It’s Beginning to Look a Lot Like Kitschmas!

 

Driving home from church today, my kids insisted on listening to an odd genre that has developed over the last 50 years or so. It’s called Christmas music, but I’m not entirely sure why.

The song that was playing while we pulled into our driveway was an 80’s classic that appealed to us to “Feed the wororld, let them know it’s Christmas time.”

Just before that we heard a marvelous carol claiming that the singer had seen mommy kissing Santa Claus. It was very cute.

Don’t get me wrong. I love silver bells and sleigh bells that ring and the whole Christmas experience. The trouble is, yesterday Karen asked me to play some Christmas music so I went to Youtube and came across some Elvis songs.

Now the thing about Elvis is that you know his touch is always perfect. If he wants to manipulate your emotions, he’s going to get you. He adored and lived and was the essence of kitsch.

So I should have been prepared for this.

Even so, listening to his Christmas concert music takes you so far from reality you wonder if there’s even a path back.

So then, having listened to Elvis for a few minutes, the Christmas music on the radio became yellow lines on black velvet under a black light. Elvis raises your sensitivity to every type of kitsch and sometimes Camp.

Back in 1962, that great and radical literary/artistic critic Susan Sontag wrote a thoughtful, honest, and readable essay called Notes on “Camp.”

She said, “The essence of camp is its love of the unnatural: of artifice and exaggeration.”

Back then she could say, “Apart from a lazy two-page sketch in Christopher Isherwood’s novel The World in the Evening (1954) it has hardly broken into print.”

I have the feeling she wouldn’t hold to that opinion anymore.

She continues, “To talk about Camp is therefore to betray it. If the betrayal can be defended, it will be for the edification it provides, or the dignity of the conflict it resolves. For myself, I plead the goal of self-edification, and the goad of a sharp conflict in my own sensibility. I am strongly drawn to Camp, and almost as strongly offended by it.”

Precisely. As I write, a Youtube cover of Pet Clarke’s Love, This is My Song is playing on my MacBook. That having ended, the next video is Darlene Love’s All alone on Christmas Day. To embody the exaggeration we are about to experience, Darlene, the singer, calls on the kid from Home Alone, who is sitting at the controls in the studio, asking him if he is ready.

He drops his sun-glasses and, with that James Dean/Fonzie coolness we inflict on our prepubescent movie stars, says, “Let’s roll.” He leans forward and pushes all the controls to their upper limit.

“Artifice and exaggeration.”

In this age when public speakers are expected to avoid the high style like H1N1, everything else is nothing but style. Particularly our worship.

So what? Let me return to Sontag’s essay, because she has things to say.

“Though I am speaking about sensibility only—and about a sensibility that, among other things, converts the serious into the frivolous—these are grave matters.”

Oh sure. How could Michael Jackson and Elvis Presley Christmas songs be a “grave matter?”

I recommend this essay to you, because I have to skip some choice lines, but let me pick it up here:

“To patronize the faculty of taste is to patronize oneself. For taste governs every free—as opposed to rote—human response. Nothing is more decisive. ”

I’d put that last phrase in italics, but I’d rather repeat it.

Nothing is more decisive.

“There is taste in people, visual taste, taste in emotion—and there is taste in acts, taste in morality. Intelligence, as well, is really a kind of taste: taste in ideas.”

Camp places style over content and even disregards the latter. “Camp is a vision of the world in terms of style—but a particular kind of style. It is the love of the exaggerated, the ‘off,’ of things-being-what-they-are-not.”

Later, “To perceive Camp in objects and persons is to understand Being-as-Playing-a-Role. It is the farthest extension, in sensibility, of the metaphor of life as theater.”

This matters because, “camp is the glorification of ‘character.’ The statement is of little importance—except of course, to the person who makes it. What the Camp eye appreciates is the unity, the force of the person.”

Suddenly she is touching on politics and the claims of both right and left about the opposing candidates – or at least potential candidates.

Camp style is serious, but exaggerated. It is fantastic, passionate, naïve. But it is serious. And it is camp because it fails in its seriousness.

It is a painting that tries to reveal heaven and puts clouds in a pure blue sky or moody lights in a house built too close to a river.

It is Swan Lake or Art Nouveau (Sontag’s examples).

It tries to be what it cannot be, so we get a kick out of it.

“Camp is the consistently aesthetic experience of the world. It incarnates a victory of ’style’ over ‘content,’ aesthetics’ over ‘morality,’ of irony over tragedy.”

Thus Oscar Wilde, perhaps the “father” of camp: “in matters of great importance, the vital element is not sincerity, but style.”

Why do we have so much camp around us?

At least one reason is because of “the culturally oversaturated medium in which contemporary sensibility is schooled. Camp introduces a new standard: artifice as an ideal, theatricality.”

And there we see our idea again, the crucial element of the argument: sensibility or taste.

Ken Myers has probably done more to help Christians understand the importance of sensibility than anybody else I’m aware of. In this essay, Sontag demonstrates how decisive it is in every area of life.

We have the political system we have, for example, because we have a taste for it.

But all is by no means lost. First of all, I believe there is a place for Camp, though one has to be careful with it.

Second, not everything is fighting against good taste. Not everything is excessive, extravagant, unable to fulfill its serious efforts. Yes, Disney is, I would argue, a Camp/Kitsch factor.

So are the publishing companies of contemporary worship songs and music books.

So are almost all Christmas and Easter programs. Nothing could be more Campy than contemporary worship for the simple reason that never have so many people tried to climb so high with so few artistic, spiritual, imaginative, and liturgical resources.

Narnia, however, is not camp. Nor is Middle Earth, though Peter Jackson’s version frequently Camps out.

But pop Christmas music…

Camp or Kitsch? For there is a difference, though I have to think and read more to grasp the refinement.

I think most of it is kitsch and here’s why. Most doesn’t try to be serious and fail. Most avoids the sanctity of Christmas altogether.

So it can be fun to listen to and add a touch of sentimentality to a Sunday evening around the tree with gingerbread men and egg nog. But it doesn’t raise itself to the level of Camp.

Not very often anyway. To do that, it would have to mention Jesus.

Incarnational Inspiration

Over the eight years of our CiRCE conference we have spent a lot of time thinking about the person and nature of our Lord. Yesterday, David agreed to create a special set of Christmas CD’s by finding six talks that specifically address the incarnation in one way or another.

I thought of one right away: The Cruelty of Heresy, a talk I gave down in FL about how when we deny either the fulness of Christ as Son of God or as Son of Man we harm ourselves and those we teach.

Also, James Daniels spoke on the incarnation at this summer’s conference.

There are more and David will find them, so keep your earpieces polished. I expect these will make a wonderful Christmas gift for a thoughtful Christian or inquirer.

Sarah Palin Watch Watch

Maybe I can’t resist or maybe I’m trying to make a point. Three years from now, Sarah Palin might conceivably run for president. Already today, the media are doing everything in their power to “frame the argument” as epistemological relativists are forced to do.

Some of their reflections are insightful, most are incredibly one-sided and reactive, if not reactionary (since they are now the status quo).

My favorite recently was this brilliant statement from Tina Brown on MSNBC that perfectly illustrates the Progressive Media’s tendency to project:

“Her confidence is based on total ignorance.”

If she hadn’t said it with such a smug, preceded by a contemptuous, expression, it might not have compelled me to post on it. But there it is.

Tina, speaking words without meaning or else rooted in ignorance of the facts doesn’t help.

I want to make an intelligent decision when I vote in 2010 and 2012. It’s getting harder and harder to do so. For that, the media, who take on themselves the duty of forming public opinion, are entirely to blame.

Too Big To Fail

The phrase has been bandied about for a few years now, and I’m trying to think of one more self-serving. Maybe, “Give me that.”

But I wonder how deeply it penetrates the American mentality. Is it how we feel about our war efforts? Our own economy? Our invincible country? After all, the Chinese need to rescue us for their own sake, right?

Nothing has ever been too big too fail, and any body that thinks it is has always set itself for destruction. Something about pride fits here.

The Great Law of Writing

Strunk and White are famous for having said, “Omit needless words.”

This is a marvelous piece of melliflous advice and counsel. And if it were possible to understand it, I would even recommend it to others.

The only problem is that only the great masters of the craft of writing can possibly know which words are needful and which needless. Or is it, “are needless,”?

I think I know where Strunk learned this counsel:

from his mother.

He wanted a cookie after dinner. She said, “You don’t need one.”

He said, “I want a coke.” She said, “You don’t need one.”

He said, “I want to go skating with my friends.” She said, “You don’t need two.”

This confused him profoundly.  “Two what?” He thought. But he didn’t ask her to clarify because he wasn’t even sure he had spelled it right, and besides, maybe he didn’t need to know. Or maybe he had three, so he didn’t get the point.

In any case, he didn’t ask. So for the rest of his life, this phrase rolled around in his mind, compelling endless thought on how little one could possibly get by without having.

Or saying.

So, as Peter Wood suggests in this, um, needful little article, Strunk bought into the anti-Victorian spartan aesthetic of the modernist. He wrote a book that has told Americans how to write for nearly 100 years now.

In this book Strunk taught Americans how to think without metaphors, to produce writing that is as clear, says Peter Wood, as the tracks of the camel in a desert.

If only Strunk had let his curiosity get the better of him, to arouse just a little cheekiness, to say to his mother, with utmost respect, “Need it for what, dear mother?”

Read the article, if you want to defend Strunk and White or if you want to gather weapons to slay them – or maybe just spider silk to catch them in their own web.

Get it?

Maybe I shouldn’t have asked that.

Question.

Maybe.

Grammar Lesson 2: The Parts of Speech: Noun Side (with a little historical introduction)

What a funny term – parts of speech. Aren’t there other parts of speech besides the written words? Like gestures.

Well, not strictly speaking. Speaking is, strictly speaking, using words.

Do you know where the parts of speech come from?

Trick question. The come from language.

Do you know who discovered them?

Isn’t that an interesting question? Did you know that Aristotle would not have been able to name the eight parts of speech? I would like to develop this further in another post, but for now let me answer the question I started this paragraph with.

In fact, David Mulroy provides the answer in his The War Against Grammar:

“The individual responsible for dividing words into eight groups is known to posterity as Dionsius Thrax (“the Thracian”)…. He studied under Aristarchus, the head of the library of Alexandria and the greatest of literary scholars in the second century B.C. Later he taught grammar and literature on the island of Rhodes [ed. Note, does that make him a Rhodes Scholar or just a Rhode Islander?], another center of Greek intellectual life. There he did the usual thing for a professional scholar, publishing a number of treatises on language and literature. Of these, only a very brief one survives, Techne Grammatike (“The Grammatical Art”). Despite its brevity, it is reasonable to list Dionysius’ Techne among the most influential books ever written, for it was the work that introduced the eight parts of speech to the world.”

No small achievement!

As an aside, next time a fundamentalist Christian type asks you why you are wasting your time on “pagans” give them a one word answer: “grammar.” All the other answers are contained in that one.

Mulroy continues so we can see the context and magnitude of this accomplishment:

“Before Dionysius’ time, the classification of most words was up in the air. Aristotle and his successor spoke of nouns, verbs, and everything else; various more detailed systems of classification were proposed without catching on. Dionysius’ swept away the competition. His book became a standard textbook for centuries. His system was adopted by Syrian, Armenian, and Roman grammarians. Via the last, especially Donatus and Priscian, his influence pervades the grammars of modern European languages.”

Do you agree that there are eight? Do you agree that an article is an adjective?

Let me turn to the immediately practical: children need to learn the parts of speech as early as possible. Adults find it much more difficult to find the time and mental flexibility to learn them in their dotage (i.e. their twenties).

Notice that, from Aristotle to Dionysius, subject and verbs were clearly understood. It is worth pointing out that the parts all relate to subjects and predicates. Maybe he saw that.

A subject is going to be a noun, even if it is some other part of speech converted into a noun. Only a noun can have something predicated of it.

A predicate will usually be a verb. Can you think of any exceptions?

As soon as I have a noun, I’ll notice (often) that saying the noun is not enough to rightly express my subject. I could say, “X does this” but that would not tell me very much, unless the context tells me the rest.

So I’ll look at that noun and I’ll want to change it, to modify it. The most obvious change to make is to add an adjective.

Adjective comes from the Latin and it means literally “thrown near or next to”. This is, of course, a very concrete definition and doesn’t describe its verbal function, especially not in English. But if we think metaphorically, we can see the point.

An adjective is “thrown next to” the noun because the noun itself needed help or it needed to be modified. So we threw a word at it.

Logically or formally speaking, the attention goes to the noun, and that’s an important point.

There are exceptions. Sometimes the writer wants the attention to go to the adjective. Yet an adjective cannot exist without a noun to contain it, so even if you highlight the adjective, you’ll unavoidably highlight the noun it was thrown near, towards, or next to.

That point is important for some who want to argue that traditional grammar is all wet because some things are so hard to define.

Sometimes they claim that an adjective is a subset of the verb if we extend the meaning of a verb to include what the noun is or is doing.

Verbs and adjectives are remarkably similar. But the difference seems to be that an adjective can exist only “in” a noun, while a verb has an external relationship to the noun.

The other difference was pointed out by Aristotle. His explanation of a verb is probably more reliable than that in most contemporary grammar texts. A verb is difference because it has tense (past, present, future, etc.). Adjectives don’t.

As a speaker you might have another question you need to answer about a noun: are you talking about a particular noun or just any old noun of that kind.

In other words, are you talking about fish generally or the particular fish you want people to look at? Or maybe you are talking about a single fish, but not the specific one that somebody else might have talked about.

If you are talking about a specific fish, you will often use the definite article.

Talk about any old fish: no article.

One fish, but not a particular one: the indefinite article.

So in English we have two kinds of articles.

You could, of course, get sick of the noun you are talking about (I mean, of course, the sound-symbol, not the thing itself) or there might be so many of them that you can’t refer to them all particularly. In those cases, you’d use a pronoun, like “those” or “they.”

You remember “They” don’t you? They’re the ones who always know what to say and everybody knows what They say. I call them, “the Immortal They” and recognize that They rule the world.

There are different kinds of pronoun as well, but we’ll hold that off for another day.

There you have it: The Parts of Speech: Noun Side (not, please note, subject side).

Nouns, adjectives, articles, and pronouns.

Eacho f these helps us to better grasp the subject of our thought in most sentences. Therefore, they enable us to better understand the nouns included in our thoughts and, often, about which we are thinking.

If we know the parts, we can start thinking about the forms they take. That will come later.

Ezra Pound on Origins, Teaching, Traditions, and Poetry

A return to origins invigorates because it is a return to nature and reason. The man who returns to origins does so because he wishes to behave in an eternally sensible manner. That is to say, naturally, reasonably, intuitively. He does not wish to do the right thing in the wrong place, to “hang an ox with trappings”, as Dante puts it. He wishes not pedagogy, but harmony, the fitting thing.

Literary essays of Ezra Pound, II

While I havn’t bought his (and T.S. Eliot’s) criticism of Milton’s poetry, and I find his politics as disappointing as I find almost everybody’s politics in the early to mid-20th century (which is to say, I feel quite comfortable judging their errors from my perch at the corner of incomprehensibility and radicalism), I cannot escape the astonishment that frequently overtakes me when I read Pound’s criticism.

Maybe he was just playing with our minds, but I don’ t think so, because some of what I’ve read by him in the past and found incomprehensible I now read and find quite insightful. Other times, he just makes good, sound, but practically helpful observations. Like this:

As to the traditional vers libre: Jammaris in his study of the Melic poets comes to the conclusion that they composed to the feel of the thing, to the cadence, as have all good poets since.

And then I’ll read something like this and think, “Wow! He’s saying something here,”:

Neither is surface imitation of much avail, for imitation is, indeed, of use only in so far as it connotes a closer observation, or an attempt closely to study certain forces through their effects.

In another essay, entitled The Teacher’s Mission, he contends for the role of the teacher and says things that need to be carefully considered because they are dangerous and because they might still be true or at least carry truth. The worst condition, therefore, would be for people to ignore the danger of the statements but still act on the ideas they express as though they are safe. Consider:

The mental life of a nation is no man’s private property. The function of the teaching profession is to maintain the HEALTH OF THE NATIONAL MIND.

Or take this:

Until the teacher wants to know all the facts, and to sort out the roots from the branches, the branches from the twigs, and to grasp the MAIN STRUCTURE of his subject, and the relative weights and importance of its parts, he is just a lump of dead clay in the system.

Ouch. But what great practical advice. I love these two:

All teaching of literature should be performed by the presentation and juxtaposition of specimens of writing and NOT by discussion of some other discusser’s opinion about the general standing of a poet or author.

The average reader has been brought up on vague general statements, which have naturally blunted his curiosity.

If you teach literature, may I invite you to reflect on and comment on one or both of those quotations. That’s the sort of thing we literature lovers need to be talking about. The problems with literature instruction are not new; we just have more really bad text books and untrained teachers than ever before.

I’m not sure where Pound is going on this next statement, but it’s worth a block

Retrospect is inexcusable, especially in education, save when used distinctly AS a leverage toward the future.

And I’m not sure about the first word in this next one: it might be criminals or animals. I suspect he said criminals. Worth a response:

Criminals [or animals] have no intellectual interests.

And finally, two statements from his essay On Tradition:

The two great lyric traditions which most concern us are that of the Melic poets and that of Provence. From the first arose practically all the poetry of the ‘ancient world,’ from the second practically all that of the modern.

and:

The tradition is a beauty which we preserve and not a set of fetters to bind us.

When you teach your students, do you feed them on beauty or shackle them in fetters?

They tend, interestingly, not to like the second option.

Berry on The Necessity of Agriculture

In Japan,”They even think agriculture may be a good thing for a nation of eaters to have.”

Wendell Berry on the necessity of agriculture.

On Afghanistan

Frankly, I have no idea what we should do there, but I do have some reflections that might help put things in something like a perspective.

First, if you are pro-democracy, you are pro-western. Everybody knows that democracy was a concept developed by the Greeks and one which very few societies or communities have bought into since their day.

Certainly the Romans didn’t. They began with a monarchy, switched to a republic, and grew into an empire. A democractic element grew and flowed through their history, but the Romans were far from democratic.

Nor was any medieval European nation or kingdom or fiefdom. Few of them could read outside the church, and I have become persuaded that the two conditions for a democratic government are 1. a smallish size (the city-state or polis) and 2. universal literacy among the citizens.

Only after the Renaissance was democracy even up for discussion and that only in western Europe. If I have mis-represented this detail, I appeal for a correction.

Democracy, so far as I can tell, grew out of the French Revolution, though some of our founders seemed to respect it (though not as much as most feared it.)

But it grew up in England and the US under the shelter of a Parliamentary Monarchy on the one hand and a constitutional republic on the other.

I can find no trace of anything realistically qualifying as a democracy anywhere else, the short-lived attempt by the five nations of our northeast not withstanding.

If, as most pro-democracy folk seem to believe, democracy is the fulfillment of a historical process and the pinnacle of just government, then it is fitting for us to pause and appreciate that historical process and how long a gestation period democracy endured.

Magna Carta placed limits on the power of a weakened king in 1215. By 1520, the Tudors held more centralized power than any king would have dreamed of holding under the Plantagenets (Lancaster or York).

In 1688 The Glorious Revolution restored limits to the monarchy and established the basic rights of Englishmen that became our (much neglected) Bill of Rights.

Our Revolution further limited, on paper, the federal government, setting free an energy for creative destruction such as the world had never seen, combining the dynamism of the Romans with the energy of the Greeks and transforming the whole planet into a wearers of jeans and eaters of hamburgers in only two centuries.

A limited government, however, requires a restrained people.

And restraints on a people sufficient to allow for limited government, internalized and accepted without a feeling of lost freedoms, take a long, long, long time to negotiate and secure.

They can only be secured by the people themselves.

For the reasons derived from this history, I cannot help but feel we need to lower our sights in Afghanistan. They are not going to accept a democracy. The warlords have too much control, as medieval barons did in England and France.

I would suggest a more realistic approach might be that followed in Tajikistan, but for the presence of Al Qaeda in or near Afghanistan.

We ought to seek stability, not a form of government in the abstract. As for Al Qaeda and the Taliban, it seems the only realistic thing to do is to contain them.

What seems certain to me is that we will be in Afghanistan for a long time and that the more we try to establish democratic forms of government there the longer will be our stay.

After all, it took hundreds of years for the English to accept defined government (and that is where we learned it), and the 20th century saw us turn closer to the 16th century than to the 17th. If we can’t maintain a constitutional republic, much less a parliamentary monarchy – and it seems we no longer believe in these options – we ought to approach Afghanistan with great humility.

By way of application to education, this sort of foreign affair underscores our need to learn British and Roman history closely. I strongly advocate a year of each in any school that seeks to be classical.

Teaching Grammar in Today’s Classroom

Here’s a fine video of a discussion about teaching grammar in the classroom: three brief, insightful lectures by experienced and witty veterans of the grammar wars. (here’s the link: http://juergenkurtz.wordpress.com/2009/11/02/teaching-grammar-in-todays-classroom/ - for some reason WordPress was not letting me create the hidden link. Sorry.)

Hat tip and thanks to Jürgen Kurtz, Karlsruhe University of Education, Germany at his blog:

Foreign Language Education in the 21st Century