The Dish

In a review of Barry Miles’ Call Me Burroughs, Peter Schjeldahl assesses the writer’s appeal:

“Virtually all of Burroughs’s writing was done when he was high on something,” Miles writes. The drugs help account for the hollowness of his voices, which jabber, joke, and rant like ghosts in a cave. He had no voice of his own, but a fantastic ear and verbal recall. His prose is a palimpsest of echoes, ranging from Eliot’s “Preludes” and “Rhapsody on a Windy Night” (lines like “Midnight shakes the memory / As a madman shakes a dead geranium” are Burroughsian before the fact) to Raymond Chandler’s marmoreal wisecracks and Herbert Huncke’s jive. I suspect that few readers have made it all the way through the cut-up novels, but anyone dipping into them may come away humming phrases. His palpable influence on J. G. Ballard, William Gibson, and Kathy Acker is only the most obvious effect of the kind of inspiration that makes a young writer drop a book and grab a pen, wishing to emulate so sensational a sound. It’s a cold thrill. While always comic, Burroughs is rarely funny, unless you’re as tickled as he was by such recurrent delights as boys in orgasm as they are executed by hanging.

In an interview with The Rumpus, Jerry Stahl is asked, “Do you feel that shame drives us to make art?”

Stahl: Well, if you have the luxury of having shame be your problem, then you’re doing all right. I think your rent has to be covered before shame becomes your biggest issue. First you have to put the food on the table and make sure not to die, then once all that’s taken care of, you have time for shame. Once I taught in juvenile hall, and there was this one guy used to say, about stuff like that, “It’s like white people shit.”

Rumpus: It reminds me of the time I was in group therapy and a mechanic in class said, “I keep having heart attacks,” and the leader said “No, those are panic attacks.” He refused to call them panic attacks because he said that’s what white people have.

Stahl: Yeah, and the number of psychological issues a child has is inversely proportional to the amount of money their parents have.

Rumpus: On that note, of suffering, and the range of it, there’s a line in one of your books that compares two kinds of suffering as being akin to comparing “acne to leprosy”—do you think you can compare suffering?

Stahl: Yes, there are different kinds of suffering. I’m not going to sit here and mock anyone’s suffering. The writer Hubert Selby helped me out a lot when he was around, and always used to say, “You can’t compare pain.” He used to tell a story: when he was in the army, he got TB, and this was before penicillin. They gave him this crazy-ass drug that made him mute and blind for a month. He was just laying in bed and completely aware, and he would hear the doctors say to other patients, to make them feel better, “At least you’re not Selby.” It is very fucking true, that it’s hard to have sympathy for white people problems sometimes, but I think if it wasn’t for shame, I wouldn’t have written one book.

Previous Dish on shame and writing here.

Philip Kennicott finds that Hungarian composer Béla Bartók’s quartets evoke “the enlightenment of a restless mind finding something definite and tangible in its search for certitude”:

[C]ompare the Bartók quartets to the 15 quartets of Shostakovich, and one hears an almost desperately single minded consistency in the former. Shostakovich’s cycle is deeply personal, and often imbued with a profound sense of fear; Bartók’s is strangely depersonalized, and more focused on anxiety. Although fear can be based on a false sense of danger, anxiety is a more ungrounded emotion, free floating, detached from immediate causes or explanations. While fear can be dispelled, anxiety is ever present, lifting on occasion but always settling back in. Even at its most calm and reflective, as in the lento movement of the Fourth Quartet, one never senses any slackening of Bartók’s obsessional need to keep control of the music. His relation to his musical materials is like our relation to the world: One must keep a grip, and keep moving.

So the music is always anxious, always driving forward, which is both exhausting and exhilarating, and perhaps that’s why Bartók’s endings—ironically anticlimactic, humorously flippant, pompously emphatic—are so appealing. By the time Bartók ends something, no honest listener could claim to want to hear more. The idea, the gesture, the mood has been wrung out, used up, finished off. And then it’s on to the next thing, with renewed energy and relentlessness.

(Video: the Pacifica Quartet performs “Allegro pizzicato” from Bartók’s String Quartet No. 4)

Nicholas Hune-Brown considers them:

The sociologist [Robert Faris] found that being connected to more students actually decreased the likelihood of becoming an elite. Kids who “bridge otherwise distant peers” were far more likely to enhance their social status, but simply having a bunch of friends who all had their own collection of friends was no way to become prom queen. “Elite status is maintained through selectivity, not connectivity, and by denying rather than accumulating relationships,” he writes.

He also found that aggression was a useful tactic. Violence was still seen as antisocial and undesirable, but “reputational aggression”—the teasing, rumour-mongering, gossiping, ostracism, and other non-physical means through which high-school kids ruin one another’s teenage years—actually doubled the chances of a student becoming a friend of the elite, particularly if the aggressor attacked a high-status individual or someone who was close to them socially (your friends, of course, are your biggest adversaries). Victims of aggression, meanwhile, were half as likely as regular kids to join the elite or second tier. Being an asshole enhances your social status at the expense of your victim.

Who knew that David Lynch did a highly literary commercial for Calvin Klein? Jonathan Crow provides context:

In 1988, fresh off his success with Blue Velvet and just before he started production on his landmark TV series Twin Peaks, he made his first commercials — a quartet of advertisements for Calvin Klein’s perfume Obsession featuring passages from such literary titans as F. Scott Fitzgerald, D.H. Lawrence and Ernest Hemingway. (Lynch’s ad featuring Gustave Flaubert is mysteriously unavailable on Youtube.)

The commercials have all the pretension, the luscious black and white photography and the vacant-eyed beautiful people that you might expect from a Calvin Klein ad. Yet they also show glimmers of Lynch’s aesthetic – a noirish, dream-like tone, an oddly framed close up, a fondness for flashing lights. Lynch dialed down the weird to serve the text. The result is far more romantic and beautiful than you might expect from the director.

The Fitzgerald ad is featured above. Watch the rest here.

This passage from John Dewey’s 1934 book Art as Experience piques Nick Carr’s interest:

An environment that was always and everywhere congenial to the straightaway execution of our impulsions would set a term to growth as surely as one always hostile would irritate and destroy. Impulsion forever boosted on its forward way would run its course thoughtless, and dead to emotion. For it would not have to give an account of itself in terms of the things it encounters, and hence they would not become significant objects. The only way it can become aware of its nature and its goal is by obstacles surmounted and means employed; means which are only means from the very beginning are too much one with an impulsion, on a way smoothed and oiled in advance, to permit of consciousness of them. Nor without resistance from surroundings would the self become aware of itself; it would have neither feeling nor interest, neither fear nor hope, neither disappointment nor elation. Mere opposition that completely thwarts, creates irritation and rage. But resistance that calls out thought generates curiosity and solicitous care, and, when it is overcome and utilized, eventuates in elation.

Carr comments that “Dewey here provides us with a powerful way of examining and interrogating technologies”:

A tool that simply smooths and oils our way, that speeds us to the execution of an impulsion, has a deadening effect. It removes us from the world and hence from the struggle with the world and its objects that gives definition to the self. The best tools are the ones that expand and extend our contact with the world, that give us more not fewer frictional surfaces. Dewey’s teaching runs directly counter to our assumption that we should seek out the technologies that offer us the greatest convenience and ease.