Finishing Out February

As March continues to lay on bad news and bad times, I've finally found myself the time to finish writing about what I read all the way back in February. This entry may be a bit on the scant side-- I've already written on this blog at length on "Eugene Onegin" and Catie Rosemurgy's "The Stranger Manual," which leaves me with... hm... four books, one of which I will once again defer to a later entry. So, that leaves me with two comic books and a less than inspiring work of translation. Let's get this out of the way.

16. Tao Te Ching, Lau Tzu (trans. Ron Hogan). Okay, clearly I'm someone who is reasonably cool with popular glosses of philosophy. I've already written about my admiration and enjoyment of Edmond and Eidinow's various excursions, and when I get around to writing about March you will see some truly embarrassing short-cuts to understanding Lacan. I mean, I think I even have one of those lame "Kant and the Platypus Walk Into Hyperreality" joke books sitting around somewhere, Christ, I hope I didn't pay a lot of money for that. Anyway, my point is that taking in a thorny primary source and chewing it into a nicely paraphrased, condensed, annotated, or extrapolated secondary product is fine and even necessary. Have you ever sat down and started reading Hegel? Really, you have? Was it fun and rewarding? You're lying to yourself. Philosophy rests largely on the task of commenting on and tweaking the meaning of earlier works of philosophy, and who am I to quibble about the line between standing on the shoulders of giants, and cashing in on them?

That being said, and keeping in mind my sympathy for the plight of the translator, Ron Hogan's translation of the Tao Te Ching is not very good. A little background; for some time Hogan's translation has been available online, and despite recently being put into print (in a slightly different form than what I read, and retitled "Getting Right With Tao") Hogan has allowed anyone who cares to read his work for free do so under Creative Commons. To which I say, kudos. I also give him hesitant props for the very basic core of his project. That is, stripping away the accumulated translators' filigree of hokey faux-mystical orientalism surrounding Lao Tzu and boiling him down to the most prosaic language possible.

Useful? Sure. Neccesary? Maybe, maybe not. A translation? I'd say no.

The problem is that Hogan goes too far in hammering Lao Tzu's language into the most down-to-earth sentiments possible, shaving off anything like ambiguity or poetry and leaving little nuggets that often come out worn down to platitude. On the other extreme, occasionally in eschewing exaggerated exoticism he goes too far in putting on a Joe-the-Plumber style working class patois. Parts of it sound like getting your Taoism 101 from Jeff Bridges, which is entirely less delightful than it sounds.

Here are some of his drastic reductions:
-“If you can talk about it, it ain’t Tao.
If it has a name, it’s just another thing."

-"Stop wanting stuff. It keeps you from seeing what’s real.
When you want stuff, all you see are things."

-"Tao's neutral:
it doesn't worry about good or evil.
The Masters are neutral:
they treat everyone the same.

Lao Tzu said Tao is like a bellows:
It's empty,
but it could help set the world on fire.
If you keep using Tao, it works better.
If you keep talking about it,
it won't make any sense.

Be cool."

True, it goes down easy, and in the third passage above I even kind of see where he was going with the whole thing. But popularizing any work of philosophy is a dangerous game, because going too far can neuter the depth of thought that made the original worthwhile in the first place. I'm afraid that between instances of pointless reduction and flights of embarrassing folksiness, I'll be sticking with my Mitchell.

17. Phonogram: The Singles Club, Kieron Gillen. Kieron Gillen is one of our most prolific and shameless pop-culture apologists, writing with a refreshing earnestness, a sophistication undiluted with ironic distance. He can overreach himself, and he can kind of look like a jack-ass, but every area of culture deserves a critic willing to embarrass himself in the expression of his passion. 2006's "Phonogram" was a short comic book series done with Jamie McKelvie that was, at heart, a parable of the gravity music exerts on culture. That might sound dry or schmaltzy, depending on how much benefit of a doubt you're willing to extend to the project, but it was good. It was overambitious and had some basic narrative problems, but Gillen provided 90's Brit-Pop with a poignant and surprisingly nuanced love-letter.

This is follow-up, a series of character studies set against the backdrop of a single night. Again, music and the irresistible grip it exerts on a person's universe are his primary concerns, and again I found myself impressed at how well he balances the abstract and the concrete. Each story sets up and explores an idea about music, while simultaneously developing a full, meaty portrait of an individual. The shared setting works in his favor, letting characters drift in and out of the spotlight, showing up as faces in the crowd, recurring as a supporting character, popping up again as antagonist, and at some point taking center-stage.

McKelvie's clean lines and gorgeously soft and crisp faces are a perfect fit. His figures are at once wonderfully expressive and somehow plastic, their pupils maybe just a bit too big for the words coming out of their mouths. There's no real illusion of life, there's always a plastic sheath of hyperreality between his drawings and the reader, and it only helps to accentuate the tone of the whole work. For Gillen's world of fashion as talisman, where who are might just be a narrative counterpoint to what you listen to, McKelvie is absolutely ideal.

18. Eugene Onegin, Alexander Pushkin (trans. S. Mitchell). I've already written about this a few weeks ago, but long story short good book good book good book.


19. The Stranger Manual, Catie Rosemurgy. Same here. Loved it, check a few pages back to find out why.


20. The Left Bank Gang, Jason.

21. Shoplifting From American Apparel, Tao Lin. Planning on writing about this and Toussaint in the near future. Capsule review, though-- it wasn't perfect, but it was promising. I'm a little more baffled by the hate for Tao Lin than the praise, though. I've read some of his poetry as well and enjoyed it, but I think overall he knows what he's doing more than some people give him credit for.