Inkwell: Authors and Artists

    

I'm not a fan of rap music, but I can tell that what current music
I do hear is not easily stereotypical in ways that link it to what was
popular in rap 20 yers ago. The rap I've heard recently (where "recently"
means "in the last few years") has felt very up-to-the-minute, and even
easily categorized as reflecting anything culturally "narrow."

I realize that my even using the word "rap" dates me -- I should be talking
"hip-hop" -- but I've been impressed with much of the music I've heard
lately.
  

    
>>#70 of 99: Ted Newcomb (tcn) Tue 15 May 2012 (08:25 PM)<<

>>Mark, I went down to B&N today to try and get Vidal's
essays...thanks
for that.<<

My pleasure. The valentine to Orson Welles ("Orson and Me"?) and the
howlarious review of the book on the Reagans (the Kitty Kelley chainsaw
bio?) are howlarious---Vidal at his waspish best.

>>While reading your book, I found myself starting to compare you to a
lot of writers and critics - some of whom you mention and some you
don't (Kurt Vonnegut for one) and then I realized you are very much
your own writer with your own style ...So thanks for this
collection of offerings ..."

Kind of you to say. The Vonnegut invocation comes as a surprise, since
I've never read the man, neither his novels or his essays. Perhaps I
should? 

Regarding style, I just finished an e-mail interview with Scott
Timberg for his marvelous L.A. book-criticism blog, _The Misread City_
http://www.TheMisreadCity.com/, in which we touched on the politics of
style, a subject dear to my heart. 

You might find this snippet of our exchange interesting:

Scott Timberg: This kind of very personal take on culture – especially
about stuff that’s off the mainstream  -- gets harder and harder to
place these days. Do you worry about the direction the world of print
is taking and that this eccentric stripe of writing will become a thing
of the past?

M.D.: Well, I'm happy to be called eccentric, if that's shorthand for
any writer who believes style is politics, and who bridles at the
insistence that less is always more; that literary style in the age of
the tweet and the PowerPoint presentation should aspire to bullet-point
brevity and, ideally, assume the form of a listicle; that the more
writing sounds like talking, the better; and that writers who overstep
the boundaries of everyday vocabulary, sending their readers to the
dictionary, are the merest elitists and an offense to public morals 
generally. 

To be sure, clarity and concision are hallmarks of good prose. But I'm
convinced the War on Ornament is really a kulturkampf against the
intellectual and the queer, in every sense of that word. It  begins
with Adolf Loos's famous rant, "Ornament and Crime," in which the
proto-modernist architect argues that Art Nouveau is a decadent,
effeminate force for evil, hastening society's decline; continues
through Strunk & White and the Hemingway cult; and is alive and well in
all those "Rules for Writing" screeds by famous authors floating
around the Web. It pretends to be about clarity and concision, but is
really about policing the boundaries of mainstream thought and
expression. Again, style is politics, and the modernist cult of
stripped-down, "masculine" prose is both an extension of Machine-Age,
Bauhausian minimalism, with all the ideological baggage that implies,
and a stalking horse for a cultural conservatism that views the long,
syntactically complex Proustian sentence and the unapologetically
sesquipedalian vocabulary as a thumb in the eye of the common man,
which is to say un-American and maybe even unmanly. 

So yes, I do worry about a cultural climate in which every American
public intellectual aspires to the status of motivational speaker for
anxious executives, and writes the sort of PowerPoint prose he hopes
will make him a hot commodity on the CEO-retreat lecture circuit. It's
the Gladwell Effect, and the editorial sensibility at mainstream
outlets are very much a part of it. 
  

    
All: How would you like me to handle your responses, left unaddressed
during my absence---I was busy swatting at questions lobbed my way by
an e-mail interviewer? Letting them drift with the current feels rude,
not to mention like a missed opportunity. For example, Godwin's
question about ON BULLSHIT opens the door to an intriguing
conversational thread. But if I respond to a post now buried under
sedimentary layers of back-and-forth, as I just did, it feels
interruptive, since the conversation has moved on. What to do?
Crowdsourcing this one. Majority rules. If no one votes, I'll just
muddle along.
  

    
I would answer Godwin's question.  Anyone else who needs follow-up
will restate.
  

    
I'd be interested in your take on the book On Bullshit.  The subject
seems to be a meta topic of just about all media representations.  
Also it would be nice to find out  what you think the role of culture
critic is and how you personally approach that.  The hip hop thrash
seems to have moved on.
  

    
via e-mail:

Please answer the question about _On Bullshit_ and let's end this
Hip-hop travesty.
  

    

> To be sure, clarity and concision are hallmarks of good prose. But I'm
 convinced the War on Ornament is really a kulturkampf against the
 intellectual and the queer, in every sense of that word.

Give me a fucking break.  How about writing that communicates without calling
undue attention to itself?
  

    
I'm not crazy about the writing style Mark uses. It takes so much effort 
to read. Were I editing it, I would at least try to add some paragraph 
breaks and try to break up some of the many overlong sentences, and I 
would query instances where a word seemed to be not quite the right word, 
but perhaps a word chosen mainly for effect.

But I think he makes an extremely good point in that paragraph tnf quotes. 
The Hemingway/Strunk&White approach has dumbed writing down and has 
popularized habits that lead to poor comprehensibility by people for whom 
English is not the primary language, and to poor translatability. 
  

    
I'm going to bury my face in the Tricia Rose book I keep braying
about, seemingly to little effect, and have myself a good cry. With the
greatest respect to Roy, who may suffer from the disadvantage of
having to toss his comments over the transom via e-mail (although he
can read the entire thread, can't he?), his comment, here, indicates
I'm not making my point of argument heard over the democratic
cacophony, here:

>>#96 of 103: From Roy Christopher (captward) Thu 17 May 2012 (09:59
AM)

Hip-hop and "thug music" (or whatever) are not synonymous. It's not
all bitches and hos and guns and drugs. People rap about everything
possible. I don't know what the radio plays as I haven't listened to
the radio since the sixth grade, but I do know that rap music is as
varied as life. Critiquing the worst of it is tired and tiresome.<<

Respectfully, Roy, I do know that hip-hop and hardcore gangsta rap
aren't one and the same, and suspect many here are not entirely
illiterate on that point, either. (I know you were responding to a
specific comment, so don't take that as snark.)

[[Mike, my understanding is that "hip-hop"---at least, in the '90s
Limbo of the Lost to which I am condemned to spend eternity---refers to
the culture from which rap, turntablism (then known as "deejaying"),
breakdancing, and graffiti sprang; rap is specifically what vocalists
do over hip-hop music, not all of which includes rapping. (Am I within
a country mile of the contemporary sense of the word, Roy?)]]

My point, belabored nearly to death by now, is that while the
underground you and our mutual friend Rocket celebrate is undoubtedly a
hothouse where a million mutant strains of hip-hop bloom unchecked by
corporate A&R, marketing, branding, and advertising, my remarks focused
*entirely on the corporate airwaves that shape mass taste*, which is
what Rose is critiquing as well. Irony of ironies, you profess to know
as little about corporate blare (my excuse: a 16-year-old daughter) as
I know about hip-hop obscura. Devil's bargain: I'll grant that that the
Street Finds Its Own Uses for Things, that a thousand flowers flourish
in the cracks in consumer culture, that there are islands in the Net
and Temporary Autonomous Zones in the Society of the Spectacle (like I
said, 100% more '90s references!), etc., etc. if *you'll* grant that
monolithic corporate culture still casts a long shadow across popular
taste for the obvious reason that even in our age of microniches still
packs a marketing wallop subcultural phenomena can't match. (Sure,
there are the YouTube-ukelele-virtuoso-goes-globally-viral
exceptions---Die Antwoord, I'm singing your song---but they prove the
rule, I think.) 

There are wheels within wheels, here. 

First, there's the debate sparked by Rocket and, more thoughtfully,
Roy: What do we mean when we say "hip-hop," and who is credentialed to
speak about it? Can fans claim tribal authority in defense against
outsiders, especially non-participant eggheads who come not to dance,
but to dissect? Also, can any fan claim that authority when the
subculture has replicated and mutated to the point where few if any
fans are fluent in all its forms? 
I've addressed those points in some depth, but I will say that JonL's
expressed desire for an Authority---i.e., a fan with "street
cred"---licensed to separate the sheep from the rams made me wince.
Perhaps I misunderstood Jon, but I cringe at the implicit assumption,
on the part of what I'm guessing is a bunch of White Guys of a Certain
Age (anybody, set me straight if I'm wrong) that black youth trumps
geriatric whiteness in debates about who stole the soul of hip-hop. My
point? That's irrelevant in a debate about the white, corporate
appropriation of hip-hop, because we're talking about the mainstream,
which all of us have access to. This is a debate about who controls the
meaning of "hip-hop" in the public mind: corporations that shrinkwrap
a romantic conjuration of black inner-city pathologies for white
middle-class consumption, or fans, black or white, young or old, who
know the subculture from the inside, in all its richness?

Dolly back the camera, Roy, and I think you'll agree there's another
debate: how do we make sense of the dialectic between mainstream and
underground, the margins and the center? Where does power reside,
especially the power to name and define? The Frankfurt Marxists
fetishized the PRODUCERS of culture, making an ornament of power, as
McKenzie Wark likes to say---fetishizing it to the point where it is
seen as a panoptical nightmare, everywhere and always operant. The
cultural-studies posse focuses on the CONSUMERS of culture, overplaying
the street-finds-its-own-uses-for-things, semiotic-guerrilla-warfare
angle to the point where you'd think middle-aged housewives writing
STAR TREK porn were our last best hope for the revolution. And
"content-agnostic" techno-determinists like Clay Shirky, Steve Johnson,
and (God help us) Jeff Jarvis---believe the medium (THE MODE OF
PRODUCTION or in this case REPRODUCTION) is the message. It's a debate
about which aspect of the communications-theory chain matters most: the
sender, the message, or the communication/distribution channel between
them. 

I believe they all matter, and that meaning resides everywhere and
nowhere. Which would be very Derridean of me. 

 
  

    
Fom: 

Paragraph breaks have nothing to do with style, and everything to do
with the sound of me banging my head against the WELL's geek-friendly
interface. 

Overlong sentences: I refer you to Henry James. And Proust. And DFW. I
defy you to diagram my sentences and find a single run-on. Sentence
length is an aesthetic decision. Our age demands bullet points, to a
minus effect: syntax is one of the weakest aspects of much of what
passes for workaday journalism. I taught in a journalism department at
a major university, and can say with some authority that sentence
construction---specifically, the use of the semicolon and the em dash,
and of the dependent clause---is going the way of manuscript
illumination.

Not quite the right word: this is a base libel, sir. Name ONE instance
of this, in the oceans of ink I've spilled here.
  

    
"sir"
  

    
David Gans: 
"Give me a fucking break."
Right, then; gloves off.  
"How about writing that communicates without calling undue attention
to itself?"
Spoken like a Deadhead, the subculture that wouldn't know style if it
scored a direct hit on Jerry's columbarium.
(Yes, I know: the WELL is crawling with them. I'll be stoned to death
with Birkenstocks, I'm sure.)
Some styles delight in form, old dear, specifically wordplay; others
strive, as Orwell said, for "prose like a windowpane." One can
communicate, and clearly, without wearing the literary equivalent of a
hair shirt.
  

    
Fom: <<scratches head in bafflement>> It's a joke. I'm riffing on
gentlemanly syntax, which reaches its dizzy apogee in the 18th century,
 for my money. As in: Boswell's _Johnson), where seemingly every
sentence ends with "sir," especially when the speaker is piqued, at
which point he becomes even *more* punctilious about the fine points of
etiquette.
  

    

> Spoken like a Deadhead, the subculture that wouldn't know style if it
> scored a direct hit on Jerry's columbarium.

Jeeziz, what a douche, and a bigot to boot.
  

    

And another thing, you wholesler of sesquipedalian rodomontade:

> It's a joke. I'm riffing on gentlemanly syntax, which reaches its dizzy
> apogee in the 18th centur

If you have to explain that it was a joke, then it wasn't one.  Or at least
not an effective one.
  

    
No sentence should be longer than a professional narrator can read in
one breath, though, sir!  But if you wish to emulate Proust, remember,
he was crazy.
  

    

Just browsing through the interviews here in the Inkwell, I see:
<inkwell.vue.45> Paul Israel
<inkwell.vue.46> Gary Greenberg
<inkwell.vue.50> Blair Jackson
<inkwell.vue.91> Howard Rheingold
<inkwell.vue.103> Steven Levy
<inkwell.vue.149> Peter Simon
<inkwell.vue.154> Oliver Trager
<inkwell.vue.168> Paul Krassner
<inkwell.vue.180> Matisse Enzer
<inkwell.vue.189> Jeff Tamarkin
<inkwell.vue.202> Max Ludington
<inkwell.vue.206> David Shenk
<inkwell.vue.246> John Markoff
<inkwell.vue.261> David Dodd
<inkwell.vue.264> David Leopold
<inkwell.vue.305> Regan McMahon
<inkwell.vue.350> Mikal Gilmore
<inkwell.vue.355> Peter Conners
<inkwell.vue.377> Peter Richardson
<inkwell.vue.388> Eric Pooley

Go ahead, tell me what muddle-headed, style-free, drug-addled dipshits those
writers are, just because they are "Deadheads."

Dipshit.
  

    
Jack slipped with very good advice.
  

    
Wouldn't those punctilious-about-fine-points-of-etiquette 
eighteenth-century gentlemen say "madam" when addressing a woman? 

But never mind, I'll concede the "sir" as being idiomatic like the "sir" 
in "No sir!" and will look for some example of some word in your writing 
here that seemed to me at the time to perhaps not be the mot juste. Unless 
you're just uhhhh riffing (isn't that Deadheadspeak?), in which case, 
carry on.
  

    
Slips. My goodness!
  

    
Damn, I used "dipshit" twice in the same post.  I am sorry.
  

    
Before I turn my attention to Mike Godwin's refreshingly thoughtful
question, I will say, parenthetically, that barging, mid-conversation,
into a discussion group convened to discuss the book of an invited
guest (whose book you show no signs of having read), and announcing
your arrival with an f-bombing fit of pique, impresses me as the limit
case in ill-bred boorishness. JonL was wondering about life on the
screen. I'll venture the theory that disembodiment encourages this sort
of bumptiousness. 
  

    
Now we're debating Proust's "craziness" and whether devout Dead fandom
has softened the brains of Gans's Roll Call of Heroes? I give this
thing 10 more posts before the brighter brains roll a weary eye and
defect, leaving the tie-dyed trolls to thump their tails in triumph.
Either that, or the moderator could do what moderators do, and
moderate.

Hang on, Godwin...
  

    
I'm finished.
  

    
If I fantasize about being the captain of a pirate submarine, that's
not a bad thought, is it?  Because piracy seems to be a logical career
choice in several parts of the world these days.  And I want to keep
thinking it.

And you brought up Proust.