Banksy on art and adverts:

“The thing I hate the most about advertising is that it attracts all the bright, creative and ambitious young people, leaving us mainly with the slow and self-obsessed to become our artists. Modern art is a disaster area. Never in the field of human history has so much been used by so many to say so little.”

Also, was anyone aware that he has crossed the pond to graffiti up the Big Not-So-Easy?

“Look at a stone cutter hammering away at his rock, perhaps a hundred times without so much as a crack showing in it. Yet at the hundred-and-first blow it will split in two, and I know it was not the last blow that did it, but all that had gone before.”

Jacob Riis

A nice interview with one of my favorite living writers, Ursula K. LeGuin.

Lots more to post soon, I’ve been neglecting the site quite a bit recently.

This Is Just To Say by William Carlos Williams

I have eaten
the plums
that were in
the icebox

and which
you were probably
saving
for breakfast

Forgive me
they were delicious
so sweet
and so cold

Everyone loves this poem, and for good reason - also, a famous in-joke amongst poets. Go figure.

I’ve just started reading Alex Ross’s The Rest Is Noise, and I’m finding it really enjoyable so far. I’ve been reading Alex’s blog for a few years now, and his New Yorker articles whenever I get the chance, and I have to say he does some of the best contemporary music coverage I’ve come across, classical or otherwise.

I’m going to try and write up something about the book whenever I get done reading it - for now, those with an interest in classical music or twentieth century history should really check The Rest Is Noise out.

In other news, Bloomsday is now a date to look forward to in the near future. It was a goal of mine to finish Ulysses on Bloomsday last year, but I didn’t even come close to making it - in fact, I barely got halfway through the book and I’ve been on and offing it ever since. This year is going to be different. As soon as April rolls around, I’m going to be picking up Ulysses again - perhaps I should try and start a book club to keep motivation up during the more “difficult” chapters of the book. Anyone else have any Joyce reading tips (besides, you know, just leaving the dang thing on the self)?

A Prayer in Spring by Robert Frost

Oh, give us pleasure in the flowers today;
And give us not to think so far away
As the uncertain harvest; keep us here
All simply in the springing of the year.
Oh, give us pleasure in the orchard white,
Like nothing else by day, like ghosts by night;
And make us happy in the happy bees,
The swarm dilating round the perfect trees.

And make us happy in the darting bird
That suddenly above the bees is heard,
The meteor that thrusts with needle bill,
And off a blossom in mid-air stands still.

For this is love and nothing else is love,
The which it is reserved for God above
To sanctify to what far ends He will,
But which it only needs that we fulfill.

Currently trying to finish:

1) The Dark Materials Trilogy by Philip Pullman

- I’m nearly done with this one, on the last of the three books, The Amber Spyglass. The story is great, compelling stuff, and Pullman’s universe(s) are dark and ambiguous. I love the clear, deep quality of the writing. Great, especially for a group of novels geared towards adolescents. Maybe as good, although not as gentle, as my beloved Earthsea trilogy. Certainly less patronizing than the Lord of the Rings series.

2) Naked by David Sedaris.

- Funny, poigiant, beautiful, maudlin, uplifting, non-fiction.

3) The Collected Wisdom of Heraclitus trans. by Brooks Haxton -

Ancient Greek philosophy that sounds like ancient Chinese philosophy. The western compliment to the Tao te Ching. Heraclitus is the originator of the phrase, “You can never step into the the same river twice” although my translator phrases it much more beautifully:

“Just as the river where I step is not the same, and is, so I am as I am not.

“I also liked:”People ought to know themselves.”

“Any day stands equal to the rest.” and perhaps most of all:

“Things keep their secrets.”

I just got around to reading Steven Johnson’s book Everything Bad is Good For You a few weekends ago. It was an interesting read, and I want to write a bit about it.

In case you missed all the media hype surrounding the book, Johnson’s major premise in Everything Bad is that mass pop culture is making us (the general public) smarter. Contemporary T.V, the internet, and video games, Johnson argues, are more complex, more difficult to understand, and consequently, more mentally challenging than entertainments of previous generations. Johnson contends that, despite all kinds of arguments to the contrary, pop culture is making people more intelligent.

Now, Everything Bad’s premise is controversial, however I won’t go into the book’s arguments point by point here. Rather, I want to focus on one aspect of Johnson’s book that I found most interesting: his analysis of video games.

Basically, Johnson argues that video games provide players with a rich environment that they must probe and explore, a kind of environment that promotes active problem solving. He contrasts this active ‘player-centric’ approach to novel reading, which as we all know is a much more passive activity. Novels, he notes, provide all kinds of mental challenges, however, problem solving in an unfamiliar graphical (and sometimes very realistic) environment is not one of them.

Now what interested me was Johnson’s focus not on not, what video games ask players to do, but how a player must go about solving individual problems. In other words, it doesn’t matter if a player is asked to rescue a princess from and evil toad demon (a rather childlike objective), what matters is that the player must ’solve’ a series of increasingly complex puzzles and tasks to accomplish the end goal.

Johnson’s argument privileges the structure of games (and the difficulty this structure poses to the player) over the content of the game itself. This kind of argumentative trope is a hallmark of our contemporary cultural landscape - the superficial is perpetually victorious over meaning, the sign is greater than the signified.

What I find interesting is that, unlike other social/cultural writers, Johnson finds this trend to be positive, not negative. New media, he contends, forces the audience to think about the structuring elements of even the most basic television show - analysis is always happening, even if we are analyzing things that may seem trivial.

I wonder, why should low-brow entertainment be so constantly derided for a lack of deep-meaning? At the end of the twentieth century we all learned that meaning is relative, that all things are at the surface, right?

Well, perhaps we didn’t all get the memo, but these are the fundamental tenets of ‘post-modernism’, the age in which we find ourselves. Whether you agree with these ideas or not (and I don’t agree with all of them), we are still bombarded with the shiny surfaces of new media everyday. Should we all be as positive as Johnson is - do you feel smarter for having danced with Google, for having watched Britney Spears?

I’m reminded of Andy Warhol, who was famous for taking his mother to Catholic Mass, even though he claimed to be somewhat ambiguous about his own faith. Warhol loved the service, though, because it was beautiful in itself, and what mattered was showing up, not whether you really believed or did not believe.

Of course, this is an inversion of typical Christian practice where belief is often a prerequisite for participation. Like Johnson, Warhol argued that content (meaning) can take a backseat to the riches of experience, of lived participation.

Thinking all this over, I can’t help but think that this insistence on the practiced, the lived, the trivial and even the superficial of everyday experience is somehow a good thing. Perhaps we don’t pay enough attention to all the trivialities that we come across everyday. Sometimes it can be hard to know what to believe these days, but I don’t think that should stop us from participating. Maybe shallow is the new deep!

What better on this all hallows eve than a David Sedaris story about death, love, and shopping for a human skeleton:

I thought I would enjoy buying a human skeleton, but, looking through the shop window, I felt a familiar tug of disappointment. This had nothing to do with any moral considerations. I was fine with buying someone who’d been dead for a while; I just didn’t want to have to wrap him. Finding a box would be a pain, and then there’d be the paper, which would have to be attached in strips because no one sells rolls that wide. Between one thing and another, I was almost relieved when told that the skeleton was not for sale. “He’s our mascot,” the store manager said. “We couldn’t possibly get rid of him.”

“Guys Like That” by Joyce Sutphen

Drive very nice cars, and from
where you sit in your dented
last-century version of the
most ordinary car in America, they

look dark-suited and neat and fast.
Guys like that look as if they are thinking
about wine and marble floors, but
really they are thinking about TiVo

and ESPN. Women think that guys
like that are different from the guys
driving the trucks that bring cattle
to slaughter, but guys like that are

planning worse things than the death
of a cow. Guys who look like that —
so clean and cool — are quietly moving
money across the border, cooking books,

making deals that leave some people
rich and some people poorer
than they were before guys like that
robbed them at the pump and on

their electricity bills, and even
now, guys like that are planning how
to divide up that little farm they just
passed, the one you used to call home.

“Keys” by Nancy Henry

When things got hard
I used to drive and keep on driving—
once to North Carolina
once to Arizona—
I’m through with all that now, I hope.
The last time was years ago.

But oh, how I would drive
and keep on driving!
The universe around me
all well in my control;
anything I wanted on the radio,
the air blasting hot or cold;
sobbing as loudly as I cared to sob,
screaming as loudly as I needed to scream.
I would live on apples and black coffee,
shower at truck stops,
sleep curled up
in the cozy back seat I loved.

The last time, I left at 3 a.m.
By New York state,
I stopped screaming;
by Tulsa
I stopped sobbing;
by the time I pulled into Flagstaff
I was thinking
about the Canyon,
I was so empty.
Thinking about the canyon
I was.

I sat on the rim at dawn,
let all the colors fill me.
It was cold. I saw my breath
like steam from a soup pot.
I saw small fossils in the gravel.
I saw how much world there was

how much darkness
could be swept out
by the sun.

things have been quiet around here lately. I don’t have any good excuses really, it’s just one of those periodic dry spells that seem to happen for no good reason occasionally here at davidcomeaux.com. i do hate to see good writing fall off on the site, so here’s a promise to make more of an effort to get back into the swing of blogging. i blame the august heat, which stiffles one’s creative juices as much as it sizzles the grass outside.

this tuesday, i admit to loving the novel pride and prejudice. yes, i know. how very 10th grade girlish of me. even those closest to me probably don’t know that i re-read ms. austen’s classic at least once every year, and that i have been doing so since i first encountered the novel in 9th grade. why?

well, first of all, i just love the story(ies) - if i have an effeminate streak, it certainly must manifest itself in my interest in all things relational - i love to hear about people’s relationships, talk about my own relationships - generally what my guy buddies call ‘gossip’. p&p’s entire story-line revolves around this kind of stuff.

of course, this kind of talk isn’t gossip - it’s far from it. rather, it’s an exchange of information that shows a profound interest in the lives of others. it’s also a strongly affective-kind of dialogue, conversations which revolve around feelings and bodies more than they revolve around ideas or other abstractions. if you’ll allow me to make a gross generalization: a large portion of men try to purposefully avoid these types of conversations. i’m not one of those men, and frankly i’m not sure why this is the case, but the truth is that if a person avoids talking about these kinds of things, they are missing out on a very important aspect of their life.

but back to pride and prejudice:

i also re-read the novel because of it’s emphasis on family - having a family and dealing with all the ensuing drama can seem like a drag sometimes, but austen makes a powerful case for why family is so important. indeed, without the family schemes in the book, there would be no great elizabeth-darcy romance.

which brings me to why i shamelessly enjoy p&p: the romance, of course! sure, some of it is contrived, unrealistic, and perhaps even a bit too melodramatic, but that doesn’t lessen the affective impact of the development of darcy and elizabeth’s relationship. the 2005 film version of p&p lucidly captures this dynamic - medium range close ups linger on hands and eyes, on touches and brief eye contact between the two characters. as the audience, we literally see and somehow feel the passion between darcy and elizabeth that ripples just below the mannered surface of the film.

the brief moments that the camera lingers are more important to the film than any one scene because they reveal that it is often in the everyday, the ordinary, that one is able to glimpse the real love between two people. in this kind of story, there doesn’t need to be any overtly heated scene of passion - it’s all there in the small details of the characters lives, if only we (and they) are willing to look.

in creating this kind of story, turning something ordinary into something that borders on the sublime, ms. austen anticipated the great message of other twentieth century writers like joyce and beckett: that the spectacular and epic exists in the everyday, if only we are able to discern it.

so if you find girls (or boys) sitting around idly chatting about who’s in love or who’s at war, don’t dismiss their talk as trivial or mere ‘gossip’. listen closely, and you’re likely to find people engaged in stories as complex, interesting, and deeply affecting as any treatise by plato or any theorem by newton.

and if you don’t believe me, just go back and read pride and prejudice. although i hate to admit it, the book really is that good.

Unexpectedly, I took part in the Harry Potter mania that was unleashed on Barnes and Nobles Saturday night. Although I haven’t read any of the books, I accompanied Jess to lay claim to her pre-ordered copy. She describes the situation thusly,

Jon and Ryan accompanied me to the Barnes & Noble premiere party. After a frantic call from Jordan, I was rushed into arriving at 10 - ish. There were already a zillion people in line. Ryan was naturally more interested in the news crews and journalists. He regaled Jon with his version of how the Harry Potter premiere story gets written. According to him, it goes something like this: Intrepid young reporter arrives at miserable local interest event. He becomes aggravated with the crowds, the mania, and the general disorder. He spends a few minutes exchanging cynicisms with other reporters and then heads to the liquor store. With a fifth in hand, the story practically writes itself : “Muggles Invade Local Bookseller. .”

Jon was bombarded by a blast from the past and Ryan’s headache was in full swing. My party would mutiny if I insisted on staying until my pre-ordered book was in hand. It was time to call on my lawyer training. I ferreted out the only person in the store without a wristband and manipulated them into waiting in line for my book. I almost felt guilty.

I don’t have much to add to that except that this was yet another occasion where I was glad to be part of a social phenomenon, even if I was silently cursing my bad luck all the while for ending up in what seems like an endless series of awkward situations this summer. Seriously, can’t a guy catch a break already?! As is the norm when I’m out with my sister, the evening was photo-documented, and you can see a few pictures of the event here in case you missed all the fun.

Every now and then, a person will encounter a group of people (or person), a set of ideas, or perhaps even an entire culture or tradition that will completely change the way that that person thinks about the world. I call these people, ideas, and events paradigm-shifters.

When someone undergoes a paradigm shift in their thinking, they see the world in a completely different way. And I don’t mean that in an abstract sense - a paradigm shift is something that is concrete - you relate and interact with the world in a different manner. To put it another way, you can think of paradigm shifts as discreet events i.e. I was one person before I met this person, thing, or idea and now I am completely different after, so different in fact, that I can divide my life into two separate phases: who I was before, and who I am now.

Paradigm shifts occurs all the time, and I think they are often the emotional high points of a person’s personal experience. Think of a graduation, or a marriage, the birth of a child, the death of a loved one - what you are thinking about are events which change a person’s understanding of themselves in the world. And they act differently because of it.

What I want to write about here though, is a different kind of important experience, one that has to do with relationships, specifically displaced relationships. Everyone has probably met a person in their life that has really changed who they are or how they understand the world around them. But there is another kind of relationship that people forge between those they don’t know personally, but with whom they feel a deep personal resonance.

While in college I happened upon each of the three people in the title of this entry (Thomas Merton, Derek Bailey, John Cage) through various ways - research, curiosity, recommendation. And I began to read (and in Mr. Bailey and Mr. Cage’s case, listen to) all that I could about these three men. I found their ideas, their music, and their attitudes towards life incredibly interesting, and each in their own way completely changed the way I thought about myself and the world I live in.

Now, I’ll digress for a moment to point out how strange it is that a person whom you’ve never met (nor ever will meet as the three people are all deceased) could change your life, your way of thinking and understanding. But it’s true - it happens.

So if you can accept the strangeness, I’d like to share with you over the course of these entries (which will appear as I write them) my interest in these three people, their ideas, and how they changed the way I think - how they caused me to shift paradigms. I hope that perhaps you’ll find some of the ideas and information I want to write about interesting, and perhaps some of these ideas may even tip you off to other ideas or people that you’d like to know more about. I’m certainly no authority on any of these people, and these entries will be as much about me as they will be about the subjects I’ll be presenting. My interest is in sharing what I’ve learned and understood with the hope that others might find it interesting, and if not, then at least they will know a little more about me and what I find intriguing. People often ask what I’m interested in, what I like, and its difficult in those situation to give any more than a superficial answer. So this is a chance for me to dig a bit deeper and share some things that have really been important to me.

Finally, I should add that it’s somewhat misleading for me to write only about three dead white men, all born within 18 years of one another, and who are all critically considered to be representative of the last cultural stages of high-modernism. However, this is part of the reason why I grouped them to write about together - they seem to fit together well in my mind.

I could just as easily write about women who I find incredibly interesting and life changing (Ursula LeGuin, Susannah Breslin, and many others) or non-American/Europeans (Mazen Kerbaj, Ibn Arabi, Haruki Murakami) or even popular figures who are much less obscure (Jimi Hendrix, Mitch Hedburg). Most of those folks are actually still alive as well (thankfully so!), and perhaps one day I will also get around to writing about them. But I’ve been meaning to write about these guys for a while, so consider this my very long introduction to the story of how Thomas Merton, Derek Bailey, and John Cage changed the way I think and how they introduced me to some ideas, people and traditions that have become very important to me since.

It’s embarrassing to admit, but I seem to have developed an addiction to browsing in bookstores in order to catalog in my mind all the items I would buy if:

1. I didn’t have too many books already
2. I had more money, or
3. I had an endless amount of spare time in which to read them.

You see, part of it has to do with the canon. You know, that list of famous books that everyone silly literature geeks are supposed to read. And yes, I know that Tom Wolfe or whoever said that the canon is dead and that it doesn’t matter what you read. But you see, the bookstores conspire against us anti-canonist. They create tables and shelves devoted to all those famous novels, past and present. They stare down ominously at me as I pass by them on the way to the science-fiction or poetry sections. ‘When are you going to read me?’ the White Whale asks. ‘When are you going to finish me?’ Ulysses chimes in.

You see, unlike my musical tastes which span the entire spectrum of musical genres (from easy-listening to the avant-garde), I’m a devout populist when it comes to fiction. Sure, I like a challenging novel every now and then. I’ve read some big names: Joyce, Garcia-Marquez, Dickens, Faulkner. But I’ve read many more one off sci-fi, mystery, and general fiction novels than I have high literature.

I think to myself, ‘The important books can wait. Right now I’m just going to have a look at this …’

Part of my problem is that I spend all together too much mental energy on my non-fictions - I’m always reading up on subjects I know nothing about - it’s a constant game of catch-up. Consequently, when I’m done learning, I just want to relax with a good story. So I put off all those intimidating novels until later.

Of course, in reality, novels aren’t intimidating, bookstores don’t form coalitions against readers, and no one will really care whether or not I ever read Gravity’s Rainbow.

But that doesn’t stop me from making the lists in my mind of all those books I’ll get to one day…