Monday, June 28, 2010
Soccer is the Nigger of the World
As the World Cup starts, conservative media declare war on soccer.
Now it appears as if Glenn Beck has waged a war against the world cup which he sees as an indicative of Barack Obama's policies.
"Barack Obama's policies are the World Cup." In an extensive rant on the June 11 Glenn Beck Program, Beck purported to explain how President Obama's policies "are the World Cup" of "political thought." Beck stated, "It doesn't matter how you try to sell it to us, it doesn't matter how many celebrities you get, it doesn't matter how many bars open early, it doesn't matter how many beer commercials they run, we don't want the World Cup, we don't like the World Cup, we don't like soccer, we want nothing to do with it." Beck stated that likewise, "the rest of the world likes Barack Obama's policies, we do not.
And it seems, from the comments of G. Gordon Liddy, that what they object to is the idea of America even joining the rest of the world in a competition; as America should embrace it's own exceptionalism.
G. Gordon Liddy: "Whatever happened to American exceptionalism?" Discussing soccer's popularity in the U.S. on his June 10 program, G. Gordon Liddy asked, "Whatever happened to American exceptionalism?" Liddy noted that "this game ... originated with the South American Indians and instead of a ball, they used to use the head, the decapitated head, of an enemy warrior."
As always, Liddy is talking nonsense. Football originated in the public schools of England, and had nothing whatsoever to do with South American Indians and decapitated heads.
But MRC's Dan Gainor gets a little nearer to the truth regarding why these people hate football so much.
Also on the June 10 G. Gordon Liddy Show, Media Research Center's Dan Gainor said, "the problem here is, soccer is designed as a poor man or poor woman's sport" and that "the left is pushing it in schools across the country." He added: "generally football games in this country don't devolve into riots or wars." He later added that the sport of soccer "is being sold" as necessary due to the "browning of America."
Original article at Media Matters
Now it appears as if Glenn Beck has waged a war against the world cup which he sees as an indicative of Barack Obama's policies.
"Barack Obama's policies are the World Cup." In an extensive rant on the June 11 Glenn Beck Program, Beck purported to explain how President Obama's policies "are the World Cup" of "political thought." Beck stated, "It doesn't matter how you try to sell it to us, it doesn't matter how many celebrities you get, it doesn't matter how many bars open early, it doesn't matter how many beer commercials they run, we don't want the World Cup, we don't like the World Cup, we don't like soccer, we want nothing to do with it." Beck stated that likewise, "the rest of the world likes Barack Obama's policies, we do not.
And it seems, from the comments of G. Gordon Liddy, that what they object to is the idea of America even joining the rest of the world in a competition; as America should embrace it's own exceptionalism.
G. Gordon Liddy: "Whatever happened to American exceptionalism?" Discussing soccer's popularity in the U.S. on his June 10 program, G. Gordon Liddy asked, "Whatever happened to American exceptionalism?" Liddy noted that "this game ... originated with the South American Indians and instead of a ball, they used to use the head, the decapitated head, of an enemy warrior."
As always, Liddy is talking nonsense. Football originated in the public schools of England, and had nothing whatsoever to do with South American Indians and decapitated heads.
But MRC's Dan Gainor gets a little nearer to the truth regarding why these people hate football so much.
Also on the June 10 G. Gordon Liddy Show, Media Research Center's Dan Gainor said, "the problem here is, soccer is designed as a poor man or poor woman's sport" and that "the left is pushing it in schools across the country." He added: "generally football games in this country don't devolve into riots or wars." He later added that the sport of soccer "is being sold" as necessary due to the "browning of America."
Original article at Media Matters
Api Again - Just Trying to Get What We All Say...
My Generation
Benjamin Kunkel writes in LRB regarding Frederic Jameson's new book of collected essays:
In ‘The Valences of History’, the concluding essay of the new book, Jameson argues that when the fitful apprehension of history does enter the lives of individuals it is often through the feeling of belonging to a particular generation: ‘The experience of generationality is … a specific collective experience of the present: it marks the enlargement of my existential present into a collective and historical one.’ A generation, he adds, is not forged by passive endurance of events, but by hazarding a collective project. That this too is uncommon enough can be deduced from Jameson’s example of the process: ‘Avant-gardes are so to speak the voluntaristic affirmation of the generation by sheer willpower, the allegories of a generational mission that may never come into being.’ So the small sect crystallises the would-be universal – an ironic and possibly dialectical contradiction, and a fitting suggestion for a Marxist professor to make amid a near unchallenged global capitalism.
The theme of generations recurs from time to time in Jameson, whose work in any case proceeds less by straightforward argumentation than by a kaleidoscopic rotation across a consistent set of problems. In ‘Periodising the 60s’ (1984), he noted that ‘the classification by generations has become as meaningful for us as it was for the Russians of the late 19th century, who sorted character types out with reference to specific decades,’ and in that essay and elsewhere this rigorously non-confessional writer has hinted at the decisive importance of the 1960s in his own formation. Jameson’s fellow Marxist critics Perry Anderson and Terry Eagleton (with some cosmic design evidently at work in the similarity of all three names) have already testified to his eminence in such a way as to give some sense of his importance to their own generation. It is a generation in which a younger person notices, though not especially among the Marxists, a widespread and not infrequently pathetic tendency toward serial intellectual and cultural faddism, which makes it the more impressive and even inspiring – to Jameson’s peers as well, it may be – that he has stayed so true to the utopian stirrings of the 1960s while remaining open to so much of what’s come since.
Jameson once likened the goofy eclecticism of certain postmodern architecture to the recipes inspired by ‘late-night reefer munchies’, and it may be an observation to bridge the gap between his generation, steeped in the 1960s, and my own to say that reading Jameson himself has always reminded me a bit of being on drugs. The less exceptional essays were like being stoned: it all seemed very profound at the time, but the next day you could barely remember a thing. Indeed there’s no other author I’ve frequented or admired to anything like the same degree so many of whose pages produced absolutely no impression on me. And yet the best of Jameson’s work has felt mind-blowing in the way of LSD or mushrooms: here before you is the world you’d always known you were living in, but apprehended as if for the first time in the freshness of its beauty and horror. One of the trippier as well as more affecting passages in Valences of the Dialectic is a sort of aria on the condition of living, through global capitalism, in a totally man-made world, one in which even the weather patterns and the geological age (the Anthropocene, it was recently declared) are human productions:
We have indeed secreted a human age out of ourselves as spiders secrete their webs: an immense, all-encompassing ceiling … which shuts down visibility on all sides even as it absorbs all the formerly natural elements in its habitat, transmuting them into its own man-made substance. Yet within this horizon of immanence we wander as alien as tribal people, or as visitors from outer space, admiring its unimaginably complex and fragile filigree and recoiling from its bottomless potholes, lounging against a rainwall of exotic and artificial plants or else agonising among poisonous colours and lethal stems we were not taught to avoid. The world of the human age is an aesthetic pretext for grinding terror or pathological ecstasy, and in its cosmos, all of it drawn from the very fibres of our own being and at one with every post-natural cell more alien to us than nature itself, we continue murmuring Kant’s old questions – What can I know? What should I do? What may I hope? – under a starry heaven no more responsive than a mirror or a spaceship, not understanding that they require the adjunct of an ugly and bureaucratic representational qualification: what can I know in this system? What should I do in this world completely invented by me? What can I hope for alone in an altogether human age?
In such a passage it’s possible to see a few things. One is as much evidence as a few lines could offer for placing Jameson among the important American writers of the age tout court. Another is his special way of being one of those (to vary what Henry James said) by whom nothing is abandoned: the apprehension of the alienness of the world is the signature experience in Sartre’s Nausea, whose author was the subject of Jameson’s PhD thesis and first book; the ‘human age’ alludes to the trilogy of novels by Wyndham Lewis, subject of another book-length study by Jameson; and the situation described here, of humanity confronting its own handiwork as something alien and exterior, is very much that of Marx’s alienated labour, in which the worker is dominated by the product of his own hands, his estranged ‘species-being’ ranged against him in the form of someone else’s capital. But the reader’s impression of tremendous intellectual power is accompanied by one of political paralysis. Who is this collective human ‘I’, in a world ‘completely invented by me’? Nobody at all, of course. Again, the analogy with drugs: perceptual journeys across the universe, confined to the couch.
Benjamin Kunkel writes in LRB regarding Frederic Jameson's new book of collected essays:
In ‘The Valences of History’, the concluding essay of the new book, Jameson argues that when the fitful apprehension of history does enter the lives of individuals it is often through the feeling of belonging to a particular generation: ‘The experience of generationality is … a specific collective experience of the present: it marks the enlargement of my existential present into a collective and historical one.’ A generation, he adds, is not forged by passive endurance of events, but by hazarding a collective project. That this too is uncommon enough can be deduced from Jameson’s example of the process: ‘Avant-gardes are so to speak the voluntaristic affirmation of the generation by sheer willpower, the allegories of a generational mission that may never come into being.’ So the small sect crystallises the would-be universal – an ironic and possibly dialectical contradiction, and a fitting suggestion for a Marxist professor to make amid a near unchallenged global capitalism.
The theme of generations recurs from time to time in Jameson, whose work in any case proceeds less by straightforward argumentation than by a kaleidoscopic rotation across a consistent set of problems. In ‘Periodising the 60s’ (1984), he noted that ‘the classification by generations has become as meaningful for us as it was for the Russians of the late 19th century, who sorted character types out with reference to specific decades,’ and in that essay and elsewhere this rigorously non-confessional writer has hinted at the decisive importance of the 1960s in his own formation. Jameson’s fellow Marxist critics Perry Anderson and Terry Eagleton (with some cosmic design evidently at work in the similarity of all three names) have already testified to his eminence in such a way as to give some sense of his importance to their own generation. It is a generation in which a younger person notices, though not especially among the Marxists, a widespread and not infrequently pathetic tendency toward serial intellectual and cultural faddism, which makes it the more impressive and even inspiring – to Jameson’s peers as well, it may be – that he has stayed so true to the utopian stirrings of the 1960s while remaining open to so much of what’s come since.
Jameson once likened the goofy eclecticism of certain postmodern architecture to the recipes inspired by ‘late-night reefer munchies’, and it may be an observation to bridge the gap between his generation, steeped in the 1960s, and my own to say that reading Jameson himself has always reminded me a bit of being on drugs. The less exceptional essays were like being stoned: it all seemed very profound at the time, but the next day you could barely remember a thing. Indeed there’s no other author I’ve frequented or admired to anything like the same degree so many of whose pages produced absolutely no impression on me. And yet the best of Jameson’s work has felt mind-blowing in the way of LSD or mushrooms: here before you is the world you’d always known you were living in, but apprehended as if for the first time in the freshness of its beauty and horror. One of the trippier as well as more affecting passages in Valences of the Dialectic is a sort of aria on the condition of living, through global capitalism, in a totally man-made world, one in which even the weather patterns and the geological age (the Anthropocene, it was recently declared) are human productions:
We have indeed secreted a human age out of ourselves as spiders secrete their webs: an immense, all-encompassing ceiling … which shuts down visibility on all sides even as it absorbs all the formerly natural elements in its habitat, transmuting them into its own man-made substance. Yet within this horizon of immanence we wander as alien as tribal people, or as visitors from outer space, admiring its unimaginably complex and fragile filigree and recoiling from its bottomless potholes, lounging against a rainwall of exotic and artificial plants or else agonising among poisonous colours and lethal stems we were not taught to avoid. The world of the human age is an aesthetic pretext for grinding terror or pathological ecstasy, and in its cosmos, all of it drawn from the very fibres of our own being and at one with every post-natural cell more alien to us than nature itself, we continue murmuring Kant’s old questions – What can I know? What should I do? What may I hope? – under a starry heaven no more responsive than a mirror or a spaceship, not understanding that they require the adjunct of an ugly and bureaucratic representational qualification: what can I know in this system? What should I do in this world completely invented by me? What can I hope for alone in an altogether human age?
In such a passage it’s possible to see a few things. One is as much evidence as a few lines could offer for placing Jameson among the important American writers of the age tout court. Another is his special way of being one of those (to vary what Henry James said) by whom nothing is abandoned: the apprehension of the alienness of the world is the signature experience in Sartre’s Nausea, whose author was the subject of Jameson’s PhD thesis and first book; the ‘human age’ alludes to the trilogy of novels by Wyndham Lewis, subject of another book-length study by Jameson; and the situation described here, of humanity confronting its own handiwork as something alien and exterior, is very much that of Marx’s alienated labour, in which the worker is dominated by the product of his own hands, his estranged ‘species-being’ ranged against him in the form of someone else’s capital. But the reader’s impression of tremendous intellectual power is accompanied by one of political paralysis. Who is this collective human ‘I’, in a world ‘completely invented by me’? Nobody at all, of course. Again, the analogy with drugs: perceptual journeys across the universe, confined to the couch.
You Gotta Have Balls - The Atlantic Monthly
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The Year Without Sex
Jun 23 2010, 3:00 PM ET Comment
VikingHephzibah Anderson is an attractive, successful British journalist in her early 30s who enjoys a life of jet-setting between London, New York, and Paris. And after ringing in her 30th birthday, she swore off sex for a year. Fed up with the "kind of sex I was supposed to be cool with as a postfeminist, twenty-first century Western woman—a casual sort of intimacy without intimacy," Anderson decided to take on a vow of chastity in an effort to make sense of what was missing in the dating mishaps of her 20s. The year-long journey Anderson embarked on became about uncovering the sets of rules, expectations and assumptions that she—and many women—often create for themselves in dating.Anderson's new book, Chastened, chronicles the ups and downs of her year without sex. Here, she discusses why sex changes relationships, the challenges (and benefits) of delaying physical intimacy, and whether her experiment brought the revelation she was looking for.
Just to give our readers some quick background of the book, could you talk about how you decided to take on this year of chastity and what you hoped to find out? Well, it's interesting. I would say that if I had known that I would write a book about it, I would've gone about it in a much more organized way. But because it was something I was doing for completely personal reasons, at least at the start, it was a decision I really felt I had to make. The real reasons for why I made it became more apparent as the year progressed, in an odd way. There are essentially three things that caused the decision. I was in New York, I saw somebody who looked awfully like my college boyfriend, escorting a girl into DeBeers. I got back to England, and it turned out that it probably was my old college boyfriend, and he was going out with his girlfriend, and proposed, and they come back with a ring, and I was intent on wringing some kind of meaning from this serendipitous sighting. So that really got me thinking and looking back, and I realized that not only was he the first person I somewhat belatedly went to bed with, but he was the last person in almost a decade that I'd dated to have said "I love you," which seemed a terrible indictment of my romantic choices. I was about to turn 30, so there was some necessary self-reflection, and then I met somebody who I really thought might be, if not 'the one,' someone with whom I could have a meaningful future. And he not only didn't say "I love you," he said "I don't love you," which was honest, I suppose. And in the middle of all of this, a good male friend told me he had finally, unintentionally, won the girl of his dreams by saying to her, "I'm so happy being with you, I'm so happy just hanging out that I don't care if I never get to sleep with you," which seemed, to me, to kind of encapsulate everything that had been missing from my relationships in my 20s. So, I really thought that I needed to step back, because it seemed that sex was really clouding my judgment. So, I decided on a year—it seemed a nice, round chunk of time—and I dated it from the time that I made the decision because it was really about taking control of my emotional life. Did you pinpoint what changed in a relationship after sex? Was it a perceived shift in the power dynamic, was it one-sided or mutual?Yes, I felt that I needed so much more from them. And, to me, it felt like I needed much more than my right. At the end of the year, I would be able to say, "Well, that's ridiculous." I think we've lost any sense of healthy emotional entitlement. I think if you go to bed with somebody, it is a kind of bond; it's not nothing, however much we try to say it's nothing. Whether you're a man or woman, you're absolutely in your rights to expect there to be some kind of emotional gain. That's interesting, because for many young women there seems to be a lot of anxiety and pressure about appearing to be a burden, or needy—Yes, needy—which I think makes us really guarded, emotionally. It was actually only during that year that I realized how guarded I'd become after a decade of not-ideal relationships. And it's a lot easier to open up emotionally, when you've set some boundaries physically, or certainly when you slow the pace. And I think there a lot of women out there who are very emotionally frustrated because they're terrified of seeming needy. And I wonder whether men perceive it that way. Many women seem to be afraid that if they send a text message a day later, the man is going to run away scared. But I guess you'd ask why we need to tiptoe around men, when they should be tiptoeing around us?Exactly! Exactly. It's interesting that you ask that question because I think those are rules we make as women.So it's us?I think it is.Why did you pick the word "chaste" and not "celibate"?"Chaste" just seemed to have more romance about it. "Celibate" seemed to have more of a religious edge for a start, and I was very keen to stay clear of that, because one of the things I wanted to do was reclaim chastity for a mainstream, secular, non-politically divisive audience. What did you find most challenging about taking on the vow?It was interesting; it wasn't necessarily the things that I would have expected at the start of the year. Certainly I missed sex, but as the year wore on that actually got easier. The six-month mark was a bit testing, but certainly toward the end that had become almost manageable because there were so many compensations. But I think that that feeling of being slightly almost trapped in a cell, in a way, just being horribly self-aware during the year was a bit challenging at times. And I was forced to see things about myself that I hadn't liked to think of myself being—you know, passive and always going along with things because that was always sort of what was expected. So, coming face-to-face with those realizations was a bit challenging. One of your suitors, the Boy-Next-Door, invites you to dinner, which you find surprising. You ask yourself whether that invitation would have materialized had you already slept with him. How important, after that year, do you think "taking things slow" matters in the longevity of a relationship? Is this something that's changed how you approach dating?Yes, it really has, actually. I don't say, "Oh, it's going to be X number of months."Actually, I've got a friend who always tells guys it's going to be three months. And she says that she never intends [for it to happen]—she never really puts that into sorts, but she always gives it till two months and that sort of sorts them out. And I don't take that approach but I've certainly slowed things down an awful lot. And it's weird, it's little difficult, at this stage. I'm taking the effects of the year itself and the effects of the book, obviously. Now that the book is out there, that tends to source very candid conversations very early on.Have you spoken to any of the men detailed in your book since its release?Most of them, I have. I was incredibly worried the Jake character would put it down feeling awful about himself. And I really didn't want to villainize any of these men...so, I think he was fine about it.Did he learn anything? Was it a revelation for any of them, about how they were going about dating?Well, the updated final chapter—which is in the U.S. edition and only in the U.K. paperback edition—I did send that before it went to press to the old friend that appears. And he said, "Well, it's so interesting to see what was going on in your mind at that point, because you very rarely get the chance to do that." And I just thought, well, communication is so hard. Nobody's been furious...I've had an odd case of a male friend saying "Am I in it?" and me sort of thinking "Well, why on earth would you want to be in it?" Caitlin Flanagan's recent piece about hookup culture for The Atlantic generated a lot of discussion online. One commenter said casual sex allows her to feel more ownership of her body. You mention in the book that this is a good idea in theory, but question whether this is what women really want.I think it certainly works for a percentage of women out there, and that's great and it's wonderful that we all have that option. And I'm in no way advocating for the clock to be turned back, but I think that a lot of women know that they have the right to say no, but actually feeling like they have the right to say no in certain situations is a quite different thing. Where is the conversation about men in this debate? In writing this book and thinking about chastity and relationships, have you considered the male perspective?I did do a talk a few months back, and it was a very mixed audience, but there was a front row of very sweet, innocent- looking student boys. And it was so funny because their questions were all, "Well, we love the idea of there being more romance in the world, but our girlfriends are the ones who really set the pace, and set it perhaps all the quicker than we would've liked.." But I think certainly if some women have a hard time feeling they have the right to say no, men—it's just considered really freakish if they say decide to say, "Let's wait." So yeah, I think it's difficult for teenage boys. And they're just bombarded with these images of female raunch wherever they look. I did speak to some male therapists who specialized in male patients. And I asked them what kind of changes they'd seen and they said a lot of their patients were getting younger, and they were coming to them with sexual problems that usually don't present until men are in their 50s. And this one guy said it was purely the result of internet porn, and they were just seeing too much and it was always on tap. Which is kind of awful, they had this kind of porn idea of what sex should be. I don't think we should go back to the point where sex is this terrifying thing and most people are so ignorant they're never going to be satisfied. But on the other hand, you need a sort of space to make it your own, imaginatively and if we're just constantly bombarded by images of what it should look like, and if movie series are hiring sexual choreographers it makes it sort of an impersonal experience and it means that today's teenagers aren't learning about sex by fooling around with each other, they're learning about it through watching what feels good to other people online. Which is kind of voyeuristic...it must be strange for them.There is a line at the end of book where you mention a relationship that you had been carrying on after the year was over. Did you dabble in chastity after the designated year had come to an end?After the year, it was over...but it has really changed everything. And it seems to proceed at a much slower pace. Would you change how you dated in your 20s?I think I would, actually. I really would. I'd be more assertive about my right to be romanced. And I think that would have probably sent some of the cads running, and then I might have then noticed some more interesting fellows. Well, I don't regret my 20s. But I wish I'd been more in tune with what I'd actually wanted, wish I'd taken some time to figure that out, and then ask for it. Are you in love at the moment? Is there someone in your life?I joked to a friend a couple months ago, "Oh, God, this book's coming out again. Maybe I should just hire somebody. Even my male friends took on the part of fiancé for that happy ending, however cynical we are, we still...But I think in a way it makes it more informative, and makes it more the experiment I was thinking of, because I'm implementing these lessons that I've learned. And I'm actually quite happy, actually quite content. There's been a lot less sex, but more romance. And a lot more emotional closeness.
« Previous Culture Next Culture »
Email Print
The Year Without Sex
Jun 23 2010, 3:00 PM ET Comment
VikingHephzibah Anderson is an attractive, successful British journalist in her early 30s who enjoys a life of jet-setting between London, New York, and Paris. And after ringing in her 30th birthday, she swore off sex for a year. Fed up with the "kind of sex I was supposed to be cool with as a postfeminist, twenty-first century Western woman—a casual sort of intimacy without intimacy," Anderson decided to take on a vow of chastity in an effort to make sense of what was missing in the dating mishaps of her 20s. The year-long journey Anderson embarked on became about uncovering the sets of rules, expectations and assumptions that she—and many women—often create for themselves in dating.Anderson's new book, Chastened, chronicles the ups and downs of her year without sex. Here, she discusses why sex changes relationships, the challenges (and benefits) of delaying physical intimacy, and whether her experiment brought the revelation she was looking for.
Just to give our readers some quick background of the book, could you talk about how you decided to take on this year of chastity and what you hoped to find out? Well, it's interesting. I would say that if I had known that I would write a book about it, I would've gone about it in a much more organized way. But because it was something I was doing for completely personal reasons, at least at the start, it was a decision I really felt I had to make. The real reasons for why I made it became more apparent as the year progressed, in an odd way. There are essentially three things that caused the decision. I was in New York, I saw somebody who looked awfully like my college boyfriend, escorting a girl into DeBeers. I got back to England, and it turned out that it probably was my old college boyfriend, and he was going out with his girlfriend, and proposed, and they come back with a ring, and I was intent on wringing some kind of meaning from this serendipitous sighting. So that really got me thinking and looking back, and I realized that not only was he the first person I somewhat belatedly went to bed with, but he was the last person in almost a decade that I'd dated to have said "I love you," which seemed a terrible indictment of my romantic choices. I was about to turn 30, so there was some necessary self-reflection, and then I met somebody who I really thought might be, if not 'the one,' someone with whom I could have a meaningful future. And he not only didn't say "I love you," he said "I don't love you," which was honest, I suppose. And in the middle of all of this, a good male friend told me he had finally, unintentionally, won the girl of his dreams by saying to her, "I'm so happy being with you, I'm so happy just hanging out that I don't care if I never get to sleep with you," which seemed, to me, to kind of encapsulate everything that had been missing from my relationships in my 20s. So, I really thought that I needed to step back, because it seemed that sex was really clouding my judgment. So, I decided on a year—it seemed a nice, round chunk of time—and I dated it from the time that I made the decision because it was really about taking control of my emotional life. Did you pinpoint what changed in a relationship after sex? Was it a perceived shift in the power dynamic, was it one-sided or mutual?Yes, I felt that I needed so much more from them. And, to me, it felt like I needed much more than my right. At the end of the year, I would be able to say, "Well, that's ridiculous." I think we've lost any sense of healthy emotional entitlement. I think if you go to bed with somebody, it is a kind of bond; it's not nothing, however much we try to say it's nothing. Whether you're a man or woman, you're absolutely in your rights to expect there to be some kind of emotional gain. That's interesting, because for many young women there seems to be a lot of anxiety and pressure about appearing to be a burden, or needy—Yes, needy—which I think makes us really guarded, emotionally. It was actually only during that year that I realized how guarded I'd become after a decade of not-ideal relationships. And it's a lot easier to open up emotionally, when you've set some boundaries physically, or certainly when you slow the pace. And I think there a lot of women out there who are very emotionally frustrated because they're terrified of seeming needy. And I wonder whether men perceive it that way. Many women seem to be afraid that if they send a text message a day later, the man is going to run away scared. But I guess you'd ask why we need to tiptoe around men, when they should be tiptoeing around us?Exactly! Exactly. It's interesting that you ask that question because I think those are rules we make as women.So it's us?I think it is.Why did you pick the word "chaste" and not "celibate"?"Chaste" just seemed to have more romance about it. "Celibate" seemed to have more of a religious edge for a start, and I was very keen to stay clear of that, because one of the things I wanted to do was reclaim chastity for a mainstream, secular, non-politically divisive audience. What did you find most challenging about taking on the vow?It was interesting; it wasn't necessarily the things that I would have expected at the start of the year. Certainly I missed sex, but as the year wore on that actually got easier. The six-month mark was a bit testing, but certainly toward the end that had become almost manageable because there were so many compensations. But I think that that feeling of being slightly almost trapped in a cell, in a way, just being horribly self-aware during the year was a bit challenging at times. And I was forced to see things about myself that I hadn't liked to think of myself being—you know, passive and always going along with things because that was always sort of what was expected. So, coming face-to-face with those realizations was a bit challenging. One of your suitors, the Boy-Next-Door, invites you to dinner, which you find surprising. You ask yourself whether that invitation would have materialized had you already slept with him. How important, after that year, do you think "taking things slow" matters in the longevity of a relationship? Is this something that's changed how you approach dating?Yes, it really has, actually. I don't say, "Oh, it's going to be X number of months."Actually, I've got a friend who always tells guys it's going to be three months. And she says that she never intends [for it to happen]—she never really puts that into sorts, but she always gives it till two months and that sort of sorts them out. And I don't take that approach but I've certainly slowed things down an awful lot. And it's weird, it's little difficult, at this stage. I'm taking the effects of the year itself and the effects of the book, obviously. Now that the book is out there, that tends to source very candid conversations very early on.Have you spoken to any of the men detailed in your book since its release?Most of them, I have. I was incredibly worried the Jake character would put it down feeling awful about himself. And I really didn't want to villainize any of these men...so, I think he was fine about it.Did he learn anything? Was it a revelation for any of them, about how they were going about dating?Well, the updated final chapter—which is in the U.S. edition and only in the U.K. paperback edition—I did send that before it went to press to the old friend that appears. And he said, "Well, it's so interesting to see what was going on in your mind at that point, because you very rarely get the chance to do that." And I just thought, well, communication is so hard. Nobody's been furious...I've had an odd case of a male friend saying "Am I in it?" and me sort of thinking "Well, why on earth would you want to be in it?" Caitlin Flanagan's recent piece about hookup culture for The Atlantic generated a lot of discussion online. One commenter said casual sex allows her to feel more ownership of her body. You mention in the book that this is a good idea in theory, but question whether this is what women really want.I think it certainly works for a percentage of women out there, and that's great and it's wonderful that we all have that option. And I'm in no way advocating for the clock to be turned back, but I think that a lot of women know that they have the right to say no, but actually feeling like they have the right to say no in certain situations is a quite different thing. Where is the conversation about men in this debate? In writing this book and thinking about chastity and relationships, have you considered the male perspective?I did do a talk a few months back, and it was a very mixed audience, but there was a front row of very sweet, innocent- looking student boys. And it was so funny because their questions were all, "Well, we love the idea of there being more romance in the world, but our girlfriends are the ones who really set the pace, and set it perhaps all the quicker than we would've liked.." But I think certainly if some women have a hard time feeling they have the right to say no, men—it's just considered really freakish if they say decide to say, "Let's wait." So yeah, I think it's difficult for teenage boys. And they're just bombarded with these images of female raunch wherever they look. I did speak to some male therapists who specialized in male patients. And I asked them what kind of changes they'd seen and they said a lot of their patients were getting younger, and they were coming to them with sexual problems that usually don't present until men are in their 50s. And this one guy said it was purely the result of internet porn, and they were just seeing too much and it was always on tap. Which is kind of awful, they had this kind of porn idea of what sex should be. I don't think we should go back to the point where sex is this terrifying thing and most people are so ignorant they're never going to be satisfied. But on the other hand, you need a sort of space to make it your own, imaginatively and if we're just constantly bombarded by images of what it should look like, and if movie series are hiring sexual choreographers it makes it sort of an impersonal experience and it means that today's teenagers aren't learning about sex by fooling around with each other, they're learning about it through watching what feels good to other people online. Which is kind of voyeuristic...it must be strange for them.There is a line at the end of book where you mention a relationship that you had been carrying on after the year was over. Did you dabble in chastity after the designated year had come to an end?After the year, it was over...but it has really changed everything. And it seems to proceed at a much slower pace. Would you change how you dated in your 20s?I think I would, actually. I really would. I'd be more assertive about my right to be romanced. And I think that would have probably sent some of the cads running, and then I might have then noticed some more interesting fellows. Well, I don't regret my 20s. But I wish I'd been more in tune with what I'd actually wanted, wish I'd taken some time to figure that out, and then ask for it. Are you in love at the moment? Is there someone in your life?I joked to a friend a couple months ago, "Oh, God, this book's coming out again. Maybe I should just hire somebody. Even my male friends took on the part of fiancé for that happy ending, however cynical we are, we still...But I think in a way it makes it more informative, and makes it more the experiment I was thinking of, because I'm implementing these lessons that I've learned. And I'm actually quite happy, actually quite content. There's been a lot less sex, but more romance. And a lot more emotional closeness.
Thursday, June 10, 2010
Personagens da Vida...
“… Tenho inveja de quem faz blague. Eu não sei fazer isso. Se fizer, vai ser um desastre. Não sou eu...”
(Michel Temer)
(Michel Temer)
Father of Hypertext Circa 99
Interview with Robert Coover
"I AM AN INTRANSIGENT REALIST"
by Susana Pajares Toscaspajares@eucmos.sim.ucm.es
Robert Coover is one of the most respected American contemporary writers. He has written fourteen books – the last one Ghost Town (1998)—and his innovative prose caused a literary revolution in the seventies when Pricksongs and Descants (1969) and his next works came out. Coover´s use of language and his philosophical reinterpretation of familiar myths and stories make him an original and necessary voice in this end of the century´s cultural panorama. He is also well known for his engagement with hypertext –he was the first major author to write about it in The New York Times Review of Books and he has worked with it for many years-- and his work as professor at Brown University.
E- Let´s start outrageously, you wrote in "The end of books", that you were interested "in the subversion of the traditional bourgeois novel and in fictions that challenge linearity". Why is nineteenth century novel not valid anymore? (People still write it)
RC- Perhaps people are still writing nineteenth century novels because that century's enterprise has returned with such a vengeance, our own fin de siecle being more akin to that of a century ago than to more recent decades. Forms--social, artistic, other--echo (and reinforce) each other; if one is an iconoclast in one arena it makes no sense to be an unquestioning camp follower in another. But I'm not dogmatic about that, either. Let a thousand flowers, as they say... I merely opposed the entrenched novelistic dogmas of form at the time, wanting to break them open and make more sorts of fiction possible. I think that has happened, because it chanced that this was a widely shared conviction.
E- You´d like to be Cervantes´ heir (as you state in Pricksongs and Descants), because literature was exhausted back in the sixties and it needed new visions. What is the situation now?
RC- In that little dedication to Cervantes, I suggest that what made our circumstances (if not our talents) comparable was that we were both standing at transitional moments in human intellectual history. In his case, it was a more or less universal move from Platonism to Aristotelianism; in ours, from Aristotelianism to what I've called in the past the New Sophism. If the circle in some manner exemplifies Platonism and the line Aristotelianism, then perhaps the best image of this new shift in thought and discourse is the hypertextual web, for the transition has been accelerated by the computer and the Internet. In any event, the line with its implicit assumption of progress was what seemed stale in the 1960s, but the closed Platonic circle would not do either: our age is more skeptical. So what I called for was more formal innovation everywhere (which was itself a Sophist dictum, I suppose: make it new).
E- When talking about Sophism, do you also share the traditional complain against them: "too many words, too much decoration, too little really said"? (Some would also describe the Internet/Web this way)
RC- For the Sophists, language is power; in an actional ("existential") and relativistic world without fixed or knowable principles, the power routes are via rhetoric and persuasion. There is not a lot of conviction that "what" is said has much substance. Certainly it has no permanence or universality. Sophists doubt Socratean "insight" and do not believe there are singular solutions to alleged, isolated problems (nothing is isolated: the Aristotelian "categories" have all broken down). One makes choices among the myriad of choices (of which the Internet is becoming a kind of field of presentation) and wins arguments. There is so much noise, it is not easy to be heard, so the techniques of persuasion are increasingly looking like hightech advertising. Getting the message out: byword of the day. Even if the message is only "buy me".
E- You have sometimes been misunderstood as an elistist writer too concerned about word-play and fantasy and too little with reality. But there is a strong critical component in your work, from The Public Burning to your last book, Ghost Town, you seem intend on destroying American mythology... What kind of weapons are parody, humour, fantasy or even blasphemy?
RC- They are probably relatively powerless weapons, but--parody, humor, blasphemy, etc.--they are what I have. As for fantasy, I am not the least bit interested except for the ways, in the real world, that it impinges upon my life (religion, jingoism, tribal myths, the managed news, etc.), and then I often hate it. Only reality interests me and it is all that I write about, whether or not it can be said that I understand it. My forms are playful and so may conceal that from the inattentive reader, but it's true. I have said it from earliest days: I am, like Kafka, like Beckett, an intransigent realist.
E- Considering tales, religion and the news under the same category of fantasy would be subversive in itself for some people who like to dismiss literature as "non-serious stuff". Your literature is intransigent realism only read by a (happy) few, what are the mass media that most people consume?
RC- Somewhat answered, I think. Mostly forms of escape. "Light entertainment", as it´s called in the bizz. As reality´s not all that easy to take, it´s not surprising that most of us duck out most of the time. It´s easy to see how mass media (including Internet email and pornography), religion, shopping, drugs, professional sports, etc., serve in this way; only slightly more controversial is the notion that the managed news (TV, magazines, newspapers, radio) is also a kind of escapist entertainment. But any look at decade-old programming or articles will make it transparent that, though some of the data may retain some limited validity (if not itself faked), the stories that held the data together are all outdated fictions.
E- In relation to this, many critics admire your use of language, not merely as a medium to tell things, but as a message in itself. Your cycles, metaphores, double meanings... Why is it worth to add another layer of complexity to the act of reading?
RC- From infancy on, we are entangled in vast webworks of layered meanings in
our language. Fantasists may simplify all that to create a passing entertainment (most movies, for example), but realists cannot. In this, I suppose, I am the child of that great realist James Joyce. I might add, though, that translators admire this use of language less, for it makes their task all but impossible.
E- I suppose you have heard this before, but as your reader, I sometimes have been angry with the particularly "heavy" language of a paragraph, only to be enthusiastic again about the next. You don´t let us readers go to sleep or ever be sure that we know what comes next, how do you think of the reader when you write? (if at all)
RC- As the ideal reader, one who has read everything, knows far more than I do about any subject, is a severe critic of careless thinking or sloppy prose, is bored by anything short of the most testing challenge.
E- José María Guelbenzu describes your use of metafiction as "a transformation of reality". In fact, your phantasies are sometimes epiphanies, moments of revelation. I´m not only thinking about Joyce, but also about writers like García Márquez. Who do you read and why?
RC- Nowadays, mostly the work of students, ex-students, and friends, as their books come tumbling through the door. This had not been my intention and will hopefully not be my permanent fate, though many of them are in fact among the best writers I know. But the two writers you mention are of course favorites to whom I return often, as with a couple of dozen others I could list here, to no useful purpose. I am still restlessly on the lookout for the unusual voice and still do read widely if maybe less exhaustively.
E- Now I´d like to talk about a couple of your novels more specifically. Back to The Public Burning, what shapes history? What kind of terrible game is this? Is the power to shape history an American quality? (It made me think of the Roman Empire)
RC- History is shaped by many things--accidents, cataclysms, even the weather--but mostly by human actions. Which is what I am interested in. Human actions and the mythological and other structures that govern and provoke them. Americans, being footloose and untethered from the outset, may be more aware of the sort of "game" (as you say) that history is, and so more quickly able to adapt to its shapeshifting patterns and rules. (For a variant on this theme, see my essay on "Soccer as an Existential Sacrament.")
E- Can you tell us a bit more about this essay?
RC- It was written on commission 15 years ago for Polaroid´s house magazine, Close-Up (the photographer is mentioned), an issue later produced as a book.
E- The concern with belief systems is also present in your "religious" works, like The Origin of the Brunist and A Theological Position, and even in baseball as religion in The Universal Baseball Association. You seem decidedly postmodern problematizing this kind of discourse, but also imply that human beings need it. What is your position regarding this now?
RC- You mean I imply that human beings need some sort of mythological or story structure to get through life? I think that's probably so, though it needn't be handed-down dogma and it can constantly metamorphose. That is to say, becoming an atheist does not free one from the need for a condensed "story" of how the universe works, though you may have to turn from primitive texts (the Bible, say) to those of geneticists and astrophysicists. Flexible, open, and loving stories are better than closed and hateful ones.
E- Do you think there is a difference between scientific texts and mythological-literary texts considered as explanations of the world? Or rather, what does it mean to choose
one or the other kind of explanation?
RC- In a Sophist world, these texts have blurred boundaries. But science strives for precision, while art focuses more on the ambiguities of the world. Science talks about things that can be defined and described, even if not fully understood or experienced (as when working with particles), art about things like goodness, truth, love, beauty, the human emotions. Art appeals first and foremost to the emotions, science to the intellect. No need to choose between them. Better to understand their respective validity and limitations.
E- The Universal Baseball Association makes imagination triumph over life. Is life really so dull?
RC- Oh no. Life is certainly not dull, though some sad lives may be. All too often it is appallingly fascinating. Imagination is NOT there to displace life: see my replies above.
E- Spanking the maid was part of the curriculum in one of the literature courses I took at the University. I remember the students (including myself) being fascinated with its kafkaesque quality, the way the rituals of life are uncomprehensible and its reflection on freedom. The novel ends when the characters have understood the ritual and want to break it. Is literature´s duty to make us understand?
RC- "Duty" is a heavy burden for a work of art. But if it is truly beautiful, then it will probably also be in some manner true, and grasping that truth can lead to some sort of understanding. A thought that often boils up as I sit and gaze, often somewhat perplexed, upon the great works of the Abstract Expressionists.
E- What kind of "duty" do you recommend your writing students? Can writing be learned?
RC- Attitudes towards writing can be learned or at least experienced, tested out. I am impatient with market-oriented genre writers, even when young. I work closely with prose and style problems, but mostly because I´m paid to do so. I´m much more interested in helping serious young writers develop innovative structures and approaches to the literary enterprise, based on their own peculiar genius. That´s one reason I have become so engaged with hypertext: a great pedagogical tool for young aspiring writers and readers.
E- In Briar Rose, there is this line about the sleeping beauty: "the fairy's spell binding her not to a suspenseful waiting for what might yet be, but to the eternal reenactment of what, other than, she can ever be", is the writer like her in this?
RC- Maybe that does reflect back upon the author's own dilemma, though I hadn't thought of that before. What I think I had in mind when I wrote it, however, was that these eternal reenactments are indeed much like the spells of wicked fairies, and as spells they can be broken.
E- In relationship to Briar Rose and Pricksongs..., what is the role of popular tales (and stories from the Bible) in our post-everything era? What can they teach us and how can we use them?
RC- The stories have invaded us and colonized themselves inside us. We can be a generous and tolerant and unquestioning host, or we can challenge them and refuse to be their mindless servants. Can't easily analyze these things away once they get inside. Have to wrestle with them on their home turf, make them show their true shapes, convert them to something we can live with.
E- Is the good reader a resistant reader?
RC- A good citizen is a resistant reader.
E- Gerald´s Party could be considered a genre fiction, a whodunit, but you trascend the genre and turn it into a carnavalesque farce. This is also cervantine, and it appears in much of your work. What does "genre fiction" mean for you?
RC- Genre fiction is the elaboration of the folktale, often just as entertaining and certainly just as conservative. Useful to me like all other "natural" forms and icons.
E- John´s wife starts and finishes with the word, "once", and like the "once upon a time" it´s the novel of the perfect storyteller. We learn about the interconnected lives of the little town and at the same time about present-time America in a very disturbing way. What is America now?
RC- Actually the last several words echo the first several in reverse, as if a palindrome were closing. But your question is too broad. I'll let John's Wife (and all my other books) stand as the answer to it.
E- Last year, Pricksongs and Descants and Briar Rose were published in Spanish. I also know you lived in Barcelona for some time. How has your work been received here?
RC- Well. When well translated. As with those two books.
E- A Night at the Movies is a book about films, another medium you love. What can films give us that books cannot?
RC- Another question asking for a book in reply. Here I was playing with the syntactical impact of film upon text. Exercises en route what will hopefully be the next large work.
E- And let´s move on to yet a more modern medium. Your two famous articles about hypertext in The New York Times Book Review are always quoted as being the moment where hypertext is "oficially born" for the literary world. Were there any inmediate repercusions? (I ask this because the situation looks pretty much the same now as it did in 1992 in terms of hypertext´s popularity)
RC- I am presently working on a longish essay about all this. The situation right now is actually markedly different, largely because of the proliferation and vast popularity of the Internet. Just held a huge conference on the topic here at Brown, covered by the NYTimes, as you know (http://www.stg.brown.edu/projects/TP21CL/).
E- You are considered "the evangelist of hypertext" in the literary community, but for the hypertext "tribe", you are still a "classic" writer, that is, your books are printed. Do you feel like an outsider in both fields?
RC- Well, not just in those two fields...
E- Why haven´t you written a hypertext? (This is suspicious)
RC- Are you certain that I haven't?
E- Oh! I hadn´t considered your Hypertext Hotel, probably because it´s collaborative writing and I´m after all a child of print. Point taken. Once you asked: "What´s so great about "interactivity" anyway?" Is hypertext incompatible with narrative as we know it?
RC- No. But it's different.
E- (You´ll hate me for this one) How do you see the future of the book?
RC- What´s most important about the moment is the emergent domination of our lives by the electronic media, and above all by the computer and the Web. Writers and artists have been reluctant to jump in, largely because of the new skills required and the numbing ephemerality of the technology: nothing stands still. But either they will do so, or literature will play an increasingly insignificant role in our lives. That´s where the readers will be, if in fact they can still read at all. So far, books show no sign of fading away, and indeed have enjoyed a kind of revival, thanks to Internet sales and pitches and home pages. But all it takes is a paper or fuel (for transporting those ponderous things) shortage. And such shortages will come.
E- What are you working on now?
RC- The next collection of stories and a return to my old pornographic film hero Lucky Pierre, a text first launched in 1969 but, having been picked up and dropped from time to time, still far from finished...
E- Thanks a lot for this interview.
Versión española
© Susana Pajares Toska 1999
Espéculo. Revista de estudios literarios. Universidad Complutense de Madrid
El URL de este documento es http://www.ucm.es/info/especulo/numero12/cooverinen.html
"I AM AN INTRANSIGENT REALIST"
by Susana Pajares Toscaspajares@eucmos.sim.ucm.es
Robert Coover is one of the most respected American contemporary writers. He has written fourteen books – the last one Ghost Town (1998)—and his innovative prose caused a literary revolution in the seventies when Pricksongs and Descants (1969) and his next works came out. Coover´s use of language and his philosophical reinterpretation of familiar myths and stories make him an original and necessary voice in this end of the century´s cultural panorama. He is also well known for his engagement with hypertext –he was the first major author to write about it in The New York Times Review of Books and he has worked with it for many years-- and his work as professor at Brown University.
E- Let´s start outrageously, you wrote in "The end of books", that you were interested "in the subversion of the traditional bourgeois novel and in fictions that challenge linearity". Why is nineteenth century novel not valid anymore? (People still write it)
RC- Perhaps people are still writing nineteenth century novels because that century's enterprise has returned with such a vengeance, our own fin de siecle being more akin to that of a century ago than to more recent decades. Forms--social, artistic, other--echo (and reinforce) each other; if one is an iconoclast in one arena it makes no sense to be an unquestioning camp follower in another. But I'm not dogmatic about that, either. Let a thousand flowers, as they say... I merely opposed the entrenched novelistic dogmas of form at the time, wanting to break them open and make more sorts of fiction possible. I think that has happened, because it chanced that this was a widely shared conviction.
E- You´d like to be Cervantes´ heir (as you state in Pricksongs and Descants), because literature was exhausted back in the sixties and it needed new visions. What is the situation now?
RC- In that little dedication to Cervantes, I suggest that what made our circumstances (if not our talents) comparable was that we were both standing at transitional moments in human intellectual history. In his case, it was a more or less universal move from Platonism to Aristotelianism; in ours, from Aristotelianism to what I've called in the past the New Sophism. If the circle in some manner exemplifies Platonism and the line Aristotelianism, then perhaps the best image of this new shift in thought and discourse is the hypertextual web, for the transition has been accelerated by the computer and the Internet. In any event, the line with its implicit assumption of progress was what seemed stale in the 1960s, but the closed Platonic circle would not do either: our age is more skeptical. So what I called for was more formal innovation everywhere (which was itself a Sophist dictum, I suppose: make it new).
E- When talking about Sophism, do you also share the traditional complain against them: "too many words, too much decoration, too little really said"? (Some would also describe the Internet/Web this way)
RC- For the Sophists, language is power; in an actional ("existential") and relativistic world without fixed or knowable principles, the power routes are via rhetoric and persuasion. There is not a lot of conviction that "what" is said has much substance. Certainly it has no permanence or universality. Sophists doubt Socratean "insight" and do not believe there are singular solutions to alleged, isolated problems (nothing is isolated: the Aristotelian "categories" have all broken down). One makes choices among the myriad of choices (of which the Internet is becoming a kind of field of presentation) and wins arguments. There is so much noise, it is not easy to be heard, so the techniques of persuasion are increasingly looking like hightech advertising. Getting the message out: byword of the day. Even if the message is only "buy me".
E- You have sometimes been misunderstood as an elistist writer too concerned about word-play and fantasy and too little with reality. But there is a strong critical component in your work, from The Public Burning to your last book, Ghost Town, you seem intend on destroying American mythology... What kind of weapons are parody, humour, fantasy or even blasphemy?
RC- They are probably relatively powerless weapons, but--parody, humor, blasphemy, etc.--they are what I have. As for fantasy, I am not the least bit interested except for the ways, in the real world, that it impinges upon my life (religion, jingoism, tribal myths, the managed news, etc.), and then I often hate it. Only reality interests me and it is all that I write about, whether or not it can be said that I understand it. My forms are playful and so may conceal that from the inattentive reader, but it's true. I have said it from earliest days: I am, like Kafka, like Beckett, an intransigent realist.
E- Considering tales, religion and the news under the same category of fantasy would be subversive in itself for some people who like to dismiss literature as "non-serious stuff". Your literature is intransigent realism only read by a (happy) few, what are the mass media that most people consume?
RC- Somewhat answered, I think. Mostly forms of escape. "Light entertainment", as it´s called in the bizz. As reality´s not all that easy to take, it´s not surprising that most of us duck out most of the time. It´s easy to see how mass media (including Internet email and pornography), religion, shopping, drugs, professional sports, etc., serve in this way; only slightly more controversial is the notion that the managed news (TV, magazines, newspapers, radio) is also a kind of escapist entertainment. But any look at decade-old programming or articles will make it transparent that, though some of the data may retain some limited validity (if not itself faked), the stories that held the data together are all outdated fictions.
E- In relation to this, many critics admire your use of language, not merely as a medium to tell things, but as a message in itself. Your cycles, metaphores, double meanings... Why is it worth to add another layer of complexity to the act of reading?
RC- From infancy on, we are entangled in vast webworks of layered meanings in
our language. Fantasists may simplify all that to create a passing entertainment (most movies, for example), but realists cannot. In this, I suppose, I am the child of that great realist James Joyce. I might add, though, that translators admire this use of language less, for it makes their task all but impossible.
E- I suppose you have heard this before, but as your reader, I sometimes have been angry with the particularly "heavy" language of a paragraph, only to be enthusiastic again about the next. You don´t let us readers go to sleep or ever be sure that we know what comes next, how do you think of the reader when you write? (if at all)
RC- As the ideal reader, one who has read everything, knows far more than I do about any subject, is a severe critic of careless thinking or sloppy prose, is bored by anything short of the most testing challenge.
E- José María Guelbenzu describes your use of metafiction as "a transformation of reality". In fact, your phantasies are sometimes epiphanies, moments of revelation. I´m not only thinking about Joyce, but also about writers like García Márquez. Who do you read and why?
RC- Nowadays, mostly the work of students, ex-students, and friends, as their books come tumbling through the door. This had not been my intention and will hopefully not be my permanent fate, though many of them are in fact among the best writers I know. But the two writers you mention are of course favorites to whom I return often, as with a couple of dozen others I could list here, to no useful purpose. I am still restlessly on the lookout for the unusual voice and still do read widely if maybe less exhaustively.
E- Now I´d like to talk about a couple of your novels more specifically. Back to The Public Burning, what shapes history? What kind of terrible game is this? Is the power to shape history an American quality? (It made me think of the Roman Empire)
RC- History is shaped by many things--accidents, cataclysms, even the weather--but mostly by human actions. Which is what I am interested in. Human actions and the mythological and other structures that govern and provoke them. Americans, being footloose and untethered from the outset, may be more aware of the sort of "game" (as you say) that history is, and so more quickly able to adapt to its shapeshifting patterns and rules. (For a variant on this theme, see my essay on "Soccer as an Existential Sacrament.")
E- Can you tell us a bit more about this essay?
RC- It was written on commission 15 years ago for Polaroid´s house magazine, Close-Up (the photographer is mentioned), an issue later produced as a book.
E- The concern with belief systems is also present in your "religious" works, like The Origin of the Brunist and A Theological Position, and even in baseball as religion in The Universal Baseball Association. You seem decidedly postmodern problematizing this kind of discourse, but also imply that human beings need it. What is your position regarding this now?
RC- You mean I imply that human beings need some sort of mythological or story structure to get through life? I think that's probably so, though it needn't be handed-down dogma and it can constantly metamorphose. That is to say, becoming an atheist does not free one from the need for a condensed "story" of how the universe works, though you may have to turn from primitive texts (the Bible, say) to those of geneticists and astrophysicists. Flexible, open, and loving stories are better than closed and hateful ones.
E- Do you think there is a difference between scientific texts and mythological-literary texts considered as explanations of the world? Or rather, what does it mean to choose
one or the other kind of explanation?
RC- In a Sophist world, these texts have blurred boundaries. But science strives for precision, while art focuses more on the ambiguities of the world. Science talks about things that can be defined and described, even if not fully understood or experienced (as when working with particles), art about things like goodness, truth, love, beauty, the human emotions. Art appeals first and foremost to the emotions, science to the intellect. No need to choose between them. Better to understand their respective validity and limitations.
E- The Universal Baseball Association makes imagination triumph over life. Is life really so dull?
RC- Oh no. Life is certainly not dull, though some sad lives may be. All too often it is appallingly fascinating. Imagination is NOT there to displace life: see my replies above.
E- Spanking the maid was part of the curriculum in one of the literature courses I took at the University. I remember the students (including myself) being fascinated with its kafkaesque quality, the way the rituals of life are uncomprehensible and its reflection on freedom. The novel ends when the characters have understood the ritual and want to break it. Is literature´s duty to make us understand?
RC- "Duty" is a heavy burden for a work of art. But if it is truly beautiful, then it will probably also be in some manner true, and grasping that truth can lead to some sort of understanding. A thought that often boils up as I sit and gaze, often somewhat perplexed, upon the great works of the Abstract Expressionists.
E- What kind of "duty" do you recommend your writing students? Can writing be learned?
RC- Attitudes towards writing can be learned or at least experienced, tested out. I am impatient with market-oriented genre writers, even when young. I work closely with prose and style problems, but mostly because I´m paid to do so. I´m much more interested in helping serious young writers develop innovative structures and approaches to the literary enterprise, based on their own peculiar genius. That´s one reason I have become so engaged with hypertext: a great pedagogical tool for young aspiring writers and readers.
E- In Briar Rose, there is this line about the sleeping beauty: "the fairy's spell binding her not to a suspenseful waiting for what might yet be, but to the eternal reenactment of what, other than, she can ever be", is the writer like her in this?
RC- Maybe that does reflect back upon the author's own dilemma, though I hadn't thought of that before. What I think I had in mind when I wrote it, however, was that these eternal reenactments are indeed much like the spells of wicked fairies, and as spells they can be broken.
E- In relationship to Briar Rose and Pricksongs..., what is the role of popular tales (and stories from the Bible) in our post-everything era? What can they teach us and how can we use them?
RC- The stories have invaded us and colonized themselves inside us. We can be a generous and tolerant and unquestioning host, or we can challenge them and refuse to be their mindless servants. Can't easily analyze these things away once they get inside. Have to wrestle with them on their home turf, make them show their true shapes, convert them to something we can live with.
E- Is the good reader a resistant reader?
RC- A good citizen is a resistant reader.
E- Gerald´s Party could be considered a genre fiction, a whodunit, but you trascend the genre and turn it into a carnavalesque farce. This is also cervantine, and it appears in much of your work. What does "genre fiction" mean for you?
RC- Genre fiction is the elaboration of the folktale, often just as entertaining and certainly just as conservative. Useful to me like all other "natural" forms and icons.
E- John´s wife starts and finishes with the word, "once", and like the "once upon a time" it´s the novel of the perfect storyteller. We learn about the interconnected lives of the little town and at the same time about present-time America in a very disturbing way. What is America now?
RC- Actually the last several words echo the first several in reverse, as if a palindrome were closing. But your question is too broad. I'll let John's Wife (and all my other books) stand as the answer to it.
E- Last year, Pricksongs and Descants and Briar Rose were published in Spanish. I also know you lived in Barcelona for some time. How has your work been received here?
RC- Well. When well translated. As with those two books.
E- A Night at the Movies is a book about films, another medium you love. What can films give us that books cannot?
RC- Another question asking for a book in reply. Here I was playing with the syntactical impact of film upon text. Exercises en route what will hopefully be the next large work.
E- And let´s move on to yet a more modern medium. Your two famous articles about hypertext in The New York Times Book Review are always quoted as being the moment where hypertext is "oficially born" for the literary world. Were there any inmediate repercusions? (I ask this because the situation looks pretty much the same now as it did in 1992 in terms of hypertext´s popularity)
RC- I am presently working on a longish essay about all this. The situation right now is actually markedly different, largely because of the proliferation and vast popularity of the Internet. Just held a huge conference on the topic here at Brown, covered by the NYTimes, as you know (http://www.stg.brown.edu/projects/TP21CL/).
E- You are considered "the evangelist of hypertext" in the literary community, but for the hypertext "tribe", you are still a "classic" writer, that is, your books are printed. Do you feel like an outsider in both fields?
RC- Well, not just in those two fields...
E- Why haven´t you written a hypertext? (This is suspicious)
RC- Are you certain that I haven't?
E- Oh! I hadn´t considered your Hypertext Hotel, probably because it´s collaborative writing and I´m after all a child of print. Point taken. Once you asked: "What´s so great about "interactivity" anyway?" Is hypertext incompatible with narrative as we know it?
RC- No. But it's different.
E- (You´ll hate me for this one) How do you see the future of the book?
RC- What´s most important about the moment is the emergent domination of our lives by the electronic media, and above all by the computer and the Web. Writers and artists have been reluctant to jump in, largely because of the new skills required and the numbing ephemerality of the technology: nothing stands still. But either they will do so, or literature will play an increasingly insignificant role in our lives. That´s where the readers will be, if in fact they can still read at all. So far, books show no sign of fading away, and indeed have enjoyed a kind of revival, thanks to Internet sales and pitches and home pages. But all it takes is a paper or fuel (for transporting those ponderous things) shortage. And such shortages will come.
E- What are you working on now?
RC- The next collection of stories and a return to my old pornographic film hero Lucky Pierre, a text first launched in 1969 but, having been picked up and dropped from time to time, still far from finished...
E- Thanks a lot for this interview.
Versión española
© Susana Pajares Toska 1999
Espéculo. Revista de estudios literarios. Universidad Complutense de Madrid
El URL de este documento es http://www.ucm.es/info/especulo/numero12/cooverinen.html
