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
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