, Author at Post Road Magazine

IV. Genre

Carlo Rotella, Charles Farrell and James Parker

Carlo Rotella: Part of my faith in genre—part of why I find genre fiction more rewarding than literary fiction, and genre movies more rewarding than art movies—is that I believe genre is a deep well of language and gesture and other moves that allow you to express just about anything. So, to follow James’s model, an idea or an emotion in the universe is trying to express itself, and somebody figures out a way to make a Western or a romcom or a barroom weeper or a landscape painting or whatever so that idea can express itself. I think that’s more likely than someone invents some new form so that idea can express itself. We’ve got these tools, and the resources that the genre brings you are deeper than the resources that almost any single author could bring, especially to figuring out some totally new form in order to express her feelings. The question is whether we need somebody sitting down at the piano and doing something nobody’s ever done before—that’s one model—or can we go back to genre to get the equipment to open a portal for an idea that’s floating around in the ether, waiting to be born? Or does going back to the genre well inhibit the ability to say something new? What’s that idea’s or that feeling’s path to being born? Somebody has to make up a new way of doing things, or somebody can take some way we’ve already got that’s supple and flexible and deep, and use it to give this idea a pathway to enter the world.

James Parker: One ultimate problem with making it new is that it may be completely unrecognizable. It would have no context if it was truly, genuinely, mind-shatteringly new. And you wouldn’t be able to digest it at all.

CR: But that might be the purest expression of this idea that’s looking for a way to be born, right?

JP: In the Book of Job there’s this terrible bet between God and the devil. God is basically boasting: Look at Job, look at this great guy! He’s the best man, he thinks I’m fantastic! And the devil says, Well, I bet if you treat him badly enough he’ll curse you to your face. And God goes, Ah, you try. So the devil goes and afflicts him, and his children die, he gets open sores, sits in a dung hill, his wife is disgusted by him, and finally he curses the day he was born, he curses the whole of his existence. And God’s response is shockingly new. God’s response is just to stand on the effects pedal and shout at Job, Did you do this? Why were you . . . ? [incomprehensible noise]. Mind-shattering. There’s not a moral to it. There’s no theory to it. It’s pure, unmitigated experience. That current is always coming at us in one way or another. So how do we manage it? That’s the impulse to make it new itself.

CR: When Charles says, We have to think of a new way to do this, I hear [incomprehensible noise that God made]. And my instinct is to go in the opposite direction, more like, Which of our preexisting Lego pieces can I use to fit together to make this thing that wants to be made?

Charles Farrell: Well, I think that innovators always make obsolete their own creation. To me, if something is stated once, the only way you can use it at that point is to add it to language. But it cannot be recreated. It has no value if it’s recreated. So, if you can do it, you’ve done nothing. If you can technically improve on it, you’ve got nothing. You’re missing the point.

CR: So what would be getting the point?

CF: There are two ways, I think, to get the point. One is that you understand that this is now part of language—this we can use. So you’ve extended your vocabulary. That’s fair; it’s workable. And then there’s also the message. What is this person trying to tell me? And how can I incorporate what I’m being told? And this is separate from technique. And again, that’s something that goes on, that doesn’t stop.

CR: Okay, I can see that that’s the way John Coltrane, for instance, worked on a lot of people in other art forms. A lot of writers said, I listened to Coltrane and I realized you could touch on that same message, that set of meanings, as a writer. You see what I’m saying? They’re trying to make portable the meaning of the technical innovation, not just trying to find a writerly analogue for the musical breakthrough.

JP: They’re trying to assimilate the existential stamp. [James would like the record to show that he now has no idea what he meant by this.]

CR: Whatever that is, that feeling, I think you could also get there with words. So, what happens when that thing that is new, that molten stuff, finds its way down into genre, either by finding its way into preexisting genres or by way of a new genre, which is essentially created in its image? Can it still mean what it meant, and then can it also be available to others, if it finds its way into genre?

CF: It can. But the established form that it finds its way into probably won’t carry the same meaning.

CR: So if jazz guys are listening to Coltrane, and trying to incorporate some of his moves into their fairly genre-bound work, isn’t that following the spirit of the innovation? Rather than just trying to copy it?

CF: What you ask there is: Can we extend the original impulse at all?

CR: Can we take the new stuff and incorporate it into our idea of playing it right? I write profiles for magazines, and let’s say I read a work of fiction that tells me something I didn’t know, changes how I think about writing. And I think, Can I do some of that in the profiles I write? And I turn this into a craft problem that I can solve. Maybe I need a new kind of lead or something. It’s like I’ve heard Coltrane and, even though I play this other kind of music, can I do something so that some of whatever’s trying to express itself through Coltrane expresses itself through what I do, even though what I do is play it right in some other form? I think that happens all the time. People who are much more bound by genre, more bound by a canon and an orthodoxy, hear something and it blows their mind, and they say, I’d like to do some of that somehow. Like, I write country songs, but I heard whoever—Joni Mitchell, say—and now I want to somehow get some of that feeling. How do we fit that into our dynamic?

CF: I think they’re doing something new if they’re doing that. Again, they’re taking vocabulary—

CR: That’s what I’m saying. They’re turning it into language—

CF: And they’re doing something new. Take Chris Whitley. You know Chris Whitley? Okay, Chris Whitley doing blues. Great guitarist, great vocalist. I think he’s doing something new, although he’s deeply indebted to the blues language that has existed for a hundred years.

JP: The market is worth thinking about.

CR: Yes, it’s a crucial part of the historical conditions component. Take film, which costs so much money to make. I think that’s why I treasure crazy-ass, badly made Hollywood films. I mean, I am happy to enjoy a smoothly executed Michael Curtiz movie, the genius of the Hollywood system and all that, but I like a crazy-ass bad movie just as much or more.

JP: How’d they manage to do this?

CR: Yeah, how’d they manage to get that past the gatekeepers? Stiff dialogue, weirdly improvised dialogue, bad special effects—often, that’s the best part of the whole thing for me. And there’s nothing more dispiriting than a well-wrought action movie. Say, John Wick 3. Suicidally depressing.

JP: What stops that from being enjoyable as genre? Can you not appreciate it as They’ve done this thing exactly right?

CR: That’s a good question because it challenges me to be systematic and not just dislike one thing and like another. Part of the answer is that I don’t think much of the way they do it right. I think the action’s boring and unimaginative and cruel for one thing, whereas if I see a Hong Kong movie that cost 1/100th to make but Yuen Woo-ping choreographed the action, I’m like, Oh, they really did that right. That was very satisfying, and kind of formally joyous.

CF: Is it possible that with a movie like John Wick, that’s done right—I haven’t seen it, so I don’t know—the market demands for what would be considered done right are so vulgar and so horrifying that doing it right, doing a big-budget film right, requires so many terrible things that you’re going to make a horrible movie.

CR: That might well be one of the secret code items I’m looking for. The more money it takes to do that thing, the more money riding on doing it right, the more I tend to value doing it wrong. So, I really like it in big-time professional team sports when somebody does it wrong, when somebody’s freaky and weird and they just play the game wrong, because I’m so tired of the well-funded, well-wrought normal way of doing things. Whereas that band playing at the Station Inn, we’re at the far edge of the market, way down there. They just need forty people to show up and pay a cover charge.

JP: So okay, who are you making it new or playing it right for? If you’re making it new in front of forty thousand people, that’s quite something.

CF: You know, to play it right at that really highly monetized level, you’re answerable to so many people by the time it’s done right that it’s almost impossible to make something of value.

CR: Of value by what standard?

JP: If you’re playing it right in front of forty thousand people, you’re just behaving yourself.

CR: Is that a good thing or a bad thing?

JP: It’s a bad thing, I think.

CR: I’m okay with behaving myself.

CF: It depends who’s asking you to behave yourself. If the industry’s asking you to behave yourself, and you’re behaving yourself—

CR: A fair point. That would gall me. But I don’t think of it in terms of the size of audience; I think about it in terms of how much money it costs. The more money it costs, the more dispiriting I am likely to find doing it right, basically. And the cheaper it is, the more satisfying I find doing it right. I find it stirring if a bunch of amateur musicians get together at somebody’s house and manage to play a Bakersfield tune.

CF: Me, too.

CR: That pushes all necessary buttons for me. I recognize that there are endless inconsistencies in how that works for me. I mean, for instance, being satisfied by a Western done right but having no use for an action movie done right, even though action movies clearly descend from Westerns. Or enjoying Michael Curtiz’s version of top-dollar Hollywood style but not Michael Bay’s. Or being equally bummed out by competent action movies that cost a zillion dollars to produce and competent literary novels that cost almost nothing at all to produce. Or loving the competent literary novels of previous eras but not the present. All that opens me to the charge that there’s no system to my thinking on this subject other than perverse personal inclination, or that the system’s so arcane and complex that it’s a mystery to me and anyone else who tries to figure it out. I wonder if everybody’s like that, or it’s just me.

Charles Farrell has spent his professional life moving between music and boxing, with occasional detours. His book (Lowlife): A Memoir of Jazz, Fight-Fixing, and The Mob, will be published in July, 2020.

James Parker is a staff writer at The Atlantic and the editor of The Pilgrim, a literary magazine from the homeless community of downtown Boston.

Carlo Rotella‘s latest book is The World Is Always Coming to an End: Pulling Together and Apart in a Chicago Neighborhood. He is a professor of English at Boston College.

The Villagers

Charles Cherington

Most people are only vaguely aware of the private equity industry, which consists of several thousand firms buying and selling companies with investors’ money. The goal is to generate profits along the way. In the popular imagination, Gordon Gekko comes to mind: a predacious sort with pomaded coif and an appetite for dismantling family-owned businesses after loading their balance sheets with debt, dispatching their former employees to eternal hell as Walmart greeters.

Private equity does have more than its fair share of sociopaths, narcissists, and other unsavories, but for most of us the battle is not to ace out fellow predators in the race to debt-laden prey but rather with our own novelty-seeking, magical-thinking homo sapiens brains. Doing your job well means never leaving the mental confines of your cognitive medieval village. Invest only in companies you understand. When buying a business, always follow the checklist, known as doing your “due diligence,” roughly translated as turning over every rock to ensure that the deal you are evaluating is not your last.

Are the company’s managers honest? Competent? Inclined to stay once you’ve bought their business? After all, sellers often sell their business just once, and they want the highest price for it. Truth, or lack of embellishment, can cost them real money. If the company makes kewpie dolls, are they special in some way? Will competitors outflank you, slash prices, and wipe out your profits? Will the herd of kewpie doll enthusiasts move on to the next shiny object, leaving rows of unsold dolls in the warehouse, causing your company to go bust and your career to end?

The list of questions that must be answered before buying a business runs for a number of single spaced pages, in small font. It’s a flight manual for the pilot whose job it is to fly new planes sold by people who have no incentive to tell you about loose flaps, faulty fuel lines or anything else that gets in the way of their once-in-a-lifetime payday.

Do it right, follow the due-diligence checklist, and over time, you will make a good living and live to fight another day. Give in to magical thinking about eternal growth in the kewpie dolls market, get duped by the surefire winner the company has in its new line of Democratic primary bobble heads, fall in love with a charming CEO whose narcissism only becomes obvious after you’ve written your check, and things can go wrong almost instantly. Always follow the checklist, and walk away when you can’t tick every box. The conventional wisdom reminds us that nobody’s career ends because they didn’t do a deal. It ends when they do the one they shouldn’t, either because they gave in to magical thinking or because they didn’t check all the boxes.

Trust nobody. Verify everything. Don’t get seduced by people, products, or financial statements. Let other people cure cancer, start Airbnb, and crack nuclear fusion. To succeed in buying companies means spending a lifetime in your small, familiar village, obeying the ancient rules. That’s doing it right in the world of private equity. It can be so stultifying that, explaining their departure from the trade after they burn out, veterans will say, “If I have to check the boxes one more time, part of me will die.”

What happens if, rather than doing it right, you want to do it differently? Let’s say, for instance, that the planet on which your village is situated is getting hotter. Doing things the same loses its purpose if sameness means your crops wilt, your well dries up, and your cows die of heat exposure. Time to do things differently—maybe even to make it new. As a private equity practitioner in late middle age, I’ve decided to leave my village. I handed over the keys to my old firm to the smarter, younger Turks who were ready to run their own show, and launched a new one that will invest in companies decarbonizing the industrial economy. We can still buy a kewpie doll maker, but only if it makes carbon negative dolls, meaning that the manufacturing process must consume CO2 rather than produce it. Maybe they will be made from recycled plastic, or plastic made from carbon dioxide, among other ingredients.

The sum total of my new work won’t amount to much. Not even enough to save my cows. The size of the greenhouse gas problem is staggering. Electric cars and solar power won’t get us there. The way we make and consume everything has to change, and change fast. Beef? Out. Plastics from petroleum? Gone. Conventional building materials? See ya.

Here’s another problem: we need our money handlers to finance a replumbing of global civilization, but they don’t like doing things differently. All the right answers on how to decarbonize the world are out there. Cheaper, safer, next-generation nuclear power plants. Chemical companies that can make products from carbon dioxide and plants instead of gas. So are all the wrong answers. Picking the winners is not easy. Nothing ends a career faster than spending a billion dollars on a new chemical plant that doesn’t make money. Governments are famously bad at picking winners from the supermarket of new ideas. Investors around the world are better at it, but they like doing things the same, not differently, especially when different comes with a big price tag and several years of waiting to find out whether you made the right call.

In the world of private equity, big global pools of capital have started looking for investors willing to do things differently when it comes to curbing the rise of planetary emissions. New firms are forming, and new funds are being raised. The amounts of money at stake so far are not consequential, but the trend is unmistakable. Has the global money machine finally dedicated itself to solving climate change? Not so fast. When investors put that money to work, everything boils down to doing it differently versus doing it right. Doing it differently means investing money in a new enterprise, one that has never existed before. It may be a plan in a document, or a small pilot plant ready to be scaled to ten or one hundred times bigger.

The risk of failure in these new enterprises is substantial. Rather than buying an established business that makes money, or building another wind farm using proven turbines, private capital will have to invest in big ideas. Think of it as Silicon Valley meeting smokestack industries. Instead of an app for picking vacation houses, these investors will have to decide which chemical plant will remake, say, the polyethylene market in a sustainable way. A different kind of due diligence checklist is required. Investors will have to rely on engineers, scientists and a host of unfamiliar experts to help choose the winner from a pile of also-rans. The size of the bets they make will be large enough to end a career if the wrong choice is made. That type of bet will have to be made several thousand times before we have the roadmap for building a carbon neutral economy.

As our species tackles “the big problem,” it has become increasingly clear that we are at war with ourselves. Can we learn how to do things differently? Can we step back and appreciate that our deeply entrenched behavior may be fine for a small village, but that doing things right in the old-fashioned sense may well wipe out most of our species? Dunno. But when the sun rises tomorrow, I’ll be cinching up my tunic, heading out to the fields, and doing things differently.

Charles Cherington is an investor living in Texas.

Alt-Hacks: Survival Strategies for Alt-Ac PhD Students

Kelsey Norwood

If you’re a PhD student in the humanities, you may have noticed that many of the “rules” you encounter in your academic career—about the “right” way to write, teach, or professionalize, or about how to do something innovative enough to get you a job but not so innovative that you scare people away—are subjective. Much of the advice you receive about how to do it right has been patched together out of others’ worst experiences and near-misses: a ridiculous question they got during a job talk, an irrational and demoralizing comment they received on an article submission, or a practiced coping mechanism for frequent encounters with institutional sexism, racism, or homophobia. Their rules may or may not line up with your own career or the exigencies of present-day graduate education.

If you’re an alt-ac PhD student in the humanities, don’t waste time trying to learn the rules. It’s exhausting. And it probably won’t produce any positive outcomes. So why bother?

You should, of course, be a colleague. Scope things out; hear what people have to say. Then, find a corner of the academic landscape where you can hang out and focus on doing your own thing, using one or more of the following tactics:

1. Find your people.

Since the rules are subjective anyway: find a community or academic field where the rules most closely align with your values or professional goals. Study what you want to study, and don’t feel constrained by boundaries that aren’t productive for you. For example, if you love Romantic poetry but can’t stop thinking about how badly you want to write an article about anxious masculinity in the films of Adam Sandler…then do it. Maybe you’ll get it out of your system. Or maybe you won’t—in which case, find a faculty member who doesn’t think you’re crazy and start formulating your dissertation: “Undermined Masculinity in 19^th-Century Meter and Late-20^th-Century Bro Comedy.”

Find some other alt-ac grad students in your program. Find ways to support and validate each other. Watch the episode of Brooklyn Nine-Nine in which Captain Holt experiences imposter syndrome whenever he’s around his husband’s colleagues from the Classics Department. Watch it again. Find GIFs from the episode to send each other later for moral support. (Bonus point for GIFs that include the line, “Who gives a rat’s ass about Boethius, Wesley?”[1])

2. Pick your battles.

During my early years as an alt-ac grad student, I was determined to write a non-traditional dissertation—something I imagined would point to the intellectual viability of the creative work I did outside academia, and act as a critique of the boundary placed between scholarly analysis and the creative production of literature or film. I used to hate it when someone told me, “Don’t worry about writing a non-traditional dissertation. You can write a traditional dissertation and keep your creative work separate.”

But here’s the thing. Writing a dissertation is hard. Writing a non-traditional dissertation is extra hard. If you’re an alt-ac grad student with little interest in going on the academic job market or turning your dissertation into a book…are you absolutely positive that you want to move heaven and earth to reshape the dissertation genre, potentially putting in an extra year or two of work, for a document that will be read by a total of three people? Are you that desperate for your committee’s approval?[2]

And it might be that you do want to reshape the genre. Maybe that’s your thing. If so, go for it. Write your Romantic poetry/Adam Sandler dissertation in a quasi-memoir style and publish it as a trade book marketed toward awesome people.

If you’re not sure, it might be worth evaluating your priorities and calculating how much time and energy you have.[3] For example, if it’s 2019 and you live in the United States, you probably spend at least 25 percent of your emotional energy summoning the will to get out of bed every morning, because you live in a world where immigrants are being imprisoned in horrifying conditions, children and people of color are frequently killed for no reason, and the abhorrent, narcissistic Cheeto™ currently sitting in the driver’s seat is evidently committed to making things worse as often as possible. Plus, since you’re a grad student, you’re most likely underpaid, living with several annoying roommates, and tired from constantly trying to figure out how you’re going to pay for groceries this week. (Of course those things aren’t as bad as being imprisoned or dying for no reason, but they certainly don’t help.)

Let’s assume that, on average, you are exerting about 40 percent of your emotional energy just getting through the day and keeping yourself going. You now have 60 percent left to fill with dissertating, teaching, outside employment, professional service, and research work that will help you reach your non-tenure-track career goals. If you feel compelled to reinvent the wheel in one (or even two) of these areas, that’s awesome. But if you try to reinvent the wheel in all of them, you will probably be very, very tired.

3. Do what works for you.

In liberating yourself from most of the traditional rules in academia, you might be tempted to replace them with rules (or another kind of structure) that offer some kind of guidance for your alt-ac life. An accomplished alt-ac scholar might serve as a productive model, giving you an idea of a trajectory or brand with which you can align yourself. There is an undeniable comfort and stability that comes from aligning yourself and your work with a similar model, and you should let yourself use this as long as it’s helpful. But if it ever limits you, don’t let it hold you back.

In other words: don’t feel compelled to sign up for a course you don’t want to take because it will put you on someone else’s version of a non-traditional path. Don’t obsess over making every hour spent at your graduate assistantship a perfect fit for the nearest career opportunity. You are, by definition, alternate. So be alternate. Take advantage of your freedom to pursue any opportunity that energizes you. Use all the resources at your disposal to do weird, innovative things that embody your non-traditional scholarly identity in its superlative form. Especially if it means your dissertation defense will include a video feed of Adam Sandler reading “Ode on a Grecian Urn” in the style of Opera Man.[4]

In the words of many rebellious youngsters of my generation: you do you. In the end, you’ll be happy you did.

[1] See Brooklyn Nine-Nine, season 6 episode 13, “The Bimbo,” written by Madeline Walter & Paul Welsh: the final (delightful) scene in which Kevin Cozner defends his husband’s honor to a room full of classicists.

[2] And even if you are desperate for your committee’s approval, is there a more efficient way to get it? Like doing some cool departmental service, leveling up your teaching skills, or training a flock of parakeets to provide services to the university as full-time avian research assistants?

[3] I suggest making a multicolored pie chart, as a coloring project can provide a stressed graduate student with much-needed relaxation.

[4] “Kubla Khan” and Billy Madison would work, too.

Kelsey Norwood is a PhD candidate in English at Boston College, a graduate assistant at BC’s Center for Teaching Excellence, and a comedy writer with a fondness for anachronism.

A Rude Awakening from Dreams of Termitopia

Bill Birdsall

“Doing it right” means quality craftsmanship, according to norms of quality. “Making it new” has to do with originality. Quality and originality can seem to be exclusive of each other. Original work can sometimes seem sloppy to one who expects and doesn’t find traditional elements of good craftsmanship in the new work. Sometimes original work sets new standards of craftsmanship that take time to be appreciated.

But original work can also radically change the course of history. The more original artists are usually the ones who are remembered in history books and make the most noteworthy marks on culture.

Now that climate change and the possible extinction of the human race are factors in our future—maybe sooner, maybe later—the longevity associated with quality craftsmanship may have less importance in thirty years than it does now. If there is no audience to appreciate originality, there will also be no more history books and no lasting marks made by anyone for their originality.

Most of my creative work (painting, sculpture, architecture, and music, mostly) is done spontaneously, without a lot of planning. For ideas to work, they have to be realistic in the way they interact with physical laws governing materials. For architecture to at least remain standing, basic design principles have to be used that reflect the strengths and weaknesses of materials. Quality craftsmanship keeps refining the interface between ideas and working models of those ideas, allowing the models to work within the physical limits of reality. Originality keeps pushing our creative limits and sometimes the traditional concepts of quality craftsmanship.

My leaning lately toward climate change pessimism has changed the importance of some of the ideas I was working toward in architecture. For many years I have been trying to develop an “immortal” building material with which to build termite nest-like cities based on tunnels and domes instead of boxes. Projecting a thousand years in the future into a “termitopia” city like that, I could see lots of economic and aesthetic advantages and exciting possibilities.

For one thing, capitalism can be brutal to losers, and it tends to rape the planet’s resources as fast as it can to sell as much product as possible. Instead of everyone buying a personal hammer, we might all just share a few hammers in communal tool libraries. Similarly, we might share the “termitopia” city as nomads instead of owning fixed property within the city which we return to at the end of every day. There are lots of lifestyle variations that could be experimented with.

Climate change dropped a bombshell in the middle of my sweet termitopia dreams. Now the human race is possibly going extinct in thirty years, whether or not I would have it be that way. Quality craftsmanship used to have value in a world where longevity was an accepted factor in things, but finding immortal materials with which to build the dream is no longer necessary if nobody is going to be around to appreciate it in the distant future. If there is no human race to appreciate the quality tomorrow, why put any extra effort into it today?

As far as originality and survival in challenging times go, maybe our creativity can help get us out of this mess in ways I can’t foresee. I hope so. Much of modern medicine treats problems as symptoms and thinks that by putting a bandage on each symptom the problem will somehow be fixed. Sometimes more radical changes to the whole system—such as a leap from capitalism to socialism, or from a carnivore diet to a vegetarian one, or from box architecture to domes—is necessary to eliminate all the sick symptoms in an existing system.

Tried and true quality craftsmanship and speculative originality both have their value, but their values are variable under different circumstances. The climate change adventure we are all part of now is one of the factors in our present time. At stake is our survival, not just our aesthetics.

Bill Birdsall, a versatile artist and musician, was born in Middletown, NY and raised in El Segundo, CA. He made his own home, Casa Mucaro, in rural Puerto Rico, where he has lived for 40-plus years.

III. History

Carlo Rotella, Charles Farrell and James Parker

Carlo Rotella: I think this is actually a pretty genre-specific conversation, at least for me. For instance: Westerns. If you were to just make a Western correctly, I’d be happy to watch it. Even if it broke no new ground, no emotional or formal new ground, no historical new ground.

James Parker: Here’s another thing, though: if you make a Western properly now, it’s almost camp. Right?

CR: I don’t care, though. I’d be happy to watch it.

JP: But there’s a camp-ness that comes from playing it right when you have a dated form.

Charles Farrell: I guess so, but that doesn’t have to be the intention of the person making the film.

CR: Right, they just want to make a Western.

JP: That may be, but they can’t, because historically things have changed. You can’t be that simple anymore. It’s more complicated. Because you’ve seen all that, and you know what a Western is, you’re in a different position from the people who made the original Westerns. Hence: camp.

CR: One of the things I’m trying to piece together is why for me the dynamics shift around so much from genre to genre. In some genres, doing it right would be enough for me; in other genres, merely doing it right is heart-stoppingly disappointing.

CF: Well, does that have to do with the trajectory of doing it right? In some cases the language moves forward in a linear way so that doing it right is achievable, and endlessly achievable, so everybody can do it right. As opposed to, for example, boxing, where the language is no longer in existence and is receding very quickly. So doing it right becomes increasingly difficult, and in the end almost impossible.

CR: We’re essentially asking How much does the history matter? That’s what James is arguing about the Western. So, for instance: fantasy right now, another genre where I am perfectly satisfied with doing it right. Tons of fantasy being written. Most of it’s not that good. But some of it’s good. And the language of fantasy doesn’t seem outmoded or out of date at all. It seems right on the money for thinking about the world in which we live. There’s no automatic retro quality to doing fantasy right. So, in that genre, doing it right feels not only satisfying to me, but topical. In another genre, it might be the opposite, as in the case of the well-wrought, well-reviewed literary novel. I can read and reread Edith Wharton and be perfectly happy—for my money, she’s the great American novelist—but whatever her contemporary equivalent is, I can’t even face.

CF: Isn’t that at least partially because Edith Wharton is about time and place? And there is no equivalent?

CR: That’s what I don’t know. I don’t want this simply to be that I have weird tastes in some areas and conventional tastes in others. I’m trying to find a key, or a code, to how the play between our two principles works, for me and for other people. Boxing is our shared extreme example on the side of doing it right is enough; fiction writing is probably my extreme example on the side of doing it right is not enough, and jazz would be Charles’s.

JP: But aren’t we always in the position of waiting for the guy in boxing who comes along and you say This is it. He brings something that was impossible until he brought it. And then seems inevitable the second you see it.

CR: I think of it as the opposite. I think of it as That fighter brought something ancient and underrated by the current age’s emphasis on disruption and the new. Basically, that’s what happened when Anthony Joshua fought Andy Ruiz for the heavyweight title. The good-looking, well-hyped, well-tuned marketing concept ran afoul of a fat man with fast hands who can fight and wouldn’t stay down and concussed the shit out of him and made him quit. Some version of that could have happened 100,000 years ago on the savannah.

CF: But you could use somebody like Muhammad Ali, or Roy Jones, as a guy who would appear, on first glance, to be doing something brand new that’s useful.

CR: And also would appear to be doing things wrong.

CF: But, the point is, they are doing things wrong, and it’s not useful to anyone else. What you’re seeing is someone who’s so extraordinary that they can do something—

CR: Yeah, what you’re actually seeing is a stylistic mule that can’t reproduce—

CF: Yeah. And that’s something that’s only true for a limited period of time. It always catches up to them in boxing and they end up taking a beating. And, of course, it always introduces what they do into the general language of bad habits.

JP: So, these are people who are bad influences, right, terrible influences—

CR: Because they’re geniuses.

JP: Because they’re inimitable.

CR: The question remains: is there a code, is there a key, to think about how you would arrange the art forms and the genres on these two axes, or is one’s response really just autobiography posing as critical sensibility? Is there a logic other than I like/I don’t like?

JP: What I like, I like the feeling of something new happening before my eyes. That’s the ultimate aesthetic buzz for me.

CR: See, I don’t think that’s the ultimate aesthetic buzz for me. I’m walking through the park, there’s a Little League game going on. There’s a pitcher nobody can hit, throwing fireballs, a little wild but overpowering. A batter walks; the next kid up bunts the runner over to second base. The next kid manages to chop a weak ground ball behind the runner to get him to third base, and the second baseman can’t handle the bounce. First and third, one out. The next kid up hits a sacrifice fly and the runner on third scores. I would stop and watch that all happen. I would think Look at them, doing it right, solving the problem; it’s beautiful. Nobody could hit the ball hard, no clean hits, and yet they’ve managed to score a run. There’s no making it new in that. Teams that can’t make clean contact on a dominant pitcher have been doing that thing—bunting, hitting behind the runner, try to slice a pop-up to the outfield—for a hundred years. And I can’t think of another aesthetic scenario, walking past a Little League game, that would be more satisfying. That includes watching some kid totally make it new—inventing a new batting stance, pitching from right field, or whatever it is. I don’t need anything more than doing it right in that situation. Maybe the next person would be, like, Oh my god, that’s so boring. Of course they did that, that’s how you solve that problem.

CF: That has something to do with your affection for following rules. Well, this works! And it refutes talent—

CR: True. I like rules, at least as cones to maneuver around, and I like that there are ways to refute talent.

CF: Sure. Talent is incredibly overrated.

CR: Talent also seems fortuitous, and nothing that the batting team did in that sequence depended on that kind of luck. The pitcher may enjoy a god-given ability to throw the ball hard, but everyone else just has to figure out a way to solve that. So, my question remains, what does our list look like of things we’re looking for to see what the specific play between making it new and doing it right’s going to look like in a particular setting? Market conditions? Historical relationships, like when the golden age of innovation in that form happened to occur? What are the factors?

JP: Think about Hendrix. He was kind of a bluesman who exploded because suddenly the technology became available, and he was the guy who was physiologically, neurologically, artistically able to harness the momentum of that, and turn it into something no one had ever heard before.

CR: Okay, so what’s the principle there you can move and apply elsewhere?

JP: The principle is he was ready. At the moment that the thing struck, he was totally prepared.

CF: He was prepared because, for one thing, there’s an overlap between phases of innovation. He was the product of a really deep-down education. By the time he hit, what he was educated in would have been considered old, but was in fact incredibly revolutionary when it happened. He had been a sideman for Little Richard, who was every bit as revolutionary as Jimi Hendrix, in much the same way. So he took this language, thought Obviously I need to make it new. I can’t play like Little Richard, but I can take this lesson. It’s part of my language; I can speak this language, and now I can do this other thing. And to me, that’s sort of the perfect combination of experience and craft and figuring out something that makes it brand new.

CR: So then what do you do with his influence now? At this point, when you hear somebody who’s clearly heavily Hendrix-influenced, don’t you just find it predictable and tedious? I’d be seriously disappointed to go into a place and find out that there’s a Hendrix freak on stage replicating licks. Dude, I love Jimi so much! Gee, what a bold and surprising choice of influences for an electric guitar player.

CF: But Hendrix himself still sounds terrific.

JP: It’s impossible to replicate the power and meaning of what he did, even if you replicate the licks, because the meaning is historically conditioned, historically determined. But that’s another paradox. The music is timeless, in the sense that it will always sound incredible, but it was utterly historically determined by who he was at that moment—

CR: Now, what if doing Hendrix now turns out to be the right tool for the right job? What if you’re in a biker bar, and that’s exactly what the bikers want to hear, and the guitar player solves the problem by playing the most predictable, totally derivative Hendrix stuff. Are you bored senseless, or are you, like, He bunted the runner over to second, and then . . . .

JP: Depends on the atmosphere of the bar, right? I can imagine circumstances under which that would be amazingly rewarding to see, like if he was transforming the mood.

CR: I see that, especially if the mood was turning ugly, and the guitar player saved the day by doing something utterly unoriginal.

JP: Yeah.

CR: So in the case of Hendrix, we’re saying: conditions in that historical moment, his doing-it-right preparation put him in the position to make it new, maybe the framing conditions in which he’s referenced now—

JP: What if we remove the artist from this, and just say there are things that need to be expressed, that the universe would like to express certain things? Hendrix was the right tool at that moment—it was tremendous and unprecedented, but for a couple of years, he was able to channel that thing that needed to happen, that wanted to be said.

CR: If that’s the model, how do you cross-apply it to other things? So, Muddy Waters? Is that the same story with Muddy Waters? Got the ideal training, technology makes a jump, a highly motivated audience emerges that wants something . . .

CF: I would say so. I think that one of the things that unifies Little Richard, Hendrix, and Muddy Waters is that they all have the component of being shocking. Every one of them is shocking. And every one if you hear them now, seventy years later, sixty years later, fifty years later, depending on the context, they’re equally shocking. I mean, I know I can listen to Charlie Parker, and y’know, I’m not thinking Well, this is beautiful, or I love this music, or I love this show. My visceral response is What the fuck? You know? Goddammit, this is shocking.

JP: Still!

CF: Absolutely. That’s what makes it innovative. It retains the power to shock.

CR: Can you locate its power to shock? Since you are completely aware of what came before and what came after, and it’s certainly not a surprise and you already know it note for note, what makes it shocking for you?

CF: Well, you have to do some work. For it to be made shocking, once you’ve internalized the language, your awareness of where the language came from is what makes it shocking.

CR: See, this seems like the impasse again. I can recognize and respect that shock, but that’s not my priority in listening to music or reading or going to the museum. My priority is expression, and I guess I feel that you can express almost any meaning or feeling simply by doing it right. You do not need to shock, you do not need to make it new, in order to create the full range of human meaning and feeling. But, you know, I get your point: things need to be expressed, and you need to find a way to express them, and sometimes it makes sense to invent a new way.

JP: Or the things themselves will find a way to be expressed.

CR: Or come at it that way, if you like. Part of our discussion that Charles and I often have is that he’s saying Somebody already did it that other way. Somebody already expressed those meanings, somebody found a way to express those meanings or those feelings. I’m done with that. I don’t need to hear that, or see that, or read that anymore—

CF: Or I can keep it, and now that’s a part of my language. It’s usable now.

CR: Discounting something because it’s already out there doesn’t feel right to me. To me, simply doing it right all over again speaks volumes about the possibility of imposing order on what is essentially a malign and confused world, and that alone is reason enough to do it right.

CF: Is this about order? I mean, should it be?

CR: It’s about making something in a world that wants to be stupid and meaningless. I guess I just feel it’s enough. If someone were to say You know what, I’m gonna learn to paint exactly like a nineteenth-century French Academy painter, I’d be, like, Bring it on. I would be totally happy to see those paintings. How about a Napoleonic battle or a scene from Greek mythology? Those haven’t been painted enough.

CF: You know, there are kits for doing that—

CR: Yeah, do the kit. I’m for the kit. I am trying to decide whether I buy the assumption that there are things that you cannot express, or that the universe cannot express, other than by making it new. Do you have to make it new in order to say new things?

JP: I think so, and because you’re in a different time, in a different set of coordinates than when the thing first happened, it’s going to have a different meaning.

CR: You’re saying that’s the only way to get the right lego pieces to make the thing you want to make—

JP: Or that it will just mean something different. That’s why I keep saying, though this might not even be the right word, that there’s a dimension of consciousness. We can’t help knowing a little bit more than whoever invented it, in a way, simply because we know what happened to the invention.

CF: But we also know a little bit less than they did, and that’s important, too.

JP: All we know about these works of art, the only thing we know more than the people who made them, is what happened next, what effect they had.

CR: But Charles is right that in some ways we also know less, because we’ve also lost all this good stuff. Boxing teaches that lesson. Whenever you gain something and separate it from its origin in order to put it into the repertoire, you lose the context and the knowledge that people had when that something came into being.

CF: And with boxing, when you lose those things, you can’t actually do it right anymore.

James Parker is a staff writer at The Atlantic and the editor of The Pilgrim, a literary magazine from the homeless community of downtown Boston.

Carlo Rotella‘s latest book is The World Is Always Coming to an End: Pulling Together and Apart in a Chicago Neighborhood. He is a professor of English at Boston College.

A Real Tradition

Evan Parker

Miles Davis is reported to have commented on Wynton Marsalis’ retro “modern jazz” by asking rhetorically, “Didn’t we get it right first time?” This seems pertinent to the subject of “get it right” versus “make it new.” The most cursory look at the history of the various forms under discussion surely supports the apparently unadventurous, consensus seeking, liberal position which contends that making it new is the only way to get it right. Dull and liberal though it may sound in this arena of potential combat, in my view it is an unavoidable conclusion.

By changing and evolving, the essence of the art form is kept alive. Charles Olson’s epic poetry was not written in the language of Milton’s Paradise Lost. The language of epic poetry, which eschews a rhyme scheme in favour of rhythm and declamatory vigour, predates Milton and goes back at least to Homer and extends past Olson.

Eric Dolphy did not play the alto saxophone in the unmodified language of Charlie Parker but can be seen as his natural continuator, extending the range of the instrument by an octave and adding additional chromaticism and using new tempo superimpositions.

Ludwig Mies van der Rohe did not make buildings like Palladino until we consider their shared concern with rigorous systems of proportion—a system which Palladino derived from the architecture of classical Greece and Rome. The school of Mies has been extended and arguably cheapened in the generic sameness of anonymous “modernist architecture” and reacted against in the post modernism of Gehry and Hadid.

This kind of revolt seems to happen when the dominance of a central figure like a Mies or a Charlie Parker has spawned so much generic, and inevitably inferior, imitation that the appearance of a Gehry or an Ornette sweeps the board clean for new thinking. Getting it right but adding nothing new seems always to lead to such ruptures.

The argument can go further and lead to Stravinsky’s struggle with tradition. He said in his conversations with Robert Craft something along the lines of “Music theory does not exist; it is simply derived from an analysis of practice,” but elsewhere in his Poetics he tells us “Une tradition véritable n’est pas le témoignage d’un passé révolu; c’est une force vivante qui anime et informe le présent. En ce sens, le paradoxe est vrai, qui affirme plaisamment que tout ce qui n’est pas tradition est plagiat […].” (A real tradition is not the testimony of a faraway past, but a living force that animates and shapes the present. This is the real paradox on the basis of which we say, in jest, that what is not tradition is plagiarism […])

Isaac Newton said something like, “If I have seen further it is because I was standing on the shoulders of giants.”

How else can it work?

Evan Parker plays the saxophone in a way that some people hear as having a connection with the jazz tradition. Just some.