Posted 5 months, 3 weeks ago mid-afternoon by oso
When speaking about how our society and culture are changing because of networked technologies, one of the many cheesy metaphors I often depend on goes something like this: In the 20th century we sat silently in the opera house; in the 21st century we find ourselves surrounded by the chaos and the pressure to participate that is inherent in the karaoke bar. I first brought this up in my “Pro-Craftsmanship, Anti-Virtuosity” talk. My main point: that karaoke bars are a hell of a lot more fun than any opera house. And, while to this day I would still take even the worst karaoke bar over the finest opera house, I do understand that many are increasingly nostalgic for the façade of masterpiece that an opera house represents. In their minds they want to rise above the droning humdrum of everyday egalitarianism and submit to the suspension of reality that virtuosity both demands and evokes. (I suppose that 3D Imax is the contemporary equivalent of the 19th century opera house.)
Yesterday, in the February issue of The Believer, I came across a newly published Derek Walcott poem titled “No Opera” that goes like this:
No opera, no gilded columns, no wine-dark seats,
no Penelope scouring the stalls with delicate glasses,
no practiced ecstasy from the tireless tenor, no sweets
and wine at no interval, no altos, no basses
and violins sobbing as one; no opera house,
no museum, no actual theatre, no civic center
- and what else? Only the huge doors of clouds
with the setting disc through which we leave and enter,
only the deafening parks with their jumping crowds,
and the thudding speakers. Only the Government
Buildings down by the wharf, and another cruise ship
big as the capital, all blue glass and cement.
No masterpieces in huge frames to worship,
on such banalities has life been spent
in brightness, and yet there are the days
when every street corner rounds itself into
a sunlit surprise, a painting or a phrase,
canoes drawn up by the market, the harbour’s blue,
the barracks. So much to do still, all of it praise.
I still remember the first time I had heard of Derek Walcott. It wasn’t that long ago, though long enough ago that Twitter was not yet even an idea. Georgia linked to an interview with Walcott on WNYC and I gave it a listen. He spoke of his poetry and his watercolors. He spoke of art as a way to escape ego. I was mesmerized by his words, though those who knew better would later summarize for me, “he can be a bit of an ass.” But the man has talent, of this there is little debate.
The fact that I followed Georgia’s blog and podcast on a weekly basis and yet hadn’t even heard of Derek Walcott is just one more example that many cultural critics would point to as evidence that we are losing our ability to distinguish and navigate between the truly brilliant and merely good. (To be honest, though, I still tend to prefer a blog post by Georgia to a poem by Walcott … poetry has just never really been for me.)
Still, there is something about Walcott’s latest poem that speaks to me. It’s as if he has fully realized that his own poems will not be held by future generations as “masterpieces in huge frames to worship.” Instead we have loud parks and cruise ships. We are more apt to worship ourselves and our groups of friends. This seems to stir about a tear of regret, but then there is a noticeable change in tone and perspective halfway through the fifth to last line: “and yet there are days when every street corner rounds itself into a sunlit surprise, a painting or a phrase … So much to do still, all of it praise.”
Poetry and art will live on long after Derek Walcott is gone, and god bless him for accepting this most basic fact with only a few stanzas of wallowing-in-barber-shop lament. Instead of giving up altogether and claiming that all poetry is dead – as our friend Milan Kundera so cleverly attempted with the novel – Walcott recognizes that there is still “so much to do” and that more people will be involved in doing it than ever before.

Evgeny has a book review in last Thursday’s The National of Jaron Lanier’s You Are Not a Gadget. Evgeny, who also has a book coming out that takes a critical stance on the internet’s impact on society, writes in his review that books taking critical stances on the internet are sorely needed, but that Lanier’s book is not the one we should be reading. Clever.
Pundit posturing aside, here is the sentence by Evgeny that I take issue with: “This is how we have ended up in our current situation, where people like Lanier – who may know everything about technology but very little about society – are the only ones asking extremely important questions.” Evgeny is actually suggesting that there is a shortage of people thinking critically about technology’s positive and negative impacts on society. That’s funny because I seem unable to escape those discussions. And it’s not just the circles I travel in – everyone everywhere has their own pet theories and we’re all just about saying the same thing over and over (even this very blog post … please forgive me).
Evgeny is right to point out that academics – who are actually paid to sit around and think and talk – have generally done a pretty dismal job when it comes to contextualizing technology’s social impact. (There is currently a debate on the Air-L mailing list – a discussion space for academics engaged in internet research – about whether or not “apps” refers to applications or Apple products. Dan Cohen, meditating on “academic theater” and “edutainment” says that academics can only blame themselves for becoming too insulated and not engaging with the public.) But Lanier has nothing new to say – not because he hasn’t read Rousseau and John Dewey, as Evgeny suggests – but rather because everything he has to say is already said on a daily basis at your neighborhood Starbucks.
What Jaron, Evgeny, Derek Walcott, and Dan Cohen all have in common are bruised egos. “Why aren’t they paying attention to me?” Jaron and Evgeny are both trying to fashion themselves as public intellectuals. This career path demands that they seek attention and create publicity. But their financial restraints seem to have influenced their intellectual thinking: something must be wrong, they figure, in a world where less people pay attention to the likes of Jaron Lanier and Evgeny Morozov.

Of course, in reality, there is a wealth of smart, critical thinking about how the internet and modern technologies are changing all aspects of society. The BBC World Service has done a great job producing many documentaries exploring these questions in locations that are often ignored. Internet Cafe Hobo is an interesting three-part series looking at the impact of cyber cafes. “Citizen Journalism – democracy or chaos” has a well-balanced look at the pros and cons of citizen participation in journalism by focusing on Kashmir and Egypt. Other episodes look at Russian hackers, online dating in India, and the internet’s impact on religion in Iraq. Some are better than others, but they are all sure to leave you with some new facts and many new questions.
At Global Voices we’ve also done a pretty excellent job looking at how technology and the internet has impacted society around the globe. For the next two weeks Global Voices and the BBC are collaborating on a special reporting project titled SuperPower to examine the influence of the Internet on our lives. Click through the links and you’ll find that there is no shortage of deep, critical thinking about how technology is changing us – both in how we perceive ourselves and relate to others.
















Mozilla Firefox 3.5.7 Mac OS X Mozilla Firefox 3.5.7 Mac OS X
Oso, thanks for pointing us to the Walcott poem, which is probably from his new book White Egrets. This doesn’t have much to do with your main concerns in this post, but I want to gently disagree with your reading of the poem.
The imagery and argument of “No Opera” are fairly typical of Walcott’s whole oeuvre, which now spans more than sixty years, and also consistent with some of the statements he’s made recently about official cultural policy in St. Lucia (where he was born and now mostly lives) and the rest of the Caribbean more widely. Here he’s rather bluntly (this is not Walcott at his most subtle) criticising Caribbean governments who decline to give serious support to the arts, in favour of subsidies for bread-and-circus Carnival festivities (“the deafening parks with their jumping crowds / and the thudding speakers”) and exploitative tourism (“another cruise ship / big as the capital”). The reference to the rather overscale Government Buildings on the Castries waterfront also seems a pointed criticism of politicians and bureaucrats more concerned with their own pocketbooks and prestige than with public welfare.
Like other Caribbean artists and writers, Walcott has nursed these concerns for a very long time. (They/we don’t all share his exact position, and as you might imagine the politics of government involvement in arts support in this part of the world are fractious and complicated.) His classic 1970 essay “What the Twilight Says” is a ferocious statement of the predicament of the artist in a postcolonial developing society. His public comments about the failure of Caribbean governments to recognise the importance of the arts have remained consistent for going on forty years; he has occasionally been openly confrontational, as in Georgetown in August 2008, when he angrily debated related questions with the president of Guyana at a public event.
All of this by way of offering some context. So that when Walcott writes that there is “no opera” in St. Lucia — nor museum, nor “actual theatre” etc. — he is not lamenting the death of his own poems in the face of the indifference of future generations. At least, I don’t read it that way. He is in fact affirming the significance and durability of his writing, and the work of other Caribbean writers and artists, charged with the responsibility and privilege (a Walcottian word) to “praise” the world around them by turning “every street corner” into “a painting or a phrase”.
The artist’s duty to exalt the world into the permanence of art may be Walcott’s major theme. It’s there in “As John to Patmos”, a poem he wrote as a teenager and published in 1948: “I swear now … To praise lovelong, the living and the brown dead.” It’s there in his great book-length autobiographical poem Another Life (1973): “We were blest with a virginal, unpainted world / with Adam’s task of giving things their names….” Etc.
So I read “No Opera” as a defiant and self-celebratory statement of artistic purpose, rather than an elegy of resignation. It’s far from his most accomplished verse, but there are some nice self-referential touches. The Homeric allusions in the first two lines remind us that the resources do not exist in St. Lucia to stage a full production of his own version of the Odyssey. The phrase “masterpieces in huge frames to worship” points us to his obsessive long poem Tiepolo’s Hound. Etc.
All that said, the meaning of any poem shifts from one reader to another, despite its author’s intentions, and “No Opera” obviously offers you some valuable resonances.
As for the relevance or otherwise of the “façade of masterpiece that an opera house represents”, have you seen this recent article by Alex Ross, the New Yorker’s classical music critic?:
http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/musical/2010/02/08/100208crmu_music_ross
(Sorry about the length of this comment.)
Safari 531.22.7 Mac OS X Safari 531.22.7 Mac OS X
Hmm, your interpretation makes much more sense than my interpretation. But for the sake of this blog post, can we let my own personal interpretation stand? (And I was just mentioning the reader’s appropriation of the writer’s text.)
And as far as that Alex Ross piece goes, I’m totally down for listening to chamber-style classical music in a jazz bar setting with peanuts and a gin and tonic. No, even better: a Gin Ting.
Safari 531.21.10 Mac OS X Safari 531.21.10 Mac OS X
i think woojay would disagree with you and much rather spend an evening at an opera house then in most karoke bars. i miss both of you. odd.