The Guardian asked a few prominent Brits to think out loud about the deceased Jacques Derrida’s theories. The results, it must be said, are a little Onionesque.
Archives for 2004
TT: Almanac
“Farce is higher than comedy in that it is very close to tragedy. You’ve only got to play some of Shakespeare’s tragedies plain and they are nearly farcical. All gradations of theatre between tragedy and farce–light comedy, drama–are a load of rubbish.”
Joe Orton (quoted in John Lahr, Prick Up Your Ears: The Biography of Joe Orton)
OGIC: Square pegs
Among all the retrospectives and remembrances of Derrida that are still multiplying like bunnies out there, I’m struck by this frank and thoughtful one by the pseudonymous literary blogger Leonard Bast. Mr. Bast looks at M. Derrida from the perspective of the college English major he was in the heyday, and comes to some sensible conclusions:
What did everyone see in him?
I persisted, and eventually I came to the kind of rudimentary understanding of Derrida that I think many people passing through English departments during that time arrived at. (How strange that time now seems!) He and his friend Paul de Man, the leading deconstructionists, had come up with a method of reading literary texts that was quite simple, even mechanical, if you could decode all the playful punning of the verbiage. To wit: identify a “binary opposition” between two terms in the text. Show how these two terms, despite being opposed, actually depend on each other and are mutually constituted. Then seize upon some obscure moment in the text, use all your ingenuity to show how, if you picked at it long enough, the apparent opposition between the two terms would unravel. Proclaim that the text had deconstructed itself, and that this was a function of language (or, to use the preferred term, “discourse”) itself, not something that you, the reader, were “doing” to the text. This was the underlying “lesson” of all texts, so it could be repeated, ad infinitum.
Sounds disappointing, right? For someone like me, it was. I realized from the start that Derrida was primarily a philosopher and I was not, and that there were other issues at stake in what he was doing (to use the philosophical jargon, the “critique of the metaphysics of presence”). What my teachers were doing with Derrida really was an oversimplification, and philosophers who defended him were not complete idiots. I could, somewhat hazily, get a grasp of the issues at stake in his philosophy, especially on the occasions when I was willing to dig into the philosophical tradition he was commenting upon. But among the people I knew, these strictly philosophical considerations had little to do with why he was “hot.” On the one hand, he provided an easy method of reading. On the other, some people claimed to find radical politics in this method, and enlisted it in the support of various kinds of feminism and identity politics.
This closely resembles my own, admittedly uninformed take on Derrida (my undergraduate study was blissfully theory-free, and by the time I got to graduate school, the historicists had grabbed the spotlight). It has the invaluable added bonus of providing a credible justification for my ignorance. I just didn’t know it was my take until Leonard so nicely articulated it.
TT: It’s out
As of today, All in the Dances: A Brief Life of George Balanchine is now available for immediate purchase from amazon.com.
You know what to do.
TT: Almanac
“Corker looked at him sadly. ‘You know, you’ve got a lot to learn about journalism. Look at it this way. News is what a chap who doesn’t care much about anything wants to read. And it’s only news until he’s read it. After that it’s dead.'”
Evelyn Waugh, Scoop
OGIC: Erin McKeown is a star
A lot of people may not know it yet. Hell, a lot of people may never know it. But the couple hundred initiates who saw her perform at Schuba’s in Chicago last month knew it, and now I do too. Here’s the rub: you might have to see her live to fully get the picture.
You can listen to some clips here. They’re a tepid taste of a pale imitation of the real thing, though. Oh, the clips are wonderful; they do bring across how funky, quirky, smart, and eclectic McKeown’s music is. The full recordings are much, much better, however, since McKeown really knows how to put a song together. The pieces are diminished by extraction from the finely crafted wholes.
But what you really need to do, if you want an instant new pop hero, is catch McKeown live. If you live in New York, Boston, California, or a few other lucky places, you can do that in the near future. When I went to the Chicago show in September, having sampled her work on line, I wasn’t ready for the full force of McKeown’s charisma and talent. She turned out to be everything I was expecting: funky, quirky, smart, and eclectic. But she was something else over and above all that: the lady was fierce. Fiercely energetic, fiercely commanding, fiercely original. We were all in her pocket from the first number, and increasingly ecstatic throughout. Afterward she resumed human proportions, shuttling around the floor, chatting up lingerers and signing CDs. Her stuff has been in heavy–almost exclusive–rotation chez OGIC ever since.
McKeown is an omnivore whose music is all over the place, borrowing from jazz, bluegrass, blues, bubblegum, even Tin Pan Alley. Her lyrics are beguiling, evocative, sometimes mysterious, but never simply obscure. The insanely infectious “Born to Hum” muses wittily–and articulately–on inarticulateness: “Once in the spring of my twenty-fourth year / I had nothing to say / With a dangling promise, a terrible past, / I threw all the words away: / We were born to hum.” My favorite song in the show was one that will appear on the album she plans to release next year, a song about, to paraphrase her introduction, the romance of the adaptation of birds’ bodies to flight. It comes from the point of view of the birds, who have “air in my bones / where the marrow should be / but what I lack for guts and blood / i make up for in dreams.” It’s a playful, tender little marvel of a song.
Come to think of it, McKeown’s distinctive voice reminds me a bit of a particularly inspired bird’s. It’s lithe and intimate, sweetly knowing, and, as Terry pointed out when he listened to Grand with me during his recent visit, a little offhand. Her singing is decorated with inventive little flourishes that sound new and natural all at once. In “James!” she sings, “James, I told you I could be delu-xe,” and the unorthodox word division, the emphatic “xe,” make the word her own. Some of her songs remind me too of an old guilty pleasure from my twenties, the Aussie band Frent
TT: Sighted book, bought same
So far I’ve received reports of bookstore sightings of All in the Dances: A Brief Life of George Balanchine in Nashville, Durham, N.C., and now (courtesy of fellow blogger George Hunka) this one from deepest Brooklyn:
Just a word to let you know your Balanchine book sits, prettily and face-out, on the Dance shelves at the Park Slope Barnes & Noble this afternoon.
Why delay? Buy it today.
TT: If at first…
From the London Observer (by way of The Wall Street Journal‘s Best of the Web Today):
In his fading years, the American architect Frank Lloyd Wright embarked on a final grand project. Invited in 1957 by King Faisal of Iraq to design a new opera house, Wright expanded the brief into a plan for Baghdad complete with museums, parks, university and authentic bazaar. Dispensing with his ‘prairie style’, he peppered the scheme with domes, spires and ziggurats.
The 1958 revolution meant that none of it was built. But the ever-resourceful Wright simply offered the design to a new client. And today, the Baghdad opera house is the Grady Gammage Memorial Auditorium at Arizona State University: an example of Wright’s versatility and the forum for next week’s presidential debate. Under the arches of a lost Iraqi skyline, George W Bush and John Kerry will meet in debate for the final time….
Talk about unlikely coincidences! Alas, I’m embarrassed to say I hadn’t noticed this one–and I know a pretty fair amount about Frank Lloyd Wright.
UPDATE: A reader writes:
Having gone to Arizona State as an undergrad (I grew up in Phoenix), I spent a lot of time at the Gammage building for rehearsals (in very weird-shaped rehearsal rooms, the layout of which was a function of Wright’s obsession with circles at the time) and performances (I had the fun of being in an upper-balcony-brass-choir for a performance of the Berlioz Requiem). The most significant peculiarity of Gammage are the sweeping ramps that stretch out from the mezzanine into the vast parking lot in which the building is situated. (Everything in Arizona is situated in the middle of vast parking lots). The ramps are never actually used (even though they might be seen as the most ambitious expression of the noble impulse behind the Americans With Disabilities Act). So why are they there? It’s the legacy of the building’s Baghdad origin–the opera house was to have been built on an island in the Tigris and the Gammage ramps are truncated versions of what were to have been pedestrian bridges connecting the building to the shores on every side.