Does Sap Sell?

Buy some shit or I'll make you cry.

It is probably a fact that sex and rock n' roll sell. As much as feminists and other ad police complain, we can't deny our basic urges for sex and ecstatic rocking (or jazzing, or grooving, or hip hopping or whatever it is you do to lose yourself). But who came up with the idea of salesy sap? Lately everything from phones to cars to pills has a commercial with sappy, sort of hopeless music. What are they trying to do to us? Make us more depressed than we already are?

Remember when they'd sell us stuff by rockin' us out? By "they" I mean the current advertising hegemony. A couple years ago I wrote about the abuse of classic rock lyrics in advertising. They always take the lyrics so far out of context that the ad becomes absurd. Well that still pisses me off, but at least the music is good! It's catchy, upbeat, and I can see it making someone want to buy something. Motorola used AC/DC's "Back in Black" a few years back, and it successfully made me buy a bitchin' black Razr phone. It died and I miss it.

In addition to sucking, sappy music doesn't help the consumer remember the product. I can think of half a dozen sappy car commercials, but I have no idea what the hell those cars those were. A vague impression of a Chrysler logo comes to mind for one of them. Snappy, not sappy, helps memory when it comes to products.

If sap does sell for some people, it might be because of a current trend in listening to sappy music, like Jack Johnson. Even if you like that sort of thing, you can't call it catchy or advertising appropriate in any way. The makers of the sappy commercials, knowing their music won't appeal to anyone who doesn't listen to "adult alternative," usually throw in a sappy storyline to help us remember the commercial. That car commercial where the just married couple drive out to a tent in a field (dude, you could have at least gotten a real tent that doesn't melt in the rain), and the girl is kind of funny looking in a cute way with her weird haircut and flowers in her hair... yeah that one. So sweet right, with the sappy music and all? Well, I couldn't tell you if they were driving a Subaru or a Volvo or a Volkswagen. I'll guess that it wasn't a Volkwagen because VW usually has an excellent sense of humor.

Here's that commercial, in case you don't watch TV (you probably shouldn't). The singer sounds like he's dying. I like that it even ends with "We could have gone a more traditional route, but it wouldn't have been nearly as memorable." Wait, what are you selling again? Life insurance?

The worst part about some of the sap songs, like the one in the AT&T commercial that rips off Jeanne-Claude and Christo, is you can't even understand the lyrics. So you walk away from the TV with some vague impression of a vague product (some phone or another...) and some vague lyrics to go along with it, that just sort of vaguely depress you and you don't even know why! I saw some shit or somethin'... and it was beautiful... (The only reason I know that's an AT&T commercial is because I looked up "Jeanne Claude and Christo ripoff.")

I don't like being sold to any more than the next educated person, but I at least like the sales pitch to have ring to it. I don't like to be depressed by advertising. It is depressing enough that advertising even exists, that it is a huge cash cow, and culture shaper. It shouldn't also make us want to jump in the ocean. Advertisers: if everyone kills themselves, no one can buy your shit.

I can think of two commercials that actually make great use of contemporary music. The music is a little saccharin, but it's happy! The Target commercial with the triplets (In a land where the river runs free...Where you and me are free to be you and me!) and the Holiday Inn Express commercial that's made Kyle Andrews famous (You always make me smile...Don't know why I love you...). While you won't catch me riding down the highway or even doing laundry to music like that, I'll at least acknowledge that the marketers of these products understand that making you cry isn't going to get you to buy backpacks or go on vacation. Giving you a little smile and a catchy tune to stick with you just might.

Growing Pains

Hello blog. Nice to see you. It's been a long time.

Those are nearly the opening lyrics of a Conway Twitty song I grew up with. It always reminds me of another Conway Twitty song, "Happy Birthday Darlin," a song which inexplicably made me cry my eyes out on my fourth birthday as I sat on the dining room floor looking at a catalog of home decor, including owls made of brown and yellow yarn and wooden beads. Because of these admissions, you can probably tell I will be 30 years old tomorrow. I plan on listening to some Conway Twitty.

My growing pains associated with turning 30 are only slight. I need to do something small for myself, like get an actual haircut. That should fix me right up. The more intense growing pains I'm experiencing have to do with grad school.

I'm in a masters program that is in no way designed for the aspiring PhD student. As I take more and more away from the course materials, it has become evident that I am in the wrong place, a place where there is no room for a student like myself to grow. This has nothing to do with other students (one of them started out super pretentious, then backed off completely). I know there are snobs and egos everywhere. It's just everything else about the program.

I blame myself for not aiming higher. I decided I had to stay local for grown-up practical reasons. Also, not one person I talked to really knew what it was like at this school. After two years of looking forward to this idea I had of "graduate study," within three weeks I became tortured by it.

But there is something new to look forward to! I'll have a new start in the Spring, in what I have verified through brilliant, trusted former professors is a super-traditional MA to PhD program in literature, with a teaching assistantship, a program in which one professor assured me I will "kick so much butt." (Last Friday I went out for drinks with all my old profs and felt so at home. Even if a school occasionally sucks, you should at least feel at home.)

I'm pissed, tortured, disappointed by this fall, but so hopeful for next semester. I think about it constantly. I feel like I'm running away or not finishing what I started, but at the same time I have to be an adult about this. So I asked yet another faculty member for advice before making a decision -- "No reason to be more unhappy than usual," she said. The consensus seems to be that there is no ideal place to be for this yucky thing called graduate school. It will probably always be "teh suck" in one way or another. But preventable, protracted misery is not a state in which anyone should spend five years or even two years of their lives. I will be at least 35 before I can be a "professor." And I don't want to look it. Here's to a fresh start at 30.

Art Problems, Partially Resolved

I found this on the Chicago Art Blog, when I was searching to see if anyone in the art world has complained about the Jeanne-Claude and Christo ripoff by AT&T:

"After all, the avant-garde contains in it the possibility of kitsch and kitsch the possibility of the avant-garde; they are separated by degrees not by kind, it's how they participate in constructing culture that makes the difference."

The blogger was not saying AT&T in particular was producing kitsch. No, that was just a plain old ripoff (I agree). But he discusses some other sort of kitschy recent ads, and their allusions to pop art may be semi-excusable. Maybe. Anyhow this little sentence neatly organizes an idea I've been trying to articulate for months! That same idea was there in a few critics I've read, but never put so clearly. I'm terrible at writing on things like "constructing culture," and I need cultural stuff to be wrangled into some more philosophical order before I can talk about it.

Maybe I can finally finish my Ranciere post now. Maybe.

From Brooks to Fish (and back)

So I got an 'A' on my very first paper as a graduate student, and in that paper I applied Fish by picking apart Brooks. For me this was blasphemy, but I had to be Fish for this assignment. What better way to explain a critic I don't know much about than by pitting him against a critic I know well? And isn't there knowledge to be gained by challenging one's own critical stance? (Brooks's = mine, usually.)

Two weeks ago I compared Brooks with Bateson, and Brooks came out on top because of what I saw as his heightening of the paradoxes in the text, a Wordsworth poem. Next week, in comes Fish, and he says some of the same things about Brooks (well, about formalists anyway) that I had said about Bateson! In the first section of "Interpreting the Variorum," Fish takes on formalist interpretations of Milton, on whom he is an expert, and shows how the formalists fall flat. They flatten out the paradoxes in the text (I had accused Bateson of that, while attesting to the formalist's paradoxical prowess!) and remove the delight of the indeterminate meanings. Most importantly for Fish, and perhaps this is what I was getting at all along when I was looking for "the critical climax" (and probably projected that onto Brooks as I read him, Fish would argue) , the formalists completely miss that (part of) the meaning of the text is in our moment of hesitation, in the experience of textual confusions, in the experience of the overwhelmingness of the possibilities of meaning! I think I've been reading Brooks affectively, and not very analytically.

Brooks does point out textual cruxes and formal features that I find exciting, but it is perhaps my actual reading of Brooks, as it unfolds in time (flitting back to the text, back to Brooks, back to the text...) that is most exciting for me. You can see how Fish has planted the reader-response seed in my brain (I'm not sure if it's sprouting or festering now), and how I am flinging myself out onto that temporal axis of criticism, where I had once sworn allegiance only to the textual, the spatial. When I presented my paper my excitement about meaning-in-reading was catching -- students thought me a Fish fanatic! But, Fish aside, I can't deny that I have begun to read criticism like it is literature (isn't it?), and interpret and respond to it as such. In a way, I've never been looking for the most rigorous theory or the most provocative argument, but for who can tell the best story.

The way I chose to do this exercise paid off in spades. I come away with a new appreciation for a certain brand (species?) of Fish, and with a refreshed and revised view of what Brooks does to those texts with which the formalists claim a peculiar intimate relationship. I still cleave to formalism pretty tenaciously, but Fish's early reader-response work (forget "interpretive communities" for now -- I'm only talking individual reader's response) helped me to see outside the box (for in our textbook's diagram, the formalists really do live in a box) and look more critically at what Brooks actually does, and at how I read him and the rest.

In the Style of Lyly

Below is a page-length of Euphuistic prose I'm writing for a Prose Styles class assignment. I'm not quite there with the antithesis and endless lists that say the same thing a hundred ways, but I'll keep editing this until it's Lyly all the way. This version was after reading Euphues on my own, but after class discussion and reading Shakespeare's parodies of this stuff (which are really exactly copied from this stuff -- you don't need to exaggerate it to see how ridiculous it is), I think I understand the style a little better. I don't understand, however, why such a style became a fad -- Shakespeare made fun of it because it had become the 16th century equivalent of Valley Girl talk.

(And after looking at this book cover, I have decided I am going to call myself not "M.A." upon confirmation of this next degree, but forever and always, "Mafter of Arte.")

Anatomy of Appetite

There came bumbling along the avenue a boy of not more than ten, a boy of more heft than health and yet of more health than holiness, thinking the town his grazing grounds and his watering hole, so that he spent these daily walks sniffing the air for familiar wafts – charbroiled burgers, fried chips, fragrant rotisserie chickens; and, if it were Friday, the sweet olfactory evidence of a pig roast. It was whispered that the boy’s mother, whose cooking was worse than her looks, and yet whose looks were better than her maternal judgment, and who had not been seen with a husband in ten years (was not the boy nearly ten?), would send him out of house to procure whatever dishes and dainties his tremendous appetite required, two twenty dollar bills his ticket to more than mere sustenance; a suburban avenue, with all its light-up signs and fast service foods and barbeque joints, his means to a greasy, dripping end.
Preferring meat before sweet (yet still fond of sweet meats) the boy had only to select this evening’s protein; after supper he would loiter in the 7-11, ogling shelves of chocolate things, chocolate-filled things, chocolate-covered things. Finding the pig roast as the fly finds honey or a dirty diaper, and landing upon a plate of flesh without so much grace as the fly, and yet creating a scene just as revolting, the boy devoured hock, nibbled feet, chewed upon pulled pork sandwich. He paid with his wadded bills and took his leave and his change for the shelves of candies, his only care now to select the most winning combination of chocolates and nougats, chiclets and nutbars, that could be afforded for nine dollars and twenty-seven cents. He loved a candy coating; for as the Reese’s cup has its chocolate shell, the M&M its colorful sugary jacket, the gum drop its sweet crystalline glaze -- he himself had none.

The Critical Climax

The commercial with the fried egg should have said, "This is your brain... This is your brain on Deleuze." And so from my fried egg I give you this rhizome or plateau or something, concerning something completely different:

A slumber did my spirit seal;
I had no human fears:
She seemed a thing that could not feel
The touch of earthly years.

No movement has she now, no force;
She neither hears nor sees;
Roll'd round in earth's diurnal course
With rocks, and stones, and trees.

I just read some E. D. Hirsch on historical criticism, from Validity in Interpretation. Hirsch (I keep wanting to call him "Ed") compares two critiques of Wordsworth's "A slumber did my spirit seal." One is by Cleanth Brooks, a Formalist whom I like most dearly. The other is by F.W. Bateson, who I don't know much about except that he doesn't like historicists. So Hirsch is comparing two critics that are not from his camp, and he makes it a contest. Hirsch believes in determinate meaning, so one of these guys (or neither) has to be "right."

Hirsch chooses Bateson as the winner, not because of his optimistic interpretation, but because of the word "pantheistic." Hirsch sees that word as proof that Bateson is taking into consideration the life and times of Wordsworth, a Romantic poet who would have some pantheistic beliefs or motifs. Hirsch goes on to point out how the two critiques are irreconcilable and therefore one of them must be invalid. Pantheism seems like a silly way to determine a winner, but it would be silly for me to complain about his choice since I don't believe in determinate meaning anyway. The contest is the problem. If I ran a contest with these two, I would try to determine who was the better critic, not who gave the right interpretation. Here they are, first Bateson, then Brooks:

The final impression the poem leaves is not of two contrasting moods, but of a single mood mounting to a climax in the pantheistic magnificence of the last two lines . . . The vague living-Lucy of this poem is opposed to the grander dead-Lucy who has become involved in the sublime process of nature. We put the poem down satisfied, because its last two lines succeed in effecting a reconciliation between two philosophies or social attitudes. Lucy is actually more alive now than she is dead, because she is now a part of the life of Nature, and not just a human "thing."

[The poet] attempts to suggest something of the lover's agonized shock at the loved one's present lack of motion -- of his response to her utter and horrible inertness. . . Part of the effect, of course, resides in the fact that a dead lifelessness is suggested more sharply by an object's being whirled about by something else than by an image of the object in repose. But there are other matters which are at work here: the sense of the girl's falling back into the clutter of things, companioned by things chained like a tree to one particular spot, or by things completely inanimate like rocks and stones . . . [She] is caught up helplessly into the empty whirl of the earth which measures and makes time. She is touched and held by earthly time in its most powerful and horrible image.

I was so moved by Brooks and kind of grossed out by Bateson. For instance, the line "We put the poem down satisfied" really rubs me the wrong way. If we subscribe to Horace's miscuit utile dulci, maybe putting a poem down satisfied is what we should hope for? But satisfaction is not exactly the same as delight. Delight doesn't require any thinking. Bateson's satisfaction is not instant or aesthetic, but apparently based on his own interpretation which smooths out any conflict in the poem. On a "reconciliation between two philosophies or social attitudes." That's pretty vague, and it hardly sounds satisfying. Certainly not delightful. It's as if he's saying the poem has satisfied its requirement to come to a resolution (as if that is a requirement of good poetry).

Bateson's pantheism angle turns Lucy's resting place into an Elysium instead of a dead stone revolving in space, but besides creating some nicer imagery than Brooks' darker interpretation provides, I don't think the critique is very effective (or affective). The whole aim of it seems to be, like I said before, to smooth out conflicts, to reconcile differences, and to cancel out oppositions without a hitch. He talks of "two contrasting moods" that are actually "a single mood," without making anything out of how these moods were sublated or elevated. He talks of the dead-Lucy "opposed to" the living-Lucy but doesn't explain the opposition, ending on a bittersweet line, the equivalent of "she's in a better place now." It's almost mawkish.

Two moods becoming one, two people (who are really one) who oppose one another, two philosophies reconciled -- these things all seem pretty interesting, and like they might occur at some climactic hinging point in the text, but Bateson doesn't bring it out of the poem. He just explains it conceptually and we are supposed to accept it. The funny thing is he does mention something that sounds exciting, and even uses the word "climax" in the line at the front of the paragraph, where he claims that "a single mood mount[s] to a climax in the pantheistic magnificence of the last two lines." Sounds so exciting, and then he doesn't deliver on it.

My impression of Bateson's critique is sort of just that -- an impression. And he even calls his own critique an impression of the poem. But even if his prose style moves someone more than it moves me, even if his vague impressions of the poem are enough for someone else to sink their teeth into, there would still be that undeniable attempt to "solve" the poem there, to smooth it over, to get relief from its tensions. What that does is just turn the poem into its interpretation. We have the end result so there's no use in re-reading the text. I may not like Bateson's delivery of his critique, but more importantly I don't like his aim. It's anti-climactic.

Brook's critique may be slightly amiss in its pessimism (even if we're not going to be historical, let's be reasonable -- I would take into consideration that Wordsworth is not a poet of sad, dark poems, so me might avoid going down the "agonized" path), but its strength is that the conflict in the poem is not canceled out. It makes for a better critique when conflicts and tension are pointed out explicitly. And if a claim is made that a text has a climax, something climactic should be brought into focus by the critic. In fact, the critique itself should have a climax.

The first line of Brooks's paragraph has us picturing a cold dead body through this whole thing, a lover looking on in "agonized shock." The "shock" may be a little over the top, but it certainly gives us an image to hold onto while Brooks elaborates on what the text does with the dead girl, and the beautifully understated "present lack of motion" makes the lifeless body even more vivid. Brooks then uses the concrete language of the poem (rocks, trees, rolling...) and shows how the differences between alive and dead, still and moving, are depicted "sharply" by Wordsworth's chosen images. He also substitutes some of his own sharp, concrete words like "whirled about" contrasted with "object in repose."

Brooks drives his images home, perhaps a little more than a Wordsworth poem seems to require. The death in the poem sort of washes over us and leaves us drenched in the weight of Lucy's helplessness. It's not nearly as "horrible" a thing as Brooks makes it out to be. But even if Brooks gets carried away, the tension he points to, and even the sadness he alludes to, is real. Perhaps this contrast between Brooks's pointed prose (which can be quite poetic) and Wordsworth's fluid poetry makes that even more apparent. The poem is not merely translated into an interpretation and left for dead, but complemented and brought to life by a good critique.

In the second half of Brooks's paragraph, things are still "at work" in the poem, not reconciled. Brooks finds similar tensions to what Bateson found (although Brooks focuses on still vs. moving where Bateson focuses on life vs. death), and he magnifies them and explicates them with a close reading on rocks and trees and such. In the last two lines of the paragraph, Brooks combines the poem's concrete images with some abstract and more emotional language to create a critical climax: "She is touched and held by earthly time in its most powerful and horrible image." Wow. That is not a resolution, but a gorgeous predicament. And that makes the reader want to go back and pore over this poem for himself. Or, he can always go back to just drinking in the poem for what it is, the "impression" of it made a little more delightful by the critic's illuminations. Since the poem is never resolved, and it is always at work, it is always worth reading.

Brooks wins!

Against the Titular Colon

Resist...

One of my professors swears by colons in titles. He tells an anecdote: "I submitted a paper and it was rejected, with no notes. I added a colon to the title, changed nothing else, and it was accepted immediately." He has a sense of humor about this of course. But he still expects colons. The way I see it, the colon is making our titles ugly, and it's making our scholars lazy.

What the Colon Does
Since my papers were long enough and intense enough to warrant colons in their titles,
I've raged against the colon machine. Or at least poked fun at it, sometimes with a colon. Consider this: colons give the reader pause; colons begin lists (and our friend the semi-colon helps us with the listing); colons suggest that thing two explains thing one.

The second function of the colon listed here is not important to titles, because we can see at a glance we're not reading a list. The first function of the colon, however, is hard to ignore. When a title has a colon in it (usually closer to the front of the title than to the end of it), it makes the reader pause a little. We haven't even begun to read the first paragraph of the paper or article, and we've already been made to pause. I think the writer who requires a pause from the reader before he's even said anything meaningful must think a lot of himself. Writers' egomania aside, a pause in a short phrase like a title is not very elegant. If I look at the bibliography from my literary criticism class, there is not a single title with a colon in it. Defence of Poetry, Preface to Lyrical Ballads, Poetics, Biographia Literaria, name only a few. One might argue that these titles are antiquated, that the colon is a modern title expectation or even requirement with a modern purpose. But does it make for a good title? No. These old titles are elegant, they flow, and they don't ask for pause in the middle of a first thought. They build expectations, they give hints, and they keep the reader reading. (I'm in reader-response mode this week, so naturally I'm thinking of the responses...)

"Defense! of poetry! Is literature at war!?"
"Oooh, lyrical ballads that can't be read until we read the illuminating preface..."
"Poetics, huh. Well, that must cover just about everything. I'd better get started."
"Biographia whaaa? I gotta find out!"

The "pause" funtion of the colon may create unstylish titles with bad flow, but the "thing two explains thing one" function of the colon is the real, supposedly useful reason these dots make themselves at home in today's titles. Like the professor's story shows, a reviewer may not be able to tell what your paper is about without that explanatory phrase after the colon. He doesn't want to guess or be given exciting expectations -- he wants to get through the pile quickly. So papers as commodities (both economic and academic) sell better when they have colons in the titles. Why not use these titles fow reviewing purposes only, and use a shorter version for print? I can't think of any other way around the over-explained titles. Certainly if something made it into a paperback for sale it would need a better title. No paying customer is going to stand for colons everywhere. It starts to seem like those old works with the short titles can wield those titles because they live up to the expectations they give us. Perhaps no one today can write anything that lives up to the "epicness" suggested by a beautiful or brief title? Or do the titles just have to get longer and longer, like phone numbers, because we've used them all up?

One big difference between the works in the bibliography and the colon-titled papers is the length and breadth -- most of those older works cover a lot of ground, but academic contributions today are doled out bite-sized. Scholars are writing shorter papers (for better dissemination) and being specific about what's in them is more important. I get all that. But that doesn't make the colon any prettier.

I have read some later pieces that do well with the short title. "On..." or "Against..." usually makes for a good start. So does "In defense of..." as we can see in many of the ancient titles. Irwin's "Against Intertextuality" comes to mind. And Fish's "Interpreting the Variorum," which I have to read this week for a presentation. Both of those titles intrigue me to no end.

What We Do with the Colon
We looked at why the colon might affect the reader, but we also have to consider what the sneaky scholars intended for it. There are several ways that the colon makes for titles that come off as knowing what they're talking about, or as some modern manifestation of style (if you can call it that -- bad style is an oxymoron, so there is disagreement on whether it can exist). The colon is often used in combination with a quotation from the work of literature being discussed, or from an earlier critic's work. Using a quotation is a clever way to make use of the explanatory function of the colon. Most often the quotation is placed before the colon, and after is a description of what the paper is really about. Here's two real examples:

"Telepathic shock and meaning excitement": Kerouac's Poetics and Intimacy

"Go": Milton's Antinomianism and the Separation Scene in Paradise Lost

The first title, as these titles so often do, borrows from Kerouac's style to create a style of its own. The scholar doesn't write like that, Kerouac does. And now she has a ready-made sexy title because she put his words into it. Thanks to the colon. And I don't even think she needed it! "Kerouac's Poetics and Intimacy" is a beautiful title by itself. Now, the second title is just ridiculous. Using a single word from the separation scene that doesn't mean much of anything in a title, the scholar got the "necessary" colon into it. The rest of the title is just clumsy. She might have closed her eyes and pointed to a line of the poem to save her shoddy title. "If I put something in front of the colon it will all be okay!" Neither of these papers are bad. I used both of them in papers I wrote my senior year. I take issue only with the titles.

Another way the colon is used by scholars is for a straight explanation of the short-version title. I already said why I think this has become somewhat necessary in today's market, but it means that scholars no longer have to have any elegance or authority in their titles because the pauses and complications of the colon-assisted title are expected. You can look through any catalog of university press books to find some hideous examples of these. You can just picture the writers of these books and articles smirking as they select the perfect quote to steal from the authors, type their obligatory colons, and sit back knowing they'll be published (or at least read) for playing the colon game so cleverly. I also picture cultural criticism and media studies fans getting giddy reading through these things. The longer the title, the more esoteric words in it, the more excited they get. Here's a clumsy one that's sure to fire up a lumpy subset of readers:
Games of Empire: Global Capitalism and Video Games

For some fictional examples of how egregious these titles can get, try this English paper title generator. The results are not far from the real thing.

One more disclaimer -- Subtitles are used in a similar way in the titling of books. There's something different about book titles though. They often have an elegant short title even if it's followed by a subtitle (which would be after the colon in a paper title). Maybe because the thing is actually getting printed in a book the scholar took the time to make a title that doesn't sound like all the others.

So I may or may not use a colon when I write my first paper as a graduate student. It's not going to get thrown out or rejected, since the professor actually has to read and grade the thing. Should I be bold and forgo the double dots? Maybe next week. This week I'll do as the assignment guidelines ask (yes, it's actually on the guidelines).

P.S. I know what "titular" means and the play on words doesn't quite work, but I left it there because I liked the sound of all those body parts in the title.