A draft of tomorrow’s post escaped into the wild when I pressed the wrong button, & was frozen in the headlamps of the careering world wide web, how embarrassing. So it might as well be tomorrow’s post today–
See, this is part of what I meant here, & what I meant about bad pub landscapes here: for god’s sake, let us be amateurs. Let us point & press & get accidental effects or just fuck up & sort of enjoy the result: because we are not “photographers”, all we are is people who got a camera. All we are is human beings trying to save a bit of our lives from time. What is the point of encouraging promateurism, except to open up paid masterclassing opportunities for professionals ? I’m already obsessive & knowing about my trade (though, god knows, I try not to be): so why the fuck would I want to waste even more nervous energy being obsessive & knowing about someone else’s ? The problem with experts is they just can’t stop broadcasting their knowledge. They know too much & they’re desperate to pass it on. Part of that is less down to enthusiasm than it seems. It is a darker desperation, an anxiety to make sure that all wisdom is received wisdom, to make sure that no one ever makes “the common error”, or “reinvents the wheel”. It reflects a deep fear of peer contempt: to make a mistake, to fail to receive the wisdom, to act as if you don’t know the score, is to feel a rush of shame so hot it might become psychically unmanageable.
Z Krishna reminded me the other day of Suzuki’s brilliant, “in the beginner’s mind there are many possibilities, in the expert’s mind there are few”. “Education” of the sort recommended here makes absolutely certain that everyone–even someone who isn’t actually doing the discipline–knows how few possibilities there are. Even inside a profession, knowing too much means everyone in chains, from the producer to the consumer. Grooming of young writers by a cadre of publishing professionals & promateurs (the latter basically parroting wisdom received from the former) is one reason why contemporary fiction has so little actual imaginative content.
17 Comments
July 8, 2009 at 3:02 pm
Yes yes yes yes. Fuck, yes.
July 8, 2009 at 3:26 pm
This reminds me of Ambrose’s Bierce “The Devil’s Dictionary”:
ERUDITION, n. Dust shaken out of a book into an empty skull
July 8, 2009 at 3:43 pm
You missed annotated editions, and people who write them. “And only where there are graves are there resurrections”*
*Annotators do not spare aphorists. Even less, then, are they inclined to spare anyone else. Frankly, you might be next.
July 8, 2009 at 4:18 pm
I’m often dismayed at what an echo chamber the comments here become; poor contrarian uzwi needs fewer sycophantic fans and more genuine opinion. You’re probably part of what drives him crazy.
July 8, 2009 at 4:23 pm
Yes. That’s it.
I’d like to make my own mistakes rather than have them explained to me so that I can glide through and out the other side of experience in the frictionless gel of secondhand wisdom.
Apart from anything else: I want my own stock of absurd rock’n'roll stories.
July 8, 2009 at 4:30 pm
euphrosyne: I rather think it’s more that people are likely to comment when they agree with the sentiments expressed.
July 8, 2009 at 5:04 pm
euphrosyne: you’re probably right. But I spend so much of my life arguing with people, getting angry, and shouting at groups and individuals and communities, that when I meet someone I agree with alot of the time I like to scream it from the rooftops. But I can happily direct you to blogs where I have left horrible comments, but here, I’m happy to be an uzwi sycophant – even if that means destroying the object of that admiration in the process!
July 8, 2009 at 5:51 pm
this is proof that time travel is possible: messages received before they were ever sent.
July 8, 2009 at 5:56 pm
In defense, sort of, of ‘promateurs’ (which is now my favorite new word), failure, which is integral to any learning process outside of workshops and universities and ‘conferences’, is not only highly dispiriting but also extremely difficult to monetize. It’s all quite well to be Bukowski, but it’s something different to be the drunk asshole in the bar at sixty-five with mad scribblings in your drawer which’ll never be published. If that’s your nightmare, not being some self-loathing hack, then you buy the books that teach you how to be a ‘photographer’ rather than just taking photographs.
July 8, 2009 at 6:39 pm
Hi Brendan.
I do take the point. But I think it’s ok to have to handle despair, & also to take the bet that you aren’t “the drunk asshole in the bar at sixty five with mad scribblings in your drawer” (a fine formulation by the way, with serious Waitsian frissons for those of us 64 in less than a month). I’m not going to advise anyone to go in that direction, because I don’t even know how to, & anyway you clearly have to be great & wild & feast on your own craziness & bad luck to do that & frankly more power to you if you do.
What I do want to insist on, & keep repeating, is that the opposite of being the unquestioning bitch of received wisdom is not necessarily to be a failed Blake (or even a successful one).
That weirdly zero-sum opposition is market professionalism’s straw man: it goes like this, either you follow the rules to the exact letter, in which case you end up very, very, very rich; or you don’t follow the rules to the exact letter, & you end up with a prolapsed bowel in a ditch. Or, worse, having to teach for a living.
Does that seem a tad overstated to you ?
It does to me. Neither does it fit the evidence. I know people who followed the rules to the letter all their lives & never did better than scrape by, & finally got midlisted to dusty death, which is probably less pleasant than coughing your liver up in a bar whilst still trying to sing Goodnight Irene. I know people who made, & make, a perfectly reasonable income despite the fact they had fun wherever they could, & got a lot of their stuff into their fiction. & I can point to people who had their first novel turned down by every publisher but one in London & yet became quite quickly one of the richest women in the world.
Another thing (but this is separate): why are people so scared of being carried off by their own lives ?
July 8, 2009 at 9:12 pm
This was something I didn’t think I was thinking about but apparently it is.
After consideration, I don’t think that fear (prolapsed bowel, ditch) is the cause of all this mess. I think it’s simple: some people want to be a photographer as much as humanly possible while taking as few photos as they can.
It’s probably not as simple as that, but I do think that’s an integral truth. People just aren’t swallowing whatever bilge gets pumped out of the ‘professional’ community; they’re actively asking for it. It’s a symbiotic relationship.
Ack, maybe that’s a bit cynical.
But the people I’ve met who buy into the masterclass mentality haven’t particularly seemed to give a shit about anything other than getting attention.
July 8, 2009 at 10:11 pm
I don’t have any experience of having been in a masterclass situation but I guess from the sound of things, it might be akin to that scene in Zardoz where Friend succumbs to the power of the other immortals, who demand conformity to the group. It always struck me that the group could have consisted of either merchant bankers or hippies – no matter: the wholesale wish to elicit oneness with the circle would be the same.
But I digress…Frankly, there are too many people, too many people who are educated, and too many of those who are educated that do quite mindless things during the 9-5; the Arts have been sold to them as ‘expression’, or now ‘professionalism’, and this notion people will dutifully comply with come the weekend or the longer evenings. It’s also an arena of ueber-selfconsciousness; you can hardly help being aware of the trainer for the Sunday Supplement dash to glossy fame and perhaps, goodness knows, some version of freedom, however badly imagined, hovering at the corner of the mind’s eye. Nothing is ever without intent, or even cunning, but we do seem to have sacrificed a certain naturalness, an in-the-marrow confidence in ourselves, and in our own flesh and blood.
I was being contrary myself yesterday but I couldn’t help thinking – why not just let things be a little? All those souls that got up on the plinth, well, they may have been rabbits appearing at the behest of the magician but the same might have been said or be said still of the subjects of a Holbein, or a Breughel, a Stanley Spencer, or a Francis Bacon – but I am sure the subjects will have the last laugh, will outlive and outwit the machinations of brush, camera or lens because their awkwardness and thirst for life is greater than the artist’s hand or eye, in the end.
Let them be, give them their 15 minutes. It may become an eternity.
July 8, 2009 at 10:44 pm
prolapsed bowel, ditch
blazing monetary success
plinth
or here in my studio painting things a brushstroke at at time and tremendously grateful for the obsessive compulsion to do so and the time to be able to do so repeatedly
oh, and yes, it is gloriously fun
I might even say transcendent
July 9, 2009 at 7:14 am
euphrosyne,
Thanks for the opportunity to elaborate.
I’m slowly digitizing my copy of Parkes’s Zarathustra by manually typing it out on the computer sentence by sentence because I want to think my own goddamn thoughts when reading it and not be distracted by the references, which shout at me: “This paragraph or sentence needs further explanation. Come and read me, I’m the explanation.”
I’d say it’s a genuine annoyance for me. (Of course, I’m also taking the opportunity to amend the translation. If I do one page per week, I’ll have a perfect text of Zarathustra in English in less than ten years. Imagine that.)
July 9, 2009 at 8:07 am
More to the point, T.S. Eliot was asked by his publisher to annotate The Waste Land… According to the legend, the publisher wouldn’t have published it otherwise, so Eliot decided to annotate it. The story has a twist: Eliot left the most obscure parts unannotated, and explained the meaning and allusions contained in the clearest parts with notes that were, if not wilfully misleading, at least more obscure than the obscure parts of the poem. It’s also what I would have done.
July 9, 2009 at 8:18 am
matrixless–
Me too.
Good luck with the Parkes. & especially with levering out some space for your own use of it.
July 9, 2009 at 10:55 pm
Hi, Mike.
Brother Alvaro is respected professional photographer, furthermore he is known for his photoshop skills and he tells me than he meets a lot of people who know more than he does about the ins and outs of the program. He doesn´t, he knows what he wants, finds a way to do it -the quicker the better- and worries no more about the matter.
I interviewed a well respected Spanish writer , José Esteban, who told me that he suffered writer´s block until Gabriel Garcia Marquez himself told him to forget about his investigation on the historical background and just write.
I do believe that nuts and bolts is a fine way to not do anything.
Comments are closed.