LOBSTERS and WRITERS

Some time ago -- a year? -- I sent an article about Alvina Krause, my undergrad acting professor at Northwestern University -- to be published in a journal managed by Tailor and Francis Group (taylorandfrancisgroup.com) which is anchored in Oxford but “has a passion” for digital distribution . . .  We are one of the leading publishers of online journals and eBooks.”

“Taylor and Francis Group is part of Informa PLC which operates at the heart of the Knowledge and Information Economy. It is one of the world’s leading business intelligence, academic publishing, knowledge and events businesses. With more than 6,500 employees globally, it has a presence in all major geographies, including North America, South America, Asia, Europe, the Middle East and Africa."  Its website is mostly pitched at investors.  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Informa

The actual journal in question is “Stanislavski Studies” edited by Professor Paul Fryer, FRSA, FHEA. He is Associate Director of Research and head of The Stanislavski Centre, all at Rose Bruford College of Theatre and Performance (UK).  He advises me that my “proofs” have not been corrected and returned and that I’m holding up publication.  I’m supposed to address all questions to a T and F editor.  I was surprised.  I thought we'd finished.

The final copy that I had sent earlier, thinking that was the last step, was finalized with Macintosh OSX, but now I’m working in Yosemite (10.10.5).  They are not very compatible.  The editor I’m assigned never heard of Yosemite and advises me to just stick to PDF.  But that’s a transmission form.  The change in operating systems is internal to the document and possibly changed the format and even some spelling.  But anyway, English spelling and American spelling are not the same.  Even American English and Canadian English do not agree.  Much of the Stanislavski literature is in Russian, an even knottier translation and protocol problem, pdf or not.  PDF is just the bucket -- proofing is done on the contents.  I was in the soup.

We’re in a similar swamp when it comes to photos, since the best ones were taken by a photographer at the end of the Seventies, now dead and her business dispersed.  There is evidently more concern about violating proper ownership in Europe than there is here.  Part of the problem is that copyright is a legal arrangement attached to nations and their treaties.  This cumbersome system means constant reviewing to devise ways to redefine ownership of new media, now what constitutes infringement in a mash-up/cross-arts world.   I’ve been looking up Google’s list of entries they removed because of legal challenge and see that they are almost all music, which is impossible to confine to one “owned” version, much less prevent from being shared, adapted, quoted, and so on.  An actual object or a close copy of it almost has to be real rather than virtual in order to talk about copyright or proofing with any meaning.

Composing table for cold metal type

As I think more closely, “proofs” are a concept developed in the days of print, cold metal type at that.  One hand-writes the corrections onto the “proof” sheets inked on the press’s bed stone-- then picks out the offending letters and inserts new letters, hoping the new spaces work.  But with computer composing, the actual print is so fluid that it’s harder to pin down than Walt Whitman’s many versions of  “Leaves of Grass.”  There is no “Editor’s Cut” because they were ALL editor’s cuts.

Putting a “journal” online in separate editions is also thinking in old categories.  There’s no reason to cluster the collections of articles in elaborate systems kept on a schedule.  They are better “streamed” to get rid of deadlines.  Information about changes or reference to other material can be attached to the articles.

Of course, since T and F is in England, they’re in the middle of the night when I’m up and functioning, so communication can hardly be in real time.  But the real problem is the old assumptions that no one quite realizes IS an assumption, much less one that is no longer practical.  It is clear to me that swinging such a wide net (“the world’s leading business intelligence, academic publishing, knowledge and events businesses. With more than 6,500 employees globally, it has a presence in all major geographies, including North America, South America, Asia, Europe, the Middle East and Africa.”)  means losing control, which is the very thing they are selling: control.

Do not lose control of the mouse.

Like all print communicators, the assumption is that we are alike, which is an advantage sometimes, but demands accommodation at some point.  My biggest advantage is that I don’t matter.  Academics (which I chose NOT to be) and commercial people (ditto) have offices in cities or universities.  They do not write in their nightgowns at dawn while cats tamper with the keyboard.  They do not live in villages where the library is devoted (with excellent effect) to children and the last remaining housewives and retirees.  Formal eminences use a vocabulary that might seem the same, but actually mean something slightly different.  Most of them have no clue about computer communication, so they hire young women (formerly typists) and say, “Make it so.”  No thought given after that because it is the world’s duty to accommodate high status people and education guarantees high status.  Except in a little grain-and-cattle town where cats have no respect.

The next hinge-gone-haywire is the relationship between commercial computer practices, whose main use is totting up the numbers and puffing up the descriptions, and the academic use, which used to be a matter of analysis, research, and freedom from selling.  To try to do academic work on software organized for the ease of recording the efforts of salesmen and rentiers is to undermine the whole structure of academics around science and law, including social morality.  I’ll deal with arts later.

Academic software

In the time since first contact with this journal, a couple of years ago, I’ve replaced my Mac computer twice, my printer/scanner three times, and my operating system twice.  I’ve used programs that have updated a dozen times -- was FORCED to do so in order to keep using them -- and have dumped half-a-dozen social platforms partly because they kept changing their terms of service.  Newcomer tech schemes for posting my essays make me run from the barrage of urging to join them.   Techies love to encrust them with bells and whistles, just to see if they’ll catch on, which means they’re soon discarded, because the people who admire such things are easily bored.

Most of the providers and users of all this stuff assume that I have what they have: iPods, tablets, smart phones, etc. and am capable of texting.  They keep demanding that I list my smart phone number but not my land line number, which is the only one I have.  They confirm acceptances by texting, which I can't receive.  I have Skype but never use it.  There is no built-in mic on my equipment and the add-on one I use is always getting misplaced.

I need stability so I can concentrate on the quality of my thought and writing.  This preoccupation with parlor tricks might account for some of the online sludge decorated with gorgeous color-saturated images.  I think another part of the problem is the quality of teaching writing in its advanced forms.  What I’ve seen is mostly a bunch of youngsters with no life experience sitting together examining each other’s work for grammar errors, just as they did in high school.  No grappling with overwhelming ideas.

The Remains.

The lobster, like all crustaceans, cannot grow without discarding its shell, which leaves it terribly vulnerable in the transitions.  MFA degrees are supposed to supply safety for beginners.  It’s an impossibility.  Clarity is a better goal, but a dangerous one.  Aspiring to economic and status success is deadly, the fisherman’s net that will land a writer in the hold of the economy to be prepared for consumption by boiling alive.  Bouillabaisse.

In the end I asked for a search of their "chain of evidence" as we might call it in the legal world, and someone along the line successfully located what was needed.  Once again, my task is complete.

Which takes me back to the original subject:  the acting classes of Alvina Krause, as derived from Stanislavski’s “method.”  It fit the genre of plays of the time -- lyric realism -- and the Edwardian culture which persisted on Broadway.  Miraculously, the "Method" worked even better for cinema actors.  But the “frame of reference,” went to movie stars who no longer studied the skeleton of the whole because it was achieved via image bricolage according to the taste and goals of an auteur, who was trying to satisfy investors.  What metaphor shall I suggest?  Lamphrey eels?  Sharks -- no, those are critics.  In the meantime the seas warm until the coral reefs die.

I am a creature of my time and place.  I can hear the ranchers loading their cattle at the edge of town, but also I can still consider the implications of the most recent neurology studies in terms of the “Method”.  The spine of the character is metaphor and the centrality of sensations as the content of identity and memory is key, and . . .   Later.  More.

CONSIDERIING SERAPHINE ON A GRUMPY MONDAY

I have an on-going wrestling match with the concept of praise. Here’s a list of problems with it:

1. In my experience, after someone has given me a lot of praise, their next move will be to ask me to do something for free, or something compromising, or to want to come live with me. (Two cats are my absolute limit and I already HAVE two cats.)

2. If I give someone else a lot of praise and then ask them for something (small and unembarrassing, let us stipulate), they suddenly disappear. There is no reciprocity in this game.

3. What do you do with praise from people who have no taste and don’t know what they are talking about?

4. In some quarters there is a constant stream of praise, the way one would praise a dog: “good girl, that’s great, oh wonderful, sit now, that’s right. . .” until it’s just noise. Means nothing.

5. Sometimes the best praise is not spoken -- just an action, a response, a gesture, a look. Kinda hard to do on the Internet, but it can be managed. I use fiction technique: “my hand rests briefly on your head.” But then I get hooked on the pursuit of praise: Did “I pinch your earlobe” mean they really liked it and for the right reason? How do I find out?

6. If I don’t get any feedback at all, I worry. Did I offend? Did I forget to send the message? Are they unconscious? Am I interrupting something far more important? Esp. if I’ve tried to praise honestly: was it too soon? Did I praise the wrong thing?

7. I HATE those thumbs up/thumbs down, “like,” five-stars, constant rating demands which are simply marketing research and go into your computer algorithm at cyber-headquarters to sell you something.

8. The worst thing about teaching was grading. The worst thing about being a student was grading. For one thing, it’s often comparative. I’ve graded classes on a curve and even awarded an undeserved A because the individual had the highest score in classes where NO ONE was performing up to the general standard or even near it -- because otherwise the administration and I would take so much political heat that we would be paralyzed. If I got an A in a class where no one even came close to my intelligence and background, it meant nothing. The two C’s on my transcript from my undergrad years were for acting and the philosophy of religion, the two courses that were most useful of any I took in the whole four years, knowledge that has been the foundation for the rest of my life. Those two C’s were in classes where the others were so brilliant that I had to fight even for a C.

9. Much praise is simply popularity. “Greatest hits” has nothing to do with curated and reflective analysis or even spontaneous emotional response -- just numbers sold. I used to get ballistic every time my denomination did a head count of who believed what and said that was what defined us. Surely there was something more permanent and valuable than flavor-of-the-week definitions of “God.” Likewise, I discovered that being a praiseworthy minister had more to do with popularity and “feel-good” quotient than insight into life.

10, Facebook categories: “Like” or “friend” trespass on words that I intend to mean something serious. I do not take liking or friendship lightly. Nor do I say “love” unless I mean something specific and high-value. I hate being forced into praise or gated categories (“you can’t come in unless you’re a friend . . .”) in the name of drumming up action. Likewise, Netflix rarely suggests a movie that interests me, though they offer a whole row of “based on” picks. Same with Amazon which more cagily says, “People who bought this book also bought that.” What do I care what other people do? Esp. when I don’t know who they are.

This weekend I have a Netflix movie that I really hate to have to send back. It’s “Seraphine,” the story of a cleaning woman who combined dogged hard work with a kind of obsessive, naive, patterned art of considerable intricacy and vivid impact. The plot, which is the artist’s true story, is about her discovery, her major reputation and sales, and then her abandonment in hard times (war and depression) which may or may not have led to her insanity. (She spoke to angels.) It’s a familiar story, but this version was inhabited by an actress, Yolande Moreau, of enormous charm and such particularity that she can’t be compared to anyone else. (There are YouTube vids of her. They’re in French.) Not really fat and not really thin, she clops along in her boots to the country where she climbs a tree and dangles her legs while her dumpling face and Siamese cat eyes drink in the sun. Her paintings are sort of halfway between Klimt and Van Gogh: repetitive, glittering, vivid, vegetal, feathered, full of eyes, visionary. http://pomposa.livejournal.com/22424.html for one set of reproductions.

Surprised by praise and fame, Seraphine has no defense except her religious ardor, which is partly what leads her into madness. The people in her ordinary life have no way to see what is praiseworthy to the sophisticated Paris art dealer and his clientele. Luckily one young woman remains her friend, but that might just be a plot device. What are we to make of this? That no one should trust praise because it is all fleeting and empty? I lean that way. But praise is also welcome, maybe a gift of insight and appreciation. But what if Seraphine had been praised for the wrong reasons that might distort her gift?

Yolande Moreau is a different story. A performance artist, soliloquist, clown and repertory actor, she is self-possessed and aware of what is praise-worthy by her own standard. One might say “shrewd” in the Belgian manner. (She was born in Brussels.) To say someone is shrewd is praise. A shrewd person is impressed by praise until she hears it given in the same terms to someone else who may or may not have achieved to the same level. Scots like me -- who keep their teeth clenched for fear of letting softness get in -- simply ignore praise and watch for actions. Of course, one is obligated to be grateful for praise and act accordingly, whether one uses terms of endearment or not. Let’s hope Susan Boyle, being Scots, survives praise better than Seraphine did.

THE THRESHOLD OF THEORY: Dove & Massumi

As soon as I was old enough to travel downtown on the bus by myself, I would go to the Portland downtown library, a graceful and impressive building, and ascend up the echoing broad marble staircase to the third floor where the fine arts books were kept. I'd stop to look at what I now know was a Beaux Arts bronze of Pan and then I’d go to where the ballet books were shelved. Some of them were in French. I’d take them down and run my eyes through the sentences though I didn’t understand French and only recognized a word here and there.

I did this in part because I loved ballet (What girl doesn’t? Or do they all love soccer now?) and in part because that’s how I had learned to read English and hoped it would work on French. It didn’t (I didn’t realize you had to speak the language before you could read it), but I love that feeling of being on the brink of understanding, fiddling with the doorknob and catches of a passage into a new world. I thought, on some level, that if I could learn to read French, I would be able to dance ballet.

So far as I know, there is no computer game, no virtual reality situation, that allows a person to learn ballet or at least to experience it in some second-hand way beyond watching a movie. This might be because girls don’t do computer stuff. Or maybe simply no one has thought about it yet, but an article I ran across, an interview of Toni Dove by Brian Massumi, has been suggestive. It is about the sense of one's own “body” that a video gamer experiences. The reference is to an interactive game called “Artificial Changelings” about compulsive shopping in the 19th century. http://www.tonidove.com/af_overview_hold.html I hasten to say that I know nothing about this game or any other game. I tried playing Pacman and Whack a Gopher once. That’s about it. But I do understand a little of what gaming is about.

And I’ve thought quite a bit about bodies: how they know where they are, how they picture themselves, how muscles record the idea of movement even when they aren’t moving and other philosophical thoughts (by a person lying on a couch because they had an impulse to exercise and are waiting for it to go away). Dove in this article talks about how one experiences movement prompted by what one is seeing, as when one gets seasick watching a movie of a pitching boat. But she’s on a much more subtle level, like varying the speed of movement slightly to control what the viewer internalizes. Massumi suggests: “It’s based on rhythm. You have to sense an unpredictable rhythm and try to unite your movement with it, it’s not on an object basis, where movement begins and ends in a particular place, and has a destination ‘out there.’ It’s an open-ended rhythmic space that’s neither here nor there.”


Dove says: “It’s like a trance, the desire to maintain a connection even when it can’t be kept and it’s quite easy to get it back. It’s not frustrating. It doesn’t go away for so long that it’s irritating.” They speak about a kind of partner-dance between the experience on the screen and the internal experience of the viewer and talk about how the uncanny is the backside of the ordinary and vice versa.

Then Dove springs this idea that “uncanny experience” has split, back there somewhere (the 19th century?), into the idea of the unconscious (the unseen uncanny) and genre fiction (the formula uncanny, the ordinary but unpredictable horrible and unscientific happening that can be commodified as pulp fiction). It becomes what she calls “the unconscious of consumer economies.” (I’d suggest this is now joined by the craze for “spirituality,” which is nearly a reinstatement of the supernatural, but displaced to a protected place not quite in the unconscious. It’s supposed to be in the “soul.” Yet available for marketing.)

Again I’m surprised, by an idea entirely new to me but instantly recognizable: “the theater of commerce.” (Oh, me and my high-end slick shelter mags and my love of haute couture!) But this twist on it is “kleptomania.” It’s interesting, she says, “because it’s a pathology that gets codified in the 1860’s when the department store emerges and becomes a theatre of commerce, a site of incredible spectacle of advertising and seduction. Upper- and middle-class women started stealing things from stores. . . apparently either the pillars of society were corruptible or the forces of merchandizing were problematic. Neither position was acceptable, so they pathologized their behavior. The women were no longer responsible for their actions. Commerce could march on.”

I was never corruptible enough to steal from Meier & Frank, but how intensely I recall a few ceremonial low-level seductions (paid for in full). I bought my mother a Sheaffer white-dot fountain pen, ivory with gold lengthwise grooves. She used it all her life and at her death my brother asked for it. With some of my first teaching money, I bought myself a compact of custom-mixed pressed powder at The Paris. Perhaps one of the most potent experiences was buying high-end leather gloves in the days when they were fitted as carefully as by a corsetier. (Oh, echoes of the Store -- er, Story -- of O!) Shopping at Target doesn’t even come close. “Madame’s fingers . . . in the tight little lambskin sheaths!”

Massumi says, “There’s a slipperiness to consumerism. You can connect with an object and buy it or steal it, but that’s never enough. There’s so much more that you could have . . . the purchase is just another step towards the next purchase. There’s a perpetual promise mediated by a very abstract technology -- money.” Money, which was silver dollars when I came to Montana, is no longer even bills or a check book. It’s a plastic rectangle “swiped” by a machine. Shoplifters are no longer the captive upper class women who are only free when shopping -- now they may be boys in search of the electronic threshold to the world.

Dove responds, “I’m thinking about the installment plan and the credit explosion, how it was contradictory to the notion of thrift that was so important to the personality structure that was part of the original building block of capitalism.” (Quick! Call Nassim Taleb!!)

Massumi says, “It puts individual lives in movement, following the movement of deferral. Money is the motor for a perpetual motion machine.” (Life as a great lay-a-way.)

When these two inevitably talk about whether this change is modern, post-modern or post-post-modern, Massumi surprisingly suggests that Dove’s line of thought is outside that sequence. “Because postmodernism was either this terrible nostalgia for the plenitude promised by modernity, or a celebration of its impossibility, with a sense of emptiness, as if nothing would come after it -- the whole rhetoric of the end of history . . . It’s not after something, after the end. It’s revisiting continuity.” The choices are not “rich or not rich”. Life is a process of going along without those labels.

Dove suggests that the ruptures between cuts or steps can join into a kind of fluid continuum of narrative, (maybe become a stairway, a hallway that is in fact a long threshold?) and, indeed, the whole principle of movies is that one individual frame after another will be melded in the mind to unified motion. I sure could get into that. I’m tired of modern, post-modern, post-post-modern. Around here, posts are to support a line of fencing.