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Book REview Digest: Sontag’s Last Stand
At the Same Time, a posthumous collection of Susan Sontag’s essays and speeches, just came out and is showing up in review columns. Does Craig Seligman live in Seattle? Because it sure seems like he looked to Mount Rainier for metaphorical inspiration in describing the book.
The rage in these last speeches is controlled rage, frosty and sublime — a snow-capped peak of rage that towers over the landscape that is the political and critical discourse of today.
In The Nation, Jeremy Harding is less poetical, but makes up for this deficiency by deferring to Sontag for much of his review. Thus we get a sense of the melancholy that informs this book.
In an essay on Beauty,
we’re brought smoothly forward into Sontag’s present–her own time and place–to reflect on a set of values that have evolved for centuries but that are rapidly degrading, she believes, under the pressure of late capitalism in America.
The deterioration of values, the corruption of essential culture, the loss of beauty and virtue–maybe liberals and conservatives have more in common than is usually thought. Apparently these concerns are common to left and right.
Both traditional society and the modernist critical reaction to it are undermined by postmodern apathy. On one hand we have pseudo-traditions–fundamentalisms which ignore the diversity, intelligence, and complexity of real tradition. (For example Joel Osteen vs. Emerson or William James.) On the other, we have the novel eclipsed by the memoir (reflection by reportage) but neither read very much unless picked up by Oprah.
Thus the vastness of postmodern consumer choice has made ours a myopic society. The thoughtful reader has been replaced by the passive viewer. Understandably, Sontag seems nostalgic for the days when letters carried more weight.
“Literature was mental travel,” she says in the same lecture. “Travel into the past…and to other countries…. And literature was criticism of one’s own reality, in the light of a better standard.”
That “better standard” is common to both tradition (religion) and modernism (analysis) in their best aspects, and sadly absent from the postmodern scene. Without it–without some sense of ideals or principles–can we hope to make a better world?
The kind of writing [Sontag] most admires may be a dying art, stifled by “our debauched culture,” which “invites us to simplify reality, to despise wisdom.” The picture she paints is extraordinarily bleak. … If fiction has a duty to “enlarge and complicate,” she can’t see it surviving for much longer. And a world without literature–”criticism of one’s own reality”–is sure to lose what’s left of its moral bearings.
I wonder, did Sontag utterly despair at our situation or did she perceive some hope, some light in the world before she left it? I guess I must read the book to find out.
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Ca Dao Vietnam: Vietnamese Folk Poetry
In 1971 John Balaban went to Vietnam to record ca dao, lyric poems passed down orally through generations. Guided by a sympathetic monk, he traversed the war-torn southern countryside, capturing some five hundred ca dao on tape. Most of these poems had never been written down, not even in Vietnamese. In Ca Dao Vietnam: Vietnamese Folk Poetry Balaban presents forty-nine of these stunning, crystalline lyrics in English translation.
The introductory essay suggests that the unassuming, mostly anonymous ca dao are quintessential expressions of Vietnamese culture. “Agrarian dynasties with a cultural continuity of millennia have left few monuments more enduring than the oral poetry and song known today as ca dao.” Linguistic and formal analyses show ca dao to be both ancient (perhaps many thousands of years old) and endemic to Vietnam. In this, they differ from Vietnamese literary poetry, which borrows heavily from Chinese tradition.
As Balaban states in the introduction, “Ca dao are always lyrical, sung to melodies without instrumental accompaniment by an individual singing in the first person…The range of ca dao includes children’s game songs, love songs, lullabies, riddles, work songs, and reveries about spiritual and social orders.” They are informed by a keen, rural sensibility which sometimes appears in brilliant nuggets of folk wisdom.
I am a Mo Village girl.
I wander about selling beer, chance to meet you.
Good jars don’t mean good brew.
Clothes well-mended are better than ill-sewn.
Bad beer soon sends you home.
A torn shirt, when mended, will look like new.
Many of the poems take love as their subject, but patience and duty generally overrule passion. Buddhist notions of karmic destiny foster a romantic quietism and the necessary social coordination of village life makes the fulfillment of individual desire something less than a priority.
HE:
In the long river, fish swim off without a trace.
Fated in love, we can wait a thousand years.
SHE:
Who tends the paddy, repairs its dike.
Whoever has true love shall meet. But when?
A concubine’s bitter lament, a drifter’s carefree song, a jungle soldier’s stoic verse: they are wonderfully varied in tone as well as subject, but all share a vivid sense of metaphor born of the intimate observation of nature. Ca dao are miracles of evocative concision. Simplicity and understatement are the rule.
A tiny bird with red feathers,
a tiny bird with black beak
drinks up the lotus pond day by day.
Perhaps I must leave you.
I wonder how the ca dao tradition has fared these past thirty-odd years. Balaban writes that already in 1971, the people of Saigon thought the tradition was dead. It was only when he took to the road and talked with country folk that he discovered ca dao to be alive and well. Hopefully they are thriving still, despite Vietnam’s increasing economic growth. It would be a shame to lose these verbal treasures, honed over generations, washed smooth in the river of time.
P.S. In a moment of pure, internet magic, Google discovered some of Balaban’s recordings here . Enjoy them there, or go to his own page for a track list, info on his other books and links.
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