If We Make It Through November
Then everything will be totally fine; in the meantime...
Note: I’m getting a “near email length limit” on this post, I think because of the amount of images. If the post isn’t displaying properly, click “view entire message.” Alternatively you can click the headline to read directly on the website, or read it from the Substack app.
Substack promises three gifts: freedom, power, and money. More specifically, the freedom to be, the power to become, and the money to subsidize the two. Nothing new, really. Still Substack tends to act as if what they’re offering is genuinely unique, and as if their starry-eyed quest “to form the basis of a new economic engine for culture” is at once surprisingly simple and proprietarily complex.
But Substack is still just the internet — blogs, subscriptions, and Twitter, rebranded. And the internet remains largely dominated by, on the one hand, unserious people pretending to be serious, and on the other, shitpost-ing anthropomorphized condiments.
Here’s to Substack!
A recent series by Alan Jacobs on Thomas Mann’s Joseph and His Brothers has inspired me, not to attempt to read that 1,400-ish-page novel, but to take up once again another one of Mann’s doorstop novels, The Magic Mountain, whose 900-ish pages is slightly more accessible. This will be my fourth or fifth attempt to make the ascent, and to be honest my hopes aren’t high. The only other book I’ve failed to finish more often is Absalom, Absalom!, which I once came within 70 or so pages of completing before inexplicably putting down. (I’ve never even come close with The Magic Mountain.)
Anyway, Jacobs’s related story about Marc Chagall is inspiring stuff.
After Thomas Mann moved to Princeton in 1938, he resumed research on Joseph and His Brothers, and consequently checked out many books on Egypt from the university’s library. When his wife Katia discovered that to borrow a book he had to sign his name on a card kept in a pocket inside the back cover, she cried, “Tommy, you’re cheapening the value of your signature!” She instructed him to get someone else to check books out for him to avoid this catastrophe.
This reminds me that Marc Chagall used to pay for everything — including a tube of toothpaste — by check, because he guessed that at least some shopkeepers, knowing his fame, would keep the check uncashed as a souvenir or to be sold later.
Exhausted by the theater of modern consumerism? Reduced to ironic protests and whimsical meta-commentary? This holiday season, continue the hardening of your heart by purchasing your loved ones a Pet Rock.
Advertising executive Gary Dahl sold a million of these for $4 per unit between 1975 and 1976. Low overhead, minimal production costs — you do the math!
Jeff Tweedy shares my take on The Beatles Anthology.
One of the most pivotal moments in my life as a musician was when The Beatles Anthology came out, in 1995. At the time, there was little out there to suggest anything other than polished, visionary record-making from the Beatles. I suspected and craved confirmation that they had to have sounded human (bad, or at least not perfect) at some point in the process of album-making. So when this collection of demos, early takes, rough mixes, and outtakes was released, I felt like I’d been handed a treasure map. A schematic of love, clear and readable enough to reverse engineer any type of tune. Did “Strawberry Fields” always sound like music made by an underwater candy orchestra? Why, no. Here you can listen to it how it was written: like a normal song strummed on an acoustic guitar. What about “Helter Skelter”? Those proto-metal, quantum-leap guitar onslaughts must have been born fully formed, a lightning strike. Right? Nope. Just a tepid blues trudge here. Fascinating nevertheless, because you know they’re onto something, even if they don’t quite sound like they’ll ever get there.
Five ways of looking at the relationship between the artist and their community.
From Austin Kleon, by way of Brian Eno:
There’s a healthier way of thinking about creativity that the musician Brian Eno refers to as “scenius.” Under this model, great ideas are often birthed by a group of creative individuals — artists, curators, thinkers, theorists, and other tastemakers — who make up an “ecology of talent.” If you look back closely at history, many of the people who we think of as lone geniuses were actually part of “a whole scene of people who were supporting each other, looking at each other’s work, copying from each other, stealing ideas, and contributing ideas.” Scenius doesn’t take away from the achievements of those great individuals: it just acknowledges that good work isn’t created in a vacuum, and that creativity is always, in some sense, a collaboration, the result of a mind connected to other minds.1
From T. S. Eliot’s “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” in a similar key to Eno-Kleon, but with the “scene” significantly redefined and expanded:
No poet, no artist of any art, has his complete meaning alone. His significance, his appreciation is the appreciation of his relation to the dead poets and artists. You cannot value him alone; you must set him, for contrast and comparison, among the dead. . . . And the poet who is aware of this will be aware of great difficulties and responsibilities.
From Harold Bloom’s Anxiety of Influence, which reconsiders Eliot’s insights, with fear and trembling:
The largest truth of literary influence is that it is an irresistible anxiety: Shakespeare will not allow you to bury him, or escape him, or replace him. No strong writer since Shakespeare can avoid his influence.
From Roberto Calasso’s La Folie Baudelaire, a celebration of French poet-critic Charles Baudelaire, the scenius par excellence, whose colossal influence over 19th and 20th century French culture started with the Parisian Salon:
There is a Baudelaire wave that rolls across all things. It originated before him and swept over all obstacles. Between the crests and the troughs of that wave we recognize Chateaubriand, Stendhal, Ingres, Delacroix, Sainte-Beuve, Nietzsche, Flaubert, Manet, Degas, Rimbaud, Lautréamont, Mallarmé, Laforgue, Proust, and others, as if that wave swept over them and submerged them for a few moments. Or as if they ran into it. Surges that meet, diverge, and go their separate ways. Eddies, sudden whirlpools. Then the flow resumes. The wave rolls on, always heading for the “depths of the Unknown” from which it came.
And to return to the genius vs. scenius distinction, a definition of the former by Baudelaire himself, who consciously or unconsciously is riffing on William Wordsworth:
Genius is none other than childhood formulated with precision.
Speaking of childhood, a few months ago my daughter came home from daycare singing a song that, even by the standards of a two-year-old, was impossible to make out. Only later did I discover that the song was called “Abiyoyo,” and that of all people, it was written and recorded by Pete Seeger.
We’ve since watched Seeger’s “Reading Rainbow”performance about fifty times.
Based on a South African folktale, “Abiyoyo” features a lot of familiar tropes, from the mysterious power of music to the fatal stupidity of certain types of monsters (specifically trolls and giants). But the story centers on a village’s decision to ostracize a troublesome father and son. It’s the kind of thing Rene Girard (obsessed with the scapegoat) or Giorgio Agamben (obsessed with the homo sacer) would scrutinize to the point of absurdity. I think the lesson is pretty simple, though: in the battle for human civilization, even annoying people have their uses.
Beethoven is a good example. Kleon doesn’t label any nodes in his illustration, but if he had, Napoleon Bonaparte would have to be among those nearest and dearest to the composer — at least until Napoleon declared himself emperor in 1804, vaporizing once and for all the French Revolution’s stated goals. Legend says that when Beethoven learned of Napoleon’s betrayal, he grabbed his pen, rushed over to the score of his recently finished third symphony, and struck through the original title, “Sinfonia intitolata Bonaparte.” The tear can still be seen on the original cover sheet, along with the name we know it by, “Sinfonia Eroica.”
Soooo good!