-2009. I’m pretty sure it’s not taboo to think anymore… It’s acceptable again to not sit paranoid that any ideas that seem on the surface-level to lack relevance to day-to-day ethical/ easily perceived trivialities (I.e. the shortsighted assumption that the pop-culture dictates and guides thought, as Kirby is asserting, which is almost entirely negated by observations of any other past philosophical/ critical/ artistic movement… though that’s a whole different can of critical worms) might somehow appear disrespectful to those directly effected by the events of 2001 and the wars that followed, or that the “market economics” that Kirby correctly observes to have become such a cultural and intellectual focal point have dictated that any philosophical or ideological discussion about the relevance, value, or true possibility of “capitalist democracy” is somehow a betrayal to those who have fallen under the tires of the system and are struggling to make ends meet (Did you catch that, too? There’s an odd double-speak that reads between the lines of Kirby’s cynicism… his overall thesis seems laden with this cumbersome implication that it’s doing some grand disrespect to those that have been beat down and silenced by the system to speak out against it or attempt to step outside of it… he’s telling us to sit down and shut up, because that’s what our cultural-moment warrants. This strikes me as typical “post-9/11 world”-style fear-mongering… which of course makes all Kirby’s references to “Big Brother” (the TV show) deeply ironic due to the title of that program’s source-text.)
(Of course, the biggest irony in these claims is that, if the conclusions about our contemporary thought-processes that Kirby’s drawing were true, why would anyone have bothered to read his article?)
In fact, it seems that Kirby’s conclusions present, ironically, a death of this “post-9/11 world” mentality to a greater extent than a “death of postmodernism”… mostly because so shortly after, these ideas seem extremely dated by the various paranoia’s of that (thankfully) short epoch of slammed-shutter thought that litter the text.
I’m not doubting for a moment that there was a brief several-year time-period post 9/11 when we put on the intellectual brakes to focus on the “real”… and Kirby’s article strikes me as a final spasm of that method of thinking. But I feel that that era is over, and artists and critics have seemed to resume progressive/ abstract thinking where the word “real” once again REQUIRES those quotation-marks (as I was attempting to demonstrate with my post on Lady GaGa that inspired this analysis), once again WITHIN the postmodern mindset, rather than in opposition to it, utilizing and toying with the observations that Kirby makes, rather than allowing themselves to be trampled by them into cultural submission.
To be fair, Kirby himself leaves space in his text for the possibility of this transition. “Although we may grow so used to the new terms that we can adopt them for meaningful artistic expression (and then the pejorative label I have given pseudo-modernism may no longer be appropriate), for now we are confronted by a storm of human activity producing almost nothing of any lasting or even reproducible cultural value.” Most present-tense observers tapped into any sort of network of creative thinkers would, I feel, be able to assert in mid-2009 that the “for now” that he refers to here was merely a nasty bout of societal growing-pains which are finally starting to pass. So then would have to be passing the “pseudo-modern” era that Kirby refers to, by his own admission that the term would in this case nullify itself by its own definition. Kirby’s “pseudo-modernism” was intended as a full-stop in the present-tense progress of ideas, but he left open the possibility for it to merge into something more like a semi-colon… with a bit of time, even that device of pause has softened into a set of brackets containing an independent clause, after which we must return to the sentence, the advancement of critical thought, already in progress before this anecdotal interruption.
Each movement is noted by its counterpoint to its predecessor, right? Then Postmodernism (as an always-admittedly loosely-defined and ambiguous phenomenon, as most “movements” are, most particularly in the present-tense) is most easily defined and grappled with in reference to Modernism. Many attribute-lists and sets of comparative points have been critically assembled… to return to Hassan, for instance, and swipe a few examples off of his diagram of this sort, Modernism is represented by “Form (conjunctive, closed)” as Postmodernism by “Antiform (disjunctive, open),” M. by “Purpose” to P.M.’s “Play,” M. by “Design” to P.M.’s “Chance,” “Art Object/ Finished Work” to “Process/ Performance/ Happening,” “Interpretation/ Reading” to “Against Interpretation/ Misreading,” “Genital/ Phallic” to “Polymorphous/ Androgynous,” “God the Father” to “The Holy Ghost,” Modernism’s “Metaphysics” to PostMod’s “Irony,” and, of course, the ever-confusing yet oft-quoted standby, “Signified” vs. “Signifier.”
Contrasting these counterpoints, and then re-observing Kirby’s observations and assertions, it seems to me that nearly all of Hassan’s characteristic examples on the Postmodern side of the chart sound an AWFUL lot like most of the very characteristics that Kirby is citing as the reasons that Postmod is dead and buried. By Hassan’s definitions, therefore, it seems that what Kirby calls the “pseudo-modern” is merely a facet and development of postmodernism, merely one that Kirby (and perhaps much of the culture at the time of his writing) hadn’t quite figured out how to constructively adjust to yet.
Maybe it’s because my vantage-point sits too close to the line Kirby draws in the sand as a “generation gap” (1980). Maybe my age-bracket, those of us right on the cusp of this transition, whose outlooks feature bits and pieces of BOTH generations and can often rationalize aspects of BOTH of the philosophies that he lays out (without contradicting ourselves any more than his own essay does), that I have a hard time viewing his assessments of the way that our contemporary culture has developed as the philosophy-shattering end-game that Kirby sees it as. Who knows. But whether or not Kirby’s stance was pertinent in 2006 or not, between the far more “contemporary” pivotal post-modern texts that he conveniently overlooked in his claim that these are the thoughts of our parents’ generation, his “good-old-days” lamenting about how short “the kids’” attention-span is these days, his assumptions that if corporate pop-media isn’t producing viable thought-products than neither is anyone else, etc, in 2009 I definitely don’t buy it.
“You are the text, there is no-one else, no ‘author;’ there is nowhere else, no other time or place. You are free: you are the text: the text is superseded.”
These last lines of Kirby’s article strike me as humorously RIFE with exactly the sort of post-modern “elusiveness of meaning and knowledge,” “ironic self-awareness,” and “disbelief in grand narratives” that are the same phenomena he’s attempting to say that we no longer participate in.
Maybe Kirby’s text ITSELF is intended as an ironic post-modern meta-text, a game of subversive idea-play INTENDED to undo itself? If so, “The Death of Postmodernism and Beyond” would have made Beckett, Borges, and Nabokov EXTREMELY proud.
(Whew. Ok… I would like to thank IMMENSELY any of you that made it all the way through that one. If you did, you deserve a cookie. By “cookie,” I mean a brand new Swords We Swallow video. Thanks for reading… Enjoy.)
In a comment to my last entry, C. Charles ("xian") Dyer left a link to this fascinating article. Thank you, Mr. Dyer.
It's by Dr. Alan Kirby, from a 2006 issue of Philosophy Now magazine. Dr. Kirby asserted that post-modernism is dead, and that the way that contemporary pop-culture, technology, commerce, and social-dynamics operate have made any thought that goes beyond observational/ critical realism outdated and irrelevant.
I'm well aware that this article is 3 years outdated. But, it's new to me... and now that I'm familiar with Kirby's idea of "pseudo-modernism," three-years-out seems like a pretty good juncture to take a look and assess his predictions, especially since many of his claims are intrinsic upon the idea of how rapidly-changing, ephemeral and transient our culture has become.
For more on this debate on "what comes after post-modernity," I've actually found that (surprisingly) the Wikipedia entry for "post-postmodernism" actually provides a helpful overview (Dr. Kirby's article and nomenclature is mentioned here as well.) I've personally been partial to the ideas of "reconstructionism" for some time, but I tend to view this as an extension and development of postmodern thought, rather than a replacement of or rebuttal to it.
Since my next entry will feature my own response, reaction, and reflection on Dr. Kirby's article, I figured that I should probably post the link before-hand so that anyone who wants to know what I'm talking about can get a jump-start on reading it.
Overall, it's a really interesting read... I understand and agree with many of Dr. Kirby's observations, but I have some definite questions and reservations about the conclusions that he draws from them. (As I scribble all over the copy that I printed out, I'm also starting to get the impression that his own line of reasoning invalidates and contradicts some of the points that he's making [not to mention the fact that anyone's reading it]... but don't we all sometimes.)
When we speak of post-modern art, it is commonly understood that elements of pop-culture play an important role. What this role typically involves when we say this is that artists (who are typically functioning (or attempting to function) in certain ways OUTSIDE of the pop-culture, utilize elements of mainstream cultural trends within their work, as components of the pastiche that they employ. Think of pop-culture as a shade of fluorescent paint, not the painting itself that the pigment is utilized to make.
As my girlfriend was recently reading elements to me of the Wikipedia bio for the current ironic pop-princess Lady GaGa, it struck me that a bit of role-reversal within these conventions may be finally coming into play. From what I can piece together from the wiki and some further digging into similar info available on the internet, here’s a brief synopsis, and my analysis of how and why it works-
“Lady GaGa,” A.K.A. Stefani Joanne Angelina Germanotta, is first-and-foremost an Artist (and not in the same way that we might off-handedly refer to Britney Spears as a “recording-artist,” rather in the “Fine Art”/ “Conceptual Project” sort of way) She’s trained at NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts and maintains a “collective” (“Haus of GaGa”- of which she claims “this is my own creative team, modeled on Warhol's Factory. Everyone is under 26 and we do everything together.”) This is decidedly NOT the resume of someone who (like most of her peers) signed themselves away to a talent-agent with a hysterical (and hysterically naive) cry of “Whatever it takes to make me a staaaaar!”
In her own words, rather; "I consider what I do to be more of an Andy Warhol concept: pop performance art, multimedia, fashion, technology, video, film. And it's all coming together, and it's going to be traveling museum show."
For a couple of weeks I had near-constant exposure to “The Fame” and streamed videos of the songs from the GaGa record… not exactly of my own volition, but not quite in a “kicking and screaming” sort of way either… I honestly don’t mind this stuff nearly as much as I feel that I probably should. From the first time that I heard it, the record struck me as conventional, clichéd, saccharine, girly pop (albeit with better-produced dance-beats and glammed-up electro than most of that ilk) of a sort that I don’t usually like…but somehow, this one felt… DIFFERENT. That difference, I believe, is IRONY. By this point I feel like I could write an entire book analyzing the double-entendres in each song and the mixed metaphors and tongue-in-cheek references in each video… but I’ll spare the close-read for now. Suffice it to say, there isn’t a single song on the record or official video released that doesn’t have an undertone or possible translation that doesn’t suggest the sort of pastiche that I’m speaking of. This is something a bit too artistically-serious to be called “spoof,” but a bit too ironic to be taken serious in the context that it’s presented… which presents another layer of irony- this pastiche is far more serious and legitimate than the genre that it takes as it’s subject. Think the way that Don Delilo, Salman Rushdie, Andy Warhol (a name you might have noticed GaGa herself seems quick to drop), or Sheppard Fairey repurpose pop-culture as a facet of their art. This is basically the same idea, but the formula has been cleverly inverted.
The nearest I can gather, “Lady GaGa’s” current public persona was created as a performance-art stunt. She seems to have taken the current media-driven pop-music market as her canvas, and decided that on it she would paint a construction of herself, an intentionally fabricated pop-star.
Let’s face it. They’re ALL fabricated. That’s part of the deal; the entirety of what currently “sells” in that realm. It’s about time that an Artist stepped up and made themself and their identity into the canvas itself, dedicated themself to creating their own identity into a “pop-star” in order to achieve, in a more extreme and all-encompassing way, the points that nearly all dedicated post-modernists, “pop-artists,” and post-post-modernists are intending to make about the world that we live in and the fleeting natures of “truth” and “reality,” by merely referencing or lifting elements of pop-culture, rather than diving right in, as Lady GaGa has.
Pop-culture is no longer merely a shade of paint dabbed on for effect or to make a point. Pop-culture IS the point, but the post-modern point remains the same. The identity is still the canvas, the artist becomes that canvas, the paint is both the artist and pop-culture itself. Lady GaGa seems on a crash course to prove that artists can BECOME the very thing that they’re critiquing (without devolving completely to satire), and this may prove to be the most extreme and compelling way of making this point to date.
That is, if anyone bothers to take notice that, regardless of the surface-level similarities, there’s something decisively DIFFERENT between Lady GaGa and Christina Aguilera.
I’m seriously considering having book-plates printed. Something with my name and a distinct design to slap inside the cover of books that I’ve completed reading and adorned with my scribbles. Some sort of insignia to claim authorship for my notes, to take credit for my marginalia. If my literary career-path proceeds as planned, this sort of thing may seem some day relevant.
I have just set down a hard-cover copy of a seminal masterpiece that all educated students of Literature are often assumed to have a working knowledge of. Most seem to claim to, and nearly all have read segments. As I pored through the work, however, I wondered more with every page how many of the members of the Literatcia that claim to have read or understood the book had actually completed reading it.
My copy of James Joyce’s “Ulysses” is battered, beer-stained, crumpled with dried coffee, and blackened through with ink. It’s been with me for more time at this point than I would like to admit; more time than it’s EVER taken me to read a single book. (This is predictable, of course… this is, after all, the book regarded by even those who know nothing else about it as ‘the most difficult book you’ll ever read.’ I was skeptical of this appellation when I began, and part of me hates voicing a regard that merely complies with the cliché upon completion.) It’s been with me as I dealt with some of the most severe lapses in motivation of my relatively short adult existence, and has proved a sort of support-structure through those time-periods, sitting steady beneath my shaking hand to remind me that “good” (or, rather, maybe “meaningful,” “worthwhile,” or “relevant”) Art and Literature CAN be, or more importantly, fundamentally HAS to be purposely difficult and challenging, HAS to, in order to deserve those titles, make you as reader WORK. Since I graduated from college, Joyce has been there to be my “rock” (I may as well continue to play with and mangle clichés) that assures me that rocks aren’t always solid, or maybe that there doesn’t even have to be a rock at all. Or maybe that the only “rock” is the one that artists create for themselves. And sure, in all of these regards, “Ulysses” is a perfect choice for that sort of “rock,” or no sort of “rock” at all.
Flipping through the physical pages of the book, which still sit stinging a bit from the abuses that I administered upon them, I can’t help noticing that my scribbles say as much about me and the place that I was personally at while writing them as they do about the printed text that contains them and was intended as their subject and inspiration. This seems, of course, in predictable posture for a critic writing in a post- Post-Modern era about a pivotal work of High Modernism. What is probably less predictable is how much I see in common between the ground that Joyce stood on and the ground to which critical thought has proceeded and, more importantly, could presently proceed further to. It seems almost fitting, for example, in regards to both the potentials of future scholarship and the critical ideology of the work in question that, rather than write another book about the book and fill it with one authors ideas about another authors ideas (which, don‘t get me wrong, is an interesting idea that definitely has its place), that a critic’s scribbles, notes, and thoughts in the margins of the original work might be reprinted and published in such a form, so that the readers of each (ideally the same reader) might be able to actively witness how the two works (and two authors) interact with one another.
The white-space at the end of the book proved a welcome silence after the book’s ending, a forty-four page marathon unpunctuated mental rant by a woman that I, at many points, wished to scream at to shut the hell up. In this gap, while still possessed by the post-traumatic headache that I feel fairly certain was much of Joyce’s intention at the end of the work, I jotted the following words-
“A reaffirmation, continuation of a destructive, yet affirmative cycle. Devotion comes in strange forms. Identities are constructed out of conflict/ conflicting conceptions.”
If you’re among what I’m guessing to be a small minority that has actually finished the book, you might know what I mean and to what it refers. Then again, you still might not. After all, my notes, and my personal understanding of the text, has as much, if not more, to do with me than it does with anyone named Bloom, Dedalus, or Joyce.
I’m open to suggestions as to what to print on my book-plates.
