The Beiderbecke Affair

Taking a Trip to Yop City

I recently reviewed another Drawn & Quarterly graphic novel: Aya by Marguerite Abouet with drawings by Clément Oubrerie.* (It’s translated from the French, but you’ll have to look hard to find the translator’s name: Helge Dascher. Publishers need to give these people more credit!) Aya is a conventional romantic comedy. The title character and her girlfriends date boys and sneak out at night to gossip, dance, and drink. Although, come to think of it, Aya doesn't actually do any of those things, and so the book, despite being named for her, ends up leaving her behind. The ending is a groaner, and the only real twist is its setting:

In fact, the story is interesting primarily because it is set in late-1970s Ivory Coast. The publisher, Drawn & Quarterly, seems to understand this, which is why it has outfitted Aya with a preface by an academic. Alisia Grace Chase, Ph.D., dutifully fusses over the “vision of Africa in the American mind” and conjures images of starving children, machetes, etc. She also notes, but does not dwell on, the other central irony of the book (after its title). To wit: “The amorous hi-jinks narrated in Aya seem so familiar, so nearly suburban in their post-adolescent focus on dance floor flirtations, awkward first dates, and finding just the right dress for a friend’s wedding, that to many western readers it may be difficult to believe they take place in Africa.”

In other words, come for Conrad’s primitives, stay for the bourgeoisie.

It’s a bait and switch that works because Oubrerie’s drawings so beautifully capture both the setting and the tone of the book. If the setting is “so nearly suburban” that it could take place anywhere, the art is a constant reminder that Aya actually lives in Yopougon, a working class neighborhood of the nation’s capital. Aya explains that the locals call it “Yop City, like something out of an American movie,” which suggests that even the characters are a little confused about where they are. Are they in an American movie about dusty, working class Africa? Or are they in something more neatly suburban?

Oubrerie’s drawings are helpfully specific. An average streetscape gives us thatch on a roof, chickens on the road, clothes on the line, and the twist and color of a woman’s pagne skirt. A party scene, meanwhile, concentrates on groovy ’70s fashions, the high afro of the deejay, and the hovering skyline of the city. There are snatches of disco lyrics in the air and even a toddler dancing under the bar. (Where’d he come from?) And all of these images are washed in endless variations on brown and orange.

I ended up liking the book more while reviewing it than while reading it. That’s the interesting part about reviewing: you engage the work more intensely, and the results can be surprising. So now the question is where I’ll stand in a year. Will my reading or my reviewing experience seem the more accurate?

PREVIOUSLY: Cranky, underappreciated translators, unite!

ELSEWHERE: “In other words, this story is an anomaly. An African Elseworlds. A brief, amusing curiosity before we return to our regularly scheduled programming of Unremitting Misery, Hopelessness and Horror® that is the African Reality™ I call bullcrap.”

* “Serving jail time in New Mexico” is not something most people would jump at inserting into their bios.

If you are new to Blogville . . .

How you know if the average reader of your blog is getting old:

If you are new to Blogville and wonder what those underlined words in blue are all about, you should know that they are links. When you click on a link, you are spirited away from Rifftides to another place on the internet that amplifies, explains or demonstrates the linked term. Happily for Rifftides, all you have to do is close out of the linked site to get back to home base.

Perhaps you’d like to try it. Click on this link. You will be rewarded.

(Pause)

Welcome back.

How you know if you’re taking yourself & the Internet a bit too seriously:

The [Mystery Writers of America], perhaps jittery because of Stephen King’s appearance, has pronounced that “cell phones, cameras and all other electronic devices” must be turned off in order to prevent certain attendees from live blogging the proceedings. I’ve never heard of such a preposterous embargo, which runs counter to the spirit of celebrating mystery writers, who I’m sure must be miffed to here that hubristic forces wish to enable their achievements to be disseminated across the Internet in real time.

Paying Our Disrespects (On Confederate Memorial Day)

How many springs have gone since they
Who wore the uniform of gray
Last looked upon the summer snow of dogwood, blooming below
Blah blah blah . . .

Nothing like starting the day off with some bad poetry. In this instance, it’s “Poem for Confederate Memorial Day” by Oliver Reeves. The holiday is celebrated today in Alabama, and it seems appropriate that the Wiki page on the subject is flagged: “The factual accuracy of this article is disputed.”

Go figure. The Civil War is still being disputed. Just last month, a Florida chapter of the Sons of Confederate Veterans rallied outside a Tallahassee museum to protest “The Proper Way to Hang a Confederate Flag,” an installation by artist John Sims. (FYI: “if you don’t want to fuck john sims, you have issues.”) Apparently it is illegal in Florida to “mutilate, deface, defile or contemptuously abuse” the Confederate flag. Of course, Sims was not abusing the Confederate flag; he was abusing the Confederate memory. “What [Sims] does is really not art,” one of the Sons told The New York Times. Kind of like Oliver Reeves’ poem, only different, I guess.

Anyway, it’s a great time to have a blog called Civil War Memory. Kevin Levin, a history teacher in Virginia, recently took his students on a field trip to the Chancellorsville battlefield. In a long post, he works through various questions having to do with Park Service representations, questions about race, and the “morality” of Sherman’s March

What I mean to say is that I have absolutely no interest in any type of moral vindication for either side. I am pleased that slavery ended as a result of the war, but I have no interest in any moral identification with the men on the battlefield or with the civilian leaders in Richmond and Washington, D.C. As a historian my primary interest is in better understanding why events transpired from as many perspectives as possible. I am not psychologically wedded to any assumptions about the relative goodness of Southerners vs. Northerners, but I am fascinated by people who do. You can see it in people’s expressions when they leave the realm of history to another place that is more about their own personally constructed ideas about what happened and what it means that it happened. While I admit to finding the language and tone worth dissection it is not from the perspective of a historian, but as someone who is interested in the ways we become emotionally invested in our ideas of the past.

It’s an interesting thing to be interested in, I suppose, but not too many of us are able to share in his detachment. Ask all the reenactors out there—and they really are out there. “There’s a mystical element to reenacting,” I wrote last year. I don’t get it, mind you, but it’s there. “These guys—the hardcore ones, anyway—know their history chapter and verse. But it’s micro-history. They know their shirt buttons. The real answers—whatever those are—can’t be found in shirt buttons I don’t think.”

I do think that once in awhile they might be found at Civil War Memory.

PREVIOUSLY: On Bruce Catton, Angry Alliterations, Tissues of Untruths, and the Periodic Usefulness of First-Degree Mythmaking (Despite Living in a World with Jessica Simpson)

IMAGE: A scene from the Battle of Chancellorsville as published in Harper’s Weekly on May 23, 1863

On True Comic Writing (As Opposed to Maureen Dowd's Comic Writing)

Alex Massie on the difference between Maureen Dowd and P. G. Wodehouse:

And that’s the problem. If you have a reputation as a great stylist it’s important that you write with, well, great style. And Dowd doesn’t. True comic writing is an extraordinarily difficult trick to pull off. Wodehouse said his books, at their best, were akin to musical comedy without the music. Now, it might seem as though it’s unfair to compare Dowd with Wodehouse. Nonetheless, she could learn from him. Wodehouse built his comedy upon a mastery of technique. He was ruthless with himself, insisting that the jokes had to move the narrative forward. If they didn’t then, no matter how amusing or well-observed they were, there was no place for them in the particular novel or story he was refining at that moment (they could of course be hoarded for later use).

IMAGE: Holmes & Jeeves. “Holmes is the world’s first consulting detective, Jeeves is the world’s first consulting gentleman’s gentleman.” More here.

Mexican Food Is Easy to Make!

“All you need is toast and quotation marks!” More here.

Whatever You Can Do I Can Do Better

In the wake of the Virginia Tech murders, South Korea is doing some soul-searching. Here is The Hankyoreh newspaper on how Korea and America are alike in the way they treat immigrants:

Kim Yun-jae, a lawyer who emigrated to the U.S., said, “Most Koreans see the [Virginia Tech] tragedy as a cause for shame and guilt, instead of considering it an incident caused by structural problems in American society. In light of this attitude, most Koreans are likely to treat immigrants and naturalized Koreans in the same way [they treated the Cho incident],” he added.

To wit:

A 30-year-old foreign woman, who gained South Korean nationality last year after leaving her home in a central Asian country to marry a Korean, wept on April 20 as she talked to a Hankyoreh reporter. Her bloodshot eyes were mixed with anger and chagrin. Her anger centers on how her 10-year-old son is treated in school, where he is a third-grade elementary student. “Fourth and fifth grade students beat my son because he is different in appearance. Despite my appeals to the school, the matter hasn’t been resolved.” Because of the matter, she transferred her son to another school, but the situation did not change. “My son is scared of going to school,” she sighed.

MEANWHILE: The Koreans have expressed shame and apologized for the Cho Seung-hui’s actions, causing more than a few Americans to wonder, WTF? Language Log explores the “interaction ritual” of saying you’re sorry.

The Laugh in Grief's Way

I am reading the new Colorado Review, and there is a poem by Graham Foust called “Nine-Eleven in a Joke.” It ends with these lines:

Today’s blazing is a place we’ve only heard of.
And you say: “The laugh in grief’s way
Is grief’s way with us.”

This poem arrived in my mail box just a few days after writing this, about the difficulties (or supposed difficulties) between Bix Beiderbecke and his stern German father Bismark. They are difficulties that have been chalked up to jazz or sex, but could have simply been adolescence. And remember, in the 1920s, the whole idea of adolescence was quite new.

Okay. Let’s try another tack. To understand Bix & His Father, one must first understand irony. Not the irony of Oedipus & Fate, but the irony of rock and roll.

To understand the irony of rock and roll, however, one must understand “the stink of shit,” to quote Pynchon in Gravity’s Rainbow, “the smell of Passchendaele, of the Salient,” which was “[m]ixed with the mud, and the putrefaction of corpses.” It was the smell of the Great War.

And to fully understand the smell of the Great War, and so to fully understand the irony of rock and roll, one must understand how, the more it stank, the more people laughed. They “shouted with laughter,” the British veteran Philip Gibbs remembered in his 1920 memoir Now It Can Be Told. It was “the laughter of mortals” who had been tricked into believing that progress overcame the primitive, that perfection was somehow possible. “Now that idea was broken like a china vase dashed to the ground,” Gibbs wrote. “The contrast between That and This was devastating . . . The war-time humor of the soul roared with mirth at the sight of all that dignity and elegance despoiled.”

By this formulation, rock and roll is not a music but a reaction, a childish reaction. And Keith Richards’ guitar solos roar with—

“What the hell?” I imagine Bix saying. “I played jazz for crying out loud.”

So look at it like this: the subtext of American life is rock and roll. It’s in the speed of traffic, the sex of spring break, and the vernacular of that moment when a politician takes off his jacket and rolls up his sleeves. This shift away from Queen Victoria and toward Keith Richards began in the Jazz Age, but it didn’t fully take hold until the 1950s, when the music’s supreme vitality and childishness took control of what George W. S. Trow calls the Assumed Dominant Mind, or the various social and cultural understandings that we all take for granted even when we don’t all subscribe. And we don’t. When, in 2004, the Bix 7 road race in Davenport put Elvis on its poster and hired an Elvis impersonator to unveil it while shaking his hips and singing, “A whole lotta running goin’ on,” the Bixography forum erupted in outrage. Albert Haim objected that “there is absolutely no connection between the music of Bix and that of Elvis Prestley [sic] or Jerry Lee Lewis” and that making such a connection was an “abomination.” Another Bixophile offered that “Bix could have kicked Elvis’ ass in a race any day”—but her playground taunt only served to the prove the point: a less-than-adult sensibility has prevailed. According to Trow in My Pilgrim’s Progress (1999), the hydrogen-bomb reality faced by post-World War II America was too terrible. The smell of Auschwitz, like the smell of Passchendaele, was too unbearable, and into that void walked television. Into that void walked Elvis.

IMAGE: Her Laughter by Janusz Walentynowicz (Kilncast Glass, Steel and Oil Paint)

The Audience Can’t Be Cynical Anymore

Terry Teachout quotes himself on violence in films; to wit, he suggests that violence in film these days is violence without consequences, that it exists only for the sake of itself:

. . . violence is an unreal presence and acts of butchery are no more consequential than Wile E. Coyote’s eternal pursuit of the Road-Runner. Automatic weapons are emptied blithely, BMWs driven off cliffs, handsomely coiffed heads blown to pieces—but there are no funerals, no weeping widows, no innocent bystanders imprisoned forever in wheelchairs because they happened to be standing in the wrong place at the wrong time.

The context of his posting, of course, is Cho Seung-hui, who was supposedly inspired by the 2003 Korean revenge film Oldboy. The Washington Post, among others, has noticed similarities between Cho’s self-portraits and images from the film (the former can be seen below and the latter above).

The Post finds even more to say about the relationship between Cho and the films of John Woo.

These similarities between fact and fiction, of course, raise striking issues that all creative artists—but especially those who deal in stories that offer visceral violence as part of their pleasure principle—must deal with. Woo built engines of excitement and stimulation that pleased millions and made him a wealthy, internationally known man. Yet now, all these years later, a young man might have used them as the vessel of his rage and alienation, taken the icon of the movie gun and moved from the intimacy of the DVD player and the arena of his imagination to the public arena, and there reenacted the ritual. This time the carnage is for real.

A little too easy to be smug on this point, I think. Here’s Oldboy director Park Chan-wook on the subject (from a New York Times Magazine profile by Ian Buruma a year ago):

Sitting in his office not long ago, we talked about violence, or more specifically about Park’s terror of violence. “In my films, I focus on pain and fear,” he said. “The fear just before an act of violence and the pain after. This applies to the perpetrators as well as the victims.” To illustrate his point, Park described a scene from his last film, Lady Vengeance, in which the father of a kidnapped and murdered child finally has the kidnapper at his mercy, tied to a chair in an abandoned schoolhouse. The father is there with his family and relatives of the child murderer’s other young victims. They all patiently wait their turns to wreak a terrible revenge on the defenseless killer.

“The father,” Park continued, “has picked up his ax. His daughter tries to restrain him. The audience expects her to say something like, ‘No, don’t do it!’ Instead, she asks him to leave the victim alive, so the rest of the family can also have a go at him. The audience laughs. The next shot shows the father with his ax dripping blood, terrified of what he has just done. The audience can’t be cynical anymore and regrets having laughed at the preparation for such a brutal act.”

Park didn’t smile while he told me this. Violence, for him, is a serious business. He may have a disturbing way of manipulating the viewers’ emotions, but as he explained to me, the focus of his work is not “the beauty or humor of violence.”

PREVIOUSLY: Déjà vu; Oldboy is “a grand, gritty, indelible experience, the sort of picture that mimics great literature in the way it envelops you in a well-told story while also evoking subtle but strong gradations of emotion.”

UPDATE: Slate weighs in:

The “Vengeance Trilogy” is difficult, painful to watch, and obsessed with depicting revenge as the ultimate act of narcissism—a way to wallow in your problems and proclaim “Oh, poor me” with a hammer. But it’s easy to get lost in the surfaces of a movie as technically thrilling as Oldboy and ignore that it urges the audience to question the thrills it offers. Park Chan-Wook sends up genre conventions to point out that we intrinsically like violence—how it looks, the risk it carries, the satisfaction of seeing a dispute resolved by a swift poke in the nose—but that the consequences make us uncomfortable. Still, it’s probably the film’s endlessly consumable mix of technical pizzazz and heavy-duty violence that have made it an instant cult classic; many critics and viewers love Oldboy for the rush of images rather than the ideas hiding in the shadows.

 

The Holocaust? Yawn.

I recently reviewed the graphic memoir We Are on Our Own by Miriam Katin (Drawn & Quarterly).* You can find the full essay in the Colorado Review. Here’s how it starts:

In literature and on film, the Holocaust has become boring. “The Nazi terror,” Phillip Lopate groused more than a decade ago, “has ossified into a stale genre, a ritualized parade of costumes and sentimental conventions, utterly lacking in the authentic texture of personally observed detail.” Jackbooted SS, the trains, the camps—yawn. Their power depends on an extreme form of violence that no longer shocks us, their meaning on simplistic ideas of good and evil. In story after story, characters of all backgrounds are trapped by history. Fate amounts to an either-or. Truth is something we already know.

In Miriam Katin’s new graphic memoir, We Are on Our Own, a Jewish mother and her young daughter fake their deaths and flee 1944 Budapest. Either they will escape the Nazis and survive or they will be caught and sent to a camp. The Christians they meet along the way will either assist the fugitives or coolly betray them. And, if mother and daughter survive, the experience will either affirm their faith in God or cruelly destroy it. To paraphrase Edmund Wilson on the elaborate machinations of detective novels: Who, in the end, really cares? The facts, after all, are unimportant. Yet the facts are what we crave, which is why Katin is able to derive so much tension from all that we do not see: the skeletal faces, the blank stares, the chimneys billowing smoke.

“Had the proponents of ‘the facts’ been willing to listen to me,” Israeli novelist Aharon Appelfeld wrote in his own memoir The Story of a Life (published in English in 2004), “I would have reminded them that I was only seven at the outbreak of World War II. The war was etched inside my body, but not in my memory. In my writing I wasn’t imagining but drawing out, from the very depths of my being, the feelings and impressions I had absorbed because of my lack of awareness.”

Katin was barely two when her story begins, but she has chosen to fill the gaps in her memory with research. Through old letters and interviews with her mother, Esther, she recreates their life on the run while attempting to address her subsequent struggles with faith. In the end, however, it doesn’t work. One gets the sense that this experience is neither etched in her memory nor inside her body. Instead, her memory is cultural, focused not on the personally observed detail—or, for that matter, the struggle with memory’s stubborn silence—but on the broad strokes we have all long accepted.

* Such a cool website, by the way.

PREVIOUSLY: You can find some Philip Lopate-worship here and some love for Aharon Appelfeld here.

IMAGE: A scene from We Are on Our Own

Living on the Grid

Kate & I have our reality shows. The only other option, I think, is to not have television. Anyway, I’ve been rereading George Trow’s Within the Context of No Context, which presents itself, to borrow from Scott McLemee, as a series of Zen koans. I like to pick it up in the morning, over coffee, and read from it randomly. Aloud. I know, too fucking early for that, but this week, on the morning after the season finale of my reality show (Kate’s reality show is on a different night), I opened it to page 59. And right there, on page 59, Trow writes that television is nothing but a bunch of transmitted electrons and that it conspires to “cover the coldness of that with a hateful familiarity.”

The first part of that: duh. The second part, though, stopped me, well, cold: hateful familiarity. That is the koan of reality television.

Why hateful? Because it hasn’t anything to do with a human being as a human being is strong. It has to do with a human being as a human being is weak and willing to be fooled: the human being’s eagerness to perceive as warm something that is cold, for instance; his eagerness to be a part of what one cannot be a part of, to love what cannot be loved.*

And here Trow, out of exasperation, starts to get snide.

What is it? It’s family hour. What is it? It’s a program, a little slice of time during which a man and his wife and a woman who works for him sit together behind a little desk-like thing. What do they do? They answer questions. No questions about France, or the Battle of Britain, or what American women despise most about their husbands according to the editors of Modern Maiden. What, the? About what? Together, in discomfort, they answer questions designed to awaken discomfort. In this way, a little reality can be got to. You can see it on their faces. They are uncomfortable, and they recognize being uncomfortable as referring to their reality. They take comfort in this reference. In that, and in the fact that they are in public. Out of their small family, which may not exist, so lonely is it, and into the grid of two hundred million.

That was in 1980. The grid is now three hundred million. And lonely is far lonelier, even with a hundred cable channels and all of the Internet. Which means that the meaning of “in public” today is something that Trow could barely have dreamed of then. But the principles from which this old anonymous show (a man, his wife and a woman who works for hiim) operated are eerily familiar. The staged interaction and the minor public humiliation form “a little grid. A little context. Convincing while it lasts, but dirty. Shimmering with doubt and embarrassment.”

And here Trow, out of despair, starts to get dark.

Why is it allowed? Because the embarrassment forms a context. The comfort of discomfort. The comfort of reality, which is a reality of discomfort. And interest. That there should be in their own sadness the means to form a little event within a context. Nobody does anything in America unless it is perceived as a step up. As the boy slices his skin to watch a scar form, he thinks how loathsome and intolerable life was before he thought to do it, and how comforting it is to belong to the new aristocracy of people who have had the imagination to have an intention to wound themselves.

Trow knew he was right in the end because he said so. “And if you think it was fun to see that happen, you are wrong,” he wrote in 1997. “There’s nothing fun about being right if what you’re right about is the triumph, or temporary triumph, of the inevitably bad.”

I appreciate that little sliver of hope he holds out. Temporary.

* For more on what Trow meant by “warm” and “cold,” see this essay by Curtis White.

IMAGE: 2 Heads by Noel Rockmore