on "Travels in Hyperreality"

After listening to one of my absolute favorite episodes of This American Life, called Simulated Worlds for the millionth time, I decided I would actually read Umberto Eco's essay that Ira Glass references in the beginning of the show. I actually read almost all his essays in the collection of them, combined under the aforementioned title. (The other really wonderful one is about blue jeans.) What follows are my notes.

Travels in Hyperreality
Umberto Eco
Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Publishers. San Diego, New York, London c. 1983.
Umberto Eco is a novelist, professor of semiotics . .

P. 34
“In an excellent essay on Disneyland as “degenerate utopia” (“a degenerate utopia is an ideology realized in the form of a myth”), Louis Marin analyzed the structure of that 19th century frontier city street that receives entering visitors and distributes them through the various sectors of the magic city.”

This is interesting for this “degenerate utopia” idea and I think I should concentrate more on what that means.

Futher on that,

“In this sense, Disneyland is more hyperrealistic than the wax museum, precisely because the latter still tries to make us believe that what we are seeing reproduces reality absolutely, whereas Disneyland makes it clear that within its magic enclosure it is fantasy that is absolutely reproduced. The Palace of the Living Arts presents its Venus de Milo as almost real, whereas Disneyland can permit itself to present its reconstructions as masterpieces of falsification, for what it sells, indeed, goods, but genuine merchandise, not reproductions. What is falsified is our will to buy, which we take as real, and in this sense Disneyland is really the quintessence of consumer ideology.”

p. 46
“The pleasure of imitation, as the ancients knew, is one of the most innate in the human spirit; but here we not only enjoy a perfect imitation, we also enjoy the conviction that imitation has reached its apex and afterwards reality will always we inferior to it.”
(this is referring to the “Audio-Animatronic” technique in Disneyland like the pirates of the carribean and how “humans could do no better and would cost more” and so these fakes are better than reality.)

p. 53
“For the distance between Los Angeles and New Orleans is equal to that between Rome and Khartoum, and it is the spatial, as well as the temporal, distance that drives this country to construct not only imitations of the past and of exotic lands but also imitations of itself.”

I think I found this interesting because it talks about kinds of distance ? And I think that distance (temporal, spatial, and cognitive) is . . . interesting.

p. 57
“Where Good, Art, Fairytale, and History, unable to become flesh, must at least become Plastic.” (talking about America, a place where. . .)

p. 275
“The comic seems to belong to the people, liberating, subversive, because it gives license to violate the rule. But it gives such license precisely to those who have so absorbed the rule that they also presume it inviolable. The rule violated by the comic is so acknowledged that there is no need to reaffirm it. That is why carnival can take place only once a year. It takes a year of ritual observance for the violation of the ritual precepts to be enjoyed. . . “

I wonder what Eco would say about the Museum of Jurassic Technology? New thing I learned the other day: Ira Glass' degree is in Semiotics. No wonder he reads from Umberto Eco for like half of that episode! It all makes so much more sense now. :)

Straw dog . . . and Clifford

straw dog: In business, something (an idea, or plan, usually) set up to be knocked down. It's the dangerous philosophy of presenting one mediocre idea, so that the listener will make the choice of the better idea which follows.

straw dog: Something that is made only to be destroyed.

So. . . i feel like we have this idea that death is some kind of abomination - something unnatural. . . a wrong done to us that shouldn't happen and maybe something about the fatlism . . . like we were CREATED to be destroyed. That is the whole point? It makes me sad. It reminds me of a really disturbing part of a Clifford book in which Clifford the Big Red Dog gets a little tiny pet robot dog that he smashes by accident. There is something scary about this big, well-meaning animal that can just squish stuff without meaning to. He's about *this close* to destroying things without really even knowing it. Which reminds me of America. And marching bands. Which is different than the straw-dog concept I guess in that the danger of this big puppy is that not intentional, but the straw-dog idea is more ominous in being intentional. But I really like the idea of a huge dog, even if he may or may not smash you by accident.

He looks so harmless here, doesn't he?

My conclusion: I need to paint literal straw dogs. :) What would that even look like? Or maybe I need to paint enormous, oversized, possibly dangerous dogs.

Maybe what I think is dangerous is that it is dangerous to love something. Because it could, indeed, be smashed.

Also. . . on another tangentially-related note: Looking through Clifford stuff makes me remember that the death of a pet is often the first experience with death that children have, and that many many books deal with the death of a pet. So as I continue to explore death (Old Yeller? Where the Red Fern Grows? Saddest stories ever. . . .) perhaps I need to keep thinking about how dogs related to that. Not that I want them to, because I like them much better alive.