Sunday, December 29, 2002

Curmudgeon Michiko Kakutani gives popular culture a critical smackdown in this morning's New York Times.  I'd be cranky too, if I had to write about "American Idol," "The Bachelor," Britney Spears, Shania Twain, or any of the countless other meaningless, talentless trifles that litter the cultural landscape.  Kakutani's article was impassioned, but she never touched, except subtextually, on the heart of the matter, which is clearly the corporatization of culture.  All the elements she decries - the homogeneity, the repetition, the coarsening to the point of vulgarity - are incontrovertibly due to the bottom-line mentality of the corporations that control mass culture.  I agree with her analysis of the current state of cultural production, and with the examples she offers, wholeheartedly.  I think, however, it would have been more meaningful to discuss what was good, and novel, and compelling about the arts in 2002.  Speaking of popular culture, I watched a videotape of "The Osbournes" for the first time last night.  I feel no desire to see the show again, but the Osbournes are awfully cute and endearing, if extraordinarily foul-mouthed (and this from a frequent and dedicated curser).  I liked it, if only for the fact that it offers definitive proof that Ozzy Osbourne's children are vastly better-adjusted than George W. Bush's.  I was lying in bed this morning, thinking about metaphor.  I couldn't get out of bed for a long, long time this morning - because it was cold and rainy, because I am tired from exercising to excess, and because there were cats lying all over me.  I finally got up and went to the gym, and while I was putting in 40 minutes of tortured, exhausted treadmill running (too foggy and rainy to be outdoors), I thought about it some more.  It's pretty hard to think at the gym - they play very, very bad music there, very loudly.  I am currently harboring a particularly intense animus towards Sheryl Crow.  Her music is grating, banal, and atonal, and I don't mean that in an understanding, chacun a son gout, de gustibus non est disputandem-type fashion.  I mean in it in more absolute terms. Anyway - metaphor.  I wrote, on Dec. 27th, about Werner Herzog's use of metaphor, and I feel the need to clarify.  I wrote admiringly of Herzog's unwillingness to define the metaphor of Fitzcarraldo's ship with any finality.  I still admire it.  For the most part, however, I strongly believe that if meaning exists in any work of art, it is because the artist put it there.  This is not to ignore the fact that language games, such as metaphor, by definition involve some slippage of meaning, whereby multiple associations of thought (or experience) to image become possible, desirable even.  This line of thinking led me to the paper on "Waiting for Godot," I wrote for one of my high school English classes. My teacher marked my painstakingly composed paper down for not grasping that the tree under which Lucky, Estragon and Pozzo wait is but a thinly disguised metaphor for The Cross.  At the time, this made me hopping mad, and felt wildly unfair, but I by no means had the critical tools to understand why she was wrong.    Hope deferred maketh the something sick To be sure, a reader can project any old meaning all over a text, but that doesn’t imply that it was intentionally placed there. After all, if this or that text serves as nothing more than a wordy, translucent scrim through which we perceive and affirm our own best-loved convictions, why bother to read anything?    There's nothing in the text of "Waiting for Godot" that leads me to believe there is any metaphor whatsoever in that play.  Everything seems very clear and straightforward, if not necessarily naturalistic - in the absence of hope, as against the asymptote of time, the characters form habits, and imbue them with meaning, albeit meaning of no intrinsic value.  Does this philosophy inform my own belief system, structure the manner in which I live my life, or in some way define my attitude towards others?  Nope - but it does not pain me one little bit to perceive this as the true theme of the play.  It strikes me as a very fine thing to write about.    My teacher's interpretation of "Waiting for Godot" was fine - certainly there are many readers, and only one author.  I wouldn't go so far as to call her incorrect.  She did, however, miss an opportunity to teach me a thing or two about metaphor, and the textual reasons why our interpretations differed so wildly.   Clear as mud?  Good.  3:57:36 PM