Against the current
DoubleTake beats backwards into the pastBy GARY KAMIYA
Photo above: Cole Theater, Rosenberg, Texas, by Mark PutnamMagazines, as a general rule, fly from memory. The brightly colored publications that smirk out from every newsstand sell the trinkets of the moment -- gossip, envy, cynical knowledge -- not reflection, and certainly not that intimate, meandering reflection that leads into the undiscovered territory of one's past. Like water-skeeters flitting about on the surface tension of the known, they speed from tiny verity to tiny verity, never getting their socks wet.
Of course, there's nothing wrong with this. You can't live your life as if it mattered all the time. Besides, surfing the collective superego is fun. You want to stop time, read a book.
But DoubleTake, a Durham, North Carolina-based magazine edited by Robert Coles and Alex Harris, stands these conventions on their head. It looks backwards. It has everything to do with memory, its treasures and delusions, and nothing to do with the thought balloons and AM static of the Now. This deliberate timelessness gives the magazine a paradoxical and oddly enticing quality. Opening its pages is a little like entering church -- an odd sensation when settling down with a glossy rag.
Church can be a drag. Sermons can pall. And there are times when the year-old quarterly's relentless sincerity and highly moral tone can seem sanctimonious, precious, "literary" unto death. But more often than not, DoubleTake succeeds. In the increasingly garish, celebrity-obsessed world of mass media, it offers that rarest of commodities: dignity.
What characterizes a DoubleTake article or photograph is not just sincerity and moral purpose but what musicians refer to as a "soft touch." This is a magazine that gives its writers permission to play quietly, to listen to overtones, to drift patiently with a piece's subtle inner logic or logics. It's this softness, this willingness to wait, to not force a conclusion to appear, that is perhaps DoubleTake's most praiseworthy editorial quality.
There are many strong pieces in the magazine's Summer issue, including a subtle short story by Tobias Wolff, a powerful memoir of El Salvador's assassinated Archbishop Oscar Romero by the poet Carolyn Forche and a lost short story by Flannery O'Connor. (And there are, as always, superb photographs, including a wonderful series by Michael Putnam on America's transformed downtown movie theaters.) The most interesting and characteristic piece, however, is Verlyn Klinkenborg's "Playing Shepherd to the Wind," an essay about being an undergraduate at Berkeley in 1970. It's a piece that reveals both the strengths and the weaknesses of the skeletonless, ruminative, feminine style favored by the magazine.
Klinkenborg begins his essay by invoking a famous literary story about Petrarch's ascent of Mt. Ventoux, supposedly the first time anyone ever climbed a mountain just for the experience and an act that is said to have inaugurated the Renaissance. Petrarch says that when he reached the summit he opened his copy of Augustine's "Confessions" -- which affords Klinkenborg a transition into his own story, since he was assigned Augustine as a freshman. But despite tantalizing thematic hints -- the search for transfiguring knowledge and its discontents -- it isn't entirely clear what role Petrarch or Augustine play in Klinkenborg's interior landscape, and as the piece unfolds it becomes obvious that no one answer will be provided.
At first this lack of explicit connection makes the essay seem vaporous, but gradually we realize that Klinkenborg is circling so aimlessly around the mystery of the past precisely because he respects its mystery, that his real subject is the delusive nature of memory. And by the time the essay reaches its climax, he has pulled the threads -- of memory and vision, of the quest of his vanished youth and his present stumbling wisdom -- together masterfully: "When I meet myself in memory I'm surprised at how insubstantial I seem, as if I were meeting the memory of a person who is composed only of memories. That's how it truly is, I suppose. What order I detect in that person, in that memory of memories, is the effect of perspective, of lines converging. I know there was no order in me when I was nineteen and that there is scarcely here more now a quarter of a century later. That knowledge would have worried me then, because in those days I didn't know that art arises from disorder. I believed that I would turn out to be an artist only when I finally fell into place."
"Playing Shepherd to the Wind" is not a perfect essay. Too much unfocused wind blows through it; at times it imitates the confusions of memory rather than examining them. But better this wistful, digressive stroll than the sentimental structures and overdramatic conclusions that mar so much contemporary literary nonfiction. Better no epiphany at all than one that falls apart after you take it home.
Sontag's mea culpa
Speaking of memory, Susan Sontag engages in some interesting historical soul-searching in a piece in the Summer Threepenny Review. In her essay, commissioned as a preface to the new Spanish edition of "Against Interpretation," Sontag confronts a painful reality: the "low culture" she aggressively and brilliantly celebrated 30 years ago in her classic book has triumphed to a degree she now, as a staunch enemy of postmodernism, finds horrifying.
The ironic truth Sontag acknowledges is that her essays were in part responsible for accelerating what she now calls "barbarism." "The ever more triumphant values of consumer capitalism promote the cultural mixes and insolence and defense of pleasure that I was advocating for quite different reasons," she writes plaintively. "What I didn't understand (I was surely not the right person to understand this) is that seriousness itself was in the early stages of losing credibility in the culture at large, and that some of the more transgressive art I was enjoying would reinforce frivolous, merely consumerist transgressions."
Sontag explains, reasonably enough, that the times justified her radical aesthetic -- that the cultural utopianism and ferment of the '60s made calling for "no more masterpieces" seem legitimate. By falling back on historical context, however, Sontag avoids the fundamental question: whether her high-culture-bashing, "transgressive art"-fetishizing, sci-fi promoting stance was simply wrongheaded, regardless of its Nietzschean, art-is-life context.
The moral, for those members of what the critic Harold Rosenberg sarcastically called the permanent avant-garde, may be: beware of what you ask for -- you may get it.