Month: August 2008

High Society–Dave Sim

Edwin Turner1 Comment

If you’re at all interested in reading any of Dave Sim’s epic 300-issue comic book Cerebus, a book chronicling the life–and death–of a misanthropic mystical barbarian aardvark, High Society is the best (and possibly only) starting point. High Society tells the story of Cerebus’s political adventures in Iest, the largest cosmopolitan city-state of Estarcion. Guided (or perhaps manipulated) by Machiavellian Astoria, Cerebus undertakes a strange, comic odyssey of political ascendancy, culminating in an election for Prime Minister (against Groucho Marx stand-in Lord Julius’s goat, of all things). Sim has a deft ear for political satire and the volume holds up particularly well to a rereading against the backdrop of the current American electoral process. While High Society conveys a certain cynical contempt for the cronyism, deal-making, and the general nasty malfeasance that underwrites politics, there’s also a reconciling of democracy, liberty, and art here that you could never find from a CNN analyst or a Fox News hack. By this point, the crude art and flubbed pacing that hampered the first few years of Cerebus are nowhere to be found. High Society is tightly-plotted, full of smart gags expressed in Sim’s keen lines, without an over-reliance on bubbles overstuffed with exposition.

The book is funny without ever being light, and rereading it again, I was surprised at how moved–and exhilarated–I was by the conclusion. Although the parody of Marvel’s forgotten Batman ripoff Moon Knight doesn’t hold up very well, and the “sideways” issues at the end are an annoying (but interesting) experiment, High Society continues to deliver both laughs and insight about the political process over twenty years after its single-volume publication. Very good stuff, and highly recommended (read it along with/against the 2008 election).

(Strange aside that I couldn’t work into the piece–remember Ken Jennings? That guy who won Jeopardy! like, a year straight? According to his blog he’s a huge Cerebus fan).

Writing in the Ellipses

Edwin Turner2 Comments
Balthus--The Living Room
Balthus–The Living Room

Flipping through Balthus‘s digressive, discursive, elliptical memoir Vanished Splendors, I came across this notation:

I deeply believe in the genius of painting, which parallels that of childhood. I’ve used painting as a language without really having decided to do so, because it suits me better than writing. Writing tries to be too explicit and go directly to meaning. That’s why I could never be a writer like many of my friends. Some aspects of my life might be clarified by the present short texts, similar to letters. . . . For me, writing can only be in the ellipses, where I express myself; painting conveys this magnificently, sometimes unbeknownst to the painter himself.

Elsewhere, Balthus lists the writers and texts he loves, and gives us (what I believe to be) a great definition for reading:

I often paint young girls who are reading. It’s surely because I saw the act of reading as a way to enter life’s deeper secrets. Reading is the great means of access to myths. Green, Gracq, Char, Jouve, Michaux, and Artuad were frequent passageways, as well as the great holy writings of the Bible and initiates like Dante, Rilke, the Pléiade poets, the great Chinese writers, the mystics John of the Cross and Teresa of Avila, not to mention Carroll, the pure German poet Ludwig Tieck, and Indian epics. All these texts and authors were landmarks in my life, and gave me another dimension of time to which I soon felt myself summoned. My young girls who read in dreaming poses are escaping from fleeting, harmful time . . . Fixing them in the act of reading or dreaming prolongs a privileged, splendid, and magic glimpsed-at time. A suddenly opened curtain sheds light from a window and is seen only by those who know how. Thus a book is a key to open a mysterious trunk containing childhood scents. .

Balthus--Girl with Cat
Balthus--Girl with Cat

But, my favorite lines in the book come at the end of the following passage:

Painting is something both embodied and spiritualized. It’s a way of attaining the soul through the body. . . . Being too cerebral and jokey can obstruct an artisan’s manual labor, and impede the ascent to the soul. Believing that my young girls are perversely erotic is to remain on the level of material things. It means understanding nothing about the innocence of adolescent languor, and the truth of childhood.

Exactly. Whenever I look at Girl with Cat, I think, man, that’s not perversely erotic at all…that’s just the innocence of adolescent languor–the real truth of childhood, actually. Nice try, Count Balthasar.

Moral Relativism — Steven Lukes

Edwin Turner1 Comment

Moral relativism is the belief that ideals of right and wrong and good and bad are contextually determined by one’s local culture, as opposed to a theory of morality that holds that good and bad exist as absolute, metaphysical values existing cross-culturally, values intrinsic to one’s humanness. At the same time, individuals, even those (sometimes especially those) who see moral relativism as the overwhelmingly rational, sensical position, nonetheless are inextricably tied to their own sense of right and wrong, and this sense often leads them into a position of judgment–and perhaps action–against, over, and/or in reaction to the perceived wrongs of other cultures and societies.

In his new book Moral Relativism, NYU sociology professor Steven Lukes employs an interdisciplinary approach to tackle one of the biggest sticking points of contemporary thought. Using a variety of methods including philosophy, anthropology, history, and literature, Lukes addresses the fundamental conflict of moral relativism: that what’s right and good in one’s own culture may not be right and good in another’s culture, yet a will remains to believe in ideals of universal human rights. Lukes uses a number of timely concrete examples, including female genital circumcision, Islamic fundamentalism, and mass immigration, to assess the costs and payoffs of holding a view that says that no absolute morality exists. Perhaps the most fascinating part of Moral Relativism is Lukes’s negotiation of Western (or globally Northern, as he saliently points out) human rights actions as an extension of colonialism, with the one-time colonists imposing their values–again–upon the one-time colonized.

Lukes concludes that “the question Who are we to judge other cultures? is a bad question.” Arguing that the “postcolonial and multicultural contexts of our time do not require us to see the discourse and practice of human rights as ethnocentric,” Lukes takes up a position–well-argued–that a moral fundamentalist might claim is simply a liberal humanist wanting to have his cake and eat it too. Which, of course, is the problem with the book. It’s a fantastic argument for moral relativism, one that points out that no one–no one–is absolutely relativist, and that, in fact, being a moral relativist entails recognizing that within cultures certain perceived absolutes exist. The idea that right and wrong are relative doesn’t mean that right and wrong are arbitrary or don’t exist–it simply means that ideals of right and wrong have to be reconstituted within different systems of social and cultural order. Yet Lukes’s book isn’t going to convince the types that need convincing. Still, those of us who think that moral relativism is simple common sense will find plenty of concrete, contemporary, real world ammunition here in case we feel like arguing with a–gasp–moral fundamentalist.

Moral Relativism, available now, is part of the new BIG IDEAS // small books series from Picador Books.

In the Land of No Right Angles — Daphne Beal

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In the Land of No Right Angles tells the story of Alex, an American college student backpacking in Nepal for a year. Alex’s overseas adventure becomes complicated when she meets fellow American Will. Will prompts Alex to help bring a poor Nepalese girl named Maya to the capital city of Kathmandu, and the three move in to an apartment together. Awkwardness ensues, including a failed threesome, a bad drug trip, and some major cultural misunderstandings. Alex leaves on a sour note, returning eight years later as a professional photojournalist to expose the horrors of human trafficking, only to find Maya embroiled in Bombay’s seedy sex trade.

The novel reads at a rapid clip, propelled by lots of dialog, and Beal certainly shows a complex knowledge of Nepali culture. Still, there’s something pervasively shallow, even troubling about Alex’s interactions with and reactions to her experience with this alien culture that the novel doesn’t quite resolve. The reader is meant to identify with Alex, the privileged American on her adventure to the exotic East. At one point, Alex states, “I wanted to come home different from what I’d been–bolder, wiser, happier.” This desire to find one’s self far away from home is nothing uncommon, of course, yet Alex’s–and Will’s–professed altruism toward their subject, poor little Maya, ultimately comes off as paternalistic and demeaning, culminating in the older Alex’s quest to “save” Maya. It’s hard to feel the empathy or sympathy that Beal wishes to evoke for Alex’s dilemma: in spite of all her questing, she still falls prey to the illusion of her own power as an educated Westerner to control the outcomes of alien others. To take a cue from Edward Said’s work revealing Orientalism in Western thinking, Alex’s East–and the people in it–exist mostly to reify and stabilize her own identity, give her her the adventure she needs to “come home different” with plenty of great stories to share.

Orientalist critique aside, Alex does have a pretty good story to tell. Beal’s descriptions are vivid and the novel has the compressed vitality of a good memoir coupled with a tone of immediacy that makes it easy and enjoyable to read. In the Land of No Right Angles will no doubt end up in more than a few book clubs this fall, and it’s certainly your smarter than average beach read–and there’s still plenty of summer left.

In the Land of No Right Angles is available August 12th from Anchor Books.