tupac versus biggie or 50cent versus mos def or mos def versus tupac versus me?
the following started out as a comment to Sean on Can o Corn, but I didnt think it was quite a comment there. So here:
I know we all want to win the popularity contest and change the world, but what if we don't want to win the popularity contest and don't want to change the world? What if we don't even know what we are doing and are working on figuring that out, and working hard, and not trying to be esoteric but using the tools at hand and one of the main problems with accessibility is accessible how? And if something is easy, if it springs out of where you are, well, you're already there, so how does that change anything? And if somethign is difficult, if it is foreign, and we dont recognize it, is that bad? Is it a matter of fault? Has some writerly duty not been upheld? I like some TV, I like relaxation and entertainment, and I also like work, sweat, and facing the difficult, even the terror of unknowing. Why does one need to triumph over the other? Why this sense of war and critique in so many different blogs I've come across? Why the guarded camps? I sense at times an almost bunker mentality. And now I feel I'm exaggerating, or that I'm the bunker.
Some kind of tension between access and difficulty, sure, sure. Sure. I want to encourage everyone who wants to connect with a larger audience to go connect with a larger audience. Read: a different audience. Read: communities, not community. The "mainstream", as in a river, is an aggregate, determined from afar, provisionally, to aid in navigation. But not to mince words: if you want an audience which is dedicated to challenging work, to work which offfers a radically divergent view of the world from the one on the Nightly News and in the big circulation magazines, its just not possible. Having written that, and realizing I probably believe it on some level, i am not so sure.
All I can say with full faith is that the commercial establishment, including that of the publishing industry, is built on inequity, and is an instrument of corruption first, and of anything else (say liberation) a distant, compromised second. Now if you are the Dalai Lama, a writer but not primarily so, you may have a fine relationship with these people, and not succumb to them. You have other media to exploit. A writer has only his books, and his book tours. It is far more difficult. The academic world has similiar problems, ones intensified at non-alternative schools. From Melville on, the tortures and difficulties of the American writer's relationship with audience, with publishing, is a long, long saga. But we, by and large, are marginally published writers, and the big break seems elusive, something to go for, something worth having.
But the funny thing with so many posts I am reading these days is this sense that there is this need to revolt against a literary establishment disinterested in, fundamentally, making bridges and meeting new readers. Am i reading that right? That seems a broad generalization, and a theme aired out all over the place - the sample at the start of one of the Roots' albums, for one (there its a question in jazz). I have to say I tend to read this as an individualist rebuke of intellectualism per se, or at least a distrust in its logic. And what might be completely understandable as a simple "i'm not finding this work interesting" tends to spill over into "this type of work is old and in the way". In whose way? And how? And who put it there in the first place? I am suggesting that this speech could use refinement. Its one thing to choose not to be an intellectual, to choose, say to foreground a writing of the heart and the sentiments. When this slides into a more general critique of intellectualism, I tend to wonder whats being repressed here, whats not being said. Like: someone really wants to take the nerds community away? Force them to go be popular, off to accessible writing labor camps?
It also doesnt seem to matter very much. There are many overlapping art establishments, or scenes. We have the chance to make our own. But I am not sure bigger is any better, or that there is any direct connection between making art and its finding an audience. Or that it is something one should aim for. "should". As if the magic of the work is a transferance of value from me the maker to some other consumer of it, in need of a fix of inspiration. I think that misses the first basic point: it is the maker who is changed, who comes alive, through the work. To much focus on audience can put the maker to sleep, changes them only in so far as it further reifies them as a branded producer of consumables. And hence consumer of them. My work with Danielle Steel brought me up close and personal with this, as has my own sad attempts to write a bio whose dominant unpsoken trope was not : love me, please. I think entertainers are fine. So are scholars and sages. I think these roles blend, but that that's an exception - they are largely distinct, which is why they have their own words. But then again, hybridity is all the rage.
My sense is many young writers feel an often overwhelming, if vague pressure, hydra-headed, to write other than they want to. As a "real, daring, drop-dead-funny, no-holds-barred cutting-edge comedian" or "disciplined and serious intellectual critic" or somesuch? I know I feel both. One voice urges to push further into some unknown, another hedges: will anyone follow? Maybe I should cut some slack, make a joke, warm them with humor. Sound familair? If so, look round kids, thats nothing to do with poor old poetry or art or one particular school thereof, thats the larger Modernism, a la Modern Capital, wheel of constant reinvention, why buy just one? Pull back further its doubt, uncertainty, on one hand a boon of honesty, openness, choice and consideration, on the other the devil tempting whoever it is the devil tempts in that one book that Bush has actually read. Its the voices in our heads and culture always criticizing, always pointing out shortcomings, failures, botched attempts and pathetic and telling marks of our own desperate forgeries. Is this the enemy we are firing our guns at?
Pooey on that. I think this is a rhetoric of unecessary division, of international borders with all the rituals and restrictions of their crossings. I know that at our best we are both amorphous and bounded as communities, yet without the need for passports and uniforms. I know that while it is useful to stir up the manifestos, they ultimately become dead weight on us. And as powerful as setting up the straw dogs for burn night on the playa may be, when someone else recognizes themselves or some loved one or tribe member in the effigy, shit be going down.
Which works in (mainstream) hip hop. Lil Kim's goin to jail, I hear they got Martha Stewarts cell ready for her. I would check Talib Kweli (Move Something) on this, though.
We can each choose to follow our desires, which wend divergences, yes, thats kind of the point, to get off the freaking freeway and bump around a bit (or an eternity), and then be free to get back on, eat at Burger King, and get to the next destination. Not an either/or. Not the old camps, the old divide. And then share notes. If we are willing and able to listen.
Last thought tonight: what kind of math are we using to calculate the efficiacy or positive contribution of our work? do we have such faith in a determinable (final sum) cause and effect? how do we know that Saving Private Ryan has been more influential than My Emily Dickenson? how do we determine if the net effect is a + or a - for humanity? Ready your slide rules and show me the math money. I say each shared piece is the old haiku formula: put it ina bottle, and let it go down the river, maybe into the mainstream, maybe to sink forever in an eddy to the side. But sometimes the side eddies are where the readers are, and the mainstream heads straight out to sea, and the whale's belly. Aint no telling. So the poet gives a humble bow to what is beyond comprehension and control, as Emily Dickenson's bound and hidden work was and is beyond her control just as much as the very publically decalimed Whitman's.
Polemics following me out into the night with all their bullshit. This empties me out, this turns sour, this is me stepping into the same GOTCHA! trap.
Posing for the cameras. So i quit my stargazing and write something.
I know we all want to win the popularity contest and change the world, but what if we don't want to win the popularity contest and don't want to change the world? What if we don't even know what we are doing and are working on figuring that out, and working hard, and not trying to be esoteric but using the tools at hand and one of the main problems with accessibility is accessible how? And if something is easy, if it springs out of where you are, well, you're already there, so how does that change anything? And if somethign is difficult, if it is foreign, and we dont recognize it, is that bad? Is it a matter of fault? Has some writerly duty not been upheld? I like some TV, I like relaxation and entertainment, and I also like work, sweat, and facing the difficult, even the terror of unknowing. Why does one need to triumph over the other? Why this sense of war and critique in so many different blogs I've come across? Why the guarded camps? I sense at times an almost bunker mentality. And now I feel I'm exaggerating, or that I'm the bunker.
Some kind of tension between access and difficulty, sure, sure. Sure. I want to encourage everyone who wants to connect with a larger audience to go connect with a larger audience. Read: a different audience. Read: communities, not community. The "mainstream", as in a river, is an aggregate, determined from afar, provisionally, to aid in navigation. But not to mince words: if you want an audience which is dedicated to challenging work, to work which offfers a radically divergent view of the world from the one on the Nightly News and in the big circulation magazines, its just not possible. Having written that, and realizing I probably believe it on some level, i am not so sure.
All I can say with full faith is that the commercial establishment, including that of the publishing industry, is built on inequity, and is an instrument of corruption first, and of anything else (say liberation) a distant, compromised second. Now if you are the Dalai Lama, a writer but not primarily so, you may have a fine relationship with these people, and not succumb to them. You have other media to exploit. A writer has only his books, and his book tours. It is far more difficult. The academic world has similiar problems, ones intensified at non-alternative schools. From Melville on, the tortures and difficulties of the American writer's relationship with audience, with publishing, is a long, long saga. But we, by and large, are marginally published writers, and the big break seems elusive, something to go for, something worth having.
But the funny thing with so many posts I am reading these days is this sense that there is this need to revolt against a literary establishment disinterested in, fundamentally, making bridges and meeting new readers. Am i reading that right? That seems a broad generalization, and a theme aired out all over the place - the sample at the start of one of the Roots' albums, for one (there its a question in jazz). I have to say I tend to read this as an individualist rebuke of intellectualism per se, or at least a distrust in its logic. And what might be completely understandable as a simple "i'm not finding this work interesting" tends to spill over into "this type of work is old and in the way". In whose way? And how? And who put it there in the first place? I am suggesting that this speech could use refinement. Its one thing to choose not to be an intellectual, to choose, say to foreground a writing of the heart and the sentiments. When this slides into a more general critique of intellectualism, I tend to wonder whats being repressed here, whats not being said. Like: someone really wants to take the nerds community away? Force them to go be popular, off to accessible writing labor camps?
It also doesnt seem to matter very much. There are many overlapping art establishments, or scenes. We have the chance to make our own. But I am not sure bigger is any better, or that there is any direct connection between making art and its finding an audience. Or that it is something one should aim for. "should". As if the magic of the work is a transferance of value from me the maker to some other consumer of it, in need of a fix of inspiration. I think that misses the first basic point: it is the maker who is changed, who comes alive, through the work. To much focus on audience can put the maker to sleep, changes them only in so far as it further reifies them as a branded producer of consumables. And hence consumer of them. My work with Danielle Steel brought me up close and personal with this, as has my own sad attempts to write a bio whose dominant unpsoken trope was not : love me, please. I think entertainers are fine. So are scholars and sages. I think these roles blend, but that that's an exception - they are largely distinct, which is why they have their own words. But then again, hybridity is all the rage.
My sense is many young writers feel an often overwhelming, if vague pressure, hydra-headed, to write other than they want to. As a "real, daring, drop-dead-funny, no-holds-barred cutting-edge comedian" or "disciplined and serious intellectual critic" or somesuch? I know I feel both. One voice urges to push further into some unknown, another hedges: will anyone follow? Maybe I should cut some slack, make a joke, warm them with humor. Sound familair? If so, look round kids, thats nothing to do with poor old poetry or art or one particular school thereof, thats the larger Modernism, a la Modern Capital, wheel of constant reinvention, why buy just one? Pull back further its doubt, uncertainty, on one hand a boon of honesty, openness, choice and consideration, on the other the devil tempting whoever it is the devil tempts in that one book that Bush has actually read. Its the voices in our heads and culture always criticizing, always pointing out shortcomings, failures, botched attempts and pathetic and telling marks of our own desperate forgeries. Is this the enemy we are firing our guns at?
Pooey on that. I think this is a rhetoric of unecessary division, of international borders with all the rituals and restrictions of their crossings. I know that at our best we are both amorphous and bounded as communities, yet without the need for passports and uniforms. I know that while it is useful to stir up the manifestos, they ultimately become dead weight on us. And as powerful as setting up the straw dogs for burn night on the playa may be, when someone else recognizes themselves or some loved one or tribe member in the effigy, shit be going down.
Which works in (mainstream) hip hop. Lil Kim's goin to jail, I hear they got Martha Stewarts cell ready for her. I would check Talib Kweli (Move Something) on this, though.
We can each choose to follow our desires, which wend divergences, yes, thats kind of the point, to get off the freaking freeway and bump around a bit (or an eternity), and then be free to get back on, eat at Burger King, and get to the next destination. Not an either/or. Not the old camps, the old divide. And then share notes. If we are willing and able to listen.
Last thought tonight: what kind of math are we using to calculate the efficiacy or positive contribution of our work? do we have such faith in a determinable (final sum) cause and effect? how do we know that Saving Private Ryan has been more influential than My Emily Dickenson? how do we determine if the net effect is a + or a - for humanity? Ready your slide rules and show me the math money. I say each shared piece is the old haiku formula: put it ina bottle, and let it go down the river, maybe into the mainstream, maybe to sink forever in an eddy to the side. But sometimes the side eddies are where the readers are, and the mainstream heads straight out to sea, and the whale's belly. Aint no telling. So the poet gives a humble bow to what is beyond comprehension and control, as Emily Dickenson's bound and hidden work was and is beyond her control just as much as the very publically decalimed Whitman's.
Polemics following me out into the night with all their bullshit. This empties me out, this turns sour, this is me stepping into the same GOTCHA! trap.
Posing for the cameras. So i quit my stargazing and write something.
posted by Kyle at 9:43 PM
2 Comments:
Ah, yes, the separation between good and bad; this or that; Black Sheep versus Young MC; East or West--why is this necessary? Does questioning it or making a stance make the whole world blind?
I have no idea. I simply put out a sense of my identity, and usually find that it folds upon itself [insert Bob's origami] and disappears altogether--that whatever I put out there in the world really has no certainty. It is so much of "how about this?"
That's what makes blogging such an interesting and cathartic venue. To push the edges of what I am capable of understanding, or to place an opinon to see it crumble, and my belly twist from what I've written. Those are definitely identity shifting moments.
Questioning everything has been so much of who I am. To find out that I know nothing each time. It is hard sometimes. It is also easy. Only if I'm willing to let it happen that way.
Someitmes it's like passing a kidney stone. It doesn't want to be moved. My 3rd eye is screaming, "But wait, I dig everything. It's cool as it is."
But some movements are unavoidable.
I read Sean's piece on COC. This guy thinks there is a need to move art outside to a larger circle. I am down with that. I also think it's already happening. Thoughts and intentions do have power. I believe this. We move things in Boulder, in China, in Los Angeles.
Whether or not art is meant to be part of the culture in a larger way, would be up to each individual artist (I'd say). And then there's the huge dilemma of creating something that can enter this corporatized market and be marketed with as much gusto as Danielle Steel. Hmmm...
According to William Burroughs (in the book with 'typewriter' in the title), trying to write a blockbuster is a no-win situation. He didn't try it with Naked Lunch. He simply wrote. It was right there in front of him.
When I was at Naropa, I was encouraged to write what was difficult for me. They wanted me to do more 'complex language.' I loved the romance though. The courtship with child's voice and non politically correct phrases. It was what excited me. It was my voice (my ancestry of 'no country'), so that was what I did.
Funnily enough, what coalesced was The Whopper Strategies. Many professors at Naropa thought it was not literary enough. They encouraged me to write about "my heritage" etc.
I was not interested in that though. Not like what I was doing. It was very hard at first. Then I talked to a friend, who said, "Don't be afraid to write a blockbuster."
I heard Burroughs in my head. I saw myself pinned between the literary world and what I gravitated to naturally. Then I allowed myself to feel it come easy. I just wrote what was already there in front of me.
In a sense, Burroughs and my friend were right, but what was amazing was how much I felt like I couldn't write something that was commercial.
I did it though. It was great. I realized when I finished that novel how much sides didn't matter. That there was no good or bad. Just to honor what I wanted to write, and, most importantly, not be afraid of writing something that was fun and easy.*
I live by this now. Have fun. It's a lot easier.
I think the call for us to move outside a circle is legitimate. It is not a question we can deal with as a group though. It is something to do on an individual basis, which may result in a commercial, non-commercial, popularity, or tomato reaction. God knows.
My questions these days are not so much about factions as much as the business side of things. How do I sell my art? How can I create financial stability for myself?
The warring faction between intellectualism and simplicity/cutting edge comedianism may also be a necessary challenge not to individual artists who gravitate naturally to complexities in language i.e. Will Alexander, Mullen, Waldeman, etc., but to the academy and its corporatization of this market, and encouragement for more of the same from university presses.
There are extraordinary poets out there--all kinds of artists--and I believe that many will not see the light of day due to the Academy's encouragement of established norms. This is nothing new though. This has been the pattern of the Academy.
Questioning art's relevancy to the people has also been a pattern for which art is constantly slanted. But there are many different Arts. There are so many factions these days that the guy on Sean's post, is obviously referring to the gallery and museum contemporaries. The already established norm.
There are so many directions to point a finger, but the moment we stop blaming and keep that power for ourselves, and take responsibility for what we put out in the world, the sooner we don't have to apoligize for anything, and can write in the fashion, style, and content that pleases us.
There is no need for blame. I hear you on that. I support you in this 100%. Shake the system. Conform. Do what is you. Hope the corporation can handle your magic. Love, lots of it.
Pirooz
*I also found that without any set idea of good or bad allowed the writing to be both commercial and literary. That the separation was in the mind, and that I encompassed all that was me and my understanding in the very moment in which I wrote, and that The Whopper Strategies or anything I have created since, is a product of my moments of creation, and any classification can be made by critics or audiences, but the only intention that mattered was mine.
pirooz, my short response: thank you for that. it is amazing, and i am thankful, that every response to this post so far has been both unexpected and exactly what i want and need to hear. it is wonderful to hear this side of your story - it is so different from my expereince at the school. so...
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