My old buddy Chris Hudson pointed out this article on Lithub by Stephen Marche, and I went and found that very 00s thing, the platform Review! The Platform review takes a tour d'horizon of, usually, fiction and tells you why the current scene sucks, It used to be the specialty of James Wood when he was at the unlamented TNR under Leon Wieseltier, the biggest poseur since Norman Podhoretz. You know, Leon? who also considered himself a chaser of women, usually the ones working at the TNR, which meant he was cancelled for a microsecond and then has come back with some well funded mag called Liberties, as in the liberty to chase your hot intern around your desk, or grope her at the bar after impressing her with who you know. Liberties will no doubt sponsor platform reviews, but I wonder if, this time around, the bait will find fishes.
“I’m so bored. I hate my life.” - Britney Spears
Das Langweilige ist interessant geworden, weil das Interessante angefangen hat langweilig zu werden. – Thomas Mann
"Never for money/always for love" - The Talking Heads
Thursday, September 16, 2021
The platform review rides again! Stephen Marche at Lithub
Tuesday, September 14, 2021
she reached out - a poem
With her blood in
the water short silk slip
- her sleeping
giant eyes -
Isn’t she the
cutest knock on your door
Since you made it
to the big girls club?
She’s knuckled down
on the finish line
-
This is a transition period – stuff happens!
“ It was the
wrong issue before the war,
and it's the wrong
issue now,”
Sez the man with
the plan.
He cannot see her as
he veers into oncoming
- this daughter of
Night - who from her rape
Bore that scar
Helen.
- Karen Chamisso
Sunday, September 12, 2021
Interessant, na? cool thoughts in a cool shade
Friedrich Schlegel as a young dude was adept at
netting the words that were in the air – and a lot of them were in the 1790s.
Thus, in his essay on Greek poetry, he netted the word “interessant” –
interesting. In Kant’s critique of judgment, the aesthetic realm was
distinguished from the practical realm by its dis-interest. It was not
interested in money, science or ethics, in itself. Schlegel took this to be a
description of art in its “objective” state. Being a German romantic, he
connected German philosophy to Greek culture – an often repeated move – and
contrasted the objective art of the Greeks, an art that was natural and close
to pure aesthetics, with the interested art of the moderns. That we label
Shakespeare’s Hamlet and Sophocles Oedipus the King both tragedies is, for
Schlegel, an error in the universal inventory – Sophocles being objective, and
Shakespeare introducing the “interested” element.
The interesting – and self-interest – are, for
Schlegel, hallmarks of the modern.
According to the OED, the etymology of the word ‘interest’
is mysterious. Until the sixteenth century, interest was spelled interess in
English. It seems to have come from inter-esse, between being. Isn ‘t that the
doxic object in its (non) essence? It
meant a claim on, a share in – what you give is what you take, potlatch rules.
But the old French was interet, and it meant loss, or damage. Somehow, the “t”
made its perilous way across the channel and stuck itself to interess. Which of
course still meant share, claim, and contained economic meanings that would
pacify Shylock – but it also broadened out to mean being curious about. Is
curiosity a harm? Does the evil eye drill a hole in your soul? Or is the object
or person or event claiming you? Or you, it?
Kant in the Critique of Judgement cut bait and
decided that the aesthetic, at least, could not be reduced to the useful. The
beautiful is without interest – although, with Kant, that moment of
disinterestedness gives a satisfaction.Friedrich Schlegel, in his study of
Greek Poetry, has his own sense of Kant’s beauty – beauty is not, to read
Schlegel one way, for the moderns, precisely because it does not damage, it
does not claim. It is an ancient ideal. The modern ideal is the interesting.
Schlegel was 22 at the time he wrote his essay. He was in Dresden. It was the
year of retraction – 1794-1795 in France. Schlegel was on that point in the arc
of his career where he was tending rightward. He ended up, of course, as an old
Metternich propagandist.
Yet in spotting the interesting as the fundamental
modernist aesthetic mode, he was definitely on to something. It is one of those
aesthetic modes fated to be continually jinxed by philosophy, which can’t get
over its Greek fixation oneauty. Recently, Sianne Ngai has been stirring things
up by reflecting on marginalized aesthetic categories, like cuteness, zaniness
or the interesting. In her chapter from her book about these aesthetic
categories, the interesting gets dubbed the “merely interesting”. Ngai, too,
goes to Schlegel for the codification of the interesting in the long game of
contrasting the subjective modern to the objective classical. Schlegel,
however, shows that the logic of the interesting – as opposed to the
interest-ed, is stymied by the in-betweeness – the inevitable projection – of
the subject. The interesting, to use McLuhan’s contrast, is cool, while the
interested is hot.
In the English and American culture of the nineteenth
century, the interesting had little standing. Interesting never fell from the
lips of a critic like Hazlitt, or Ruskin, or Arnold, who were uncomfortable
with the implication – at its most radical – that there was no room, here, for
judgment. That is, the interesting seemed merely interesting, with that
mereness making for a degree zero of judgment. The Victorians were nothing if
not judgers.
In the revolt against the Victorians, the interesting
returns to represent, mysteriously, an aesthetic attitude, something I
associate with Stein and Duchamp.
“As
lan Mieszkowski underscores in Labors of
Imagination, the interesting for
Schlegel is thus ultimately a matter of comparison based not on kind but on degree.
"Since all magnitudes can be multiplied into infinity," Schlegel
writes, "Even that which is most interesting could be more interesting
.... All quanta are infinitely progressive" (35,72). There is thus a sense, as Schlegel's fellow Athenaeum
contributor
Navalis notes, in which what is Most interesting is
the 'presentation of
an object in series-(series of variations, modifications, etc.).” Ngai,
122.
Schlegel’s idea here derives in part from the
opposition to what he took to be the source of Greek objectivity – the search
for the perfect. If we see the perfect as the contrary of the interesting, we
get close to why it is such a modern – modernist – aesthetic mode, and why it
is dogged by its own generated opposite – the boring.
Ngai’s chapter follows Schlegel in defining the
aesthetic mode from the side of the spectator, the aesthetic consumer, rather
than the producer. However, once we grant the interesting a right to its place
in the aesthetic domain, we are granting it a place in the whole set of
motivations that come together in creation – motivations that may well
overwhelm the divide between producer and consumer.
Which is where I will leave this note.
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