The New Inquiry

The Soldier, The Sage, The Saint & the Citizen

Mark Lilla’s spring 2010 Columbia University Literature Humanities Course-wide Lecture, “The Soldier, The Sage, The Saint and The Citizen” is now available online.

P.S. Lilla’s new NYRB piece “The Tea Party Jacobins,” is out and duly slated for this week’s reading roster.

Moral belief as aesthetic stance

Susan Sontag believed that intellectuals should, must, take political stands. She was active in the movement against the Vietnam War. She tried, with passion and persistence, to awaken American and European consciences to the genocidal catastrophe in Bosnia. And yet I would not call Sontag a political thinker. For Sontag, politics was an arena for practicing the high moral style. It was about the individual bearing witness. It was, in another of its aspects, about the writer defending literary values, the values of civilization, when they were under siege, as they were in Sarajevo.

This is from Ellen Willis’ Three Elegies for Susan Sontag. (As you may have noticed, Sontag is a perpetual topic of interest here at TNI.)

This passage raises all sorts of questions for me about art, morals, and political action. For example: what is the difference between the “high moral style” as practiced by Sontag and the rest of politics? Is that a grittier, more pragmatic kind of realpolitik? Is one more morally correct than the other?

And: are literary values moral values? Lionel Trilling would say yes; Camille Paglia would laugh derisively, then say no. Willis’ phrase “the values of civilization” is frustratingly vague—is this civilization in the sense of culture (the arts), or society (politics/ethics)? Willis elides the difference between them, perhaps because Sontag tried to do the same later in life, when she became predominantly a fiction writer (though she still did write criticism, most notably Regarding the Pain of Others, which certainly marries artistic and moral concerns).

We can read Sontag’s turn away from criticism toward fiction as a surrender to the realization that criticism can never hold the same moral power as art, the novel being the great moral form in the Western tradition. Of course, when Sontag gave up criticism for fiction—when she fully indulged her moral preoccupations—she became largely irrelevant, culturally speaking. But isn’t striving for moral seriousness always an admirable project? In the end, it depends on your priority: aesthetics or ethics, the interesting or the good. And I’m inclined to agree with Paglia: they do at times conflict.

Lester Bangs and Rock Music As The Eternal High School Girlfriend

Did you ever want to kill what weaned you? Well, don’t try too hard. The next generation will not live for no burnout myth and how will we all look clinging to and rationalizing this shit? Eight-year-olds are gonna demand that somebody say something pretty soon. This album will not endure, but neither will Blonde on Blonde. They will never surf again. So maybe we should appreciate the noise they make drowning, friends.  

Dear Mick

You always play ignorant. Why?

You’ve been projecting yourself on me all along.

You remind me of a certain apathetic antibody. But that’s all right.

There is a certain resignation about you. But you’re not stagnant.

You hate pretension in all forms, so you overcompensate.

You like things for the wrong reasons. Always.

If you ever got sick I would never be around you. I would never see you. Why take chances?

We haven’t known each other that long.

The best things are the ones that start slow, uncertainly, and build.

 I don’t love you. I just like being around you.

-Lester Bangs, “It’s Only the Rolling Stones,” in The Village Voice, October 31, 1974 

More than reviewing albums or critiquing music, Lester Bangs had a very public and messy personal relationship with rock & roll. In this essay declaring the Stones lost and irrelevant, he breaks into a free-verse poem to Mick Jagger, which sounds more than anything else like a break-up poem to a high school girlfriend. It degenerates quickly from vague but recognizable criticisms into the kinds of things one would only expect to say to a lover with whom things had gone horribly sour:  “If you ever got sick I would never be around you. I would never see you. Why take chances?” Being with someone when they’re sick is among the most intimate possible human interactions; it is not one we usually consider having with the music or literature we care about. But Bangs imagines what he would do if Mick-were-sick as naturally as he would his own kin. 

Bangs was as much a professional mourner as a rock critic. His essays are long, rollicking funerals, and he comes to the albums, and then the writing about the albums, with an expectation of—even a hope for—grand and explosive sadness. It’s the same way we come to relationships as teenagers: Getting to feel big, important feelings is more the goal than is actually making something work.

But Bangs’ sadness is effective because mourning is the essential action of rock music. It’s a genre defined less by particular chord progressions or musical requirements than  by sadness. Rock and roll is happy music about sad things. As Bangs says in an earlier essay, explaining why Exile on Main Street may be the Stones’ greatest album,  

Exile is dense enough to be compulsive: hard to hear, at first, the precision and fury behind the murk ensure that you’ll come back, hearing more with each playing. What you hear sooner or later is two things: an intuition for nonstop getdown perhaps unmatched since the Rolling Stones Now! and a strange kind of humility and love emerging from a dazed frenzy. If, as they assert, they’re soul survivors, they certainly know what you can lose by surviving. As they and we see friends falling all around us, only the Stones have cut the callousness of ’72 to say with something beyond narcissistic sentiment what words remain for those slipping away.

Exile is about casualties, and partying in the face of them. The party is obvious. The casualties are inevitable.

- Lester Bangs, “I Only Get My Rocks Off When I’m Dreaming: So You Say You Missed the Stones Too? Cheer up, We’re a Majority!” Creem, January 1973 

Even at its most morose, at its slowest, most dragging, rock music transforms sadness by putting rhythm and noise to it. It defies sadness by forcing it into an extroverted form. Rather than crying alone, it calls up all its friends and throws a party about sadness. When The Rolling Stones write a song about loss and numbness and ten thousand kids dance to it, the genre has briefly defeated the emotion by forcing it into the language of sex and celebration.

Bangs wanted to be a rock star, not a rock critic. He admits this freely in his writing—like the asshole at a party, he’s always referring to a band that no one’s ever  heard play and which never materializes. His writing is an admission of insufficiency, a love affair with the less attractive cousin of the girl he really wants. But it’s his own sadness at this insufficiency that brings his writing closer to the music. It’s why he has to have a high-school romance with bands like the Rolling Stones, and it’s why we’re still turning to him to explain, by means of a ridiculous, unexpected free verse break-up poem, why we still care that the Rolling Stones wrote some records and why it breaks our hearts when some of those records suck.

There’s something unavoidably and seductively adolescent about rock & roll in the same way there’s something unavoidably and seductively adolescent about sex and love. That’s why rock music is almost always about love and specifically love that doesn’t work out, and why it’s an essentially adolescent art form. Bangs therefore cleaves his writing to its subject matter by writing about rock & roll as though it were his lying, cheating, hated-and-loved on-again, off-again high school girlfriend. In this way, his criticism is not just about rock & roll, but is itself rock & roll in prose form.

I’ll never forget that day. My girlfriend and I took the bus all the way from our suburb into downtown San Diego, went right to the concert hall ticket windows, and suddenly I said: “Fuck it! Fuck them! Who needs ‘em?” And went staggering erratically in the general direction of Skid Row, dropping tears as big as cantaloupes.

Since we’d had our troubles, my girlfriend thought I was crying over her and me. When she found out I was crying over for the Stones, she was pleased as puke!

“You’re so immature!” she said. “Here I thought it was because you loved me, when it’s really because you’re mad at the goddamn Rolling Stones.

Damn straight I was! […] The day of the concert found all my blustering disdain drained to sheer distilled sorrow. A fan in mourning! Oh Stones, Stones, how could you do this to me?

-Lester Bangs, “I Only Get My Rocks Off When I’m Dreaming: So You Say You Missed the Stones Too? Cheer up, We’re a Majority!” Creem, January 1973

[Flash 9 is required to listen to audio.]

Leonard Cohen, “Chelsea Hotel #2” (1974)

First of all, love is a joint experience between two persons—but the fact that it is a joint experience does not mean that it is a similar experience to the two people involved. There are the lover and the beloved, but these two come from different countries. Often the beloved is only a stimulus for all the stored-up love which has lain quiet within the lover for a long time hitherto. And somehow every lover knows this. He feels in his soul that his love is a solitary thing. He comes to know a new, strange loneliness and it is this knowledge which makes him suffer. So there is only one thing for the lover to do. He must house his love within himself as best he can; he must create for himself a whole new inward world—a world intense and strange, complete in himself. Let it be added here that this lover about whom we speak need not necessarily be a young man saving for a wedding ring—this lover can be a man, woman, child, or indeed any human creature on this earth.

Now, the beloved can also be of any description. The most outlandish people can be the stimulus for love. A man may be a doddering great-grandfather and still love only a strange girl he saw in the streets of Cheehaw one afternoon two decades past. The preacher may love a fallen woman. The beloved may be treacherous, greasy-headed, and given to evil habits. Yes, and the lover may see this as clearly as anyone else—but that does not affect the evolution of his love one whit. A most mediocre person can be the object of a love which is wild, extravagant, and beautiful as the poison lilies of the swamp. A good man may be the stimulus for a love both violent and debased, or a jabbering madman may bring about in the soul of someone a tender and simple idyll. Therefore, the value and quality of any love is determined solely by the lover himself.

It is for this reason that most of us would rather love than be loved. Almost everyone wants to be the lover. And the curt truth is that, in a deep secret way, the state of being loved is intolerable to many. The beloved fears and hates the lover, and with the best of reasons. For the lover is forever trying to strip barer his beloved. The lover craves any possible relation with the beloved, even if this experience can cause him only pain.

[pp. 26-27 Carson McCullers, “The Ballad of the Sad Café”]

The Gift

Leopoldo Lugones Argüello (13 June 1874 - 18 February 1938)

Jorge Luis Borges, August 9, 1960:

The sounds of the plaza fall behind, and I enter the Library. Almost physically, I can feel the gravitation of the books, the serene atmosphere of orderliness, time magically mounted and preserved. To the left and right, absorbed in their waking dream, rows of readers’ momentary profiles in the light of the “scholarly lamps,” as a Miltonian displacement of adjectives would have it. I recall having recalled that trope here in the Library once before, and then that the other adjective of setting —the Lunario’s “arid camel,” and then that hexameter from the Aeneid that employs, and surpasses, the same artifice:

Ibant obscuri sola sub nocte per umbram.

These reflections bring me to the door of your office. I go inside. We exchange a few conventional, cordial words, and I give you this book. Unless I am mistaken, you didn’t dislike me, Lugones, and you’d have liked to like some work of mine. That never happened, but this time you turn the pages and read a line or two approvingly, perhaps because you’ve recognized your own voice in it, perhaps because the halting poetry itself is less important than the clean limbed theory.

At this point my dream begins to fade and melt away like water in water. The vast library surrounding me is on Calle Mexico, not Rodriguz Pena, and you Lugones, killed yourself in early ‘38. My vanity and nostalgia have confected a scene that is impossible. Maybe so, I tell myself, but tomorrow I too will be dead and our times will run together and chronology will melt into an orb of symbols and somehow it will be true to say that I have brought you this book and that you have accepted it.

[Flash 9 is required to listen to audio.]

Hard Life, Bonnie “Prince” Billy

“I remember just being real impatient with [country music]. Until I’d been living here about a year. And all of a sudden I realized that, what if you just imagined that this absent lover they’re singing to is just a metaphor? And what they’re really singing is to themselves, or to God, you know? ‘Since you left I’m so empty I can’t live, my life has no meaning.’ That in a weird way, I mean they’re incredibly existentialist songs. That have the patina of the absent, of the romantic shit on it just to make it salable. But that all the pathos and heart that comes out of them, is they’re singing about something much more elemental being missing, and their being incomplete without it. Than just, you know, some girl in tight jeans or something.”

- David Foster Wallace on country music. (via Hannah Might)

Another reason for the shock which [William] Eggleston’s seemingly unspectacular photography caused was the fact that it was not accompanied by any commentary. ‘Its subjects are, on the surface, the ordinary inhabitants and environs of suburban Memphis and Mississippi—friends, family, barbecues, back yards, a tricycle and the clutter of the mundane, for behind the images there is a sense of danger.’ The choice of subject matter seemed to some critics to be totally indiscriminate, as though William Eggleston has applied no criteria at all. ‘Eggleston’s photographs often seem to have been taken not by a photographer but by a motorized camera swinging around the photographer’s head on a string. Whatever happens to be in front of the lens when the shutter was tripped got photographed. Whatever was not, did not.’ But even this negatively meant criticism reveals a further important aspect of Eggleston’s work, namely his democratic approach to the subject matter. Eggleston speaks again and again of the ‘democratic camera’ which considers every object worthy of depiction. Naturally, this seemingly impersonal way of seeing things makes no distinction between ‘beautiful’ and ‘ugly’. In other words, William Eggleston does not operate with the usual visual hierarchies, but rather accepts those motifs which illustrate his concept correctly.

More on Eggleston here.

Kent Klich: Tel al-Hawa, southern Gaza City (2009)

I met Swedish photographer Kent Klich in Gaza some months ago and just saw that he recently won the first prize in the General News category of the prestigious World Press Photo awards. The prize-winning image is from the project he was pursuing in Gaza with the help of PCHR, a series entitled Gaza Photoalbum.

The pictures of empty home interiors scarred by the then-recent attacks of “Cast Lead” are beautifully photographed, perfectly lit and and seem eerily deserted. Gaza’s cinder block houses look so gray from the outside that the color of many photographs becomes quite striking, too. People led normal, happy lives in these rooms, the yellows and purples - as well as the everyday objects in the rooms - seem to say. But now that these homes appear to be abandoned, and time has stopped in a moment of horror, we find ourselves searching for clues. Who lived here? How did they spend their time in these rooms? Were they in the house when the attacks took place? Did people die here?