lord_whimsy: AMERICANS: PUT DOWN YOUR IGNORANT, INSULAR PENS!

whimsy (

lord_whimsy) wrote,
@ 2008-10-02 13:03:00

Entry tags:

ill-considered notions

AMERICANS: PUT DOWN YOUR IGNORANT, INSULAR PENS!
This little item had me rolling. I love how this tweedy git wants to have it both ways:

Permanent secretary of the Swedish Academy Horace Engdahl told the Associated Press that US writers were "too sensitive to trends in their own mass culture", which he said dragged down the quality of their work. "The US is too isolated, too insular. They don't translate enough and don't really participate in the big dialogue of literature," Engdahl said. "That ignorance is restraining."

But then adds:

"It is of no importance, when we judge American candidates, how any of us views American literature as a whole in comparison with other literatures. The Nobel prize is not a contest between nations but an award to individual authors. It is essential to remember that when national feelings run high."

So he gets to take condescending swipes while insisting upon his own impartiality? No, not self-serving at all.

By his rationale, we should assume that nine tenths of humanity--those in traditional cultures who don't really get around as much as jet-setting European academics--have nothing of value to contribute to the world of arts and letters because they are "insular" and "ignorant". People who are deeply situated in their cultures clearly have nothing of worth to teach us, unless of course it reflects the European model. Who's being ignorant and insular here?

It would have been far more honest of him to say that American literature simply leaves him cold, that he doesn't understand or identify with it. But instead we get this smug, crypto-aristocratic dismissal of an entire culture's literary output. Any other culture, and he would be lambasted for such arrogant, broad-sweeping claims.

I'm not fooled by the pious academic drag, Horace: you are the Compte de Buffon's successor.

(45 comments) - (Post a new comment)

	petrusplancius 2008-10-02 05:50 pm UTC (link)
	That's really funny. I was once sitting in a train returning to England to Paris and overheard two Frenchmen discussing the dominance of English as an international language; one must remember of course, one of them said, that English is a language of commerce and French is a language of culture. (Reply to this) (Thread)

lord_whimsy
2008-10-02 05:58 pm UTC (link)

Amazing such skewed, lazy thinking persists. It's the same chauvinist mindset that gave us pap like this:

In his ninth volume, published in 1761, Buffon compared mammalian species and noted examples in which the same species lived on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean. He claimed the New-World versions were always smaller and weaker. European livestock exported to America were always stunted. Species indigenous to the New World were always smaller than comparable species in the Old World (the largest American mammal was the tapir, nowhere near the size of an elephant). Of American Indians, he wrote, "the organs of generation (of the savage) are small and feeble. He has no hair, no beard, no ardour for the female. Though nimbler than the European, his strength is not so great. His sensations are less acute; and yet he is more timid and cowardly." And so on.

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petrusplancius
2008-10-02 06:30 pm UTC (link)

I think that modern anti-Americanism of this kind has a rather different basis, arising out of resentment at American dominance in politics and popular culture; so the comforting thought naturally suggests itself, that these people may be rich and good at producing Hollywood blockbusters, but they're insular and not really cultured; just as during the period of British dominance, the British could be dismissed as a nation of philistine shopkeepers.

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	lord_whimsy 2008-10-02 07:56 pm UTC (link)
	I wouldn't mind so much if such criticisms were well-reasoned: there's much to criticize. But so much of it is rationale based on irrational prejudice and petty snobbery. I can't respect that. (Reply to this) (Parent)(Thread)

	petrusplancius 2008-10-03 08:46 am UTC (link)
	There's been a great deal of scorn poured on this poor man in the British papers this morning! One particularly good article which I will pass on if I can find it online. (Reply to this) (Parent)(Thread)

	petrusplancius 2008-10-04 04:17 pm UTC (link)
	I can't, but there's this: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/arts/main.jhtml?xml=/arts/2008/10/03/boamerica103.xml (Reply to this) (Parent)(Thread)

lord_whimsy
2008-10-05 12:15 am UTC (link)

So let's consider the product rather than the conditions of its creation. What would it look like to be not-parochial in a literature? What, we should ask ourselves, would a corpus of writing need to do? It would need to look outwards towards the world. It would need to engage with modernity - not just the political conditions of our age but its technological and linguistic texture; its science and its religion; its mass-media and its consumer culture.

And American writers have a natural advantage in this - one they exploit - because the lion's share of all these things is American. The defining ideological clash of our age pits Islamism against a specifically American form of modernity; it wasn't an accident that the prime target was the World Trade Center in New York. The primary battleground in the fight between secular and religious world views is in American classrooms and American abortion clinics and the pages of American newspapers. The collapse of the global financial system originated - again - guess where? We may be in a period of the collapse of American power in favour of Russia or China or (dream on) a federal Europe, but the story - the cultural story - is still the eclipse of America rather than the rise of anything else.

French theorists have been good - perhaps better than any - at describing (often from a hostile or sceptical perspective) the weird, hypertextual, multiply mediated experience of modernity. But in terms of fiction, it's the Americans who have plunged right in. In Don DeLillo there's mediation, there's political spectacle, there's the extreme abstraction of global capital, there's the broad sweep of history and there's the age of terror. The science fiction of Neal Stephenson and William Gibson introduced virtual reality to literature; and Richard Powers's scarily clever, high-concept novels - Plowing The Dark collides cyberspace and Middle Eastern terrorism - took it further.

And look how David Foster Wallace and his ancestor Thomas Pynchon incorporated hard science into phantasmagoric cultural vaudeville. Foster Wallace's footnotes are the nearest thing you'll see to hypertext in fiction. Pynchon's latest book is an appropriately demented international history of the turn of the 20th century.

Parochial? Jeepers. If these guys look parochial from where Mr Engdahl's sitting, it really is time for me to start learning Swedish. Or I'll do him a deal. We can both start learning Chinese. My treat.

Been waiting for someone to bring up Dickinson.

There's no excuse for the dearth of translation, of course.

Edited at 2008-10-05 12:15 am UTC

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lord_whimsy
2008-10-06 01:08 am UTC (link)

Not to flog a dead horse, but:

"...Engdahl made official what has long been obvious to anyone paying attention: The Nobel committee has no clue about American literature. America should respond not by imploring the committee for a fairer hearing but by seceding, once and for all, from the sham that the Nobel Prize for literature has become."

"When Engdahl accuses American writers of being raw and backward, of not being up-to-date on the latest developments in Paris or Berlin, he is repeating a stereotype that goes back practically to the Revolutionary War...while Engdahl decries American provincialism today, for most of the Nobel's history, it was exactly its "backwardness" that the Nobel committee most valued in American literature.

Just look at the kind of American writer the committee has chosen to honor. Pearl Buck...John Steinbeck...wrote broad satires on American provincialism with nothing formally adventurous about them.

Such writers reflected back to Europe just the image of America they wanted to see: earnest, crude, anti-intellectual. There was a brief moment, after World War II, when the Nobel Committee allowed that America might produce more sophisticated writers...William Faulkner..Ernest Hemingway...but in the 32 years since Bellow won the Nobel, there has been exactly one American laureate, Toni Morrison, whose critical reputation in America is by no means secure. To judge by the Nobel roster, you would think that the last three decades have been a time of American cultural drought rather than the era when American culture and language conquered the globe.

But that, of course, is exactly the problem for the Swedes. As long as America could still be regarded as Europe's backwater—as long as a poet like T.S. Eliot had to leave America for England in order to become famous enough to win the Nobel—it was easy to give American literature the occasional pat on the head. But now that the situation is reversed, and it is Europe that looks culturally, economically, and politically dependent on the United States, European pride can be assuaged only by pretending that American literature doesn't exist. When Engdahl declares, "You can't get away from the fact that Europe still is the center of the literary world," there is a poignant echo of Gloria Swanson in Sunset Boulevard insisting that she is still big, it's the pictures that got smaller."

http://www.slate.com/id/2201447/pagenum/all

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lord_whimsy
2008-10-06 01:11 am UTC (link)

"Nothing gives the lie to Engdahl's claim of European superiority more effectively than a glance at the Nobel Prize winners of the last decade or so. Even Austrians and Italians didn't think Elfriede Jelinek and Dario Fo deserved their prizes; Harold Pinter won the prize about 40 years after his significant work was done. To suggest that these writers are more talented or accomplished than the best Americans of the last 30 years is preposterous.

What does distinguish the Nobel Committee's favorites, however, is a pronounced anti-Americanism. Pinter used the occasion of his Nobel lecture in 2005 to say that "the crimes of the United States have been systematic, constant, vicious, remorseless" and to call for "Bush and Blair [to] be arraigned before the International Criminal Court of Justice." Doris Lessing, who won the prize last year, gave an interview dismissing the Sept. 11 attacks as "neither as terrible nor as extraordinary as [Americans] think," adding: "They're a very naive people, or they pretend to be."

It would be nice to think that the Swedish Academy was not endorsing such views when they selected Pinter and Lessing or the similarly inclined José Saramago and Günter Grass. But to prove the bad faith of Engdahl's recent criticisms of American literature, all you have to do is mention a single name: Philip Roth. Engdahl accuses Americans of not "participating in the big dialogue of literature," but no American writer has been more cosmopolitan than Roth. As editor of Penguin's "Writers From the Other Europe" series, he was responsible for introducing many of Eastern Europe's great writers to America, from Danilo Kiš to Witold Gombrowicz; his 2001 nonfiction book Shop Talk includes interviews with Milan Kundera, Ivan Klima, and Primo Levi. In his own fiction, too, Roth has been as adventurously Postmodern as Calvino while also making room for the kind of detailed realism that has long been a strength of American literature. Unless and until Roth gets the Nobel Prize, there's no reason for Americans to pay attention to any insults from the Swedes. "

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petrusplancius
2008-10-06 12:11 pm UTC (link)

Personally I don't attach much importance to literary prizes; viewed in a long perspective committees of that kind always get it wrong half the time; and it is exceedingly difficult to form a fair judgement on what is best in universal literature.

Also, I suppose I am too much of a fogey to attach much value to the way in which American literature may or may not reflect 'modernity' (post-modernity?) with its mass media, consumer culture etc. If I were reflecting on how this Swede has got it so entirely wrong, I would point to the way in which American literature has a rich and varied tradition extending well back into the 19th Century. There is nothing provincial about Herman Melville for instance. Or indeed Emily Dickinson!

This stuff about American culture conquering the globe, Europe being culturally dependent on America seems to me to be almost as crass as what Engdahl was saying. One has to make all kinds of distinctions in that regard. It is simply not the case that high culture and scholarship in Europe is subject to American domination, we have our own traditions and idiosyncrasies which vary from country to country and have deep historical roots. Within a common western tradition to which America has made an increasingly valuable contribution.

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lord_whimsy
2008-10-07 12:00 am UTC (link)

Agreed. That triumphalist nonsense is as bogus as it is distasteful.

I love continental European literature, and I wouldn't want to live in a world devoid of Roussel, Louys, Perec, and Calvino.

Yes, of course awards are beside the point. This post was just a hobby horse for my contrary mood the other day. Nuts to Nobel.

I too raise a suspicious brow when people start raising the spectre of Relevancy To Our Times. Temporal parochialism.

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petrusplancius
2008-10-07 09:02 am UTC (link)

I find myself particularly drawn to the kind of literature that doesn't call attention to itself as being 'important' and have earnest volumes written about it by academics, and the kind of art that can't be marketed as a brand to sell for hundreds of millions of dollars at auction. Perhaps someone should found a special prize for books, which though of the most exquisite quality, could never hope to win the Nobel prize. In connection with all this talk of prizes and competitions for cultural domination, I am reminded of Degas' scornful remark about some art critic, 'Oh he's the kind of person who awards marks to painters'.

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johnschreimann
2008-10-02 07:08 pm UTC (link)

That's a really ridiculous distinction for two reasons.

There's nothing really bad about commerce. And culture -- if we define it by what it is and not what we expect -- is not always a good thing (violence, snootiness, misogyny, bigotry anyone?). Commerce for the most part is not disconnected from culture. In academia it is where people are protected by the state because they feel (erroneously) that education could never be in demand by consumers, but not to anywhere else.

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	bricology 2008-10-02 05:59 pm UTC (link)
	Do Engdahl's sentiments remind anyone else of a certain Scots-Japanese-German blogger? (Reply to this) (Thread)

	lord_whimsy 2008-10-02 06:04 pm UTC (link)
	See below. It appears we have no right to complain. We should be grateful, in fact. (Reply to this) (Parent)

imomus
2008-10-02 06:02 pm UTC (link)

I actually have a lot of sympathy with Horace's point of view (and by the way you're mixing up the original statement with the retraction he made the next day, after fellow committee members "got to him").

In this case there really is -- and should be -- one rule for America and another for the rest. The US cannot both stymie cultural diversity and expect to benefit from it too. It cannot be "the one culture" and "just another culture".

I looked at some of the problems which inform Horace's position in this article in Wired:

"Rüdiger Wischenbart noted some shocking facts about the current realities behind book translation.
Worldwide, he said, between 50 percent and 60 percent of all translations of books originate from English originals. It's sometimes higher: 70 percent of all books translated into Serbian, for instance, have English originals. In return, only 3 percent to 6 percent of all worldwide book translations are from foreign languages into English. English speakers, it seems, are talking a lot but listening very little. If this were the airline industry, we'd be talking about the kind of world where you can't fly from Moscow to Berlin without changing in London.

Non-Anglo cultures are also listening less and less to each other, more and more to us. "In 2005," Wischenbart reported, "a mere 9.4 percent of all translations into German came from French originals.... Yet, this still brings French comfortably to second place in the overall translation statistics in Germany, as compared to 2.7 percent for Italian (number 3), or Dutch (2.5 percent, number 4) or Spanish (2.3 percent, number 5). Sixty-two percent of all translations were of English originals. All other languages and cultural in-roads seem like peanuts in comparison, and no politically well-intentioned process will ever mend this imbalance.... Centrifugal forces are working against globalization, resulting in culturally fragmented islands and regions, with few cohesive lines in between."

The "pipe dream" that Wischenbart describes is UNESCO's point-to-point vision of global cultural flow from any point to any other. The world we live in today, though, is still a hub-and-spoke world.

If it's clear in the book world, it's even clearer in the film world. The U.S. studios' share of the box office in Europe grew from 30 percent in 1950 to more than 80 percent by 1990, with 70 percent of that dominated by just six companies -- Disney, Viacom, Sony, Fox, AOL Time Warner and Universal. European movies, in contrast, can't achieve more than 5 percent of U.S. market share. American studios remake the most successful European movies for the U.S. market."

US power and dominance means that we need to practice "asymmetrical multiculturalism", disallowing a culture which already invades our own and giving leg-ups to cultures which are seldom heard from. Dominant groups need to hold back from stressing their ethnic particularities while weaker groups need to express theirs, precisely because of the existing power imbalance.

Horace's point about US provincialism is that a whole literature can exist which makes reference only to US popular culture, and can assume -- precisely because of this dominance -- that its references will be universal.

However, it looks as if we're coming to the end of the period of massive US dominance. I'm willing to admit that one day the US will just be one struggling, plucky culture among many, encouraged to have its say when its turn comes, and to express its fascinating particularities and strut about in its national costume for the tourists. At that point it will have every right to benefit from diversity and multipolarity. Just now, as the greatest obstacle to it, it has no such right.

Edited at 2008-10-02 06:05 pm UTC

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mercyorbemoaned
2008-10-02 06:39 pm UTC (link)

two related questions:

'm willing to admit that one day the US will just be one struggling, plucky culture among many, encouraged to have its say when its turn comes, and to express its fascinating particularities and strut about in its national costume for the tourists. At that point it will have every right to benefit from diversity and multipolarity. Just now, as the greatest obstacle to it, it has no such right.

1. What is US culture? I am a fourth generation American and no one is supporting or even permitting my cultural expressions. I cannot raise my children in anything resembling the manner I, my mother, her mother, or her mother were raised. The physical infrastructure for doing so is gone or decayed or not friendly to my racial group. I am perfectly aware I have no right to my culture - it's rubbed in my face every time I interact with an institution.

2. The question of who determines US culture is closely related to your passive voice up there. Encouraged to express itself and have its say by whom? Aliens? Aliens with no culture? So that they're not being the dominant culture? Explain please, I am clearly too American to get how a minority cultural expression can be encouraged by something that isn't a dominant culture.

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	lord_whimsy 2008-10-02 07:26 pm UTC (link)
	Horace's point about US provincialism is that a whole literature can exist which makes reference only to US popular culture, and can assume -- precisely because of this dominance -- that its references will be universal. Well, this "point" is rife with its own provincial assumptions, isn't it? Looking forward to your Book of Thailands, Nick! (Reply to this) (Parent)

bricology
2008-10-02 11:22 pm UTC (link)

"it looks as if we're coming to the end of the period of massive US dominance. I'm willing to admit that one day the US will just be one struggling, plucky culture among many, encouraged to have its say when its turn comes, and to express its fascinating particularities and strut about in its national costume for the tourists."

I wouldn't hold my breath waiting for that; the imminent demise of America has been predicted about as often as the Second Coming of Jehovah.

One thing that I find curious about all of this is that it presumes that the US is going to maintain the same cultural trajectory into an indefinite future. That doesn't square with America's changing demographics (changes that don't necessarily suggest losing dominance so much as shifting values), and it certainly doesn't reflect the punctuated equilibrium of technological evolution that the US has led for the past 50 years. Nor does it address the fact that the US is still by far the immigration destination of choice, and is likely to remain so.

Also, if Obama wins, and the Democrats pick up a number of additional seats in the Houses, we're going to see a significant redefinition of what "America means" in 2008 and is going to mean in 2009, 2010...

"Worldwide, he said, between 50 percent and 60 percent of all translations of books originate from English originals. It's sometimes higher: 70 percent of all books translated into Serbian, for instance, have English originals. In return, only 3 percent to 6 percent of all worldwide book translations are from foreign languages into English. English speakers, it seems, are talking a lot but listening very little."

I realize it's quite un-PC to suggest, but let's not automatically presume that there's much that's been written in Serbian that's worth reading within Serbia, or without. As fashionable as it may have become in some circles to downplay the literary achievements of English-language writers, I have little doubt that, since the time of Gutenberg, the ratio of significant literary works to the overall population of any language group is higher in English than say, Chinese or Indonesian. Has there been a Serbian Shakespeare? -Melville? -Dickens? -Greene? -Atwood? -Dickinson? -Faulkner? -Bellow? -Pynchon? How about Chinese equivalents?

"If it's clear in the book world, it's even clearer in the film world. The U.S. studios' share of the box office in Europe grew from 30 percent in 1950 to more than 80 percent by 1990, with 70 percent of that dominated by just six companies -- Disney, Viacom, Sony, Fox, AOL Time Warner and Universal. European movies, in contrast, can't achieve more than 5 percent of U.S. market share. American studios remake the most successful European movies for the U.S. market."

This seems to me like culture bit-mining, but let's allow for the moment that theatrical films from America are dominant in some foreign markets. (Unless there's strict nationalism or a quota system, there's always going to be some disparity in film influence.) Are films America's only cultural export? We produce and export literature, art, dance, music and every other genre of the arts; those also have to be taken into consideration, and I would argue that they speak much more favorably of our accomplishments. We also import a significant share of the world's cultural products.

And as for "American studios remake the most successful European movies for the US market" -- have you noticed how many of the films made in other countries are direct rip-offs of American films? From Bollywood to Hong Kong, you can find locally-made versions of everything from "Star Wars" to the "Dirty Harry" films, locally made, financed, distributed and viewed. No cultural imposition necessary. (And certainly no copyrights observed.)

Ultimately, this whole discussion seems like an intellectual game played by people who feel disenfranchised from what they identify as the dominant culture. I don't know very many Americans who really care about this topic, and it's not due to apathy or to lack of critical reasoning skills. They simply don't find it relevant to their lives, more than just an academic curiosity.

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petrusplancius
2008-10-03 09:25 am UTC (link)

I agree with much of what you say, but I am quite sure that the dominance of English in translation has nothing whatever to do with the quality of the work available in that language. After all, only a minute percentage of what is translated has any literary quality at all. And the fact that the novels of Philip Roth will be much better known just about everywhere than those of Joseph Roth has nothing to do with the relative quality of their work. It is very easy for an American (or Englishman like myself) to be blasé about this matter, but it is a remarkable phenomenon which can have significant and, in my view, unfortunate cultural implications. Looking at the matter from the opposite persppective, it does strike many Europeans that (US) American literature is rather self-enclosed in a way that, say, South American literature is not, and that many US American writers would benefit from having a wider frame of reference and broader culture. And by the way, American culture is not 'dominant' in Europe outside certain limited areas of popular culture.

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bricology
2008-10-04 03:01 am UTC (link)

Oh, I'm not asserting that the dominance of English in translation is the direct and exclusive result of the quality of work available in that language. Part of the dominance is surely because English has replaced French as the international language.

Having said that, it seems statistically more probable to me that there will be a certain percentage of books that have literary merit in a language in which 375,000 new titles are published this year (not to mention existing books in print), rather than say, in the Hawaiian language in which, I would guess, very few books are published each year. Also, given that English has the largest written vocabulary (approximately a half-million words), as opposed to again, Hawaiian (with a few hundred words), English is far more likely to engender literary sophistication than written languages with significantly fewer words. All other languages would fall in their various positions along that continuum. Forgive me if this is all self-evident.

Of course it is always a good thing for cultures to reach outside of themselves, to broaden their influences. Such has been the nature of English, with its inclusion of so many loanwords (contrasted with France and the limitations imposed by the L'Académie Française). Also, it seems to me that many American writers do indeed expose themselves to the world beyond our borders. Nearly the whole of American literature of the first-half of the 20th century was profoundly influenced by expatriate life in Paris and elsewhere. Other than the determined recluses like Flannery O'Connor, and those with lives cut short or debilitated with substance abuse, I'd be hard-pressed to name more than a few significant American authors of the second-half of the 20th who weren't well-traveled. For example, Saul Bellow was extremely widely-traveled, visiting Europe twice every year and venturing into Russia long before it was open to the West. Likewise, Vonnegut. Kerouac traveled extensively in Mexico and considered Japanese culture and philosophy a significant influence. Philip Roth has spent time in the Czech Republic every year since the '70s.

I can't speak authoritatively, of course, but from my limited time living in Europe and traveling around it and Japan, I would say that the effect of American culture -- if not the product itself -- has had a profound influence abroad, and continues to. Of course, this is as much for ill as good. And at the same time, America has always been both a huge consumer of foreign culture (consider the current mania for all things Japanese), as well as the world's largest conglomerate of foreign cultural influences. We may be a melting pot, but the ingredients aren't negated by the process.

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petrusplancius
2008-10-04 02:14 pm UTC (link)

I wrote a long reply to this but accidentally wiped it out just now by pressing the wrong button! Basically I am on board with all this, I regard English as a genuine world language (above the utilitarian level), not in the control of Britain or for that matter the USA, and one that is open moreover to outside influences and local development, so I am not too impressed by over-simple charges of linguistic imperialism; but I do think its dominance induces forms of laziness that can be harmful in different ways, among publishers in concentrating so much on translations from English (which leads to distortions in people's appreciation of the wider literary heritage, and does cause much second-rate English writing to be propagated at the expense of first-rate writings from other languages), and among English-speakers in making them so resolutely monoglot (it is rare even among educated English people, and I suspect Americans too, to have sufficient mastery of even one other language to read in it for pleasure). In that remark about American writers, I should assuredly have inserted all kinds of qualifications. As for the influence of American culture abroad, that is an exceedingly complicated matter. It certainly does not exercise any dominant influence on traditional European high culture (and one might add, humanistic scholarship), and the sensitivities that provoke people like our Swedish friend to make crass remarks like those above arise from a feeling that commercial mass-culture of American inspiration is serving to undermine that traditional culture. Such reflections as I had to offer on that matter have disappeared into the ether, probably to nobody's great disadvantage.

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	maps_or_guitars 2008-10-02 06:48 pm UTC (link)
	So individual American authors are to be hobbled on account of the criminal size and success of publishers and media conglomerates? Ah, but I forget, we're a monolith over here. Hand Me My Moose Gun, Mabel, I'm Off To Dominate The World Media. (Reply to this) (Thread)

	lord_whimsy 2008-10-02 07:48 pm UTC (link)
	We're also forbidden from writing from our own experiences, because such experiences may be uniquely American--and we can't have that. "The big dialogue of literature" might go on without us! No xmas cards from Allan Bloom this year! Oh no! Edited at 2008-10-02 07:52 pm UTC (Reply to this) (Parent)(Thread)

maps_or_guitars
2008-10-02 08:10 pm UTC (link)

I'm sure that this is also the case with music. Damn. I must sell all my guitars and replace them with whatever computer Momus is using these days. What, a Mac? Does its Chinese parts outweigh its American design? Don't the Finns or somebody have a nice beatbox I can use instead? I wish this could have come up when there were still investment bankers to buy my maps. Turning myself into an authentically European musician is going to be expensive.

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johnschreimann
2008-10-02 09:05 pm UTC (link)

Haha. I'm an uncompromising defender of the free market for this very reason.

As much as people hate capitalism in the world of arts, it all comes down to what people actually want to buy. Imaginary dialogues don't exist (except to schizoids). And inherent "rights" and "value" of books or entire cultures don't exist either. Thinking this is the case is actually downplaying why great books sell -- because it's actually good and readable.

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imomus
2008-10-02 10:32 pm UTC (link)

So let me get this straight. You don't have any problem with the fact that 70% of European box office is accounted for by six American companies, but that European films only account for 5% of US box office? You think that this is just because American films are better than European ones? You don't think that control of the distribution channels has anything to do with this? You don't think it's in any way undesirable that one continent should control another's cultural options in this way? And how about when a high-minded jury like the Nobel panel needs to decide who to reward, don't you think they'll take this kind of imbalance into account -- the fact that we hear an awful lot from one culture and hardly at all from others? Don't you see why they might want to give someone else a chance to be heard, for once? Or is it all just a big commercial jungle out there, survival of the fittest, devil take the hindermost? And are people who try to level the ground, make the talkers listen to someone else for a change, are they just pompous meddling asses?

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johnschreimann
2008-10-03 12:03 am UTC (link)

Question 1:

No. I don't have a problem. I wouldn't have a problem if it were 100 percent or 0 percent of European sales, either. Or if it were 100 companies or just 1 company. Or zero companies. Or if it were Ethiopian companies or South African companies importing or exporting. I'm not a big nationalistic person, either... so putting a different name on the location of where things were produced makes not a single difference to me in that regard.

Question 2:

Yes, it has to do with the distributors (though you could mean stores or Disney, et al for that matter) if that is what you mean by "distribution channels." Book selling is a business. They do a great job of making available what people want to read or watch -- and do a better job than anyone in the past. Look in Barnes and Noble. Probably some of Dr. Phil and Clive Kussler. But they have all of the "high-minded" stuff like Derrida/Sartre and French/Japanese dubbed movies. We certainly live in a time when there is greater access to any media. There is not much excuse why anyone cannot make anything or distribute it anymore, really. Besides an imaginary dialogue, we can't also compare results to another imaginary "situation", either, that was preferable in the past. I can't think of any.

Question 3:

Why does it matter what the Nobel panel thinks? This ignores that that the market and money are rewards that exist now (even if they didn't in the imaginary time when writing was all about dialogues and falsely constructed competition among groups). And writers, except for the cash prize maybe, should only care if what they do satisfies themselves and makes them money. Or they should do something else if it doesn't (like people who don't like writing or aren't good). I mean scarcity being what it is, paper and time and other resources should be used in other ways. Many of the countries in the world have worse problems to deal with than not being recognized by Nobel. Like not being killed by religious fanatics or having something to eat because a dictator runs a command economy and has driven the currency into hyperinflation. Throwing them a few bones isn't going to create wealth nor a thriving book industry.

Question 4:

If someone wants something, it is no grounds that others should agree too. Not even what I want is what I advocate. I might advocate all people read my favorite authors or that reading having a minimum allowance per week for everyone. Or displace religious texts with something more eclectic. I advocate the market, not trying to prevent anything (except force). Certainly if not for the limitations of reality, we all want everything to be possible at once. The people who try to "make the talkers listen" are really trying to make "listeners listen." The people who make the talkers listen are better talkers. You could also mean more belligerent talkers that bludgeon lesser talkers, but in my mind the "commercial jungle" is not a jungle like that at all. It's the civilized way of making and comparing art. At some degree, it's the civilized way comparing anything. You might notice that no action was taken to make sure people read our livejournals and it happened. Why is that? Well, because we don't live in a jungle. And even unfit (commercially) people like me still write -- even with a measly few readers.

(Reply to this) (Parent)

lord_whimsy
2008-10-03 04:00 am UTC (link)

Or is it all just a big commercial jungle out there, survival of the fittest, devil take the hindermost?

Please. You know as well as I do that you can remove the commercial element to art, books, and film, and you'd still have some bitchy artists competing, keeping score. Much of your blog is devoted to this sort of jockeying. Those little artworld ranking graphs you post are no better than someone judging a movie by how much it grossed.

And are people who try to level the ground, make the talkers listen to someone else for a change, are they just pompous meddling asses?

That's exactly what they are. And they kill culture by feeding it to odious leaden beasts like "the big dialogue of literature."

We should remember we're talking about books and films, not fuel and food. It's hardly a zero sum game. Does a big budget film prevent an indie flick from being made? Does a Harry Potter book prevent an obscure title from being published? In my experience, the blockbuster films and books often fund the more obscure projects.

Now let me get this straight: you don't think the Europeans who line up to see Hollywood films are aware they're in line to see a Hollywood film? And if they don't have a problem with it, why do you care--unless you feel you know what's best for them?

(Reply to this) (Parent)

	cap_scaleman 2008-10-03 08:50 am UTC (link)
	Books and iec-creams are not the same. (Reply to this) (Parent)(Thread)

	lord_whimsy 2008-10-04 03:49 am UTC (link)
	Dammit--no wonder I have ink all over my tongue! (Reply to this) (Parent)

trini_naenae
2008-10-03 05:23 am UTC (link)

Ah yes, the classic "this culture I don't like because ______ is shit and should be ignored at all costs because ______ and we're totally better than them" thinking.

What I say to those that will listen is this: All cultures have their good parts and their bad parts. In some cultures the good parts are more prominent/obvious and in some cultures the bad parts are more prominent/obvious. I can find good things in just about any culture, even the ones that have hurt me. Stop complaining about culture ____ and accept them for what they are. Try to do something to improve whatever is problematic about that culture (and complaining doesn't count - it must be positive/active). And if you think a certain culture is the best ever and has no faults chances are one of these three: 1)You haven't lived in the culture long enough to get to a point of serious frustration. 2)You have been separated yourself from said culture and forgotten about the bad parts and are deluding yourself. 3)You haven't lived in a culture outside of your own long enough to appreciate it for what it is, good and bad (and this usually takes 1 or 2 years for cultures similar to one's own to 5 or more years with the cultures that are very different).

If I have gathered from previous encounters that they won't listen or experienced them not listening then I simply won't talk to them about such things. Why waste my thought and make myself miserable? If the person is a friend and I know they can take it, I have given them a stern "oh no you don't" talking to. And if someone insists on going on about how they are obviously superior to me, I simply remove myself from their presence.

I've found more and more that systematically removing toxic people and opinions from my life/sphere of influence (as much as is possible at least) makes me a much better person. Of course, I'm sure I can be a bit snotty at times and probably need reminders as well.

edit:Then again, I'm probably just preaching to the choir.

Edited at 2008-10-03 05:25 am UTC

(Reply to this)

cap_scaleman
2008-10-03 08:29 am UTC (link)

Hmm, this reminds me a bit of the criticism they've recieved for not choosing Astrid Lindgren for winning the nobel prize of literature. But think about it, she have had her books translated into several languages and most of them are children's books not particuarly being books explaining the changes of the times they where written.

And everybody know her.

Selma Lagerlöf, on the other hand, seem to be forgotten and burried by the short memory of the masses.

(Reply to this) (Thread)

	lord_whimsy 2008-10-04 04:00 am UTC (link)
	So, did you think Astrid Lindgren should have won a Nobel, Cap? Raises a lot of questions. Should room be made in the Nobel ranks for popular or light works? Must all Nobel laureates be purveyors of difficult, serious work? Should the enrichment of a culture be a factor in selecting who wins? (Reply to this) (Parent)(Thread)

	cap_scaleman 2008-10-04 08:03 pm UTC (link)
	Hmm, well, I am quite indifferent. (Reply to this) (Parent)

jermynsavile
2008-10-04 12:00 am UTC (link)

Wasn't aware that there was a "European model." Is there? I've been reading for years and couldn't identify one if you aimed a shotgun at my head and told me my life depended on it.

One bloke, silly prize, who cares? In fact all prizes seem a little arbitrary and, as such, ridiculous. And his attitude is no less ludicrous than those responsible for "The Oscars," in which Americans celebrate ~~world~~ American cinema and pretend they're being fair/inclusive because there is a foreign language category. It is reported world-wide with uncritical adoration, as if the judgements are objective and devoid of bias, cant and commercial considerations. People who award prizes and can suppress their critical faculties enough to do the job aren't really to be trusted, surely?

Today there was an article in The Times where some imbecile wrote, on the basis of two American comics, Sarah Silverman and Tina Fey, getting a bit of airtime that women (and presumably American women at that) were now the future of comedy. We live in an age of caricature and gross generalisation. And if there are a couple of men who do well next year I'm looking forward to The Times running stories on the return of testosterone in comedy. All daft. And anyone with any sense reads this stuff and yawns.

It all has little to do with pro- or anti- Americanism, just journalists looking for copy.

(Reply to this) (Thread)

	lord_whimsy 2008-10-04 03:44 am UTC (link)
	How dare you come along and toss ice cubes into my hot little teapot, J! Can't you see I'm trying to whip up a hot frothy tempest here? (Reply to this) (Parent)(Thread)

jermynsavile
2008-10-04 07:05 am UTC (link)

I'm having a hard time trying to imagine the affable Whimsy that I know and admire turning into a tabloid-style controversialist. I'd rather think of it as a consequence of one of two things:

- that moment when one reads the papers and reacts with spluttering indignation to some half-arsed comment that is probably mis-reported in the first place and then, half-an-hour later, one thinks "bloody journalists, winding me up again over nothing ..."

- or, more likely, all this time you've been spending in the woods has awakened in you the instincts of a hunter. This was merely you laying down a trap, while thinking, "today I'm gonna catch me a Momus..."

(Reply to this) (Parent)(Thread)

	lord_whimsy 2008-10-04 03:27 pm UTC (link)
	Stop wagging that finger, J--you're denting my nose! (Reply to this) (Parent)(Thread)

	jermynsavile 2008-10-04 06:48 pm UTC (link)
	It isn't just admonishment, there was admiration too at a job well done. You did catch you a Momus! (Reply to this) (Parent)(Thread)

	lord_whimsy 2008-10-04 11:47 pm UTC (link)
	Eh, I love Nick--he just makes me cranky sometimes. (Reply to this) (Parent)

	grandfaults 2008-10-04 06:58 am UTC (link)
	I agree with almost everything except for one tiny mote: The use of "drag" in a pejorative sense is totally out of place, especially in this text! Drag performers have their own culture/reasons for performing and it shouldn't be used as an insult... (Reply to this) (Thread)

	lord_whimsy 2008-10-04 03:32 pm UTC (link)
	The drag queens I've known since the mid-eighties would be highly amused at your comment. Drag ain't just "drag" anymore. "La Cage aux Folles" was a long time ago. (Reply to this) (Parent)

	imomus 2008-10-09 12:56 pm UTC (link)
	The author Horace and his colleagues chose for the Nobel Prize for Literature was a Frenchman who has lived in such exotic places as Nigeria, Bangkok, Mexico City and... Boston. (Reply to this) (Thread)

	imomus 2008-10-09 11:55 pm UTC (link)
	Mark Lawson cautiously defends the Nobel committee's anti-Americanism -- not on the grounds of provincialism this time, but because US novels tend not to be formally experimental. (Reply to this) (Parent)

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