While I'm with you on the Whitehead piece, I don't thing I agree with you about this:
I don't like it because the writing calls attention to itself and while that's a fine thing for writing to do in, say, an Anthony Lane movie review, it doesn't have any business doing it in a love letter, which is, presumably, about something more important than the writing and the writer's self-regard.
What's wrong with conscious artfulness in a love letter? If the spirit it's written in is "Look at this pretty thing I've made to give you" rather than just, "Look at me, I'm so clever", I'd think it was generous, rather than self-absorbed. Writing doesn't have to be artless to be sincere.
That kind of overt manneredness of style is what really bugged me about Beloved.
Of course I wouldn't like it even if it weren't in a love letter, because I don't like that style anyway. This sentence: It gives me this because I knew and recognized its beauty under the grime of its wandering. especially. The phrase "it gives me this" is the worst part.
The problem is that you have an arresting image, but know you can't use it, but want to show, anyway, that you thought of this arresting image and then abandoned it (because you can't use it).
I'm not sure how you're using "artless" here. There's quite a bit of art in sincerity, absolutely.
And now I have no idea why I wrote such an absolute statement like "it doesn't have any business doing it in a love letter," which is just a stupid thing to say. What I meant to say is: when attempting to write about something of import and gravity, don't call attention to the writing itself. I blame my lingering cold.
What I understand you to mean is that a love letter shouldn't call attention to itself -- that the writing should focus all the attention on the emotions it describes, or on the beloved, because to do anything else minimizes the importance of the subject matter, rather than of the writer. (And in the 9-11 context I think you're perfectly right). It takes skill to do that certainly, but the impression left, if it's well done, is that the writing is a pure, unstudied, outpouring of emotion, rather than an artfully created artifact.
On the other hand, if the goal of a love letter is to bring pleasure to the recipient, surely there's a place for mannered, highly polished, or artificial writing if that's what the recipient would enjoy. It's not self-centered to put one's writing skills consciously on display if they are displayed in the service of creating a gift for the beloved. (The actual letter quoted doesn't do that much for me, but I could see something in that style being a pleasure to receive.)
Isn't that what's at issue? Her artfulness makes me doubt her abjectness. (I'm probably claiming more than I can argue for, but that's what I think, dammit.)
There is a state of abject hopelessness in unhappy or failed love, which enables flights of creation as a substitution for talking to the object of affection.
Been there. Not mind you, that I d expect to ever see the letters published anywhere. Mostly because 95% of them never got sent.
Reluctantly, the slow kid in the class raises his hand and asks "What was wrong with what Whitehead wrote?"
He reflects on his initial reaction to the collapse of the towers and writes:
It had been a nice shot. And certainly it had been easier to shape the horror into an aesthetic experience and deny the human reality. There was safety in that distance. A man picked up his bike and walked away. My wife and I went home. There had never been any safety at all.
If this is what he felt, it is a reasonable thing to feel and a good thing to write. Do we have to pretend that the only authentic reaction was shock and horror; that people did not try to deal with it in different ways, including "shap[ing] the horror into an aesthetic experience?" It's what people do . . . with all sorts of experience -- love, war, loss. Sure the focus was on him, not the towers. But we don't need him to tell us what the towers falling looked like.
If I ever write a love letter to Unfogged, I promise not to make it precious or contrived. Until then I will ride the purple dragon of unrestrained locution across bad taste's infinite horizon.
What bothers me about it is that he's assuming I care about how he felt, in the immediate aftermath of a much more important event -- he's co-opting 9-11 for self-aggrandizement. Given that you could say the same thing about any personal piece of writing about anything that's, in itself, more important than the writer, I'm not sure if I can defend that reaction, though.
Isn't that what's at issue? Her artfulness makes me doubt her abjectness. (I'm probably claiming more than I can argue for, but that's what I think, dammit.)
I tend to agree, although I know it's not true. There's a way in which abjectness promotes artfulness, of this particular kind—artificiality or superficiality (or so seeming)—when, while in its grip, you try to write, especially if you have some self-awareness. Writing that way tends to produce an impression of writerly distance in the reader, but it also, I think, does so in the writer, which is why someone who was really abject might gravitate towards the style.
Unfortunately it also presents an impression of abjectness trying to achieve distance, and is, I think, very very hard to pull off. What I don't like about such writing isn't, half the time, that it's artful, as it is that it's "artful". It's a recognizeable style, and most of the time it's done no better than genre writing generally is.
It's like this: you are abject, you write an artful letter. This is perfectly possible—so it's not really true that the artfulness is cause for me to doubt your abjectness—but my instinct is still that your artful letter is not true to your abjectness, that, say, you are not abject in the moment of writing your artful letter.
I think that's why all the comments have been so doubtful and qualified. Really, you can do anything you like as long as you do it well enough: Whitehead, using the collapse of the towers to give us insight into his psyche, would be perfectly acceptable if what we saw there was worthy of being considered in the same breath with a great tragedy. On the other side, while I was defending artful love letters above, it can't be denied that if you write artificially and badly, you look like an incredible ass.
So, once again, the highly skilled and gifted can do whatever they like, and the rest of us can't win for losing.
I think that the artifice is an expression of the abjectness. Here I am, so abandoned that I have nothing to do but embark on these flights of fancy. I cannot sleep--this is where it starts, I cannot sleep--and I think that nothing cannot be made beautiful--because my suffering is so terrible that my only hope is that even it can be made beautiful. Aestheticization is the last thing I can do with my suffering. I offer it up to you knowing you don't care about it.
(Here's my criticism: I object to any letter written to Tom Wolfe that does not contain the phrase "Fuck you." This is not restricted to abandoned lovers.)
But it is for nothing, the reading of this post, for nothing the realization that lights the small bomb at the center of me, the heart-centered eruption: that the preciosity of my writing must yield to unprecious things, to deodorant and foot-fungus, to the canker sore that has not yet healed behind my back molar: memento mori! And I know this, but it gives me no wisdom; I am as a forlorn lost dust-bunny in a maze of rose petals that contracts, contracts to extinction!
You know, before I saw that "holding up the cat"picture, I had conflated the Matts McIrvin and Weiner in my mind, and pictured Weiner as resembling that little drawing on McIrvin's site.
So then when I finally did see the aforementioned photo, I thought "Either that's from a long while ago, or dude's got a seriously good rug."
Isn't Whitehead trying to capture the horror, and the inadequacy of an aesthetic response? He shouted, "Oh my God!" for a reason, right? And yet at the same time, the sight is so awful that there is the reaction "to shape the horror into an aesthetic experience and deny the human reality."
I also felt overwhelmed that day, that what I was seeing was too awful to appreciate. It's true that I got distracted from what was actually happening in the towers by self-consciousness, and the aesthetics of the moment. Whitehead has his finger on something essential about that day.
I think I understand what Whitehead is trying to say in that paragraph, and I think the criticism of him misses his point. But without a link to the full piece, maybe I am missing something. E.g., Mason criticizes him for using the word "sighed," but that's not in the excerpt above. (Not a subscriber to TNR either, alas.)
"Sighed" is in sentence 3. I think it conveys what it must have looked like very well, myself. And I feel kind of dirty for making that aesthetic assessment. Which is I guess the point.
Well, obviously whatever point I'm trying to make is undercut by my (lack of) close-reading skills. OTOH, it tends to suggest that the word wasn't that obtrusive.
I don't think that Whitehead's so bad. Nearly everyone commented on the surreality of 9-11, how it was "like a movie." I think he's doing a decent, not brilliant, job there of describing that perception in somewhat more original terms. The way he sort of shrugs that his sense of safety was the illusion, but that doesn't take him out of his aesthetic bubble, captures something important about a common reaction to 9-11 too.
Once, having liked the movie, I picked up The Right Stuff, and put it down again after three pages. I liked The Machine Stops, though that's the only thing I've ever read by the other. I once got a final Jeopardy right that required you to know there were two famous Tom Wolfe's, and none of the other contestants did, not even Ken.
I wonder if the realization that she was a Victorian matron might have spared me this post. I should have written Thomas, but wrote Tom, because she addressed him that way.
Another point is that both samples have too much "I" in writing that should be about the "not-I."
That's probably what you meant by "get out of the way," eh?
Posted by Tripp | Link to this comment | 05-19-05 10:21 AM
While I'm with you on the Whitehead piece, I don't thing I agree with you about this:
I don't like it because the writing calls attention to itself and while that's a fine thing for writing to do in, say, an Anthony Lane movie review, it doesn't have any business doing it in a love letter, which is, presumably, about something more important than the writing and the writer's self-regard.
What's wrong with conscious artfulness in a love letter? If the spirit it's written in is "Look at this pretty thing I've made to give you" rather than just, "Look at me, I'm so clever", I'd think it was generous, rather than self-absorbed. Writing doesn't have to be artless to be sincere.
Posted by LizardBreath | Link to this comment | 05-19-05 10:24 AM
That kind of overt manneredness of style is what really bugged me about Beloved.
Of course I wouldn't like it even if it weren't in a love letter, because I don't like that style anyway. This sentence: It gives me this because I knew and recognized its beauty under the grime of its wandering. especially. The phrase "it gives me this" is the worst part.
The problem is that you have an arresting image, but know you can't use it, but want to show, anyway, that you thought of this arresting image and then abandoned it (because you can't use it).
Posted by ben wolfson | Link to this comment | 05-19-05 10:24 AM
why can't she use the arresting image?
Posted by text | Link to this comment | 05-19-05 10:26 AM
Writing doesn't have to be artless to be sincere.
I'm not sure how you're using "artless" here. There's quite a bit of art in sincerity, absolutely.
And now I have no idea why I wrote such an absolute statement like "it doesn't have any business doing it in a love letter," which is just a stupid thing to say. What I meant to say is: when attempting to write about something of import and gravity, don't call attention to the writing itself. I blame my lingering cold.
Posted by ogged | Link to this comment | 05-19-05 10:33 AM
the cold lingering in your soul?
Does that draw too much attention to itself?
Posted by text | Link to this comment | 05-19-05 10:34 AM
wow...scrap!
What Ben said, though.
Posted by Austro | Link to this comment | 05-19-05 10:36 AM
I responded to you. Though really I should have made LB's point.
Posted by ac | Link to this comment | 05-19-05 10:38 AM
I'm not sure how you're using "artless" here.
What I understand you to mean is that a love letter shouldn't call attention to itself -- that the writing should focus all the attention on the emotions it describes, or on the beloved, because to do anything else minimizes the importance of the subject matter, rather than of the writer. (And in the 9-11 context I think you're perfectly right). It takes skill to do that certainly, but the impression left, if it's well done, is that the writing is a pure, unstudied, outpouring of emotion, rather than an artfully created artifact.
On the other hand, if the goal of a love letter is to bring pleasure to the recipient, surely there's a place for mannered, highly polished, or artificial writing if that's what the recipient would enjoy. It's not self-centered to put one's writing skills consciously on display if they are displayed in the service of creating a gift for the beloved. (The actual letter quoted doesn't do that much for me, but I could see something in that style being a pleasure to receive.)
Posted by LizardBreath | Link to this comment | 05-19-05 11:02 AM
Yes, I agree with you completely; saying that such writing didn't belong in love letters tout court was dumb.
Posted by ogged | Link to this comment | 05-19-05 11:06 AM
What is pleasing about it is that she is abject, and manages to be artful anyway. Which may not come across in that small passage.
Posted by ac | Link to this comment | 05-19-05 11:09 AM
Isn't that what's at issue? Her artfulness makes me doubt her abjectness. (I'm probably claiming more than I can argue for, but that's what I think, dammit.)
Posted by ogged | Link to this comment | 05-19-05 11:14 AM
No, ogged you are wrong.
There is a state of abject hopelessness in unhappy or failed love, which enables flights of creation as a substitution for talking to the object of affection.
Been there. Not mind you, that I d expect to ever see the letters published anywhere. Mostly because 95% of them never got sent.
Posted by Austro | Link to this comment | 05-19-05 11:18 AM
Reluctantly, the slow kid in the class raises his hand and asks "What was wrong with what Whitehead wrote?"
He reflects on his initial reaction to the collapse of the towers and writes:
It had been a nice shot. And certainly it had been easier to shape the horror into an aesthetic experience and deny the human reality. There was safety in that distance. A man picked up his bike and walked away. My wife and I went home. There had never been any safety at all.
If this is what he felt, it is a reasonable thing to feel and a good thing to write. Do we have to pretend that the only authentic reaction was shock and horror; that people did not try to deal with it in different ways, including "shap[ing] the horror into an aesthetic experience?" It's what people do . . . with all sorts of experience -- love, war, loss. Sure the focus was on him, not the towers. But we don't need him to tell us what the towers falling looked like.
Posted by The Idealist | Link to this comment | 05-19-05 11:30 AM
If I ever write a love letter to Unfogged, I promise not to make it precious or contrived. Until then I will ride the purple dragon of unrestrained locution across bad taste's infinite horizon.
Posted by Standpipe Bridgeplate | Link to this comment | 05-19-05 11:30 AM
i think the finest possible love letter to unfogged has already been written.
Posted by silvana | Link to this comment | 05-19-05 11:40 AM
What was wrong with what Whitehead wrote?
What bothers me about it is that he's assuming I care about how he felt, in the immediate aftermath of a much more important event -- he's co-opting 9-11 for self-aggrandizement. Given that you could say the same thing about any personal piece of writing about anything that's, in itself, more important than the writer, I'm not sure if I can defend that reaction, though.
Posted by LizardBreath | Link to this comment | 05-19-05 11:40 AM
Isn't that what's at issue? Her artfulness makes me doubt her abjectness. (I'm probably claiming more than I can argue for, but that's what I think, dammit.)
I tend to agree, although I know it's not true. There's a way in which abjectness promotes artfulness, of this particular kind—artificiality or superficiality (or so seeming)—when, while in its grip, you try to write, especially if you have some self-awareness. Writing that way tends to produce an impression of writerly distance in the reader, but it also, I think, does so in the writer, which is why someone who was really abject might gravitate towards the style.
Unfortunately it also presents an impression of abjectness trying to achieve distance, and is, I think, very very hard to pull off. What I don't like about such writing isn't, half the time, that it's artful, as it is that it's "artful". It's a recognizeable style, and most of the time it's done no better than genre writing generally is.
Posted by ben wolfson | Link to this comment | 05-19-05 11:41 AM
I'm probably claiming more than I can argue for
I'm not sure if I can defend that reaction, though
I tend to agree, although I know it's not true.
This is interesting.
Posted by ogged | Link to this comment | 05-19-05 11:43 AM
It's like this: you are abject, you write an artful letter. This is perfectly possible—so it's not really true that the artfulness is cause for me to doubt your abjectness—but my instinct is still that your artful letter is not true to your abjectness, that, say, you are not abject in the moment of writing your artful letter.
Posted by ben wolfson | Link to this comment | 05-19-05 11:47 AM
The clue might be in the writing itself: whether we find it precious or appropriately artful.
Posted by ogged | Link to this comment | 05-19-05 11:55 AM
I think that's why all the comments have been so doubtful and qualified. Really, you can do anything you like as long as you do it well enough: Whitehead, using the collapse of the towers to give us insight into his psyche, would be perfectly acceptable if what we saw there was worthy of being considered in the same breath with a great tragedy. On the other side, while I was defending artful love letters above, it can't be denied that if you write artificially and badly, you look like an incredible ass.
So, once again, the highly skilled and gifted can do whatever they like, and the rest of us can't win for losing.
Posted by LizardBreath | Link to this comment | 05-19-05 12:28 PM
LizardBreath,
What bothers me about it is that he's assuming I care about how he felt
Yes, that is it exactly, at least for me.
And, just for future reference, if one is sending me a love letter then the whole thing better damn well be about me!
Posted by Tripp | Link to this comment | 05-19-05 12:28 PM
I think that the artifice is an expression of the abjectness. Here I am, so abandoned that I have nothing to do but embark on these flights of fancy. I cannot sleep--this is where it starts, I cannot sleep--and I think that nothing cannot be made beautiful--because my suffering is so terrible that my only hope is that even it can be made beautiful. Aestheticization is the last thing I can do with my suffering. I offer it up to you knowing you don't care about it.
(Here's my criticism: I object to any letter written to Tom Wolfe that does not contain the phrase "Fuck you." This is not restricted to abandoned lovers.)
Posted by Matt Weiner | Link to this comment | 05-19-05 1:38 PM
Matt, maybe I will marry you.
Posted by ac | Link to this comment | 05-19-05 2:36 PM
But it is for nothing, the reading of this post, for nothing the realization that lights the small bomb at the center of me, the heart-centered eruption: that the preciosity of my writing must yield to unprecious things, to deodorant and foot-fungus, to the canker sore that has not yet healed behind my back molar: memento mori! And I know this, but it gives me no wisdom; I am as a forlorn lost dust-bunny in a maze of rose petals that contracts, contracts to extinction!
Posted by Matthew McIrvin | Link to this comment | 05-19-05 8:04 PM
Actually, Matt, that wasn't very precious at all. At least not the peculiar kind of preciousness that bugs *me*.
Posted by ben wolfson | Link to this comment | 05-19-05 8:19 PM
You know, before I saw that "holding up the cat"picture, I had conflated the Matts McIrvin and Weiner in my mind, and pictured Weiner as resembling that little drawing on McIrvin's site.
So then when I finally did see the aforementioned photo, I thought "Either that's from a long while ago, or dude's got a seriously good rug."
Posted by Mitch Mills | Link to this comment | 05-19-05 8:47 PM
I'm probably claiming more than I can argue for
I'm not sure if I can defend that reaction, though
I tend to agree, although I know it's not true.
This is interesting.
In Naples they say "Non e' vero, ma ci credo."
The fact that it's a saying makes me nervous about Neapolitan culture.
Posted by andrew | Link to this comment | 05-20-05 3:37 AM
Ben, what I was trying to do was to express the subtext under the preciosity. That took art too, if I say so myself.
ac: Aw, shucks.
Mitch: Don't call my cat a rug.
Posted by Matt Weiner | Link to this comment | 05-20-05 11:33 AM
Matt, my "Matt" was McIrvin. I don't know why I referred to him as "Matt" instead of "Matthew".
Posted by ben wolfson | Link to this comment | 05-20-05 12:01 PM
I suppose you assumed everyone would know if you meant me you'd say "Weiner."
McI's post did rock.
Posted by Matt Weiner | Link to this comment | 05-20-05 12:42 PM
"you'd have said"? Also I think a "that" or two would make that sentence more parsable.
Posted by Matt Weiner | Link to this comment | 05-20-05 12:43 PM
Isn't Whitehead trying to capture the horror, and the inadequacy of an aesthetic response? He shouted, "Oh my God!" for a reason, right? And yet at the same time, the sight is so awful that there is the reaction "to shape the horror into an aesthetic experience and deny the human reality."
I also felt overwhelmed that day, that what I was seeing was too awful to appreciate. It's true that I got distracted from what was actually happening in the towers by self-consciousness, and the aesthetics of the moment. Whitehead has his finger on something essential about that day.
I think I understand what Whitehead is trying to say in that paragraph, and I think the criticism of him misses his point. But without a link to the full piece, maybe I am missing something. E.g., Mason criticizes him for using the word "sighed," but that's not in the excerpt above. (Not a subscriber to TNR either, alas.)
Posted by Tyrone Slothrop | Link to this comment | 05-20-05 1:00 PM
"Sighed" is in sentence 3. I think it conveys what it must have looked like very well, myself. And I feel kind of dirty for making that aesthetic assessment. Which is I guess the point.
Posted by Matt Weiner | Link to this comment | 05-20-05 1:23 PM
Well, obviously whatever point I'm trying to make is undercut by my (lack of) close-reading skills. OTOH, it tends to suggest that the word wasn't that obtrusive.
Posted by Tyrone Slothrop | Link to this comment | 05-20-05 1:38 PM
Or that you were too busy trying to rescue someone from a squid.
Posted by washerdreyer | Link to this comment | 05-20-05 1:47 PM
Exactly.
Posted by Tyrone Slothrop | Link to this comment | 05-20-05 2:58 PM
I don't think that Whitehead's so bad. Nearly everyone commented on the surreality of 9-11, how it was "like a movie." I think he's doing a decent, not brilliant, job there of describing that perception in somewhat more original terms. The way he sort of shrugs that his sense of safety was the illusion, but that doesn't take him out of his aesthetic bubble, captures something important about a common reaction to 9-11 too.
Posted by Tia | Link to this comment | 01-19-06 8:43 AM
Which Tom Wolfe?
Once, having liked the movie, I picked up The Right Stuff, and put it down again after three pages. I liked The Machine Stops, though that's the only thing I've ever read by the other. I once got a final Jeopardy right that required you to know there were two famous Tom Wolfe's, and none of the other contestants did, not even Ken.
Posted by Tia | Link to this comment | 01-19-06 8:47 AM
The other one goes by Thomas, right? They're both kind of meh.
Posted by Joe Drymala | Link to this comment | 01-19-06 8:50 AM
Thomas Wolfe, author of Look Homeward, Angel. The author of the letter was writing around 1900.
Posted by ac | Link to this comment | 01-19-06 8:51 AM
Wait, maybe The Machine Stops is by E.M. Forster. Must google.
Posted by Tia | Link to this comment | 01-19-06 8:55 AM
I like Bonfire okay.
Posted by Joe Drymala | Link to this comment | 01-19-06 8:57 AM
What brought you back to this thread, Tia?
Posted by Joe Drymala | Link to this comment | 01-19-06 9:00 AM
I wonder if the realization that she was a Victorian matron might have spared me this post. I should have written Thomas, but wrote Tom, because she addressed him that way.
Posted by ac | Link to this comment | 01-19-06 9:01 AM
My new theory of Ogged, literary critic, is that he doesn't make enough allowance for context.
Posted by ac | Link to this comment | 01-19-06 9:02 AM
It was linked in the most recent thread as an example of Ogged calling things ac likes gushy.
Posted by Tia | Link to this comment | 01-19-06 9:02 AM
Ah, I had thought it was Tom. My criticism in 24 is retracted.
Posted by Matt Weiner | Link to this comment | 01-19-06 9:03 AM