Introduction to an Anthology (of a sort)
September 26, 2022
Another attempt at the introduction…
I don’t think this collection holds together all that well. I struggle to cohere the blog entries as a body because most every unit entry––each part of the supposed whole––is incoherent in itself. But not incoherent enough, I don’t think, for incoherence to be a connective tissue. The incoherence isn’t conversely consistent enough to appear intentional––and what am I supposed to do, retroactively muddy the more cogent entries to better target a shaky at best patina? Not that intent is a premium here, that was not the point. I had no hypothesis or organizing principle when I embarked on the blog project. Attempting to outfit one now is a bit of a fool’s errand. We are meant to reflect. Crystallization is the benefit of time. The blog entries are memories. How do I feel about them? Describe their textures.
Or perhaps diagnose? The blog entries are merely a running document of my neuroses. This is true-er and more troubling. Did I really manage to center every entry on myself? This was meant to be an exercise in affective criticism, dedicated exploration of texts, works of art. The self is implicit, but did I go too far? I’m doing my best to spare you the solipsism. This whole schtick is obvious and tired and too alive. Perform an autopsy. The blog posts are a body, a cadaver. Identify patterns, abnormalities. What happened here? These are all possible avenues.
And yet I feel an urge to perform some kind of thematic lift. I had a greater project in mind here, one that addresses, challenges, expands upon Ngai and ugly feelings in the abstract. Maybe that is just not the case. I am seeking system, and coming up short.
So, while I stall here, how about some more about me? How bout that? Shall we? I am caught up in––entrenched in, shall we say––this mode of writing that derives any ideologic and/or aesthetic merit it may or may not have through a hedging process that is equal parts rhetorical and emotional. Throughout these writings, you’ll find (poor you (see, I’m doing it!)) that I’m hesitant to take a firm position on anything, and when I occasionally do, I am quick to debase that position. When I acknowledge my shortcomings as a writer and rhetorician and hang a lantern on my anxieties about my stance, I armor myself. So long as the kernels of the argument I’m noncommittal to are somewhat cogent/interesting/intelligent, I can do anything. This is a kind of drug.
The compulsion to hedge of course originates from the real bottom, the deepest stores of my own insecurity. My intelligence is situation dependent at best. I am not a deep or different thinker. I do not have a theoretical ballast––the first month of material here went right over my head. Hence the smokescreen, the hullabaloo. All that and then laziness. The shucks, this engine’s faulty but we’ll make it! posture saves me the trouble of developing a real argument, with like a thesis and like evidence and all that. It saves me from having to really read or think, which is when you’re almost sure to encounter your real self. So it’s a crutch. (Can a crutch be style?) I was semi-dependent from the onset and then we read Koestenbaum in class and I read some more outside of class and he really introduced me to new possibilities for writing. Somehow, reading him affirmed that what I was doing was okay and emboldened me to iterate upon it, refine it to the station of supreme sophistication, viability. That’s like a C+ Koestenbaumian sentence there. I went a little hard in the cut aping him for a while and I’m in the process of drawing myself back, his residue calcified in my style guide, stubborn. Anyways, let’s package everything I’ve laid out thus far and call it A Crisis of Authenticity.
This has been my chief ugly feeling for some time now. I am suspended, on the page and in the day to day action of existence, between poles of hyper-arrogance and self-consciousness. The process of art making (if you can call this art) both soothes and exasperates the tension, becomes a meta-expression of it. Contrary to Ngai, however, I do hold that artwork itself can fire change (which I’ll get into after a few more agenda items). A thought: why do my blog posts argue anything? Why all the strife, the pitting works against one another? Perhaps if I eliminated the need to defend a position, I’d have no use for the meta-commentary (not a viable strategy in all arenas). What a dumb thought.
A finale to whatever this is: the lame thing is that this is not a new or interesting problem. Self-obsession, irony, post-irony souring/consuming the writing, not solving or meaning anything. Relax. This is my biggest hedge yet.
THE HUMILIATION OPTIC
I expand on what I’m writing here in a later blog entry. The gist is, for the better and worse, Koestenbaum’s Humiliation changed my life. I have moved through the world differently since I finished it. At first, I believed Koestenbaum had provided me a whole new way of looking at things––a new logic, a new criteria. Upon further consideration, I’ve amended that understanding. From Koestenbaum, what I’ve gleaned is language. His concepts were not necessarily illuminating. I believe I understood humiliation implicity (I believe we all do), but I didn’t have the words to think about it with any sophistication. So it’s not that I now assess the scenarios I encounter in my day to day through the optic of humiliation, but that I can access its lexicon. Language is fragile. It is prone to misapplication. But it is empowering. It can set us on a path toward catharsis. Words aren’t everything, but they’re a start. Again and again, great pieces of writing like Humiliation have expanded the vocabulary I use to process feeling and having to feel. So I keep the faith. Art does not remind us of the trap, it helps us to understand it and gives us hope of finding a key. If we built this world, we can build a better one. That kind of thing. You could say hope is the trap, but I’ll stop you right there. All of this is hokey. All of this is true.
NOTES ON ORGANIZATION
I’ve chosen to present the entries chronologically and with little to no editing. I believe this introduction, the entries, and the postscripts to the entries make up an exercise in form––how I’m choosing to write, my posture, my persona, the self-debasement, the messiness, etc.––being the content, more than the content of the writing itself. The broad organization is perhaps a better expression of my own ugly feelings and my thoughts on them than anything I actually have to say in the thick of things. This is at least the rationale I’m going with. My gambit. I’m not lazy. I am.
Generally speaking, I believe I’m a more focused writer in the earlier part of the anthology. Again this is form wise. Wall to wall, the topics I choose are rather nonpertinent. Early on, I operate from a position of strength. That’s the voice I don. I believe what I have to say and my cases are bulletproof. The self-consciousness and the earnestness pick up as we progress. My clarity has the opposite trajectory. The postscripts are more attuned to these patterns. I’m afraid to revisit them. They were written in a kind of fugue (even ‘fugue’ romanticizes it. I was hungover and mad). These are the broad strokes…
From Koestenbaum’s ‘The Inner Life of the Palette Knife’: “One of my pedagogical aims is to encourage writers to…make work that is modest, grandiose, peculiar, detailed, reduced, blunt, odd, a little bit stupid, a little bit clumsy, with secret pockets of refinement” (Koestenbaum 243). I hope that on occasion the blog entries honor/uphold this credo.