1. Observe. Akerman.
In Book of Mutter, Kate Zambreno writes of how she remembers her mother always cleaning, scrubbing the floor on hands and knees, the house her domain and her garden her reprieve. At the end of her life, when time was short, her mother laments how she had slaved for her family. Was cleaning a form of exorcism for her? Perhaps. Zambreno draws a parallel between domestic labor and the endless task of doing and undoing in art-making with a nod to Chantal Akerman’s Jeanne Dielman as an example that encompasses both. It’s a three-hour film of a woman tending the kitchen, feeding her son, taking occasional gentleman callers — the housewife in her element as durational performance. Zambreno writes:
To be a housewife in the old mold, was to live by the rule of erasure. One day’s operating around pretending nothing occurred, no mark made. Ordering one’s life by rooms.
But also: Akerman refuted this role too. In her first film Saute Ma Ville (Blow Up My Town), she’s a young girl unskilled at domestic labors, making a mess in the kitchen, attempting to mop but absolutely not adept, pouring wine and eating spaghetti alone, humming to herself. A misfit in the kitchen, who lights the stove and lays down her head on the burner. The screen goes dark as it explodes. It’s an exorcism of domestic labors, a deathblow to housewifery, a desire to not just to walk away but to blow it all up.
Despite this domestic dismantling at the beginning of her career, Akerman continued to return to the home in her work. Akerman’s final film, No Home Movie, primarily unfolds within the confines of her aging mother’s apartment, with the exception of scenes of landscape interspersed: trees flailing in the wind, the camera moving through seemingly endless barrenness. The film is a tribute to Akerman’s mother and her habitual space of existence. Through Akerman’s own restlessness and itinerancy, we see how she is anchored by her mother’s presence.
And so it’s important that Akerman films their Skype conversations. Her mother asks why she does this and Akerman responds, “I want to show there’s no distance in the world.” The film is a way to negate their inevitable distance approaching through death, to hold on, to make the present permanent.
The film captures the gradual but marked progression of Akerman’s mother’s physical decline over months, perhaps years. It captures their patois of shared intimacies and inside jokes, their mutual adoration, as her mother loses autonomy. Soon she can’t eat by herself or swallow her food. By the end she’s barely able to stay awake. Akerman with no home but her mother makes this chronicle of her physical decline even more devastating to witness.
At one point Akerman sets up the camera in a way that the image evokes a Mark Rothko with its swaths of color juxtaposed. There’s a wall, the door, and the sliver of room between, through which her mother’s body moves unaware of the camera’s eye. We hold onto this movement, watchful and meditative.
The end of the film is marked by a silence. The apartment empty, dark, hollow.
Akerman’s mother died shortly after the end of filming.
Months after the film’s release, Akerman committed suicide.
2. Absence. Rothko.
It is April, I am visiting the Rothko Chapel in Houston, Texas. I am not sure why but I thought the chapel was a gallery and that the canvases would be more like those commissioned for the Four Seasons in his later period — the deep red hues fiery enough to envelop if not consume, the color of Henri Matisse’s decadent “Red Studio,” a color that inspired Rothko to become a painter.
But the chapel is a chapel and the 14 paintings here are a variation on black, muted, somber, meditative. They draw in the viewer in a more subtle way. It takes a few minutes for my eyes to adjust to the chapel’s dimness — a pall pale in comparison to the tropical scene of palm trees, vivid blue sky, shrill bird calls, just beyond the doors.
The colors reveal themselves slowly — black in shades of charcoal gray soon take on distinct hues — muted purples and deep greens. The triptych hung at the back of the chapel begins to undulate as I gaze: gray skies, purple storm, dust clouds and through them a tower, disintegration, falling away. It’s not entirely different than looking into Yayoi Kusama’s “Infinity Nets,” the sense of dissolution and the eternal — all and nothingness.
I come to the chapel twice. The first time a meditative man sits in the center of the chapel, with a notebook before him. His body revolves from painting to painting in a clockwise fashion.
The next day I return and the man who had been in the center the day before now sits on a bench and periodically raises his arms, his legs. I sit on a cushion on the floor, with my back to the door, and I stare into the triptych again. Sitting here conjures a dream I had the night before: I’m standing in Lake Michigan, with water all I see before me, rising and choppy with storm, engulfment. The water drawn in the same hues as the paintings. I sense the possibility of drowning. But also, a raft.
Rothko conjures thoughts of my mother and of her absence. My mother is alive and yet I have struggled all my life with her absence, her depression, and mine, my fears of leaving her alone with her sadness even as a child. In some way it’s an inheritance of lost mothers — I the inheritor of her loneliness, as her mother was institutionalized when she was a young child. An affinity for Rothko is one of the few appreciations I’ve shared with my mother in my adult life. I think of this staring into the vast openness of the painting, the canvas like a black hole, falling into absence.
My aunt and mother visited me once during my years living in Brooklyn, and we went to see Red, John Logan’s play about Rothko’s life and work. I’ve come to equate Rothko’s later years with this play, this color that I was expecting to see here in the chapel. In the play, Rothko tells his assistant, “There’s only thing I fear in life…One day the black will swallow the red.” Perhaps it’s fitting that I’ve forgotten the black in favor of the red: the red was the play, the red was my mother so alive that night, touched by Rothko’s idealism and passion, his arrogance and melancholy, his discipline and rage. We both recognized some aspect of my father in his character, with mutual love and disdain. My mother was so present. It dawns on me now with distance that this darkness, this black of Rothko is also her, and more familiar than red.
3. Exorcism. Zambreno.
Kate Zambreno’s Book of Mutter is an elegy, an archive, a palimpsest of fragmented memory. The book is built around the absence of her mother, who died from lung cancer more than 10 years ago. Its writing is an act of exorcism, ostensibly, but as I read further, I realize it’s also a conjuring, a wish to make her mother’s absence present.
“What does it mean to write what is not here? To write an absence,” she wonders. She wrestles with the desire to conjure and in doing so, to purge; she struggles with its impossibility. It’s like walking through a series of empty rooms, once occupied, in an attempt to reinstate the former occupants. How to move forward? It’s a Beckettian dilemma: “…I can’t go on, I’ll go on.”
When she writes “I would like to see the house on fire. The crowded theater of my mind,” she evokes Akerman’s doing so. She aligns her project with Louise Bourgeois’s Cells, specifically her “Cell (Choisy),” pictured on the cover of Book of Mutter: a white model of Bourgeois’s childhood home, set behind a fence, with a guillotine blade hanging just above — the severance imminent. She quotes Bourgeois speaking of her artistic process:
To have really gone through an exorcism, in order to liberate myself from the past, I have to reconstruct it, ponder about it, make a statue out of it and get rid of it through sculpture.
This book is a repository of Akerman’s pondering and conjuring, which it seems becomes a process of accretion and erasure, not to rid but to write and to conjure again: “Over a decade now, my multiple attempts at reconstruction…”
It’s as if the book’s language has broken with the weight of sorrow. Just as when Zambreno first recalls her mother’s white dress worn to her graduation and can’t bring herself to write that this is the dress her mother is buried in, as if in doing so she would kill her again.
If Book of Mutter is darkness, intimate, fragile, poignant, a book of grappling with her mother’s death, it’s Zambreno’s first book, O Fallen Angel, that’s the exorcism, fiery with intellect and passion. A grotesque American Gothic — filled with vitriol for capitalism, for suburban comforts, for American solipsism. It’s a takedown of the Midwest archetype, reproductive futurism. and the hegemony of Mommy, dimwitted, fat-assed, always well-meaning. Mommy here is guillotined by cruelty and in this fairytale — she deserves it.
But from the beginning, Book of Mutter is already undone. The text is fragmented, blown open as the author struggles to articulate absence, to write a book with its central figure missing. We encounter Zambreno’s mother through pieces, assemblage — the contents of her purse (tissues, tobacco); the altar of her bathroom cabinet (Clinique lipsticks, powders, Vaselines); the photos (her mother in the floppy hat, with her ex-husband, “someone else’s wife”); their matching outfits.
The objects are talismans, just as her lists of female artists are potential surrogates. To find a narrative through art, through others, is one way to both elevate her mother and to share this loss, to make it closer to comprehensible. Like Sylvia Plath, like Anne Sexton, her mother a tragic figure. Like Roland Barthes, like Henry Darger, motherless, she mourns. Like Bourgeois, she attempts to break from it. But in the end nothing is “like” her mother’s death, nothing compares, nothing is or can replace her mother. It’s her loss, her grief, her own and tremendous. And yet, as author she also becomes a réalisatrice playing and replaying, flipping through her archive of memories, orchestrating — like watching films again and again — attempting to extract an essence.
Zambreno casts her mother as lead, mysterious beauty, with cigarette, Coach purse, floppy hat. If she’s present here in literature, it seems there is the potential of moving on.
And all the while Zambreno asks, is this exorcism, like her mother’s cleaning, an endless pursuit? As readers we witness her interrogation of the art as she’s making, her purging alongside her memory’s refrain. It’s a mutual understanding she’s leading us through, an unearthing of how to continue while unable to. From Darger and Bourgeois she asks this too:
Was art for both of them — a form of exorcism, to be able to channel and control, their abandonment, their past?” A form of survival.
In a Slate piece published back in the fall, Kitty Burns Florey took on the unenviable task of diagramming the utterances of vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin. Florey, the author of Sister Bernadette’s Barking Dog, clearly has a unusual predilection for sentence diagramming (which I’m pretty sure the Army Field Manual prohibits as a form of torture.) Nonetheless, her project was more journalistic than aesthetic; she suggested that diagramming a sentence “provides insight into the mind of its perpetrator.”
Perhaps, rather than having some grammatical genius that allows him to seem for confident and masculine than he may actually be, he is merely a product of several years of Warriner's English Grammar.
These are not even the words of Obama, but that of his speech writer, whose job is to make him look good. Therefore, diagramming a sentence from his speech should say nothing about the Messiah.
Kirk, Tx.
Kirk,
What we think we know can often prevent us from learning new things. Last year's Time piece on Obama's speechwriting process:
http://www.time.com/time/politics/article/0,8599,1837368,00.html
Neil
Kirk,
Are you saying Obama's speechwriter is scripting not only his prepared addresses, but ostensibly spontaneous responses to press conference questions (which was the context for this sentence)? I'm not sure I follow your line of argument, but would be happy to know more…
Neil,
The article does mention "the 27 year old wunderkind," Favreau who helps him with his speeches, so which are Obama's words and which are Favreau's?
Garth,
I certainly wouldn't be surprised if Obama rehearses his answers to questions that he anticipates. He is the slickest politician since…well, Bill Clinton, so polishing answers just as with speeches would be easy to imagine. After all, any politician who can convince the American people that a trillion dollar spending bill is going to stimulate the economy certainly gets props from me.
Kirk, Tx.
PS Garth, at least we agree on Bolano.
Goodness. It must be hard work, Kirk, patrolling the entire internet for instances of flattering or admiring statements about the new President of United States which can be turned into sneering implications that those who flatter or admire him have switched off their brains.
How do you find the time?
@Goodness. Or rather, how does someone find the time to diagram the president's speeches?
Kirk,
A speechwriter can only do so much. Like Obama, George W Bush had a team of 3 competent speechwriters yet he couldn't even put together two words coherently. The job of a speechwriter is to write in the speaker's own voice, not be the voice. If you're implying that Obama is just a voicebox, you're sorely mistaken. You've got to be pretty good with language to make the president of the Harvard Law Review.
What troubles me about this sentence is not its grammar, but its content. Obama sees the important issue of bringing to book people who abused executive power under Bush administration as "looking backward"? Ethics are at issue here, and unfortunately Obama has failed to live up to his own pre-election standards on the question of accountability. Check out the delays and settlements he recommended in the subpeona of Rove and the nod he gave to the Justice system to basically uphold security certificates and such from the Bush era. He is not willing to deprive himself of the vast and unconstitutional powers that he inherited from the Bush administration. This will be the most serious credibility issue with his presidency.
Could we have some similar diagram also for Bush speech? please.
I totally agree Obama is a great communicator, which in most instances today means he reads well from a teleprompter. And I concur that Bush was perhaps the worst communicator we've ever had. Laughable. But actions speak louder than words, so after all of Obama's campaign promises he has a mountain to climb.
Kirk,Tx.
Kirk,
It's your cult that wanted Bush's War, so that they could act out The Left Behind series, for "Jesus". I'm not surprised that logic and facts are regarded as the enemy.
Sorry I don't fall into your category of Republican Evangelical. I am an atheist that happens to be a conservative in most cases.
If you think that the Bush administration regarded logic and facts as the enemy you aint seen nothin' yet!
Kirk,Tx.
I don't think magic-talking is a sign of respect. If american people were to be treated as adults the truth would plain and clear (adults can handle the truth, right?). Instead everybody is left to draw his own conclusion (magic talking alert!). The wrongdoers will be prosecuted, or not? Keeping an eye on the future is more important than justice or not? The same political-correctness-BS just in a nicer package.
This MUST be put up side-by-side with a Bush quote. Please, I'm begging.
I've met Obama (I was at the University of Chicago when he taught there). This isn't from a speechwriter; he's always spoken like this.
The sentence analyzed exposes one of Obama's serious weaknesses – lack of precision and clarity.
When Obama's finally gotten to the period at the end of the long sentence, the listener has no more insight into Obama's views or probable future actions than they did before he uttered the first word of the sentence. While a casual observer (or an Obama worshiper) thinks the question has been answered, it was not. He could either prosecute everyone in sight within the Bush administration (of course, only for "clear" violations), or he could do absolutely nothing (of course, in the interest of "looking forward").
I am hopeful that Obama's seemingly intentional ambiguity and failure to take a clear position is a political technique he reserves for dodging domestic issues and that he lets experienced people craft his messages for the international stage. In international matters, failure to communicate effectively and clearly can have serious consequences including unnecessary escalation of tensions to the level of warfare.
The article makes fun of Bush 43 for the statement: "You're with us or you're against us" [I believe the author used a fragment of Bush's sentence here, but that's not material to this discussion]. However, the purpose of speaking is to communicate. It is reasonable to agree or disagree with Bush's position, but it's impossible to not better understand Bush's position and attitude after hearing this statement – he views sitting on the sidelines on the issue of terrorism to be equivalent to supporting terrorism.
If you watch his many interviews or read his two self-authored books and countless articles dating back to his law school days and early marriage life and on through the present, you will see that Obama has always talked this way. His themes, views, syntax and delivery have been remarkably consistent. Say what you want about him, but his voice – with or without a speechwriter's help – is authentically his. To say otherwise is mere ignorance or delusion.
To all who believe Obama's statement is obfuscating but that there's clarity in Bush's "you're with us or you're against us" statement: You are wrong.
Obama here says we will enforce the laws, but he's not about to set the government toward consuming itself with second-guessing all dubious Bush Administration decisions; that should evidence emerge of clear wrong-doing, your title and your friends will not save you from justice, but that his administration is not about to launch a comprehensive witch hunt. This is pragmatic.
Bush's alleged clarity is anything but pragmatic. If an overall long-term ally like Mexico or France opposes our invasion of Iraq because they find our charges of Iraqi terrorism-abetting to be unpersuasive — are they now "with" the terrorists who perpetrated 9/11? Is Russia "with" the terrorists, or Syria — or Hamas? It would seem they are. And yet we permit them to go on existing — which makes us "with" the terrorists, doesn't it? Sorry, but I never saw the clarity in Bush's black-vs-white jingoism.
I am pleased to have a president with an adult ability to examine the world and address its complexity. That serves the national interest well.
Logosfera, I would argue that letting people come to their own conclusions is, in fact, treating them like adults–especially when compared with the paternalistic alternatives that you offer.
Secondly, in Obama's answer you can find answers to every question you raised. Will wrongdoers be prosecuted? He says yes, when it is clear that they in fact did wrong. Is keeping an eye on the future more important and "justice" (which, in fairness, is not synonymous with "looking backward" which is what he actually said)? Yes, he says he's more interested in looking forward than dwelling on the past. These are not contradictory–He's more interested in the future than the past, but when clear wrongdoing is occurred then those accountable should be prosecuted.
I think you do a great job showing how Obama's brain works as it is manifest in his construction of syntax and design. He's a remarkable thinker, strategist and writer. I think his sentence structure demonstrates all the complexity he brings to the issue, his understanding of opposing ideas, and an aesthetic sense of parallelism and rhythm.
It's an odd world we live in when sentence structure *is* construed as indicative of morality, but actions aren't.
Stop addressing Kirk the Texas troll. Internet 101, people.
The commas are misplaced in that sentence. Here I fixed it for you!
"My view is also that nobody's above the law and if there are clear instances of wrongdoing, that people should be prosecuted just like any ordinary citizen but that, generally speaking, I'm more interested in looking forward than I am in looking backwards"
Unfortunately this quote didn't contain the one mistake which I observe fairly regularly in Obama's speech: the use of "a" before a noun beginning with a vowel. For example, he says "launch a attack" instead of "launch an attack." I've also heard several friends who were raised in Hawaii speak similarly, so maybe it's a local Hawaiian thing?
The semicolon was correct. When the first clause contains commas, the punctuation mark before the conjunction should be a semicolon for the sake of clarity.
Yr pedantic trivia for the day
Anonymous @ 6:01:
It isn't clear what you hope to imply about the comparative morality of the actions of Presidents Bush and Obama, if anything, in this thread about clear communication.
No one here is claiming that sentence structure indicates morality, only that it indicates a person's thought patterns. Sentences that become complex without becoming unclear indicate something very promising about the mind producing them. That's all.
Using "a" for the *unstressed* article in all positions is hardly localized to Hawaii; I've heard it all my life. I say it – and I've never been to Hawaii. Many people do it, even if they wouldn't write it; it's simply a phonological feature of a large number of English dialects. You may call it a "mistake", but the difference between "an" and "a" has been a fluid one in English for a long time.
@Ridger–
I think it's the glottal stop that arises between the "a" and following vowel sound that reminds me of the spoken Hawaiian language. Hawaiian is replete with consecutive vowels that are separated by glottal stops. I was just wondering if that found its way into English as spoken in Hawaii.
As for it being a "mistake," I was taught that it was incorrect, both in speech and writing.
Why does it matter that it's unstressed??
What with all the sentence diagramming? He still didn't say anything. Typical politician – platitudes and no substance.
The second "that" clause isn't really parallel to the other two, because it's subordinated to the "if" clause
In my experience as an applied linguist specializing in the American accent, "a" and a following vowel sound overall tends to be more of a male characteristic, and then secondarily, a sub-30 trait.
"I certainly wouldn't be surprised if Obama rehearses his answers to questions that he anticipates."
Non sequitur; you asserted that these were Obama's speech writers words, not his — strongly implying that they were part of a speech. Your response simply confirms what was evident from the first — that you're a grossly dishonest person.
Can we go easy on Kirk, folks? He's been commenting here for a while and is a Bolano fan, which is two marks in his favor, and while his first comment did strike me as a bit piquant, I'd like to invoke (invent?) the law of proportional snark.
Beautiful, how elegant, like a flower!
Thanks Garth!
Nothing against Obama or his supporters. His English is that of a well-healed Ivy Leaguer, I just don't agree with his policies.
Bolano Rules!
Kirk, the "Texas Troll"
Sheesh … You would have thought that Bush Derangement Syndrome (BDS) would have ended on January 20, 2009, but clearly, it hasn't.
"You would have thought that Bush Derangement Syndrome (BDS) would have ended on January 20, 2009, but clearly, it hasn't."
Seeing as his two wars and 5 trillion dollars of national debt are still with us, I see no reason to let up.
Kirk,
You are welcome to disagree with Obama's policies, but your critique is not based on much more than unexamined assumptions and rigidified bias, with a liberal (muahaha) dose of snarkiness thrown in for good (read: bad) measure.
This, unfortunately, is a dire disease of the conservative mind. The previous President and his slavish followers being prime examples. Listening to the likes of Rush Limbaugh only releases more toxins into the body politic and offer no cures at all.
"Bush Derangement Syndrome" not letting up? That's nothing — 8 years later, conservatives are STILL blaming stuff on Clinton.
Kirk, Obama's been in office a few weeks. Bush was in there screwing things up for 8 years. I'm not willing to talk down the new president, on whom we all depend, for a few years yet.
I want him to have his chance to make things better, and I'll support him in much of what he does in his early days in office.
Considering that conservatives spent 7 years shrieking about how unAmerican it was to question the president — calling the rest of us traitors and haters (and a lot of you are still doing it) — I'd think you guys would be willing to give THIS president a little leeway.
@Kirk: "If you think that the Bush administration regarded logic and facts as the enemy you aint seen nothin' yet!"
Really? This administration is going to play looser with logic and facts than the *Bush administration*?! Now we *know* you're a troll.
There is everything to respect about the wise words of a thoughtful, respectable and intelligent president of the United States – something we have not enjoyed for a while.
But the sentence in question is remarkably simple; so much so that if it represents such cause for celebration by the author, one would wonder whether he too shared this property.
I refuse to believe that we have reached the stage where anything uttered in public that is not incomprehensible garbage is reason for elation. Things have surely not grown that bad yet.
I never said anything about Bush…
As I stated before Obama is an eloquent communicator but what he is communicating is his desire to make us a socialist nation.
After 7 years of the New Deal, Treasury Secretary Morgenthau said that all the money that had been spent had not worked. Trying to spend our way out of recession is an exercise in futility.
Kirk, Tx.
I'm thinking Bush supporters are just jealous that our president is no longer as stupid as they are.
@Kirk, that's a "well-heeled Ivy Leaguer", not "well-healed".
– a not-so-well-heeled Ivy Leaguer in VA
i kinda like your post! :D love it. thanks for posting :D
I chuckle every time someone uses the phrase "socialist nation" or even the word "socialism" today, in reference to Obama. It's right out of the GOP playbook.
The funny thing is, the GOP lost this election, and they're not bright enough to notice they continue to lose ground. Their talking points just aren't getting any traction, except among the very small number of Sarah Palin syncophants.
Keep on digging in your heels, Republicans, and do your best to wreck the country even more than George Bush managed. Stay right out in the open, spreading your lies, where we can see you. The rest of us will get on with business while you squabble in the mud.
Hank,
Obama wants to "spread the wealth," how is that not Socialism?
I believe that the GOP message is getting traction…They're certainly not going down without a fight about this "stimulus" package.
Again, George Bush is no longer in the White House!!!
But I would rather have the country wrecked by Bush than utterly destroyed by Obama's policies.
Furthermore, I believe that those that pulled the lever for Obama will live to regret it when they are giving half of their paychecks for programs that only make individuals and businesses more reliant on government.
Texas Troll
I'm sorry, but I just find it hilarious that Obama making the US a "socialist nation" (which I don't think will happen) is regarded as a bad thing. I, personally feel that we should work to close the ENORMOUS gap between the rich and the poor, and since those who are well-off obviously aren't doing it themselves, I think the government should assume more responsability for that.
"I chuckle every time someone uses the phrase "socialist nation" or even the word "socialism" today, in reference to Obama. It's right out of the GOP playbook."
Sorry, but there are more than knee-jerk conservatives who think that running a huge deficit is fundamentally immoral. The impulse to control and direct is not unique to the right; you on the left employ the same tools for different ends. The real issue is individual liberty vs. statism, *classical* liberalism versus collectivism, whether progressive or conservative.
Nationalization of the banking sector doesn't amount to socialism? Read some Von Mises. Please.
Very erudite, I’m sure. I think by now we’ve all concluded that Obama is a thinker, that he doesn’t go off half cocked like Bush and his ball-and-Cheney. But what bothers so me about Obama’s use of language is his frequent grammatical mistakes. He says things like: America is doing our duty. Correct version: American is doing ITS duty or We are doing our duty. He says things like: President Bush has invited Michelle and I to the White House.
How can someone who has attended Harvard and taught constitutional law not be able to master such mundane and fundamental concepts as which pronoun agrees with its noun? I honestly can’t understand. His grammar is helping to dumb down America.
Even Mrs. Obama uses this construction. She said, “I am a woman who loves my husband.” She too has been privileged to receive a wonderful education, but helps to dumb down the language.
Come on, Obamas! Start cracking those grammar books with your kids!
Mae
Socialism aside, I’m no “grammar queen,” but this sentence needs a lot of work. Too many “that’s,” a useless “also,” and if one moves “forward,” why would they not alternatively move “backward” (minus the s).
For example:
–My view is that no one is above the law. But if there are clear instances of wrongdoing, people should be prosecuted as ordinary citizens. In general, I am more interested in looking to the future, rather than the past.–
If Obama could put together a really great string of words off the cuff, then, he might be considered a great speaker. Otherwise, in my opinion, he needs all the help he can get–including a teleprompter.
I’m anxious to see an update to this article. How does “word salad” fare in the realm of sentence diagramming.