​Poems can be fairly forthright. Mayakovsky’s poem “An Extraordinary Adventure which Befell Vladimir Mayakovsky in a Summer Cottage” (http://www.uvm.edu/~presdent/mayakovskypoem.html) is nearly as straightforward as poetry gets. Mayakovsky is depressed, making posters for the Russian State Telegraph Agency in the sweltering heat. He notes where the sun goes down every night and rises every day and the repetition of sunset and sunrise enrages him to the point that he yells to the sun it ought to disrupt its cycle and come for tea with him. To his great surprise the sun does “for the first time since creation”. They have tea and jam, chat, and become friends. The poem ends with Mayakovsky beginning to shine in his glum summer cottage and his vow to adopt the sun’s motto and “keep shining everywhere”.
 
He would kill himself ten years later.
 
Frank O’Hara’s “A True Account of Talking to the Sun on Fire Island” (http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/a-true-account-of-talking-to-the-sun-on-fire-isl/) references the Mayakovsky poem in the opening stanza when the sun says: “Don't be so rude, you are only the second poet I’ve ever chosen to speak to personally”. The sun and Frank O’Hara chat. The sun admires O’Hara’s poetry and just like with Mayakosky the sun gives the poet advice. As the sun leaves it tells O’Hara it may leave a “tiny poem in that brain of yours as my farewell.” The poem concludes:
 
"Sun, don't go!" I was awake
at last. "No, go I must, they're calling
me."
"Who are they?"
 
Rising he said "Some
day you'll know. They're calling to you
too." Darkly he rose, and then I slept.
 
The final line (perhaps reminiscent of the conclusion of Milton’s famous sonnet “Methought I saw my late espoused saint” (https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems-and-poets/poems/detail/44746) adds a great deal of mystery (see also http://www.english.illinois.edu/maps/poets/m_r/ohara/talking.htm). But who are they? Why will they also call to O’Hara some day?
 
O’Hara was dead in eight years, killed by a jeep on the beach of Fire Island described in the poem. The poem was found in his papers.
 
Carson’s "Good Dog" is very different (http://convolutes.blogspot.com/2010/03/good-dog-anne-carson.html). Mysterious from the get go: dense contain classical allusions and perhaps echo Greek syntax, strange turns of phrase and concatenations of words. Lines that alter in mid-stream and change by line’s end.  
 
It is disturbing and disorienting: 
 
1 You know the second person in the history of the world
the Sun chose to speak to personally was Frank O’Hara, the
first was Orpheus [me].
 
Since Mayakovsky is mentioned in O’Hara’s poem by the sun, Orpheus seems to be calling Mayakovsky a liar, or is himself lying and trying to write Mayakovsky out of the story. The choice of Orpheus immediately makes clear that the sun that gives gifts is Apollo. Apollo is terrifying, not cozy like the suns of Mayakovsky and O’Hara:
 
You are my Sweetheart said the
Sun. He was sitting on the hood of his truck. Somehow it
was menacing. I hardly knew what to say. I got into the
truck that strange autumn light sharpening all glass and
harm my hands fell off. The Sun got in beside me took my
hands one by one blew into each finger filling it with a
kind of sound. Gave my hands back to me. That was the
beginning of my being interesting
 
This is one of the great stanzas. Of course Apollo is “menacing” and poetic inspiration is not blazing like a warm samovar but having one’s hands chopped off and being made a vacant lyric vehicle. Orpheus’ becoming an inspired poet means becoming a vessel of Apollo and becoming vapid and self-obsessed: “my fifteen minutes in hell”, “One thing about hell is the echo is fabulous”, notices of the Eurydice in the Daily Mirror and her death as a consequence of Orpheus’ desire to get another gig in Hades with its great acoustics. True poetry is not the opposite of the culture of celebrity.
 
The poem is full of strange word play and “pissed palindromes”:  “harmful til lips spill it” and the title Good Dog itself. The disorientation and darkness brings the other two poems and poets into question. The sun is not warm but Apollo the destroyer. Inspiration is brutal. Poets are liars and/or competitors. Perhaps Orpheus refuses to recognize Mayakovsky due to his forthrightness. By adding this third poem to the other two, a poem in which the poet claims himself to be mythically prior to the other two poets (and Orpheus of course is mythically prior to all poets) Carson alters the other two poems.
 
Orpheus must be speaking from Hades, the eternal unpleasant mythic present. "Good Dog" suggests O’Hara was being called to Hades in the final lines. All three poets died young (not Carson!).  They latter two do not know what is in store. Orpheus suggests that to be a poet is to not control the Sun or language and to be unaware of one’s mortality or the ominous nature of gifts from Apollo: 
 
A scrap of paper torn and brownish now some words just
stain. What does it mean the littorals above Europe I never
found out. I look at it fast sometimes Hoping.

Each time I hear Aphex Twin’s Nannou I want to hear it again. That’s true of many other pieces of music, including many by Aphex, but there’s something different about why I want to hear Nannou again. Every time I hear it, it’s a puzzle and the feel of being pulled into a different dimension. It begins with what sounds like a music box being wound, and as it gets up to speed it sounds like gamelan, steel drums, shakers and guiro as played in an alternate machine universe by robots, replete with exquisite whirring sounds in some gentle robot Caribbean we are being given access to. It is pulsing, living, and as delicate as could be. Like machine crickets. And then around 2:37 it winds down and needs winding again and it pulses along again in its intricate beauty.

The “winding” sound that begins it seems to become the shaker and the guiro. And that’s part of why I find it so fascinating and mysterious. It sounds like you are listening to a field recording of a peculiar object, a field recording of a strange music box due to the sound of the music box winding up and winding down at the beginning and the end and in the middle. But then as the winding becomes rhythm and as it turns into an interacting purring composition it ceases to sound like a documentation of an object and it sounds more like a window into a parallel robotic musical universe where steel drum jams and polyrhythms have emerged in parallel by a kind of convergent evolution. And this is because of a simple but seamless device, the “winding sound” that initially seems to refer to something – “crank of music box” – external to the music produced by the music box gets drawn into and bootstrapped up to the polyrhythm and becomes part of the music as a shaker and guiro. It makes for a strange Escher-like musical object. And as soon as we forget about the cranking qua crank, it appears again in the wind down and wind up.  It gives it the feel of living in a slightly different dimension between objects and the sounds they produce. An autonomous musical object that could wind itself and could go on forever. And the mystery of the puzzle. And the window on to the robot world of another dimension. And so I wish it would go on forever.

Restriction: I am only discussing blogs where philosophers discuss the profession as such or a part of the profession, not blogs where philosophers do philosophy.* 
Argument: 

1. If philosophers did more philosophy then there would be more philosophy. (I take this to be uncontroversial)
2. Some of this philosophy so done would be good philosophy (I take that some of it would be bad philosophy does not contradicts this)
3. If more philosophy was done there would be more good philosophy (I grant this is controversial. I’m working on a paper to support this step, and I will get back to it as soon as I’m done with this blog post)
4. Philosophers love to procrastinate (Evidence: Introspection and observation)
5. Philosophers love to win arguments (Evidence: Observation, I don’t win many arguments so my introspective evidence is thin)
6. Philosophy blogs provide much opportunity to procrastinate (By Modus Crastinatus)
7. They also provide many opportunities to argue and counter-argue, which results in further procrastination (Again by Modus Crastinatus)
8. The time spent in said arguments could be spent doing philosophy (I take this as obvious insofar as it could be spent doing many things, for example learning a language or how to drive a race car)
9. Less philosophy is done as a result of philosophy blogs (Idem)
10. Philosophy blogs are ruining philosophy

OBJECTION — Ruining? Come on! They just make a little less philosophy.
RESPONSE — That is how I define ruining.

OBJECTION — You would say this sort of thing!
RESPONSE — Yes, accepted.

OBJECTION — Why are you singling out blogs? Lots of things allow for procrastination. I can procrastinate at the drop of the hat.
RESPONSE — Yes, but engaging with philosophy blogs makes it seem as if one is doing philosophy or something for philosophy. This is a far more nefarious procrastination pump. And if one is actually doing something for philosophy, all the worse.

OBJECTION — You are writing a blog, isn’t that a contradiction?
RESPONSE — We are philosophers, right, so we know that from the fact that one procrastinates it doesn’t follow that procrastination isn’t bad. Didn’t Socrates say that, double negative and all? Also no one reads my blog, so it doesn’t contribute to the general procrastination problem much. And you can see from the shoddiness of my argument that it didn’t take me long.

OBJECTION — I multitask!
RESPONSE — Rubbish.

*Samia Hesni has pointed out to me that the blog "What is it Like to Be a Woman in Philosophy" is extremely valuable and that this is a problem for my argument. Samia is correct, thank you for the correction. There is a sense in which I think "What is it Like to Be a Woman in Philosophy" is applied philosophy, but it would take another blog post to argue for this.  

(ONLY READ IF YOU HAVE SEEN VIOLA!)

One of the characters in Matías Piñeiro's Viola comments Shakespeare-style that an epilogue can add to a good play. Unsurprisingly the film Viola has an epilogue. But unlike with a play, the epilogue doesn’t just add. It magically transforms what has come before. That we are now in an epilogue is signaled by a voiceover spoken by the character Viola. If it were not for the voiceover, the visuals and audio would be continuous with what happened before, we would just take this as the next scene since they they are chronologically continuous. 

In the epilogue Viola retrospectively narrates from an indeterminate future moment in which the relationships on the screen have ended and new ones have begun. We immediately learn from the voiceover that a strange and powerful sequence about ten minutes earlier in the film was a dream, Viola’s dream. We were in Viola’s mind in that sequence, but didn’t really realize it until the epilogue. And when we learn this we accordingly revise our relation to what we have seen. It is reminiscent of Hong Sang Soo's brilliant Night and Day, but far more gentle.

Just before the epilogue, Viola has let two musicians into her apartment, a young women (being greeted by her boyfriend as she watches in the still above) and a young man who seems to be drawn to her. In the epilogue Viola’s boyfriend plays indie music with the two and then Viola  joins them and sings a funny improvised duet — off key — with her boyfriend and the musicians. In the voiceover Viola remarks that she felt deeply in love with her boyfriend at this point. Since Viola is narrating from a point where everything has shifted and where she has broken up with her boyfriend and has (I assume) begun a relationship with the young man whom she let through the door who is playing behind them as they sing, the events we are watching an extraordinary poignancy. 


Yet we also know as viewers that her boyfriend is already in love with another (from prior events in the film) and we know from the dream that things are already changing in her relationship to him as well. The epilogue allows us to have a complex relation to a moment right at the cusp of change and realignment. It doesn’t just cap off the film, it extends the narrative indefinitely in a way unexpected until Viola begins to narrate.

But it’s not just the voiceover or the gap between voiceover and the film's chronology. The final long shot is one of the most beautiful in recent cinema. The camera focuses on Viola. The male musician in the background is out of focus and her boyfriend to her left (our right) is in focus but comes in and out of the frame as they sing their song. There is a miraculous moment where we see the back of Viola’s head in perfect focus as she stares at the musician — out of focus. That is the moment that we know that Viola is moving towards him. And yet in this future perfect he is still unclear and unfocused. It perfectly captures the flux of the moment visually - the visual play between in and out of focus and in and out of frame in conjunction with the continuity of the music unifying them all. The boyfriend who she is now momentarily in love with and at the same time about to be no longer in love with in this moment of transit is in focus. The song that they sing is full of incidents of their life, irritations. It shows that things are not as smooth as they seem. It makes us wonder are these pregnant moments that seem static and perfect always transitional? Are our retrospective stories about them always in part lies? A cinematic epilogue can do this!

Montage, defined broadly, is a juxtaposition where a viewer/listener is aware of the two things in juxtaposition that produce a third. A shot of a fallen body and of a smoking gun produce a third image or narrative belief in the viewer – the body’s present state was caused by the gun’s firing. There are many different theories about how and why montage works that have been discussed over the course of the history of the philosophy of film and film theory.

In the example I gave just now montage is used to draw the viewer into the narrative. But montage also creates distance. It makes the viewer aware by the juxtaposition of two images, sounds, sound and image etc., that they are watching a film or hearing a sound or watching actors or thinking about a concept. The images of beliefs montage generates move the viewer to a different kind of perspective.

My friend David Barker (http://www.davidbarkerfilms.com) has described montage to me as the art of controlling distance, and I understand this to mean the manipulation of these juxtapositions in order to control the viewer’s greater distance from or immersion in many aspects of a film or an artwork. Understood in this way montage is common in many art forms. Indeed some art forms, DJ-created electronic music and cinema, give montage pride of place in the roster of artistic techniques. Indeed it is so central to these two art forms that the former might be renamed sound montage and cinema “simultaneous-visual-and-auditory-montage”.

But, you might say -- I can imagine a very good film without montage! It would be just one long shot and no cuts. The viewer’s immersion in or distance from the film would not change. That doesn’t mean there’s no montage on the above definition. Rather there’s no editing in the cutting-pieces-of-film sense. But if a director never changed your distance to a film and you managed to get anything out of the film or be interested in it or moved by it this would be a happy accident. Films may make more or less use of the techniques we primarily associate with montage, but that does not mean that there is no montage in the sense described above.

Godard is and has been perhaps the most cutting edge practitioner of montage in cinema. From jump cuts, to radical uses of sound, to flattened images, quotation, breaking the fourth wall  -- and that’s just in one scene in Pierrot le Fou – Godard films often feel like an experimental laboratory of montage. The example above all points to Godard’s favored way of controlling a viewer’s distance from the narrative or from immersion in characters and situations – violating cinematic norms. Just as violating a narrative norm -- Janet Leigh’s exit in Psycho – gives rise to strong sentiments in a viewer and an awareness of the narrative itself which if not properly modulated results in the inability of viewers to further invest in the narrative so violating rules of montage tends to provoke greater distance unless further modulated. Belmondo’s and Seberg’s charming faces in Breathless, for example, pull a viewer right back into the film, another use of montage, after being popped out from the use of non-standard montage with jump cuts.

In Goodbye to Language, Godard uses 3D and contemporary surround sound to further heighten the density of montage. 3D is used in many ways by Godard, but one particularly interesting use involves drawing on a limit of 3D. 3D often feels like stacked 2D, multiple 2 dimensional planes stacked in a 3D array. Godard uses this “limitation” throughout the film as a way of making the viewers experience unnatural gaps and distances. The image at the top of this post, which was used to advertise Goodbye to Language is very cheesy in 2D. But in 3D the actress looks as if she is in a different disconnected plane and consequently her arm looks incommensurably long and awkward. The gap is the point of the image I think, and it is a brilliant use of montage internal to the frame.

Relatedly Godard uses surround sound to make the viewer very aware of the disjointed character of the sound. It comes from weird places, the room sound changes in the middle of a speech, it drops stereo to lopsided mono, changes dramatically in volume and stops and starts unexpectedly, non-diegetic music is used in a way that is oddly juxtaposed with the image, etc. As with the 3D, the limitations and artifacts are highlighted.

There are countless other examples of montage in Goodbye to Language. We are constantly made aware as viewers that we are watching a film. The techniques range to do this from the shadow of a crane in a particularly still shot, unnatural color, odd camera angles, very artificial and affected speeches (a long-time Godard favorite), accented voices of many kinds, the use of different languages, countless references to authors and quotes, quoting internal to the film, quoting internal to the frame (by having a television monitor showing another film within a scene), a theatrical scene of the writing of Frankenstein in period costume (but involving Godard’s voice), many super titles and words on the screen and difficult to focus on images (both maximizing the use of “3D”), chronological confusion, and really this is just a casual catalogue.

So what’s the point? I think the point is fairly straightforwardly asserted in the title. All of this is juxtaposed with the world of a dog, Roxy.  This is a world without language. Language is dizzying, philosophy and culture, quotes references, how we organize and create our lives and loves, our traumas, are all connected with it. But really when all is said and done there’s something also to be said for the life of a dog. And in being made very distant from the human world of language via montage, as well as very aware of its Frankensteinean nature, its complexity and also its hollowness and burden (quoting things we hardly understand all the time is tiring to do as well as to listen to!) we move back into and settle on Roxy. This is not to say that Godard rejects language, it is the stuff of his film – if anyone ever made a pitch for the idea of cinematic language this is it. Rather it too has its limits which we can access through montage, and there are circumstances where a goodbye seems right.