Day 42: John Logan, Joy Williams, Dwight Macdonald
I am tired so I will give some brief thoughts today.
Content warning: The Joy Williams story is very dark.
John Logan - The Picnic
I came across this very beautiful poem which recounts a first experience of requited love. It might come close to sentimentality but somehow does not. It really just achieves a seriousness and beauty. Here is an excerpt.
She didn’t move her head or take her hand.
I felt a soft caving in my stomach
As at the top of the highest slide,
When I had been a child, but was not afraid,
And did not know why my eyes moved with wet
As I brushed her cheek with my lips and brushed
Her lips with my own lips. She said to me
Jack, Jack, different than I had ever heard,
Because she wasn’t calling me, I think,
Or telling me. She used my name to
Talk in another way I wanted to know.
Anthony Wilson's response to the poem is even more beautiful. The last two paragraphs caused wave upon wave of the "about to cry" feeling:
On another level, however, I was more than intrigued because the poem was about experience I knew little about but was keen to discover. Furthermore, while I felt that the poem was ‘like someone talking to me’ I also knew that lines like those quoted above were not the way that people spoke. There was a sense that this was language which was both real and artificial at the same time.
I now identify these feelings as being to do with the interplay of concepts such as ‘form’ with ‘content’, or, ‘voice and feeling’ with ‘structure’. But at the time I felt a combination of intrigue and puzzlement. To borrow another phrase from the poem, I now see that the poem enacted ‘talk in another way I wanted to know’. Whenever I read or hear a poem I like for the first time I still feel that same caving as at the top of the highest slide. It is a kind of joyous nervousness. I want the poem to talk to me in a way I know and yet have no knowledge of. I am in the business of wanting to be surprised. I am already falling in love with the words taking shape in my throat and under my breath.
I was moved a little by the poem, but extremely moved by this blogger's response. Thank you.
Joy Williams - After the Haiku Period
I think this is the best one of the collection so far, as I have already mostly forgotten what the others were about. This has all the classic Joy Williams humour, unpredictability and pessimism, but there is a clear climactic ending.
It speaks to the utter hopelessness one feels about our gleeful stupid destruction of the world, and also, the utter futility of protesting it. I remember the only 'good news' of the last few years being when that US soldier set himself on fire to protest Israel's genocide of the Palestinians. Finally it felt like someone was reacting to the despair in an adequate and sensible way, but like all acts of despair, changed ultimately nothing.
The two women at the end try to attone for their rich father, "a great molester of the human spirit" as David Berman would say, by taking several abbatoir workers hostage who can hardly speak english. The story ends with them blowing their own heads off. Again, this is perhaps the only sensible thing one can do when faced with the utter unchanging horror, but still ultimately means nothing. I am not sure how Joy Williams is still alive when she has spent her writing career confronting such darkness, so much time thinking of the evil we stupidly perpetuate every second. Jokes is the answer. That Joy Williams can make this dark hopeless story very funny is telling. You have to laugh to keep from crying.
Dwight Macdonald - Masscult and Midcult
A 70 page fun and scathing essay on bad art. It says exactly the same thing as Clement Greenberg's more-concise essay Kitsch and the Avante-Garde but this essay gives more examples and is perhaps less snooty.
Masscult is the kind of pandering mainstream slop that producers assume the public wants.
Midcult is mid-tier unchallenging bastardisations of the highbrow. Macdonald uses Hemingway's Old Man and the Sea as a prime example, and I would agree. Other examples I can think of would be Saltburn, Banksy, and "immersive environment" art exhibitions. Clement Greenberg wrote that this was the most insidious form of kitsch, but I'm not sure Macdonald would agree.
For all its failings, midcult entertainment can at least be said to do things schmickly. Masscult nobody really wants or needs.
Midcult is a much less loaded term than Kitsch, which you need to have read Greenberg to understand his meaning of the word (most think it is just for lava lamps and toby jugs). In this way it is a useful essay. But really it retreads the same ground as Greenberg too much to be enlightening to me.