Details, Moments

During one of our initial discussions about how to structure Golems Waiting Redux, I showed Daniel some details I'd cut from xeroxes of some of the photographs. I had them tucked away in my work-diary as a talisman against work and the way its sameness and its neverending tiny crises can drain the time out of you till you're at the end of another year with nothing done, and exhausted nonetheless – And as a reminder that the project would be done, because Daniel wanted to do it and I would see to it that we didn't let it slip out of sight and out of mind.

Daniel liked the details a lot, suggested we put some of them in the book. "…And so then there are these little moments happening…"

I'd never heard details called moments before. They'd been details since the time of Ruskin, if not Vasari.

It was an odd usage, so I put it away to know about and remember for its oddness, for the way it cut the piece out of the whole, and, somehow, speak as though the whole were momentarily forgotten. The word seemed to me to do this in a way that the word detail could not, because detail always suggests the whole.

Well, the neverending tiny crises continued and I forgot about moments/details, until I read (crisis interruptus) this on Lidia Yuknavitch's blog some months later:

Someday they will write about these things.

Look: this is as far as I've got. Perhaps this is all I have to say.

Theo already enjoying the idea of the cigarette he plans to light upon reaching his production company in fewer than ten minutes.

Look: just here just like this.

We must try to mature more quietly.

The nicotine inhalation. The energizing burn. Pleasure's smoky rush.

Like this and nothing else.

This is part of a page from Lance Olsen’s novel Head in Flames, published by Chiasmus Press. The typefaces represent the 3 different voices in the book – but it's not the fragmentation and interweaving that struck me so much as the insistence on the micro-moment within each fragment. Like this and nothing else.

Lidia goes on to say that Chiasmus books are meant to wake you out of the mental sleep that other books maintain and serve. I take it that she means, largely, corporate publishing.

(There are honourable exceptions here – Le Carré's subject has always been fury at the sheer bastardry of the people he went to school with, the British Ruling Class. The Cold War wasn't the subject, it was the setting of his signature works.)

And so it seems to me that there are 2 sorts of fragmentation going on right now in the semi-unconscious processing in our mental lives: the first, the detail becoming the moment, space-based art becoming time-based art, seems to me to not only invoke flow instead of stasis, but to reject stasis and the whole picture. Even the idea of the whole picture. (Although, if you are teaching and critiquing a piece, or even looking at it, perhaps what you call a detail doesn't matter so much. You're pointing and talking and the whole piece is right there.)

The second acknowledges the whole picture: the ruling philosophy and apparat of our (political, experiential) lives, and rejects it overtly (on political, experiential grounds) to build again from the experienced moment on up.

The universe beginning with a grain of sand.

Digital Rights Management

Until now publishers rewarded writers on a sliding scale: the more copies sold, the more the writer earnt.

Digital Rights Management could be seen as a way to track the published copies for honest royalty purposes. However, because DRM does not prevent piracy it cannot track all the copies of a file. Putting DRM on a book does not ensure proper payment for either the writer or the publisher.

An illustration:

There is no legitimate e-book version of Curse & Berate in 69+ Languages. Those copies are all pirated; the publishers and editors make nothing from them. I don't think there was an e-book clause in the contract; if there was, we removed it, wanting to deal with that separately. Several major illnesses & one merger & acquisition later, we still haven't broached the matter – firstly, the creators and publishers have been pre-empted by the pirates, and secondly, the creators need to get other projects done. GobQ is a very small operation.

For very small-scale operations, piracy really does matter: it does the producers – the writer/editors, the small publishers – out of income that is significant on that economic scale.

As Doctorow says, DRM essentially locks a customer into a particular supply-chain, and this has nothing to do with paying the writer or covering the costs of production and publication. All DRM does is limit the number of copies the less technologically-savvy can access. It creates an artificial scarcity in certain paying segments of the market. DRM exists to make the e-world mimic the hard-copy world and so maintain old (read mega-corporate) commercial structures.

The real question is how to compensate writers and publishers. The answer seems to me to lie in moving away from the per-copy model.

The trouble is we don't know what to replace it with.

Homework: What would happen if Stephen King made no more than, say, Tom Spanbauer? What would that world look like? How would attitudes to writers and writing and publishing change? What would happen to the book trade?

(Due Fri. Sept. 24, at 5 p.m. No extensions.)

Half an Hour Well Spent

I went right through the 800s at my local library the other day. I'd never done that before.

Found a book of Grace Paley's poems (a real poet), a late book of Annie Dillard essays, and Antonia Fraser's memoir about Hard Pinter.

Snagged 'em all. With a graphic novel in drawings and photos about Afghanistan, from 1986, from the graphic novel section.

The bag is full of riches. Life is full of amplitude.

The Virtues of Gender

Sometime last week? this week? somewhere on the web (see goodreads) Stephen King said "Harry Potter is about confronting fears, finding inner strength and doing what is right in the face of adversity. Twilight is about how important it is to have a boyfriend."

I was irked by the tone of condescension. I haven't read Twilight; I wouldn't be surprised if it's not very good.* But I can't abide snottiness. It's second on my list of vices, after laziness. And so my first formulated response was, "Harry Potter's not allowed to have a boyfriend."**

But as I was paraphrasing King's comment to my faithful dinner companion that night I had one of those occasional experiences of hearing myself from outside myself, and found my self – or one of my selves – thinking, "God, he sounds like a bloody libertarian."

Which lead me to think about that list of Harry Potter virtues – they are virtues of the lone heroic individual; they are not virtues of interdependence or relationship. (Why is Romance the largest genre by volume of book sales? Why do women keep wanting to re-imagine the world as kind to them?)

And suddenly I saw King's list of virtues as essentially gendered. Which I'd never seen before.

----

*Which goes to show, again, that the words themselves are not what we read for.

**(Dumbledore's gayness was revealed in a post-Potter comment by Rowling. It’s not indicated in the books.)

The Geometry Set

Sometime in the 1930s my father bought this – a draughtsman's set. After my parents were married it lived in the soft darkness – rarely-worn scarves, soft gloves – at the back of one of his wardrobe drawers. I'd occasionally see it when I was desperate and had left my brass compass at school (2/6 at the beginning of each school year because I had a gift for losing them), and had geometry for homework. I seem to remember he lent it to me the day I had to sit for a scholarship exam, when he also lent me his slim, brown, worked leather briefcase with sturdy wrap-around zip. I saw that a little more often than what I thought of as the geometry set, but not much more.

I won the scholarship (much to my shock). Mostly, I think, because he lent me these magical instruments.

The Black Swan

And so we finally saw The Black Swan. I didn't know much about it before watching it, and so I was surprised to see all the ancient tropes: the fragile virginal acolyte, the powerful impresario, the stage mother (only in the chorus, then pregnant), the role too hard to play, the self-slaughter at the moment of triumph...

It was The Turning Point and The Red Shoes, only worse. (There was no supportive company or converted composer, no jealous director / dramaturge. No one at all cheered for the woman in The Black Swan.) There was an amazingly cruel scene where the new principal dancer is introduced to the donors and supporters, pained and complex expressions and champagne on the staircase, while the former principal dancer is in the crowd on the floor below, a nobody, left to scurry off as best she can. (She's later run over by a car, sustains massive damage to her right leg, and cuts herself in the cheeks because she is & has nothing now.)

It was not White Nights. (Oh, that timid, wicked, commissar-loving Helen Mirren, that coward and inferior artist, that failure who failed to grasp the freedom embodied in the West!)*

The Black Swan definitely was not Tap. It wasn't anything with Ginger Rogers; it wasn't Singin' in the Rain or even bloody Yankee Doodle Dandy.

Art is dangerous for women, mostly, it seems, because men control it. Were any of the men in The Black Swan too virginal, too timid, too frigid? (Too unmanly, as you might have thought, but possibly not said, about Robert Helpmann?) Were the men's toenails splitting? Did the director sexually assault them to improve their performances? Were they declared unfuckable? No? And why not?

Arnofsky also directed The Wrestler. It could be argued he's just a misanthropist... But… The Wrestler kept reminding me of Lipstick and Dynamite, a documentary about women wrestlers in the U.S. in the '40s, '50s and early '60s – the punishing schedules, the drugs to keep you going, the cheating managers, the cheating spouses & partners, the virtual impossibility of working your way out of your contract –

Some of management's deceptions in L&D took me straight back to my time in boiler-rooms. So I thought The Wrestler was about class, not gender.

It might be that it's impossible to make a film about ballet that isn't about gender (the limitations of the f, the transcendence of the m.).

Just remind me never to watch another one. Ever.

---
* The character Galina was not an inferior artist: she was a peak performer of classical ballet. Classical ballet was becoming a thing of the past;  the Soviet Union was about to collapse.  Modern ballet, especially America modern ballet, was, in the movie, the dance of relevance, new horizons, the future - all packaged as "artistic growth." What of modern dance 25 years later, when America is on the verge of collapse? Is the Baryshnikov character now quaint and inferior, now that modern dance is becoming a thing of a particular era, emblematic of a future that leaked away into storms and sand? The plot prevented modern dance being presented as another choice, or something a classically-trained ballet dancer could continue to do with an aging body.

You can't separate the economic power of a milieu from the estimation of its arts...

Reading

Nemesis by Chalmers Johnson.

The great relief he gives comes in two flavours: things have indeed changed, changed utterly; he has a name for the disease, and it accounts for all the symptoms we see around us now. The disease is militarism (the worship of war and its weapons and accoutrements, its headlong destruction), and it has always been the deadly enemy of democracy.

And, as occasional relief from the austere comforts of Johnson, I am also reading The Red Queen*, by Phillipa Gregory. She's very good – and the covers of her Tudor novels have delicate lacework of red or silver foil tudor roses in a kind of Moorish arch across the top. They gleam when you tilt the book and the light glances off them. Whatever else falls, light still falls.

---

*Which is something of a tour de force. Gregory takes this vain, ambitious, cold, narrow woman – cabin'd, cribb'd and confin'd by her gender and circumstances, married off at 13 to Owen Tudor, half a country away, whose circumstances do not enlarge or gain in freedom until the Battle of Bosworth – and makes us see her. We pity her at times. Often, in fact. But in her cold, narrow, unlovely way, Margaret repels our pity. She is, finally, the mother of Henry VII and grandmother of Henry VIII - as far and overtly above our pity as she always thought she was.

Gregory is very good. And no slouch at power relations.