Gore Vidal

Sloshing through the books and magazines that litter my home, the October 26, 2015 New Yorker still in the bathroom. Twice now I have read Nicholas Schmidle's feature on a young Syrian refugee -- then suddenly, as if the magazine had a secret compartment, Leo Robson's expanded review of Jay Parini's Empire of Self: A Life of Gore Vidal (2015), with its playful title "Delusions of Candour", but an even better subtitle, "How will we remember Gore Vidal?"

Good question.

What I remember of Gore Vidal begins with my introduction to him in People magazine in the mid-1970s. The accompanying black-and-white picture showed Vidal and Norman Mailer dressed in 1950s style suits glaring at each other from opposite sides of Kitty Carlisle's couch. The article described how, after years of baiting each other, the two came to blows, with Vidal calling Mailer a "dirty little Jew" and Mailer responding with something only slightly less injurious. From then on I made it my business to know who these men were and what they meant to America.

Here is a paragraph from Robson's article:

Yet it would be hard to imagine a less intimate biography. Parini loved spending time with the wordly, woundless Vidal, and he seemed eager to perpetuate Vidal's myths about himself. In a letter from the late forties, Vidal wrote that psychoanalysis is "quite a frightening experience," and that "it's not a pleasant thing to see oneself." But when Vidal tells Parini that his experience of therapy failed because "I have no unconscious," the biographer doesn't pause to comment.

Critique of Judgement

"Something is beautiful if it gives pleasure without interest," says Kant in his Critique of Judgement (1790).

Are we interested? Not if we believe that beauty -- the perception of beauty -- is in the eye of the beholder.

So many of the world's problems begin and end with objective notions of anything, let alone beauty.

I am interested in what Marxists have to say about "objective material conditions" existing independent of our consciousness.

The image above is a reproduction of a 6" x 6" drawing by Ryan Heshka. It is the most fucked up thing I have seen this week.

////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////

No Questions

The Crowd Pleasers
39" x 31"
Acrylic on Canvas
1978
David Bowie: New Afro/Pagan and Work 1975-1995
Exhibition: The Gallery, 28 Cork Street, London, England, April 18-29, 1995

A viking funeral, like the closing scene in The Vikings (1958).

Three Questions

What is it?

It is an 81.9 cm x 121.3 cm realist painting by Andrew Wyeth, entitled Christina's World (1948).

How is it made?

It is made of tempura on gessoed panel.

What does it mean/How is it relevant?

The strength of this painting lies in its narrative(s). Could it have been made with a camera, an actor and a rural landscape? I would say only insofar as its actor was able to pose in a way that would be difficult to achieve by someone who is able-bodied; for the person in this picture is not able-bodied but distorted by illness or injury, and this illness or injury infects what I think this person is yearning for (if she is yearning at all).

The feeling I get from this representation is not desire but its more complex form, a mix of desire and disgust, further complicated by necessity. Because of the subject's physical condition, what she wants might include more than a) the house (a home); b) the person inside this house (a potential friend, a potential lover); or c) something that the person in this house might or might not be aware of. If it is not a salve the subject is seeking, then it might be a remedy or a cure.

Why this painting is relevant is not because it allows for a complex meditation on desire but because of its potential to reflect our present attitudes toward illness: that the desires of those with illnesses are different from those who do not suffer from them. Why the subject of this painting should be judged differently from those who are able-bodied is the same as asking, Why is it that every time someone lights a cigarette in a movie, we wonder if a) that person is of a questionable character; b) the cigarette will be used to torture the person sitting opposite; or c) the house is about to burn down?

Poem

who am I to know this writing for?

a waves its blackened screech

palms at the heels as wings go

frozen in an instance of falling

on the page to feed upon its ink

readings taken and made

pattern of consumption its own

mess the text suggests what’s left

potential for additional subtractions

not the story of a bird but its form

a cold grey windowlessness

a condition an atmosphere

measures paced with fence posts

barbs notes to sing along with

the sun in love our bouncing ball

automotive hymn book shifts

a choir wakes to its refrain

who am I to know this singing for?

if not to keep this bird aloft

my hands below the landscaped page

A small room inside a bay window. A single bed, a table and chair, and a sink. I could manage something larger, with more conveniences, but I could never match the view.

"The history of the idea of culture," writes Raymond Williams at the beginning of the concluding chapter of his Culture and Society 1780-1950, "is a record of our reactions, in thought and feeling, to the changed conditions of our common life."

In the margin beside it, in my twenty-something handwriting:

"Even before getting to culture we must consider the idea of Culture as something akin to the minute hand of history."

An inch or so later:

"Not Culture unto itself, reified and timeless, but something forever changing, through conflict."

The dialectical Williams, the Marxist Williams...

Who did I think I was? Who was I? Am I still a participant in that pattern of thought?

As I look over my thirty-year-old undergraduate transcript (the abbreviated course names windows into the classrooms that housed them) it occurs to me that my university education was an unintended blend of grand theory and post-structuralism, material conflict and political economic signification, Marx and Foucault.

I appreciated the knife-edge that is Marxism, its language and its methodology; but anytime it became too rigid, too exclusive, too deterministic, I would think to myself, It is just another discourse -- one amongst many.

From that, a kind of pluralism, or a cultural relativism, as it came to be called by its critics -- and then the Berlin Wall came down and globalism turned from a positive word (for example, how Jeff Wall uses it in his "Four Essays on Ken Lum", in Ken Lum [Winnipeg/Rotterdam: WAG/Witte de With, 1990]) to a negative (globalization), a force that all cultures are subject to -- under a single mode of production.