Two eloquent passages from the day’s reading

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I’ve had Dwight Macdonald’s Parodies: An Anthology from Chaucer to Beerbohm –and After (1960) for years, and nibbled at it betimes. The September 20th issue of The New Yorker has a Louis Menand review of The Oxford Book of Parodies (2010) which has this beautifully clear –indeed, all but anthropological– summary of what HAPPENED in the 50 intervening years:

In 1960, though, Macdonald was pushing on a door where there was still some resistance. Since then, literature has ceased to be the dominant middle-class cultural preference, and the barrier between the authentic and the parodic has collapsed. A “diffused parodic sense” is everywhere. The culture is flooded with ironic self-reflexivity and imitations of imitations: travesties, spoofs, skits, lampoons, pastiches, quotations, samplings, appropriations, repurposings. This has happened at the low end (television commercials that are parodies of television commercials) and the high (postmodern fiction). And since 1960 a giant continent of mainstream entertainment has emerged of which parody is the foundation, from National Lampoon, Monty Python, and “Saturday Night Live” to Spy, Weird Al Yankovic, “The Simpsons,” and The Onion.

…even the members of reading clubs could use some guidance making sense of a culture in which almost nothing is taken seriously unless it first makes fun of what it is. This practice may be partly self-protective: it is harder for someone to subvert you if you are already subverting yourself. But self-parody can also convey authority. The “Daily Show” is a parody of a news program, and a lot of people rely on it for news.

Still, anthologically speaking, where to start? When everything is quasi-parodic, when everything presents itself with a wink of self-conscious exaggeration, then it may be that parody is finished as the kind of genre you can represent within the confines of an Oxford Book… (pg 80)

And an hour or so later I found myself immersed in Joshua Clover’s “Busted: Stories of the Financial Crisis” from September 20 issue of The Nation, staring at another brilliant bit of analytical abstraction:

…When one converts, say, collateralized debt obligations and credit default swaps into a folksy story about the neighbors and their home insurance, the crisis appears more legible than its components, those acronymic phantasms of fictitious capital traded by the blind protocols of shell companies hoping to arbitrage a few billion pennies from minuscule imbalances in a great global system.

What those two passages share is an exemplary clarity of analysis and expression, to which I wish I could rise myself. Still, I know it when I see it.

Photographic ruminations

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What part does equipment play in what a photographer is able to do? Clearly, in the last 6 months Betsy’s 60mm macro lens has taken her into almost magical realms of vision and transformed her capability to capture what she could see. My own fascination lies with ultra wide angle perspective, ever since the adventures in the 1970s with the 21mm Zeiss lens on the now-defunct Nikon rangefinder camera.

breadmaking 1973

While there are ultrawides for digital cameras (I’m actively considering the Tokina 11-16mm), they’re pretty large and not so very portable, but tempting nonetheless.

At the moment I find myself lusting after a smaller and less obtrusive solution, Voigtländer’s Color-Skopar 21mm on a Bessa R4A body, a 35mm film camera. I happened upon a FlickRiver pool for that lens, and I continue to slaver. My birthday is approaching…

Sandburg vs. Frost

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Harper’s put this up today:

The policeman buys shoes slow and careful; the teamster buys gloves slow and careful; they take care of their feet and hands; they live on their feet and hands.

The milkman never argues; he works alone and no one speaks to him; the city is asleep when he is on the job; he puts a bottle on six hundred porches and calls it a day’s work; he climbs two hundred wooden stairways; two horses are company for him; he never argues.

The rolling-mill men and the sheet-steel men are brothers of cinders; they empty cinders out of their shoes after the day’s work; they ask their wives to fix burnt holes in the knees of their trousers; their necks and ears are covered with a smut; they scour their necks and ears; they are brothers of cinders.

–Carl Sandburg, Psalm of Those Who Go Forth Before Daylight, first published in Cornhuskers (1918)

…and I was reminded of Robert Frost’s sentiments re: Carl Sandburg, as disclosed in a letter to Lincoln MacVeagh (quoted in Paul Muldoon’s essay on The American Songbag, in the Marcus and Sollors New Literary History of America, pp 609-610):

We’ve been having a dose of Carl Sandburg. He’s another person I find it difficult to do justice to. He was possibly hours in town and he spent one of those washing his white hair and toughening his expression for his public performance. His mandolin pleased some people, his poetry a very few and his infantile talk none… I heard someone say he was the kind of writer who had everything to gain and nothing to lose by being translated into another language.

Some balance is restored, perhaps, by this from Christian Wiman in his essay on Frost in the same New Literary History of America (p 540):

Of course, there are more shoals than poems, more confusion than the songs that seem, briefly, to contain and control it. This is particularly true for modern poets and their inheritors. With this in mind, the buffoonery and bluster of Frost’s public persona become, perhaps a bit more explicable, as do all the cutesy, folksy poems that seem to have been written solely in the service of this persona.

Honors about even, don’t you think?

links for 2010-08-28

  • An Auto-Tune About Bankers: 'We Didn't See It Comin' : Planet Money : NPR
    (the tip of another iceberg spotted, bearing down upon us)
    (tags: geekery economics video)
  • Has America Caught the British Disease?
    (from NewGeography) "…The old elite of aristocratic parasites, Church of England drones, and their snobbish retainers like elite lawyers and professors despised upwardly mobile arrivistes, although their children and grand-children might become socially acceptable if they abandoned “trade” for the lifestyle of genteel rentiers and were laundered through public schools like Eton and Oxbridge… As British industry shrank under American and German competition, the City of London became even more important. Finance was a clean business, untainted by the grime and odor of the factory, and could be practiced by gentlemen…"
    (tags: ethnocalumny economics)