A New Yorker Story More About the Parents Than the Child

 The latest New Yorker short story, "Hansa, Gretyl and Piece of Shit." by Rebecca Curtis, raises more interesting questions about the parents of the chief protagonist, a young girl named Gretyl, than it does about her. She's a passive girl who tends to blame herself for anything that's wrong and as such, is not that interesting,

Some might argue that's a description of all-too-many girls, and perhaps that's the point. If so, it seems just a bit out of date.

Gretyl's parents are the key to this distressing tale, albeit one with a politically correct ending.

In a nutshell, this is a family of three daughters considerably spread out in years and by the time Gretyl is coming of age, the parents do little more than feign interest in their last offspring despite her increasingly distressed physical condition.  Gretyl's mother is into the nice things of life and her father, a pilot often away, has begun to wonder if he should start over again with a new wife who can give him a son.

Gretyl is depicted as singularly passive and accepting of her plight as an illness, now routine if quickly addressed, takes a devastating hold. Her only friend, a stray cat she secretly feeds, meets a dreadful fate, seemingly becoming a nail in Gretyl's own coffin. But they will be reunited in the afterlife, or so Gretyl eventually appears to believe.

Saved by an immigrant intruder, Gretyl also marries one and becomes a workaholic anesthesiologist not in San Francisco, but in Oakland. And as we all know, there is no there there, at least not a there one wishes upon oneself. Loyal and supportive of her criminally apathetic parents as time passes, she's depicted as a saint.

With the German fairy tale a structural device, the ending is appropriately a mostly happy one -- far too happy when it comes to Gretyl's parents.

The bottom line: Ms Curtis has a prose style well suited to story telling, but she needed a better story to tell. It did serve to remind me that it had been a while since I had listed to Englebert Humperdinck's opera "Hansel and Gretyl" and it's beautiful "Prayer Duet." Now if only one could have come across something like this while reading the story. And hmmm -- in the opera, Hansel is generally played by a woman. Nothing new in opera, but in tune with these times of gender fluidity. perhaps Ms Curtis will consider incorporating something along those lines for her next offering.

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After I posted this review, I got to thinking there might be another way to look at this story. Perhaps it can be viewed as a political allegory even though Ms Curtis made no mention of that possibility in her author interview.

The backdrop is President Donald Trump's run for office in 2016 plus various subsequent statements. Central to his election campaign was a call to strictly limit cross-border immigration ("rapists and murders") and to, if possible, halt all immigration from Islamic countries. In conjunction with this, Trump was widely viewed as seeking the continuation of "white supremacy" when it comes to who controls the U.S.

In brief, the chief protagonist of the short story in question, a teenage girl named Gretyl, is near death as a result neglect by her lily white parents.  Outside, a seemingly threatening, non-white man appears to be lurking and there are reports of break-ins and robberies in the neighborhood.

But in the end, the immigrant, a man originally from Palestine, but who grew up in Kazakhstan (Islamic regions) saves Gretyl and she goes on to marry a Persian-American and, except for one thing, leads a productive life focused on helping people who are disadvantaged. 

The moral: the long-dominant white population Trump wants to preserve and protect are losers and our salvation lies with immigrants and especially, in this case, if they have an Islamic background.

Perhaps Ms Curtis could be encouraged to comment.

Black Writers Make Progress Despite "Systemic Racism"

 We've heard a lot in recent months about how the U.S. is fundamentally defined by "systemic racism" -- in other words, discrimination against non-white citizens, and especially Blacks, is baked in the cake because the country was established on that very basis despite certain idealistic postulates.

Thus, one branch of this theory goes, reform of existing institutions can't, by definition, produce equality and justice. Absent a major transfer of power, Blacks in particular can't get anywhere.

In the face of such arguments, I've been trying to see if there might be a counter-narrative, at least in the arts. Could it be that things aren't quite as bad as it is currently fashionable to depict them?

The Nov. 9, 2020, Arts section of the New York Times  has an item about a woman, who somewhat against the tide, writes short stories and is just having her second collection, "The Office of Historical Corrections" published. Replete with a photo of the author, Danielle Evans, the piece was awarded two thirds of a page.  Not bad publicity!

Ms Evans is Black and what interested me was what she had to say about that. In a nutshell, while there is still room for improvement on one front or another, a lot of progress has been made.

Asked how things have changed, Ms Evans had the following to say:

"I'm less afraid that I'll be the only Black writer that somebody reads or that there will be only one book by a writer of color each season that people are talking about. It's much more true now that you'll hear, 'Here are eight books by Black writers. Let's think about what they are saying to each other.'"

While that's good news for those unwilling to throw out the baby with the bathwater when it comes to making America a better society, it's also good news for Ms Evans as a writer. It gives her, she said, more freedom to write about riskier, weirder material because she doesn't have to worry about being taken as representative of her race.

Where is change still needed?  In Evans view, white writers need to talk more about race and Black writers should be asked to review books written by whites, in part to point out what's missing there. 

"People of color notice absences, we notice the treatment of secondary characters, where the language gets weird. And that's useful for everybody."

There was a time -- well, it seems very naive now -- when the notion of where thing ought to go was "integration." The concept was that if discriminatory barriers could be broken down, we could all be the same despite differing skin colors, religions, whatever. Well, not anymore. Racial differences need to be noted, acknowledged in a positive fashion, explored, understood and valued.

Here's Evan's take on that when it comes to literature:

"We should be talking about race more as a function of craft -- of everybody's craft. Maybe it shouldn't be the first paragraph of every review, but it should be noted that books have a racial context. Conversations would be more interesting for it. Part of the answer is making that conversation more visible in more places, so it doesn't feel hyper-visible  when it's focused on the work of Black writers."

Moving away from race and onto the state of literary fiction, Evans believes it has a future despite many claims to the contrary.

"If I put the right story in someone's hands, it can change their life," she said. In that context, she pointed in particular to Toni Morrison's 1992 novel "Jazz."

 

The World of Art Has Abandoned Beauty and Aesthetics

 Once upon a time, beauty was a noble virtue and a philosophic ideal as opposed to a trip-wire of political correctness. Aesthetic considerations, often refined, formal and generally acknowledged if always subject to challenge, then determined what was beautiful, what was not. And the art world was the main venue where debates over relative beauty took place.

Not so much, if at all, anymore.

"Art today is less about the formal or aesthetic properties of an object than a way of talking about the intricately entangled, increasingly unstable world in which we live."  So said Ben Eastham, a London-based art critic in an essay entitled "The Case for Embracing Uncertainty in Art."

And, indeed, that quote is the only place in the entire, lengthy essay where the word "aesthetic" or "aesthetics" occurs. How about "beauty?"  That word doesn't occur at all.

Perhaps it all started in 1917 when Marcel Duchamp contributed a porcelain urinal signed "R. Mutt" and entitled "Fountain" to a New York art exhibition. Whatever the genesis, matters have come a long way since then, to the point where aesthetic considerations are about the last thing an art museum is likely to consider when mounting an exhibition of contemporary works. What the works, or what the artist (since the works themselves are often incomprehensible), says about society (rarely if ever anything positive), and whether the artist can be viewed as a disadvantaged minority of one sort or another, seem to be what matters most.

In other words, the world of art is today just another extension of the world of politics and social criticism. Why does it survive as such? Well, there is still a certain mystique about the whole business and a fascination over the celebrity it can bring. In addition, there is apparently still sufficient cache in acquiring works of a known-name artist as a trophy of one's wealth and power, and perhaps even as a store of value -- if a lot more questionable than, say, owning a Monet painting.

Some will, of course, be quick to point out that social commentary or overt criticism has long figured in at least some prominent works of art (Picasso's "Guernica" for example), but almost always in the past presented in a context of aesthetic principles. That, according to Eastham, has pretty much disappeared.  If that leaves viewers puzzled as to what they are seeing, or why they are seeing it, so be it, he maintains.

"Where movements have historically been defined by shared forms and subjects linked to their sponsors (church, state, merchants), the art of today can only loosely be identified by some common characteristics: it foregrounds ideas over forms and materials; borrows liberally and not always responsibly from disciplines as varied as philosophy, ecology and sociology; is preoccupied by forming connections between disparate ideas and cultures; is sceptical of received wisdoms; takes place in a globalized world; is, to quote Marshall McLuhan, “whatever you can get away with” or, to paraphrase Robert Rauschenberg, “whatever I say it is.”

So where does that leave aesthetics and beauty? Out in the cold, or as we continually see, in the enveloping arms of commerce where the nobility of beauty is devalued on a daily basis.

Humdrum-Sex, Disturbing Violence Loom Large in "Ghoul"

 Back about four years ago, when I was reading The New Yorker regularly (I stopped because I thought the magazine's coverage of the arts had significantly deteriorated), I came to realize that most of its weekly short stories were "downers."  You can read what I had to say about that here.

Well, I decided to re-subscribe and the latest short story, "Ghoul," by George Saunders, fits easily into that trend. It's unrelentingly dystopian if rather imaginatively set in an underground theme park that calls to mind Dante's "Inferno."

Asked in a New Yorker author interview whether the story has a message, perhaps as a metaphor to the current U.S. sociopolitical situation, Saunders said he didn't know what his story meant. He described it, in effect, as an exercise in writing -- an attempt to write something that will "try to get the reader to finish the story -- no easy feat -- by making each little motion of the narrative compelling."

How does he accomplish that? In large part in the tried and true manner -- heavy doses of sex and violence. Not much in the way of innovation there, but as we know, sex and violence sells -- and the New Yorker pays authors well for the stories it publishes.  

While the sex is depicted as rather casual, very open "mating" about which no one is much concerned, the violence is another story.  This theme park is run on the basis of a bunch of rules and the population (sort of a circus-performer-like tribe) is encouraged to rat on each other when transgressions take place.  As opposed to Dante, that brings to mind George Orwell and "1984." Those deemed guilty in "Goul" are kicked to death by their colleagues and friends, and one way to break the rules is to not kick hard enough.

When the chief protagonist, a man named Brian, gets involved in one of these situations, he has a bit of an awakening that Saunders identifies as perhaps the most significant moment in the tale.

“Sometimes in life the foundation upon which one stands will give a tilt, and everything that one has previously believed and held dear will begin sliding about, and suddenly all things will seem strange and new.” [Brian thinks to himself]  Now, is that a good thing or a bad thing? I find I’ve reached the same conclusion as Brian (aided, I’d say, by the process of writing this story): it depends. It depends on what we do next in the face of this new understanding of ourselves."  So Saunders told the New Yorker.

Readers can make of that what they will and that's the point, Saunders would say.

U.S. Minorities Seen Needing Control Over Production

Viet Than Nguyen, author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel "The Sympathizer" and not an uncontroversial character based on what I have previously written about him, has expressed a somewhat Marxist view of what U.S. non-white minorities need to do to get their stories told.

They need to acquire control over "the means of production," he told the Los Angeles Times.

“If you come from a so-called minority, let’s say me as an Asian American, you live in a condition of narrative scarcity: almost none of the stories are about you. ... If Black people and other people of color and other minorities don’t control, or don’t have control, over the means of production, they really don’t control their stories. They are subject to the whims and mercies of people more powerful from them — the producers and the owners — who can dictate what kinds of stories are told,” Nguyen said.

The author appeared to be talking mainly about film and other expensive forms of story telling as opposed to writing, but his point is nonetheless in the tenor of the times: a perceived need to end "white privilege" and to even "cancel" the culture associated with it.

But it seems a little behind the curve. There doesn't seem to be a pronounced shortage of stories involving or about minorities at present. Rather, perhaps all too belatedly, there seems to be a determined push toward greater diversity with respect both to the nature of the stories being told and who is telling them. For evidence of that, consult the arts sections of major American newspapers and magazines on regular basis.

Just one example: the leading candidate for this year's Tony award for the best play on Broadway (before theaters closed for the pandemic) is "Slave Play" by Black playwright Jeremy O. Harris.

James Joyce, Cardi B and the Censorship of the Arts

 In 1933, Judge John M. Woolsey famously found that James Joyce's novel "Ulysses" was neither pornographic nor obscene despite, for instance, a scene in which the chief protagonist, Leopold Bloom, masturbates within his pants in sight of a young lady who has encouraged his sexual act by lifting her skirts. 

This, by the way, appears to have been informed by an incident in Joyce's own life. On his first date with his future wife, Nora Barnacle performed a similar service in a park not far from where the scene involving Bloom took place and at about the same time in the early evening.

Woolsey's ruling, which was upheld upon appeal and built upon by various subsequent rulings, opened the door to a much wider range of literary expression than had been the case previously, resulting, for instance, in books such as "50  Shades of Grey" being published without incident.

Now comes Cardi B and her collaborator Megan Thee Stallion with their recent hit "WAP," song a recent New York Times article identified as "brazenly graphic" and "uninhibited raunch." Well, if one reads the lyrics, that's putting it mildly.

Before I go on, some readers might contend there is a difference between a song and literature. Well, not any more.  Bob Dylan, one might recall, was recently awarded the Novel Prize in Literature for the "poetic expressions" contained within his song lyrics.

So what has Cardi B's song got to do with "Ulysses?"  Censorship lifted in the case of the latter and censorship imposed in the case of the former, but not by public authorities seeking to protect public morality and the established order of things.

In the case of "WAP," the censorship is voluntary and aimed at maximizing revenue, money apparently being more important to the creators than freedom of artistic expression. That's one for the Nobel folks to ponder if Cardi B eventually comes up for consideration.

As the NYT reports, 

While "WAP" with its original lyrics is free to stream and in so doing, managed to command the top spot on "Billboard's Hot 100" for four straight weeks, receiving over a billion clicks in the process, it needed to be cleaned up, which is to say censored, before it could be played on commercial radio.

"Today, most major releases that have some naughty words -- including the latest from Taylor Swift and even Stevie Wonder -- also come out in censored versions," the NYT article said. "Decades ago, that may have been done in part to avoid political controversy. Now business is the driving force, as labels chase down every click and playlist placement to maximize songs' streaming revenue."

"There is definitely a market for edited content," Jim Roppo, general manager of Republic Records, told the NYT.  "If you are eliminating yourself from that market, then you are leaving money on the table."

Perish the thought, and especially in the name of artistic integrity -- giving Ms. B and Ms Stallion the benefit of the doubt here.

A Woman's Life Lived Not to the Expectations of Others

 I was looking through the Arts section of the Nov. 1, 2020 Sunday New York Times  and got reading an article about a photographer named Jona Frank.

What jumped out at me was the following:

"Unlike her mother, however, she pursued her personal dreams, not others' expectations." 

This reminded me of a project of mine, proceeding very slowing at present as a result of the pandemic: trying to get at least a few arias of a neo-baroque operetta called "Patricia" composed and sung. While I may blog more about this in the future, if you are interested you can find out the details and hear a couple of songs sung here. (Click on the word "here.")

The operetta is all about a young woman named Patricia who, like Jona, doesn't want a life based on the expectations of other people.  

Jona's mother, readers learn, believed in the importance of "respectability" in traditional middle class American suburbia. "She was not a person who believed she could have options," the NYT quotes Ms Frank as saying. While her mother lived in what Ms Frank believes was "quiet despair" Ms Frank herself felt trapped in "the uncomfortable fit between societal norms and individual desires." Her photographs attempt, among other things, to explore such a situation.

Patricia's situation is a little different. A very bright girl, strong in math and science, her parents and teachers strongly encouraged her to pursue a career in such directions and when one encounters her in the operetta, she has a high-paying technical position with a firm specializing in digital imagery. Her first aria, in the baroque da capo style, is entitled "All my life I've been sensible" and her second is entitled "I'm good at my work."  I'm sure you get the idea.

But Patricia has just returned from her first visit to Manhattan, for an industry conference, and her eyes have opened. She wants to drop everything and go there to "search for the woman I am, shed the woman they made me untrue."

Her friend Beatrice is horrified -- an on it goes from there.

Well, I started this project well before the pandemic and I suspect Patrica would not be anxious to start over in Manhattan at the moment.  But the composition project is moving exceptionally slowly and with any luck, a vaccine will have been deployed and Manhattan back to it's familiar self, with respect to culture and the performing arts, by the time this is completed.  If not, I suppose I can set it clearly in the past as sort of a nostalgia piece.