Biblical Incantations: Agee and Evans

By Matt Pearce

I’m still working on this week’s passage, but I already had a few thoughts — the first being that to read James Agee and enjoy the experience is to have overcome a summit of tics.

Agee's prose is, to paraphrase Robert Lowell, a "monotony of the sublime." The natural proportion of things seems to have been thrown out of whack; details of the smallest sort are blown up to near-hysterical significance. Each little thing seems electrified with mortal urgency and has become shocking to the touch.

Then there’s Agee's paralyzing self-consciousness, on display from the beginning in a throat-clearing that spans dozens of pages. Agee seems paranoid about not fully representing his subjects, whom he holds in an incantatory awe of Biblical inflection:

“A man and a woman are drawn together upon a bed and there is a child and there are children: First they are mouths, then they become auxiliary instruments of labor: later they are drawn away, and become the fathers and mothers of children, who shall become the fathers and mothers of children: Their father and their mother before them were, in their time, the children each of different parents, who in their time were each children of parents: This has been happening for a long while: its beginning was before stars: It will continue for a long while: no one knows where it will end...”

And they begat, and begat, and begat.

As we go on, his frenzied deference is reminiscent of the Book of Numbers, where Moses’ men survey the foreign tribes of Canaan and return humbled:

“...The land, through which we have gone to search it, is a land that eateth up the inhabitants thereof; and all the people that we saw in it are men of a great stature. And there we saw the giants, the sons of Anak, which come of the giants: and we were in our own sight as grasshoppers, and so we were in their sight.”

Walker Evans’ photos seem to take on a similarly intense focus. The close crop and the harsh conditions combine for a kind of claustrophobia. The subjects are rarely given a backdrop that suggests any kind of space. We can extract any number of interpretations for this, but one metaphor is easy to reach: these people are trapped in their lives.

Rachel Carson & Silent Spring

By Matt Pearce

Our perception of man and nature colliding is mostly iconographic and kind of hegemonistic. Something is always being dominated by a greater apocalyptic force. Houses are always getting flattened by mudslides, mountains of salmon are seen swung around in a giant net.

These things are sensational and make for great images. They inspire people to action.

So how, then, do you write about a disaster whose root causes are molecular? And in a time when prevailing scientific wisdom was seemingly sacrosanct?

Carson’s use of lyricism — metaphor, essentially — is the natural tool for jumping from place to place, from zoom to zoom; a wide-angle telescope with a perfectly-adjustible aperture capable of capturing her argument for nature’s — and man’s — interconnectivity.

I think it’s important to point out the successes of the written word when we encounter them. Nature is a beautiful thing, but as much as we’d love to luxuriate in its visual largesse, a physical camera can’t tell all its stories.

DDT: what is it, exactly? What does it do when it enters an organism? How does it affect an insect, a waterway, a township? These are the questions a crusading writer has to answer, and answer in ways that can engage the people who most need to be engaged.

On a related note, you have to be curious about who will be Carson’s heir for our generation, and what values they’ll challenge. We look back with pride on our successful muckraker journalists who, stripped of the context of history, seem to don great cloaks of justice.

But how were they treated in their day? As activists. Rabble-rousers, challenging the system.

This seems to conflict, slightly, with some of our inculcated values as journalists: impartiality, fairness, not becoming the story. I wonder how much the achievement of success affects questions of these journalists’ “impartiality,” and how much that empowers us as journalists to pursue causes we know are just.

Because what if we’re found in the wrong? We would have violated some of our most hallowed professional values.

I suppose muckraking journalism is kind in that its successes are much better remembered than its failures. It makes me also wonder whether our attempts at impartiality aren’t also hedges against the changing mores of history.

Nonetheless, Rachel Carson was right, and so we salute her. She had the facts on her side, and she delivered them with the grace of a litterateur. Given her success, and the success of the authors we’ve read before, it’s hard to argue against journalists taking a few more chances and making a few more stands.

Robert Frank, photographer & visualist

Recent articles about Robert Frank exhibit at MOMA in New York have appeared in Wall Street Journal by Luc Sante & by Anthony Lane in the New Yorker, Sept. 14, 2009.

Exhibit ends January 3, 2010.

Also, an article in NYT about Robert Frank, noticed by Matt Pearce.
See link.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/25/arts/design/25frank.html?_r=1&8dpc

BH

Extraordinary Otherness

James Baldwin, John Edgar Wideman, Luis J. Rodriguez, and Ruben Salazar--along with Hunter S. Thompson, explore what it means to be an outsider in a culture.

What do you see as common links in their themes?
How does reporting strengthen their writing?
How does their use of language and voice make their writing memorable?
How do they reference their own race, gender, class or sexual-orientation identities in their non-fiction writing?

Read aloud from each of these. See how they differ. How does the place of publication or the era of publication influence their production and the audience consumption of what they write? Considering the manifold forms of media, who or where today reports and writes the way these authors do?

What do you discover about these authors when you Google them?
For example, Luis J. Rodriguez http://www.csmonitor.com/2009/0907/p02s04-lign.html

When you read them deeply?

BH

Chien-Chi Chang

The other day I showed you the amazing book, THE CHAIN (UK: Trolley, 2002) with the photographs by Chien-Chi Chang. He made the pictures at a mental asylum in Kaohsiun, Taiwan, beginning in 1993 and ending in 1999.

Here is a link to his biography. Study it to learn what you can about photography, about him, about yourself, and about our world:

http://www.magnumphotos.com/Archive/C.aspx?VP=XSpecific_MAG.Biography_VPage&AID=2K7O3R14TBS7

Here is a link to a photo archive of his pictures:

http://www.magnumphotos.com/Archive/C.aspx?VP=XSpecific_MAG.PhotographerDetail_VPage&l1=0&pid=2K7O3R14TN1D&nm=Chien-Chi%20Chang

Here is an article with a photo essay by him about the Taiwanese village where he lived as a child.

TIME Asia article:
http://www.time.com/time/asia/2003/journey/taiwan.html

BH

How The Other Half Lives: Jacob Riis

Mel Mencher, my professor at Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, introduced me to Jacob Riis and HOW THE OTHER HALF LIVES. The book opened the doorway for my lifelong journey in writing and thinking about how class, impoverishment, economic and social issues are covered in newspapers, magazines, online, books, and images.

By the 1880s in New York, social reformer Riis benefited from a new invention – flash powder. In the era of early photographic technology without artificial lighting, images required long exposures. Flash powder helped Riis to illuminate the squalor of tenement houses packed with families, filth, and the choking smoke of coal stoves. Another reformer, sociologist Lewis Hine, later would help to establish photojournalistic documentation of societal problems.

What ideas do you get from Riis? His reportage? Writing? Photography? Point of View?
How is he a journalist? How is he a social reformer? How is his writing clouded by class and ethnic blinders?

Who are his heirs?

Have you read Jonathan Kozol's Rachel and Her Children : Homeless Families in America? He also wrote stories in NEW YORKER in early 1990s about homelessness.

Who is documenting and writing about the hard edge of the working poor in Missouri? The United States? The world?

What is interesting is the slippery slope, the borderlands between working
poor and the folks who end up at St. Francis House in Columbia. A friend of mine once worked as physician and researcher at MU. He had an employee who made about $16,000
a year. She ate squirrel sandwiches on occasion, made by her grandmother.

Missouri, including Columbia, has lots of people who work hard and barely get along financially.

"Wintour and Some Discontent"

Here is a link to a NPR story on a documentary--"The September Issue"--about Vogue magazine.

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=112205015&ps=cprs

Read this. Listen to the audio. Think about the role of editors, the role of magazines in American culture and world culture, consumption, advertising, marketing, desire & journalism.

BH