As if posting a (if I do say so myself) rather substantial first entry to this summer's book club, by the end of it I suddenly found myself irrationally confident in my ability to read books and then write commentary about them. I should have remembered that, as of late, I've barely been able to maintain a bi-weekly schedule of posting (which is supposed to, of course, be a weekly schedule) about any old thing, let alone make consistent, specific, content-driven posts about actual things. So, I didn't read Walden this week, like I claimed I was going to do last week. I did read the first several dozen paragraphs, though, and I still intend to read the thing by the end of the month.
I would like to also note, though, that it isn't Walden's unreadability that kept me from reading it. Or, to restate, it's me that's the problem, not Walden. The timing just wasn't right for things to work out. Walden, we've still got a chance to make things work, I just need some more time first. My suspicion is that, in fact, I'll wind up writing about Walden's continued or renewed relevance for young people nowadays, and about how ridiculous it is to have been made to read it in 11th grade, when I was totally incapable of doing so (as I recall, I read some of the key passages, but definitely didn't read the whole thing, or if I did read it cover-to-cover, more just looked at the words, rather than actually parsing them, or I read the Cliff Notes, or the Cliff Notes were so boring that I couldn't even get through them). But I've gotta save all that writing for when I actually read the thing.
The main other cultural-digestive thing that distracted me from Thoreau was the release (and subsequent purchase (breaking a pretty consistent string of not buying media that I had going there for a while)) of a second By Brakhage anthology DVD set from the Criterion Collection. There is the part of the post where it becomes ever more painful what a nerd I am for art, but Brakhage was an amazing film-maker, and additional was an incredibly great aesthetic thinker and a brilliant reader of poetry. Combine all of that and he's been a huge influence on my own thinking about art, and especially lyric art, especially lyric poetry (which I tend not to write about for Culturology, since it's, like, rarified and probably snooty, and mostly, I imagine, uninteresting to almost everyone on the planet (and here I distinguish between poetry, which I think everyone on the planet can potentially enjoy and get a lot out of, and poetics (the theory of poetry) which is more for the poets than for the readers, in the end (even though poets, of course, are also readers))).
Brakhage is most known for his painted-on films, which are almost always silent, and which find as their inspiration closed-eye vision. Brakhage, on the various special features of the DVDs, talks about how he was really trying to make "music for the eyes." And I think, even from a popular-cultural perspective, in a lot of ways we can all see how all the arts aspire to be music. Or we have that experience, in listening to music, of finding it to be a direct line to emotional and visceral experiences in a way that happens more often and more consistently than with writing or visual art. But, before I diverge too far into talking about such things, maybe I should stop...
Brakhage is also well known because he was, for a long time, a professor of film and the University of Colorado, in Boulder. His most famous students are Trey Parker and Matt Stone, who made the original South Park short while students of Brakhage's. He also, awesomely, has a cameo role in their first movie, Cannibal: The Musical (which I haven't watched in many years, but I recall being at least entertaining, if not as laugh-packed as, say, Orgasmo). So even though Brakhage didn't really have any use for narrative sound-film, and especially not for Hollywood movies, he still managed to play a role in a couple of his students' spring break project. Which is pretty rad. I like to imagine Parker and Stone approaching him about it, and Brakhage just chuckling and amicably agreeing.
So in that way, Brakhage as a further influence on me. Even though he was a total visionary and an incredible lyric artist (and thereby, is perhaps not as immediately approachable as some artists--at least from the aesthetic conversation perspective; I think his films are very understandable), and could probably be seen as being a bit of a snoot thereby (in one of his interviews he says something awesome to the extent of "I've never seen a Hollywood movie which required more than 15 minutes at a coffee shop afterwards to discuss" (that's a massive paraphrase, and I hope I'm not misrepresenting there)), he still managed to be a cool professor and show up in a random, goofy movie. Right on.
Coming up on the I Know What You Bookclubbed Last Summer Booklove Bookclub:
July 16th: B. Traven's The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (this will be read by then; I'm already halfway through)
July 23rd: Gene Yuen Lang's American Born Chinese
interesting post despite that i've never seen any of Brakhage's stuff. i disagree that "all the arts aspire to be music." however, i would bend your words to say that "all the arts aspire to achieve the emotional connection and response that music seems to achieve by virtue of it being what it is." maybe we're overloaded with visual imagery in our culture, or maybe the way that sound is used and perceived in our lives, it elicits more direct passion than visual media. or maybe sound really does affect the body differently, regardless of culture.
speaking of which, something i've been thinking about lately is smell. as a sense, it's very underutilized. how come there's no device for the remote communication of smell? we have that for sound and sight, and even to a degree, touch. but not for smell. well... that's not totally true, cause i guess perfume is a form of remote communication of smell. it's like the t-shirt of smell, if you will.
furthermore, what about smell art? we have multiple forms of visual and auditory art, and combinations therein, but barely anything involving smell (save for 4D movies). except perfume. and i guess cooking is an artform that involves smell too... anyway, yeah, i champion scent as the next big sense to be communicated by art. THE SMELL GALLERY.
i think i actually prefer the topic of you trying to read Walden to you actually reading it, because i think i know how you're gonna feel about it. however, the journey of you actually reading the damn thing is sorta more interesting for many reasons i don't feel like naming.
It could very well become an "all the things that I've done while still not reading Walden" kind of thing, though, Nick. Which maybe still seems best to you?
As for smell art, I remember, back in college, hearing about some artist that had interviewed all these people that had had near-death experiences, or who had actually died and been revived, and found and created what he claimed to be "the smell of death." Not what it smells like to another person, but what the dying individual actually smells themselves.
It's also important to note that human thinking is very visual overall--just look at our language and you'll see how often we use visual metaphors to explain and understand things. So I'm not saying that visuals aren't important, or don't have visceral/emotional impact, but that, even cultural influence aside, music has a more direct line; and also, it can effect us without any specific message, which representational art and all language can't do.
what was this death smell???? did you smell it? did it smell like a Jesus candle???
AudioShocker Shoutouts!
I'll have to check out the second Criterion Brakhage anthology; I have the first one and although I go a long time without watching any of it I still love it. It and Koyaanisqatsi combined between 2003 and 2004 in really putting me off of conventional narrative film in which characters talk to each other. I have the same recollection of the gist of Brakhage's "coffee shop afterwards" comment. And I also like his cameo in Cannibal: The Musical, including the waggish "and introducting Stan Brakhage" credit that Parker and Stone give him. I believe he exchanges a couple lines of dialogue with the guy who later played Kenny in BASEketball, which to me is an order of magnitude better than Orson Welles and the fast-talking guy who used to be in Micro Machines commercials both having supporting roles in the Transformers movie. (The old, animated, actually-more-coherent-than-Michael-Bay's Transformers movie.)
Regarding Walden, I reread it this spring (I was in the mood for reading something not self-helpy about what's essential in life) and found it both approachable and enjoyable in a way that was impossible when I first saw it in the same junior-year English curriculum as you did. In large part that's because I can now see the humor and frequently acidic wit in his piling-up and playing-out of metaphors and wordplay (or most of it, anyway; some of it remains hard to parse). The ability to understand humor, except for the superficial and jokey kind, may be the last faculty to develop in experiencing any kind of art -- at any rate, I've had a similar experience with other writing, as well as visual art and music. More than that, though, I think the ideas are very adult and tremendously hard to grasp as a teenager: Whatever other rebellious or melodramatic protests against the world you may feel at 17 (and I actually didn't have many of either), trying to "simplify, simplify" and to strip unnecessary consumption and activity out of your life probably aren't high on your list of concerns, at least if you're in high school and your room, board, and schedule aren't very much yours to worry about. Further, I don't think our teachers were prepared, for whatever reason, to discuss Thoreau's ideas as a call to step outside of mainstream culture -- maybe here I'm being unfair because I didn't read the book or even make it through the Cliffs Notes either and I don't remember the content of the classroom discussion because of it, but I remember more focus on the nature writing aspects of the book (to be fair, that's most of it by volume) than on the parts (to cartoonishly oversimplify it) about using less stuff so you can work less hard and be more attentive to the world around you. As one of my writing professors put it, while lamenting all the early-twentysomethings in his workshops who were completely put off by Herman Melville because they were required to read Moby Dick too young, I guess they have to make you read something, but it's a shame that these books get ruined for you. I won't get started on how my eighth-grade class read The Call of the Wild.
fart art.
@Nate: yeah, high school teachers always focus on the nature aspects of Thoreau for some reason. doesn't make any damn sense! i got lucky and had a really good *hippie* 11th grade english teacher, though, and she helped us comprehend the more nuanced aspects of the book (at least, the ones that could be easily explained to 16 and 17 year olds) along with the boring nature writing.
@Ross: FFFPPPPHHHHPPPTTTTTTT.
AudioShocker Shoutouts!
I don't think that there's anything wrong with focusing on the nature aspects of Thoreau (or of Emerson, or of Whitman, or of American Transcendentalism generally)... it's actually one of those instances where you can see poetic ideas making a difference politically. Since it was all very influenced by Wordsworth's views of and writing about Nature, it's special (and this notion was introduced to me by my professor, Campbell McGrath, so it's not mine, as such...) because with Transcendentalism, poetry made a difference, since you can draw pretty direct lines between Wordsworth, Emerson, Thoreau, and Whitman to John Muir, who was crucial in the founding of the National Park System, which, despite Corporate-owned Government's attempts to destroy everything for everyone forever, have managed to actually preserve some shit that's worth preserving.
Nate, the 2nd set of Brakhage is definitely worth getting. It really opens up a whole other set of his works that one wouldn't know exist with only the first anthology. You see entire gestures, movements, and techniques that aren't present in the first set. For instance, I think a lot of the painted-on films represented in the first set show Brakhage's ability to open up motion into the images, on a line parallel to the line of vision, but in several of the films here, the motions move just as often on the x and y axises. I also find myself noticing more the way the lyrical/musical aspect of the works seems to push at the boundaries of their own technologies (though I've been super-interested in technology and lyricism recently, so I'm probably slanted to noticing such things everywhere). It's as though, with these motions, that Brakhage gets at the same caesura at the edge of his frames as Pollock did with his canvases (important because new art has its best shot of arising when coming from the caesura/void/abyss at the limits of the previously-modern).
Many of these films, too, are just as masterful and moving as those captured in the first two discs, so it's not like extra discs of director's cuts or anything. Plus, the extras are managed a bit better, and there are some excellent interviews and lectures with/by Brakhage, who I never get tired of listening to at this point (I just wish there was more and more of the "encounter" side of the discs).