Etudes, Not Essays
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Jean-François Garneray’s The Piano Lesson.
Earlier this week I wrote up a list of rules I try to follow in my digital thinking/writing life. The three of you out there who have been faithfully reading this blog might have stumbled a bit at the penultimate guideline on that list, related to holding your fandoms lightly, not making too much of pop culture, etc, a guidelines that made me out to be a living, breathing incarnation of the “Old man yells at cloud” Simpsons meme. And perhaps a hypocrite, to boot: wait a minute, my loyal readers say, isn’t this the guy who wrote a whole post about one scene in a Muppets movie? And blathered on about how awful The Steve Miller Band is? What gives?
On one level, the grumpy answer to give is simply: this is my blog, I write what I want! I contain Whitmanian multitudes, etc etc. But I want to offer a little more justification, one that meshes with my honestly and firmly held conviction that in the grand scheme little of what pop culture produces will matter in a century’s time, all washed away like tears in rain, as some dude once said (I don’t remember who). That explanation, briefly, is that I view my blog primarily as a place for pre-thinking, not thinking itself. As I said in a previous post, thinking is hard, and most of us most of the time will not actually engage in it, but only something resembling it. Here on the blog, then, I make a conscious effort to pre-think in ways that keep me sharp and engaged, so that when I try to set about the actual task of thinking I have my tools whetted and primed.
Allow me to be pedantic for a moment (as my wife will note, the lack of permission never stopped me before). There’s a little etymological tidbit that people who teach writing like to trot out to put their students at ease: WELL ACHKUALLY, we say, “essay” comes from a French word that just means “attempt.” Thus do we essay (usually unsuccessfully) to trick our students into writing something simultaneously worthwhile and yet knowingly imperfect (our students, ever ready to oblige, nail at least one half of that equation). This etymology is 100% true, and “essays” should always be considered attempts at thought. But there’s actually a French word that signifies something pre-essay: the etude, bane of piano students everywhere (or, in my case, cello students with the dreaded Popper - David, not Karl). Etude, in the French, means “study.” In music it is a piece of music, short and technically focused, that aims to develop some facility in the player. Some Etudes break out to achieve the status of legitimate pieces of music in their own right (as I write I’m listening to an album of etudes by a favorite composer, Philip Glass), but most simply exist to fulfill that original purpose, as exercises for the budding student.
That’s how I like to think of my blog posts, especially those focused on pop culture: as etudes designed to help my flex my muscles. But what muscles? For me, these are the muscles of close reading and description, along with perhaps analysis and insight. These are critical critical tools, but sometimes they languish in the back of the shed in favor of overblown rhetoric, political commitment, or any number of things.
One of the most painstaking but beneficial assignments I received in graduate school came in an upper level film analysis class. The task was deceptively simple: take a single shot from the current film under examination, and right a brief but absolutely thorough description of everything in the shot: every aspect of mise en scène (costumes, props, notable makeup, etc); camera placement, as well as any camera movement; and blocking, lighting, etc. From the outside looking in this is a simple task, but once you get inside it you realize just how complex it can be when you actually bother to notice everything. We watch films all the time, but how often do we think about these elements as we go along? Well, now I do, constantly.
If there’s something I’m going to harp on constantly in my posts about criticism, it’s that we spend too little time engaged in this act of description. We strip mine cultural products for their parts, looking to shove whatever meager evidence we gather into our ill fitting mold of choice. We demand that our cultural effluvia conform perfectly to the au courant political and social mores of our tribe, or else we pore like scribes over the newest superhero film for signs of minuscule connection to the 49 other films in the franchise. Such is the state of a lot of pop culture writing today. To receive this mess of pottage, we’ve traded away the ability to notice how films (or shows, or whatever) wriggle under our attempts to vivisect them, how they operate, however teeteringly, as systems in their own right.
So that’s what I’m up to here, just practicing my writerly scales by trying to stop and examine and think about particular pieces of culture. For the most part I won’t try to elevate these exercises by providing some grand scheme or insight; I’ll just be hammering away at the keys of observation, so that when the opportunity presents itself, I’m ready to really settle down and think.