Refuting Arguments

Found on Brain Pickings, I thought this passage from Susan Sontag's September 16, 1965 entry in As Consciousness Is Harnessed to Flesh: Journals and Notebooks, 1964-1980 (public library) to be quite insightful:

The main techniques for refuting an argument:

Find the inconsistency
Find the counter-example
Find a wider context

Instance of (3):

I am against censorship. In all forms. Not just for the right of masterpieces— high art— to be scandalous.

But what about pornography (commercial)?
Find the wider context:
notion of voluptuousness à la Bataille?
But what about children? Not even for them? Horror comics, etc.
Why forbid them comics when they can read worse things in the newspapers any day. Napalm bombing in Vietnam, etc.

A just/ discriminating censorship is impossible.

Age as Genre?

This arrogant article about how normal adults shouldn't read fiction marketed to Young Adults won't do anything combat the impression that the New York Times is elitist:

Books are one of our few chances to learn. There’s a reason my teachers didn’t assign me to go home and play three hours of Donkey Kong. I have no idea what “The Hunger Games” is like. Maybe there are complicated shades of good and evil in each character. Maybe there are Pynchonesque turns of phrase. Maybe it delves into issues of identity, self-justification and anomie that would make David Foster Wallace proud. I don’t know because it’s a book for kids. I’ll read “The Hunger Games” when I finish the previous 3,000 years of fiction written for adults.

This is the worst kind of lazy thinking. Note how he admits that he doesn't know what he's bashing, only that because it's labeled as "Young Adult" it's not worthwhile to him. This really raises my hackle. First of all, it's the worst kind of literary snobbery. Has Mr. Stein even asked himself who labels a book as YA or not? I certainly don't want anyone making these decisions for me. For example, knowing the kinds of excellent fiction that are disparaged as "science fiction" when one could make a very strong argument that they should be marketed as "regular" fiction (Stephenson and Gibson, to name just two), makes me wary of trusting any booksellers to label what i'm reading. Secondly, it's a bit stunning to think of the excellent books that he'll miss under this line of thinking: off the top of my head, he's miss out on The Chocolate War and The Catcher in the Rye along with countless others.

Personally, I enjoy ripping through a YA novel now and again. I recently ripped through L'Engle's Wrinkle in Time in a few days and found it highly enjoyable, both as a good story and also as a fun nostalgia trip back to the kid I was when I first read it. I also continually get meaning out of Juster's The Phantom Tollbooth when I pick it up every few years or so. It's good to look through the eyes of a kid now and again!

For a better argument against Mr. Stein's writing, see Alyssa's good breakdown. What are your thoughts? Do you avoid YA books, find them a "guilty pleasure," or actively seek them out?

Hating on Fall Be Kind

One of the bands I forgot to mention in my new music post the other day was Animal Collective. At the recommendation of Jonathan Lethem, I picked up the Fall Be Kind EP and was blown away by it. Fun listening!

Reading up on the collective, though, was an exercise in bizarre hipstersm prose. Few, if any, people writing about the music spoke to the music in terms of listening to a group of songs. Instead, they wrote about how the music "fails to build upon" past successes (i.e., the earlier albums are always better) or talk about how annoying Animal Collective fans are (as if you should judge music by who listens to it).

As an example, Ben Graham's excellent review for the Quietus looks at the EP from the perspective of politics and punk and finds it lacking:

...Alternative America was able to settle back into its spaced-out hippy comfort zone, as hazy as the fog over the San Francisco Bay. Just ... sit and listen to this new EP by Animal Collective, who have developed their 'Brian-Wilson-with-a-sampler' sound over the last decade to become the cherished darlings and freak-flag bearers of the whole contemporary scene. ... It's always seemed to me that Animal Collective have more in common with these mellow, close-harmonising spiritual children of David Crosby than with the electronic avant-garde they're more usually linked with: frequently wonderful, and groundbreaking and innovative in many ways, Animal Collective nevertheless seem bound to a late 60s musical and cultural aesthetic which is often anachronistic and even unhelpful in a 21st Century context.
... At the close of 2009 this kind of head-in-the-sand navel-gazing is even less acceptable, no matter how physically impressive it would be if you could actually carry out that mixed metaphor as a literal action. The fact is, Animal Collective are highly educated young people from the richest nation on earth, wearing masks and pretending to be pandas while effectively pissing around in a sandpit. The patterns they make are often exquisite. But it's not enough.

While this is interesting, I find it lacking in several respects:

- What is "enough"? Producing more angry music? Inserting deliberately political lyrics into songs that may not be able to support them? The end here is vague and the criticism suffers as a result.
- Again, the defining of the music by its audience. Who cares what scene they're part of? All that you should really be judging is the music that enters your ears.

Anyways, at the end of the day, I love this little album and find myself continually listening to it. I'm not reading the lyrics for deeper meanings or exploring what their audience says about them. I'm just enjoying the good songs.

Bryan Ferry and Critics

So i've been doing a bunch of reading about Roxy Music online because, as I may have mentioned, I'm obsessed with them. Here's what I don't understand: people make merciless fun of Bryan Ferry, many of them by mocking his hair. (Exemplified in this pretentious knock of Avalon) And, admitably, some of this is deserved: I haven't (yet) listened to all of the stuff that he recorded - with Roxy or without - but it's clear that the late period Roxy abums are not nearly as groundbreaking or relevant as the early Roxy albums. And it does seem like some of his more recent solo albums tread water stylistically. The reviews for his most recent album – Dylanesque, a collection of Dylan covers – have been particularly brutal.

The problem I have is that if you listen to the music for what it is, you're still listening to pretty good stuff. Dylanesque may not be groundbreaking, but tell me you're not moved by his lilting tenor on Knockin' on Heaven's Door, or touched by the gentleness (!) of his take on Positively 4th Street. It’s only when you compare it to his classic Roxy toons (or even the irrepressibly joyful sacrilege of his A Hard Rain's a-Gonna Fall) that the songs fall short. But who cares about that! Musing about career paths and themes and betrayed promise is why so many people find criticism irrelevant: if a song speaks to you, then who cares if the guitar riff was lifted from an old Joe Walsh song or if the singer looks ridiculous in his cravat? (And make no mistake, the cover of Dylanesque makes Ferry look ridiculous.) Judging music by its look - regardless of how much Ferry influenced this trend himself in the 70s - is the cardinal mistake of the MTV era, and it's one of the major reasons why, in my opinion, why so little popular modern music really stands out as classics.

In short, sure it would be nice if Ferry could gear it up again and produce some of those weirdly energetic classics from his heyday. (I'd kill for another song on the par of Prairie Rose, myself.) The big problem I think most critics have with Ferry’s latter work is that he just doesn’t take the singing risks that he used to (just listen to what he does in Strictly Confidential). But in the meantime, listen to what we've got now and don't judge it based on your expectations, just what's in front of you, right here and now.