The Mailer Review/Volume 12, 2018/Lipton’s Journal: Mailer’s Quest for Wholeness and Renewal: Difference between revisions

The Mailer Review/Volume 12, 2018/Lipton’s Journal: Mailer’s Quest for Wholeness and Renewal (view source)

Revision as of 13:30, 16 May 2021

4 bytes added , 16 May 2021

m

→‎Part II: Mailer and Jazz: Fixed typo.

Grlucas

Bureaucrats, Administrators

10,115

edits

@@ Line 69: / Line 69: @@
 He writes of his coming to understand that “jazz consists almost entirely of surprising one’s expectations” and that “the artistry lies in the degree to which each successive expectation is startled.” It is an art form that “has risen to the crisis of modern painting” by “changing the audience’s expectations nightly . . . . a self-accelerating process,” that is not without risk and is now blending all the arts.{{sfn|Mailer|n.d.|loc=[[Lipton’s Journal/December 1, 1954/8|#8]]}}
-The surprising risks jazz musicians take display the existential nature of their art, through the immediacy of improvisational creation. “Instead of trying to understand the beauty of jazz,” Mailer writes, “one should understand it as something which is constantly triumphing and failing.” Victory is simply the “effort to keep musically alive.” To flesh out these insights, he offers the example of Dave Brubeck and Paul Desmond improvising together “entirely off on their own with nothing but their nervous systems to sustain them wandering through jungles of invention with society continually ambushing them.” Brubeck, Mailer adds, might “wander into a cliché, then investigate it, pull it apart . . . put it together into something new.” Sometimes Brubeck succeeds, sometimes he fails, but whether he fails or succeeds he accepts the risk and creates “a communication between the soul and the world.”{{sfn|Mailer|n.d.|loc=[[Lipton’s Journal/December 17, 1954/47|#47]]}} Caution is the “high priest of society,” Mailer continues, and “swing is a distillation of competitiveness in social life,” but “jazz is the soul.”{{sfn|Mailer|n.d.|loc=[[Lipton’s Journal/December 17, 1954/50|#50]]}} Here Mailer echoes a quip often attributed to Duke Ellington when asked about the difference between swing music of the 30s and 40s (the pop music of Mailer’s generation) and jazz: Swing is business, jazz is art.
+The surprising risks jazz musicians take display the existential nature of their art, through the immediacy of improvisational creation. “Instead of trying to understand the beauty of jazz,” Mailer writes, “one should understand it as something which is constantly triumphing ''and'' failing.” Victory is simply the “effort to keep musically alive.” To flesh out these insights, he offers the example of Dave Brubeck and Paul Desmond improvising together “entirely off on their own with nothing but their nervous systems to sustain them wandering through jungles of invention with society continually ambushing them.” Brubeck, Mailer adds, might “wander into a cliché, then investigate it, pull it apart . . . put it together into something new.” Sometimes Brubeck succeeds, sometimes he fails, but whether he fails or succeeds he accepts the risk and creates “a communication between the soul and the world.”{{sfn|Mailer|n.d.|loc=[[Lipton’s Journal/December 17, 1954/47|#47]]}} Caution is the “high priest of society,” Mailer continues, and “swing is a distillation of competitiveness in social life,” but “jazz is the soul.”{{sfn|Mailer|n.d.|loc=[[Lipton’s Journal/December 17, 1954/50|#50]]}} Here Mailer echoes a quip often attributed to Duke Ellington when asked about the difference between swing music of the 30s and 40s (the pop music of Mailer’s generation) and jazz: Swing is business, jazz is art.
 Mailer more than once compares playing jazz to bullfighting, another existential art, and posits that jazz, bullfighting, and cosmopolitanism are the three “culture bearers of the hipster,” culture bearers that “Stalinism [i.e., totalitarianism] will continue to war against.”{{sfn|Mailer|n.d.|loc=[[Lipton’s Journal/December 17, 1954/57|#57]]}} Mailer will follow up this thought later, writing, that Be-bop “is a hybrid art (like opera)” expressing a distrust of society, a sort of decadence that allows the soul of the musician to be expressed.{{sfn|Mailer|n.d.|loc=[[Lipton’s Journal/February 1, 1955/422|#422]]}} These thoughts lead Mailer into meditations on the language of jazz and the hipster, the language of anti-totalitarianism. Hipster speech contains “fucking rhythms . . . almost as powerful as music.” About the be-bop jazz chorus, he writes, “You get me bee-bopping too.”{{sfn|Mailer|n.d.|loc=[[Lipton’s Journal/January 3, 1955/186|#186]]}} It was the energized be-bop form of jazz in the early fifties that helped him feel his way beyond “the sweet clumsy anxious to please Middle-class Jewish boy.”{{sfn|Mailer|n.d.|loc=[[Lipton’s Journal/January 3, 1955/187|#187]]}}