As usual Doug had a good show and as usual I had to listen again for the names.
Emily Gould was the first guest. In between getting up and getting the computer going I missed the intro. I gather Emily Gould graduated from some college or univ in Ohio and came to NYC 2001 to make it in something-something, writing and got a job at Gawker, worked for a year and quit.
She talked about prevailing attitudes, the social sort of darkness that comes with making the scene of a sort of social-media journalism, or gossip about the near-celebrities, which is turned inward. It all has a very superficial quality, and yet why would I find myself spending the day at this?
The Heart Says Whatever...
Emily Gould quit after a year I gather because she couldn't take the nasty writer milieu of the big city, and the pressure to have an opinion within a minute, an hour, a day or two of some event or impression or person.
I had exactly a one gig shot at posting a column on an internet art magazine. The assignment was to go to TJ Clark curated show of AE, then listen to his lecture and write about it. Fuck! Sure I knew the art imtimately. I grew up with it, it was just losing its edge when I was student, and I've thought long and often about it. You would think I'd have a snappy opinion. Nope. It was too big a topic and I was too connected to the work and a couple of the painters. I didn't know were to begin. I think only now some ten years later, I might be able to come up with something. Beside I was completely green, about these things. This was a big show, the lecture was part of a major modern art history project, and I was out of my league. You can hook a big fish and lose it.
Point. I am interested in anyone like Emily G who can say something within hours or a few days about anything. I am interested in this generation or young people who come of age in this rotten ass age of ours with its utter hopelessness, its absolute promise to crush us all and to kill off any bright moment or dream. I am thankful to the gods I was young when I was.
But EG doesn't seem too crushed about it. That first job is always a big one, especially if you came out of school expecting to find something related to the arts, and have to settle for realities. At least she got the inside gimpse of a fast track internet publishing business. It was great intro. I am sure it came in handy when she sat down to write a memoir of her days at Gawker. I'll add something here. Scenes change and they change fast, usually faster that you (or I) change. I think if you find a very cool scene, one that suits you, count on that for about two years and then start planning to move on. I went to four different colleges looking for some indefinite something about going to school, learning art, getting a cluster of like minded friends. Out of eight and half years, I had one year of very cool in Uni Iowa of all places. It turned out that most of the people I knew there were from big cities: LA (me), Chicago, Philly, New York City---some magic thing of chance. They were in English, Drama, or Art.
I digress. So she says, my soul was tired. She mentions competition. There is a big surprize that the arts are probably the most competitive and vicious of all things I've ever tried. Everybody is NOW, and there is no escape.
Books, I like reflecting, she says. Where as books could take years. What about waiting for the reaction? (Is New York done?) Interview authors while they cook? Hilarious...and not so far out. You should look at Douglas Duncan photos of Picasso, his wife and kids around a table and kitchen for noon Mediterranean style feast. It sure looked like paradise to me. It was part of a style of being an artist---in the long ago. If you remember that much of Picasso's paintings deal with either women or food, or still life as they call it. He even did women as food, if you look at the abstract girl before the mirror you can imagine the interior of the girl in the mirror as a bowl of fruit shapes. Digressions.
Books. Sure wish I could discipline myself to do one. Here's the thing about writing an extended work, if you are used to instant opinion---which I have discovered I am over the years of email at LBO. Books are more like a big painting or scuplture. It takes, duh, time. You work up to points, then wait for more to come. Then there are periods of inspiration. Personally, I's rather juat stop for awhile than force onward. One key, is to not give a shit what it might be like after its finished. You are not going to know anyway. The other thing is to find `stuff' to keep you going, something intrinsic about writting, but not exactly writing itself. For example, I picked a terrible subject to try to write about, and discovered what it required was to study the long and deep themes in the history of philosophy---a subject that bores 99.99 percent of my friends to death. Nobody to talk to. So? I find it enormously interesting because at root, it is the history of the western mind, or mind-sets of other people in different times and places---sort like the art history of the mind.
Right now I am reading a long book of essays by Isaiah Berlin. Man, oh man, I am glad I waited for this one. At one point he focuses on an Italian early 17-18thC writer name Gambattista Vico:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giambattista_Vico
The importance here for me is that first Ernst Cassirer studied Vico, more than fifty yeasrs before Berlin, probably through Wilhelm Dilthey:
http://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/ge/dilthey1.htm
Then Cassirer reworked this construction of a cultural science (also borrowed heavily from Hegel--and Marx for that matter) to delve into the worlds of language, myth, arts, and societies, or realities in his giant work, Philosophy of Symbolic Forms.
The importance for studying guys like Strauss? They form one of the reactions against the all pervasive influence of enlightenment positivism, social sciences, historicism, and so forth. There turned out to be a split between those reactions, with Strauss taking the road of an absolute archimedian point, so he returned to antiquity, or the antiquity of his idealist imagination. The other reaction went in the other direction, a form of a rather intellectually frightening cultural relativism, where you might never be able to conclude with any form of truth or any fixed set of values. However what you gain, is I think a deeper sort of insight into the history and workings of various sorts of human minds, societies, activities, ways of life. I began to wonder, do you even need a truth at all, if you have some much more indefinite but larger notion of the works, the worlds that people have inhabited?
Now this is the mirror at a history of ideas level, of what was happening in the living and concrete history of my youth, say the 60s-70s. I feel like I am just getting to that great point that is captured in Hegel's metaphor of philosophy, the owl of Minerva, takes flight in the dusk of an age, and can only approximate its life depicted in grey on grey. He forgot to mention this was one hell of a lot of fun.
Anyway back to Emily Gould. You know blogging or commentary on the times in some immediate local frame---whatever the medium, is not a new phenomenon. It is a core social need. I am rememberng two writers who did a wonderful job, in their different ways, Janet Flanner and Andre Gide. I mention them because Gide become something of a model or ideal for me and so did Flanner, a little later, in a different way. So there are models out there worth reading, considering, thinking about. For my interest they form part of a cultural history, the sensibilities of ages, on gone. And as to sharing too much? Gide was a pederast and wrote about it. Flanner was lesian, mostly and didn't write much about it, although it was well known, and mostly accepted among the painters, writers, and literati where she worked. Hemingway wasn't all that impressed, but his fictional women were mostly girls, colts like Maria, while he resented some of his wives like Martha Gilhorn
Emily G writes about a blog as:
``a house with an always-open door where people who are looking for you can check on you, compare notes with you and tell you what they think of you.''
This is what doing a public art is, an invitation to a hanging. I found this particularly true of performaning arts and visual arts, because people can see you right away, in an instant and they will have opinions about what they see. Sometimes it is so bad, I could feel a hot burn on my face, ready to fight or flight, as if I was in a car accident. That's just the way it is. Sit next to a gallery agent while they flip through a portfolio of a year's worth of work and dismiss it with a chatty bravado that makes your ears burn.
>From her article here:
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/25/magazine/25internet-t.html?pagewanted=3&_r=1
she meditates briefly if she would have been better off, staying in publishing where an editor might take you under wing and show you the ropes. (I still have a somewhat hard time considering any of these internet media, a medium worth much more than gossip. But never mind that for now. It has certainly changed me in the last fifteen years so it must be worth something since I spend so much time with it.) What is also going on in that kind of relationship. or should be, is the cultivation of a sensibility, whatever that means, your sense of the world. They trivialize this as `mentoring', but if you go back and read the histories of writers like Gide, you find one of his mentors was Paul valery. When you read Valery's essays, you can see it. This is what a literary tradition is, what it looks like on the inside. And, then Gide's NRF was the literary magazine of the period.
Here is Emily Gould reading the first chapter of And the Heart Says Whatever:
http://www.andtheheartsayswhatever.com/
I'd forgotten how sad it felt to be young with nothing much going on, except getting by to somewhere else. I'd forgotten my own dis-satisfaction with my parent's lives, all five from several different worlds. I had forgotten that after a few of weeks of adventure, my lovers, and even just friends had mostly lost their magic qualities---not to mention I had lost mine. And, in the end they couldn't help me find my way, or theirs. It was always nice to take a walk or go visit friends and have dinner, talk, and drink. But the trouble was we never, except for a rare few months in another place, talked about anything important in writing, painting, trying to sort out how to do those lives we imagined we would live---and which I can say in retrospect, none of us did.
So it's easy to see why I might have a great sympathic glance at Emily Gould. It's impossible to resist advice or counsel. Just read and write and take pictures or better sketch, and keep working your way out of the autobiographical. There will come a day, maybe when you've run out of things to say about yourself, when you can imagine a character you can construct who is not like you, quite, but somebody you've known. Then you can feel a kind of liberation from the constant self-absorbed world that becomes like a hot stuffy closet---when youth can no longer stand being young.
Parts of that are already present in the background impressionistic sounds, smells, colors, with their words. But EG givea too crude and ironic a rendition---some of that needs work. The master of this brilliant impressionistic stage with disafffected and self aborbed characters complete with the inner irony of such scenes was Flaubert. But there are better examples from poetry of Emily Dickinson and Elizabeth Bishop, where irony disappears with the cutting edge uncion of the surreal.
All I have to offer are reading lists. Try Dante and laugh. The Florentines in their nightly promenades, gossip, intrigues, and extravagance, this kind of thing is legend.
CG As usual Doug had a good show and as usual I had to listen again for the names.
Emily Gould was the first guest. In between getting up and getting the computer going I missed the intro. I gather Emily Gould graduated from some college or univ in Ohio and came to NYC 2001 to make it in something-something, writing and got a job at Gawker, worked for a year and quit.
She talked about prevailing attitudes, the social sort of darkness that comes with making the scene of a sort of social-media journalism, or gossip about the near-celebrities, which is turned inward. It all has a very superficial quality, and yet why would I find myself spending the day at this?
The Heart Says Whatever...
Emily Gould quit after a year I gather because she couldn't take the nasty writer milieu of the big city, and the pressure to have an opinion within a minute, an hour, a day or two of some event or impression or person.
I had exactly a one gig shot at posting a column on an internet art magazine. The assignment was to go to TJ Clark curated show of AE, then listen to his lecture and write about it. Fuck! Sure I knew the art imtimately. I grew up with it, it was just losing its edge when I was student, and I've thought long and often about it. You would think I'd have a snappy opinion. Nope. It was too big a topic and I was too connected to the work and a couple of the painters. I didn't know were to begin. I think only now some ten years later, I might be able to come up with something. Beside I was completely green, about these things. This was a big show, the lecture was part of a major modern art history project, and I was out of my league. You can hook a big fish and lose it.
Point. I am interested in anyone like Emily G who can say something within hours or a few days about anything. I am interested in this generation or young people who come of age in this rotten ass age of ours with its utter hopelessness, its absolute promise to crush us all and to kill off any bright moment or dream. I am thankful to the gods I was young when I was.
But EG doesn't seem too crushed about it. That first job is always a big one, especially if you came out of school expecting to find something related to the arts, and have to settle for realities. At least she got the inside gimpse of a fast track internet publishing business. It was great intro. I am sure it came in handy when she sat down to write a memoir of her days at Gawker. I'll add something here. Scenes change and they change fast, usually faster that you (or I) change. I think if you find a very cool scene, one that suits you, count on that for about two years and then start planning to move on. I went to four different colleges looking for some indefinite something about going to school, learning art, getting a cluster of like minded friends. Out of eight and half years, I had one year of very cool in Uni Iowa of all places. It turned out that most of the people I knew there were from big cities: LA (me), Chicago, Philly, New York City---some magic thing of chance. They were in English, Drama, or Art.
I digress. So she says, my soul was tired. She mentions competition. There is a big surprize that the arts are probably the most competitive and vicious of all things I've ever tried. Everybody is NOW, and there is no escape.
Books, I like reflecting, she says. Where as books could take years. What about waiting for the reaction? (Is New York done?) Interview authors while they cook? Hilarious...and not so far out. You should look at Douglas Duncan photos of Picasso, his wife and kids around a table and kitchen for noon Mediterranean style feast. It sure looked like paradise to me. It was part of a style of being an artist---in the long ago. If you remember that much of Picasso's paintings deal with either women or food, or still life as they call it. He even did women as food, if you look at the abstract girl before the mirror you can imagine the interior of the girl in the mirror as a bowl of fruit shapes. Digressions.
Books. Sure wish I could discipline myself to do one. Here's the thing about writing an extended work, if you are used to instant opinion---which I have discovered I am over the years of email at LBO. Books are more like a big painting or scuplture. It takes, duh, time. You work up to points, then wait for more to come. Then there are periods of inspiration. Personally, I's rather juat stop for awhile than force onward. One key, is to not give a shit what it might be like after its finished. You are not going to know anyway. The other thing is to find `stuff' to keep you going, something intrinsic about writting, but not exactly writing itself. For example, I picked a terrible subject to try to write about, and discovered what it required was to study the long and deep themes in the history of philosophy---a subject that bores 99.99 percent of my friends to death. Nobody to talk to. So? I find it enormously interesting because at root, it is the history of the western mind, or mind-sets of other people in different times and places---sort like the art history of the mind.
Right now I am reading a long book of essays by Isaiah Berlin. Man, oh man, I am glad I waited for this one. At one point he focuses on an Italian early 17-18thC writer name Gambattista Vico:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giambattista_Vico
The importance here for me is that first Ernst Cassirer studied Vico, more than fifty yeasrs before Berlin, probably through Wilhelm Dilthey:
http://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/ge/dilthey1.htm
Then Cassirer reworked this construction of a cultural science (also borrowed heavily from Hegel--and Marx for that matter) to delve into the worlds of language, myth, arts, and societies, or realities in his giant work, Philosophy of Symbolic Forms.
The importance for studying guys like Strauss? They form one of the reactions against the all pervasive influence of enlightenment positivism, social sciences, historicism, and so forth. There turned out to be a split between those reactions, with Strauss taking the road of an absolute archimedian point, so he returned to antiquity, or the antiquity of his idealist imagination. The other reaction went in the other direction, a form of a rather intellectually frightening cultural relativism, where you might never be able to conclude with any form of truth or any fixed set of values. However what you gain, is I think a deeper sort of insight into the history and workings of various sorts of human minds, societies, activities, ways of life. I began to wonder, do you even need a truth at all, if you have some much more indefinite but larger notion of the works, the worlds that people have inhabited?
Now this is the mirror at a history of ideas level, of what was happening in the living and concrete history of my youth, say the 60s-70s. I feel like I am just getting to that great point that is captured in Hegel's metaphor of philosophy, the owl of Minerva, takes flight in the dusk of an age, and can only approximate its life depicted in grey on grey. He forgot to mention this was one hell of a lot of fun.
Anyway back to Emily Gould. You know blogging or commentary on the times in some immediate local frame---whatever the medium, is not a new phenomenon. It is a core social need. I am rememberng two writers who did a wonderful job, in their different ways, Janet Flanner and Andre Gide. I mention them because Gide become something of a model or ideal for me and so did Flanner, a little later, in a different way. So there are models out there worth reading, considering, thinking about. For my interest they form part of a cultural history, the sensibilities of ages, on gone. And as to sharing too much? Gide was a pederast and wrote about it. Flanner was lesian, mostly and didn't write much about it, although it was well known, and mostly accepted among the painters, writers, and literati where she worked. Hemingway wasn't all that impressed, but his fictional women were mostly girls, colts like Maria, while he resented some of his wives like Martha Gilhorn
Emily G writes about a blog as:
``a house with an always-open door where people who are looking for you can check on you, compare notes with you and tell you what they think of you.''
This is what doing a public art is, an invitation to a hanging. I found this particularly true of performaning arts and visual arts, because people can see you right away, in an instant and they will have opinions about what they see. Sometimes it is so bad, I could feel a hot burn on my face, ready to fight or flight, as if I was in a car accident. That's just the way it is. Sit next to a gallery agent while they flip through a portfolio of a year's worth of work and dismiss it with a chatty bravado that makes your ears burn.
>From her article here:
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/25/magazine/25internet-t.html?pagewanted=3&_r=1
she meditates briefly if she would have been better off, staying in publishing where an editor might take you under wing and show you the ropes. (I still have a somewhat hard time considering any of these internet media, a medium worth much more than gossip. But never mind that for now. It has certainly changed me in the last fifteen years so it must be worth something since I spend so much time with it.) What is also going on in that kind of relationship. or should be, is the cultivation of a sensibility, whatever that means, your sense of the world. They trivialize this as `mentoring', but if you go back and read the histories of writers like Gide, you find one of his mentors was Paul valery. When you read Valery's essays, you can see it. This is what a literary tradition is, what it looks like on the inside. And, then Gide's NRF was the literary magazine of the period.
Here is Emily Gould reading the first chapter of And the Heart Says Whatever:
http://www.andtheheartsayswhatever.com/
I'd forgotten how sad it felt to be young with nothing much going on, except getting by to somewhere else. I'd forgotten my own dis-satisfaction with my parent's lives, all five from several different worlds. I had forgotten that after a few of weeks of adventure, my lovers, and even just friends had mostly lost their magic qualities---not to mention I had lost mine. And, in the end they couldn't help me find my way, or theirs. It was always nice to take a walk or go visit friends and have dinner, talk, and drink. But the trouble was we never, except for a rare few months in another place, talked about anything important in writing, painting, trying to sort out how to do those lives we imagined we would live---and which I can say in retrospect, none of us did.
So it's easy to see why I might have a great sympathic glance at Emily Gould. It's impossible to resist advice or counsel. Just read and write and take pictures or better sketch, and keep working your way out of the autobiographical. There will come a day, maybe when you've run out of things to say about yourself, when you can imagine a character you can construct who is not like you, quite, but somebody you've known. Then you can feel a kind of liberation from the constant self-absorbed world that becomes like a hot stuffy closet---when youth can no longer stand being young.
Parts of that are already present in the background impressionistic sounds, smells, colors, with their words. But EG givea too crude and ironic a rendition---some of that needs work. The master of this brilliant impressionistic stage with disafffected and self aborbed characters complete with the inner irony of such scenes was Flaubert. But there are better examples from poetry of Emily Dickinson and Elizabeth Bishop, where irony disappears with the cutting edge uncion of the surreal.
All I have to offer are reading lists. Try Dante and laugh. The Florentines in their nightly promenades, gossip, intrigues, and extravagance, this kind of thing is legend.
CG