I Believe That Robots Are Stealing My Luggage Saturday, August 30, 2003

A question in the "Blogger Help" menu on the side of my screen:

How do I edit what I've written?

I could write a book, baby!

An incredible exchange in Waugh this afternoon, too long to transcribe. Essentially, a character who was a stuffy object of fun (sort of like Brideshead, if you remember that book) has a scene where he gets to shine. And it's absolutely marvelous. I went on about this before, but that's what makes Waugh a great satirist, I think: He's generous, and scrupulous. His sympathies and interests may lie with dear old conflicted Guy Crouchback, but he never forgets that the rest of the cast isn't just there for show. He has a responsibility toward them, like a teacher who might not care for a particular student but gives the lesson his all nonetheless.

Here's a little thought game for you. I found out that a guy in my office, a self-styled rake of a certain age, absolutely hates Bill Clinton. I won't dwell on my dislike of either of them, but I thought it was hilarious that a guy who's been playing the Boomer Who Never Grew Up for so long should hate the guy who defined the role. So I ask you: What public figure you do resemble--but can't stand?

I haven't been able to think of anyone for myself. Mostly I just resent guys who arrived at the same writerly ideas I did but got there first. (Like, oh, doing a sci-fi novel in '30s gangster style.) Or maybe I'm like the fatheads and vulgarians at Aintitcoolnews, who are pure aesthetes if I ever saw them. They've devoted their lives to absorbing art, to use a convenient term, and indeed frame their experiences in terms of art. Read a review there sometime: Most of them start off with ten paragraphs of "I remember the first time I walked into the Hong Kong Action Video Store in my old neighborhood..." I can appreciate a good reminisce; but please.

To digress to aesthetics...when my friend divorced me over politics (see the first week, I think, of this blog) one of the points in the complaint was my shocking opinion of art; namely, that it should be beautiful, and that "messages" ruined the aesthetics most of the time. Didn't I know the point of art was truth? (This, by the way, from someone who once told an interviewer at jury duty that he didn't believe in absolute standards of right and wrong. Meow.)

The assumption behind his argument, I think, was that there's some bourgeois about the pursuit of beauty; as if I were some Drones Club booby hiring a string quartet to play in my sitting-room while the old girl who "does" around the flat hands out brandies. Or, more darkly, that high art is fundamentally oppressive, that arbitrary standards enforce an exlcusionary power structure and eventually lead to violence against the dispossessed, sometimes real, sometimes just critical. e.g., every ticket you buy to see "Mona Lisa" means another Egon Schiele on the bonfire.

My answer, which I was too flustered to make at the time, is something like this. People who want their art to be "true" don't know what truth is. "Truth" as it's used in art usually boils down to "unpleasantness": As if you don't know the reality of someone unless you catch him on the toilet. "Truth," by that measure, is a sucker's game. I think I can say uncontroversially that the past few generations have been racing toward the cultural bottom like greased pigs. The cutting edge of "truth" in, say, 1953 looks condescending and ridiculous now. Who takes Paddy Chayefsky seriously now? Or "The Man With the Golden Arm," an undershirt opera with heroin singing tenor? (Mort Sahl: "In the Fifties, to get a girl you had to be a Jew. In the Sixties to get a girl you had to be a Negro. In the Seventies to get a girl you have to be a girl.")

Not that I claim to know what the truth is. To paraphrase another whimpering aesthete, Mark Eitzel, I keep looking for it in all the wrong places: the sidewalks and the sky. But I'm pretty certain that it's not transient, and it's not ugly. Call me nuts, but I think if you create a piece of art that's genuinely beautiful, the truth will take care of itself. To subordinate yourself to the idea of beauty, to make yourself a pipeline for beauty to enter the world...that's more "true" than flagging the aggrievement of the moment.

The absolute truth: I am fading rapidly. Have a great weekend. You're all gorgeous.

@ 12:51:00 AM,

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