Yo Matt, six days later and 2nd on my list...
On Sun, Aug 28, 2011 at 3:40 PM, Matt Kundert <[email protected]>wrote: > > Hey John, > > John said: > You display your intelligence, coolness and so forth by producing > something new on the scene, in the academic world. But here in the > heartland, we just want to raise our babies and find some hope for > our lives and those of our children. So hooking into hallmark > platitudes might not be cool in the circles you move in, but here in the > real world, it's what we need. > > Matt: > I think that's a pretty good counter-display of common sense. John: Nice phraseology Matt! I think I will steal that and use it when I want to say, "you're stupid" in the most tactful way possible. :-) Matt: > In > academia, we're graded--if you will--by our ability to distinguish > ourselves by a combination of newness and betterness. There's a > certain sense in which this process of new generations of academics > replacing old ones in this manner might risk imploding, but I'm still > not sure there's a better way to do it. > > John: Well, I think there is. I think the MoQ resolves at least, what is meant by "better". And I think when an entire academy is stuck in a certain rut, a certain blindness to what betterness is, or whether it is, could be helped by following this "better way to do it". Matt: > However, you don't need to be an academic to feel like cliche is a > bane on your personal existence. John: Well, no, I mean, you're right about that. But you do have to have a certain academic bent, to conceptualize it that far. Most people just go with the social flow and what you deem cliche, they deem deepest meaning. Matt: > An entire movement of people, the > one's Pirsig called "the antisystem people," people of whom we might > say are attached to the word "authenticity," grew out of the Romantic > movement at the beginning of the 19th century and gradually seeped > into the culture at large, in America through Emerson and Thoreau > most of all. John: "grew out of the Romantic movement" as you say, is an ongoing process, I think. It wasn't confined to a single generation. My own educational process brought the coincidence of Deep Ecology and the British Romantic period in one year of study, and I fell in love with like-minded people as myself, and thus discovered a label for myself. I am romantic. mea culpa. Emerson and Thoreau? My kind of guys. Matt: > These people have, we also might say, a "touch of the > poet," and do not just turn up their noses at cliche like snobs (though > a lot of these types are just snobs), but sometimes genuinely fear > that cliche doesn't cut it to express the real emotions they feel. > Some just disdain Hallmark; some genuinely feel anxious about > expressing themselves. > John: "To me the meanest flower that blows, brings thoughts too deep for tears" beCOMES a cliche eventually, but at the same time it does express an eternal human problem. Our words and thoughts can't go deep enough, so what is a cliche anyway but a shortcut to meaning? A quicker way of expressing what IS deep and meaningful. I mean, in a way, avoidance of cliches can be just as degenerate as relying upon them, eh? Matt: > I don't go in for authenticity-talk for the sake of authenticity-talk. I > don't think there's anything wrong with well-worn phrases in the > expression department. If "rock" is fine for us, why not "love"? It's > frustrating, to be sure, to see the commodification of anything, but I > doubt we should let that, by itself, make us turn our backs on > expressing love, coming up with theories about it, or anything else. > John: Well, I agree with you there. Matt: > I come from southern Wisconsin. My newly minted wife comes from > central Minnesota. We're both over-educated snobs with too much > irony to not giggle at the platitudes. John: Well there is something in that, tho, beyond "snobbery". The pair of you are a new team in the face of the world out there, and distinctifying yourselfs is part of the bonding that goes on in successful marriages. Especially newly-minted ones! Part of the reason I knew I'd like Lu as a wife, was we caught each other snickering up our sleeves at the same things. Matt: Yet, express ourselves we must, > and I indeed tried my hand at genuine expression through letter and > poem. And I wrote the whole script used at our wedding. And two > weeks ago, one of my closest friends asked me to be the only > speaker at her secular wedding. What did all these occasions have > in common? To purge myself of the anxiety of cliche, I always begin > by making fun of the cliche, then noting the impossibility of doing > anything else, and then trying to make up a few new ones myself. > John: Yes, that is a gift to your friends. Sometimes they sink to cliche, because they don't have this particular imagination that you possess. And when you take it and convert it for them, you are serving them in a good way. And the more you do it, the better you get. But I think blanket rejections just shut off all flow. Matt: > The trick, I think, is to be self-conscious without derisive. Especially > in front of people who have their own codes and proprieties for > expressing their love to each other, you don't want to invalidate > them by saying they are full of shit. Everyone knows cliches are > cliches. But you can tease them without falsifying them. > > The wedding I spoke at consisted of more heartlanders, a much > bigger group than at my own small wedding (100+ compared to 30), > and hardly any of them knew who I was. I was just a friend of a > niece or step-niece, or step-niece of a friend, getting up to speak. > (Oddly enough, all from the same areas, too: southern Wisconsin > and central Minnesota.) A very tough crowd to successfully speak in > front of, and I made it harder on myself by choosing to read a sonnet > by Shakespeare before saying "a few more words about love, since > clearly we haven't heard enough yet," as I put it in the moment. > (The officiant had already trotted out wheelbarrows full of cliches > ahead of me, which I had not expected.) When all was said and > done, it was the only time the bride almost cried (my friend is a > particularly difficult nut to crack: she despises cliche so much that, > when she intoned her lines in the ceremony--unlike her soon-to-be > husband who inflected soft care and adoration into his lines--she > sounded like a robot with a shotgun pressed against the small of > her back) and a surprising number of strangers walked up to me > to congratulate, or thank, or tell me that it was just what they > thought. The cherry, however, is that amidst these regular heartland > folks was my friend's aunt who is an English professor. I heard > through the grapevine that she, too, had been impressed, and I'm > guessing by a slightly different sense than the others. > > I don't mean to toot my own horn (and what kind of horn it, > anyways?), but I do mean to suggest that these kinds of things are > possible. We can, if we so choose, reach higher than platitudinous > cliche without invalidating those who are comfortable with well-worn > proprieties of expression. We can please the heartland and the > authentics. We can say something a little new that wraps up > together the old, and seems to tap into what everybody thinks > already, even if they didn't know it at the time. I believe this in > theory, and I think I occasionally succeed in practice (though how > new? who knows). As Emerson said well ahead of me: "the artist > must employ the symbols in use in his day and nation to convey his > enlarged sense to his fellow-men. Thus the new in art is always > formed out of the old." It's not easy, but what is? > > not easy indeed, Matt. But it sounds to me like you are on the right road and in my book, that's the same thing as arriving so I'd grant you bodhisatva hood in a moment. For me, the heartland has been a revelation on many levels, and if I can get it down in words, I'll be lucky. It's not easy, but what is? John Moq_Discuss mailing list Listinfo, Unsubscribing etc. http://lists.moqtalk.org/listinfo.cgi/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org Archives: http://lists.moqtalk.org/pipermail/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org/ http://moq.org/md/archives.html
