Episode Seven -- Lunch Pail Writer

I. George Carlin and the February Lesson

Last summer George Carlin died. I was blue about it, but I was fine -- he was older, he lived hard for a good while, etc. Then I turned on YouTube and watched his last concert special. The first words out of his mouth were "Fuck Lance Armstrong." That's when I cried just a little. Who's going to say "Fuck Lance Armstrong" now? Because, goddammit, somebody in this pitiful excuse for a culture has to say "Fuck Lance Armstrong."

God, I hate Lance Armstrong.

Last autumn they honored Carlin with the Mark Twain Award, and they broadcast the special in February. Here is my favorite part. This is John Stewart from the Daily Show:


George Carlin's transformation was amazing, and one of the reasons that I'm here today is I was fortunate enough to be asked to host "Forty Years in Comedy: A Night with George Carlin." Now, the idea was that we were going to take this amazing comedian, who had been doing comedy for forty years, and had two heart attacks, and we were going to send him to Aspen, Colorado, the highest point in America, where there's very little oxygen. And then we were going to bring in a heavy smoker from New York to interview him.

So my job was to interview George, and I got the chance to get to know him a little bit beforehand. I flew out to California to meet him and to sit down with him and to talk with him, and I think that's where I learned the lesson about George Carlin and what he meant to comedy and what he was like as an artist. I didn't know what to expect. I went over to his office on Brentwood, and I sort of had this idea that I was going to watch The Master create. You know, we were going to go there, and he was going to be like, "Hey man, let's go out to the desert, I'm going to take some peyote, I'm going to get in the earth, and shit's going to come to me."

And I walked into his office, and it's just a computer, and a desk, and this incredibly anti-establishment mind punched in every day and sat and worked. He cared enough about his comedy, and what he was doing, that every day he punched the clock. This was a blue-collar guy. That was the main message that I took from him.


That aired while I was in the early stages of writing my dissertation. Don't get me wrong, I had been reading a ton, I had written up a long proposal, and I had done a ton of writing (other projects) in the past. Still, though, I had held onto a certain conception of writing. And I looked upon becoming a professor in much the same way. Although I worked hard at teaching (extensive comments, hours of preparation, tracking down interesting pieces to complement what we were studying), I did not have the right attitude about scholarship. Or any kind of writing, for that matter. And the lesson I was learning, and that was becoming increasingly coherent in my mind after a month of at least three hours a day/six days a week of clocking in, sitting down in front of the computer, and finding word after word, constructing sentence after sentence until they seemed to be paragraphs, was that it is a job. Labor. You sit down and build what you can each day and let time take care of the rest. The rest being, of course, accumulation. There are no magic pills or herbs or buttons or anything like that – nothing psychedelic in its literal, "mind-revealing," sense. The process is accumulation rather than revelation. It's work; it's a job.

Now that reads like something a mature person would write.


II. Good Point

This very astute argument was in my comments section, and I'd like to post it here:

I gotta call you out on one thing, though--lumping Updike together with all such "high art." Why is his brand of bad writing (and I don't like him particularly) illustrative of high art--and symphonies?! And Updike aside, what's wrong with high art? What IS high art? Aren't the Rolling Stones high art? Within the pop music world, they pretty much define the canon--no music is more played, known, or abused in popular culture. And they're virtual royalty, with money, models, and castles to boot. In 100 years, won't we being going to the symphony to hear them? (hopefully they will have finally retired by this point, but you get my meaning).

I think much of what we consider high art is that which has been commodified by a cultural elite which has little hand in actually creating it (though they often support it--usually posthumously). Just because Regan played "Born in the USA" at his rallies doesn't make Springsteen a sell-out tool or a Republican elitist (especially since he didn't agree to lend it!). On similar grounds, I have to take exception to your comment of rather being on fire than listening to a symphony, as if the very art form is compromised by its elitist values. The very same life force that penetrates the Stones best songs is found in music from Bach onwards (and even before). Beethoven was a working class nobody whose father beat him and who tried to scrape together a life as a touring pianist, before finally giving that up and trying to compose. He broke all the rules, shocked one of his teachers, the venerable Joseph Haydn, and even wrote a symphony dedicated to what he saw as a true hero of the people--Napoleon (until said dictator invaded Austria--he then rubbed out the dedication so hard the page tore). My point being that classical music (a bad generic term), far from being "rich white men's music," was largely composed by moody, dissident, impoverished, angry artists who were ignored in their time and often defrauded by the very elitist society who now trumpets their works in every concert hall.

Updike is Updike, and he has a reputation. But I hope everyone's reputation doesn't damn them to mediocrity, especially when many of these reputations are posthumous. High art is in the eye of the beholder, and I hope we can judge the work on its own values (as you do Updike), rather than dismissing all symphonic music--or epistolary novels--or impressionist paintings--to the dung heap. That which we love, we love. Even KISS has its place. But isn't damning KISS over the Stones a kind of judgment of high vs. low art? (though I agree--I hate their music).


Here is my response, with some modifications:

I just read your comments, and I think they're insightful and spot-on. If I read you correctly, you're arguing that creative output is creative output, and designations of high and low, classical and pop, and etc. are terms that are applied (usually long) after the fact by critics and taste-makers. I really hated that book, and I had a bug up my ass about it because a) It looks like I'll be engaging it even more thoroughly b) Updike seems like an Ivy League guy writing about his perception of the working-class. So I teed off on my perception of elite tastes to make an awkward point. I'm going to leave it up because it's honest from that moment, but with your permission I would like to highlight your points, especially about Beethoven. Truth be told, I like Beethoven, and I listened to parts of one of his symphonies with a class when I taught The Heart is a Lonely Hunter. (I do think that good rock and roll music represents the Lifeforce, though.)

The other point you make that I really like is that even in pop culture a low/high dichotomy emerges. Critics will laud The Velvet Underground, who sold only a handful of records, and denigrate KISS and their ilk. It's the elite/popular struggle, and it eventually emerges in every new medium -- it emerges as soon as somebody takes a mode of expression seriously enough to write about it. First it's trashed, then it's taken seriously, then there's the elite/popular clash. It happened with film, it happened with television, it happened with rock and roll, and it will probably happen with webisodes. Ironically, critical darlings such as Goddard love the "trashy" stuff, just as critical darlings such as Cobain grew up on KISS and Sammy Hagar.

Plus I was really sad about Michael Jackson dying. Mean dads can fuck a guy up.