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Friday, January 14, 2011
Palin, Crosshairs, and Semiotics: The Signs of the Times
Can one draw a line between Sarah Palin's Crosshairs map and the shooting of twenty people in Tucson? Can political discourse be a catalyst to murder?
Much has been made of Ms. Palin's map, the fact that she called out Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords' district in Arizona, and Ms. Palin's tendency to invoke gun-based metaphors. Pundits have argued that these are pieces in a puzzle that may have motivated a young man to engage in an act of violence that has stunned the nation and even further polarized an already divided electorate.
Many smart people are asking many smart questions about this horrific incident. But, one thing no one is asking is to what degree do symbolic acts--like icons and metaphors--actually affect us?
One way of answering this unanswerable question is to turn to semiotics.
Semiotics is the study of signs--both the actual signs themselves and what signs communicate. In the terminology of semiotics, the sign itself is called the "signifier," and the message it conveys is called "the signified." For example, in the United States, we have come to associate a red octagon with "stop." The red octagon is the signifier and coming to a halt is the signified. Though it may sound overly dramatic, almost everything is a sign, and every sign has at least one signifier. A white picket fence carries a strong signifier, as does a Porsche, as does a swastika, as does an American flag. In the case of, say, a cross or the Confederate flag, there are a whole host of complex signifiers. One signifier can, depending on who you are or what you believe, carry opposite meanings. As our culture becomes more and more visually defined, semiotics plays an increasingly important role since more and more messages are delivered visually.
This is precisely where semiotics enters the "crosshairs" conversation.
It's also where semiotics enters the conversation about violence in America, the conversation about political extremism, and more pointedly, the conversation about culpability in regard to the shooting of Gabrielle Giffords. Readers who may have arrived at this story only recently may not know that Ms. Palin's political action committee (PAC) has "targeted" Ms. Giffords' Arizona district for conservative activism. To visually denote this, a "crosshairs"--two lines that intersect in the middle to denote aim or the focus of sight--was placed over three congressional districts in Arizona and around the country.
Some critics of the former Alaska governor have made a direct link between the signifier (crosshair) and what is, perhaps, its main signified (shooting). That is, the crosshairs planted the seed to shoot the representative of the district targeted by the bullseye.
Supporters of Ms. Palin defend her use of the crosshairs icon because for them it is not a violent signifier; merely a symbol of "focus." Opponents, and even some supporters, like The View's Elizabeth Hasselbeck, on the other hand, have leveled harsh criticism at Palin for use of a signifier that connotes hunting, shooting, killing. Hasselbeck herself noted the map "looks like an al Qaeda Christmas card."
When we don't know how to interpret a signifier, we often look to past signifers to help us. So, someone uncertain about the signified (or message) Ms. Palin intends, might look to other visual cues to see if there is a consistent message.
It's possible that certain people see what they choose to see, but others may only see what's in front of them. One might, then, draw a line from these images to the crosshairs to advocating violence. Most would not. But some might.
Ms. Palin's aid, Rebecca Mansour, defended the image, and the semiotic associations one might make by redefining them: "We never ever, ever intended it to be gun sights. It was simply cross-hairs like you'd see on maps."
Semiotics also applies to language--especially metaphors. Metaphors use a visual image to make a point. So, when Ms. Palin augments visual cues with linguistic ones, like her now trademark "Don't Retreat! Reload!," hunting and shooting-based interpretations get harder and harder to avoid. Repetition of visual codes tell you how visual codes should be interpreted.
Or, put in the language of semiotics, what emerges is a consistent "signified."
So, what does this mean for political discourse in the U.S.?
Anyone who watched the speeches of Sarah Palin and Barack Obama today witnessed a powerful moment in American public discourse. Palin's video, posted on her Facebook page, and President Obama's, delivered at the memorial service for the victims of the shooting in Tucson, both attempted to address the country's wounds--which still seem to be hemorrhaging--as a result of the shocking events on Saturday and the politicization those events engendered.
Political speeches are the height of linguistic symbolic action. They reveal an incredible amount about the speaker. In the case of these speeches, that holds true. One draws a line in the sand, the other advocates unity. One is riddled with anger, one makes a plea for civility. One is a challenge; one is a call for compassion.
These, too, are consistent signifiers.
| Jan 14 at 10:22 AM
Wednesday, January 05, 2011
The N-Word, Huck Finn, and You
"Nigger" appears 219 times in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. A new version of the book aims to reduce that number by 219. That's right. Mark Twain's Adventures of Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn: The NewSouth Edition has replaced the word "nigger" with the word "slave." The expurgated version comes to your local bookstore in a month or so.
Who is leading the charge to de-slur the most controversial "classic" of American literature? Some school board in South Carolina? Sarah Palin? Christine O'Donnell? William Bennett? Liberty University's English department? The ACLU?
Not hardly.
Mark Twain's Adventures of Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn: The NewSouth Edition, which splices both books into one, is the brainchild of Auburn University professor Alan Gribben, a perfectly respectable Twain scholar. His motivation? Years of teaching the novel to students from the South and personal experiences with the book in his new home state of Alabama. "My daughter went to a magnet school and one of her best friends was an African-American girl," says Gribben. "She loathed the book, could barely read it."
That got to him, but what really pushed him to recast Twain's book was his involvement with Big Read Alabama, when he was asked both to write an introduction to the version that Alabamans would be reading and to travel around the state giving talks about the novel itself. He was shocked to discover how many teachers could not teach Huck Finn because of the racial slurs but also how many general readers were turned off by all 219 uses of the N-word. Astonishingly, it appears that John H. Wallace's claim that Huck Finn is the "most grotesque example of racist trash ever written" is actually being taken seriously.
So, Gribben decided to help create a version of the book that would make it acceptable to school boards and book clubs. He had elided "nigger," and "Injun" goes the way of the buffalo.
To his credit, Gribben is aware that his scholarly reputation is on the line. Already, some high-profile Twain scholars have decried the book, likening Gribben to Thomas Bowdler, who bleached Shakespeare's dirty scenes for more starchy readers. What Gribben sees as mainstreaming, others see as censorship.
And it does raise some absolutely fascinating questions.
What do Gribben's edits of Twain say about the sanctity of art? For example, if viewers suddenly find the David's penis offensive, would it be okay to deface the sculpture to make it less graphic? Violence against women is also abhorrent. Are we going to start altering rape scenes to make them less disturbing? On the other hand, is the real value of Twain's book found in the repeated uses of the N-word or in the overall message of the book? If Huck Finn is primarily a repudiation of racism, isn't getting more people to read it a good thing? On yet another hand, isn't reading the new version with the N-words removed whitewashing the degrading connotation of slavery? Doesn't it make slavery seem less disgusting, therefore making the book more racist?
In his provocative book Nigger, Harvard law professor Randall Kennedy uses Huck Finn as a springboard for his study of the N-word in American culture and why censoring it can be dangerous:
"I am addressing the contention that the presence of nigger alone is sufficient to taint Huckleberry Finn or any other text. I am addressing those who contend that nigger has no proper place in American culture and who thus desire to erase the N-word totally, without qualification, from the cultural landscape. I am addressing parents who, in numerous locales, have demanded the removal of Huckleberry Finn from syllabi solely on the basis of the presence of the N-word--without having read the novel themselves, without having investigated the way in which it is being explored in class, and without considering the possibilities opened up by the close study of a text that confronts so dramatically the ugliness of slavery and racism."
I get what Gribben is trying to do; I've taught Huck Finn. I know it's difficult. Those of us who devote our lives to books want people to experience the liberating power of great literature and courageous ideas. I love the way literature can be malleable, the way it can, as Wallace Stevens might say, "find what will suffice." But, Kennedy is right, and that's why this new book rankles.
Look, we all hate the word. Twain grew to hate the word. Kennedy hates the word. I hate the word. Every time I typed it in this column I deleted it before going back and typing it again, angry I had to type it twice. But, this solution reminds me of treating the most obvious symptom instead of the lurking, chronic disease itself. This "new" book may be more of a feel-good pharmaceutical than an honest confrontation. And we don't even have the list of scary side-effects yet. For me, the Neosporined Huck Finn is not the right remedy for the injuries of slavery and racism; it's a band-aid that doesn't cover the wound.
| Jan 05 at 11:08 AM
Friday, December 31, 2010
True Grit and Winter's Bone: New Female Heroes?
At first glance, it would appear that the two best American movies of 2010--Winter's Bone and True Grit--have next to nothing in common. One is a low-budget starless study of meth cookers in the Ozarks, while the other is a high-profile star-spangled riff on a classic Western novel and an even more classic film.
And yet, the two share remarkable plot points: a teenage girl wanders the exceedingly dangerous and essentially lawless backwoods of Arkansas in hopes of bringing some element of closure to questions about her father. Sure, the films take place over a century apart, and they are not exact mirrors of each other, but they share enough to make a comparison worthwhile. They also might suggest a new kind of female hero.
2010 was an interesting year for female protagonists. Lisbeth Salander from the Stieg Larsson novels emerged as a stealth feminist hero in the uberblockbuster Millennium trilogy. And, in a different but equally lucrative way, Twilight's Bella managed to suffer her way into millions of readers' (and viewers') psyches. Both are intriguing female characters and demonstrate ingenuity, strength, and perseverance.
Hailee Steinfeld as Mattie Ross in True Grit (2010)
But, neither are as intriguing as Winter's Bone's Ree Dolly (Jennifer Lawrence) or True Grit's Mattie Ross (Hailee Steinfeld), in part because we are unaccustomed to watching teenage girls make their way through desolate and dangerous patches of forest and swamp with little more than their wits. We have grown used to tough-mined and tough-mouthed girls navigate the nasty waters of urban landscapes. Think of Just Another Girl on the IRT or last year's Fish Tank. But, it's rare to see a girl alone in a rural landscape, which has, for so long, been the territory of men.
We tend to associate women with the precarious and equally unpredictable world of the social minefield where a misstep can lead to moral and cultural calamities. Or, as is the case in Black Swan, a young female is pitted against other women. But a girl left to her own devices in the middle of nowhere, where everyone must be assumed to be an enemy, feels foreign. In the case of these two movies, though, it's fantastic.
Winter's Bone is a better film--it's the best movie of the year--in part because Ree's journey is scarier and more solitary than Mattie's. Mattie's quick wit and smart mouth lends her an air of sophistication and capability that Ree may not possess. In fact, one of the reasons we're so anxious for Ree is because we aren't sure she is capable of making it through the woods without disappearing or dying. Americans tend to endow young men with the survival skills to weather the prairie, Indian Territory, and bad guys (consider Cormac McCarthy's Border Trilogy or Jack London's Call of the Wild) but not girls.
Jennifer Lawrence as Ree Dolly in Winter's Bone (2010).
Winter's Bone and True Grit defy this paradigm.
The original odyssey--Homer's tale of Odysseus wandering and warring for 20 years before returning home to his loyal wife--is so grounded in male accomplishment, there has never really been a model for the female odyssey. Smilla's Sense of Snow works with this motif, as does Pedro Almadovar's Volver, but few American movies have given women the same opportunity to go inward by way of the journey outward.
These two films challenge classic gender stereotypes as well as the semiotics of the hero's journey. Ree doesn't need no stinkin' man to save her. She's fine on her own. In fact, her odyssey just might save you.
| Dec 31 at 01:41 PM
Thursday, December 23, 2010
Is San Francisco to Poetry What New York is to Fiction?
Last month, I was invited to serve as the Guest Blogger for the blog of the Best American Poetry. In one of my first posts, I made a controversial claim---San Francisco has emerged as the best poetry city in the country.
Here's why.
No city in America is producing more good poetry right now than San Francisco. Its older generation of poets altered poetry's landscape, and its newer crop of writers, who seem to be winning every possible award, are shaping poetic terrain as well. New York might stake out a claim as the country's fiction center, but San Francisco has planted its flag as the poetry capital of the United States.
Ever since The San Francisco Renaissance and the subsequent Beat Movement ensconced figures like Jack Spicer, Kenneth Rexroth, William Everson, Michael McClure, Robert Duncan, Phillip Whalen, Gary Snyder, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Robin Blaeser, Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsburg into the poetry walk of fame, San Francisco has been a must-see on America's literary map.
McClure and Ferlinghetti, for example, are still producing high quality work as are other groundbreaking poets of that generation like Diane di Prima, the current poet laureate of San Francisco.
Consider as well all of those younger but equally well-established experimental poets such as Aaron Shurin, Paul Hoover, Maxine Chernoff, Norma Cole, and Michael Palmer. Their contributions to innovative poetics have been immeasurable. And then there is the elusive August Kleinzahler--San Francisco Poetry's cranky uncle. He won the Griffin Prize in 2004, and his most recent collection, Sleeping It Off in Rapid City, New & Selected snatched the 2008 National Book Critics Circle Award.
Just as exciting is the generation of poets in their 30s and 40s who are also making a name for Pleasure-website themselves. No mid-career poet is hotter than D. A. Powell right now. Last year, Powell's Chronic was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, it won the California Book Award, the Northern California Book Award, and it made several best books of the year lists. Powell also captured the lucrative and much sought-after Kingsley-Tufts poetry prize. Readers should also be aware of other award-winning poets like Brian Teare, Camille Dungy, Justin Chin, John Isles, Truong Tran C. Dale Young, and Randall Mann--all of whom have published between two and four books. Of particular note is Matthew Zapruder, whose newest collection, Come All You Ghosts, is making pretty much every "Best" list for 2010. All of these writers are shaping the conversation not just of poetry in San Francisco but the entire country.
I'm especially impressed by a whole phalanx of poets who have published their first book within the last year. The most notable include Robin Ekiss, The Mansion of Happiness (winner of the 2010 Shenandoah/Glasgow Prize for emerging writers and a finalist for many other awards); Melissa Stein, Rough Honey (winner of the 2010 APR/Honickman First Book Prize); and Keith Ekiss, Pima Road Notebook.
And that's just within SF itself. Include Oakland, Berkeley, and San Jose in the poetry hug, and you snuggle up next to Kay Ryan, Brenda Hillman, Robert Hass, Rusty Morrison, Barbara Claire Freeman, Rebecca Foust, Lyn Hejinian, Sandra McPherson, Sally Ashton, Rachel Loden, and a very popular young poet named Craig Santos Perez.
The question though is this: is this love-in of poetic talent random, or is there something about San Francisco that draws or engenders good poetry?
There are some practical reasons for San Francisco's (and the Bay Area's) poetry dominance. The proximity of Stanford, Berkeley, Mills, UC-Davis, St. Mary's are hard to ignore. Throw in all of the high quality local MFA programs at USF, San Francisco State, and California College of Arts and the great publications and presses (Poetry Flash, Zyzzyva, City Lights, Omnidawn, Heydey, New American Writing, and the wonderful Sixteen Rivers Press just to name a few) and a real community of writing comes into being.
Also, poetry tends to be about liberation and experimentation, two characteristics San Francisco has always been known for. In fact, if you listed ten traits of American poetry and ten traits of San Francisco, the Venn diagram of the two would likely have huge overlap.
The film The Social Network makes a compelling argument for Silicon Valley as the center of the technological universe--it's where everything is happening. The art of technological innovation; the technology of artistic innovation. Technae is as much at the root of poetry as it is at the root of technology. It is not surprising then that poetry, the first social network, thrives in a culture of innovation and accomplishment. Despite its traditions, poetry has always been unusually current. It seeks the cutting edge. And so innovation begets innovation; accomplishment begets accomplishment.
I mean look at the Giants.
Can anyone prove that great baseball does not follow great poetry? The only logical explanation for San Francisco's World Series victory is that the city's poetry is paving the way by hitting homer after homer.
Well, and then there's that Brian Wilson . . .
Dude must write some killer sonnets.
| Dec 23 at 07:03 AM
Friday, December 17, 2010
The Problem with Overculture
Seeing a lot of the same things online and in stores as you do your Christmas shopping? Noticing a pattern of the same movies, books, music, and gadgets recommended in magazines and blogs? Wondering if everyone has really read Jonathan Franzen's Freedom or seen Black Swan or listened to the Yeasayer or Local Natives album? The same might be said for the iPad, big screen TVs, and Wellingtons. Does everyone own the same things?
With the rise of information immediacy, there has been a rush both to celebrate and to claim whatever might be the it. We've always loved to consume, but it's clear that at this particularly moment in history we want to know what we should be consuming. In short, we desperately want to know what to want.
And, with the explosion of viable media outlets, there are now more cool places to help us know what to desire. In the past, middle-class Americans turned to People and Entertainment Weekly or The New Yorker and Cosmo/Esquire to learn about new books, music, cars, and clothes. But, now there is Slate, Salon, National Public Radio, The Huffington Post, Wired, QVC, iTunes, Domino--not to mention Facebook and Twitter and countless other sources to tell you (and even rank for you) what is important, cutting edge, and, now.
These are the accoutrement of what I call Overculture.
Overculture is the system that creates ubiquity in American consumer and popular culture. Overculture is the saturation of our lives with the rhetoric of what items we need to make our lives more meaningful, more authentic, and more modern.
And, as its name implies, Overculture is everywhere.
For example, Starbucks plays music heard on Friday Night Lights, which gets written about in Slate, which has an agreement with NPR, which reviews books available in Borders, which sells Fair Trade coffee, which is the subject of an article in The New Yorker, which reviews the new Cat Power album, which gets played on an episode of Grey's Anatomy, the soundtrack of which winds up on display at the checkout counter in Starbucks, along with the book reviewed that day on Fresh Air, the author of which spoke at the TED convention, which now has an App for the iPhone, which you can buy at the iStore, which happens to be featuring songs by Cat Power and the audio book from Fresh Air. So, you post that on Facebook, and your friends Tweet your link, which gets posted on more Facebook pages, which causes more people to buy the book for their Kindle, and the next thing you know, that same book is for sale at Starbucks.
Overculture is a new kind of cultural map that flags everything that has hit a tipping point; everything with-it people are supposed to either consume or be aware of.
Overculture is not always an intentional force. In fact, it is most interesting when it is the random offspring of the marriage of marketing and capitalism--what I call the arrival item. An arrival item is an album, a piece of clothing, a gadget, a book: anything that makes the owner feel like he has arrived.
The best thing about the mega-popular blog Stuff White People Like was that it punctured the inflated significance of the arrival item, the currency of Overculture. The subtle argument of Stuff White People Like is that white people all like the same things. By "white people," the authors are referring to that huge demographic of middle-class, educated, culturally aware people who think of themselves as being in the know or who want to be in the know. In other words, whiteness here is less about race and much, much more about taste.
Knowing what to like is, on some level, more important than actually liking. As John Cusak's character Rob says in High Fidelity: "what really matters is what you like, not what you are like. Books, records, films: these things matter." One reason they matter is because they help gain access to a social class. In America, social class is really no longer just about money; it's also about taste. And taste (knowing what to prefer) is an easy way to indicate that you have arrived in the middle (or upper-middle) class.
Of course, there is nothing wrong with overlap regarding cultural texts and cultural icons. Dialogue about what makes the best contributions to society is one of the most important and most pleasurable activities. What is worrying, though, is the slow disappearance of alternatives and the rapid advancement of sameness. Perhaps the next it will not be the cache of Overculture but the cache of the overlooked.
| Dec 17 at 09:50 AM
Friday, December 10, 2010
Is Hip-Hop poetry?
"Rap may be the most revolutionary development in poetry over the past thirty years," scholar Adam Bradley charges, "and yet its originality is often hidden in plain sight."
Such is the core argument of Bradley's provocative Book of Rhymes: The Poetics of Hip-Hop which has snagged some pretty righteous press in the last year. This week, he reentered the high culture conversation when Kelefa Sannah used Book of Rhymes as a springboard to take on Bradley's newest project--a nearly 1,000-page compendium of rap lyrics entitled The Anthology of Rap (co-edited with fellow scholar Andrew DuBois) in the pages of The New Yorker. This behemoth of a book coupled with his formalist critique of rap lyrics has made Bradley the leading advocate for the you-should-see-rap-as-poetry party. No one's really sure how big or rowdy that party is, but it sounds like a lot more fun than kicking around with Christine O'Donnell and her homies.
That said, as far as Bradley's rap-as-poetry project goes, one question lingers: what, really, is at stake?
From the 1920s until the 1980s, a very specific approach to evaluating, appreciating, and interpreting poetry dominated high school and university literature classes. That approach, called "New Criticism," focused on the "formal" elements of a poem that made it a self-contained art form, like rhyme, meter, metaphor, alliteration, assonance, irony, and symmetry. It attempted to be objective and scientific but could all too often come off as stuffy, emotionally barren, and profoundly exclusionary. Interestingly, about the time The Sugar Hill Gang busted out with "Rapper's Delight" in the early 80s, New Criticism started going the way of the 8-Track. The super sleek CDs of poststructuralism, postmodernism, and multiculturalism made poetry sound much clearer and much more human. Which is why it is so interesting that Bradley adopts the tool-kit and terminology of New Criticism to argue that rap lyrics are poetry. One of the criticisms of the book is that Bradley ignores the violence and sexist content of rap and focuses solely on technique--the very strategy that so many writers and scholars of color fought against.
Jay-Z & Kanye West
It is, fun, however, to see Biggie lyrics dissected in the same space and in the same way as Robert Frost poems. One wonders what Frost would have thought of Too Short's "Don't Fight the Feeling" as poetry. For better or worse, Bradley doesn't go there; rather, he highlights KRS-One's onomotopoeias: "Woop! Woop!" (police siren) and Pharoahe Monch's apocopated rhymes ("last batter to hit, blast shattered your hip / Smash any splitter or fastball), in an attempt to stake out rap's plot in the gated community that is Western poetry. "By preserving the integrity of each line in relation to the beat," argues Bradley, "we give rap the respect it deserves as poetry."
But, what does rap gain by being "poetry?" Access to the middle class? Long done. Scholarly books devoted to the craft? Done. Classes on rap and hip-hop in universities. That ship, too, has sailed. Norton-like anthologies of their work? Done and done again.
The bling of poetry is burdensome. Poets make no money, almost no one buys their books, they never get to dis Taylor Swift in public, they don't get to make cameos in Old School, they hardly ever wear Adidas, and, worst of all, MTV never asks to pimp their ride. For (most) poets, gin and juice is alliteration not a breakfast beverage.
I think it's time for poetry to get the street cred of rap and for poets to be admired (and perhaps even feared) the way rap stars are. For me, the question isn't so much why rap doesn't get the same respect as poetry, but rather why poetry doesn't get the love rap does. How interesting would America be it be if poetry received the airtime, the publicity, and the cultural relevance of its younger, dirtier brother?
| Dec 10 at 03:00 PM
Editor's note:
This is an SFGate.com City Brights Blog. These blogs are not written or edited by SFGate or the San Francisco Chronicle. The authors are solely responsible for the content.
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