The Red Purple Circus Radioshow: Recent Episodes
Andrew Field
This is a podcast to discuss graphic novels, and the different art forms from which they come, (which seems to be pretty much everything), and by which they are inspired. I'm inspired as a critic and artist by the magpie quality of most people involved in the arts, the need less for systematicity than voice cobbled together by some strange serendipitous eccentricity of time, place, people and situation. I hope to talk with other people besides me about these things, and even come up with some possible ways of talking about graphic novels and larger questions about art, criticism, culture, and social justice.
In an earlier podcast, concerning William James, as well as in our podcast on Allen Grossman, we talked about the notions of the transcendental and the fallible, terms that we derived from Grossman. But that was only the beginning of our exploration, for these are terms with enormously important ramifications for how we think about art, and it would be irresponsible of us to speak about art, or catharsis, the reception of art or the creation, if we didn't have an adequate account of the relationship between art and love, and therefore between art and the Beloved. Yet the Beloved, or the muse. or Sophia, or the Shechinah, cannot be understood minus the fallible, since we are not walking and talking inner guidances of voice but human beings that are embodied and not perfect. How do we describe how a truly Beloved can tap like a magnet into an artist's desire and somehow write or draw or create or compose through the artist?
When we look back on the 20th century from the perspective of the 21st, we see that there are immense lacunae, canyons of omissions, in our stories about art and literature. One lacuna is comic books, and the many forms they have helped to bring into being, like graphic novels. A second, which I do not discuss in this episode, but hope to do in a later one soon, is cartoons, and therefore the innovations of Walt Disney and what this had led to in masterpieces of film like Wall-E, or Up, or the Toy Story movies. Graphic novels have come of age in the same way in which animation has - thing of Wes Anderson's Fantastic Mr. Fox, or the short films of Nikki Lindroth Von Bahr, which we discussed in an earlier episode of the podcast. Therefore any account of the 20th century art and literature from the perspective of the 21st has to take into account the innovations by artists and thinkers and innovators and inventors like Stan Lee, Will Eisner, and Walt Disney, all through of whom were visionaries with enormously sophisticated and fascinating ideas about technology, and communication, and story, and art, and design; and if we can think about their own work - and in this podcast we focus on comic books, and their relationships to other art forms like music, film, and painting, all of which figure in really important ways in the works of Lee, or Eisner, or Disney - than we can have a nuanced, valenced, scientific-artistic account of art and literature than is true to the spirit of William Blake and to the hybrid formations of the 21st century.
Narcissism is a serious problem in our society, where people with enormous and alarming senses of entitlement bolster their own egos based on their need for approval or to prop up their own insecurities. And whether this is a mental illness, as in the DSM-V parlance of a disorder, or whether this is a personality trait, the effects on an individual can be lifelong and deeply traumatic. I grew up in a terrifyingly narcissistic family, and to this day I struggle with the internalized scripts I inherited from them: "you are guilty," "you are worthless," "you are fat," "you are ugly," "you'll never amount to anything," "you are not a human being." I suppose, logically speaking, what other kinds of messages would people convey if they are unable to empathize, since would they not feel, more than anything else, their own inability to be in the world or derive sustenance through work or relationship? Regardless, it is useful for me, and hopefully others, to understand narcissism in a more detailed way; and so in this episode of the RPCRS we look at the DSM-V, talking about each, and trying to tease out differences between confidence and grandiosity, for example (narcissists being horrible interpreters of differences), or fluctuations of inferiority and superiority versus general braided moods in ordinary life of happiness and sorrow.
Mark Strand and Charles Wright are two of the most important American poets of the 20th century, and help indicate directions in the 21st which are yet to be determined but tantalizing. Strand gives us somberly, mordantly, reverently ironic poems that groan with a kind of wryness and wisdom all his own. Wright extends meditation into the acutest descriptions of time passing and the images that unfurl as he witnesses what happens through the associational spells he casts on and through the landscapes of his poems, moving from Li Po, say, to Richard Rorty, to Mondrian, and asking enormously compelling questions that are poignant and thought-provoking. We should read both of them more; both have immediately recognizable voices, both have unique sensibilities, and both, deriving from Whitman in Wright's case, as well as different strands of art and philosophy and Eastern religion, and Bishop and Stevens in Strand's, introduce new strains into our picture of American poetry.
We tend to think of poetry as "poetry," although poetry is really poetries, and there are many kinds of poetries and should be, as there are no standards for verisimilitude though there are standards for quality. To say there are poetries is to speak of sensibilities, which are as variegated in the history of American poetry as we could hope, and will hopefully remain so. We tend to think of different traditions as neglecting each other or antagonistic towards each other, and perhaps this is something that artists feel, though critically it seems useful to think about different value commitments derived from different artistic and poetic praxes, philosophies, and sensibilities, regardless of what these commitments might indicate. In the case of Mei-Mei Berssenbrugge, we have a poet, Asian-American, deeply committed to a tradition that includes Wallace Stevens and John Ashbery, in her interest in the philosophical and the meditative, as well as the phenomenological. In the case of Philip Levine, we have a poet, Jewish-American, deeply committed to a tradition that includes Walt Whitman and John Keats, (though I think Levine's inheritance as a Jewish-American poet is more vexed than Berssenbrugge's, meaning Berssenbrugge enters more naturally into the Stevensian tradition, while Levine's place in a Whitmanian or Keastian tradition as a Jewish-American is very difficult to tease out, more ambivalent we could say), in his interest in forms of description, a kind of sanity of remembrance, and a rugged awareness of the dignity of people in idiosyncratic, agonizing, or toughly endearing contexts. We should not say abstraction or empiricism are better or worse but incommensurable. Let's explore this topic in tonight's podcast.
We inherited from Freud the notion, mostly right, that sex is one of the most important aspects of life. But following Harold Bloom, who argued that Freud overemphasized sexual fantasy and underemphasized the imagination, there has to be a way to honor both imagination and sex, and in so doing reach a better understanding of the whole person, as a sexual, imaginative, and spiritual person. In this podcast we dive into the nitty gritty of some aspects of child development, to try and understand how children think about their genitalia (we are adults here), and how this thinking figures into peer relationships and better and worse experiences of intimacy.
Growing up can be agonizing, and often it has to do with figuring out how to separate from one's parents, to "be me but not me." Individuating requires anger, but anger is scary because we want to feel in control of our feelings, and if we've grown up in abusive families than anger is doubly scary since there is the fear we will drown or commit suicide or kill or harm someone else. When we have experienced abuse, we might struggle with more fused or isolated states of being, because we are afraid to assert ourselves out of the fear of anger, and so lose ourselves more in other people; or we are so angry that we isolate ourselves from people. The more we find healthy forms of individuating, channeling our anger and asserting ourselves, the more we are able to both identify and separate without fusing and isolation. When this happens we can manage our anger and anxiety better, and live more fruitful lives, have better sex, and feel more happy and gratified in our work and personal lives.
We talk on this podcast sometimes about issues related to mental health, so I thought it would be helpful to share my own story about growing up with bipolar in a narcissistic family, with both parents who were emotionally abusive and two brothers who were also emotionally abusive. Doing so, and coming to a deeper understanding about mania, inspiration, religious experience, trauma, and creativity, we might also be able to help others and be more discerning in our relationships.
It seems like, because of the way in which we can access pretty much any art form in some form online, that hybridity in the arts, in the best sense, as a fructifying germinative process, is encouraged, and this can explain the wonderfully variegated landscape of the arts, with hybrid creations by the works of Gabrielle Bell, Sharon Van Etten, Ariana Reines, Ben Lerner, Maggie Nelson, Anne Carson, The Magnetic Fields, Nikki Lindroth von Bahr, Outkast, Dana Schutz, all of whom find through genre(s) new ways of exploring the parameters and constraints of genre in new creations that defy the old while participating in as rich a manner as possible in the traditions of literature, visual art, and music from which their forms spring.
We've been talking about music, but sometimes it's good to let the music speak for itself. Here are some of the best examples we have.
American music is a category we often don't think of as a category. American literature is - we might think immediately of figures like Mark Twain, or books like Moby Dick or Leaves of Grass, whether our familiarity with these books is deep and abiding or cursory. But strangely enough, American music is a different thing, for most of us have quite a deep sense of rap, or hip-hop, or various strains of contemporary music - indie, country, alternative - although we don't often talk about all of these different strains as part of a kind of mosaic, or tapestry, or collage - choose your metaphor - for the shifting kaleidoscopic quality of American music as American music, an indigenous musical tradition(s). What is American music, or, better put, how might we think about it? What unites Bob Dylan with Aaron Copeland or Philip Glass, or for that matter Billie Holiday, Louis Armstrong, Outkast, Hank Williams, Fiona Apple, and The Magnetic Fields? In this podcast we talk about how American music stems primarily from the thought of Ralph Waldo Emerson and his emphasis on "self-reliance," and the tradition of Black spirituals identified by W.E.B. Du Bois as the Sorrow Songs.
Today we talk about science fiction - ways we might think about it in the context of speculation, of thinking about and imagining what a future might look like, and therefore engaging in various fascinating acts of a sort of counter-factual divination. We then discuss the work of Dante Alighieri's Divine Comedy, John Milton's Paradise Lost, and Wallace Stevens' "The Idea of Order at Key West," stopping along the way to explore possible connections between science fiction and the religious imagination, and therefore different religious cosmologies and mythographies like Gnosticism. What does it mean to speculate? What is "the world"? I think these are fundamental questions we take up in this post, along with questions about consciousness, with pit stops as well to the story of the Golem in Jewish tradition and Plato's Allegory of the Cave. We also take a few swipes at C.S. Lewis's interpretation of Paradise Lost, and read the opening passages from Inferno, Paradise Lost, and "The Idea of Order at Key West."
We have talked on this podcast about sources for graphic novels, like comic books or comic strips or cartoons, but we neglected one of the most important sources, that is, children's literature in the form of picture books. In this podcast we talk about relationship between picture books and graphic novels, ini relationship to questions about childhood development as represented in compelling and dark and poignant and mysterious ways in folktales, fairytales, and fables, like those collected by The Brothers Grimm, or Aesop, or Tales from The Thousand and One Nights, or Hans Christian Andersen's fairytales, or myths from Greek mythology, or the Aggadic Tales of the Hasidim collected by Martin Buber. When we speak of children's literature in the light of these works, we find aspects of literature that appeal to the inner child in us while also, as Bruno Bettelheim argued, to deep psychology processes related to individuation and suffering and beauty and spirituality. The world of the child is secretive, magical, full of wonder, of talismans, of things imbued with an almost supernatural tinge or fringe of meaning; and folktales, fairytales, myths help us to tape into that world, that experiential strata of memory and imagination in each of us, somehow both preverbal and also weirdly transcendental, in the sense of the spiritual lives of children as described in the work of Robert Coles in The Spiritual Life of Children. Graphic novels, deriving from cartoon strips like Charles Schulz's Peanuts, or George Herriman's Krazy Kat & Ignatz, also derive as a form of image-voice-story from picture books. In this episode, we read from "Cinderella" in The Brothers Grimm, and talk about how the spirit of these folktales, that are dark, poignant, forebidding, foreboding, mysterious, secretive, indicative of both trauma and triumph, quiet, humble, unassuming, can been seen in works by Gabrielle Bell, for example, which often combine the childlike and the adult and traumatic in configurations of meaning that create tones of both menace and wonder, humor and tragedy that add a new sort of tonal and content/form chapter to the history of literature in the form of the graphic novel.
In this podcast, a continuation of our discussion about visual art in the 20th century, we begin to talk about painting in relationship to poetry, and therefore different phenomenological experiences reading to reading versus looking or noticing, interpretation and perception we could say. We discuss how words and images have different relationships to metaphorical and symbolic meaning; and we discuss the work of Bern Porter as wonderfully indicative of what Richard Rorty meant in his phrase "redescription," how placing words, images, ideas, in new contexts changes what the meanings are, and how this is a good description of healing as a form of life that recontextualizes the past in order to open it to the future and new and different meanings.
Next we talk about seeing - just the ability to see - and how this is fundamental to the act of creation, in painting and other art forms; and we discuss how human feeling needs to be the sine qua non, the basic currency, for discussing art shorn from desiccated models of criticism and art which hopelessly entangle conversations about art and justice in less robust or organic frameworks. We begin talking about the ethics of seeing, and how so many people in this world seem to not see anything - the epidemic of the headphones in the ears seems to play a role in this - as well as begin speaking about tone in the context of metaphor, symbol, and association.
In our second podcast of the fifth season, we embark on a discussion of Picasso, Matisse, and Duchamp in the context respectively of thought, feeling, and intention, and use our conversation about these different value-commitments to hopefully come to a better understanding of the critical work of Clement Greenberg. We do this to hopefully start thinking about art in the 21st century with some perceptiveness, and trace if we can some sort of historical picture by which we can understand the cartoonist tradition as well as implications about standards for verisimilitude - there being to my mind no standards for verisimilitude, and should not be, and this should be a tenet of all criticism fundamentally - for there should be standards for quality....but then what would that mean?
We are beginning a new season of the podcast focusing on visual art, and we are going to get this season started by talking about Jewish art, in the context of the Torah and other everyday objects, and Christian art, in the context of the work of the Old Masters, and how we might think about these different traditions. We also hope to delineate a cartoonist tradition in American visual art in the 20th and 21st century, in the work of Philip Guston, Jean-Michel Basquiat, and Dana Schutz, and to do so we do a bit of front loading in this episode to pave the way to discuss Clement Greenberg, Abstract Expressionism, Color Field painting, and larger questions about perception, interpretation, Matisse, Picasso, Duchamp, and human feeling.
Recently on a bike ride to the DIA, the Detroit Institute of Art, I had the chance to watch a video of a dance performance in Burkina Faso, in the section on African art, and to look at a Japanese screen in the Asian art section. Both experiences were revelatory, and they gave much insight into various aspects of shamanism and performance that we have been talking about throughout these podcasts. This morning we talk about what both the dance performance, and the costume of the dance performance, and the communal nature of the performance, can tell us about the relationship between tradition and value, as well as how art can serve as Hogarthian moral instruction and emblematize or put into action different "techniques of ecstasy," a phrase from Mircea Eliade. We also talk about habit, with a detour into William James and his masterpiece of psychology (though he also wrote masterpieces in religion, and philosophy), Principles of Psychology.
We often talk about culture on this podcast, and how art is the primary moral teacher in our world because of its relationship to catharsis, along with the bankruptcy of theology following the Shoah; and if we are going to continue our thinking and talking about art in relationship to the 21st century, we have to talk about film. Film comes primarily from theater, and therefore cannot be thought about apart from questions about comedy and tragedy, as well as writtenness, orality, and performance. The greatest director of the 20th century is Ingmar Bergman. In this podcast, we talk about Bergman's greatest student, Nikki Lindroth von Bahr, and how she achieves something in her short films that represent a legitimate achievement through animation, forms of comedy that combine bleakness with a sweetness that tonally and formally seem unique and part of von Bahr's own vision, her own sensibility; and we end by discussing how these various questions about tone and sensibility related to the modes of comedy and tragedy, beginning with Greek tragedy and moving into Shakespeare and Bergman, find different fascinating sorts of emphases in the work of filmmakers like The Cohen Brothers, Wes Anderson, and Paul Thomas Anderson.
What is the relationship between sketch comedy, children playing with toys, and fables? They are all aspects of culture, which we can think of as something that combines art, religion, and ethics, or in a different sense art and criticism. Culture, be it Greek, or Jewish, whether in the forms of Renaissances, like the Italian or English, or traditions, like comedy or puppetry, is fundamentally folkloric, and at the heart of culture is the valuing of play as a human function that allows us to grow, and is at the heart of being human, versus pretending, which is the anti-human. In this episode, using Aesop and his fables as our role model for thinking about culture, we look at figures in our culture like Adam Sandler, the Cohen Brothers, Plato, Socrates, Homer, and other playwrights, poets, philosophers, and writers of prose fiction, to think about the role culture plays in our world as both aesthetic, moral, and religious teacher, and what this can teach us about the relationship between imagination and memory in the never-ending story of what it means to be a human being.
In this episode of the podcast, we talk about bipolar illness, which I have, and differences between bipolar, as well as other mental illnesses, like schizophrenia, schizoaffective disorder, and clinical depression, from trauma. We also touch upon differences between the mental illnesses mentioned above and personality disorders, as well how we might talk about differences between mania and inspiration, based upon the criteria of consensus and feeling.
We have been talking about how any criticism in the 21st century needs to take into account the Shoah, and how therefore it needs to involve aesthetics as well as ethics and religion. In this podcast we talk about the work of Ken Wilber, in the context of the value spheres of the good, the beautiful, and the true, and how Wilber's vision, which he calls AQAL - all quadrant, all level - is one of the most important works of psychology in the 20th century, a synthesis of Western psychology and Eastern religion that was never done in the history of thought. AQAL can provide what Wilber termed "orienting generalizations" for thinking about art in the 21st century, though it lacks an emphasis on the imagination. In this podcast, we talk about why a robust lens for thinking about art, through aesthetics, ethics, and religion, can help us understand why Joaquin Phoenix's performance in Walk the Line was powerful but the script was not; why Denise Levertov's poetry about Vietnam and Amiri Baraka's poetry about 9/11 are weak and dangerous, but Jay Wright and Amy Clampitt and May Swenson's poetry is not; and why suffering in King Lear or Greek tragedy, because it suffering that is processed and transformed into actual thought that moves and provides catharsis, gives us greater works of art that something like Darren Aronovsky's Requiem for a Dream, which is merely unprocessed suffering, versus a work like Ingmar Bergman's Autumn Sonata.
Bob Dylan is the most important artist of the 20th century, and he also belongs in the company of Sigmund Freud, Harold Bloom, Franz Kafka, Paul Celan, and Gershom Scholem as a Jewish artist who helps us understand the Shoah through the non-conceptual nature of his music and its commitments to feeling more than thought. In this podcast we talk about Dylan's contribution to American and Jewish culture, primarily through performance, which is a form or oral Torah, and which I think is the main thing he leaves behind, a kind of ungraspable ephemerality, like the nature of melody.
We've been talking on this podcast about forms of evaluative criticism that attempt to understand art in the context of the Shoah and the 21st century. And evaluation essentially means finding good role models for art. I think that, when it comes down to it, sexual liberation as a goal in the 1960s was completely misleading, and not sustainable, and that it also led to forms of drug abuse that were very harmful for people and families and individuals. This need for liberation, transplanted into sex and drugs, was a misunderstanding, since liberation, freedom, is something in the soul, the spirit, and not something related to sex or drugs. We can say that sex and drugs were perhaps attempts at separating from the conformity of the 1950s, but they were not sustainable, and even if they played some role in pushing space between who we were and who we are, and therefore played some role in allowing for social justice movements like women's right to vote, or the Black right to vote, still we lose a sense of the human being if we equate liberation exclusively to sex or drugs which, if you think about it, seems dangerously insane and simplistic. But I think this way of thinking seeps into the novels of Philip Roth, for example, and makes them therefore less interesting, and I think for that reason an author like Cormac McCarthy, or Joshua Cohen, give us better role models for fiction because of their representations of violence and what they do with it. The same can be said for thinking about Dostoevsky in relationship to Tolstoy, or Hitchcock in relationship to Bergman - the latter two directors give us more imaginative and deeper representations of human beings, and therefore more helpful pictures, more honest and compassionate and profound, about human beings, and these pictures are sustainable.
In our second exploration of Shamanistic Criticism, we talk about the Shoah in the context of consent, and how the denial of consent is more than a fraying of the bonds of human community, but a severing that leads to forms of rape which are the antithesis of religion, art, and ethics. We also discuss mysticism and silence in the context of trauma and religion, as these are experiences, and relationships to language - languages of feeling, or energy, as well as forms speechlessness that precede the verbal, or are anterior to it - that can help us think more clearly about the role silence might play in art in the 21st century following the Shoah, and the ramifications this role might have in thinking about ethics and religion.
We are hoping to delineate some aspects of what I want to call shamanistic criticism, and to do so I want to discuss six Jewish artists and writers who I think can help orient our conversation along these lines: Franz Kafka, Sigmund Freud, Harold Bloom, Bob Dylan, Gershom Scholem, and Paul Celan. In the work of these six, I think we can begin to come to some deeper understandings about art in the 21st century, in the context of ethics, religion, and other matters as well.
We've talked a lot in this podcast about hybridity in the context of art form, genre, and ekphrasis, but it seems like any understanding of the meaning of hybridity in 21st century art and literature has to begin, in some sense, with the work of Anne Carson, which has no parallel in the history of art and literature in terms of the originality with which she cracks open tradition and imbues it with a spirit that is utterly and unprecedentedly her own.
How is it possible to write three books that each, single-handedly shaped the course of philosophy, religion, and psychology in the history of American letters, indelibly, since they were written, published, read, and loved for now more than 100 years? We often find writings in a more academical vein on subjects like this, but I think specialization can get in the way of us appreciating and coming to an understanding about the magic that produces a work like Principles of Psychology, the momentum of it, the harvest of insights that have the power this day to simply flabbergast in their penetratingness and sort of wondrous bewildering array of diamond-shining insight. And then to do this not only in psychology, but philosophy, and religion....it doesn't make any sense. So how do we make sense of it? In this podcast, I argue that the only way to make sense of this kind of accomplishment is through what Allen Grossman termed the transcendental and the fallible, which, when we combine with Harold Bloom's theory of the anxiety of influence, gives us a supple and honest enough way of thinking about art that can invoke the spiritual and the aesthetic, the religious and the ethical, in a handclasp that is tight enough to hopefully use, but loose enough to hopefully be free of too much overspecialization.
In this episode we talk about the work of Ben Lerner, the poet, novelist, essayist, and critic, in the context of changing notions of maleness in fiction, as well as larger formal questions about fiction related to consciousness and perspective, as well as the notion of fiction as a strange synthesis of the detective genre and the musical, Mikhail Bakhtin, the great Russian philosopher, literary critic, and scholar, famously argued that the novel form was unique in the history of literature for its representation of what he called "heteroglossia," meaning how in one story a reader could be presented with an array of voices, perspectives, idioms, and how this texture, like a symphony in some sense - discordant, harmonious, silent - gave us a picture of life related to the multivocality of existence, a kind of pageantry, rather than the univocality we customarily associated with the lyric "I" in poetry. In Whitman, for example, we are presented with pictures of every possible person, but the picture is held together by the strength of Whitman's voice and vision, and no one speaks in a Whitman poem outside Whitman, meaning there is no dialogue, even if the greatest Whitman's poems are in some sense nothing but dialogue between the self and the other (for univocality presupposes multivocality in the voicing of the text by the reader). Bakhtin's attribution of heteroglossia to the novel form is a remarkable insight, but it could be updated when we think about poems by John Ashbery for example - in As You Know, where we are given two independent poems juxtaposed side by side, something which Thylias Moss also takes up in her own poetry in a different way in Wannabe Hoochie Mama Gallery of Realities' Red Dress Code, both being explorations of the ethical ramifications of style in some sense, in addition to other things - since those poets do something that Lerner does, different from Whitman even if underneath the sort of umbrella that Whitman unfolded for American poetry, being the exploration of first-person consciousness - the subjectivity of the "I" - through third person, what Lerner does for examples in his chapters on Darren in The Topeka School. These are ways that artists attempt to incorporate the Levinasian other more firmly within the picture of art, while still retaining the irreducibly otherness of the self as a Whitmanesque trope into the fullness of the picture of art. When we then consider the role that the music of the human voice plays in Lerner's work, like the voice of Ashbery or Moss - in the voices of Jane, or Jonathan, or Adam - then we see how strangely things like music, poetry, and language interact in profoundly moving and original ways in Lerner's work.
Allen Grossman is the single greatest Jewish-American poet of the 20th century, and while even his criticism, which is of an enormous magnitude, remains that lethal form of document, the "critic's critic," (he deserves many more readers), his poetry is even more siloed off, a kind of poet's poet's poet, and is rarely read. This is not right, as Grossman wrote more powerful poetry, and Jewish-American poetry, than any of his peers - Alvin Feinman, Irving Feldman, and John Hollander. When we combine Grossman's poetic vision with his critical vision, in crucially significant works of thought in The Sighted Singer: Two Works on Poetry for Readers and Writers, a series of dialogues between Grossman and the poet, critic, and professor Mark Halliday, along with a masterpiece of creative and critical thinking about poetry, "Summa Lyrica: A Primer of the Commonplaces in Speculative Poetics," as well as his The Long Schoolroom: Lessons in the Bitter Logic of the Poetic Principle, which contains some of the most important essays on poetry in the 20th century - essays which significantly influenced the work of Elaine Scarry, Michael Clune, and Ben Lerner - then we have a beginning picture of Grossman's contribution to our understanding of art and poetry in the 20th century, especially in the wake of the Shoah.
We cannot discuss 21st century Jewish-American prose fiction if we do not discuss 20th century Jewish-American prose fiction, and no discuss of this subject would be complete, or even near complete, without first discussing the work of Philip Roth, one of the greatest American novelists of the 20th century. Roth's work derives primarily from the intersection or migration of the influences of Russian literature - Leo Tolstoy, Anton Chekhov, Nikolai Gogol, Alexander Pushkin, Fyodor Dostoevsky - and Franz Kafka, the great Jewish writer from Prague - into the American stream, of Melville, Twain, Hawthorne, Flannery O'Connor, Carson McCullers, Henry James, Ernest Hemingway, Ralph Waldo Ellison. But it also comes from the Jewish-American comedic tradition - Lenny Bruce, Mel Brooks, Jackie Mason. But of course he also must be read alongside his contemporaries - Saul Bellow, Bernard Malamud, Cynthia Ozick, Henry Roth, and Abraham Cahan. Roth was an artist with a discipline that is frankly frightening; he was a self-professed atheist with a vocation to the genre of fiction so religious that anything Roth says about the literary enterprise is invested with such deep levels of irony that we somehow need to take everything he says without any grain of salt whatsoever, while taking what he says with a grain of salt. It is this dialectic - the utterly honest with the utterly delightful, that makes reading Roth this strange experience of encountering a kind of confrontation with suffering, that makes one feel both brave, chastened, and happy in a sad way, for Roth was a comedic genius, and though he wrote two masterpieces late in his career (he wrote many masterpieces, but these are considered his greatest) American Pastoral and Sabbath's Theater, and American Pastoral was a tragedy, it is the impulse towards laughter, the move from trauma into looking at it in a way to laugh out of pain and make suffering into something that one can understand in a less rigid or judgmental fashion, that makes Roth a kind of moralist to outfox the moralists, someone who loved the Jews more than the Jews, (an irony that was never lost on him), but who, because he loved his people, needed to combine that love with a fury of moral critique, through comedy, through the sheer exuberant riotousness of his prose, that, while retaining the orderliness of the paragraph, the labor of the daily in and out, the backbreaking search for the right word for the right feeling or experience or mood, that carved his own space in the American canon, a Jewish-American space, that to this day speak to his people in deep ways that therefore speaks to a wide audience as well.
In our last podcast, we began with a discussion of Harold Bloom's work, to think about larger questions related to American literature to then come to some understanding about Jewish-American literature in the 20th century and therefore the 21st. In this podcast, we take up the topic of migration as a metaphor for literature - how Russian sources like Leo Tolstoy, Anton Chekhov, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Nikolai Gogol, and Alexander Pushkin, as well as Central European sources like Franza Kafka - pour into the works of the great Jewish-American writers and novelists of the 20th century - Philip Roth, Bernard Malamud, Cynthia Ozick, Saul Bellow, Henry Roth, and Abraham Cahan. How do we think about migration as a metaphor for literature when considering sociological and aesthetic questions? What does it mean to be a Jewish-American, or a Jewish-American artist, and how does one find belonging, however changeable or sturdy, as both a Jew and an American - and, by implication, as an African-American, say, or a Serbian-American, or a British-American, or an Asian-American, or an Arab-American, or an Indian-American? These are not easy questions to answer, because how people grow can be excruciating, how people find their places, how they negotiate who they are within contexts that can be backbreaking or stifling or oppressive, and if we are speaking about art, how do these sociological aspects themselves migrate into the frame of representation to find expression in the works of the great Jewish-American writers and novelists? We start here with questions about folklore and religion - what is called in Judaism aggadah - and we do this for a larger understanding and appreciation of 20th century Jewish-American literature, and thus 21st century Jewish-American literature.
Ever since Harold Bloom's publication of The American Canon, we have at our disposal the most cogent and canny text available for thinking about American literature since Emerson - about 150 years of some of the greatest writing of all time, in all of the literary genres save, in that text, the graphic novel - and yet this is a book that received barely any attention in the press. We need this book, nonetheless, because we need to be able to look back where we were at, in order to see, or hope to see, where we might be headed. Bloom was predominantly a critic of poetry, and to understand American prose fiction, for the American tradition was Bloom's focus, and any attempt at criticism in America needs to begin with Bloom and work its way back to Emerson and before that to Johnson, we need to think about the relationship between not only prose and poetry, but American prose and American poetry. What are some of the value commitments in poetry that are different than prose fiction? What are some of the different value commitments in Jewish-American fiction versus American poetry? Why is Jewish-American poetry a less successful genre than Jewish-American prose fiction, if we agree, as I do, with Bloom's argument in the 70s in Commentary magazine that poetry was primarily a Protestant phenomenon? In this podcast, we take up some of these questions, in order to hopefully talk with more appreciation and acknowledgment of Bloom's outsized contribution to American literature, and begin talking about issues related to anonymity and community, personality and character, that might help us begin to talk about contemporary Jewish-American prose fiction, and more specifically the work of Joshua Cohen and Ben Lerner.
We often talk about art and culture on this podcast, but those things presuppose, I think, the ability to transpose one's suffering into something meaningful, and therefore to achieve some form or degree of catharsis. But when people have mental illness, which causes suffering, and their illness goes untreated - without medication, or therapy, or support, or art, or different forms of friendship and love - then the suffering can become worse and worse and lead to extreme states of psychic agony, such as mania, or different forms of psychosis, or clinical depression, or what I would think - not knowing enough about this - aspects of schizophrenia would have for a person living with it on a day to day basis. In our popular culture, we often see images of "mental illness" - a kid who is a sociopath shooting up a school, for example - and we then associate these images with "mental illness," when in reality most people, including me, who has bipolar, are generally people who aspire to live a good life and who, when one's mental illness is treated, can find love and meaningful work and thrive, contra all these news cycle images which mislead us into thinking about mental illness in ways disconnected from the quieter and more everyday lived reality.
But mental illness is different from madness, which I define in this podcast as the inability to empathize that leads to things like racism, antisemitism, misogyny, rape, abuse, and all the forms of fear in our world that prevent us from seeing the human face as the other, in the terms of Emmanuel Levinas, the great Jewish and French philosopher. Madness is ill will, the opposite of "kavanah," the meaning in Judaism for good will. Madness therefore erodes the bonds of human relationship, friendship, and community that keeps the human image, the face of the beloved, at the center of one's heart and mind, which can then shine and illuminate the face of others and keep the texture of communities strong and thriving. To be mad is to not have a master, and therefore to perform a kind of lawlessness in the world that is unable to listen and therefore unable to empathize, since the act of imagination itself is a kind of freedom that comes only through enormous amounts of discipline and the honoring of tradition and authority that is earned. Madness is therefore insanity, but mental illness when it involves human beings with good will and is treated can lead to quite beautiful and meaningful friendships and work and family, which I would define as sanity.
There is a strange way in which the history of 20th century art - literature, music, visual art, and hybrid forms - is also a history of Jewish-American work in the arts. The greatest American critics of the 20th century were Jews - Harold Bloom, Clement Greenberg, Manny Farber, Pauline Kael, Renata Adler; the greatest singer-songwriter of the 20th century is Bob Dylan, a Jew, and we also have examples like Aaron Copland and Morton Feldman in classical music, and Benny Goodman in jazz; the most important movement in the 20th century in the U.S. was Abstract Expressionism, which was in some sense a Jewish movement, involving Jewish artists like Barnett Newman and Mark Rothko, and Color Field painters like Helen Frankenthaler and Morris Louis, and Philip Guston who grew out of these movements; in prose fiction we have Philip Roth, as well as Bernard Malamud, Saul Bellow, and Cynthia Ozick, not to mention Henry Roth and Abraham Cahan, as well as Yiddish writers like Isaac Bashevis Singer in prose fiction and Jacob Glatstein and Moyshe Leib Halpern in poetry; in film we have directors like Stanley Kubrick and the Cohen Brothers; in comedy everyone from Groucho Marx to Lenny Bruce to Gene Wilder; actors like Al Jolson and Joaquin Phoenix; and in graphic novels and cartoons we have Art Spiegelman, Ben Katchor, and Roz Chast and the artists whose work their work grew out of, like Stan Lee, Will Eisner, and Jules Feiffer. Kafka stands at the head of these many traditions, along with Russian literature, Emerson, and Shakespeare; and if we add Sigmund Freud and Gershom Scholem to the mix - for Harold Bloom thought that a form of Gnostic Judaism, in the works of Scholem, Freud, and Kafka suggested the most important directions for 21st century Jewish art, in addition to the poetry of Paul Celan - then we can begin to think about the contribution to American culture on the part of Jews in the 20th century, a story that has not been remotely or adequately told. In this podcast, we talk about the relationship of Jewish and Jewish-American culture to folklore, and read a few tales from Martin Buber's "Tales of the Hasidim," to come to a deeper understanding about tradition, family, and the relationships between life and art.
If we are to come up with ways of talking about art that are less wedded to language exclusively, say, rather than honoring the languages of images, music, images, hybrid works; and if we are to recognize not only the greatest art forms in these traditions, but also the forms of art, derived from folk culture, from which, in addition to the tradition of the great works, people derive meaning everyday; and if we can also take into account great works of art, like the songs of Bob Dylan, or the plays and poems of Shakespeare, or the mid-career essays of Harold Bloom, that reach a wide audience while also being part of the everyday and the great, then we can begin to have a more robust understanding of art, and in doing so come to a better understanding about artists like Dylan, or Ben Katchor, or critics like Manny Farber, or thinkers like William James, or the beginning of this tradition of artists and thinkers who work in hybrid and parallel (but different forms) William Blake, and behind all of them Shakespeare, who offered us unparalleled opportunities to participate in the richest works imaginable that combine music, performance, song, languages of word and body and voice, visual art (the way the play is set for an audience), and an entire slew of aesthetic decisions that make one reconsider what art is or means or involves or suggests. If there is no intrinsic nature to human beings, as Richard Rorty argued, then there is no intrinsic nature to art; and, if we are to think about art in the 21st century, we need to begin to think about it in richer and thicker contexts that lend answers we can use to live our lives.
Postmodernism was supposed to be a movement of sorts to elevate the low and bring to earth the high, in some sense or manner, but that had already happened in remarkable ways in the works of the British Romantic poets, like "Lyrical Ballads," the book of poetry written by William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge that figured out a way to combine the colloquial or vernacular with the literary in remarkably moving ways. And of course, before the British Romantic poets, there was Shakespeare, who departed from his forbears, the Greek tragedians, and the Greek comic writers like Aristophanes, to create plays that, as Samuel Johnson observed, combined joy and sorrow in the most fecund ways imaginable, while also finding no barrier between the bawdy and the most penetrating forms of thought imaginable, in Hamlet, for example, juxtaposed with Falstaff. I want to develop a theory about visual art that places cartoons more centrally to our understanding of art, since I feel that there is no standard for verisimilitude, which suggests that exaggeration, or caricature, is at the heart of what artists do. Cartoons are unique to 21st century art, because they broadcast a different relationship between violence in representation, and violence of representation, as if notions about the human and animal from Aesop and Ovid's "Metamorphoses" met notions about human character from Cervantes, so that forms of magic co-exist with forms of suffering that make us laugh and tickle the funny bone (Wile E. Coyote falling off a cliff), in colorful landscapes whose very saturation suggest new ways of imagining that take a note from Fauvism, for example, and Matisse, while injecting into the equation a different tone, that is somehow lovable and foreboding, ominous, and flat-out violent, (think of the relationship of the characters in Art Spiegelman's Maus - the human beings represented as mice - to the Holocaust) like a Grimm's Fairy Tales transposed into technicolor. Cartoon violence is like the famous children's song, "row row row your boat, gently down the stream, merrily merrily merrily merrily, life is but a dream," combined with the great anonymous Medieval poem, "O Western Wind," "O Western wind, when wilt thou blow / The small rain down can rain / Christ! if my love were in my arms / And I in my bed again." It is a form of verisimilitude that captures the way life can sometimes feel like a dream - the ephemerality of it, the outlandishness, whether of pain or comedy, even the sense of something slightly stage-settish about the world - but also a visceral and painful drama of longing, that feeling of "Christ! If my love were in my arms/ And I in my bed again." A groaning, something ridiculous that cartoons can turn into a strain of art that combines the silly with the contorted, to give us images of our own expressionistic selves seen, as if by necessity, from the enchanted. Cartoons are also ways we process trauma that are more common, though I mean common in the sense of its etymology, as related to a community. It takes more maturity to watch Ingmar Bergman's "Autumn Sonata" than watch a Mickey Mouse cartoon, and perhaps that in the end is the main difference between cartoons and works of the nature of Bergman - Bergman's movies reach less people, but I wonder if they reach the ones they do reach in a deeper way. When we then move to consider the work fo Shakespeare, or Bob Dylan, or Harold Bloom - all three of whom read a very wide audience in very deep ways - we begin to ask questions about what makes a work of art lovable, and therefore lasting, and why questions about habit, in the forms of rereading, say, are necessary for thinking about art.
Ralph Waldo Emerson is the greatest American thinker of all-time, with the exception of Harold Bloom, and, as a critic, knows only Bloom and Samuel Johnson as peers. He is the beginning of Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, Hart Crane, Wallace Stevens, John Ashbery, Jay Wright, A.R. Ammons, James Merrill, Jay Wright, Thylias Moss, Marianne Moore, Elizabeth Bishop, May Swenson, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, Henry James, Mark Twain, Ernest Hemingway, Eudora Welty, Flannery O'Connor, Carson McCullers, Zora Neale Hurston, Ralph Ellison, Toni Morrison, Colson Whitehead, Aleksandar Hemon, Philip Roth, Joshua Cohen, and is therefore American literature and art (Abstract Expressionism being itself a fundamentally Emersonian project). American culture, which was inaugurated by Emerson, is Emersonian, and the best way of thinking about American culture is through Emerson and therefore the lens of the Sorrow Songs, as identified and described by W.E.B. du Bois, the greatest Black and American intellectual, who was a profound thinker and sociologist, as well as editor and founder of the NAACP, and a powerful student of Emerson. There is no end or beginning to his work, which is bottomless and heightless, wideless and weightless and wildness, a leaping from stream to stream, state to state, strain to strain, in endless fresh imaginings. In this podcast, we discuss Emerson's work in the context not only of his time, including the Civl War, but the nature of his thought; his need to define the American character as distinct and different from the European character; how he defined the American character in the context of solitude and freedom, but ultimately also necessity; and how he, like Whitman, saw the Civil War - and how we might think racism, or sexism, or rape, or fear and hatred of any kind of difference, or even in some sense the Covid crisis, which killed more people than the Civil War - as crises that need healing, and therefore people to learn how to think independently for there to be any healing. We also discuss the notion of crisis in the context of the Holocaust, the biggest difference between the work of Emerson and Bloom, and why banality as the root of evil, as defined by Hannah Arendt, is in a large sense why both Bloom and Emerson wrote criticism, and Johnson as well, and why we need art and criticism, especially in the work of Shakespeare, to not only survive but become more mature.
Miguel de Cervantes is the greatest novelist of all-time, with the exception, of writers, of Shakespeare and Montaigne. There really isn't peer for Cervantes, who created characters in Don Quixote and Sancho Panza that have no precedent in literature, in terms of distinctness and larger-than-lifeness, with the exception of Shakespeare, but also in terms of their spirit, something Spanish and Latin-American that has its own people, its own folklore, its own symbols, its own tradition, its own music and ethnology and rituals and dress and food, as well as its own literature - Eduardo C. Corral, Fernando Pessoa, Federico Garcia Lorca, Jorge Luis Borges, and Jose Saramago, and Ada Limon, for example - and which we need to honor and appreciate and understand if have any hope of making sense of terms like Latin-American - the hyphenation in the term, but also the forward-leaning dash, we could say, (a punctuation mark that the Latin-American poet Corral uses in fascinating ways in his poetry at times) since any immigrant to America is constantly tilting towards windmills, facing unimaginable obstructions with an unimaginable amount of courage and strength and desire. To understand traditions, we need to go to the root of these traditions, and in Spanish and Latin-American literature it is Cervantes, so we discuss in this podcast Cervantes' picaresque novel Don Quixote, and how and why it is one of the greatest book of all-time.
We often seem to emphasize writing, but sometimes at the expense of orality, of actually hearing human speech. And when we think about it, there was a world before books, before the Protestant Reformation and I suppose, though I don't know enough about this, the Torah as well. After the invention of the Gutenberg Press and the teachings of Martin Luther people began to have the opportunity to read to themselves, in solitude, and this gave birth to a different relationship to both the book and the imagination. But orality is an entirely different dimension of literature, and we don't emphasize it enough, though to hear something like Milton's Paradise Lost, or Shakespeare, or the poetry of Jay Wright, or the music of Bob Dylan, is to enter into various performances that have a totally original and wonderful power apart and distinct from the experience reading silently to oneself or hearing a performance life versus on record or computer. And the Odyssey, which is about a man trying to come home to his beloved, his partner, is one of the greatest stories all-time, and we lose out on that power of hearing it spoken when we only read it without hearing it. So in this podcast we focus on the orality of poetry, read some of one of the most important and influential books and poems ever written, and talk a little about the Gods as sort of elders for a community, and why the notion of King Solomon as a judicious figure resonates even to this day.
In this podcast we talk about the work of Bob Dylan, who I think is the greatest American artist of the 20th century. We talk about why music criticism is hard to write, before embarking on a short survey of Dylan's career leading up to The Basement Tapes, as well as mentioning some important works of scholarship about Dylan. We try and capture, despite the difficult in writing or speaking about music, aspects of Dylan's music that are not talked about enough, such as his exploration of speechified song in "Subterranean Homesick Blues" and its relationship to both current musical forms in rap, and ancient traditions related to Homer; the way Dylan is neither prophet nor poet nor song and dance man but a coyote figure who cannot be captured in categories or nets of any kind; and we touch briefly on Greil Marcus's work on Dylan's music in The Old, Weird America: The World of Bob Dylan's Basement Tapes, which point out the strangeness of Dylan's music at the time, the profundity, and how it tapes into religious, carnivalesque, circus-esque, vaudville-esque, and even darker strains of a kind of unconscious American bizarria that has no precedent in musical history and that to this today retains a freshness made out of desuetude, like something visionary made out of the supernaturally stale, that could be found in the deepest out-of-the-way corners of the most hard-to-find barrooms in the country, and that ramifies out in the world in sound of a rawness and wondrousness that will never be repeated. We also give a brief overview of Dylan's career leading up to the songs on The Basement Tapes, touching upon his relationship to Woody Guthrie, his famous plugging in at the Newport Folk Festival, and the restlessness that defines his career and makes him the heir of Walt Whitman's uncategorizable yawping unnetability.
In this podcast we talk about the work of Harold Bloom, the greatest literary critic of the 20th century, and the most important American critic since Ralph Waldo Emerson. We still don't really know how to read him, or even for that matter read him, even though things like aesthetics are discussed in academia without even mentioning his name. I think the reason is partly because his work is so mature, and original, that we don't really have frameworks yet for thinking about or understanding it, which puts us in a. weird position, of recognizing that he was the greatest critic of the 20th century, and one of that century's most important thinkers - while also acknowledging that we still only barely understand his work. Bloom contributed not only to the history of literary criticism, like Augustine did in his reading of the Hebrew Bible from a Christian perspective, but also to the disciplines of religion and psychology, and he did this through his theory of the anxiety of influence, and concomitant with that the idea of "misreading" or "misprision." All of Bloom's work can be traced back eventually to Shakespeare, and both influence and misreading are aspects of Bloom's worldview, his way of seeing, which was Shakespearean in the sense of a Nietzchean aesthetic perspectivism, and the valuing of both individuality and the sources and people from which this individuality stems and strives, but which was also permanently and always in a state of mourning about the Holocaust, which happened when Bloom was in his twenties, and which, though he barely wrote about it, was one of the single most important reasons for his work, and an impetus for everything he did. Bloom was as much an ethical critic as an aesthetic one, and all readings of him as some oblivious aesthete ensconced in the tweed-wearing world of academia and the Ivy League are inevitably preposterous readings of a man who saw the world through his own eyes, and changed the nature of how we read forever.
It is a commonplace to hear nowadays that the millennial generation is "spiritual but not religious," and this is a fascinating development. What does it mean? Because of the changed nature of the world, owing to things like the internet, people, including young people, have more available to them as grounds for thought, including different religious practices and philosophies. Some of these practices have been transplanted from Eastern religious traditions, like Buddhism or Hinduism, but I think in the U.S,, beginning in the 60s and up to today, they have taken on a particularly American character. How do we make sense of Buddhist teachers like Pema Chodron, or the Christian tradition as represented by A Course in Miracles, or the teachings that combine Eastern and Western influences in the work of Adi Da? How do we make sense of the Heartfulness meditation practice - which I think is the best and most efficacious meditation system in the world - or the role that imagination plays in anthroposophy and the Waldorf schools (the product of the thought of Rudolf Steiner) in the U.S.? The teachings of Eckhart Tolle, or the channeling of Seth through Jane Roberts? I ask these questions as an anthropologist and critic and artist, and not as an academic or intellectual per se. But the point, I think, is that these questions have profound implications for pedagogy, since we are talking about ways of life, traditions, related to things like a moral education, an aesthetic and imaginative education (see the work of Kieran Egan, or Steiner's work with the Waldorf schools), and a religious or spiritual education, transposed not in a key of guilt but more related to being a good person open to wonder and creativity. In this podcast we talk about the work of Harold Bloom, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and WillIam James, as an entry point into discussing these very important questions related to thought, seeing, and imagination.
Emily Dickinson is the greatest American poet, along with Walt Whitman, but she does not receive as much attention, in part because she is a woman, and in part because the originality of her thought is so demanding and polysemous that we still struggle to understand her work, or talk about it in a way that does justice to its complexity, nuance, and degrees of irony and sincerity. Because of her unspeakably intricate use of tropes, metaphors, slant rhymes, and hyphens, as well as the relationship in her work between hymns and music and her poems - as well as the way she transubstantiates grief and anger and rage into poems that mangle and raise language to an entirely different register - we need to figure out how to discuss the feeling and accomplishment of Dickinson's poems, their ambiguity when it comes to tone, semantics, diction, rhythm, and how one line of hers can feel as if one were walking across that old playground wooden platform, that dips and slightly wobbles like a pirate adventure, each step suggesting a different set of lusters, a different balance or altitude, in. weathers that change as one moves, in a Dickinsonian atmosphere that seems like Nature herself.
We need a lens for thinking about Generation X's relationship to the generation that preceded us, known as the Baby Boomers, and how the art of our generation is different from that generations in fascinating and important ways. We have a different relationship to art because of the internet, because of our distance in history to the Holocaust and slavery, and because of our relationship to religion and spirituality. Art today, in the works of Gabrielle Bell, as well as Fiona Apple, Joshua Cohen, Paul Thomas Anderson, Joaquin Phoenix, Stephin Merritt, Ariana Reines, Lauren Redniss, Austin English, Maggie Nelson, and Ben Lerner, strives to achieve different and unique forms of hybridity, of combinations and clashings of modes (beauty, justice, science) forms (literature, art, music) content (sensory, delayed sensory, mimetic, which are terms from Elaine Scarry's Dreaming by the book), and therefore different ways of imagining religion, or different religious was of thinking about the imagination, or just different ways of imagining the imagination. Bell is at the center of this movement, because she is a master of the graphic novel, which is fundamentally a hybridistic form, combining in an integrated and organic unity image, voice, and story. She is the most sophisticated thinker of our generation, with the most cognitive originality and the least affectation, and she does it through drawing, writing, and storytelling, which is an unprecedented achievement. If Bob Dylan was the most important American artist of the Baby Boomer generation, and Harold Bloom the most important critic, Bell is our most important artist of Generation X, and any attempt at a reckoning with what we have achieved so far needs to begin thinking first about her work and, in so doing, come up with better ways of thinking about trauma, religion, social justice, and art.
There is no American culture without African-American culture, since American music comes from Black music. Anyone who listens to the Beatles without an awareness of this is lying to themselves. And Black music comes, as W.E.B. Du Bois writes about, from what he called "The Sorrow Songs," meaning songs that slaves sang in the fields during sweltering and backbreaking conditions to express their pain through music. These songs, I imagine, would have uplifted the spirits of both singer and whoever was listening, while also being an enjoyable form of laughter against whoever would be threatened by merely a song. When we situated American music rightfully within the Black tradition, we can begin to have more sophisticated models of understanding about the relationship between singularity and community, since jazz honors the dignity of the individual and happens in an embedded communal context that supports while allowing each person in that nexus of performance to shine. Considering American music rightfully as emanating first from a Black tradition also means thinking more deeply and morality and art, since Black performance is fraught with issues related to racism that seem quite similar to the nature, to this day, of The Sorrow Songs. In this podcast, we talk about Black music and religion, differences in literary criticism and religious criticism, (and therefore difference between critics and Talmudists, say, or exegetes of whatever religious variety), listen to Robert Johnson's "Cross Road Blues," and touch upon the work of W.E.B. Du Bois and Albert Murray.
The greatest American poet, along with Emily Dickinson, is Walt Whitman, and as we continue our discussion of American poetry, it's time to start talking about Whitman and his contribution not only to American poetry but to a kind of flavor of the American character whose invention began with Emerson but who found its greatest expression - in a kind of plainspokenness, a strong powerful soulful graceful dignity-tracing healthful surge of the most beautiful creativity - in the poetry of Whitman. This flavor is down-to-earth and enormously prone to wondering and watching and thinking about things; it is curious, and strong, and sensitive, lyrical when it needs to be, blunt when it does, too; it finds the greatest prurience in the least affectation, and plunges in a kind of mad love death into anything that speaks to the greatness and authenticity of the soul. In this podcast, we talk about Whitman's olfactory metaphors, his manner of thinking about life and the world that combines beauty and goodness, and his catalogs, which give us appreciative and imaginary images of people, culled from Whitman's own experience, that allow us to see the singular dignity in each human being, and therefore define a kind of worthiness in anyone in American who listens to his or her conscience and chooses to live a meaningful life.
We often give a lot of attention, when painting a picture of 20th century American poetry, to John Ashbery and Wallace Stevens, or for that matter Elizabeth Bishop, but we tend to neglect the work of Hart Crane, who I think is the most important American poet of the 20th century and the legitimate heir of Whitman more even than Ashbery. Crane's vision was more severe, more rugged; and questions of his life run into his art in ways that we don't really have words for yet, but begin to ask questions about determinism and fate and freedom, while happening on a kind of dark and apocalyptic stage (with some exceptions, like "Chaplinesque," which we read) that suggests aspects of the 20th century we still must wrestle with, like the Holocaust or slavery or the wresting of the land in America from the Native Americans or any ethical situation that involves greed or selfish violence. Crane's vision, to my mind, is the purest, the most powerful, and the least afraid, and it is as unrelenting as his vision, which catapults the mind into a kind of doomed tragic grandeur of ecstasy, while harking back to the motif of the mother, death, sea, and the night that Whitman played with and invoked so powerfully in his own work. Crane cannot be seen in the American poetry picture without Whitman, but he won his own voice apart from Stevens, and his vision is wider and perhaps more visionary, harsher, and at the end of the day more liberatory.
We have talked in the last few podcasts about how contemporary poetry, with some important exceptions, largely took a downturn in the 1970s and, going into the 2000s, lost all relationship to the actual tradition of Dickinson, Whitman, Bishop, Ashbery, Thylias Moss, Jay Wright, and other poets of that stature who we cannot avoid if we wish to write poetry at all. As we enter into the second decade of the 2000s, we are starting to see some poets who are genuinely doing interesting and powerful work that plays with tradition in fascinatingly original ways, while incorporating different tonal registers that had never been seen before on the American poetry scene. In this podcast, we talk about the work of Aaron Kunin, from his book Cold Genius, and the work of Chelsey Minnis, from her book Poemland, and talk about how these poets incorporate constraints and new tones to write poetry that manages to be expressionistic, heart-breaking, deeply funny, cerebral, and visceral while providing implicit and incisive critiques of things in our society like banality in all of its forms.
John Ashbery is the single most influential poet of the 20th century, and there is no one writing poetry today that can even begin to write without wrestling with this influence and trying to carve out a voice distinct from his. He's the greatest American poet since Dickinson and Whitman, and we still do not know how to talk about a form of music in poetry that uses concepts non-conceptually, or barely conceptually, or something like that. There is a music in Ashbery's work that scissors through every crust of thought that ever held one back, and barrels across imaginative vistas of color and imagination with a kind of sublimity that is a sort of religious adventure of feeling. We need to start thinking about his work in a way that is adequate to it, that does not reduce it, and that can use language to describe an art form that uses language to question what language even is. In this podcast, we talk about the greatest poet of the 20th century, and we read two poems: "Soonest Mended," and the beginning stanzas of "The Skaters."
I think Elizabeth Bishop inaugurates a new chapter in 20th American poetry, because she is so sui generis - she does not fit into any of our categories for describing poetry, like "postmodern" or "confessional" or what have you - and because she writes extraordinarily mature poems that can be frightening and enjoyably funny and fun and magical in the same work. She also is the most ekphrastic of poets, inheriting this tendency from her own teacher, Marianne Moore, but making it her own, in her own voice, which pushed back against the schoolmarmish quality of some of Moore's work and discovered her own blend of lovable eccentricity that combined a painterly sensibility with a genius not only for language but for finding her own original relationship to language. In this podcast, we talk about the role that trauma and the excruciating need and experience of finding one's own voice plays in poetry and by extension the other art forms, and we read and discuss two poems by Elizabeth Bishop that exemplify this strange admixture of the traumatic and transcendental, the prerational and the transrational, the damaged child and the imaginative child, in "Sestina" and "In the Waiting Room."
In this podcast, we move into a discussion of psychology and psychoanalysis. We talk briefly about the work of William James and more in-depth about some of the ideas of Sigmund Freud, and the move into a discussion of projection and transference and the relationship these two psychological acts have to do with co-dependency and anger.
We have not thought deeply enough about fits between criticism and art form, and what it is that makes a good fit between an art form that uses language and evaluation to consider the meanings and achievements - the appreciations and critiques, the one necessitating the other, though always coming first - of another art form, whether this be in language, as in literary criticism, or image, as in art criticism, or music, as in music criticism. How does one write using concepts in literary criticism through words to describe an art form that attempts to use concepts in a musical fashion which discards the concepts as soon as they are barely suggested? Poetry is conceptual, but it "resists the intelligence almost successfully," in the words of Wallace Stevens. Music and art are different, because they are not conceptual. In this podcast we read three poems by Wallace Stevens, one of the greatest American poets of the 20th century, and we meditate on how it is possible to even begin writing about this most protean, fecund, multifarious, florabundant, and shockingly austere poet.
We as a country face a lot of pressing issues, and one of them is a form of universal salvation, propagated by weaker forms of Christianity that advocate for "healing" while unwilling to face or think about actual human suffering and history, whether that be slavery, the Holocaust, or personal trauma via rape, abuse, or suffering of various kinds. Samuel Johnson, the greatest literary critic who ever lived, with the exception of Harold Bloom, was a profound moral thinker in the wisdom tradition of Solomon, and reading him can give us insight into the difference between being judgmental versus being judicious. In this episode, we read excerpts from two fo Johnson's essays, and talk about how his courage and writing can help us think about morality and criticism for the 21st century.
There is a lot of poetry written today, but most of it is not the greatest, which is the case with all the arts, and critics sift through the bad poems to find the poems that deserve attention because they have a worthiness. In this poem we look at two poems by Ariana Reines and John Beer, the two most important poets writing today.
Art is a process whereby we try and transform our pain or trauma into a form that can help us heal and thereby help others heal. But healing involves catharsis, which is also a form of vengeance, and therefore every work of art works, through aesthetics, in the realm of social justice via a powerless power. We seek healing because every adult carries a damaged child inside them, just as every adult carries an imaginative child, and art is an attempt on the part of the damaged child to use their imagination to covert their suffering into something beautiful or meaningful to allow them to feel seen and heard and validated. The imagination itself comes from the heart, and the heart is somewhere between the mind and the body, and we don't know enough about it. In this podcast we talk about why reading psychology imaginatively is a better lens for understanding art and life.
There is a tradition of Jewish-American poetry in our country that no one writes about or is even aware of, and when one is it is often in the form of anthologies organized thematically, but there are also poets like Alvin Feinman, Richard Howard, Irving Feldman, Allen Grossman, and John Hollander, as well as Peter Cole and translations by David Rosenberg, that deserve more attention. These men write poems stronger than most poems written today, and their names are not even mentioned at all, which is a travesty and another indictment of our insular, tepid, Ashbery-terrified poetry community, that still confuses powerless power with political power and therefore writes marvelously atrocious poems. In this podcast, we discuss why Jewish-American poetry has historically been a vexed subject, and we read three poems by Feinman, Howard, and Feldman.
In this podcast we talk about why contemporary poetry is often staid and derivative, and we argue that is was never able to individuate from either the poetic influence of John Ashbery or the critical influence of Harold Bloom. We also discuss cultural and historical reasons why a confusion about aesthetics and ethics has led to a poetry world that is cut off from the rest of the cultural world, and that mostly spins around in circles and is tone-deaf to other currents in our culture.
Often when we talk about politics, we wind up devolving into rants and ill-will. This happens, as well know by now, in part because of the bubble of social media, in part because our populations are divided in very entrenched ways through things like race and money, and in part - perhaps the scariest part - because a large majority of information on the internet consumed by the populace is neither objective as possible nor interested in such. But there is another reason as well - people want to have a voice, regardless of their political persuasion, and rants and ill-will are often ways that people try to find a voice when they haven't figured out how exactly. In this podcast we talk about why individuation is at the heart of why people engage and want to engage in the political process - to be heard - but why more mature acts of individuation are more likely to earn respect, and this itself depends on good sources of information and moral leaders, to my mind, before political leaders per se.
In this podcast we take a more political direction, talking about why the overturning of Roe V. Wade is not good for this country, and why it should trouble any self-respecting free thinker with a modicum of empathy for vulnerable populations, including women, as well as more mature interpretations of the Hebrew Bible and New Testament.
When we talk about art, we talk about catharsis, and when we talk about catharsis we talk about suffering, personal or collective and historical. Catharsis can heal by allowing for an indirectly direct confrontation that provides a safe context for imaginatively considering the meaning of pain, and therefore the meaning of suffering. Theodore Adorno famously wrote that "to write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric." But he did not mean advocating for silence, but rather, I would argue, incorporating silence into works of art. How do we think about poetry in relationship to unimaginable suffering, now that seventy years approximately has passed? In this podcast, we talk about these things, and we discuss a poem by Paul Celan, "Islandward," to try and understand what role something like poetry, or art in general, could play in the context of genocide.
I think theater is our best metaphor for thinking about the arts, and so in this episode of the podcast, we focus on Shakespeare and his relationship to ekphrasis, and therefore to art as a whole and art as hybridity. Along the way we also stop to talk about the nature of theater as something that troubles the distinction of art and life in the most fascinating way, and how theater, through Shakespeare, can helps think about art forms ranging from dance to film to visual art to poetry. To do so, we also take a trip into the work of Howard Gardner and his theory of multiple intelligences as a means for explaining, in a psychological framework, how we might think about differences between Charlie Chaplin and Pablo Picasso, or Michael Jordan and Soren Kierkegaard, while thinking about these questions in a critical and evaluative light.
There was an article, I think before covid, in the New York Review of Books, in which Zadie Smith argued that Emily Dickinson (she could be right about this) is a better poet for our times. But in doing so, she also described Whitman as a "poet of containment," if I am remembering this correctly (I don't subscribe to the magazine anymore, and the article is behind a paywall). In this podcast, I take issue with this description, attempting to situate Whitman's best poems, along with the greatest forms of any in any iteration, in the context of shamanism, which I argue is a sort of experience of the imagination akin to what Elaine Scarry calls "the felt experience of imagining," and close to Harold Bloom's description of poets and people more generally as secret Gnostics in The American Religion: The Emergence of the Post-Christian Nation. I also discuss Jay Wright's poetry, and how it is embedded within Dogon religion, as well as briefly Bob Dylan's music in a similar vein.
There are today an unprecedented ability to access different art forms with literally a movement of an index finger in an instant. This means that there is also the possibility of a very pungent fermentation, germination, pollination between the arts, since experience and imagination do not discriminate and say "oh, this is music, and only music," but rather "everything I have ever thought or felt, in some sense, or seen, or touched, goes into this 'song'" since the imagination is something that unifies and doesn't live by making neat distinctions. In this podcast, we talk about ekphrasis (which usually. means poems written about, or inspired by, paintings) in the context of imagination, individuation, sex, and the ingredients that go into every act of creation.
There is a commonplace assumption in Western imaginative and religious traditions that interpretation is crucial for understanding who we are, where we came from, and where we are going. Think of Augustine's lens on the Hebrew Bible, or Shakespeare's reading of the Geneva Bible and Cervantes. But what is the difference, anyways, between acts of reading and creation, versus acts of meditation? Aren't all three different ways of courting inspiration, or insight, or a kind of "healthy-mindedness", to use a term from William James' The Varieties of Religious Experience? Why isn't imagination talked about more in religious texts? (Is there something fundamentally heretical about it?). In this rambly podcast, we try to get at some possible koan-cracking solutions to these questions.
There has been talk in our culture recently about the role of the critic, and this is an important conversation. There was an article recently in the New York Review of Books by Merve Emre, the author, academic, and literary critic, about the role of the critic, and on Twitter we find debates about the merits of Marvel movies versus Scorcese flicks. These are important conversations, because a critic helps us think, and thinking is the antidote to banality, which Hannah Arendt argued is the definition of evil. Because criticism is therefore both a moral and aesthetic act involving thinking, critics like to think about thinking. But this raises the question - what is the difference, then, between critics and philosophers, between Harold Bloom and Aristotle? For more on this matter, listen in...
There have historically been attempts to come up with a term to describe graphic novels, cartoons, and comic strips, as well as comic books, and the two main ones are probably Will Eisner's "sequential art" and Ben Katchor's "picture-stories." Both are terms that attempt to find a word to fit the art form that uses words and images to tell stories. In this podcast, I dorkily try to explain why I think "story drawings" is a better term for talking about works like graphic novels, because I think Eisner's term emphasizes painting too much, and Katchor's too much of a picturesqueness. For more on this, as well as why Kafka fits importantly into this picture, give a listen....
There is so much to learn about the relationship between mental illness, creativity, and emotional issues, and I tend to think we have only scratched the surface of this topic. Kay Redfield Jamison's work is enormously important in this context, but I think it is also useful to hear from artists themselves, and even critics. Foucault's work is also important in this context. These three things are separate things, but for people with bipolar, including me, they can become quite muddied experientially when one is coping with unmedicated symptoms or in the prodrome phase, a word for when people are having symptoms before a diagnosis. This podcast talks about the relationship between creativity and trauma, while also trying to talk clearly about how these separate factors - the objectivity of mental illness, the complicatedness of emotional issues, and the meaning created from trauma in the arts - can coalesce in different artists lives to form a way of seeing, which to my mind is the best way to describe the difference between Kafkaesque, Dickinsonian, and Shakespeare, for example. A theory of creativity for the mad, let's say.
Enough time has probably passed where we can see the main traditions of the graphic novel, a relatively recent invention as an art form, a bit more clearly. Which is a fancy way of saying that, like TikTok, which is a kind of new invention in technology, the graphic novel is also a new invention, and a kind of technology, though it is an art form, while TikTok is a medium for deferents kinds of art forms, like dance or comedy. And the same way that every kid as has two parents, every art form has people who bring it into being. In the case of the graphic novel, that art form's parents are Art Spiegelman and Robert Crumb - R. Crumb is his name as an artist - and through them come the main traditions of Raw (from Spiegelman) and Weirdo (from Crumb). In this podcast, we discuss some differences and similarities between the traditions, as well as larger questions about possible cultural-historical sources for the art form we call the graphic novel.
When you read a Spiderman comic, what's great about it is so many things, but also the drawings and the story. The drawings are a form of art, like paintings, and the story is made out of words, like a poem or novel. But also a comic book has voice, meaning the voice of the characters and the voice of the narrator. Voice is more like a poem or music; or, music and poetry emphasize voice more than the other art forms, I think. So if a graphic novel is made out of voice, image, and story, and therefore like a poem, painting, and novel combined, then is it more like one or the other?
The graphic novel is an insanely versatile form that incorporates image, voice, and storytelling. It seems kind of unprecedented, as a form of literature, for that reason. There have been some really interesting critics who have written about the form - I'm thinking right now of Harvey Pekar and Bob Levin - and these critics have helped us think about the difference between the critic and scholar, as well as stereotypes about each (which Pekar and Levin seem interested in their own ways of fighting). What happens when we throw Harold Bloom, Manny Farber, and Clement Greenberg into the mix? Listen to find out.