The Beiderbecke Affair

Emily Dickinson + Because I Could Not Stop for Death + Write Your Own Damn Essay

“I’ve had instances where 20% of the term papers have resulted in failures for the semester because they were plagiarized—and those were just the cases I could PROVE,” reports Kevin Prufer at Critical Mass. Prufer is a university professor on the board of the National Book Critics Circle, and he speculates why plagiarism is so rampant in undergraduate classrooms:

State universities have become increasingly pre-professional and students enrolled in, say, nursing or construction safety or criminal justice majors often question the purpose of having to take a literature class. They sometimes tell me they feel justified copying, since the course shouldn’t be required, anyway. Moreover, any Google search on a classic poem or poet will yield hundreds of paper mill sites. (A search for “Emily Dickinson” + “Because I could not stop for death” + “essay” returns hundred of sites offering research papers for pretty modest prices—even for free. Frats can buy a few of these, then file them for any student to use). This is clearly a big temptation for even a good student who hasn’t started a term paper the day before it’s due. And, finally, university administrators are so fearful of lawsuits, they’re afraid to punish plagiarism with anything more than a slap on the wrist. Every professor I know has stories (at least second hand) about students threatening lawsuits about this kind of thing.

I’ve had similar experiences, both as a student and as an instructor. My sophomore year in college, I took a course on the history of Christianity taught by a professor about to retire. The enrollment included what seemed to me an inordinate number of fraternity and sorority members—aren’t discussions of Hume, Pascal, and Martin Luther normally dominated by more nerdy types? Turns out that the Greek system had 20 years of this professor’s tests on file. He knew this perfectly well, of course. On the day of the final, he bid us farewell with a few angry words about cheating (20 years too late, one might argue) and a brand new, impossibly difficult test. I saw one girl crying afterward and muttering the word “vindictive.”

In graduate school, I taught a required course in reading, writing, and speaking. Students naturally complained about the course, so I asked them what they thought about the liberal arts. They looked puzzled. I told them there was a College of Liberal Arts and many of them were enrolled in it. The conversation that followed lasted much of the semester: we talked about what the liberal arts are, where they came from, and why they are or are not worth a student’s time and money.

Prufer seems most concerned with how students come to think plagiarism is okay. (Presumably there is a connection between the attitude he highlights and cases like the one involving Kaavya Viswanathan.) But he makes an excellent point that the expectations of students and professors have hopelessly diverged. It’s bad enough that many liberal arts students have no idea what the liberal arts are, let alone do they have any commitment to them. Now ask those same students when they made the decision to come to university. Ask them why they came to university. You’ll likely get more blank looks.

Many professors have very traditional assumptions about what college is supposed to be and require their students to meet them halfway in the classroom. Those students, however, are either there for very different reasons or they have no idea why they’re there in the first place.

Plagiarism, punishment, and lawsuits, I fear, are the least of our problems.

Writing vs. Propaganda (In Which Ken Kesey Is Conjured in Order to Utter an Expletive)

In Slate, Ron Rosenbaum calls attention to our culture’s cookie-cutter storytelling, wherein the audience already knows the story—its outline is everywhere. Only a few new details are necessary . . .

Could it be that the three films [about United 93] are a symptom of our addiction to fables of redemptive uplift that shield us from the true dimensions of the tragedy? Redemptive uplift: It’s the official religion of the media, anyway. There must be a silver lining; it’s always darkest before the dawn; the human spirit will triumph over evil; there must be a pony.

That’s always been the subtextual spiritual narrative of media catastrophe coverage: terrible human tragedy, but something good always can be found in it to affirm faith and hope and make us feel better. Plucky, ordinary human beings find a way to rise above the disaster. Man must prevail. The human spirit is resilient, unconquerable. Did I mention there must be a pony?

Popular culture does not trust art because art is unpredictable. It doesn’t stick to traditional storylines with comfortable messages. It strikes out on its own; it follows its characters. A novel or a movie that sets out to convince us of something will almost certainly fail as art. That’s what writer George Saunders means, I think, when he observes: “You would never want to be a political writer if the process was, ‘I believe X, now I’m trying to prove it through a story.’ That’s propaganda, cause fiction doesn’t really work that way.”

By contrast, this response to Saunders, to be found in the comments section at The Reading Experience, is almost laughably off the mark:

Is that a fact? So if say it appears to me that the US government or say the German Nazi government is/was acting criminally by various invasions, and if it appears to me that these criminal governments are getting away with it because people are acting like “Good Germans,” that is, being obedient to authority, etc, then if I as a novelist try to show that this is indeed the case and how profoundly it is the case and how in many ways profoundly immoral such a situation is, realistically or by way of quality caricature, then we are to think, no, that is “propaganda” and therefore bad and mistaken because “fiction just doesn’t work that way,” that is, novelists would be mistaken to think they could “believe [understand] X,” and then “try to prove it through a story.”

Heaven forbid anyone ever attempt to try to show something they actually believe, that is, understand, by way of narrative. Heaven forbid they have a purpose in writing.

That’s right. Heaven forbid. On this general subject, Kevin Guilfoile recently conjured Ken Kesey, who “said that if you’re fortunate enough to make your living as a novelist you will almost certainly be approached one day by an individual—perhaps even a powerful or influential one—who will suggest you use your talent as a tool of some political, religious, or commercial agenda. It is the obligation of a writer, Kesey said, to look that person in the eyes and say, Fuck you.”

In Defense of Smirky, Self-Aggrandizing, and Adolescent Reviews (Well, Sort Of)

It’s a peculiar moment we’re in, culturally speaking, that we are so inclined to argue about reviews even at the expense of considering the books themselves. Case in point: Greil Marcus recently reviewed a collection of tributes to Allen Ginsberg’s “Howl” in The New York Times, observing that the volume’s over-reliance on first-person narrative annoyed him:

This gets tiresome. Sven Birkerts, bidding fair to replace Rick Moody as Dale Peck’s “worst writer of his generation,” offers an unbearable template: “Can I possibly convey how those words” — the first lines of “Howl”—“moved in me, how that cadence undid in a minute’s time whatever prior cadences had been voice-tracking my life?” No, he can’t. He wanders on, into “the moment of Shakespearean ripeness.” “Ripeness” would do the job, but you get the feeling it’s important to Birkerts to remind us he knows Shakespeare—or maybe to equate his reading “Howl” with Edgar’s revelation in “King Lear.”

Aside from the fact that Birkerts was, in fact, a victim of one of Dale Peck’s drive-bys, this still strikes me as pretty tame stuff. (Poor Birkerts, though. He didn’t even know he was a victim—Peck’s piece originally had been cut by The New Republic—until James Atlas, doing his own piece on Peck’s aptly titled Hatchet Jobs, dutifully phoned for a comment.) Anyway, this past week Mark Slouka, director of creative writing at the University of Chicago, registered his complaint with the NYTBR, calling Marcus’s review “smirky” and “so unnecessary” and “self-aggrandizing” and “adolescent.” “When did this Tarantino-criticism (all affect, high body count) come into vogue?” he wants to know. “And how soon can we be rid of it and return to the business of reviewing each other’s work seriously and honestly?”

Maybe I’m going out on a limb here, but what’s mutually exclusive about serious and smirky? serious & self-aggrandizing? serious & adolescent? Why must there always be decorum? Dale Peck, for instance, who lately unzipped his fly and pissed all over The Morning News’ already slightly silly Tournament of Books, can be a very good critic. That’s not me saying that, by the way. That’s Gary Sernovitz, who continues:

When [Peck] angrily scrawls, “Lies! Lies! All lies!” on the cover of Rick Moody’s The Black Veil, it’s not right, it’s not justified, it probably hurts the book’s resale value, but it’s good: Dale Peck genuinely cares about fiction. He writes forcefully and directly, without any academic fussiness and often with surprise. (One novel’s tensionless structure is “like playing racquetball in a court with no walls.”) Peck is enlightening about black women writers’ rise into prominence, for example, or the trap of being a cult writer like Kurt Vonnegut. In his best essays, Peck celebrates books’ successes and laments (without joy) their failures on clear, common, deeply-felt criteria: their characters’ vitality and complexity, the credibility and balance of their drama, the closeness of their observation, their humor, their prose, their pace. Even when using his axe, Peck can reveal insights into the novel as a form. For instance, Peck writes that Julian Barnes “is a terribly smart man and a terribly, terribly skilled writer, if by smart you mean a mind that has ready access to its wide store of information and by skilled you mean a writer who can manipulate words so that they simultaneously sound familiar and original.” However, “intelligence and talent in the service of a discompassionate temperament . . . are precisely the opposite of what one seeks from a novelist, or a novel.” Finally, Peck convincingly laments that his essays, literary criticism in general, and in particular his notorious review on Rick Moody’s The Black Veil, are too often discussed in terms of personality and gossip. “I realized that people,” he writes, “were less interested in what I (or the writers I reviewed) had to say than the possibility of a brawl.”

Sernovitz then observes that it can be difficult, once you’ve figured out how good & interesting Peck is, to wrap your mind around how mistaken he is . . . Now think about that distinction: good vs. mistaken. Good means he writes well, makes interesting & thoughtful arguments, advances the discussion, advocates for the relevance of art. Mistaken means he disagrees with me. Which is more important?

The context of my thoughts—and if you think that I agree 100 percent with myself, you’d be wrong—are a review I am writing of a book that, so far anyway, I don’t much like. (Greil Marcus, it turns out, does like it, having blurbed it for the front cover.) So I don’t like it. Scott Esposito argues, quoting William H. Gass, that all we “need to ensure that a bad book is quickly forgotten is to simply not speak its name.” Well shit. Am I supposed to just call my editor and say sorry, the book sucks, I can’t review it? A bookstore owner, meanwhile, dismissed the value of any published review: “I’d guess that at least three-quarters of my customers couldn’t care ratshit about any review written by ‘professional’ reviewers . . .” So am I supposed to be worried that if I’m being paid for this review, that makes me a professional which makes me a shark, one of those slick pundits who are out to screw the public into buying a book they don’t actually want to read?

A commenter on Books, Inq., a site run by the Philadelphia Inquirer’s books editor Frank Wilson, confesses that “I also don’t particularly enjoy writing negative reviews, and I agree with Frank that they’re of less value than positive ones.” Well, I’m not telling people what to think, but what about those of us who do find value in writing and reading negative reviews?

For my own part, loving something means nothing if I don’t also not love something. For the reader, what does a positive review mean if there are no negative reviews? I’m reminded of a Dan Bern lyric:

I said maybe I love everyone
She said that’s the same as loving no one
I said okay, I guess, whatever

Esposito’s reply, and it’s a reasonable one, is okay, but “I don’t think there’s much need to write a bad review of an unremarkable book from an obscure author.” That’s true only if you see reviews simply as consumer research tools. After all, what’s the point of telling me not to buy a book I’ve never heard of? But I don’t see reviews that way. They’re partly that. But they’re also tools that teach us how to think about books, how to read books, how to judge books. And they’re also—or they can also be—art unto themselves. They’re art about art.

While it’s sometimes strange to review the review, that to me is why it’s worth it in the end.

On No Man's Land, Or Where George Bush, Osama bin Laden, and Duong Thu Huong Meet

The PEN World Voices Festival in New York City is being “blogged” at various places, with the MetaxuCafe functioning as a convenient portal. Levi Asher of LitKicks offers a lengthy play-by-play that is marred by frankly offensive political asides like this one:

The room’s temperature heats up again when Polish dissident Adam Michnik begins barking in his guttural native language. We had heard about Christian crusaders earlier, but Michnik remarks (via his translator) that he sees more of a crusader in Osama bin Laden than in George Bush (personally, I say we call it a tie and get rid of both of them).

I say it’s not a tie, but then I’m one of those crazy moderates. Meanwhile, Asher identifies Duong Thu Huong (pictured) as a Vietnamese poet; in fact, she’s a Vietnamese novelist. I apologize for being nitpicky. I’m jealous that she spoke and others, not I, were there to hear her. But I am also disappointed that more has not been reported on her remarks. She tends to be fiery & outspoken, which is why she has long been an enemy of the Vietnamese Communists; her novels tend to be dense, challenging, beautiful, and unapologetically Vietnamese. They are worth searching out. But I urge you to read them for the writing, not because their author’s life story is thrilling (it is) or because her politics are worthy (they certainly are). As I wrote in my review of No Man’s Land:

The problem with all this biography is that it too often  gets in the way of Huong's actual writing. “It is a measure  of her talent that the government has tried so hard to  muzzle her,” reads one typical review. “And it is a measure of her courage that they have failed.”

That’s just dumb. The huffing and puffing of bureaucrats and the pain inflicted by seven months in prison are not a measure of Huong’s talent but a response to the size of her readership, which, in Vietnam anyway, has always been large. In a recent consideration of a Thai writer, Carlin Romano of the Philadelphia Inquirer let his  tsunami-weary readers in on the fact that “Asians, too,  possess intricate private psychologies.” In other words, if  you don’t read Southeast Asian writers for their politics, then read them for the fact that their novels prove them to  be . . . human.

Foreigners human? C’mon. One hopes that a festival like PEN World Voices puts a lie to such silly notions.

PS—Here’s an excllent NPR report on Duong Thu Huong and her writing.

Deciding Deciders and the Deciders Who Are Like, Eh?

Lee Siegel rides the cultural wave:

This is how it goes. Bush childlishly says that he’s the “decider” who has the last word on who stays and who goes in his administration, the “Daily Show” immediately creates a character called “The Decider,” and in today’s New York Times, we are treated to an article investigating whether the man or the woman has “decider” status in selected couples. Soon we’ll get the faux-educated David Brooks column (“Hamlet He’s Not”), the Nora Ephron film, “You’ve Got a Decision,” and the Time magazine cover story, “Decision Nation.” Of course, all this would conclude with a grand cultural-political synthesis by Frank Rich: “The Gang That Couldn’t Decide Straight.”

The interval between fact and its quick-change into journalistic conceit and then flat-out fiction gets shorter and shorter. No wonder memoirists lie about their lives. They’re just distorting their own experience before the culture gets hold of it.

In the Case of Kaavya Viswanathan

To his credit, Bill Poser @ Language Log is not joining the on-call chorus of condemnations, but more from him in a moment. First, you’ll recall that Kaavya Viswanathan (pictured) is the 19-year-old Harvard undergraduate who was accused this week in The Boston Globe of plagiarizing portions of her debut (chicklit) novel How Opal Mehta Got Kissed, Got Wild, and Got a Life. Over at The Elegant Variation, Mark Sarvas responded by quipping that “the only lower rung would be plagiarized fanfic”; Maud Newton, meanwhile, linked to a MetaFilter post in which a person claiming to be one of Viswanathan’s former TAs anonymously announced that really she’s a shitty writer who slept in class. (That’s some classy instructor.) And on Tuesday, one of Sarvas’s commenters wondered . . .

Why do people who are accussed of plagarism always the ones who calls it “harmless”. What she did was wrong. Period. Let’s see how many rush to her defense, or whether she’s held up to a different standard because a) She’s only nineteen b) She’s attending Harvard c) Both

Or d) Neither. My objection has to do with the sheer unseemliness of the piling on. Well, that’s part of it. The TA was self-serving & unreliable, not to mention dreadfully tacky. Blogs that hold themselves above the alleged actions of Viswanathan shouldn’t then gossip & spread rumors about her. They should instead study the record and then actually think about it . . . as Bill Poser has done. He encourages us to consider the difference between passages that are copied word for word and passages that are similar; the difference between plagiarism that is not accidental and plagiarism that is intentional; and the difference between plagiarism that will clearly benefit the author and plagiarism that does not seem to.

I’m writing about this partly because I think that an innocent young woman is being unfairly condemned, but there is a larger issue at stake here too, namely the increasing privatization of our common culture. No creative work, whether scientific or literary, is the exclusive product of any single individual, or even of a large group of individuals, such as a corporation. All such works build on a tradition of thousands of years created by innumerable people, from which they draw ideas, facts, words, and expressions. It is in the nature of culture for people to make use of elements of previous work in composing new ones, whether by reciting the same facts, presenting or disagreeing with the same ideas, pursuing the same themes and plots, and using the same words and expressions. In music one piece is influenced by another, sometimes only in broad matters of style or performance, sometimes in reusing sequences of a few notes.

The point is that what Viswanathan allegedly did is not wrong, period. It is perhaps wrong. It is perhaps harmless. It is perhaps something in between. It is wrong, question mark, and worth a more intelligent discussion, I think. (h/t)

IMAGE: David L. Ryan, The Boston Globe

UPDATE: Jack Shafer is a take-no-prisoners critic, but one I respect a lot. His take:

Please! Pinching one or two phrases from another book in the course of writing a 320-page novel might be accidental. But by the time a novelist does it 29 times, the effort is transparently intentional and conscious. Unless, of course, Viswanathan composed her entire novel during Ambien-induced sleep-writing episodes.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Little, Brown withdraws the book; author of this post asks himself why it is that he cares about any of this?

Muhammad Atta Goes to Maine (Where He Confronts an Abnormal Compression of Time Caused by Monotony)

. . . No, Amis is not citing boredom as a cause of terrorism; rather, boredom accompanies it. Terrorism, in some respects, causes boredom. So Atta thinks anyway as he stands in line at the airport, nagged as we all are by those same three security questions, repeated over and over: Did you pack these bags yourself? Have they been with you at all times? Did anyone ask you to carry anything for them?

It didn’t take very long to ask and answer those three questions—about fifteen seconds. But those dead-time questions and answers were repeated, without any variation whatever, hundreds of thousands of times a day. If the planes operation went ahead as planned, Muhammad Atta would bequeath more, perhaps much more, dead time, planet-wide. It was appropriate, perhaps, and not paradoxical, that terror should also sharply promote its most obvious opposite. Boredom.

Amis’s story is obsessed with this idea of “dead time”—such a vivid expression considering the circumstances. The terrorist confronts it on an elevator: “Consulting his watch every ten or fifteen seconds, [Ed: Notice that it’s not any amount of time, but fifteen seconds again] he decided that this downward journey [Ed: Sorry, but the story will end with another downward journey, won’t it?] was dead time, as dead as time could get, like queueing, or an interminable red light, or staring stupidly at the baggage carrousel.”

Amis’s discourse on boredom reminds me of Thomas Mann’s in The Magic Mountain. When I read that book, I lived in Korea, and I remember coming upon this passage perfectly prepared to understand it. My first few weeks in country were new and strange and terrifying; they seemed to last a year. Our final six months, on the other hand, were trimmed down to an efficient routine; they went by in a blur. This was also the experience of Hans Castorp up on the mountain. Here’s how Mann put it:

A great many false ideas have been spread about the nature of boredom. It is generally believed that by filling time with things new and interesting, we can make it “pass,” by which we mean “shorten” it; monotony and emptiness, however, are said to weigh down and hinder its passage. This is not true under all conditions. Emptiness and monotony may stretch a moment or even an hour and make it “boring,” but they can likewise abbreviate and dissolve large, indeed the largest units of time, until they seem nothing at all. Conversely, rich and interesting events are capable of filling time, until hours, even days, are shortened and speed past on wings [Ed: wings!]; whereas on a larger scale, interest lends the passage of time breadth, solidity, and weight, so that years rich in events pass much more slowly than do paltry, bare, featherweight years that are blown before the wind and are gone. What people call boredom is actually an abnormal compression of time caused by monotony—uninterrupted uniformity can shrink large spaces of time until the heart falters, terrified to death.

Muhammad Atta, Amis seems to suggest, is terrified to death of boredom, of dead time, of “the misery of recurrence, like the hotel elevator doing its ancient curtsy on every floor, like the alien hair on the soap changing its shape through a succession of alphabets [Ed: Notice that one of those shapes, back in the Portland hotel, was the infinity sign], like the (necessarily) monotonous gonging inside his head [Ed: Pontius Pilate too was afflicted with a splitting headache in Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita]”—and he combats it with this one act that can never be repeated.

This, Amis/Mann says, is how one stops time and so more fully & more deeply lives. And this is how I remember those first few weeks in Korea, when each day seemed to exist in a dream, when each minute lasted forever . . . “As for [Atta] (and perhaps this is true even in cases of vaporization, perhaps this was true even for the wall-shadows of Japan), [death] took much longer than an instant. By the time the last second arrived, the first second seemed as far away as childhood.”

Muhammad Atta Goes to Maine (Only to Disappear on the Frighteningly Invisible Palm of God)

A few months after the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, I stayed in the same Portland, Maine, hotel where Muhammad Atta had spent the night of September 10. There was nothing particularly remarkable about the experience (I also once lived across the hall from a University of Iowa graduate student before he murdered five people on campus and then killed himself). An accident of geography, nothing more, but I thought about it anyway when I read “The Last Days of  Muhammad Atta,” a short story in last week’s New Yorker in which Martin Amis imagines the hijacker  in Portland.*

Maine seems like a strange place for Egyptian terrorists (as Iowa seems a strange host to Chinese murderers). But that’s part of what provides Amis’s story its frisson. Remember the opening shot of Todd Field’s 2001 film In the Bedroom, which was also set in Maine? The soft breeze through the grass, the laughing young lovers, and the muted colors could have belonged almost anywhere . . . Yet it seemed significant that the director had us outside, lying in the grass. We were lulled into feeling safe by the bucolic beauty of the place and by the lovers’ disinterest in anything but the passion of the moment. It felt, in other words, like a dream.

Much of the rest of the film—like Amis’s story, especially the end of his story—also seemed to reside in this dreamlike state: between waking and sleeping, between a real place and an imagined place, between justice and murder.

And what anchored it all was Maine.

In his essay “Giving Up the Gun,” Andre Dubus wrote: “Tuscaloosa did not feel like a place where I needed a gun. Of course if you feel the need to carry a gun, you need one everywhere. But the territory of violence was in my imagination: Cities were places where predators lived; towns and small cities were not.”

Dubus, by the way, wrote the story “Killings” on which In the Bedroom was based. (Fans of his writing—count me as one—may want to know that the Newburyport Literary Festival will honor his life & work this weekend. Andre Dubus III and Richard Russo will both speak.) Dubus’s story documents an affair, a murder, and a numbingly bloody revenge—a series of events made all the more ironic by the wheelchair-bound ex-Marine’s own decision, a few years before his death, to turn the other cheek and relinquish his own collection of handguns.  He was afraid, he wrote, of killing someone. At the end of “Giving Up the Gun,” he explained: “On the train, I gave up answers that are made of steel that fire lead, and I decided to sit in a wheelchair on the frighteningly invisible palm of God.”

Wow. Every time I read that, all I can say is wow. But now I read it and think of Muhammad Atta, on the plane, putting all his faith in steel and fire. Dubus was a devout Catholic, and his singular, moral vision of justice—a vision that permeates both his fiction and nonfiction—was not based on anything so simple as divine judgment; rather, it seemed driven by a very human confusion. Where do I need a gun and why? If Tuscaloosa isn’t violent, perhaps my imagination is.

For his part, Atta seems to be driven by, of all things, boredom . . .

* It occurs to me that the Iowa murders were also immortalized in The New Yorker, in Jo Ann Beard’s essay “The Fourth State of Matter.”

From the Dept. of Too Much Information Dept.

I don’t need a critic to step back and act like he’s speaking from the clouds. But neither do I need to know what’s in his dreams. Ben Brantley, however, doesn’t care what I need. What he needs, apparently, is Julia Roberts. In today’s New York Times he reviews her Broadway performance in Three Days of Rain, calling her “so deeply, disturbingly beautiful that you don’t want to let her out of your sight.”

And before we go any further, I feel a strong need to confess something: My name is Ben, and I am a Juliaholic. Ms. Roberts, after all, is one of the few real movie stars—and I mean Movie Stars, like the kind MGM used to mint in the 1930’s—to have come out of Hollywood in the last several decades.

[. . .]

Like a down-home Garbo, she is an Everywoman who looks like nobody else. And while I blush to admit it, she is one of the few celebrities who occasionally show up (to my great annoyance) in cameo roles in my dreams.

Black Is the New Face

Here, more than anywhere else that I know or have heard of, the daily panorama of human existence, of private and communal folly—the unending procession of . . .  miscellaneous rogueries, villainies, imbecilities, grotesqueries and extravagances—is so inordinately gross and preposterous, so perfectly brought up to the highest conceivable amperage, so steadily enriched with an almost fabulous daring and originality, that only the man who was born with a petrified diaphragm can fail to laugh himself to sleep every night and to awake every morning with all the eager, unflagging expectation of a Sunday-school Superintendent touring the Paris peep-shows.

Mencken was right, of course. I encountered those words last night while reading a chapter called “Ragging and Slanging” in Terrible Honesty: Mongrel Manhattan in the 1920s wherein author Ann Douglas describes the context of the first blackface shows as a culture that was obsessed with parody: Blacks were parodying high white culture; whites were parodying low black culture, or, in some cases, parodying blacks parodying whites. Pretty soon, everybody got confused. When Paul Whiteman’s popular white orchestra burlesqued the early jazz tune “Livery Stable Blues”—packing it “full of comic instrumental effects in order to illustrate the superiority of Whiteman’s usual smoother sound”—the audience loved it. Sincerely. A serious popular culture is born.

Anyway, I was interested in blackface because this week I came upon this:

Yep. An all-girl Korean pop group that performs in blackface. Wow. Koreans are sometimes a little tone deaf about the meaning & effect of certain appropriations. In Daejeon, where Kate & I lived, there was a Hitler Bar. (Here’s a similar version in Seoul.) When the Sisters (who are not actually sisters let alone sisters) debuted in 2003, they were greeted with comments on their website of which this one is typical: “The Bubble Sisters are ignorant, racist bitches, hands down.” Nanda, Bluesy, Spicy, and Sleepy, meanwhile, apparently didn’t mean to stir anything up. According to the Korea Herald, “Lead singer Nanda says all the extra attention was an unintentional by-product of the ‘blackface’ gimmick.” Like I said, tone deaf. Still . . . “‘We really love black music,’ she explained, drawing a distinction between who the band is parodying and who it respects. ‘We want to undermine the typical Korean band, who are pretty but don’t have any talent, and open the doors to musically talented people who, if they don’t fit into this compartment, are usually forced underground.’”

For what it’s worth, an admirable goal.

That was then, though. The Bubble Sisters disappeared for a while, but now they seem to be back. Sans makeup. Who will they parody now? Or have they become what they once made fun of? How confusing.

In the meantime, via About Last Night, I came across this Warner Brothers cartoon, one of the “Censored 11,” that is another confusing mixture of brilliant art, wicked parody, and racist stereotypes. It’s called “Coal Black” and parodies “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs” (by the way, don’t Nanda, Bluesy, Spicy, and Sleepy sound like they could be the Four Dwarfs?). Writes the proprietor of Something Old, Something New:

The important thing about “Coal Black” is that it’s one of the best and most imaginative cartoons ever made, with a crazy gimmick or wild experiment in almost every shot, and all kinds of visual ideas that no one had ever tried before (though Clampett’s trick of changing the colour of the background to signal a change in mood was probably inspired by Chuck Jones’s “The Case of the Missing Hare” from the previous year). Ideas like the words “Blackout So White!” appearing in print above the Queen as she speaks those words (and then bites off the phone she’s speaking into); keeping the dwarfs offscreen in one shot and animating their shadows instead; starting a dance sequence with Disney-style rotoscoping and suddenly shifting to a cartoonily-animated jazz dance; having the dwarfs pop up one by one to the rhythm of “Blues in the Night”: there’s something spectacular or hilarious every second. And Rod Scribner’s animation of Prince Chawmin’ unsuccessfully trying to revive So White may be the best piece of animation Scribner—or maybe anyone—ever did.

And finally, The New Republic today pans (mostly) the silhouette art (pictured above) of Kara Walker, which takes on these sorts of black stereotypes (sort of):

Although Walker may want us to believe that she’s telling it like it is, the exhibition is easy on the eyes and easy on the mind. Is there anybody visiting the Metropolitan who doesn’t regard the government’s response to Katrina as a catastrophic failure? And aren’t most people who visit the show going to agree with Kara Walker that poor, African American residents of New Orleans bore an inordinately large share of the tragedy? The images that Walker has selected do form a kind of backdrop for these perfectly sensible thoughts. Homer’s Gulf Stream, with a black man alone on a tiny boat, has always been a powerful painting and is no less so in this context. The show has its interesting moments, no question about it. But this isn’t the same thing as advancing an argument, which is what Walker claims to be doing in a statement that she’s prepared. “In this show’s analogy,” she explains, “murky, toxic waters become the amniotic fluid of a potentially new and difficult birth, flushing out of a coherent and stubborn body long-held fears and suspicions.” In a weird way, this is a feel-good show. Walker is offering museumgoers an opportunity to massage their emotions—and give some relatively simple emotions a highfalutin package. Kara Walker may believe that a stroll through “After the Deluge” will make the world a better place, but what she’s probably really feeling is that she’s become a better known artist. That makes the world a better place for her, which is another thing entirely.

Ouch.

IMAGE: Untitled, 1994/1995 by Kara Walker (Collection Deutsche Bank)