Ideas that came up in class on 1/30

1. Mel Gibson: the actor-director has had one of the best careers in Hollywood, starring in cult movies, a well-liked action series, and even winning Best Director. But his views are widely considered unacceptable, so much so that his career as an actor may be over (unless he does Lethal Weapon 5). Is Gibson "transgressive"? By my definition, no: because transgressive artists upset widely-held values, but somehow make it into the mainstream. They avoid being labeled and dismissed. Somehow they make it through the cultural filters. How?

2. Music and literature: Burroughs said he wrote "picaresque" fiction, not fiction after the nineteenth-century model. This traditional type of story designs plots on a spatial model. You know, the person who wrote Lethal Weapon (Shane Black) would call it a "story arc." But avant-garde or just disagreeable writers (like Jack Kerouac) often use a musical model to design their stories. And a picaresque novel features a character who moves from adventure to adventure - no arc: and it's sort of like the way a song moves from verse to chorus to verse to chorus. (Or the way a Kung Fu movie or a Fred Astaire dance movie always gets back to the dance/fight scenes. A transgressive novel gets back to the violence or other intense content.) And polyphony (also called "counterpoint"), the interweaving of voices (melodies), may have no big-picture structure at all. A fugue in music often lacks a fixed structure - it is a tapestry of distinct melodies all at once, such as in Bach's works - best played (transposed from the harpsichord) by Glenn Gould.