The most important thing Meredith taught me was that I should shut the fuck up. Meantime, I have no regrets about the scene I just made in an Applebees in the middle of the Maine woods, in which I got into a very angry debate over French/American political relations, which always comes down to the same thing, someone throws out a stereotype about the French or the Roma or the any other group of people in the world, and I ask for some sort of evidence, of which nobody ever has any, and then I remind that the group we ourselves belong to not only is associated with some pretty bad stereotypes, but that in my experience they’re all true. And then everyone gets offended and pissed off because, well, we’re angels, and it’s the rest of the world who’s fucked up. So I’ve completely had it with hipsters, intellectuals, young people, the inveterate, fanatics, zealots, and artists. The only people I still like are: alcoholics, nymphomaniacs, chefs.
One might call Don Quixote “self-reflexive” in the way Cervantes’ own work finds its way onto the bookshelves of Don Quixote, and is soon after substantially criticized. Is this humorous? Only under the condition that we know whom Cervantes is, and that he wrote what we’re reading, and perhaps a bit about his past literary failures. And if somebody uses the same technique now, is it postmodern? And if it is postmodern, is it postmodern because it’s a borrowed technique? Or does its being borrowed just make it derivative? And if one bases an entire work on such techniques, is that then postmodern? Or is it what we now call “ironic”—a term which is now defined as “any act, pretense, or creation that is uninspired, derivative, uneducated, misinformed, or otherwise pageanted as unique, employed as a pretense for an antithetical interior.” When I attended a class on “Modern American Drama,” I scoffed at the idea that “one cannot begin to understand modern American drama before understanding what came before it.” And we spent 90% of the class reading wretched 19th century plays…but I was one of the lucky ones, because I accidentally fell into studies that led me away from our contemporary liberal arts education, it’s precisely that education that makes me cry every time I see someone reading Lolita (you don’t deserve to read Lolita!) or Ulysses (have you read anything else by Joyce? Do you own a dictionary?) or hear somebody exclaim that they’ve decided to begin a new religion…in earnest. I haven’t read Ulysses. Because I’m not ready yet. And I shouldn’t’ve read Lolita.
The world of art, in my eyes, is a meritocracy. Do you deserve to do what you’re trying to do? So I’m not bothered by musicians who don’t understand music theory so long as they have large musical vocabularies (thereby forcing them to have some unorthodox system of theory). I met a chef recently and asked her what she thought of a certain classy restaurant (I don’t own nice enough clothes to eat there) whose owners had no formal culinary education. She said their quality was inconsistent. But so was Paul Verlaine’s. Why is cheap porn legal when it tries so hard to ruin the choreography? If I ever hear “it’s just sex” or “I always thought it was pretty straightforward” again–I’m going to get violent–and I don’t mean sadistic, I just mean violent. I am bothered by artists who neglect studying history and chemistry—they forget that Picasso illustrated a volume of Buffon’s Natural History, or that Duchamp studied classical methods of painting, or that Warhol was a practicing Catholic (the parallels between Catholicism and his art should make you laugh…only they just occurred to me). I am bothered by poets who don’t live as if words are actions, who don’t understand verbal economics, who don’t press back into the cervix of literature before struggling to lick their mothers’ lips…which is where Aristophanes comes in:
Wouldn’t it be considered avant-garde if, during a play, the playwright himself walked out and began discussing the merits of his own work, the demerits of others’ work, and discussing the work we are currently auditing? There’s a word I like: audit. That’s why I only read poetry aloud—it belongs in the air. Imagine it in a film, actually, if in the middle of a comedy the director began speaking directly to the audience. And if that’s not strange enough, imagine if it wasn’t the director who was speaking, but rather if one of the characters began speaking as if he himself was the director, completely leaving his role in the film and pretending to be a person who exists outside of the film in reality, who helped create the film. Pretty fucked up. And yet this happened—to relatively little acclaim—twenty years before the trial of Socrates.
My second comment is this: I find it fascinating to see Aristophanes disagreeing with Socrates, to read Plato’s arguable portrait of Gorgias, to consider the idea that proponents of Aeschylus hated those of Euripides, or to recognize that American schools like to shy away from Plato’s critiques on democracy or Plutarch’s illustrious depiction of Lycurgus and his utopian Sparta. Have people really been people ever since the beginning? How quaint!
GO TO CHARM SCHOOL, YOU LIBERAL ARTS FUCKS. CHARM ME.
p.s. i need someplace to live during september. can i live with you?
arts & fetters 