Weetzie Crap

young adult tchotchkes

On Wednesday the New York Times published an interview with that wispy scribbler of lucrative subversions, Francesca Lia Block. Next to the headline they've posted a misty photo of Block herself, confusing, as usual, her collection of "literary" characters for Hot Topic shoppers with her own life. The Times writer regurgitates Block's cultural cache in the same way that Block's world is described on the back of her large-print fables or on websites devoted to her work: "Francesca Lia Block's Los Angeles is a glittering dream world of 'stained-glass Marilyn Monroes shining in the trees, leopard-spotted cars, gardens full of pink poison oleander, where the pollution makes for extra-beautiful sunsets.' " Juxtaposed against a description of the ways in which Block's "real" life overlaps with the fantasy world of her books is a repeated insistence upon the edginess of Block's books, of her daring offering of non-normative characters and desires. Block dares to mention AIDS, eating disorders, incest, and subculture/mall fashions in her little ditties, rolling her bag of "issues" into a metallic commercial for the Adam's Family Reunion-esque quirkiness of her well-marketed teens. Her hackneyed brand of coolness sits firmly in a kind of late-ninties nihilistic primitivism. Her characters give lip-service to caring about "politics" through such affirmations as "I'm into Indians!"

And so Block imposes conventional complexes on style rebels and, voila, sells tons (750,000 at Harpercollins, one of her publishers) of books. Her flashy packaging of what she fancies to be subcultures mass-markets the threshold of content in YA fiction. But what is so constructive about the grocery list multiculturalism she animates?

Block attempts to wield all that glitters into a feisty refutation of the pitfalls of overconsumption and patterns of abuse, but her characters ultimately fail to escape the heavy dose of history they are incredibly shrinking beneath. Block cannot write her way out of the past or the present, and finally offers nothing more than Freud and fairies in this season’s fashions. Through her choice to continually rework fairy tale motifs, she seems to be toying with the idea that the fracturing of archetypal molds might be a world-changing undertaking. Her attempts to rewrite troubled "outsider" teens as dazzling warriors are heroic, but as the title of her collection of the "Weetzie Bat" stories, Dangerous Angels, implies, her fables teeter more toward the exploitation of teenage angst than the exposition of American decadence.

Everyone in Leather!

Fear and Loathing :

"Reading the front page made me feel a lot better. Against that heinous background, my crimes were pale and meaningless. I was a relatively respectable citizen--a multiple felon, perhaps, but certainly not dangerous. And when the Great Scorer came to write against my name, that would surely make a difference.
Or would it? I turned to the sports page and saw a small item about Muhammad Ali; his case was before the Supreme Court, the final appeal. He'd been sentenced to five years in prison for refusing to kill 'slopes.'
'I ain't got nothin' against them Viet Congs,' he said. Five years." (74)

The Arcades Project:
"Grund has made the ingenious suggestion that the bonnet, which is contemporaneous with the crinoline, actually provides men with directions for managing the latter. The wide brim of the bonnet is turned up--thereby demonstrating how the crinoline must be turned up in order to make sexual access to the woman easier for the man." (80)

from the "Biographical Note" in the 2000 Perennial edition of The Bell Jar: "The pressures of the fashion world which seems increasingly superficial and artificial, the return home to the dead summer world of a suburb in Boston. Here the cracks in her [the heroine, Esther Greenwood's] nature which had been held together as it were by the surrounding pressures of New York widen and gape alarmingly. More and more her warped view of the world around--her own vacuous domestic life, and that of her neighbors--seems the one right way of looking at things." (254)

Chasing Rabbits

"Now, lying on my back in bed, I imagined Buddy saying,
'Do you know what a poem is, Esther?'
'No, what?' I would say.
'A piece of dust.'
Then just as he was smiling and starting to look proud, i would say, 'So are the cadavers you cut up. So are the people you think you're curing. They're dust as dust as dust. I reckon a good poem lasts a whole lot longer than a hundred of those people put together.' " (56)

The "survey" of American lit class i teach began as a genuine survey. i would start the class reading Hawthorne or Melville and move through Gilman and Wharton to Hemingway and then open up the 20th century. i moved chronologically, thinking i was ready to back my selections up with some modernism/postmodernism scaffolding, but i wasn't. So i switched to a thematic approach. My "American Dream" organizing principle quickly transformed into the "American Nightmare," and the course now reads as a seminar on decadence. i replaced Hemingway with Fitzgerald, but the other "novels"--The Bell Jar, Fear and Loathing, The Virgin Suicides, Letters to Wendys--still fit the semester's narrative arc.

And now Hunter S. Thompson has gone and pulled a Hemingway. Or a Plath. Not quite a virgin suicide, but he has "committed" the act just the same.

Yesterday i began class by wishing my students a happy 21st day of black history month and told them, "Today's the day Malcolm X was assassinated in 1965. Hunter S. Thompson blew his brains out yesterday." i was too depressed to discuss either event, so we jumped right into discussing The Bell Jar. Then we spent 20 minutes getting to a point where they would consider "culture" each time they wanted to say "crazy" while they were oprah-analyzing Esther Greenwood, Plath's self-penned literary doppleganger.

Well, i asked them, what exactly is "wrong" with Esther? "She didn't get accepted into the summer seminar with the famous writer." "Her cheezy boyfriend doesn't take her writing seriously and he wants her to settle down, marry him, and start having babies." "She's obsessed with the fact that she hasn't had sex yet." "She feels bad for the Rosenbergs." "She can't decide if she wants to be 'good' or 'bad'." "She has to spend the summer with her annoying mother whose snoring keeps her awake." "The pregnant neighbor strolls by every morning with her six dirty kids and Esther hates babies." "She's in the English honors program but doesn't know anything about Shakespeare." "She got dosed with some really bad electric shock therapy." "She can only focus long enough to read tabloids." "She can't stop thinking." "She over-analyzes everything." "Eisenhower."

Alright, i say. What if we look for "mythologies," like the kind Roland Barthes was examining in last week's reading, in The Bell Jar? "Well," my conflicted journalism major suggests, "We could see her difficulties with how to go about being a poet as exposing the myth of how women were supposed to behave in the 1950's." At that point, class was almost over.

Before we start with Thompson's book, we'll read Didion's "Slouching Towards Bethlehem" and watch Gimme Shelter. Now that Thompson has performed Hemingway hara-kiri, will my students only be interested in talking about his "issues"? Will they dismiss his social critiques because of his proclivity for drugs and write off his suicide as "depression"?

Fight Test

The "Translators' Forward" of Benjamin's Arcades Project picks up a conversation we've been having in my 'notebooks' class this semester. The class is predicated on the examination of three famous 'notebooks': Marx's Grundrisse, Benjamin's Arcades Project, and Rem Koolhaas and Bruce Mau's S, M, L, XL. The AP forward proposes that, rather than simply offering a "blueprint" for a more cohesive, anticipated later stage of his collections, perhaps Benjamin was in the active process of creating a new kind of political writing as he pieced together (and revised) his Passagenarbeit. The translators propose that reading the notebooks compels a reader to take a stand regarding the "classic distinction between research and application, Forschung and Darstellung." They explain that Benjamin both worried over what use to which the notebooks might be put, as well as "the future construction of a literary form for this text." (xi)

As our class has recently taken heated positions regarding our receptions of the Grundrisse as either inferior predecessor to Capital in the hierarchy of "great" work, or brilliantly prescient cultural studies-like treatise, not only on methodology but also upon the historical emergence of capital, we are ready for round 2 of Forschung v. Darstellung.

Some of us felt persuaded by Antonio Negri's concern in Marx Beyond Marx that the Grundrisse not simply be subjected to a philological reading, because the import of the notebooks as a "theoretico-political" project might be located in its openness: "We can see in it the passion for totality, but only in the form of a multiplicity of sequences and leaps, never in a monolithic sense; we can find in it, above all, a dynamic which has the plurality and the same diversity of subjectivity, and is nowhere closed." (13)

We decided that we liked the sound of this phrase, "passion for totality." As we move into the AP, we will continue our consideration of the model offered by this predilection, and will ask ourselves whether or not Benjamin shared Marx's mania.

Benjamin Terms

i'm reading Benjamin's Arcade's Project for one of my classes, "Forms: Notebooks." In this space i will post links to definitions or images of words i've come across in my reading that are either unfamilar to me or have been complicated by Benjamin. i welcome posts from readers who can offer further definitions for any of these terms, or suggestions for other words that should be highlighted from the text.


panorama: "In their attempt to produce deceptively lifelike changes in represented nature, the panoramas prepare the way not only for photography but for film and sound film." (5)

Jugendstil: "The transfiguration of the solitary soul appears to be its goal. Individualism is its theory." (9)

etui: "The interior is not just the universe but also the etui of the private individual. To dwell means to leave traces." (9)

antimacassars: "Coverlets and antimacassars, cases and containers are devised in abundance; in these, the traces of the most ordinary objects of use are imprinted. In just the same way, the traces of the inhabitant are imprinted in the interior. Enter the detective story, which pursues these traces." (9)

flaneur: "The flaneur still stands on the threshold--of the metropolis as of the middle class. Neither has him in its power yet." (10)

physiognomics: "Early contributions to a physiognomics of the crowd are found in Engels and Poe. The crowd is the veil through which the familiar city beckons to the flaneur as phantasmagoria--now a landscape, now a room." (10)

chthonic: "It is the unique provision of Baudelaire's poetry that the image of woman and the image of death intermingle in a third: that of Paris. The Paris of his poems is a sunken city, and more submarine than subterranean. The chthonic elements of the city--its topographical formations, the old abandoned bed of the Seine--have evidently found in him a mold." (10)

Gesamtkunstwerk: From this watchword derives the concption of the 'total work of art'--the Gesamtkunstwerk--which would seal art off from the developments of technology. The solemn rite with which it is celebrated is the pendant to the distraction that transfigures the commodity. Both abstract from the social existence of human beings. Baudelaire succumbs to the rage for Wagner. (11)

Charles Fourier: "Marx took a stand against Carl Grun in order to defend Fourier and to accentuate his 'colossal conception of man.' He considered Fourier the only man besides Hegel to have revealed the essential mediocrity of the petty bourgeois." (17)

phalanstery: "The secret cue for the Fourierist utopia is the advent of machines. The phalanstery is designed to restore huan beings to a system of relationships in which morality becomes superfluous." (16)

Overstock

On the edge of my couch sits a stack of books i've purchased this semester for one of the graduate classes i'm currently enrolled in. All 5 books pursue speech act theory in some fashion, a conceptual hot topic around which my latent academicism purportedly orbits. Speech act theory takes J.L. Austin's designation of "performative" speech, language that calls into being what it names, as the impetus for its linguistic formulations. i'm in grad school because i found Judith Butler's reframing of performative speech as performativity, and of performativity as a way of considering the ways in which "reality" performs its way into being through such persuasive encores as gender, provocatively compelling. But like many other overeducated waitresses, i'm beginning to wonder, what is the point? What is all of this fun and exciting theory making?

Exhibit A: inevitable intellectual hypocrisy. i own an ipod and i update it daily.
Exhibit B: pathetic retention. As i searched my bookshelves for a title for this blog, i came across a copy of one of those new books eagerly perched on my couch. i pulled the book off the shelf, humbled to find my own fastidious undergrad notations ("Rorty is a wanker") confirming that this was indeed my book and that i had indeed rebought a book i had, some years earlier, scrupulously perused.
Exhibit C: classroom logomachy. i frequently roll my eyes at the sincerity with which my classmates and i defend the dangerous propositions inherent in Derrida's work in between sips of our radical praxis corporate coffee treats. Then i push play on my ipod, hop on my bike, and head home to prepare inspirational classroom exercises designed to inspire my students into exposing cultural mythologies a la Roland Barthes. After passing by the College Republicans' advertisement for a Sunday afternoon "P.E.T.A." BBQ at a frat house, i consider giving up.

Michael Warner, in Publics and Counterpublics, his collection of essays revolving "around a central question: What is a public?," bitterly laments, "But most of the imaginative energies of queer culture have come to be focused on a rigorously anti-assimilationist rhetoric invoked only in non-state public-sphere contexts such as Modern Language Association panels." (212) But Michael Warner, when you came to speak at my (state university) campus's "Counter-Cultures: Dissent, Radicalism, and Community in American Life" conference during the year i dropped out of graduate school, i only heard about your lecture and about this radical conference from some grad students who came into the feminist bookstore where i work after your lecture. Why didn't those grad students post a flier at the FEMINIST bookstore, or at least at one of the bars where disillusioned ex-grad student hipsters drown their sorrows, or even at the non-profit record store across the street from the feminist bookstore? Michael Warner, why didn't you organize a reading at or at least drop by the record store or the bookstore?