I was reading an essay called “Art and Answerability” by Mikhail Bakhtin the other day, where he makes the claim that one of the most important differences between novels and dreams is that in novels, we see the main character from the outside.  And as so often happens when I’m ostensibly reading something for my real job, I immediately started thinking about how I could squeeze a blog post out of it.

With regard to literature and dreams, this statement of Bakhtin’s is one of those ideas that seems accurate, but can never be tested.  I’ve never heard of anyone having a dream where another person was the main character, but that doesn’t mean it can never happen (and I did once dream a non-representational laser light show, which was pretty weird), and even if it  never does happen, that doesn’t mean that this is an important differance.  And Choose Your Own Adventure books aside, there’s not a whole lot of novels out there that situate the reader as the experiencing subsect of the book.  Yes, rewriting The DaVinci Code in the second person might make it more dreamlike, but while writing in the second person might create a dreamlike effect, but it’s mostly just going to jump out at the reader as an affectation. It’s too unnatural to be taken seriously.  So pointing out that a narrative needs to depict its characters from the outside is accurate, but it’s also nigh-tautological, kind of like pointing out that the story needs to be made up of sentences and words.

That, at any rate, was the state of affairs when Bakhtin was writing.  Luckily, the times have now caught up with him, and we have a new form of narrative where both 2nd and 3rd person narration are common.  I’m talking about video games, and will continue to do so after the jump.

Matthew Wrather hosts as the panel (Matthew Belinkie, Peter Fenzel, and Mark Lee) overthink:

• Crank truancy
• Rage (the rage of Achilles, son of Peleus)
• Pretending to be pretentious
• Our Sean Connery impersonations
• Dragonball
• What Art Ain’t

Tell us what you think! Email us or call 20-EAT-LOG-01—that’s (203) 285-6401. If you haven’t yet, take the very short survey! And… spread the overthinking by forwarding this episode to a friend.

Download Episode 42 (MP3)

Overthinkers who live in and around New York City should make a point of riding the Q train from Brooklyn into Manhattan the next time they want to see something amazingly cool.  (No, I’m not talking about the waterfalls.  Those were lame, and are gone now anyway as far as I know.  This is way better.)

If you look to the right as the train sails through the abandoned Myrtle Avenue subway station, you will see a Yakov Smirnoff joke about Cinema:

It’s brief abstract film animated by the motion of the train itself.  It works on the same principle as the 19th century zoetrope, except instead of spinning a drum you just sit back and let the train do the work.  (Don’t feel bad if you don’t know what a zoetrope is — if google hadn’t come through for me, I had planned to write “one of those old timey spin-the-wheel-and-look-through-the-slot dealies.”)

What I like about the Masstransiscope is that you’re suddenly confronted with a piece of art while you’re inhabiting the least artistic space imaginable.  It also helps that it’s a film.  Usually when we see public art, it’s a statue.  A statue isn’t something that commands urgent attention.  You look at it for a while, you get bored, you stop looking, you wonder what you’ll have for lunch, you look again… as a result, there’s nothing particularly odd about ignoring the statues and murals that decorate so many of our public spaces.  Even if you went to a museum for the specific purpose of seeing statues, you’re going to spend a more time ignoring any given individual piece of art than you will spend paying attention to it.  But we are NOT used to ignoring moving pictures.  (At least not yet, although in the post-Tivo era that may be changing.)  When we go to a movie, we keep our eyes glued to the screen for the whole duration. If we look down even for a second, that second of film will be gone, and we won’t get it back.

Add to this the fact that we spend most of our time on the subway zoning out and not paying attention to anything.  So when you pass the Masstransiscope, you’re suddenly shocked out of this listless commuter-state into an incredibly active perception of this miniscule blip of beauty… and then it’s gone.  Like Keyser Soze.  Or, you know, a psychadelic jellyfish.

Anyway, it’s really worth seeing it for yourself if you can.  You might want to do this sooner rather than later.  There’s no plan to take it down, but it spent most of the last 20 years under an impenetrable coat of graffiti, and it probably won’t be long before it gets tagged back out of existence.

More on the project and it’s creator, Bill Brand, can be found here.

The title here is taken from a recent post by mlawski on the difference between [Strong Female] Characters and [Strong Characters], Female.  The image is a painting by the French artist Louis-Leopold Boilly, which (according to the exhibit guide at the museum I saw it in) is a symbolic representation of “the phallic mother.”

More chicks with…you know…after the jump.

Overthinking It bids a fond farewell to Robert Rauschenberg, who passed away last Monday at the age of 82.

Honestly, his stuff isn’t so much to my taste. But there’s no denying that he was an important guy. You’ve got to imagine that overthinkingit’s de jure favorite artist/mancrush/obscure object of desire/fetish object Matthew Barney’s style would have been a lot different if Rauschenberg hadn’t cranked out this bad boy

in 1959.

BY THE WAY

One of Rauschenberg’s main teachers was Josef Albers, whose paintings mostly look like this.

Which just goes to show: either Rauschenberg paid NO damn attention in class, or Albers couldn’t teach.

No sooner did I finish my weeklong series on Rambo than I came across this little corner of the blogosphere, and I think it, as much as anything else, helps me clarify why I bothered to do a weeklong series on Rambo.