MINDFUL PLEASURES

THE UNNAMABLE by Samuel Beckett

2012-01-31T13:11:00.000-05:00

Thirty days ago I began what promises to be a year of our discontent (to put it mildly) with a reading of Beckett's The Unnamable, a decidedly dreary way to start a year that began drearily enough, with overcast skies the color of woodsmoke and tree-tearing winds blowing down frozen air from Guy Maddin Land. l'Innommable, as the author called it en Francais, is a complex, disturbing, unsettling little interior monologue that demands multiple readings. Most of the difficulty arises from the fact that Beckett builds his monologue out of contradictions that radically undermine the interior monologue form and images that assault that form's humanistic underpinnings. None of this, however, has deterred humanists from trying to recruit the work for their team, citing its closing cadence, "I can't go on, I'll go on," as a statement of existential affirmation in the face of absurd nothingness. This attempt to strategically confuse Beckett with Camus quickly founders, though, with the realization that The Unnamable ends with this phrase, that "I" does in fact stop--forever--immediately upon uttering it. The text thus ends not in affirmation but in another of the explicit contradictions that rhetorically define it. Indeed, one might go further and state that all of the text's contradictions culminate in this most unsettlingly terminal one, the fatal period and blank silence after "I'll go on."

The Unnamable is also another of those works (like Moby Dick and Robbe-Grillet's Jealousy) that makes much of post-structuralist literary theory seem redundant, little more than a prosaic (or deliberately obscure) codification of ideas presented more ably and accessibly by the earlier artists. Sam and Herman and Alain got there firstest with the mostest, and their works are still much better reads than those of Jacques D. or Jacques L. or even Michel F. (who was a good and lucid writer much of the time, better than his brethren) and Roland B. (ditto). Of course, this raises the question of how readily the "poststructuralist" aspects of these works would have been recognized if we were not reading them through the unbreakable lens of our knowledge of Derrida, Lacan, Foucault, Barthes, et al. So the criticism and theory does seem necessary after all, if only (to borrow a simile from Northrop Frye) as a kind of hermeneutical scaffolding to be knocked away once the hard work of authentic reading is underway.

While reading The Unnamable I became convinced that this book would profit remarkably from a sensitive dramatic reading of the kind Joyce performed with a fragment of the Wake. This is a text that cries out to be read aloud... slowly... deliberately... with measured pauses between each phrase. The thought of Joyce also brought up the notion of Beckett's monologue(s) as a radically deconstructed 'revision' of Molly Bloom's--an idea to provoke a future re-reading.

A Private Tumor of the Soul

2012-01-30T20:59:00.000-05:00

From George Steiner's very interesting Paris Review interview, a great epigram that ends with an image worthy of the third writer in Steiner's little list:

"How can you, after Proust and Joyce and Kafka and Faulkner, sit down and write a novel? I've never quite understood. Answer: you have to. And the you have to is a private cancer, a private tumor of the soul."

GNADENHUTTEN: AN AMERICAN VOICE by Brian A. Oard

2012-01-30T20:47:00.000-05:00

The following is a short fictional monologue based on historical fact, a side-product of my current novelistic project:

My dearest Margaret (speaks Private Thomas Ord of the Pennsylvania militia after the massacre at Gnadenhutten in the Ohio country, March 7-8, 1782, a forgotten footnote to the American Revolution) I cannot write my dearest Maggie hand still shaking with rage and shame trying to remember O Maggie trying to forget my love the things I see in this wild land when we crossed the river and rode toward the village an Indian my age came running across brown winter grass still patched with snow in the shadowed places and seeing our guns cried Don’t shoot and smiled as at a joke Don’t shoot...I am a Christian... My father is a white man like you...My name is Joseph and his smile widens I am Joseph your brother and Bilderbeck riding beside me lowered his musket spat out a plug of tobacco said That so? raised the barrel flashing in sudden sunlight between clouds and fired into the smiling savage’s face we rode on trampling the body that twitched in the grass to the village called Gnadenhutten by the Dutch Indian-lovers who converted these savages finding the village abandoned and all the savages men women children in the field gathering winter withered corn and themselves withered sapling thin hollow eyed gaunt skin stretched tight as bookbinding over rigid skulls These people are starving Christy said and the Irishman Welch replied Aye, for white man’s blood. And if not a man then a woman or child’ll do, eh Wallace? And Wallace nodded agreement seeing nought before him but his captive wife and sons and hearing nought but the blood crying vengeance in his veins

Colonel Williamson called the Indians together Gather in the church yonder all of you he ordered them breathlessly fat face flushed with the effort of speaking We will transport you to Fort Pitt for food and shelter Williamson ordered two detachments to round up the neighboring Indians and waiting we grumbled at the colonel’s words I didn’t ride here to take prisoners Welch said and everyone agreed until Christy the preacher began Please, gentlemen. These are Christian Indians, no more harmful than a mouse in the field. The crime be not theirs and vengeance not ours. Twould be a sin to harm them... If they’re Christian Hindeman said we’ll send ’em to heaven and their souls’ll smile down on us Welch said Never figgered ye fer an Indian-lover, Christy, you with your woman still warm in the ground at their hands Christy said These are not the responsible parties. Vengeance is mine, sayeth the Lord and Bilderbeck grumbled An eye for an eye sayeth the Book, isn’t that right, preacher? the men gathered round Christy threatening belligerent until Colonel Williamson came forward and calmed them saying Men, we are here for reasons larger than ourselves, our petty prejudices, fears and opinions. We have come to this howling wilderness to strike the flint of civilization on the stony ground of savagery, in this unforgiving darkness to light the lamp democratic; so in this spirit of democracy to which we young, we new, we first Americans have pledged our lives, our blood, and our sacred honor, let us decide this matter in a spirit democratic, Line up, men! Line up for a vote! Now let each man decide the matter for himself without demagoguery or coercion. Let each man who believes these Indians should live step forward now. Williamson’s face clouded when only a few militiamen stepped out of line That be all of you who vote for mercy? He sighed audibly Very well, men. You have made a Pilate of me, and I wash my hands of this affair. At sunup you may do what you will with the prisoners

The Indians imprisoned in the church informed of impending execution kept us awake all night with their praying and hymning until first light dawned and the killing began with the men and the boys taken to one one building for slaughter and the women and the girls taken to another and the eighteen who voted against removed themselves with Colonel Williamson to a spot below the riverbank where only the sounds of the killing could reach them O Maggie I was not of their number I saw Hindeman in the church rip two babes from their mothers’ arms and holding them by the ankles in each hand draw his arms back like Our Lord on the Cross and slam the babes together once twice three times until he dropped them to the floor heads broken like eggs and leaking brains I escorted prisoners to the men’s slaughterhouse and it was a gory scene Leet and Bilderbeck bloodied like butchers the floor sticky and smeared with red bootprints and Solomon Urie throwing his bloody rope around the entering prisoners and forcing them down kneeling on their backs on the floor while Hindeman or Leet did for them with a hammer and I remember walking the path of my dark red bootprints back to the church and back to the building again and taking the women to their slaughter with Welch and his tomahawk and his pile of bloody scalps tossed carelessly in a corner he trades them for whiskey I’ve heard I saw a young man scalped skull bared to the bone but still alive and somehow escaped running for the river across the grass down the bank into the freezing water and up the other side howling like an animal skull shining silver in the sunlight until the preacher Christy I later heard rose from the group of demurrers aimed his musket and fired at the buck bringing him down saying God have mercy on his soul. I would shoot a brokenlegged horse just the same I took an old woman to Welch’s building and Urie roped her since the men were all dead by now and held her facedown on the floor and Welch handed me a rock hammer saying Ye’ll be as bloodied as the rest of us and we’ll all meet in the same Hell and the old Indian woman begins reciting in English I shall not want and Urie calls out bloodyfaced Do her, man! and the woman He restoreth my soul and I raise the heavy hammer in both hands and Welch That’s it. Batter the bloody bitch and the woman Though I walk through the valley of the shadow and thinking savage savage savage I bring the hammer down and the woman Thy rod and thy and her skull gives way and warm blood splashes my cheeks and spots my spectacles O Maggie

FINNEGANS WAKE film and Samuel Beckett's FILM online

2011-12-22T23:45:00.000-05:00

Among the wealth of interesting stuff at UbuWeb (a site I've just discovered) is a complete online version of Mary Ellen Bute's obscure ca.1965 film Passages From James Joyce's Finnegans Wake. Also viewable online at the site is Samuel Beckett's inventively titled Film, starring Buster Keaton. In my brief initial visit, I also discovered--and listened to the zippy-paced first page of--a complete reading of Finnegans Wake performed by Patrick Healy. The 'Joyce Sound' page also features the soundtrack from the Strick Ulysses film and the well-known recording of Joyce reading from the Wake. Elsewhere on the site, visitors can watch Jean Genet's short film Un Chant d'Amour and clips from the later films of Orson Welles in the One-Man Band documentary. Check this site out.

Three Reasons to Learn German

2011-12-20T15:01:00.000-05:00

There's an old European joke that becomes less true with every passing year: A person who speaks three languages is trilingual, a person who speaks two languages is bilingual, and a person who speaks one language is American. I'm an American who speaks English, French and enough Italian to make myself understood by silk-suited mafiosi on the Amalfi Coast (long story), but recently I've been regretting that my knowledge of German is limited to what I've picked up from old movies and reruns of Hogan's Heroes. (And let's face it, "jawohl, mein kommandant!" is not exactly a useful phrase in the Germany of today.) I've read most of the canonical krauts--Goethe, Holderlin, Trakl, Kafka, Mann, Grass, Celan, Sebald, Jelinek, Handke, Bernhard, et al--in English translation but now I'm frustrated by the fact that the following three major works of twentieth-century German literature have yet to be completely translated:

The Aesthetics of Resistance by Peter Weiss. Weiss is best known in the English-reading world as the author of that wild and crazy Sixties play Marat/Sade (which is still outraging Brits after all these years in a 50th anniversary RSC revival), but The Aesthetics of Resistance (a novel which can count W.G. Sebald among its admirers) is surely his prose masterpiece. A three-volume fictionalized account of leftist resistance to the Nazis (but that description hardly does it justice; it's like saying Sebald's The Rings of Saturn is a travel book), Weiss's book digresses into topics much further afield and begins stunningly with a description of the Pergamon Altar at the Berlin antiquities museum that cinematically 'pulls back' to show us the central characters walking and talking in and around the altar. It's a brilliant opening to a fantastic book, but unfortunately only the first volume has been translated into English. (And it's only available in a seriously pricey edition from the University of Chicago Press.) I hope translator Joachim Neugroschel and U. of C. Press intend to English the rest of this brilliant novel.

The History of Sensitivity by Hubert Fichte. This monumental nineteen-volume work of fiction and nonfiction (That's right, 19 freakin' volumes!! I guess the dude was pretty sensitive) is described on the flap copy of the Serpent's Tail edition of Fichte's Detlev's Imitations as "a dialogue with Proust's Remembrance of Things Past" that has "established [Fichte] as one of the great European writers of the twentieth century." Sounds like it's worth at least a partial translation, n'est-ce pas? Unfortunately, I haven't been able to find any of these books in English.

Zettels Traum (Bottom's Dream) by Arno Schmidt. The magnum opus of one of the 20th century's most original writers, this 1334-page Finnegans Wake-influenced novel might just be the single most important German literary work of the last century not yet translated into English. John E. Woods, whose recent English versions of Thomas Mann have won great acclaim, is reportedly at work on a translation to be published in the near future, presumably by Dalkey Archive Press. I eagerly await it.

THE KINDLY ONES by Jonathan Littell

2011-12-20T12:54:00.000-05:00

Many critics were much too kind to The Kindly Ones. Not only is Jonathan Littell's trainwreck mash-up of Ernst Junger, Gert Ledig, Georges Bataille and Aeschylus not a great novel; it rarely even rises above mediocrity. Littell's prose is bland and boring, and the narrative this toneless instrument is forced to carry achieves the rare feat of being both unimaginative and unbelievable. The prose (which I assume is as flat in the original French as in English translation--probably a safe assumption these days) might be defended as a deliberately bland narrative voice, an appropriately banal reflection of the evil banality of an SS bureaucrat's mind, but there are two major roadblocks on the way to this artistic justification: first, Littell's narrator, Maximilien Aue, is not a typical Nazi bureaucrat but an aesthete among the fascist elite, so one would expect his voice to be more florid, baroque, even Proustian; second, the opening line of the novel ("Oh my human brothers, let me tell you how it happened.") suggests that what follows will be a novel 'spoken' in a recognizable, idiosyncratic voice, a la the voices of Humbert Humbert or Dostoyevsky's underground man. Instead, Littell quickly loses this tone, and the prose becomes a merely competent, workmanlike wordstream remarkable only in its Nilotic length. The fact that this is exactly the kind of unremarkable, transparent prose we find in popular fiction (and no, I'm not going to invoke Gide, Camus, Robbe-Grillet and 'degree zero' writing; Littell's effort isn't good enough to merit that defense) suggests the proper way to read The Kindly Ones. For this is not really a 'literary' novel at all; it's a work of genre fiction, a big, bloated, research-intensive historical novel of the kind James Michener and Leon Uris used to write. It's tricked out in literary drag--allusions, quotations, intertextuality, philosophical discussions--but barely hidden beneath these gaudy rags is a book that Slavoj Zizek might call the "obscene supplement" of Herman Wouk's War and Remembrance. And about the novel's oft-mentioned 'obscenity,' its sexuality and scatology, perhaps the best that can be said is that fascism as anal sadism is a familiar and questionable idea, and it hardly merits a thousand-page dramatization. (Reading this novel, one gets the impression that Littell believes the classic psychoanalytic interpretation of fascism is an original idea he thought up one morning while masturbating in the shower.) All of that said, when The Kindly Ones is read as a historical novel, it's not all that bad. The historical reconstructions are well done and utilize the latest scholarship, and the meetings and discussions among SS officers probably come close to the reality of Nazi evil in its banal, bureaucratic form. If readers can overlook all the poorly digested research that the characters disgorge like Aue's many vomited meals, it's a decent piece of historical fiction. But there's really no reason for it to be 975 pages long. It's not War and Peace; it's not even War and Remembrance.

W. G. Sebald at 17, a photograph of a photograph

2011-12-18T12:48:00.000-05:00

From 8mobili's photostream on Flickr, here's a photograph of W. G. Sebald's 1961 blood donor card, containing a photo of the author as a 17 year-old young man. Since the only familiar images of Sebald show him in the last two decades of his life, there's a slight shock in realizing that he was once this moody-looking Bavarian youth.

INDIGNEZ-VOUS! by Stephane Hessel

2011-11-17T13:04:00.001-05:00

This week of nationwide police repression of the U.S. Occupy movement, a reminder from Mayors Quan, Bloomberg et al that all repression is local, seems a perfect time to read Stephane Hessel's universal call to (nonviolent) arms. Hessel's tiny book--so small you can stuff it in your pocket where it will be safe when Billionaire Bloomberg's robothugs come to toss all your other books into a garbage truck--delivers a simple and important message that has already resonated around the world: Get angry...and then channel that anger into political engagement. As Hessel writes, "...there are unbearable things all around us...If you spend a little time searching, you will find your reasons to engage. The worst attitude is indifference. 'There's nothing I can do; I get by'--adopting this mindset will deprive you of one of the fundamental qualities of being human: outrage. Our capacity for protest is indispensable, as is our freedom to engage." If that passage sounds rather Sartrean, there's good reason for it: Hessel was influenced by Sartre (and Merleau-Ponty, and Hegel, and surely a host of others) during his long-ago Normalien years. Indeed, the nonagenarian Hessel has lived so long that he comes to us now like a revenant from a gone world, a time of authentic heroism (he fought with the French Resistance), unspeakable horror (he was tortured by the Gestapo and imprisoned at Buchenwald and Dora), and triumphant intellectual accomplishment (his father knew Walter Benjamin and was a translator of Proust). Hessel comes out of this past now fading from memory to myth with a warning that we not betray the spirit of the Resistance, not turn a blind eye to injustice at home and abroad, not follow the siren songs of consumerism and accumulation. There are no new ideas in his pamphlet--just good ones. The same might be said of many books that changed the world. It's not a manifesto but a call to authentic action, with the emphasis on authenticity. The Tea Party 'acts,' but its actions are transparently inauthentic, born of Murdochian misinformation, channeled by political demagoguery and funded by corporations. The current Republican presidential debates are little more than a Koch Brothers Muppet Show, a sorry parade of corporatist drones--let's see if any of them can talk while David Koch drinks a glass of water. Don't bother seeking authenticity there, especially not from the probable nominee, Mitt "Corporations are people, my friend" Romney, who if elected will be a worse president than George W. Bush. Domestically, a President Romney will act as corporate-raider-in-chief, and internationally he will resurrect Bush's foreign policy team to foment more international disasters. Anyone who liked Dubya will love Willard. Today, if you seek authenticity, look in the streets. It was there in the encampment at Zuccotti Park until Bloomberg turned the park into a police state: a utopian experiment in noncapitalist life, a reminder to the millions that there is another way of living. This is the message the millionaires find insufferable, and that's why the batons flew Monday night. In The Middle Mind, Curtis White writes, "We will know we have succeeded in saying something that matters when we are told that it won't be tolerated." On Monday night, Occupy Wall Street received the bluntest possible confirmation that what they are saying matters. It matters profoundly. It matters so much that in order to stop it Michael Bloomberg left his 'reasonable man' reputation in tatters and acted--as John Hodgman said on last night's Rachel Maddow Show--like a papier mache puppet in an anarchist parade. The Occupy movement, wherever it moves from here, is meeting Hessel's challenge.

A piece of Hessel trivia: Stephane Hessel's father Franz Hessel was involved in a very Parisian menage a trois ca.1910 with the painter Marie Laurencin and the writer Henri-Pierre Roche. Roche later fictionalized the relationship in a novel titled Jules et Jim, the basis for Truffaut's great film. Stephane, then, is the son of 'Jim.'

Progress of Work on Work in Progress (not an exagmination round my factification...)

2011-11-10T22:52:00.001-05:00

After a month's work on the book announced in my previous post, I've written my way through two distinct conceptions before finally arriving at a third that's good enough to take all the way to completion. First, I began the book as the digressive travel narrative vaguely outlined in the post below, but after about 25 pages it became a creature of tangents without a center. That's not necessarily a bad thing, but it is in this case. I was trying to put everything into the book and succeeded only in drowning the narrative in details and digressions, factual and fictional. So I started over, this time writing a more narrowly focused nonfiction travel book, less Sebald and more Paul Theroux. But it wasn't long before this book went completely, manically fictional in a gonzo Hunter Thompson kind of way. Again, not necessarily a bad thing, but not the book I want to write at this time. The swerve toward fiction in this (and the first) false starts, however, showed me what this book really wants to be: a novel. And that's what it is now. The third conception, of which I am now on page 40 of the rough draft (written in my nearly microscopic, often illegible hand on that quasi-Luddite cliche of cliches, the yellow legal pad), is the story of a man named Steiner, a chemical engineer working for an oil company in the Midwest, who, nine months after the deaths of his wife and twin daughters in a car crash, takes a trip into the west for reasons he does not completely understand. The novel is about what happens to Steiner after the Tragedy (as he thinks of it), after his personal and professional lives suddenly crash down around him. I'm giving him my route and many of my experiences--Steinerized, seen from the perspective of a smart, shy, geeky, middle-aged engineer who is suffering intensely and who is also that rare thing in literature, a genuinely and complexly good man.

That's where the thing stands today. And that's probably all I'll be saying about it until the rough draft is completed. My new working title: Steiner's Journey.

Traveling and writing and travel writing: Where I've Been and Where I'm Going

2011-10-15T17:02:00.000-04:00

Regular visitors to Mindful Pleasures will have noticed the absence of new posts over the past few weeks. Rest assured that the reason for this silence is good, exemplary, maybe even admirable, and has not a trace of slackerhood about it. In late September I made like Kerouac and took off on the road. The route I actually drove--as opposed to the considerably different one I had planned to drive--took me out of Ohio and across Indiana on US-30, across Illinois on I-80, along the eastern edge of Iowa on the Great River Road from Davenport to Dubuque, where a wrong turn took me back across the Mississippi and into Wisconsin (damn those Dubuque street signs!), along the Wisconsin Great River Road from the aptly-named Dickeyville to Prairie du Chien (pronounced 'do sheen,' like a suggestion to perform oral sex on Bishop Fulton J. or Charlie) and onward and upward to La Crosse, where I caught I-90 and turned west again, driving 90 across Minnesota, South Dakota and into Wyoming, turning south on Wyoming 59 at Gillette, catching I-25 at Douglas, riding it down the eastern edge of the Rockies through Colorado and into New Mexico, where I turned east on I-40 and Route 66ed it through Billy the Kid country and the Texas Panhandle into Oklahoma, catching I-44 outside Oklahoma City and riding it across the Ozarks rollercoaster through southern Missouri to catch I-55 on the east side of St. Louis, turning east at Bloomington onto Illinois 9 which became Indiana 26 and eventually detoured me onto Indiana 22 (Indiana's state seal is a DETOUR sign) to Interstate 69 (make your own joke) north to Fort Wayne and US-30, the last leg of the trip repeating the first leg in reverse, because the end of all my exploring is to arrive at the place where I started and be reminded why I left...

I have flown over the west before, but this was my first time driving into it, my first long drive west of the Mississippi--and, given the condition of my eyes, perhaps my last (as a driver, anyway). It was, unsurprisingly, a momentous journey.

Now, after catching my breath, I'm holed up at home trying to turn my memories, notes, thoughts, dirty jokes and altitude-induced hallucinations into something resembling a travel book, a hybrid of nonfiction and fiction akin to Sebald's Rings of Saturn but wilder, ruder, more American, attuned to the 'old, weird America' of Bob Dylan, the Beats, Hunter Thompson, Robert Johnson, Robert Altman, Louis Armstrong, Buffalo Bill and Sitting Bull, a book sometimes spoken in an American voice that's a bizarre hybrid of carnival barker, old time evangelist and contemporary urban rapper. That's the tall order I've set myself, and while I work on filling it, here are a few off-the-top-of-my-head highlights and lowlights, state by state, from my days on the road:

OHIO: Stretching for miles along US-30 between Van Wert and the Indiana border is a surprisingly beautiful windfarm. The white turbines stand not ranked in military rows but clustered into groups across the open fields, their long, spiky, superimposed blades sometimes resembling gigantic Claus Oldenburg versions of the barbs that punctuate the fences around these fields. Stand here at sunset on a clear evening, and you'll catch yourself thinking that if the future will look like this, it might be worth the trouble.

INDIANA: There's a firearms emporium on US-30 called Guntown, and in case the name and the building's Western movie set facade don't hammer the message home, the owners have helpfully posted a sign that reads: We Sell GUNS, the last word in HUGE letters. This place is so multiply an epiphany of a certain type of American sensibility that I don't really know where to begin unpacking it.

ILLINOIS: On my way back I stopped in Bloomington and asked a selection of citizens chosen at random if the name 'David Foster Wallace' rang a bell. Not a single bell rang. This too was an epiphany, of the declining cultural importance of literary fiction. I would hazard a guess that although none of those people might have read Saul Bellow, at least one would have heard of him.

IOWA: There's a spot along the Great River Road (Route 67) north of Clinton that must be one of the loveliest places in the entire Midwest. The roads climbs a hill, and at its crest you see laid out for miles below and around you a gorgeously luminous, painterly landscape of rolling hills, green valleys, fertile fields, blue sky, wispy white clouds. And then you descend and drive into the painting. It's a breathtaking place and it constituted my trip's first pure 'landscape high.'

WISCONSIN: The wrong turn in Dubuque turned out to be a fortunate error, for it led me to a stretch of the Great River Road between Prairie du Chien and La Crosse that hugs a riverside cliff for miles and provides gorgeous views out over the wide Mississippi, so wide in places that the mind cannot quite comprehend it as a river and so imagines it is seeing a lake.

MINNESOTA: Driving through the western Minnesota prairie at sundown I experienced for the first time in my life one of America's great natural wonders: sunset in the flatlands, the slow dying of the light over the plains, that evening redness in the west.

SOUTH DAKOTA: My advice for travelers going west along I-90 through South Dakota: ignore all the billboards, avoid the Great Black Hills Tourist Trap, and spend a day in Badlands National Park. Listen to the music of the canyons and the cliffs. This is a Rilkean place.

WYOMING: If Conrad's Kurtz had been an American, his last words would have been, "The vastness...the vastness." Drifting like Eastwood along the High Plains taught me more of America and its terrors than any experience of my life short of reading Melville and Cormac McCarthy.

COLORADO: The entrance to Big Thompson Canyon along Route 34 on the way to Rocky Mountain National Park is a wide-eyed, gape-mouthed, sheer cliff-walled stunner. My mind was blown long before I arrived at the mountains. But I loved the natural pine scented air up there. It must be breathed to be believed.

NEW MEXICO: Santa Fe is the southwest's Great Adobe Tourist Trap. Pray you, avoid it. (And on the way there, watch out for the Welcome to New Mexico Speed Trap on I-25 at the bottom of the Raton Pass.)

TEXAS: The eyeboggling flatness of the Texas Panhandle--and the treeless, flat vastness of the High Plains generally--is guaranteed to blow the corneas and minds of travelers accustomed to the eastern and midwestern landscape of rolling hills and plentiful woods and a stand of fifty-foot trees eventually blocking the horizon in every direction. No wonder easterners came out here in the 1800s and went completely insane.

OKLAHOMA: Still the dustiest state. When I think of Oklahoma I see a pickup truck driving flat out between two fields on the red dirt prairie and sending up behind it a long, high smokescreen of Oklahoma dust.

MISSOURI: A porn shop at every highway exit and a Golden Corral in every town, Missouri is a state dedicated to the conspicuous consumption of fake sex and cheap food. What do Missourians do when they're not masturbating? They go to Golden Corral and eat until their legs give out. And then they go to Golden Corral in electric wheelchairs.

Of course, all this is but a hucksterish tease for the book to come, the book I have only just begun to write. My working title, unoriginal but appropriate, is Wide Open Spaces: An American Journey. A journey not only into the land, but into the past, wandering as far afield as Gnadenhutten, Mankato, Sand Creek, Wounded Knee, Ludlow, Amache, the Johnson County War, postwar Poland, Hiroshima and Nagasaki. An American book, in other words. A song of the barbed-wired road.

When Faulkner Met Gable

2011-09-21T00:10:00.000-04:00

From Shelby Foote's Paris Review Interview, a classic collision of Hollywood and Literature:

FOOTE: ...You’ve heard that thing about Faulkner and Clark Gable haven’t you? Howard Hawks was taking Faulkner out on a quail shoot and came by to pick him up a little before dawn to get to where they were going by first light. Clark Gable was in the car, and Faulkner in the backseat. As they rode along, Gable and Hawks got to talking. Gable said, You know, you’re a well-read man, Howard. I’ve always been meaning to do some reading. I never have really done it. What do you think I ought to read? And Hawks said, Why don’t you ask Bill back there. He’s a writer, and he’ll be able to tell you. Gable said, Do you write, Mr. Faulkner? Faulkner said, Yes, Mr. Gable. What do you do?

The Real Problem with HUCKLEBERRY FINN

2011-09-17T11:12:00.000-04:00

The real problem with Huckleberry Finn has nothing to do with the novel's notorious and historically accurate 219 uses of the word 'nigger.' (About which, Twain's comedic descendant Stephen Colbert said it best: "Mark Twain isn't just a great writer; he's a great rapper.") No, the real problem, the problem that remained unspoken in the highly-circumscribed media 'debate' over the book, is the fact that this widely-acknowledged 'great American novel' does not deserve the first of those adjectives. While it contains some great moments (Huck and Jim on the island and the raft in the book's first third, Huck's famous "All right, then, I'll go to hell" turning point scene later), the novel as a whole is fatally flawed by a series of poor authorial decisions. Once the two con men climb aboard the raft, the novel goes south faster than the flooded Mississippi, and Twain must have seen it floating swiftly away, because at this point he began to pad furiously. The last two-thirds of the book contain more padding than a room full of Victorian furniture. The misadventures of the duke and dauphin are bad enough, but when Tom Sawyer arrives, the book's quality drops like a boulder down a well. Tom's annoying schemes and his good-naturedly sadistic tormenting of Jim are like a long, painfully unfunny joke drawn out to soporific length--and then drawn out even further. I'm surely not the only reader who ends the book hoping that Jim's first act as a free man will be to whup that little white boy's ass all the way back to Missouri. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is one-third great and two-thirds tiresome. While acknowledging that it's an essential and highly influential work of American literature, we should not overestimate its quality.

Pap Finn, Prophet of the Tea Party

2011-09-17T10:23:00.000-04:00

One of the many things Huckleberry Finn can teach us is that the worldview of American reactionaries has undergone remarkably little change in the past 150 years. Huck Finn's father--one of Twain's supreme creations, a character equally comic and terrifying--at one point launches into a rant that could, mutatis mutandis, issue from the mouth of any of the millions of present-day Americans (about 20% of the voting population, it appears) who constitute the rank-and-file of that amalgamation of corporate tools, right-wing anarchists, nativists, gun rights hysterics and others who seek shelter under the Tea Party's umbrella:

"Oh, yes, this is a wonderful govment, wonderful. Why, looky here. There was a free nigger there from Ohio--a mulatter, most as white as a white man. He had the whitest shirt on you ever see, too, and the shiniest hat; and there ain't a man in that town that's got as fine clothes as what he had; and he had a gold watch and chain, and a silver-headed cane--the awfulest old gray-headed nabob in the State. And what do you think? They said he was a p'fessor in a college, and could talk all kinds of languages, and knowed everything. And that ain't the wust. They said he could VOTE when he was at home. Well, that let me out. Thinks I, what is the country a-coming to? It was 'lection day, and I was just about to go and vote myself if I warn't too drunk to get there; but when they told me there was a State in this country where they'd let that nigger vote, I drawed out. I says I'll never vote agin. Them's the very words I said; they all heard me; and the country may rot for all me --I'll never vote agin as long as I live. And to see the cool way of that nigger--why, he wouldn't a give me the road if I hadn't shoved him out o' the way. I says to the people, why ain't this nigger put up at auction and sold?--that's what I want to know. And what do you reckon they said? Why, they said he couldn't be sold till he'd been in the State six months, and he hadn't been there that long yet. There, now--that's a specimen. They call that a govment that can't sell a free nigger till he's been in the State six months. Here's a govment that calls itself a govment, and lets on to be a govment, and thinks it is a govment, and yet's got to set stock-still for six whole months before it can take a hold of a prowling, thieving, infernal, white-shirted free nigger, and--"

Imagine Pap Finn's reaction if someone told him that the president of the United States was a "mulatter p'fessor" and you will begin to understand the dark circuit of American memory from which the Tea Party draws its power.

My favorite scene in BLOOD MERIDIAN

2011-09-16T23:11:00.000-04:00

My favorite scene in Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian is one of the few that doesn't end with blood spurting from an opened artery or a handful of brains blowing out the back of someone's head. It's the marvelous scene in chapter 19 that McCarthy laconically titles "Brown at the farrier's." When the murderer Brown arrives at a San Diego farrier's workshop and orders him to saw off the barrels of a shotgun he has stolen, the craftsman is dumbfounded and appalled. For the gun is a thing of beauty, a masterpiece of the gunsmith's art. Sawing off its barrels would be tantamount to cutting off Michelangelo's David at the knees or wiping one's ass on a canvas by Monet. The farrier refuses and flees (the only sensible thing to do when one sees a Cormac McCarthy character coming one's way), and Brown is left to hack off the barrels himself. This is one of the few scenes in the novel in which McCarthy orchestrates a stark conflict of worldviews and value systems. (It's also one of the very few in which an unarmed person stands up to a member of the Glanton gang and lives.) It is a collision of cultures. Brown is a nihilistic killer from out of the American desert places. For him, the value of any object resides solely in its capacity to inflict terroristic violence. The farrier, by contrast, is an urban businessman and craftsman, a believer in the rule of law and the pure value of exquisite artisanry. Compared to Brown, the farrier is an aesthete; compared to the farrier, Brown is an imbecilic monster. I also suspect that the farrier is the only character in the book who comes close to being an authorial stand-in. He is the book's only authentic artist, standing both within its violent world and critically apart from it. Perhaps we can begin to read Blood Meridian properly only when we read it from the farrier's point of view.

BLOOD MERIDIAN : Cormac McCarthy's Critique of Capitalism

2011-09-16T22:19:00.000-04:00

One of the themes of Blood Meridian is the fundamental nihilism inherent in all ideologies of power: Manifest Destiny (most obviously in Captain White's ill-fated filibustering expedition); imperialism; capitalism; Christian morality. When the Glanton gang commandeers a Colorado River ferry late in Blood Meridian, Cormac McCarthy gives us a little allegory of the nihilistic contradictions of capitalism. Here's the relevant passage:

...Glanton took charge of the operation of the ferry. People who had been waiting three days to cross at a dollar a head were now told that the fare was four dollars. And even this tariff was in effect for no more than a few days. Soon they were operating a sort of procrustean ferry where the fares were tailored to accommodate the purses of the travelers. Ultimately all pretense was dropped and the immigrants were robbed outright. Travelers were beaten and their arms and goods appropriated and they were sent destitute and beggared into the desert. The doctor came down to remonstrate with them and was paid his share of the revenues and sent back. Horses were taken and women violated and bodies began to drift past the Yuma camp downriver... (262)

If Glanton and the boys were alive today, they would be oil company executives. Come to think of it, ex-Exxon CEO Lee Raymond does look a bit like a slightly more hirsute Judge Holden:

Lee Raymond: former Exxon CEO, Jabba the Hut impersonator

Well, the Judge told us he would never die, didn't he?

BLOOD MERIDIAN by Cormac McCarthy

2011-09-15T00:05:00.000-04:00

Don't look away. We are not speaking in mysteries. You of all men are no stranger to that feeling, the emptiness and the despair. It is that which we take arms against, is it not? Is not blood the tempering agent in the mortar which bonds?... What do you think death is, man? Of whom do we speak when we speak of a man who was and is not? Are these blind riddles or are they not some part of every man's jurisdiction? What is death if not an agency? And whom does he intend toward? Look at me.
--Judge Holden in Blood Meridian

Judge Holden 'makes' Blood Meridian. Without him it would be a beautifully written western with a violent, Peckinpah-ish lyricism; with him, it's a great and fascinating novel that deserves shelf-space among the best works of Melville and Hawthorne. Judge Holden ('Judge' is possibly his first name, significantly mistaken for his title by the novel's other characters [cf, bizarrely enough, Judge Reinhold]), this seven-foot, 332-pound, dancing, declaiming, murdering masterpiece of malevolence, this ice-blooded preacher of the gospel of war, this terrifying and terrifyingly familiar embodiment of American nihilism, is by far the most impressive character in Blood Meridian and probably the greatest in McCarthy's entire oeuvre. Don't trust Holden when he claims not to speak in mysteries, for how else can he speak when he is himself the greatest mystery, appearing first to the Glanton gang as their satanic deliverer sitting calmly on a rock in the wilderness and proceeding to instruct them in the improvised manufacture of gunpowder from its natural plutonic elements? This story in chapter 10, which Chaucer might have titled 'The Ex-Priest's Tale,' is in my opinion the point at which the book blasts out of its 'revisionist western' subgenre and achieves true greatness. And the judge provides the powder for that blast. He seems bigger than the book, in the same way that Shakespeare's greatest characters are so much larger than the borrowed plots that struggle to contain them. And like Hamlet and Lear he is constantly performing, irrepressibly theatrical--even at one point declaiming naked upon a battlement in a raging thunderstorm a poem that could only be the storm scene from Lear. (McCarthy is artist enough to describe this performance only vaguely and indirectly, letting the reader connect the literary dots. The Lear connection becomes more obvious later when we see the Judge wandering with his 'fool.') Also like those Shakespearean creations in their respective plays, Holden is the only character in Blood Meridian whose consciousness seems uncannily to contain the book in which he appears. When he tells his fellow killers that "Books lie," only he seems to appreciate the delicious irony, only he seems to realize that he is a character in a book. What else could be the meaning of his mysterious smile as he speaks these words? Even more interestingly, it might be argued that Judge Holden is the 'narrator' of Blood Meridian, that the book is 'spoken' in the voice of his polymathic, polylingual consciousness. He is, after all, the only man still alive at the end, still dancing, still talking, and still insisting that he will never be stilled.

(This hypothesis might clear up one of the book's concluding mysteries: Why does the scene-synopsis at the head of the last chapter describe the last scene in German? Obviously, this is another example of the multilingual Holden showing off. The fact that the line's 'Ich' refers to Judge Holden seems to confirm the hypothesis. This is McCarthy's way of identifying the narratorial consciousness at novel's end.)

IT'S YOUR MISFORTUNE AND NONE OF MY OWN: A NEW HISTORY OF THE AMERICAN WEST by Richard White

2011-09-03T14:15:00.000-04:00

Richard White's King Ranch-size volume of 'New Western History' is an interesting, enlightening, sometimes exciting, sometimes boring book that badly needs two things: 1) a proofreader and 2) an author who can write like Patricia Nelson Limerick. I read White's book immediately after Limerick's seminal The Legacy of Conquest, and It's Your Misfortune... suffers from the inevitable comparison. Most obviously, Limerick is a witty and engaging writer, while White's prose lopes along like an starving pony. (It may seem beside the point to criticize a historian's prose, but it's not. Historians are, by definition, writers, and the quality of their prose should enter into the evaluation of their works.) Passing from medium to content, White's work can be read as an often-ponderous elaboration of ideas presented more snappily--albeit much more summarily--in Limerick's book. In short, The Legacy of Conquest provides the thesis statement of New Western History, and White professorially marshals the facts and stats to support it. While that's probably not an unfair description, it does slight the undeniable strengths of White's book. This is an insanely wide-ranging work that finds interesting and unfamiliar things to say about events as disparate as the California Gold Rush and the Dust Bowl, Japanese-American internment and the fictional life of Billy the Kid, the founding of the National Park system and the slow death of Indian Territory (as what's now Oklahoma was once known). It's probably best not to read this book cover to cover (as I just did) but to treat it as a revisionist encyclopedia of Western history, dipping into the index to find White's take on the Mormon settlement of Utah, the transcontinental railroad, the rise of Reagan, etc. The passages that most interested and intrigued me were White's occasional exemplary asides: he has a wonderful eye for the telling historical anecdote. His account of the California 'Indian hunters' Hi Good and Robert Anderson and Good's richly deserved end reads like a tale taken from Blood Meridian, and his mention of Juan Cortina's War equally piqued my interest. Also, White's brief description of the strict gun control that existed uncontroversially in many Western towns is the best kind of history writing--the kind that complicates our present political uses and abuses of the past.

OUTER DARK by Cormac McCarthy

2011-08-19T14:15:00.000-04:00

Cormac McCarthy suffered no sophomore jinx. Quite the opposite, in fact. Three years after his highly promising 1965 debut, The Orchard Keeper, McCarthy delivered Outer Dark, his first great book and the work in which he first struck the seam of surreal apocalyptic violence that he would continue to mine for the next 40 years. A double-picaresque that follows both a young woman's wanderings through Appalachia in search of her abandoned baby and her brother's wanderings in search of her, Outer Dark is a marvelously lyrical tale of American terror. It's the kind of book Paul Bowles might have written had he never gone abroad, the kind Stephen King might have written had he been a better and more Faulknerian writer. The panoply of horrors to which McCarthy, like a loathsome god, delivers his protagonists begins with the usual Southern Gothic incest and insanity, moves on to murder and lynching, and doesn't cease until we've been subjected to a scene of vampiristic cannibalism that anticipates both the sublime terrors of Blood Meridian and the horror movie excesses of his more recent works (e.g. The Road). On the final page of Outer Dark McCarthy shows us an image that might represent the entire novel: a road disappearing into a gray, deathly, impassable swamp. This is the Cormackian Rome to which all the author's roads lead, a miserable sink of death. This swamp is the true and only setting of Outer Dark. The reader has spent the preceding 241 pages wandering feverishly through it, smelling the sulphur reek of this miasmic "spectral waste." It should also be noted that the swamp, which is approached by the male protagonist but not the female, is described in explicitly female terms. The mud that sucks Culla Holme's shoe is described as rising in a "vulvate welt." The swamp, like the pond with the "singing willow rim" in Hart Crane's "Repose of Rivers," is an image of female genitalia as the site of an incestuous return to origins, of male penetration as a violation of the incest taboo. It's a fundamentally misogynistic and puritanical image of the vagina as a thing to be fled. And since the novel contains obvious allusions to the Oedipus myth (the baby abandoned in the wilderness, for one), it should surprise no reader that the thing these characters flee will be the thing to which they are inevitably returned. The forbidding vulval swamp is both the provocation and the only end of Culla's wandering. Like his sister Rinthy, it is the female object that equally attracts and repels him--consciously repels and unconsciously attracts. It is the motor that will keep him moving through the Dantean hills of McCarthy's Appalachia until he finds at last his final swamp.

"The Last Good Country" by Ernest Hemingway

2011-08-16T23:43:00.000-04:00

While "The Last Good Country" is included in two collections of Hemingway's short stories (the Finca Vigia Edition Complete Short Stories and The Nick Adams Stories), it is in fact neither a story nor complete. It seems to be the beginning of a novel that Hemingway never came close to finishing. (I base this conclusion on the published text, with the knowledge that Hemingway's posthumous publications sometimes represent only a portion of the manuscripts from which they are edited, as was the case with The Garden of Eden--see the highly illuminating endnotes to Frederick Crews's essay on Hemingway in The Critics Bear it Away.) If he had finished it, "The Last Good Country" may well have been his Huckleberry Finn, a much less comic and much more erotic Finn in which the youthful central character lights out for the unspoiled wilderness in the company of his younger sister and in which the pastoral retreat features incestuous desire, gender-bending and a literalization of Huck's Fiedleresque homoeroticism. It's tempting to grasp at this eroticism and argue that Hemingway was unable to finish this piece because its sexual themes cut too close to the authorial bone (as it were). But I suspect that "The Last Good Country" might have been abandoned for more purely aesthetic reasons. The finished novel/novella would have alternated between the narrative of Nick and his sister in the woods and that of the game wardens' search for them (centering on the town), a classic American contrast between 'wildness' and 'domesticity,' 'country' and 'town,' 'civilization' and 'savagery.' The problem lies in the fact that the 'wilderness' scenes greatly overpower the rest of the story. Everything memorable in the published text, everything interesting, everything original, takes place between Nick and 'Littless' in the woods, and Hemingway surely realized this, surely saw that the form to which he was married required him to spend too much time with characters and situations that were insufficiently inspiring, too many pages with the game wardens and the townsfolk. And so he let this story go and moved on to something else, leaving us with this tantalizing fragment that shows occasional flashes of greatness and leaves me wishing he had lived to reconceive it. It could have been brilliant.

THE BLACK DAHLIA by James Ellroy

2011-08-01T23:06:00.000-04:00

The first book in Ellroy's already-classic LA Quartet (The Big Nowhere, LA Confidential and White Jazz are the others), The Black Dahlia is a very pleasant surprise. It is easily the equal of any noir mystery ever written, even the genre-defining works of Hammett, Chandler and Cain. The pacing is swift, the prose taut and sharp, the narrative voice almost completely convincing. The seeming ease with which Ellroy slips into the 1940s, recreating its atmosphere of deep and blatant racism, anti-semitism, homophobia, casual brutality (happy days are most definitely not here again in Ellroy's LA--or ours, for that matter) should cause all period novelists to turn at least slightly green. There is much to praise in this book, and much to criticize, but the aspect that most puzzled and intrigued me is the novel's false ending. As anyone who has read it knows, The Black Dahlia seems to come to a satisfying conclusion 100 pages before its end, with the title murder unsolved (as it officially remains in un-Ellroyed reality) and the hero married. I suspect that I'm not the only reader who arrived at page 258 and wondered what the remaining third of the book could possibly contain. To read these pages and find that they contain a rather typical (if finally surprising) solution to the crime was disappointing at first--as though Ellroy, having written a novel that departed from genre conventions, was compelled to bring his story back into line. But there is another, more interesting way to read the double ending of The Black Dahlia. Maybe the story does in fact end with Bucky and Kay's wedding, and the remainder of the novel is pure fantasy. The last 100 pages might be interpreted as Bucky Bleichert's fevered, obsessive, psychotic, noirish fantasy of solving the Dahlia murder. The final denouement is thus not so much Ellroy's genre-fulfillment as Bucky's wish-fulfillment. Unable to solve the case in novelistic 'reality', he solves it in writing, creating a compensatory narrative that relates to his own life much as the novel The Black Dahlia relates to Ellroy's life--a narrative compensation for the unsolved murder of his mother.

Forget About It : My Very Short List of Annoying Novelistic Cliches

2011-07-25T16:43:00.001-04:00

I usually oppose prescriptive approaches to art, but even I have limits. Here are a few literary cliches that contemporary fiction writers should probably avoid:

A shot rang out. No it didn't. Gunshots don't ring; landline telephones and Salvation Army bells do. Shots snap, crackle, and pop (like a cereal commercial); they also explode, echo, ricochet, erupt, burble, and whistle (past the ears of those lucky enough not to be on the receiving end--which is what Hemingway meant when he said you never hear the one that gets you), but they never really rrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrriiiiiiiiiinnng.
Any sentence beginning with the word 'suddenly.' Especially overused by thriller writers, as in "Suddenly a shot rang out. Thompson dove for cover. "Let's get outta here," he grunted to the blonde, already hot-footing it for the door."
"Let's get outta here." Don't say it; make like Nike and just do it. This and all closely related lines of dialogue are the novelist's easiest and cheapest way to signal a shifting of scenes. If you can't accomplish this simple task more artfully, you shouldn't write.
Stage directions, such as 'he rose,' 'he walked across the room,' 'he staggered,' 'he sat,' 'he stood,' 'he opened the door,' 'he closed the door.' These bland but necessary directions cast a pall of boredom over any page on which they appear. Why can't we write 'he sank into his naugahyde Barcalounger and relaxed to a Pat Boone LP,' or 'he took a sip of fine Kentucky bourbon and neighed like a Derby horse,' or, less whimsically, 'he dragged his left foot to the front of the room'?
Paragraphs composed entirely of short simple sentences. Or, in James Ellroy's case, fragments. Of short. Simple sentences. During the 1980s heyday of minimalism, whole novels were written in this facile 'see Dick run' prose. Critics straightfacedly hailed their strength. And vigor. Now it's over. Thank Dog.
Authorial moral earnestness. The most serious novels are, in Kundera's great phrase, "an investigation of human life in the trap the world has become." A novel should not exist primarily as a platform for authorial posturing (though we all do strut a bit; we're only human). The author's morality (and his/her politics, philosophy, etc.) informs every sentence of a good novel. It need not be billboarded. If you write well enough--and authentically enough--the ideological/intellectual stuff will take care of itself.
Postmodern Self-Consciousness. After almost half a century of novels in which writer-characters write the novel we are reading and/or make fictional appearances to comment upon their own fictions, etc., etc., this sort of thing has hardened into a blood clot in the aorta of contemporary literary fiction. Still something of a subversive strategy when Salman Rushdie used it in Midnight's Children, its status as cliche was clearly signalled by its deployment in Neil Simon's Jake's Women (which was, to be fair, superior Simon). Whenever a technique appears in a Neil Simon play, it has ceased to be subversive.
Academic novels. These days, most well-reviewed, 'serious' writers of 'literary fiction' are either graduates of MFA programs and/or pay their bills by 'teaching' at colleges and universities (living off LitFic is incredibly difficult; even David Foster Wallace had a professorial day job). This sorry situation has led to a glut of campus novels (even Denis Johnson wrote one[!]). Like every other genre, this one boasts a few very good books (David Lodge's Small World and Chabon's Wonder Boys come to mind), but most fail to rise above mediocrity.
Suburban social realism (or as Parisians might call it, le roman de Franzen). I think everyone has had enough of the bland banlieues americaines, n'est-ce pas? The only original suburban novel still possible is an utterly tasteless Pynchonian allegory in which all the boring, bourgeois characters, ashamed of being trapped in such an imaginatively impoverished genre, commit mass suicide at the end of chapter one. In the second chapter, fire destroys the suburbs. The rest of the novel tells the story of a family of neurotic rabbits who hop around madly and shag each other silly amidst the ruins of the human world. The book ends with the triumph of lapine fascism and a song-and-dance number titled, "When Rabbits Rule the World (It'll be Auschwitz Time for Kitty Cats)."
Insert Your Least Favorite Literary Cliche Here.

THE SUNSET LIMITED by Cormac McCarthy

2011-07-22T17:29:00.000-04:00

The Sunset Limited is that rare Cormac McCarthy work that doesn't go far enough. Ol' Cormac is usually dependably excessive, to say the least. Blood Meridian is the most surrealistically excessive Western in our literature, just as Moby Dick is our most surrealistically excessive sea story. The unlimited pneumatic mayhem of No Country For Old Men (or for any other men--or women--except Anton Chigurh) served to indict our entire culture, but even that wasn't enough for McCarthy. Not content with laying waste to a part of a part of the country, he let the entire world have it in The Road. And sometime in between these works, he crafted this odd, unplatonic dialogue that he calls 'a novel in dramatic form.' Well...Sorry, Charlie, but it's nothing of the kind. Judged as a novel, The Sunset Limited is a thin, weak concoction. It comes off much better when we read it as what it really and obviously is, a play. It's a promising script for a potentially great dramatic production, provided the actors and directors play it with minimal solemnity and maximum irony (there is much dark comedy here, even a Beckettian note in White's frequent attempts to leave the room). The biggest problem is that McCarthy fails to take these two men far enough into themselves. Neither recounts the worst thing he has ever done, and neither presses the other to do so. This final reticence may reflect well upon the two men's humanity, their mutual respect and capacity for empathy, but it robs the play of a potentially shattering dramatic crescendo, a pair of glorious, Sam Shepard-style titanic monologues in which Black and White recount their worst moments. As it is, the text is haunted by these lacunae, the monologues that never were. Leaving them out is an entirely defensible artistic choice, but I don't think it was the correct one in this case.

THE DA VINCI CODE by Dan Brown

2011-07-22T14:44:00.001-04:00

The Da Vinci Code is garbage, utter tripe, a book so poorly written that it can be read as an unintentional parody of pop thriller writing. I read it several years ago, and I have yet to receive a reply regarding the bill I subsequently sent to Dan Brown, charging him a (fairly reasonable) dollar value for my wasted reading time and demanding payment in full. A blurb on the cover of my copy quotes Nelson De Mille's hysterically effusive description of the novel: "This is pure genius." To which I can only reply: If this is pure genius, I'd hate to smell crap. I have retitled the book Thriller Written with a Mixmaster, because it reads as though Dan Brown tossed an average thriller, a tourist's guidebook and a volume of dotty art history into a Mixmaster and pressed 'Puree.' This is not to say, surprisingly, that the book is entirely without merit. (Nothing that riles the religious right can be entirely without merit.) But its few noticeable merits--superfast pacing, clever puzzles--shrink to subatomic size in proportion to its most glaring demerit: the absence of any perceptible authorial talent. To call The Da Vinci Code 'junk food for the brain' is an insult to junk food. This is a cheap, disposable thriller so poorly written that it doesn't even qualify as a guilty pleasure. If I rated books with stars, I would give it a black hole.

STUDIES IN CLASSIC AMERICAN LITERATURE by D. H. Lawrence

2011-07-11T00:05:00.145-04:00

"The furthest frenzies of French modernism or futurism have not yet reached the pitch of extreme consciousness that Poe, Melville, Hawthorne, Whitman reached. The European moderns are all trying to be extreme. The great Americans I mention just were it." -- D. H. Lawrence

The biggest problem facing readers of D. H. Lawrence's nonfiction is the separation of the author's invaluable insights from his errant crackpottery. Studies in Classic American Literature contains a surprising number of the former and far too much of the latter. As a testy, polemical, provocative examination of several essential 18th and 19th century American books, this 88 year-old text remains highly valuable. As a basic primer on how to read these books--trust the tale, not the teller; great advice for reading anything--it is probably unbeatable. As an exercise in American cultural criticism, it is a fundamental and prescient volume. "Can you make a land virgin by killing off its aborigines?" Lawrence asks at one point, posing the question of American genocide at a time when Wounded Knee remained a living memory. In his essays on James Fenimore Cooper, Lawrence anticipates (and perhaps exceeds) Leslie Fiedler's signature insights into race and myth in American literature. He uses the Leatherstocking novels to define an endlessly suggestive 'myth of America': "[the novels] go backwards, from old age to golden youth. That is the true myth of America. She starts old, old, wrinkled and writhing in an old skin. And there is a gradual sloughing of the old skin, towards a new youth." Near the end of the same essay, Lawrence gives us his darkest reflection upon the obsidian mirror of American fiction: "The essential American soul is hard, isolate, stoic, and a killer. It has never yet melted." These two sentences can teach us much about the contemporary American right and its psychotic, suicidal, anti-American cruelty--a psychosis that often manifests itself in a drive to smear all liberal aspects of government and society with rhetorical excrement and then complain that they stink. Sarah Palin brandishes all the firearms, but the telegenically cruel Paul Ryan (who eerily reminds me of Bret Easton Ellis's Patrick Bateman) is the real Natty Bumpo of contemporary American fascism. That old fascist cyborg Dick Cheney is so enamored of Ryan's hard, isolate stoicism that he has stated, "I worship the ground Paul Ryan walks on." (Which I guess clears up all the confusion about the true religion of the American right, n'est-ce pas?) As this brief digression suggests, the best parts of Lawrence's book remain more relevant than anything in any other octogenarian work of criticism. But these best passages are embedded in far too much of the aforementioned crackpottery: long anti-feminist tirades, a bit of anti-semitism, pages and pages of blather about the Lawrencian "Holy Ghost," a bunch of bizarre, bitchy non sequiturs... Amazingly, the book is still worth reading. It is worth our time to separate the true Lawrencian gold from the resentful, forgettable dross.

My Proust Questionnaire (Happy 140th, Marcel)

2011-07-10T00:05:00.001-04:00

In honor of Marcel Proust's 140th birthday, I've decided to submit to a version of the infamous Pivotian, Liptonian, Vanity Fairian 'Proust Questionnaire.'

Your most marked characteristic? None of your business
The quality you most like in a man? Wit and sensitivity
The quality you most like in a woman? Friendliness and wit
What do you most value in your friends? The fact that they are my friends
What is your principle defect? Perfection
What is your favorite occupation? Turning sentences around, making worlds of words, liking that other world.
What is your dream of happiness? I have more interesting things to dream about
What to your mind would be the greatest of misfortunes? Total paralysis or the disintegration of the mind
What would you like to be? An enigma
In what country would you like to live? England, specifically London, even more specifically Bloomsbury, most specifically of all Bedford Square
What is your favorite color? The deep blue of shadows cast by evergreen trees upon freshly fallen snow
What is your favorite flower? Queen of the Night Tulip, the most decadent flower in the world
What is your favorite bird? The one between my index and ring fingers
Who are your favorite prose writers? Marcel Proust, Virginia Woolf, James Joyce, Walter Pater, Vladimir Nabokov, William Faulkner, many others
Who are your favorite poets? Ovid, Dante, Shakespeare, Donne, Whitman, Dickinson, Yeats, Rilke, Celan, Hart Crane, Allen Ginsberg, T.S. Eliot, many, many others
Who is your favorite hero of fiction? Tyrone Slothrop
Who is your favorite heroine of fiction? Fanny Hill
Who are your favorite composers? Bach, Beethoven, Berg, Wagner, Mahler, Morton Feldman
What is your favorite symphony? Beethoven's Ninth
What is your favorite opera? Wagner's Tristan und Isolde
Who are your favorite painters? Picasso, Titian, Rembrandt, Cezanne, Fragonard, Goya, Manet, Van Gogh, Beckmann, many others
Who are your heroes in real life? A 'real life' hero is a dangerous thing to have.
Who are your favorite heroines of history? Ditto
What are your favorite first names? Alexandra, Marina, Natasha, Miranda
What is it you most dislike? Today's Republican Party, a surreal collection of Burroughsian Talking Assholes
What historical figures do you most despise? Hitler, Stalin, and many other religious figures
What event in military history do you most admire? It's difficult to find anything admirable in human slaughter
Who are your intellectual heroes? Jean-Paul Sartre, Noam Chomsky, Mahatma Gandhi, Thomas Jefferson, Emma Goldman, Karl Marx, Friedrich Nietzsche, Sigmund Freud, Alfred Kinsey, Albert Einstein, Richard Dawkins
What natural gift would you most like to possess? Perfect vision
How would you like to die? As Bartleby said, I would prefer not to...
What is your present state of mind? Weird to surreal, a Gaudi palace of spiralling dreamstone
To what faults do you feel most indulgent? Excessive love, and any other 'fault' born of authentic passion
What is your favorite word? Superflux
What is your least favorite word? No
What is your motto? Doubt Everything

Celebrating Marcel Proust's 140th Birthday

2011-07-09T00:08:00.002-04:00

No one outside the hardcore Proustian community seems to have noticed yet that this Sunday, July 10, 2011, is the 140th birthday of Marcel Proust. I suggest celebrating the occasion by taking a long swig from the Modern Library 'Proust Six-Pack':

This is a box set of the complete In Search of Lost Time (A la recherche du temps perdu) in six sturdy paperback volumes, as translated into English by C.K. Scott Moncrieff and subsequently revised (twice) to bring it into line with the most recent French edition. (Ideally, of course, one should read Proust in French; I'll be working on that for the rest of my life...) I have my quibbles with some of Moncrieff's choices, but his translation remains the best Proust in English. I've sampled the other recent translations and found them flat, bland and unsatisfying, a weak stew. Moncrieff's work, on the other hand, is sinuously, Art Nouveau-ishly impressive enough to be a monument of English prose.

A single sentence in Robert Hughes's The Shock of the New convinced me that it's impossible to really know Proust until you've experienced Art Nouveau architecture at its excessive best. So one might also celebrate Marcel's cent-quarantieme by watching Japanese director Hiroshi Teshigahara's great and beautiful 1984 documentary Antonio Gaudi. (It's available from the Criterion Collection and can be rented from Netflix.) This is an almost entirely wordless 72-minute visual essay that plays like a poem or a modernist symphony (or a Proustian novel), piling image upon image upon image, allowing breathtakingly photographed examples of Gaudi's works to speak for themselves. When a narrator's voice enters near the end, it seems to come only to demonstrate the superfluity of words. The images are the thing.

This would also be a good time to study some of the Old Masters that Proust especially loved: Chardin, Rembrandt, Vermeer. Look at Vermeer's View of Delft and try to find Bergotte's little patch of yellow wall (but don't kill yourself doing it):

That's how I'll be marking a date that should be as important as Bloomsday on the literary calendar.

HAPPY PROUST'S BIRTHDAY!

A thought on Terrence Malick's DAYS OF HEAVEN and Henry James's THE WINGS OF THE DOVE

2011-07-05T23:21:00.000-04:00

"Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal..." -- T. S. Eliot, "Philip Massinger," The Sacred Wood

By the Eliotic standard, filmmaker Terrence Malick must be considered a 'mature poet,' even in his early work. Malick's second film, the beyond-beautiful Days of Heaven, boldly steals its central love triangle from Henry James's The Wings of the Dove (a novel written, appropriately, in the same general period in which the film is set [within a decade or so]). Genders are switched, and the action is shifted from London drawing rooms and Venetian palazzi to the harsh world of the early 1900s Texas Panhandle (portrayed credibly by Alberta, Canada), but the attentive and literate viewer will have little difficulty seeing the wealthy, doomed Sam Shepard as wealthy, doomed Milly Theale, the conspiratorial Richard Gere as conspiratorial Kate Croy, and the lover-turned-conspirator-turned-lover Brooke Adams as lover-turned-conspirator-turned-lover Merton Densher. Critics have often pointed out the thin, elliptical nature of Days of Heaven's narrative, a story so slight as to be dwarfed by the stunning visuals, but it seems less elliptical and more intertextual (not to mention more interesting) once one identifies the Jamesian intertext.

The Grand Unified Conspiracy Theory of English Literature : A Satyrickall Diversion

2011-07-04T12:39:00.002-04:00

Ben Jonson spilled the beans four centuries ago in an unwritten letter recently discovered bound between the endpapers of a nonexistent book in the London Library: The Looney Hypothesis is all true, every bit of it. The Earl of Oxford wrote Shakespeare's plays and Shakespeare wrote Marlowe's plays and Marlowe wrote Middleton's plays and Tommy the Kyd wrote John Webster's plays between rackings in the tower; Ben Jonson wrote everyone else's poetry and John Donne wrote Ben Jonson's; Donne also wrote most of George Herbert's poems (the ones not written by Marvell), Marston wrote all of Tourneur's works, the Countess of Pembroke wrote Sidney's Arcadia, Spenser wrote Francis Bacon's essays, and Bacon wrote Queen Elizabeth I, who wrote nothing save death warrants; Addison wrote Steele's essays and Steele wrote Addison's; Marvell wrote Milton's epics while Milton wrote poems, pamphlets and precious little else, being blind (surely no one still believes that Bennettian wives' tale about the blind bugger's dreary dictation to his dutiful daughters?); Alexander Pope wrote Homer's epics and Samuel Johnson wrote Swift's satires and Henry Fielding wrote Tristram Shandy and Sterne wrote Richardson's Clarissa over a single sleepless weekend; Wordsworth and Coleridge were inventions of William Blake, while Hazlitt and De Quincey were prosey aliases for Byron and Shelley; Keats wrote every Romantic poem but found criticism Byronically 'killing'; Mary Shelley wrote all of Percy Bysshe's poems and Percy wrote the tale of Frankenstein; Jane Austen's books were written by George Eliot, Eliot's by Anthony Trollope, Trollope's by Thackeray, Thackeray's by Dickens, Dickens's by Lewis Carroll, Carroll's by Michael Jackson, Jackson's by Walter Pater, Pater's by John Ruskin, Ruskin's by Marcel Proust, Proust's by James Joyce, Joyce's by Virginia Woolf, and Woolf's by a dustman from Sydenham named Willie Stoat; Flann O'Brien wrote the half of Finnegans Wake that was not written by Myles na gCopaleen, Brian O'Nolan wrote all of Flann O'Brien's works, James Joyce wrote Brideshead Revisited as a piece of high satire, and Graham Greene wrote the rest of Evelyn Waugh while vacationing in Jamaica; in the beach bungalow nextdoor, Ian Fleming invented John Le Carre as a pseudonym for a former spook from Cornwall, while James Bond begat Kingsley Amis who begat Another Amis, who wrote all his father's books; and Salman Rushdie wrote everything, including the Koran.

I hope this clears things up.

Pour Joyce: Eighteen Joycean Thoughts for Bloomsday

2011-06-16T00:05:00.258-04:00

Paul Cadmus, Jerry, 1931. (Toledo Museum of Art; Toledo, Ohio). The sitter is Cadmus's lover, the artist Jared French. This nakedly intimate, surprisingly complex and deeply erotic painting is my favorite artistic image of the novel that has given a name to today.

In honor of Bloomsday 2011 here are eighteen thoughts inspired by Ulysses, one for each chapter. Pour them into the porches of your rears.

1. TELEMACHUS. Who is Stephen Dedalus's third 'master,' the one who wants him "for odd jobs"? He pedantically identifies the first two masters (Pope and King) for the benefit of Haines, but his cryptic reference to the third flies far over the Englishman's low-altitude head. It's one of the many teasing riddles Stephen leaves unsatisfactorily answered, and thus several answers suggest themselves. (This shows that Joyce has learned well the secret of Shakespearean motivation: the less an author explicitly tells, the more labyrinthine the reader's guesses.) Stephen might mean Ireland, the unchosen country of his post-collegiate funk (Yes, Stephen Dedalus is 20th-century literature's archetype-defining 'slacker'), or he might be referring to his literal boss, the decidedly odd Mr. Deasy; or, at a stretch, Buck Mulligan, who depends on Stephen's job to finance his Thursday night carousing. The best answer, though, is literature, the artistic master to whom he has yet to offer a sacrifice, save his grandiose 'epiphanies' and the odd little scraps of poetry composed on library slips (and torn typing paper) during stolen moments on Sandymount Strand.

2. NESTOR. Every good reader of Joyce is, like Stephen, a learner rather than a teacher. Dubliners and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, while great and re-readable, are less than infinite works. They don't demand a lifetime of re-reading. Ulysses, by contrast, is a book one can re-read even beyond the Biblical threescore and ten. (Fortunately, it's better than the Bible, and funnier.) And Finnegans Wake surely requires several lifetimes (as well as proficiency in many languages), many cycles of recirculation before we begin waking to the Wake. We are all learners of Joyce, attempting with each reading to understand his books in toto and always moderately succeeding before always colossally failing. For however well we may read, Joyce reads better; however cleverly we may interpret, Joyce interprets more cleverly. He knows all of our tricks and is always several steps ahead of us, occasionally turning to mock us, always scribbling determinedly on...

3. PROTEUS. An excellent example of the vast network of cross-references that ties Ulysses together appears in this passage from 'Proteus': "Pico della Mirandola like. Ay, very like a whale. When one reads these strange pages of one long gone one feels that one is at one with one who once..." Taking the middle sentence first, this Hamlet line seemingly thrown up by random association refers back to the first chapter, where a peninsula is described as lying "on the water like the snout of a sleeping whale." More obviously, it sounds the novel's Hamlet motif and joins the Hamletisms of chapter one to the motif's gargantuan thematic expansion in 'Scylla and Charybdis.' The mention of Mirandola in the first fragment signposts the third sentence, which is a pitch-perfect parody of Walter Pater's essay on Pico della Mirandola in The Renaissance. This parody of Paterian prose precurses the parodic style/structure of 'Oxen of the Sun' (where Pater is among those specifically parodied) and might also remind us of Pater's oft-quoted line (from the essay on Giorgione in The Renaissance) about all art aspiring to the condition of music, a possible conceptual inspiration for the 'Sirens' chapter. And wherever there is Paterian aestheticism in Ulysses, one gets a whiff of the novel's Wilde motif and the closely related motif/theme of homoeroticism, two aspects of Ulysses that have been insufficiently explored.

4. CALYPSO. The tolling churchbells that end this chapter resound Westminstered through the pages of Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway. Woolf disliked Ulysses (her well-known statements about it are shallow and class-prejudiced, not Woolf at her critical best), but she was deeply influenced by it, writing in Dalloway an anglicized, bourgeois-centric, feminacentric, more formally traditional, more sharply focused, and much more concise 'revision' of Joyce's novel. Joyce's exact contemporary (Woolf was also born in 1882 and died in 1941) was hardly alone in being decisively influenced by the the book of Mr. Bloom's day. Ulysses was influencing writers even before Sylvia Beach booked it. Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot read it as a work-in-progress in manuscript and magazines, so the Joycean juxtaposition of myth and modernity stands behind two of the great poetic monuments of Modernism, The Waste Land and The Cantos. Is there any other novel that has had a comparable influence on the history of poetry?

5. LOTUS EATERS. When Bloom, walking near Trinity College, sees an unimaginative poster for a sporting event, he thinks, "Damn bad ad. Now if they had made it round like a wheel. Then the spokes: sports, sports, sports: and the hub big: college. Something to catch the eye." The poster he sees is too obvious and representational: a "cyclist doubled up like a cod in a pot." The one he imagines is more abstract, even avant-garde, the sort of thing the Italian Futurists or Russian Constructivists might have conceived. In other words, it's au courant for the time of the novel's composition, but too early for that of its setting. If Joyce learned from Shakespeare, he also learned from Dante: a writer can easily make his characters seem ahead of their time (or in the Florentine's case, make them peerless prophets) by setting his tale a few years in the past. This tiny scene is also a demonstrative commentary on how quickly the most radical artistic ideas can be turned to the stuff of advertising. Capitalism can digest anything.

6. HADES. Consider a single paragraph from Mr. Bloom's ride to the cemetery:

"The stonecutter's yard on the right. Last lap. Crowded on the spit of land silent shapes appeared, white, sorrowful, holding out calm hands, knelt in grief, pointing. Fragments of shapes, hewn. In white silence: appealing. The best obtainable. Thos. H. Dennany, monumental builder and sculptor."

Note the sudden whiplash turns of tone and register, the unexpected collisions of discourse--all perfectly appropriate for a description of something seen from a speeding carriage. We begin with neutral, tourguide-like description, then jarringly lapse into the discourse of auto racing (a motif of the funeral procession). After a mere two words, our temporary sports fan of a paragraph spills into lyrical description ("Crowded on the spit of land...") that crosses over into a parody of elegiac sentimentality ("sorrowful, holding out calm hands...In white silence: appealing"). This register is hewn by the more descriptive fragment "Fragments of shapes, hewn," and after a brief return to the elegiac, we immediately lapse into the language of self-promotion, advertising, Leopold Bloom's professional discourse: "The best obtainable." And we end with a passing glimpse of Mr. Dennany's business sign, a capitalist banality that bathetically undermines the lyrical beauty of the preceding lines.

7. AEOLUS. Here's a truism I'm tired of repeating: Modernism at its best was always already post-Modern. Joyce becomes postmodernly self-conscious in this chapter about newspaper production, printing, writing and (above all) rhetoric. Wandering among the newsmen of Dublin, Ulysses achieves self-consciousness and reflects upon the means of its own production. At the most explicit moment of formal involution, editor Myles Crawford pulls Stephen Dedalus aside and asks him to write "something with a bite in it" and proceeds to prophesy the novel in which he appears: "Put us all into it, damn its soul. Father, Son and Holy Ghost and Jakes M'Carthy." Mr. McCarthy's compatriots are of course well represented in Ulysses, fathers and sons constitute one of the novel's major themes, and the ghosts of Homer and Shakespeare are holy enough for Joycean work. Among the other spirits present at the seance, one should mention Stephen's mother, Bloom's father and son (that theme again), Oscar Wilde, Parnell, Paddy Dignam, and an unholy host of others.

8. LESTRYGONIANS. When Bloom pauses to watch a typesetter in the 'Aeolus' episode, his mind returns to a memory of his father reading Hebrew, and he reflects upon Old Testament morality: "Justice it means but it's everybody eating everyone else. That's what life is after all." Sweeney Todd couldn't have said it better. This Hebraic Hobbesianism is explored further in 'Lestrygonians,' when Bloom enters the Burton and witnesses a panoramic Darwinian spectacle of the eaters and the eaten: the munching men are compared to animals at their feed. This may be what life is, after all, but Bloom decides to have none of it and retreats to Davy Byrnes's "moral pub" for a gorgonzola sandwich (not recommended for the lactose intolerant). It might be possible--but not terribly interesting, perhaps--to interpret this chapter as an allegory of the birth of ethics as a dialectical response to the Hobbesian state of nature. But like all of Ulysses, it's much, much more than that.

9. SCYLLA AND CHARYBDIS. Joyce has already Brechtianly revealed the stage machinery of his novel (most explicitly in 'Aeolus'), so it should come as no surprise when Stephen begins his discourse on Shakespeare by mentally invoking that unlikeliest of muses, the most secret father of Joycean naturalism, Saint Ignatius Loyola. Buck Mulligan is absolutely right about Stephen (and his creator): he has the cursed Jesuit strain in him, but it's injected the wrong way. It's ferociously secular. And just as Stephen Loyolanly meditates upon Shakespeare's London, Joyce the novelist Loyolanly 'composes' his own earlier Dublin. Ulysses is, among much else, a demonstrative secularization of the Loyola meditation technique known as 'composition of place' (which Stephen explicitly cites in the same line). This, I am convinced, is the compositional key to Joyce's realism. This is how he 'achieves' Dublin on the page. Joyce the apostate sat in Trieste-Zurich-Paris from 1914 to 1921 and performed Loyolan compositions of place on the Dublin of 1904.

10. WANDERING ROCKS. Before he ends this most peripatetic of episodes with a tour de force tour de Dublin, Joyce takes us inside the consciousness of Master Patrick A. Dignam, son of the encoffined and engraved stiff from 'Hades' ("First the stiff; then the friends of the stiff."), in a 'juvenile' prose style reminiscent of the early pages of the Portrait. It also, to my ear, sounds like a typically pitch-perfect Joycean parody of Gertrude Stein's prose. Judge for yourself. Here's the son recalling the father's death and encoffinment: "His face got all grey instead of being red like it was and there was a fly walking over it up to his eye. The scrunch that was when they were screwing the screws into the coffin and the bumps when they were bringing it downstairs." This also sounds a bit like mid-period Samuel Beckett, the Beckett of Molloy. But the art of the sentences is pure Joyce: notice that "screwing the screws" sonically and visually analogizes the repetitive screwdriver turns of the action it describes, and that the b's in the second half of the sentence 'bump' against its smooth sonic flow like the coffin against the stair walls.

11. SIRENS. One obvious question arises from this section: Where is "Ulysses: The Opera"? Answer: it's right here, waiting for a composer Wagnerianly ambitious enough to music the 700-page Joycean libretto. Seriously, a novel this musical cries out for operatic adaptation. We have had two attempts at film adaptations (by Joseph Strick and Sean Walsh); both are watchable and interesting but neither comes close to the book's level of artistry. A less 'realistic' adaptation for the operatic stage might work much better. It might, in fact, given a sufficiently Brechtian director, come much closer to the novel's artistic heart. Imagine an operatic Ulysses conceived like Berg's Wozzeck, with eighteen scenes that play like self-contained mini-operas, each in a different style. I will ask my question again: Why doesn't such an opera exist? Why isn't it already part of the Met repertoire?

12. CYCLOPS. A few years ago, in a basement gallery at the Art Institute of Chicago, I encountered a photograph that absolutely destroyed me, tore at me until I felt fragmented, ripped me apart like an angry child's least favorite toy. The photograph was taken after World War II by David Seymour (known professionally as 'Chim'), and it showed a young girl named Terezka standing before a chalkboard on which was scrawled an indecipherable jumble of tangled, spiralling lines that superficially resembled some of the abstract expressionist paintings in the galleries upstairs. The wallcard informed me that Terezka had been photographed in a home for disturbed children after spending most of her young life in a concentration camp. She had been asked to draw a picture of 'home' on the chalkboard. These words helped me understand the image, but the image itself blew all that understanding away as soon as I looked into Terezka's eyes. Her haunting and haunted stare, directed straight into the camera, is one of the most deeply horrifying things I have ever seen. These are eyes that have seen far too much, that have been forced to drink so deeply of human horror that they can only project that horror outward. These are eyes blighted and blinded by experiences most human beings can hardly imagine. Looking into them was like staring into the sun. I couldn't bear it for more than a few seconds at a time. I left the gallery, left the Art Institute, and walked aimlessly north on Michigan Avenue. By the time I reached the Water Tower I heard another voice, a counter-tone, rising up inside me to meet the unspeakable horror of Terezka's eyes. It offered itself as a kind of answer to the image. It was the voice of Leopold Bloom from the 'Cyclops' episode, answering the anti-semitic arseholes at Barney Kiernan's by defining love as the opposite of historical hatred. Love. It's a kind of answer.

13. NAUSICAA. After his Gerty-enabled ejaculation on Sandymount Strand, Bloom tries and fails to write her a message in the sand with a phallic wooden 'pen.' He throws the wood away, accepts that they will never meet again, and slips into a doze. (The parallels between his encounter with Gerty and his later and longer one with Stephen Dedalus are instructive.) His sleep-slipping mind immediately fires off a machine gun barrage of motifs (beginning "O sweety all your little girlwhite up I saw dirty bracegirdle made me do love sticky...") to create one of the novel's most extraordinarily avant-garde passages. This brief paragraph is beyond the rest of Ulysses, beyond surrealism, beyond even Finnegans Wake; the nearest analogy that comes to mind is William Burroughs' 'cut-up' method. As Bloom sleeps, Joyce leaps.

14. OXEN OF THE SUN. This chapter is Joyce's gift to English majors. A good part of its lit-geek fun comes from trying to identify all the styles parodied. Even the best-read of readers probably won't correctly identify them all. Fortunately, Gifford and Seidman's Ulysses Annotated (an essential reference) does a wonderful job of separating the pseudo-Lamb from the cod De Quincey, the faux-Ruskin from the false Carlyle. Joyce's takeoff of Carlyle is particularly hilarious: "By heaven, Theodore Purefoy, thou hast done a doughty deed and no botch! Thou art, I vow, the remarkablest progenitor barring none in this chaffering allincluding most farraginous chronicle. Astounding!" Astounding indeed. This is parody so perfect that it passes into criticism and forces the reader to wonder why anyone ever took Carlyle's maniacal fustian seriously.

15. CIRCE. If 'Sirens' sings out a demand for operatic adaptation, 'Circe' demands an imagistic alchemization at the animating hands of Terry Gilliam. It's a script for the greatest cartoon Gilliam will never draw. Much, much more than this, "Circe" is Joyce's farcical response to Goethe's already rather ridiculous Faust, Part Two, as well as a parodic take on Flaubert's weirdest work, The Temptation of Saint Anthony. More immanently, this longest section of Ulysses--taking up more than a fifth of the book's total length--is the novel's outrageously Freudian dream of itself. Or as a Reagan-era public service spot might have said: this is Joyce's brain on drugs, really good drugs, premo shit, hardcore hallucinogens cooked up especially for Ol' Jimmy Boy by Albert Hofmann's predecessor at Sandoz Labs. But this isn't really Ulysses unhinged. Joyce never loses control. This is Ulysses uncensored, a dreamtime bursting of the imaginative strictures, the rational rules of fiction, under which much of the novel is written (especially the more 'realistic' sections; Joyce here shows us that adherence to the rules, not to reality, is what defines 'realism.') For me, 'Circe,' 'Penelope' and 'Proteus' are the novel's three most liberating chapters...

16. EUMAEUS. ...and this chapter is surely its most boring. Intentionally so. If 'Cyclops' and 'Circe' are the inspirational takeoff points for Thomas Pynchon's wildly imaginative flights, then 'Eumaeus' and the first half of 'Nausicaa' might be considered the birthplaces of David Foster Wallace's accomplished and irritating experiments in imitative form. This chapter is a resting place in the night, a cabman's shelter where the novel pauses to catch its breath after the metamorphic frenzy of 'Circe.' It is also--and this may be the most interesting thing about it--the last piece of traditional narrative fiction Joyce ever wrote. After this comes the catechism of 'Ithaca' and the deluge of 'Penelope,' and then the labyrinthianly idiolectal Finnegans Wake. 'Eumaeus,' then, might be read as a demonstration of the exhaustion not merely of Bloom and Stephen but of the naturalistic narrative tradition as a whole. Joyce comes not to praise the tradition but to bury it. This is Joyce turning the final screw in the Paddy Dignam coffin of traditional fiction.

17. ITHACA.

What is the significance of the four full-page initials, U, S, M, and P, that decorate respectively the title page and the first page of each section of the standard 1961 edition of Ulysses?

Anagramming most obviously as 'sump,' the letters codedly signify a pit to which liquid wastes are drained, a cesspool, and might therefore constitute a puritanical designer's critical commentary on the book's content. Another view reads the letters in order to form an acronym describing the central character: Unreconstructed Sado-Masochistic Paddy.

Why does the 1961 edition of Ulysses end this chapter with a greatly enlarged period?

That's not a period, my daffy darling. It's a wormhole that bypasses the 'Penelope' episode and takes the daring reader directly into the loonyverse where sleepers never wake, Finnegan's, there to meet sinbad the sailor and jinbad the jailer and tinbad the tailor and--you get the picture.

18. PENELOPE. Here's a highly arguable assertion about the overall structure of Ulysses and its relationship to twentieth-century literature: Ulysses begins in Modernism (the first six chapters), passes through the Postmodern dissolution of the autonomous self (chapters 7-17), and ends, in 'Penelope,' with a compelling Post-Postmodern recovery of the subjectivity dissolved in the previous chapters. Discuss. ("Oh, rocks! Tell us in plain words.")

And while you're discussing it, I'll take this opportunity to lament the fact that the 1975 edition of Joyce's Selected Letters, edited by Richard Ellmann, is currently out of print. By virtue of its inclusion of the uncensored texts of Joyce's wonderful erotic letters to Nora, this is quite possibly the only volume of author letters in existence that might conceivably sell a commercially respectable number of copies, so I find its absence from the market puzzling, to say the least. Surely this book would be a natural for the New York Review Books Classics imprint. I wonder why they haven't picked it up. Until this book is brought back into print, the Joycean literary landscape will be like a home without Plumtree's Potted Meat.

American Writers and American (Sur)Reality : A Premature Ejaculation for the Fourth of July

2011-06-09T00:05:00.007-04:00

"..the American writer in the middle of the twentieth century has his hands full in trying to understand, describe, and then make credible much of American reality. It stupefies, it sickens, it infuriates, and finally it is even a kind of embarrassment to one's own meager imagination. The actuality is continually outdoing our talents, and the culture tosses up figures almost daily that are the envy of any novelist. Who, for example, could have invented Charles Van Doren? Roy Cohn and David Schine? Sherman Adams and Bernard Goldfine? Dwight David Eisenhower?" -- Philip Roth, "Writing American Fiction," (1960), collected in Reading Myself and Others

These are Philip Roth's most famous nonfictional words, a classic statement of the American novelist's eternal complaint: how can I write about a reality that constantly outruns my imagination? The best answer to this is a short, Beckettian one: Imagine more. Fail better. This was the path taken by Roth's more experimental contemporaries (Pynchon, Coover, Barthelme) and eventually by Roth himself in Portnoy and after. But even fifty years later Roth's complaint remains quotable, continues to resonate, and even finds unexpected confirmation in Roth's own later Nixon satire, Our Gang, the imaginary outrages of which were quickly overrun by the surreal reality of Watergate, the Plumbers, and the "cocksucker!"-sputtering Nixon of the tapes. While Roth's list of cultural and political figures is hopelessly dated (Adams and Goldfine have dropped completely off the radar; Cohn and Schine exist only as minor cloven-hoofed creatures in the demonology of the American Left; Charlie 'Quiz Show' Van Doren has been reduced to a name on dust jacket blurbs; and everybody today seems to like Ike [except Guatemalans]), the thrust of his argument still cuts to the American bone. Indeed, Roth's words are--as the cliche goes--even more relevant today. Just look at the tame, conventional fictions that are being touted as 'great American novels' (I mean you, Jonathan Franzen) while the central characters of truly great novels strut and preen and perpwalk across our TV screens every evening at 6:30: Bernard Madoff, Donald 'the chump' Trump, Dominique Strauss-Kahn, Dick Cheney, George W. Bush, John Ensign, Anthony 'the aptly-named' Weiner, the unnamed soldier who is killing or dying in Afghanistan even as I type this...the list is pretty much endless. What American novelist living or dead could have imagined the life of Barack Obama? Not Faulkner, not Fitzgerald, probably not Toni Morrison, not James Baldwin, maybe Ralph Ellison. Who among our novelists could have imagined that a morbidly obese, radio-ranting drug addict would become arguably the most important person in the Republican Party? David Foster Wallace surely could have, ditto Thomas Pynchon, but who else? The life of Hillary Rodham Clinton would have taxed the imagination of Edith Wharton and been denounced as a feminist fairy tale had Joyce Carol Oates written it. If Pynchon had written a novel in which America is illegitimately ruled for eight years by two guys named Dick and Bush, his readers would've chuckled and thought, "Where does he get this stuff?!" More seriously, has any American novel of the past twenty years surpassed in political perception and tragic knowledge Naomi Klein's two-volume nonfiction anatomy of corporatism, No Logo and The Shock Doctrine? Given that corporatism (or globalisation, or global corporate capitalism, or late capitalism, or whatever you want to name the poison) is the hegemonic ideology of our time, any novelist interested in politics should be on this topic like a Blakean fly on Joycean shit. Where are the fictional explorations of the profound psychological impact of corporate thinking on the way we live today? There should be as many novels about corporatism today as there were about capitalism and communism during the Cold War. Who will be corporatism's John Le Carre? Who will be its Pasternak, who its Nabokov, who its Orwell, who its Sartre? What writer will rise to our dreary day and make herself the equal of the current crazy mess? As our political discourse has become increasingly insane over the last three years--a good starting point for the downward slide is the day in 2008 when John McCain selected Sarah Palin as his running mate, apparently choosing her name at random from a Juneau phonebook--I have had one recurring, pseudo-Wordsworthian thought: Nathanael West, thou should'st be living at this hour: / America hath need of thee... If you listen very carefully in the stillness of three o'clock in the morning (where all the clocks stop in the dark night of the American soul) you can hear a faint whining sound that after a while resolves into the threnody of America's few remaining readers literally calling out for a book that gives our current political landscape the kind of satirical skewering Nathanael West gave the crazies of his day in A Cool Million, still the greatest of all American political satires. Of course, the West-ern treatment is made considerably more difficult today by the fact that our contemporary political culture not only beggars the imagination but also secretes its own satire. A character as ridiculous as George W. Bush makes an American Swift or Voltaire redundant; everything Dubya says is satire by virtue of the fact that it issues from his face. The same is true of Cheney, but transposed to a darker key. Our coronary cyborg of an ex-Vice President is a headbirth of Joseph Heller at his deadliest. And what of Sarah Palin, the egregious failed governor of Alaska who still basks in the cultic devotion of her millions of foolish followers and luxuriates in the mindless attention of the very 'lamestream media' she thinks she despises? Palin, the puritanical conservative in stripper boots who dog-whistles apocalyptic rhetoric between shopping sprees, the Christian moralist whose electoral appeal boils down to a Morse Code-winked "vote for me because you want to fuck me," seems to have escaped from an unwritten late chapter of Gravity's Rainbow. And how about those psychologically damaged Bobbsey Twins of right-wing demagoguery, the sad fatboy Limbaugh and the delusionally paranoid Beck? Not really self-satirists, these two little boys are case studies in abnormal psychology, more pathetic than comic. Rush Limbaugh will always be the fat kid who wants to be cool and uses his verbal facility to impress the jocks with his outrageous comments. Listen to Big Rush and you can almost hear the 1960s high school football players saying, "That Limbaugh kid, man, he'll say anything. Silly little fucker." Of the paranoid stylings of Glenn Beck more than enough has already been said; it is sufficient to point out that this man sincerely believes that the 1930s kitsch decorative art at Rockefeller Center (of all places!) is part of a Communist plot of imagistic indoctrination. (It worked like a charm, an apotropaic one; Rockefeller Center is the Vatican of corporate capitalism.) Beck's silly hobbyhorses, though, are but so many special cases of the grand delusion affecting too much of the American right: the idea that self-styled 'conservatives' (who at their intellectual best/worst are not conservative at all, but rather constitute a kind of right-anarchist vanguard envisioning a taxless, governmentless corporate utopia) are a powerless, embattled minority fighting valiantly against overwhelming odds. This is obviously risible: a minority they certainly are (witness the returns from the last five presidential elections: Clinton, Clinton, Gore, barely Bush, Obama), but the anti-democratic force of corporate cash skews the odds ever so slightly in their favor. Nor can they be called 'embattled,' since no one really fights them. The centrists who dominate the Democratic Party bend themselves into knots appeasing the right, and the 'American left' is much more a right-wing fantasy than a viable political force. A political discourse free of ideological hallucinations would be a refreshing change, but I don't see the sun of that day rising any time soon. The best image for our current impasse may be Tea Party darling Michelle Bachmann's affectless, trancelike stare: a zombie leading the blind. Yes, the goofballs of the right are their own best satirists; they are the unintentional Voltaires of themselves. If they had no real power, they would be as perfectly ridiculous as the hopelessly obscure, utterly powerless hardliners of the American left. But because the rightists do have power, because they are financed and supported by corporations and individuals with theoretically bottomless pockets, they should alarm and energize anyone who cares about freedom. On this upcoming fourth of July, let's rededicate ourselves to saving what's best about America from the so-called 'conservatives' (cue the sound of Burke spinning in his grave) who would destroy it.

"the gelatinous, contractible threat of the shapeless octopus of dreams" : On the Prose Style of FADO ALEXANDRINO by Antonio Lobo Antunes

2011-06-08T00:05:00.006-04:00

Fado Alexandrino is an amazing novel, brilliantly written and masterfully conceived and executed. Even if it had been less well-written, the novel's impressive formal originality (Lobo Antunes' montage-like narrative style in which temporally and spatially disparate scenes are conjoined in a single page, a single paragraph, sometimes a single sentence) would have been sufficient to earn it 'must read' status. The author takes a hint from one or two chapters of Joyce's Ulysses and, exhibiting a Kirk Varnedoe-esque 'fine disregard' for the rules of novelistic fiction, transforms that hint into the hallmark of his style. Fado Alexandrino is the Sentimental Education of the Portuguese revolution, the Ulysses of 1970s Lisbon. It's one of the most important European novels of the past 40 years. And it is also a singularly exhausting reading experience.

I am not saying that the book is especially difficult. (It is a difficult novel--relative to, say, the works of Martin Amis or Ian McEwan--but it's not extraordinarily difficult. After 15 or 20 pages, readers attuned to post-Joycean fiction will become accustomed to the Antunesque style and have little difficulty navigating the cubistically shifting planes of his narrative.) My readerly exhaustion might have something to do with the work required to follow the novel's four distinct but simultaneously narrated storylines, but I suspect a more likely culprit in the very aspect of Fado that makes it so exhilarating and impressive, the author's maniacally metaphorical prose. The metaphor I quote in the title of this post is an admittedly extreme example, but pretty much every page of the novel exists under the gelatinous, contractible threat of Lobo Antunes' octopoid metaphors. (I know it's problematic to comment on the prose of a work read in translation, but Gregory Rabassa, who beautifully translated Fado, is one of the world's most highly regarded literary translators, so I assume that his English version is very faithful to the author's Portuguese.) Antonio Lobo Antunes doesn't write like someone who consciously invents metaphors, who deliberately pauses during the writing process to construct a clever image or a startling simile; he writes like someone who naturally thinks in metaphors; he writes like a man possessed by a metaphorizing demon. Lobo Antunes writes like a demiurge who hovers above every blank page and commands his images to be fruitful and multiply. He is the writer as orgymaster, a Sade of the simile, letting linguistic copulation thrive while his metaphors metastasize into figurative octopi that threaten to strangle the meaning of his serpent sentences beneath an insufficiently diaphanous linguistic veil that sometimes becomes as impenetrably dark as the mouth of the River Tagus on a gloomy winter night... Yes, reading Lobo Antunes at his most manic feels something like that. Reading him, in other words, is both exhausting and exhilarating. It's like good sex. But not the safe, bodiless, postmodern wordsex that academics call 'transgressive.' That's hardly Antonio's style. His prose is strictly bareback, down and dirty linguistic fucking from the wrong side of the tracks. If Jose Saramago is the only contemporary Portuguese literary writer you've read, you definitely need to give Antonio Lobo Antunes a try.

IN PRAISE OF OLDER WOMEN by Stephen Vizinczey

2011-06-07T00:05:00.004-04:00

According to a legend recounted on the front endpapers of my edition of this book, an early reviewer disgustedly tossed his advance copy into a wastebasket and wrote to the American publisher, "...I hope that Mr. Vizinczey will be murdered before he has time to write another book." When the book that caused this Khomeini-esque reaction in 1966 is read today, one wonders what aspect of this urbane, restrained and rather tame novel (tame not only for our time but for its own, the time of Naked Lunch, Last Exit to Brooklyn and the lifting of the Chatterley ban) was so upsetting. A highly literary erotic bildungsroman set against a background of historical tragedy (World War II, Nazism, Auschwitz, Stalinism, the 1956 Hungarian uprising), In Praise of Older Women reads like a lighter, more comic, much less ironically detached, Budapest version of the The Unbearable Lightness of Being. This comparison is intentionally anachronistic; Vizinczey's work preceded Kundera's by about two decades and might have influenced it, in a very general way. In contrast to Kundera's great work, Vizinczey's novel is good, interesting and minor. I want to call it a 'major minor novel.' (Unbearable Lightness is a major novel; Catch-22 is a Major Major one.) It's smart about sex and cognizant of the complexities of love. The chapters on 1956 and the narrator's experiences in Italian exile are wonderful, as are the passages in which Vizinczey's narrator indicts intellectuality and political action as flights from the self--"No argument can fill the void of a dead feeling," he writes--even as he flees from himself into erotic entanglements. Vizinczey should perhaps have given this irony greater emphasis, given us a more Nabokovianly unreliable narrator. As it is, Andras Vajda is an insufficiently unreliable narrator, more Henry Miller than Humbert Humbert. A more mysterious, elusive central character would've made the book more deeply interesting.

THE HUMBLING by Philip Roth

2011-06-06T11:09:00.000-04:00

Philip Roth's 'Nemeses' quartet is really a quintet if you count The Dying Animal (which Roth categorizes as a 'Kepesh book'), a sextet if you include the 'Zuckerman book' Exit Ghost, or even a septet if you stretch the concept to include The Plot Against America. All seven books are thematically similar enough to belong together in the Library of America volume in which they will (surely) eventually be bound. The Humbling is probably destined to be considered a lesser member of this group. If Everyman (which I seem to be alone in finding exceptionally weak and unimpressive) was Roth in elegiac mode, The Humbling is his essay in tragedy. And a blatantly theatrical tragedy it is: a three-act structure; an actor-protagonist who has become psychologically unable to act (shades of Bergman's deeply theatrical film Persona); explicit references to O'Neill, Chekhov, etc.; a makeover scene drawn from the deeply disturbing, self-abnegating makeover of Kim Novak in the last act of Vertigo; and even a gun mentioned in the first act, brandished in the second, and predictably discharged in the third. It is rather remarkable to see how many bases Roth can touch in such a brief book, but this is more the pleasure of watching a master at work than the much greater delight of reading a masterful book. For The Humbling is a minor Rothian performance, evidence that the tragic isn't really this major writer's mode. His greatest and most original mode, the one in which he writes his most powerful fiction, is the comical-tragical-absurdical-outragical of Sabbath's Theater, Portnoy's Complaint, The Human Stain, Operation Shylock, Zuckerman Unbound, The Anatomy Lesson, and (a lesser example) Our Gang. But tragic Roth is better than no Roth at all, and The Humbling is a good enough book, not a bad one. I predictably enjoyed most of its predictable pages.

ULYSSES by James Joyce: Chapter Three, 'Proteus'

2011-06-03T00:05:00.004-04:00

Joycean modality of the ineluctably visible. Signs of all things we are here to read. Words, words, words... The 'Proteus' episode of Ulysses, Stephen Hamlet's soliloquy on Sandymount Strand, is a hermeneutic minefield strewn with interpretive traps for wary readers. (Joyce doesn't bother trapping the unwary; that's too easy.) Stephen's thoughts look 'deep,' and Joyce works overtime to achieve this appearance, taking us on an eccentric allusionary tour through his mental library of philosophy, theology, aesthetics, etc. As a consequence, most readers miss the most crucial point of the section: its shallowness. I began to understand this only after traveling to Dublin and spending a sunny Sunday morning on Sandymount Strand. The strand is a huge sandflat. At low tide the soppy sand stretches far out to the barely visible edge of the sea, and it's possible to walk out over the flat, if you don't mind trudging through shoe-sucking muck. When the sea stops holding its watery breath and exhales back toward the land, the tide comes in very quickly over the flats. I know from experience how easy it is to find yourself stranded on a slight rise as the water rills in around you. (I still have an old pair of shoes stained darker brown by Irish Seawater.) When reading 'Proteus' we must realize that although Stephen is indeed at the edge of the sea, it is a pathetically shallow sea. Even at high tide, you can probably wade out a considerable distance before the water hits your waist. Likewise, while Stephen Dedalus appears to be a Hamlet plumbing his depths, those depths are in fact almost all shallows. Whenever his broody musing threatens to touch a deep place in himself, a place of guilt or shame or anxiety about sex or death, Stephen flies off on yet another tangent, soaring away into his mental library, into the rhetoric of theology, philosophy, history, into memories and fantasies, into self-mockery. (The passage in which the cocklepicker man orders his dog away from the dead dog's body reproduces the structure of the entire episode in miniature: the Claudius-voice of Authority orders Stephen Hamlet to put off these thoughts of death ["Tatters! Out of that, you mongrel!"]) This self-mockery may be the most important because it's the beginning of self-criticism, but it's only a beginning. And most of it is, importantly, aimed at his former self, an "other me" who can be more safely dismantled. Stephen went to Paris with grandiose dreams of forging great art in the soul's smithy; now he's back in Dublin and still in the process of realizing that he must first forge his soul.

Another point about this shallowness: late in the section we see Stephen's naked emotions, his loneliness and neediness and self-pity; we glimpse a kind of depth, and it's not a pretty picture. This depth is, in fact, embarrassingly shallow: adolescent, maudlin. Stephen's emotional life is not an acceptably complex, avant-garde construction; it mocks his "Latin Quarter hat," and so it must be fled. I suspect that this, rather than the book's proletarian roughness, is the aspect of Ulysses that Virginia Woolf found so repellent. Posh Virginia wanted to believe that all human beings (or at least that tiny minority that finds its way into serious fiction) are unfathomably complex. Joyce knew that most of the time we are insufferably shallow creatures, ankle-deep and mucky like Sandymount Strand.

There are some endlessly interesting juxtapositions of writing, sex and death near the section's end. Stephen, so horny he's kissing the air, has a thought and writes it down on a torn scrap of paper, a wordy ejaculation that we cannot read. Soon after, while the tide comes erotically in ("long lassoes from Cock Lake"; Cock Lake is a long phallic inlet of the sea into the Strand at low tide), Stephen lies back against the sharp rocks and masturbates, jesuitically mortifying his flesh even as he pleasures it. This is the 'job' he thinks of in the line "Better get this job over quick." He's giving himself a quick handjob as the tide rolls orgasmically in. (The eroticized description of the tide might thus be understood as a construction of Stephen's masturbating consciousness.) And after this, after he comes, he punishes himself with a guilty vision of sexual putrefaction (the drowned man as a "bag of corpsegas" with a "quiver of minnows" in its trousers). And from this vision he predictably flees into pseudo-Hamlet, The Tempest and typically Dedalean intellectual parody. (My masturbation interpretation, which runs counter to the general critical consensus on these passages [most critics think Stephen is urinating here, despite the fact that he's reclining (a good way to wet one's trouser legs) in full view of any passing pedestrians; a pocketed reclining handjob makes more sense], resonates perfectly with Bloom's later masturbation on a different part of Sandymount Strand [in "Nausicaa"]. Sandymount, it seems, was where Dubliners went to wank in 1904. Today they have internet porn.)

The deep power of "Proteus," the part that hurts, is Joyce's bulls-eye portrayal of young male literary consciousness. This is how English majors think--a fact that I can only acknowledge now that I'm older than Bloom. We think we're out far and in deep, but we're really just wading in the shallows, wanking on the strand.

ULYSSES by James Joyce: Chapter Two, 'Nestor'

2011-06-02T02:05:00.000-04:00

Chapters one and two of Ulysses are sutured together by a beautiful sonic 'match cut.' The last word of 'Telemachus,' usurper, shares an initial vowel sound and rhythm with the first two words of 'Nestor,' You, Cochrane. The matching music of the words (an early hint of the technique of 'Sirens') transports us smoothly from the seaside path of the first chapter's conclusion to the classroom at Mr. Deasy's school.

'Nestor' is one of the novel's slighter chapters, but it contains some of Stephen Dedalus's greatest moments. His definition of a pier as a "disappointed bridge" is simply gorgeous, an example of a 'pathetic fallacy' that generates genuine pathos. Every human being wandering alienated through the modern city is a pier who thinks he's a bridge. In his dialogue with Mr. Deasy (a name that Dickensianly rhymes with 'queasy,' appropriate for a character who becomes increasingly nauseating as the scene progresses), Stephen effectively rephrases Marx's Eighteenth Brumaire on the nightmare of history and succinctly deconstructs Deasy's ill-informed Shakespearean allusion by contextualizing it as a line spoken by Iago. He also rather wonderfully describes himself as a 'learner' rather than a 'teacher.' My favorite moment of the discussion, though, is the Joycean coup de theatre that occurs when Deasy's Protestant Hegelian argument reaches its "one great goal, the manifestation of God" at the very moment a goal is scored in the hockey game out the window. Deasy is too blinded by dogmatism to note the deflationary irony, but nothing is lost on Stephen, who "jerk[s] his thumb towards the window" and defines God as "a shout in the street." A shrug of the shoulders slightly defuses this populist blasphemy (which unsurprisingly is also a classical allusion: vox populi, vox dei).

This most literally pedagogical of Ulysses's chapters is the perfect place to say a few words about the vast academic secondary literature that has grown up around this novel. There is an intimidatingly massive library of Joycean books, essays, journal articles, webpages, blogs, etc., but only three books are absolutely necessary for an informed reading of Ulysses: Richard Ellmann's still-standard biography, James Joyce (in its 1982 revised edition); Stuart Gilbert's James Joyce's Ulysses; and Don Gifford and Robert Seidman's Ulysses Annotated. These books, especially the last, will tell you more than you need to know. This may sound like an enormous diss directed at the Joyce Industry, but it's not. I've found many other Joyce books informative and even enjoyable, but none of them are as absolutely necessary as the three mentioned above. As to the fraught question of which edition of Ulysses to read, I've read both the Gabler edition and the long-standard 1961 edition and found that while there are a few interesting differences in some specific lines, most of Gabler's many corrections are very minor. I'm tempted to call the scholarly tempest over the Gabler edition "Much Ado About Nothung"--but surely someone has already used that as an alternate title for Wagner's Ring.

...and another thing about the opening of ULYSSES

2011-06-01T12:44:00.000-04:00

Because the setting of the first chapter of Joyce's Ulysses has become so familiar over the nine decades since its publication, we may have lost sight of just how incredibly disorienting the novel's opening pages are. Think back to your first reading of the book. If, like me, you attempted to read it 'cold,' without first dipping your toes into the tepid teawater of Joyce criticism, the first few pages must have left you entirely at sea (specifically, at the Irish Sea). This is because Joyce takes the principle of in medias res to heart and thrusts us into the midst of things we cannot possibly understand. Only late in the chapter will the attentive cold reader understand, by piecing together various clues, that the chapter takes place in and around the Martello Tower at Sandycove. To appreciate the extremity of Joyce's Modernist difference, the shock of his new, just consider how a 19th-century novelist might have begun Ulysses: "On the morning of June 16, 1904, a stately but rather plump young man known to all as 'Buck' Mulligan paused atop the stairs of the Martello Tower at Sandycove, a sleepy coastal village south of Dublin." That's a perfectly respectable Victorian frock coat of a first sentence that does everything a perfectly respectable silk-hatted first sentence should. It's also a fine substitute for Sominex. Joyce's 'cold open' is, by contrast, considerably more disreputable, disorienting, defamiliarizing. It doesn't make me drowsy.

ULYSSES by James Joyce: Chapter One, 'Telemachus'

2011-06-01T00:05:00.185-04:00

I'm beginning this Bloomsday month with a quick re-reading of the Joycean Telemachiad, the first three chapters of Ulysses, a book I've read cover to cover seven or eight times. (Yes, I've lost count.) The point of these posts isn't to offer any 'universal' interpretation of the novel or its episodes (Ulysses dissolves all interpretations like a universal solvent, anyway). Rather, I want to shine some light on a few passages and ideas that may not have received sufficient attention in the voluminous critical literature...

The first words of Ulysses are too familiar, so let's look closely at them until they become strange again. "Stately, plump Buck Mulligan came from the stairhead..." The elevated, formal connotations of 'stately' are rammed immediately, with only a comma's mini-pause, into the low-comic, ironically deflationary connotations of 'plump.' (The deflation is ironic because the word's literal meaning is an opposite of 'deflated.') Read the words aloud and you can hear the deflation: 'stately' slides smoothly off the tongue through slightly parted lips; 'plump' pops and snaps and rumbles flabbily as it climbs laboriously out of the mouth. Here, in the book's initiating moment of differential meaning, its first two words, Joyce simultaneously demonstrates the deflationary irony that will be the keystone of the novel's comic rhetoric and gives us a crucial lesson in how to read Ulysses. We must take nothing, not a single word, at face value; we must always look for the deflating irony that inevitably lurks somewhere nearby.

Every time I re-read Ulysses I'm amazed anew at the number of major themes Joyce is able to introduce, with seeming effortlessness, in the brief space of the first chapter. Most of the novel's themes and motifs and many of its techniques are either stated or foreshadowed here: a haunting familial death (Stephen's mother here 'containing' the theme that Bloom splits between his father and son), anti-semitism (in Haines's late anti-Jewish aside), cultural imperialism (Haines's plundering of Irish folk culture), imperialism and/as the nightmare of history (Haines again: "history is to blame"), Oscar Wilde as/and the specter of homosexuality (Wilde, dead only a few years before the first Bloomsday, stands alongside Parnell as one of the novel's most important ghosts; note also Buck Mulligan campily calling Stephen "my love"), Catholicism (in Buck's comic blasphemies and Stephen's melancholy pronouncements), fathers and sons (in the teasing preview of Stephen's discourse on Hamlet and in Mulligan's "Ballad of Joking Jesus": "my father's a bird," an image that unites the dove of the Holy Spirit and the winged phallus of classical art while also saying, less exaltedly, "my dad's a dick."), the classical and Mediterranean worlds (Buck's Wilde-ish Hellenism), and much more. The whole novel is contained in embryo in this first chapter. Subsequent chapters will perform acts of cellular division and gargantuan multiplication upon the various parts of the fetal body here formed.

Homer's Odyssey and Shakespeare's plays are the most important intertexts in Joyce's radically intertextual novel. The relationship to Homer is well-known after 90 years of exhaustive exegesis, and I've long considered it less important than the novel's profound and multifaceted intertextual relationship to the plays of Shakespeare. If Homer is the skeleton of Ulysses, Shakespeare is its central nervous system. I'll have more to say about this (someday) in an eventual post on "Scylla and Charybdis," so for now I'll limit myself to a general thought on the allusions of Ulysses. The densely woven allusionary texture of this novel (exemplified in "Telemachus" by allusions to Shakespeare, Xenephon, the writings of the Church Fathers, Yeats, Wilde, Swinburne, and many, many others) is the literary culmination of that distinctively Modernist rhetoric developed decades earlier in the studio of Edouard Manet. My favorite place and time for the birth of Modernism is Paris in the spring of 1863. While Salon-goers crowded in to mock Manet's Dejeuner sur l'Herbe (Luncheon on the Grass) at the Salon des Refuses, the artist was across town working on Olympia. These two seminal paintings were built around a texture of knowing allusions to the history of art, allusions that both deflated the authority of tradition by positioning it amidst mundane modernity and deflated the modern by juxtaposing it with older, more 'heroic' forms. Manet should thus be recognized as the inventor of the technique of mutually deflationary allusion that lies at the heart of the rhetoric of literary modernism: Ulysses, The Waste Land, Mrs. Dalloway, Pound's Cantos, and all the libraries of works that have flowed from them. Manet is the father of Modernism; his model Victorine Meurent might be considered its mother. (Some readers might say that this form of allusion elevates rather than deflates, granting the tradition the immediacy of modernity and raising modernity into the heroic realm. There is a name for such readers: optimists.)

A HISTORY OF GAY LITERATURE: THE MALE TRADITION by Gregory Woods

2011-05-26T16:57:00.000-04:00

Don't let the Yale University Press logo and the author's academic Gay Studies credentials fool you. This is not yet another entry in the More Foucaultian Than Thou sweepstakes. A History of Gay Literature is an extraordinarily intelligent, well-argued, clearly written and enjoyably readable book. Indeed, this is about as close as literary history comes to a page-turner. A possible reason for this pleasant divergence from the run of the Queer Theory mill may lie in the author's nationality. He's a British Professor of Gay and Lesbian Studies, and unlike too many of his American confreres he still values linguistic clarity and apparently still believes in that Phantom of the English Department, the 'common reader.' With a global reach and a range that runs from ancient Greece to contemporary New York, this ridiculously learned and near-encyclopedic book is a single-volume education in gay literature. The obvious writers and works are covered-- Shakespeare, Marlowe, Wilde, Genet, Ritsos, Arenas--as well as many less familiar names. However well-read you think you are, I guarantee that you will find discussed herein a great writer or book you have probably not read. (In my case, I discovered Hubert Fichte, Herve Guibert and Virgilio Pinera.) Even more impressive than the book's range is the author's critical acumen. Woods's reading of Eliot's The Waste Land as a gay pastoral elegy is worth the price of the book. Likewise his discussions of Marlowe's Edward II and Shakespeare's sonnets, of which he writes, "Reading the sonnets will always flush out the reader's attitudes to homosexuality. To that extent if no further, this sequence of poems is the key gay text in English literature." When I finished this book, I wanted more. I wished Woods had gone deeper into Samuel Delany (especially his key queer text, The Mad Man), explored the gay themes in Clive Barker's SF/fantasy novels, etc., etc. At nearly 400 pages, this book is still too short. It could have been almost twice as long. (Yes, I'm perfectly aware of the gay phallic rhetoric barely concealed by the loincloth of this complaint.) This is a marvelous book that might just change the way you read. It will certainly add at least a few more books to your to-read list. And isn't that, finally, the most important function of criticism at the present time?

A SPORT AND A PASTIME by James Salter

2011-05-26T14:55:00.000-04:00

James Salter has long been described as a 'writer's writer,' which sounds too much like the opposite of a 'reader's writer.' In fact, he's a very good and highly readable writer who has developed a prose style that's both more staccato and often more beautiful than Hemingway's. A Sport and a Pastime is a derivative novel, descending very obviously from the European-set fictions of Fitzgerald, Hemingway and Miller (not a bad trio to emulate, by any means), but the familiarity of setting and subject is overcome by the sheer force of Salter's art. His prose, which at first looks almost as stripped-down as James Ellroy's, soon reveals an unexpected poetic lushness, a painterly sensuality that reminds me of Bonnard (a painter explicitly referenced in the text). Almost every page contains a quotable example of Salter's eye. Here are a few selected at random:

Certain things I remember exactly as they were. They are merely discolored a bit by time, like coins in the pocket of a forgotten suit. (Did I mention that this book was derivative? Yes, this sounds too much like Proust when taken out of context, but within the flow of Salter's short sentences the line of descent is obscured.)

Her body, portions of it, seem to become luminous in his mind. Everything he touches or looks at, the fork, the tablecloth, somehow, by their homeliness, their silence, seem to celebrate that flesh which only a single layer of cloth conceals, does not even conceal, proclaims. (a very long sentence, for Salter)

Mornings with clouds. Windy mornings. Mornings with black wind rushing like water. (This is Salter-style at its most distinctive, like lines from a plein air painter's notebook. The sentence that immediately follows these teeters on the brink of cliche, a brink Salter's prose knows a bit too well.)

Beneath his trunks is a white like fresh bandages. His buttocks are like the inside of an apple. (This lilywhite ass is some of Salter's best work, poetically strong enough even to overcome the silly word 'buttocks.')

What's Wrong With Faulkner's LIGHT IN AUGUST

2011-05-13T13:15:00.001-04:00

"...a novel is a prose narrative of some length that has something wrong with it..." -- Randall Jarrell

You don't touch the Torah.
That's why I rarely write about William Faulkner.

If there is a grand secular American scripture, it must surely contain Faulkner's works of the 1930s, Melville's Moby Dick and The Confidence Man and his shorter fictions, the essays of Emerson, Thoreau's Walden and "Walking" and "Civil Disobedience," the poems of Whitman and Dickinson, the best novels of Cormac McCarthy and Toni Morrison, Miss Lonelyhearts and Gravity's Rainbow. That would be enough to found a real religion upon--more than enough--if we needed a religion.

In that nearly unbelievable run of great books Faulkner wrote between the late 1920s and the early 1940s--a period that reached its artistic peak at Absalom, Absalom!, my candidate for the greatest American novel of the 20th century--Light in August is not among the (here comes the annoying pun) most august lights. The Sound and the Fury and As I Lay Dying shine more brightly. They are crisper, tighter books. Absalom is better written. In Light in August Faulkner seems to have given himself permission to stretch out and write at Dickensian length, and while he achieves much that is great and beautiful and intelligent and terrible and sublime in these pages--enough to make any criticisms seem almost nitpicky--the book suffers from this authorial freedom in three important ways. First, it's simply too damn long. The second half of the novel could have been shortened by at least 100 pages without losing anything essential. There are entire scenes that could and should have been reduced to a few sentences of exposition. (This is heresy, I know, but sometimes we must risk the stake.) Second, in a surprisingly clumsy piece of novelistic construction, Faulkner brings his novel to its bloody climax more than 40 pages before the end. The final two (two!) chapters are less catharsis and loose-end tying than an authorial inability to shut up. It's as though Faulkner put himself in a writing trance and couldn't break out until he brought us full circle to Lena Grove on the road again. I admire the symmetry, but I yawned at its execution. Third, and most importantly, Faulkner gives us too little Joanna Burden, one of his most interesting, complex and mysterious characters, and far too much Rev. Hightower, a relatively uninteresting Andersonian grotesque. (Many of Light in August's characters are, in fact, grotesques that might have flowed from the mind of Faulkner's early mentor Sherwood Anderson (Hightower, Mr. and Mrs. Hines; Byron Bunch, Lucas Burch, Percy Grimm); Faulkner might almost have titled this book Winesburg, Mississippi.)

These faults would probably have sunk a lesser novel, but this is not a lesser novel. This is Thirties Faulkner, our greatest writer in his greatest decade. Light in August, with all its faults, is still better than many other writers' best works. It's an essential part of the modern canon, a must-read. Indeed, it's good enough to be read more than once.

A New (well, pretty old, actually) Pynchon Pic...but don't get excited, it's just his arm...

2011-05-08T13:21:00.006-04:00

The above photograph, which was published on the LA Times website last week, was taken somewhere in southern California, ca.1965. The porcine pinata is named Claude. The foxy lady in the Oedipa Maas dress and flaccid-armed sweater is one Phyllis Gebauer. The right arm crooked around the open door in the shadowy background (look closely) is allegedly attached to the unseen body of noted non-recluse Thomas Pynchon. While this photograph might initially appear to be merely a jokey demonstration of the author's near-Yahwistic aversion to representations of himself, a close semiotic analysis reveals encoded in its seemingly banal, snapshot-like exterior a carefully constructed series of references both to Pynchon's past and future works and the history of Western art. Just as the Pynchonian arm is both an exercise in synecdoche--using a part of the body to represent the whole--and a delightfully skewed reference to the first line of the Aeneid, the two fingers raised to signify 'peace' and/or Churchillian 'Victory' simultaneously represent the entirety of Pynchon's oeuvre through a synecdochic display of the title of his first novel, V. The aforementioned foxy lady on the landing is likewise simultaneously a reference to the caryatids on the Porch of the Maidens at the Erechtheum (Athens) and, as suggested above, a possible original for the protagonist of Pynchon's second novel, The Crying of Lot 49. The pudgy pink porker pinata, its presence as puzzling as a pope in a peignoir, presumably precurses the Pynchonian protagonist's piggy performance in the insufficiently alliterative Gravity's Rainbow. Unsurprisingly, the pinata also obviously signifies that ubiquitous Pynchonian dramatis persona, Pig Bodine. The lumpy V formed by the pig's erect ears (which like the earlier Erechtheum allusion sounds the erection motif of Gravity's Rainbow) leads the viewer's eye by a commodius vicus of recirculation back to the V of Pynchon's fingers. And so the end of our ocular voyaging is to arrive at the place where we started and know that place anew as a sign signifying Pynchon's 1990 novel Vineland. We might also notice the angle of Pynchon's signifying gesture: the rigid middle finger can be read as an 'I' as well as one half of a 'V'; the two together thus monogram Pynchon's most recent novel, Inherent Vice. The woman's expressionistically tilted shadow on the sunny California wall at lower right surely references the German Expressionist motif in Gravity's Rainbow, and this disturbing combination of southwestern sunlight and fascistic shadow should bring to mind the closing section of Against the Day. (Note the way her shadow-head is violently penetrated by the knife-like sawtoothed metal banister that seems to levitate magically above the unseen steps.) In perfect opposition to this, the photograph offers at upper left the shadowy secular cross cast by the window's crossbar on a blind that rather heavy-handedly signifies a world blind to the joyous, magical, transforming grace, the goofball good luck, that is the most positive force in Pynchon's novels. And what are we to make of that other, even more mysterious shadow, the oblique black line running across the wall at right, above and roughly parallel to the banister? Is this merely the shadow of an awning support, or could it be the Hiroshima-flash imprint left by the vapor trail of a screaming that has just come across this peaceful California sky?

Now everybody--

(I also like the way the Sixties flower decal on the door seems affixed to the woman's forehead like one of those large metal reflectors worn by doctors in Marx Brothers movies.)

LITERARY CINEMA : A List of Great Film Adaptations

2011-05-07T15:14:00.004-04:00

Mediocre books make great films and great books make mediocre films. That's the general rule, the first half best exemplified by The Godfather (which even Mario Puzo admitted could've been a better book) and the last half by the career of Joseph Strick. Most film adaptations of great books succeed only as illustrated versions of the source novel. Here are a few exceptions to this rule, some truly great films from great books.

Time Regained (Raul Ruiz). A beautifully photographed adaptation of Proust's endless novel that succeeds in finding a visual stylistic analogue for Proust's prose style.
The Unbearable Lightness of Being (Philip Kaufman). A great, smart, sexy adaptation of Kundera's great, intelligent, sexy novel.
The Sheltering Sky (Bernardo Bertolucci). Bertolucci's beautiful film captures the beauty and menace of Paul Bowles.
William Shakespeare's Hamlet (Kenneth Branagh). Branagh, not Olivier, made the only truly great Hamlet in cinema history.
The English Patient (Anthony Minghella). Now that the Miramaxed hype has been forgotten, we can enjoy this great film without Harvey Weinstein's shadow hulking over us.
Doctor Zhivago (David Lean). "How did you come to be lost?" A great exploration of the many ways people can be 'lost' in the whirlwind of revolution.
The Age of Innocence (Martin Scorsese). Scorsese's truly impressive range has yet to be generally acknowledged. This guy went from Rupert Pupkin to Jesus Christ to Henry Hill to Edith Wharton to the Dalai Lama, and all five films were marvelous.
Short Cuts (Robert Altman). Altman's masterful adaptation of several Raymond Carver stories was the best American film of the 1990s.
The Wings of the Dove (Iain Softley). James would certainly not have approved, but it's still a great film.
The Portrait of a Lady (Jane Campion). James would probably not have approved, but...
Vanya on 42nd Street (Louis Malle). The My Dinner With Andre team reunites for this 'workshop' version of Chekhov's Uncle Vanya that will move you to tears.
A Clockwork Orange (Stanley Kubrick). A fairly faithful and endlessly ironic adaptation of Anthony Burgess's Finnegans Wake-influenced futuristic novel.
The Tin Drum (Volker Schlondorff). Not a complete adaptation, but still a great, one-of-a-kind film.
Howards End (James Ivory). James Ivory's masterpiece.
Wonder Boys (Curtis Hanson). Brilliant adaptation of Chabon's excellent novel. How many other mainstream American films can you name that include a knowing reference to Jean Genet?
The Last Temptation of Christ (Martin Scorsese). This is the only Jesus movie worth watching. Even better than Pasolini's. All others drown in kitsch.
The Decameron (Pier Paolo Pasolini). Beautifully filmed version of some tales from Boccaccio.
Les Enfants Terribles (Jean-Pierre Melville). Silly beginning, brilliant ending. Melville's film has the strengths and weaknesses of Cocteau's story.
The Spy Who Came in from the Cold (Martin Ritt). Classic spy film from a classic spy novel. Richard Burton, Claire Bloom, and the first cinematic representation of George Smiley make this one especially worth watching.

Some Great Films Most People Haven't Seen

2011-05-07T14:24:00.002-04:00

The title of this list pretty much explains it...

Cowards Bend the Knee (Guy Maddin)
Brand Upon the Brain! (Guy Maddin)
L'Age d'Or (Luis Bunuel and Salvador Dali)
The Fire Within (Le Feu Follet) (Louis Malle)
Faithless (Liv Ullmann)
Withnail and I (Bruce Robinson)
The Death of Mr. Lazarescu (Cristi Puiu)
4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days (Cristian Mungiu)
The Grey Zone (Tim Blake Nelson)
Padre Padrone (Paolo and Vittorio Taviani)
Once Upon a Time in America (restored 4-hour version)(Sergio Leone)
Pickpocket (Robert Bresson)
La Roue (Abel Gance)
Eraserhead (David Lynch)
Bad Education (Pedro Almodovar)
Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors (Sergei Parajanov)
Secret Honor (Robert Altman)
The Taking of Power by Louis XIV (Roberto Rossellini)
Playtime (Jacques Tati)
Cache (Michael Haneke)
Sansho the Bailiff (Kenji Mizoguchi)
By Brakhage: An Anthology (Stan Brakhage)
Experimental Films (Maya Deren)
Six Moral Tales (Eric Rohmer), especially Claire's Knee, La Collectionneuse, My Night at Maud's, and Love in the Afternoon
Les Biches (Claude Chabrol)
Ali: Fear Eats The Soul (Rainer Werner Fassbinder)
Vivre Sa Vie (Jean-Luc Godard)
La Guerre Est Finie (Alain Resnais)
Peeping Tom (Michael Powell)
Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters (Paul Schrader)
Salo, or the 120 Days of Sodom (Pier Paolo Pasolini)
F For Fake (Orson Welles)

A few notes: Guy Maddin may be the most exciting and original filmmaker currently working in North America. The Fire Within is Louis Malle's early masterpiece. Faithless is from a screenplay by Ingmar Bergman. La Guerre Est Finie ("Lenin is not a prayer wheel!") is one of the most intelligent political films of the 1960s. Bad Education may be the absolute masterpiece of Queer Cinema. Peeping Tom is a self-consciously cinematic thriller that out-Hitchcocks Hitchcock. Pasolini's Salo was intended to be 'indigestible'; I consider it one of the most disturbing and important explorations of fascism ever filmed. F For Fake is Welles's great late masterpiece, the secret father of all postmodern documentaries. All of these movies should be available from Netflix. Check them out.

THE 50 GREATEST FILMS -- A Personal Canon

2011-05-07T13:38:00.001-04:00

Here's something new for Mindful Pleasures, the first of three "great movies" lists. This one is devoted to my selections for the 50 greatest films of all time. The list begins with my three candidates for the greatest movie ever made, but after that it's in no particular order.

Persona (Ingmar Bergman)
Citizen Kane (Orson Welles)
Vertigo (Alfred Hitchcock)
The Act of Seeing With One's Own Eyes (Stan Brakhage)
Napoleon (Abel Gance)
Grand Illusion (Jean Renoir)
Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors (Sergei Parajanov)
The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie (Luis Bunuel)
The Decalogue (Krzysztof Kieslowski)
Andrei Rublev (Andrei Tarkovsky)
City Lights (Charles Chaplin)
The Battleship Potemkin (Sergei Eisenstein)
Koyaanisqatsi (Godfrey Reggio)
The Seventh Seal (Ingmar Bergman)
Rashomon (Akira Kurosawa)
8 1/2 (Federico Fellini)
Cries and Whispers (Ingmar Bergman)
Murmur of the Heart (Louis Malle)
Ivan the Terrible, Parts I & II (Sergei Eisenstein)
My Dinner With Andre (Louis Malle)
The Phantom of Liberty (Luis Bunuel)
Treasure of Sierra Madre (John Huston)
Belle de Jour (Luis Bunuel)
McCabe and Mrs. Miller (Robert Altman)
Man With A Movie Camera (Dziga Vertov)
The Battle of Algiers (Gillo Pontecorvo)
Umberto D (Vittorio de Sica)
Jules and Jim (Francois Truffaut)
Annie Hall (Woody Allen)
Double Indemnity (Billy Wilder)
Three Colors : Blue, White, Red (Krzysztof Kieslowski)
An Angel At My Table (Jane Campion)
The Unbearable Lightness of Being (Philip Kaufman)
Apocalypse Now (Francis Ford Coppola)
A Clockwork Orange (Stanley Kubrick)
Ran (Akira Kurosawa)
The Godfather trilogy (Francis Ford Coppola)
Sunset Boulevard (Billy Wilder)
Casablanca (Michael Curtiz)
The Passion of Joan of Arc (Carl-Theodor Dreyer)
Doctor Zhivago (David Lean)
Pulp Fiction (Quentin Tarantino)
Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (Mike Nichols)
Short Cuts (Robert Altman)
The Searchers (John Ford)
Greed (Erich von Stroheim)
Goodfellas (Martin Scorsese)
Chinatown (Roman Polanski)
Pickpocket (Robert Bresson)
The Night of the Hunter (Charles Laughton)

A few notes: Persona, Kane and Vertigo tie for the top spot. Brakhage's short film (available in the essential Criterion Collection release By Brakhage: An Anthology, Volume One) is probably the most harrowing, shocking, unforgettable documentary I have ever seen. Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors is one of the great masterpieces of 20th-century cinema and deserves to be much better known. All of Bunuel's films are worth seeing, especially the post-1960 work. De Sica's Umberto D is the saddest movie I have ever seen. An Angel at My Table is Jane Campion's masterpiece, an indelible account of a journey through madness. It's still fashionable to deride the third Godfather film, but upon recently re-watching it I found it an excellent complement to the first two (and Sophia Coppola isn't really that bad, either). Many consider Lawrence of Arabia David Lean's greatest film, but I prefer Zhivago, despite the fact that all the Russians are played by a bunch of Brits, an American and an Egyptian. If I hadn't arbitrarily limited myself to fifty titles, many other films might have made the list: Claire's Knee, Unforgiven, Last Year at Marienbad, Synecdoche New York, Blue Velvet, There Will Be Blood, La Dolce Vita, Cleo From 5 to 7, 2001: A Space Odyssey, Pat Garrett and Billy The Kid, etc., etc....

Reading William Deresiewicz Online

2011-05-05T20:13:00.000-04:00

Some of the most interesting and insightful recent writing on American higher education has been the work of William Deresiewicz. He's also a superlative literary critic, with a clear, direct reviewing style reminiscent of Edmund Wilson (yes, he's that good). When his articles are eventually collected in book form, I'll pre-order a copy. In the meantime, here are links to my favorite Deresiewicz articles and reviews available online:

"Love on Campus" (from The American Scholar). An essay that begins with pop culture cliches and expands to explore the complex reality of the erotic side of education.

"The Disadvantages of an Elite Education" (from The American Scholar). The title pretty much describes it...

"Faulty Towers: The Crisis in Higher Education" (from The Nation). A marvelous and depressing tour d'horizon of the current American university crisis. Should be required reading for anyone considering an academic career.

And after googling to find these articles, I discover that Deresiewicz has already posted links to these and more at his website, rendering this post redundant. Check out the essays here and the reviews here. If you haven't read Deresiewicz, follow these links and treat yourself to one of the best critics writing today.

THE POORHOUSE FAIR by John Updike

2011-05-03T13:19:00.007-04:00

First novels tend to be derivative, autobiographical, or both. Styron's Lie Down in Darkness, Joyce's Portrait, Mailer's The Naked and the Dead excellently exemplify each of the three tendencies. The Poorhouse Fair, John Updike's first novel--a novella, really--is an exception to this rule. This young man's novel about old people, this Harvard grad's tale of the impoverished, also rather remarkably avoids social realist cliche, but it does so by indulging quite a bit of Cold War-era anti-socialist cant. Updike mocks the kitsch of Fifties America--popular culture, bureaucratic efficiency, commodified nostalgia--while seeming blind to the kitschiness of his own Christian-inflected anti-modern nostalgia. (If the novella doesn't collapse over this contradiction, it's only because there's just enough irony here to keep the cardhouse standing.) Set in a very thinly sketched near-future socialist America, The Poorhouse Fair is, politically, a kind of Updikeanly genteel Animal Farm with an all-human cast. There's even a scene--the book's most surprising--in which the poorhouse inmates revolt and literally stone their paternalistic warden. (This being an Updike novel, the stones are small, and he's not seriously hurt.) So this is a work of Updike the center-rightist, a sort of American Christian Democrat, a writer who has not yet morphed into that very American contradiction, the prurient puritan of his major novels (Couples, Rabbit is Rich, The Witches of Eastwick). The Poorhouse Fair is well-written (Updike was always Mr. Style) and formally innovative in its American context (importing into Fifties fiction the day-in-the-life time frame and floating point of view of Mrs. Dalloway and Ulysses), but it's still a minor work, pale but promising.

The idea of mature Updike as a prurient puritan sets me thinking about the essential American-ness of this description. Prurient puritanism, or puritanical perversion, is the dialectical contradiction at the core of Jonathan Gathorne-Hardy's recognition, in his interesting biography of Prof. Alfred Kinsey, that the United States is both the most puritanical and the most licentious society in the developed world. (The assertion is, of course, highly arguable. Japanese culture unites traditional conservatism and schoolgirl porn. German culture marries sado-masochistic pornography to the puritanism of Ratzinger... But let's indulge the idea for the length of this paragraph.) These two opposites coexist, as they must, because puritanism requires prurience, it mandates an obsessive, panoptical voyeurism directed toward the self and others--especially sexual selves and others. Puritanism and perversion feed off each other in an ultimate confusion of host and parasite. I'm tempted to say, 'You can't have one without the other,' but this ignores the fact that sexual variation exists outside the puritanical context. Puritanism is a cultural construct. Sex, powered by intertwined cultural and biological circuits, outlives its antagonists.

THE NOONDAY DEMON: AN ATLAS OF DEPRESSION by Andrew Solomon

2011-05-02T06:00:00.091-04:00

When Andrew Solomon's The Noonday Demon was published in 2001 it must have set some kind of record for impressive blurbing. The back cover of the first edition dust jacket is festooned with effusive praise from William Styron, Harold Bloom, Larry McMurtry, Louise Erdrich, Naomi Wolf, Adam Gopnik and Kay Redfield Jameson. On the back flap, DNA co-discoverer James Watson calls the book "A brilliant, kaleidoscopic portrayal of the human experience of depression," while the front flap features praise from constant blurber Edmund White and (the piece de resistance of blurbs) the soon-to-be-late W. G. Sebald, who called the book "astonishing." Anything that astonished the astonishing Mr. Sebald is of interest to me, so I decided to give Solomon's book a try, reasoning that a work so highly praised would either live up to its blurbs or quickly sink beneath their weight. (My exact thought went something like "either this is one of the greatest books of the past decade, or somebody been osculatin' mucho posteriori...") Rarely an optimist in these matters, I expected the book to sink like a millstone.

My expectations were pleasantly disappointed. (I seriously doubt that posterior osculation was exchanged for advance praise.) The Noonday Demon is both a harrowing personal memoir and a readable journalistic account of the phenomenon of depression considered from many angles (biological, historical, sociological, political, psychological, etc.). Despite the author's pro-pharmacological bias (about which he is admirably up-front), it's a surprisingly balanced book that both lauds the efficacy of antidepressants and criticizes contemporary psychiatry's flight from 'mind' to 'brain,' from psychological causation to pharmaceutical treatment. It didn't criticize this quite enough for my taste, but that's my bias. The book is quite well-written, with some passages of great beauty (these are concentrated, for some reason, in the opening chapters; the last few chapters impressed me less), and the chapters on suicide and the history of depression, while heavily reliant on familiar sources, have a disturbing (and in the latter case, surprisingly Rabelaisian) power. Does The Noonday Demon live up to it's blurbs? Perhaps. Is it worth reading? Yes, especially for those who have never been to the depths. Solomon at his best almost succeeds in taking us there.

ERNESTO SABATO, 1911-2011

2011-05-01T12:22:00.002-04:00

Argentine novelist and intellectual Ernesto Sabato died yesterday, April 30, less than two months short of his one-hundredth birthday. The Washington Post obituary can be read here. An international literary figure, he deserves to be remembered for three incomparable novels, The Tunnel, On Heroes and Tombs, and The Angel of Darkness. All were translated into English years ago, and all are currently out-of-print in the U.S., a fact that reflects poorly on American publishers and readers. Sabato should be as well-known as Mario Vargas Llosa and was equally worthy of the Nobel Prize--indeed, he was more deserving than a few recent laureates I could name. In Argentina, he is being remembered not just as a writer but as an important public intellectual who headed the commission that investigated the atrocities of the 1970s-80s Argentine dictatorship. This indicates once again the vast gulf between the status of major writers in Latin America and their status in the overspecialized lands north of the Rio Grande. Can you imagine any American novelist being asked to investigate, say, the crimes of George W. Bush? (The Pynchon Commission, perhaps?) Can you imagine any American writer being named a U.S. ambassador? (Octavio Paz and Carlos Fuentes were both Mexican ambassadors; the closest American analogue would be John Kenneth Galbraith, who was much more an economist than a novelist.) When a major news story breaks, do Americans expect Toni Morrison or Cormac McCarthy to comment upon it? The very idea is risible. In Latin America, however, Garcia Marquez, Vargas Llosa and Fuentes have for decades been major public voices on the issues of the day. With the death of Sabato, an important Argentine voice has fallen silent forever. Adios.

REALITY HUNGER by David Shields

2011-04-27T14:30:00.002-04:00

To paraphrase Woody Allen: Those who can, do; those who can't, teach; and those who can't teach (or write), teach writing. David Shields teaches writing--or tries to--somewhere near the western edge of the Great Flyover, and Reality Hunger is this university professor's not-exactly-angry manifesto. (Because we all know the next revolution will be led by English professors, right?) Shields's manifesto-as-mixtape consists of 618 Wittgensteinianly numbered aphorisms, some as brief as a single line and most, mercifully, extracted from the works of writers much better than the credited 'author.' Shields's own contributions are no better than the bland and boring book in which he attempted to put the ideas manifested here into academic 'praxis,' The Thing About Living Is That Someday You'll Read A Book As Boring As This And Wish You Were Dead (as it should've been titled). The best stuff here--and there is a surprising amount of thought-provoking wisdom stuck between the whining and banalities--is without exception stolen from writers like W. G. Sebald, William H. Gass, Nietzsche, Emerson--in short, writers who drink Shields's milkshake and beat him senseless with a bowling pin. Shields's own 'aphorisms' might have been condensed into two or three lines:

1.I am lazy, hear me whine.

2.The contemporary literary novel is in a state of formulaic exhaustion, and if any good ones exist I'm too lazy to read them.

3.What is to be done? Hybridize novel and memoir into a fragmented form of novella length.

The author's intellectual laziness and proud unoriginality (the academic's version of the lowbrow's proud ignorance) are on display even in the work's central thesis. Any intelligent reader can see that what publishers call 'literary fiction' has hardened into a genre (I attempt to outline the rules of this genre in my post on Jennifer Egan's Look At Me, below), so this Newtonian revelation deserves a big fat "Duh!" Nor is Shields's favorite answer to the current impasse in any way original: in essence he suggests an Americanized version of European Late Modernism (Robbe-Grillet, Barthes, Sebald), a nonsolution that would set Emerson spinning in his echt-Yankee grave. (One might also note that the very project of manifesto-writing is an unoriginal exercise in Modernist nostalgia, evincing a conservative, traditionalist impulse to return to a time when 'the novel' supposedly mattered more than it does today.)

Shields's prescription for the "next big literary thing" is so mild, so tame, so (say it!) academic as to be essentially worthless. We don't need more vapid novelistic memoirs or memoiristic novels or pale imitations of Sebald. No, the only thing that will save American literary fiction today is a rediscovery of the wild energy that has always been the best and strongest and strangest part of American literature. The next American novelists should seek to be the children of Melville and Faulkner, of Ralph Ellison and Toni Morrison, of Ralph Emerson and William Gass, of Emily Dickinson and Allen Ginsberg, of Thomas Pynchon and Don DeLillo, of Cormac McCarthy and Philip Roth, of Robert Stone and Anne Sexton. The last thing American literature needs is a generation of David Shields's vapid toadies telling us what to think.

Reality Hunger is just barely worth reading--for the parts that aren't written by Shields--and worth arguing with, but any reader will find much more that is worthwhile in Shields's source materials. Before wasting time with David Shields, spend it wisely with the essays of Emerson (some of the greatest prose ever written by an American), the essays of William Gass (especially those in Fiction and the Figures of Life, The World Within the Word and Finding A Form), and Nietzsche's The Gay Science and Beyond Good and Evil. With that toolkit, you'll be able to compose a much better manifesto than the originality-starved Reality Hunger.

THE BROOM OF THE SYSTEM by David Foster Wallace

2011-04-19T22:39:00.001-04:00

In a truly creepy coincidence that every reader today will be unable to ignore, David Foster Wallace's 1987 novel The Broom of the System is brought to its pseudo-apocalyptic climax on--of all the 365 days DFW might have chosen--the eleventh of September.

Of course, it's September 11, 1990, in the near-future of the novel's few early readers. But still... tres creepy.

The first hundred pages of The Broom of the System are pretty good, the next two hundred somewhat less so, and the last 167 a major league yawnfest. There are some good scenes throughout, but too many of them are too long, extending several pages past the limit of readerly patience. Among the good stuff, I was especially impressed by the underutilized Norman Bombardini, a grotesquely obese Mr. Creosote-figure (see Monty Python's The Meaning of Life; see it immediately) who personifies the all-consuming gaping maw of corporate capitalism, the force that has transformed the book's Cleveland, Ohio, into a commercialized, corporatized toxic waste dump (Yes, DFW's first novel is set in Cleveland; it's the Not Really Great But Still Pretty Good Postmodern Cleveland Novel.) from which residents escape for weekends in the Great Ohio Desert (G.O.D., bien sur), an artificial wasteland constructed in eastern Ohio at the behest of a maniacal 1970s governor. (DFW's satirical point is solid. Ohio was in fact ruled by a murderer in the '70s: Governor James Rhodes, the butcher of Kent State, who now, in an obscene irony that would've surprised Wallace not at all, has a community college in Lima, Ohio, named after him.) Bombardini is a wonderfully Swiftian invention, but although he haunts the entire novel, he only appears in one brief scene (probably the funniest scene in the book). (To further demonstrate the excellence of DFW's invention, we might note that Bombardini can also be interpreted as a satire of the dialectical movement of Hegel's Phenomenology; Broom of the System is, among other things, very much a philosophy major's book, a Wittgensteinian comedy [but not, alas, a very satisfying one].) Many other potentially interesting narrative strands are left deliberately loose and unexplored (Lenore's mother, her brother John), and overall the book has a decidedly claustrophobic feel. Its ambition is large, but its world is too small. It wants to be epic, a big, sprawling infinitely jesting thing, but it's trapped in a postmodern closet, doing time in the prison house of Mad Ludwig's language--confined to campus, one might say.

In Broom we can see Wallace feeling for his distinctive form but not quite finding it, not here, not yet. This isn't the book in which digressions become central and narrative marginal--that's the other, later, bigger, more famous book, the one a surprisingly large number of people--my own John Self included--actually have read, contrary to the uninformed assertions of all those reverse-elitist philistines who extrapolate from their own lack of experience to insist that no one really reads it. Infinite Jest is indeed being read, but it's not being read critically enough, with an eye to its weaknesses as well as its strengths. I have serious reservations about the book, but I think it's too good to be elevated into an object of cultic devotion. IJ--and everything else--must be read critically. Broom of the System isn't--as I was saying before that digression into the other book--a completely deconstructed fiction in which digression becomes central and narrative arc marginal, and much of what doesn't work in Broom is narrative machinery, scenes that exist solely to move the story forward. When Wallace isn't digressing, he isn't at his best.

In any other year, The Broom of the System would probably have been the year's most auspicious literary debut, but 1987 also gave us William T. Vollmann's You Bright and Risen Angels, a staggeringly accomplished first novel that's better-written, more imaginative, more original, more reckless, and much, much wilder than Wallace's effort. Wallace readers who aren't yet Vollmann readers should check him out.

THE THING ABOUT LIFE IS THAT ONE DAY YOU'LL BE DEAD by David Shields

2011-04-16T22:39:00.000-04:00

Here's yet another piece of 'creative nonfiction' that promises much and delivers too little. This one should've been subtitled A Desultory Memoir of My Incredibly Boring Life, Plus a Lotta Stuff (But Nowhere Near Enough) About My Very Interesting Father, Plus Many Pages of Random Statistics I Found on Wikipedia... I don't think many readers are 'hungering' for the 'reality' Shields dishes out here. It's a bland and tasteless confection, a cake baked with sawdust. If mediocrity had an odor, it would smell like this book. Shields's prose is a slick, competent and utterly undistinguished upmarket journalese; he seems to think he's the new Montaigne, but he writes like a contributor to Vanity Fair. And this short but padded monument to his vanity is anything but fair. Time spent reading this book is time wasted, and since time is money (for the purposes of argument let's say time costs $20 per hour), I calculate that David Shields owes me $160. I don't expect a check.

I mourn the trees that died to produce this book.
I mourn the bugs that lived in the bark of the trees that died to produce this book.
I mourn the woodpecker that would have fed on the bugs that lived in the bark of the trees that died to produce this book.
I mourn the cat that would've eaten the woodpecker fattened by the bugs that lived in the bark of the trees that died to produce this book.
I mourn the hawk that would've eaten the cat that would've eaten the woodpecker fattened by the bugs that lived in the bark of the trees that died to produce this book...

You get the picture.

David Shields's work provides no compensation for the micro-havoc it has wreaked on some fragile ecosystem.

Petruchio as Troping Turd: A Scatological Exchange in THE TAMING OF THE SHREW

2011-04-14T20:12:00.000-04:00

KATHARINE: ... I knew you at the first
You were a movable.

PETRUCHIO: Why, what's a movable?

KATHARINE: A joint stool.

--William Shakespeare, The Taming of the Shrew (2.1; 196-7)

Here's my crappy interpretation of this rather curious exchange. On the surface of their first verbal slugfest, Katharine tropes Petruchio as a piece of court furniture, an inhuman object meant to be used by his betters, a ducal footstool. Her word 'movable' is from the French meuble, furniture, but it also signifies a bowel movement, a loose stool. This then becomes the joint stool (or 'join'd stool' in a variant reading), both a product of the woodworker's art and a turd with a turn in it. This surreal hinged turd might also be described as 'articulated' both in the sense of 'jointed' and in that of 'given clear and effective utterance.' The highly articulate Petruchio, then, becomes a jointed, movable piece of shit capable of clever and spontaneous linguistic tropes. And since the word trope is derived from the Greek word for 'turn,' we can clearly see that Katherine has within the space of two lines spoken figurative rings around Petruchio, troping him as a troping turd.

Note how different this Katherine is from the defeated speaker of the play's final scene, a misogynistic denouement that might be redeemed for comedy by a production that foregrounds the play's oddly broken 'frame' (a Brechtian production) or by an actress capable of playing the monologue with sly sarcasm. As written, the tamed Kate is a figure of near-tragic banality.

LOOK AT ME by Jennifer Egan

2011-04-10T23:31:00.000-04:00

Look At Me is a good, somewhat underrated American novel. Published in 2001, the same year as Jonathan Franzen's The Corrections, it deserved at least as much hype and praise as that good but decidedly overrated work. Like Franzen's novel, Egan's is an intelligent, efficient, highly competent example of contemporary American literary fiction. Also like The Corrections, it is disappointingly unoriginal. And pushing the comparison a bit further, we can say that the two novels are, in at least one respect, unoriginal in the same way. Both appear to have been constructed according to the standard recipe for contemporary upmarket literary fiction: Take one or more Joyce Carol Oates-style plots and season to taste with the satirical irony of Don DeLillo. The fact that much of today's most highly-regarded LitFic can be called 'Ironized Oates' (available next to Quaker Oats in the Barnes & Noble cereal aisle) indicates the extent to which this fiction has hardened into genre--a genre with rules almost as transparent as those of the mystery or romance genres. And what are these rules? With apologies to Wallace Stevens, here are a few Notes Toward a Less-Than-Supreme Literary Fiction:

It must be 'realistic.'
It must be contemporary in setting.
It must concern itself with 'the matter of America.'
It must be self-conscious (but not too self-conscious).
It must be ironic (but not too ironic). [This might be called 'Booth's Law' in honor of the late Wayne Booth, American literature's premier irony cop.]
It must criticize contemporary American life (but neither too much nor too blatantly).
It must ultimately validate the middle-of-the-road liberalism that most American readers bring to it. (Reading, a potentially self-critical act, is thus reduced to an exercise in self-congratulation.)
It must depict strategies for 'coping' with contemporary American life as rational and necessary.
It must depict strategies of resistance to contemporary American life as naive and/or insane.
It must bite the corporate hand that publishes it (but only with the foam rubber teeth of irony).
It must contain within itself its own ironic self-criticism (thus short-circuiting anything Michiko Kakutani might say).

Those are the rules of LitFic Road, but this road, despite its trendy reputation, is looking very old today. It's paved with cobblestones, and its bed, 19th-century realism, is older than Edison. This fact points toward one of the major problems with Look At Me (a novel that adheres, more or less, to all the generic 'rules' listed above): this novel that is so au courant, that so knowingly deploys the techniques of postmodernism and so chillingly describes the world and people technology is producing even as we read, this ultramodern novel is, rather bizarrely, built according to blueprints borrowed from the Joyce Carol Oates Construction Company. Egan fails to invent a form equal to her subject, and thus she falls back on what the history of the novel has bequeathed to her: a plot dependent upon some truly unbelievable coincidences. To be fair, however, I probably shouldn't fault Egan for failing to invent a new form here. Formal invention is the most difficult thing a writer can do, and this was only her second novel. There is some very good stuff in Look At Me, enough to make it worth reading (I'm thinking of the face-cutting photo shoot, Charlotte Swenson's suicidal leap to her downstairs neighbor's balcony; the characterization of Edmund 'Moose' Metcalf, a character complex and interesting enough to have to have been the center of his own novel, like Kate Gompert in Infinite Jest), but not enough to lift it far above the pack. There's also another problem: Egan's prose is not too many cuts above the horrid novelese of her character Irene Maitlock. This is probably because Egan also writes in novelese, but hers is a more upper-class, country club dialect of the language--a distinction that suggests a largely unnoted (because invisible to bourgeois critics?) bourgeois bias in American literary fiction. It's getting late, so I'll wrap this post up with a bottom line: Look At Me is good, better in many ways than The Corrections, but it's not a great novel.

POST OFFICE by Charles Bukowski

2011-04-07T15:10:00.000-04:00

I'm not a member of the Cult of Hank, nor has Bukowski ever been an important writer to me, but even I found his 1971 novel Post Office to be a fast, funny and thoroughly enjoyable read. After being unimpressed by Bukowski's poetry, and even less impressed by the portrait of the artist as an old, bullshit-addicted jerk in the documentary Bukowski: Live Through This (or whatever it was called), I was pleasantly surprised by this novel, a rancidly funny account of drudge-life among the clerks and carriers of the LA postal service. A minor classic of the literature of work (a too-small genre in contemporary American fiction, which spends most of its time away from the places where most Americans spend most of their time: in frustrating, repetitive jobs), Post Office descends not only from the hardboiled California law firm of Hammett, Chandler & Cain but also from Celine, the Henry Miller of the Tropics, and early Hubert Selby, Jr. (Hank must've been reading a lot of Grove Press books during the '60s.) Bukowski's prose comes from the hardboileds, but his attitude is that of an American Celine. The descriptions of work here are reminiscent of Celine's great passages on working in the Detroit auto factories in Journey to the End of the Night. Bukowski in this book is closer to French Modernism than to any of the American Naturalists. Those writers, from Sinclair and Dreiser to, I guess, Oates and Franzen, either embrace, or fail to fight free of, some overarching ideology (be it Socialism, Communism or, for the latter two writers, a tepid, bathwater Liberalism). Bukowski is more nihilistic--and thus more European--more of a Nietzschean beast. (This is not to slight the native American tradition of artistic nihilism, a living one from Melville until now that finds perhaps its most succinct formulation in the famous line from Johnny Cash's "Folsom Prison Blues": "I shot a man in Reno / just to watch him die.")

I have a few criticisms, of course: the chapter that consists entirely of memoranda reeks of filler, an author's desperate attempt to pad his book up to 200 pages; there are a few passages that ring false in which Bukowski gives us a Chinaski who's a little too righteous and near-heroic, too much of an authorial wish-fulfilment fantasy; I also noticed a couple of places where an officious proofreader seems to have incorrectly 'corrected' Bukowski's text, producing elementary grammatical errors.

And I notice from the books list at the front of Post Office that death hasn't slowed Bukowski down. His prolificity has been unaffected by his passing. There's even a volume of 'new poems' published 11 years after his death. Even if Bukowski left an enormous amount of material lying around, some of these books must be exercises in barrel-scraping. Next year Ecco will probably bring out You Get Tide For 20% Off Sometimes: The Selected Shopping Lists of Charles Bukowski.

HITCH-22 by Christopher Hitchens

2011-04-04T17:21:00.001-04:00

I am reasonably certain that Christopher Hitchens did not intend to write a memoir that would leave readers exclaiming "O what an asshole Hitchens is!", but that's one of the effects Hitch-22 had on me. I say 'one of the effects' because this book is as alternately amusing and infuriating as its author. I've long admired Hitchens's virtuosity as a polemicist (but not as an 'intellectual,' which he isn't, despite his being anointed as such by people who wouldn't know a real intellectual if Lionel Trilling bit them on the bum) and delighted in his demolition of Norman Podhoretz (included in his superior collection of literary articles, Unacknowledged Legislation), his blistering indictment of Henry Kissinger, and his largely valid criticisms of everyone from Mother Theresa to the Clintons, and I found his bestselling atheist polemic, god Is Not Great, enjoyable and necessary although not nearly as important as Richard Dawkins's masterful The God Delusion. So even though I opposed the Iraq war from the start, while Hitchens was and remains one of its most vigorous defenders, even though I was one of those people massing against the war on Dupont Circle the evening it began (Did you hear us, Hitch, in your aerie in the DC air?), I approached Hitch-22 with an open mind and initially found quite a bit to like about it. His account of his childhood and parentage, his education at Ye Olde Birching Shoppe and Oxford, his youthful adventures in homosexuality and Trotskyism, his exploration of his Jewish heritage, his chapters on Martin Amis and Salman Rushdie--these are all very good (but it must be said that Hitchens's memoir doesn't hold even the nub of a candle to Martin Amis's Experience, which recounts some of the same incidents). Yes, there are many wonderful pages here, but unfortunately there are also many pages that deserve to be used as a rough-and-ready substitute for Charmin. These latter leaves cluster predictably in the Iraq chapter, which finds the Hitch at his self-righteous, intellectually dishonest, paper tiger-creating worst. His crude, Fox News-worthy caricatures of the war's opponents and his fawning descriptions of the deservedly disgraced Paul Wolfowitz and that international conman and Iranian agent Ahmad Chalaby deserve to finish Hitchens as a 'journalist' even if cancer doesn't do the job first. (OK, that was mean, I'll admit it. But Hitchens is a big boy, and unlike most Iraq War cheerleaders he can both dish it out and take it.) But Iraq aside--as though one could put it aside, ignore it, in any discussion of Hitchens, something akin to discussing Ezra Pound without mentioning his brief career as an Italian radio personality--but Iraq aside, and the author's curious reticencies and insufficiently explored sexuality (his perennial man-crushes, for example) also to one side, the largest problem with this memoir is the impregnable fortress wall of narcissism Hitchens has constructed around his shabby, post-Communist East Berlin of a self. The Hitchens of these pages is so rapt by self-love, so trapped in Wilde's "lifelong romance" (even the Gore Vidal of Palimpsest is a more self-critical memoirist), so much a Capote-ish look-at-what-a-wonderful-person-I-am-and-listen-to-all-the-wonderful-names-I-can-drop kind of narrator, that upon closing his book I found myself wondering if the author's back was still sore from the performance of this 422-page self-administered blowjob.

More seriously, if the former neocon court jester Christopher Hitchens is what passes for a public intellectual in America today, and if books like this--the second-rate ramblings of a second-hand mind--are what passes for intellectual discourse, then I suppose it's safe to conclude that our culture has paddled so far up Bullshit Creek that we might as well rename it the River Of No Return.

THE FLANDERS ROAD by Claude Simon

2011-04-01T20:20:00.106-04:00

Here's an amazing discovery. The Flanders Road by Claude Simon (who won the Nobel in 1985 but remains largely unknown outside France) is one of the great underappreciated novels of the 20th century. Published in France in 1960 and beautifully translated into English by the poet Richard Howard, it is an absolute masterpiece, easily the equal of any French novel since the death of Marcel Proust. This book and its author deserve to be as widely known and read as Sartre, Camus, Robbe-Grillet, Duras, et al. On the rare occasions when Claude Simon is mentioned outside France, it's usually in a list of nouveaux romanciers like the one that ended my last sentence, but the achievement of The Flanders Road is best appreciated in a less nationalistic, more High Modernist context. James Joyce, Virginia Woolf and Marcel Proust are at least as important as Alain Robbe-Grillet in any list of this novel's influences, and the most important and obvious influence of all is William Faulkner, whose Absalom, Absalom! Simon comes close to quoting in a few places. But all of my praise, however richly deserved, is perhaps only a strategy to delay the impossible task I have set myself in this post: to briefly describe this deceptively short (231 pages) and extremely intelligent novel. Here's my attempt: A stream-of-consciousness WWII novel centering around the rout of French forces by the invading Germans in 1940, The Flanders Road is a complex, difficult work that moves through time and space with the fluidity of Proust and views both the horrors of war and the ecstasies of love with the darkly poetic eye of an Atomic Age Baudelaire. Rarely has any war novel so effectively captured the atmosphere of an ignominious defeat: the mud, the rain, the filth, the fear of capture, the stench of death. Stock phrases like 'existentialist fiction' and 'the absurdity of existence' don't even come close to the terrible realities this novel describes. No reader will understand everything in this book on a single reading (I didn't), but it's beautiful and terrible and impressive enough to compel multiple re-readings. Seek out a copy and read it, then read it again. And then tell everyone you know about it. The Flanders Road should not remain a secret.

FIRST LOVE by Ivan Turgenev

2011-04-01T19:37:00.001-04:00

In the crystal-clear Penguin Classics translation by Isaiah Berlin, Turgenev's First Love is a wonderful, surprising little novella (or long short story; 19th-century writers frequently blurred the not-yet-solid line between the forms). The plot is simple, the stuff of Oedipal melodrama and grand opera: a sixteen year-old boy falls in love with a 21 year-old girl, only to discover that his rival for her affections is his own father. Turgenev's handling of youthful passion and infatuation is remarkable. Few readers will soon forget the night of silent lightning or the narrator's silly, more-comic-than-romantic leap from a 14 foot-high wall, but I was most impressed by the events of chapter twenty-one, in which the narrator, unable to injure his father with the knife of Freudian castration, chooses instead to identify with him. The two men ride together, and the father's horse, a thoroughbred mare, is described in terms that recall the 'thoroughbred' Princess Zinaida, the apex of the family love triangle. The narrator's first experience of love threatens to become an initiation into phallocentric misogyny. But he then witnesses his father's rough treatment of Zinaida, treatment explicitly paralleling the father's equestrian exploits: he strikes the girl with his riding crop before bursting into her home and, it is strongly suggested, riding her. After the shock of this scene, Turgenev swiftly wraps up his tale with a flurry of convenient deaths and a suggestion that all the complexities and contradictions of life are subsumed in the one death that puts a period to us all... But I don't quite buy this proffered interpretation. The events of the penultimate chapter overshadow even the deaths of the final chapter; the revelation of the violence of passion is what continues to haunt the narrator--and his readers.

MATING by Norman Rush

2011-03-25T16:39:00.000-04:00

A novel that takes 50 pages just to get itself underway had better contain some impressive local pleasures within those first 50 pages, and it had better blow my mind within the first one hundred. Mating fails on both counts. This novel was highly-praised and National Book Awarded upon publication, and that high hype leaves me all the more disappointed. Two problems loom over the entire book. First, despite Rush's age at publication, this was his first published novel, and he has yet to master one of the most important and difficult aspects of the novelist's art: pacing. This book lumbers so boringly through its first 100 pages that I doubt if most readers make it past them. Second, while more than one critic has praised Rush's prose, I remain immune to its dubious charms. The narrator's voice fails to grab me. I find it too flat and chatty and, worst of all, unconvincing. I don't 'hear' the character in the voice, and that's a fatal flaw in a 'voice' novel (a first-person narrative depending upon the narrator's distinctive voice to hold readerly interest). Comparing Rush's narration to the superior voice-work of Martin Amis in Money or Styron in Sophie's Choice puts into relief the banality of Mating's prose. Every reader can 'hear' John Self and Stingo. Rush's unnamed narrator is a comparative drone.

Sebald News: A PLACE IN THE COUNTRY to be released Dec. 6

2011-03-18T16:43:00.001-04:00

I've just noticed that Amazon.com is now accepting pre-orders for W. G. Sebald's collection of essays on European literature, A Place in the Country, which will be released Dec. 6, 2011. The Amazon page contains no additional information about the book except the number of pages (240). More info will surely be added in the coming months. In the meantime, here's Amazon's image of the cover:

A Place in the Country is a translation of Sebald's Logis in einem Landhaus, described on the highly-informative Sebald blog Vertigo as "a book of essays on Robert Walser, Gottfried Keller, Johann Peter Hebel, Jean Jacques Rousseau, Eduard Mörike, and Jan Peter Tripp." I'm looking forward to it.

UPDATE, 5/16/11: I've just noticed that Amazon is now no longer accepting pre-orders for this book and that the publication date has been pushed back to 2013. What's up, Random House?

THE DEATHS OF THE POETS : AN ABC by Brian A. Oard

2011-03-17T13:00:00.001-04:00

Apollinaire, war-wounded, weary, dizzy from delirium, head haloed bandage-white where the doctors drilled his brain, hears the street outside his window celebrating Armistice, chanting A bas Guillaume! A bas Guillaume! A bas... Guillaume, this Guillaume, barrel-bodied kaiser of the Now, thinking himself reviled, collapses on the sweaty mattress and timely dies, murdered by a lynch mob of the mind.

Berryman jumped the barrier
one wintry Minnesota morning
after meeting Mr. Bones halfway
across the Washington Avenue Bridge.

For a moment they struggled
until a holmes&moriarty
left a single broken body
lying limply

like a needled balloon.

So where did you go, Mr. Bones?

Crane leaped up, up, into the azure Caribbean, his rentboy body transfigured in sulphurous sunlight. Like Billy Budd he rose, but no blessing left his lips, no thoughts of sailors, poets, heiresses dribbled black ink on the pristine page of his mind. No thought. Only the aquatic adagio enraptured him. And an oddly remembered schoolboy rhyme: Full fathom five the poet lies. / These are fish that eat his eyes.

Dickinson died in the middle of May, the month when robins dangle worms and kittens climb for fledglings in the nest. She died as she lived: ice-cold, zero at the bone. Colder than the coldest Cassatt, her mind lay dying, turning in its groove. Her raddled breathing filled the house until the evening bells brought cease. Burn my poems, she instructed her sister. Burn them all. But Auden was half-right: poets make nothing happen.

Eliot smoked himself to death, a common enough recreation. Burned at the last by the fire he tongued, he lay on his bed like the evening spread out against the sky. Emphysema, the doctors said. Base mortality, the poet knew. And also knew his Greek: emphysema, bodily inflation. Oh dear God... Tie me down like Gulliver, my dears, ere I float away.

Frost went two years earlier, after the goddam doctors botched his crotch. Prostate cut out, leg veins tied like ribbons, blood flooding his lungs, the old bastard kept working. In his bed at Peter Bent Brigham Hospital--good Yankee name--he was midway through dictating an essay on Ezra, that mangy dog still barking in Italy, when the ravelled sleeve unravelled, and he never woke again.

Ginsberg didn't die howling. He was too old and Buddhist for that. When his body took his life in the spring of 1997, he died in peace, at home, among friends--a good death--rarer than radium.

Hughes, Edward James, familiarly Ted, OM and laureate, died of 'natural causes.' The same might be said of two of the women in his life, and his son.

Ignatow, David (1914-1997), American poet. How did he die?

I'll admit it.
I did it.
I tossed him off a cliff
into the egg-blue Mediterranean,
just to make this abecedarium
complete.

Johnson, ever quotable in his prime, remarked to his ever-quoting Boswell, "It matters not how a man dies, but how he lives. The act of dying is not of importance, it lasts so short a time...A man knows it must be so, and submits. It will do him no good to whine." Years later, on his deathbed, Johnson whined, "I would give one of these legs for a year more of life, I mean of comfortable life, not such as that which I now suffer."

Keats knew physic and diagnosed himself, in that little room beside the Spanish Steps. Examining the handkerchief: "I know the color in that blood. It is arterial blood. I cannot be deceived in that color. That drop is my death warrant. I must die." And the epitaph dictated to Severn, proof of a truth the poet knew: water washes granite away.

Lowell pulled closed the squealing door of a New York yellow taxi. "Where to, mac?" asked a driver from Central Casting. "Over the river, my Charon," the poet straight replied, "and into the great steel trees...West 67th Street." "Gotcha." Home to Lizzie. Home. Descending from the Queensborough Bridge into the smog of midtown, he felt a fist clenching deep within his chest. He tried to cough, couldn't catch a breath, felt himself falling forward. Falling. Manhattan fading around him, he died into the whiteness between words.

Marlowe, drunken, wild-eyed, lunges forward with his knife. "Pay, you whoreson! Or I'll take it in your blood!" The sound of running, a shatter of glass. Tables screech and candles fall. Two men struggle in the fiery darkness until the steel blade finds its home. The tall man stage-whispers, "Greetings from Her Majesty, Kit," and stands unsteadily, Shakes himself, staggers from the inn.

Neruda died just twelve days after the death of Allende and the murder of Chilean democracy in an American corporate coup. (See Seymour Hersh's The Price of Power for the role of ITT and Anaconda and the Nixon administration's plan to "make the economy scream.") Soldiers ripped his house apart. "You won't find anything here but poems," the dead man said. The poet's body rejected Pinochet like a failed transplant. He bled with Chile, died with Chile, his funeral the first moment of protest in a generation of fear.

Owen, who knew better than the old lies, heard the congested coughing of a German machine gun just before he died. Dulce et decorum est to be hacked up like bloody sputum at the age of twenty-five.

Pound the fascist fuck outlived all the other, better Modernists, dying unromantically in a Venice hospital in 1972. Go figure. But give the rat bastard his due: he got Joyce and Eliot published, re-made The Waste Land, and in one hundred and twenty-three ways made himself indispensable to Modernism. And when he wasn't prostituting his poetry to crazy politics, he wrote some beautiful verse. An asshole can be a great poet too.

Quilty was more playwright than poet but nonexistent nonetheless. He expired from multiple gunshot wounds inflicted by a humbly umbral assassin at the end--or before the beginning--of a novel by Nabokov (pseudonym of Darkbloom, V.)

Rimbaud in a Marseilles deathroom screams in his agony, sweats tears of pain, goes down in a hellish season, leaves no epitaph. Poems and Paul darkly backward now, he dies a failed colonial, a century's cliche, a death of three dots... But there are, we must remember, worse fates for a poet. T.S. Eliot, for instance, died into the arms of Lord Lloyd-Webber. Meow.

Sexton's long drive to nowhere was limerickly predictable. Electric ranges obsolesced Sylvia's way, so she breathed the exhaust of an automobile to her death in 1974, a year when gas was cheap and life slightly more expensive.

Thomas's autopsy report allegedly stated death's cause as "an insult to the brain." All viewers of The Glenn Beck Show should consider themselves warned.

Updike died in the newspapers, and the newspapers died all around him. He's here only because Louis Untermeyer is even more minor, and I haven't read Ungaretti.

Virgil in his deathboat donned a Kafka mask and ordered the unfinished Aeneid burned. Unable to polish it, he preferred to polish it off. Dying, he thought the work already buried, never to be born. Swear, Tucca...Swear, Varius...Drown my child in the harbor at Brundisium. After the poet's death, those false friends betrayed him at the Emperor's word.

Wilde was neither the first poet murdered by moralists, nor the last. Broken in body by Her Majesty's Prisons, he dies in a Paris hotel room near the gonging bells of Notre Dame. That posh cunt Douglas, on the other hand, seemed to live forever.

X, the unknown, much-anthologized Anonymous, died somewhere of something at some time in the past, recent or distant, unless he or she remains breathing, as she or he most certainly does.

Yeats, last wild goose, became his admirers most unIrishly in the south of France. Most people don't know this, assume the echt-Irish poet died under Ben Bulben with a shamrock in his teeth. But no, he succumbed continental, rested in French earth for near a decade while the bombers buzzed above him and the troop trains rumbled west and east. Panzers, pass by. In '48 the tardy Gaels finally dug him up, lugged his bones to Sligo, and set a simple stone. Right here lies the poet Yeats. / Think on him and pay your rates.

Zukofsky died as he lived: into his poetry. A quartet playing Bach in the back of his mind, he thought a final comma, semicolon, period, til the lung's motion ceased and the poet became his book. Z became "A," as was prophesied. It was good enough for Shakespeare, after all.

"My Life had stood--a Loaded Gun" (poem 754) by Emily Dickinson

2011-03-14T00:11:00.001-04:00

Here's my attempt at a close reading of this familiar but difficult and enigmatic poem. My text is from the standard Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson, edited by Thomas H. Johnson.

My Life had stood--a Loaded Gun--
In Corners

The first stanza provides our only glimpse of the speaker's life in the past, before the present tense action of the central four stanzas and the modulation to the future in the final stanza. In a metaphor that states and initiates the overarching conceit of the poem, the speaker's life is compared to a loaded gun, a deadly phallic weapon. But the cruel energy of the weapon is trapped in potentiality. The speaker's life, loaded with potential, was stagnant, neglected, left to stand in corners. We should note the plural on 'corners' because it suggests that the gun was a powerless object moved around the house at the will of others. The speaker is a powerless domestic figure, a person commanded but never commanding. We might at this point guess that the speaker is a woman even if we knew nothing about the author's gender, and this supposition adds a provocative and unsettling note to the poem: the notion that all those quiet, dutiful daughters and wives of 19th-century America were so many loaded guns just waiting to explode. Lizzie Borden and her ax are not far away. Dickinson is also close to a very modern feminist critique of patriarchy: even this speaker, remarkably conscious of the conditions of her existence, can trope upon her life only in terms of the patriarchal ideology that has interpellated her, formed and informed her self. Her life is a loaded gun, a weapon used by males, a virginal phallus that has yet to 'shoot its load.' Even at her most radical moment, her mind remains colonized by the male imagery that is the only imagery of power her society permits.

--till a day
The Owner passed--identified--
And carried Me away--

The mysterious "Owner," surely a male figure, a suitor, a lover, now appears, and He changes everything. The Owner seems a psychologically familiar conflation of lover/husband/father/God, a 'lord and master,' to use a common 19th-century euphemism for a husband. The first 'owner' of the speaker's life would be her father, the next 'owner' her lover-husband, the ultimate 'owner' her Creator. The ambiguity creates at least a hint of incest to darken both the nuptial and theological interpretations, but this is surely the same hint of incest that is present in some form in much female heterosexual love, whether directed toward a Daddy-figure or an anti-Daddy. The word 'identified' is crucial here. The action of the poem begins with this act of identification. On the metaphorical level it's the owner of the gun noticing it and picking it up on his way out the door; on the erotic level, 'identified' is an intransitive verb meaning 'to be or become the same.' This one word is Dickinson's signification of sexual intercourse, the Owner 'takes' the speaker, the two become one. This interpretation is confirmed by the next line. The erotic, even orgasmic, connotations of the phrase "carried away" persist even into our time.

And now We roam in Sovereign Woods--
And now We hunt the Doe--

The marriage is now consummated on a linguistic level, as "Me" and "Owner" become "We." The owner carries the speaker away from domestic confinement into American national mythology's master symbol of freedom, the wilderness of the American frontier. The woods are "sovereign," denoting both 'kingly, regal,' a patriarchal space, and 'unlimited in extent,' the vast western woodlands in which the Puritans saw a howling wilderness and where later generations found the landscape of American pastoral. We are now in the realm of the frontier narratives studied at length by Richard Slotkin, the land of regeneration through violence. And it is also, we should add, a deeply patriarchal realm. They are killing does, not stags. The speaker in marriage conspires with the owner to destroy female intruders in a man's world.

And every time I speak for Him--
The Mountains straight reply--

And do I smile, such cordial light
Upon the Valley glow--

The couple live their violent life in pastoral harmony with nature. The mountains echo the report of the deadly rifle, a sound figured as the narrator 'speaking for' the Owner. This topsy-turvy usurpation of male privilege--a woman speaking for a man instead of the usual vice-versa--is the first sign that the couple's frontier adventure is empowering the woman, that she's experiencing a distinctly female version of violent regeneration--also a male privilege in American myth. What might initially seem a brighter side of this empowerment is depicted in the 'smile' image, a complex and compressed conflation of face, sun, and firing gun barrel. But the word 'cordial,' from the Latin root meaning 'heart,' throws a violent bloody light over this glowing valley. This smile is not an insipid 'happy face.' It's the smile of a human being become as violent as nature. It's a smile that earns Dickinson the title Camille Paglia awards her in the last and best chapter of Sexual Personae: Amherst's Madame de Sade.

It is as a Vesuvian face
Had let its pleasure through--

The speaker's Sadistic empowerment in nature now issues in an image that answers the phallic gun of patriarchy that is the poem's controlling conceit. A Vesuvian face is, literally, a face through which emotions suddenly burst forth, but more important than this meaning is the other denotation which the speaker's emotion causes to burst through the very phrase 'Vesuvian face,' an image of a volcano in eruption, the face of a mountain exploding and bursting with hot, bubbling liquid. The image is vulval, vaginal, an anti-phallic symbol that would melt any male 'gun' tossed into it (as vaginas tend to do). This is the pleasure the face lets through, a triumphant and violent image of sexual power diametrically opposed to the imagery the speaker borrows from patriarchy.

And when at Night--our good Day done--
I guard My Master's Head--
'Tis better than the Eider-Duck's
Deep Pillow--to have shared--

This stanza steps back a bit from the extremity of the preceding lines. The 'good day' of regeneration through violence is done, and patriarchy attempts to reassert itself. Man is 'Master' now, but the woman is no longer an unproblematic slave. Now she's a Hegelian slave aware of the dialectical relationship in which she plays a role. She protects the man, and to that extent she has a form of power over him, power that he has granted her, just as she grants him power through her act of self-subordination. The 'deep pillow' image, a Picasso-ish conflation of bosom, buttocks and vagina (three places in which a penis can deeply pillow), transfers the Master/Slave dialectic to an erotic plane where the couple 'share' each others' bodies in the night.

To foe of His--I'm deadly foe--
None stir the second time--
On whom I lay a Yellow Eye--
Or an emphatic Thumb--

We are still in the night, the speaker is guarding the man, holding in her hands the deadly gun of her life. We should note that Dickinson artfully blurs the line between tenor and vehicle in the poem's organizing metaphor. In the poem's first line, the gun is established as the vehicle and 'my life' as the tenor; in subsequent verses, the narrator is not the woman, but the-woman-as-gun, the woman who, through the man's mediation, has become the gun. The marriage of man and woman between the first two stanzas is also the union of tenor and vehicle. We can 'see' the speaker as a woman, as a gun, or as a woman with a gun; the 'proper' visualization would probably be a superimposition of the three. The most curious thing about this stanza is the odd final image of that "emphatic Thumb." Placed in parallel with the firing gun barrel's 'yellow eye,' the capitalized 'Thumb' is an image that gigantizes the speaker by miniaturizing the man's 'foes.' They are tiny bugs to be smashed under a thumb. She's a goddess who will treat his enemies the way Gloucester's 'wanton boys' treat flies. (Read King Lear, if you don't get my allusion.) She could keep Mick Jagger under her thumb.

Though I than He--may longer live
He longer must--than I--
For I have but the power to kill,
Without--the power to die--

This is the most difficult stanza of the poem, so I'll begin interpretation with an attempt at vulgar paraphrase: It is possible that I will outlive him / But he must outlive me / For I have the power to kill him / And only he has the power to kill me. This is what Dickinsonian marriage comes down to, in the end, at the shitty end of life: the one who granted us life is the one who must take it away. A theological reading is possible, but any "The Lord Giveth..." sentimentality is undermined by the ice-cold cruelty of Dickinson's tone. The man must live longer than the woman because he must kill her. This final mercy killing is the love-death that brings to synthesis the poem's themes of eros and thanatos, love and violence. We can read it otherwise, in many other ways, but we should beware of any interpretation that lessens the violence of the ending, for that violence is true to the rest of the poem. Throughout the poem, Dickinson grants us a deeply disturbing vision of love and cruelty, a vision equalled in English only by Blake's "The Mental Traveller."

Poetry after Auschwitz: What Adorno Really Said, and Where He Said It

2011-03-12T23:34:00.000-05:00

Gore Vidal remarks somewhere upon the irony that George Santayana is remembered today only for his warning about forgetting. (All who remember Santayana are doomed to repeat that those who do not remember history are doomed to repeat it.) Theodor Adorno seems to have suffered a similar fate, remembered by most nonspecialists only as a German gloom-meister who pronounced that after Auschwitz, poetry could no longer be written. Few realize that what Adorno actually wrote was more complex and subject to revision in his later work.

The original quote (always taken out of context and rarely footnoted) occurs in the concluding passage of a typically densely argued 1949 essay, "Cultural Criticism and Society," reprinted as the first essay in Prisms. Here is the entire passage, from the English translation by Samuel and Shierry Weber:

The more total society becomes, the greater the reification of the mind and the more paradoxical its effort to escape reification on its own. Even the most extreme consciousness of doom threatens to degenerate into idle chatter. Cultural criticism finds itself faced with the final stage of the dialectic of culture and barbarism. To write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric. And this corrodes even the knowledge of why it has become impossible to write poetry today. Absolute reification, which presupposed intellectual progress as one of its elements, is now preparing to absorb the mind entirely. Critical intelligence cannot be equal to this challenge as long as it confines itself to self-satisfied contemplation. (Prisms, 34)

It's a difficult passage from a difficult essay, made more difficult by being wrenched out of context. (One really must read the entire essay to understand the closing lines. If you find an inexpensive copy of Prisms in a secondhand bookstore, grab it.) Adorno's meaning, particularly what he means by the word "reification," becomes clearer when read in light of two earlier sentences in this same page-long paragraph: "In the open-air prison which the world is becoming, it is no longer so important to know what depends on what, such is the extent to which everything is one. All phenomena rigidify, become insignias of the absolute rule of that which is." Here's my paraphrase/interpretation of the key sentences: To persist, after Auschwitz, in the production of monuments of the very culture that produced Auschwitz (Adorno might have spoken of Strauss's Four Last Songs rather than generalized "poetry") is to participate by denial in the perpetuation of that barbaric culture and to participate in the process (reification) that renders fundamental criticism of that culture literally unthinkable.

This is a harsh, devastating idea, and Adorno eventually came to consider it something of an overstatement. In his late work Negative Dialectics he offers this conditional revision--a revision that is, in its own way, perhaps even more devastating than the final paragraph of "Cultural Criticism and Society." I quote from the English translation by E. B. Ashton:

Perennial suffering has as much right to expression as a tortured man has to scream; hence it may have been wrong to say that after Auschwitz you could no longer write poems. But it is not wrong to raise the less cultural question whether after Auschwitz you can go on living--especially whether one who escaped by accident, one who by rights should have been killed, may go on living. His mere survival calls for the coldness, the basic principle of bourgeois subjectivity, without which there could have been no Auschwitz; this is the drastic guilt of him who was spared. By way of atonement he will be plagued by dreams such as that he is no longer living at all, that he was sent to the ovens in 1944 and his whole existence since has been imaginary, an emanation of the insane wish of a man killed twenty years earlier. (Negative Dialectics, 362-363)

This is a great and terrible passage, philosophy written with Kafka's ice-axe, history as a nightmare from which there is only one awakening. It's impossible for me to read these lines without thinking of Primo Levi, of Jean Amery, of Paul Celan (whom Adorno may well have had in mind as he wrote). This passage deserves to be at least as well-known as the line about poetry and barbarism.

THE FEMALE EUNUCH by Germaine Greer

2011-03-11T20:29:00.000-05:00

Next month marks the 40th anniversary of the first American publication of The Female Eunuch, a book that's still readable, still provocative, still beyond-the-pale outrageous at times. Today it serves as a reminder that once upon a time, not too long ago, feminism was a genuinely revolutionary movement. At the time of Greer's writing, "second wave" feminism had only just emerged from the New Left and had yet to trifurcate into (a) the gender-equity branch of corporate capitalism, (b) an area of specialization for bourgeois careerist academics, and (c) a Victorian anti-sex discourse puritanical enough to warm Jesse Helm's nonexistent heart. If feminism had followed a less careerist and more Greerist path--or, alternatively, if it had returned to its Modernist roots in Simone de Beauvoir's existentialism instead of pretending that Judith Butler and Kate Millet were major and original thinkers--it might've been less 'successful' (as success is measured in corporatist America) but more useful as an ideology of revolutionary change. Feminism would've been less easy to co-opt and de-fang--or to hold in protective custody on the game preserves for radical ideas that America's college campuses have become.

The Female Eunuch is dated, as any 40 year-old topical polemic must be, but my most serious complaint is that the chapters aren't long enough. In a book this radical and important, size does matter, and Greer's chapters aren't big enough to successfully contain their enormous topics. The 'Sex' chapter, for example, a mere eight (!) pages, could and should have been an entire 300-page book (or an even longer and deeper one) with individual chapters on each of the topics briefly discussed here. I would've liked to have seen more of Greer's truly amazing discoveries in 17th- and 18th-century medical books (the quote from Samuel Collins reads like the tip of an iceberg of remarkable medical prose that remains unknown and unread today); the chapter's critique of the technologization of sex (a process synonymous with the names Masters and Johnson, those masters of johnson mastery) is still provocative today; and Greer's criticism of tame, vanilla, popular culture sexual imagery as basically counterrevolutionary is deeply compelling. (Her example--not as dated as we'd like to believe--is a 'sex scene' from an early Jackie Collins novel. Greer's reading of the passage is delightful, like Virginia Woolf with a filthy mouth: "Miss Collins's heroine is prudish, passive, calculating, selfish and dull, despite her miraculous expanding tits.") I could've read a whole book of this sort of stuff, so I was disappointed when this chapter, and most of the others, came to so sudden an end.

SUPERLATIVES : A List of the Greatest Things

2011-03-07T17:44:00.006-05:00

Inspired by Woody Allen's oft-cited list of 'things that make life worth living' from the film Manhattan, here's my ridiculously exclusive list of the Himalayan heights of beauty and sublimity. These are some of my personal "greatest things in the world."

Greatest Aria: Waltraud Meier's performance of the 'liebestod' (final aria) from Wagner's Tristan und Isolde, as recorded with the Berlin Philharmonic under the direction of Daniel Barenboim (available on CD from Teldec, 1995). No matter how many times I listen to Meier's liebestod, it never fails to destroy me. But it's a "good destruction," as Hemingway would say. This is music as orgasmic transport.

Waltraud Meier as Isolde

Greatest Jazz Song: Charlie Parker's instrumental version of "Loverman." This is the most awesomely moving couple minutes of jazz that I have ever heard. Listening to it, I feel the vibrations of Parker's saxophone deep inside my chest. The music plays me.

Charlie Parker, American Genius

Greatest Modernist Novel: Ulysses by James Joyce. No reader of this blog will be surprised by this choice. As I've said before, it's the Rosetta Stone of Modernism. It's also funny, sad, and mind-blowingly accomplished. And it's a love story, a book about love, "the opposite of hatred."

Marilyn Monroe reading Molly Bloom's soliloquy. A detail from one of my favorite photographs.

Greatest Work of 19th-century Aestheticism: The Renaissance by Walter Pater. The unholy bible of English Aestheticism, this is one of the most beautiful books in the language, a masterpiece of impressionistic prose. More than a book about art, this is a manifesto for living.

The exquisite Mr. Pater and his rockin' stash

Most Beautiful Painting: The most beautiful painting in the world is Peter Paul Rubens' Moonlight Landscape in the Courtauld Gallery, London. Little-known today, it was revered in the eighteenth century and deserves to be rediscovered. No reproduction can come close to doing it justice.

A poor snapshot of the most beautiful painting in the world

Greatest Film: Persona (1966), directed by Ingmar Bergman. I could list twenty or thirty of the greatest films ever made (and I'll probably do that in a future post), but Persona is my current choice for the greatest of them all. This is an apex of the art of film, a work as inexhaustible as the greatest novels, as rewatchable as a great novel is rereadable. It's intelligent, erotic, shocking, and always several steps ahead of the viewer. I have never read a satisfying interpretation of Persona--and that might also be a mark of its greatness: the greatest art resists interpretive capture.

Liv Ullmann and Bibi Andersson in 'Persona'

Greatest Live Rock n Roll Performance: Jimi Hendrix at Woodstock. One witness (who inexplicably remembers the Sixties) described Hendrix's version of "The Star-Spangled Banner" as sounding "like the Vietnam War exploding inside your skull." The comparison is apt, for Hendrix performs heavy aerial bombardment on the National Anthem and takes a field full of revelers into the sonic heart of a darkness their country was creating half a world away.

Jimi Hendrix deconstructing the discourse of American patriotism in a time of war

Greatest Romantic Poem in English: "Ode on Intimations of Immortality" by William Wordsworth. A single poem that encapsulates most of Wordsworth and much of the movement he co-initiated. If you haven't read it for a while, re-read it and feel its staggering beauty.

Wordsworth: A Portrait of the Once-Radical Artist as Victorian Gentleman

Greatest Opera Ending: The ending of Rigoletto, a magnificent tragic coup de theatre that reminds us of the strong affinity between grand opera and Greek tragedy.

The tragic final scene of Rigoletto

Greatest Portfolio of Portrait Photographs: Richard Avedon's In The American West. When I saw an exhibition of this series a few years ago, I understood that these images were the flipside of Avedon's portraits of the famous and fashionable. These are images from the other America, portraits of the maimed and moneyless victims of the American Dream.

From Avedon's series 'In the American West'

Greatest Visual Meditation on Sex, Power and Death: Titian's The Death of Actaeon in the London National Gallery. One of my criticisms of Camille Paglia's Sexual Personae is that the book almost entirely ignores Titian, an artist whose late work reaches a height of sublime cruelty that Paglia's beloved Sade never achieved.

Titian, The Death of Actaeon, ca.1565-76

Greatest Narrative Poem of the Post-Classical Era: The Divine Comedy by Dante Alighieri. I prefer to read the Inferno, Purgatorio and Paradiso in the sublime translation by Allen Mandelbaum.

Dante and his three realms, from an old Florentine fresco

Most Sublime Image in Western Poetry: The 'river of light' near the end of Dante's Paradiso. Paradise isn't nearly so much fun as Hell, everyone agrees, but this breathtaking image makes it worth the trip. Botticelli and William Blake both tried and failed to illustrate this scene; its beauty is beyond visual representation.

Blake's attempt looks more like Dante panning for gold

Greatest Physical Experience: Orgasm. A great, shaking, shattering, consciousness-obliterating sexual climax is all of transcendence we can know on earth, and all we need to know.

Hedy Lamarr in ecstasy in 'Ecstasy' (1931)

Greatest Renaissance Drama: Hamlet. Four hundred years on, we're still trying to catch up with Hamlet. And just when we think we're winning, we realize he's lapping us yet again.

Title page of 1605 Hamlet

Greatest Recent Atheist Book: The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins. Much smarter than Hitchens and much funnier than Dennett, Dawkins is a turbocharged intellectual delight.

Richard Dawkins models his 2010 Halloween costume

Greatest Place for Sacrilegious Sex: The altar of St. Stephen Walbrook, London. Designed by Henry Moore, it's rockhard but otherwise perfect for a quickie. The church is beautiful too.

Henry Moore's erotically inviting Stone Age altar at St. Stephen Walbrook

Greatest Work of Sculpture since Bernini: Rodin's Gates of Hell. Most of the Rodin works that have become curatorial cliches (including The Thinker) were originally conceived as part of this sculptural magnum opus, an elaborately ornamented pair of doors that may well be the greatest work of decorative art since the invention of stone tools.

Rodin's Gates of Hell

Greatest Pop Song: Bob Dylan's "Mr. Tambourine Man." Dylan wrote plenty of songs more mysterious and poetic than this one, but some of the lyrics in "Tambourine Man" are the work of a Wordsworth turned troubadour. Magnificent.

Bob Dylan as Cate Blanchett

Greatest Natural Color: The deep blue in the shadows cast by evergreen trees upon freshly fallen snow.

Greatest Artist in the History of Western Art: Pablo Picasso. I consider this obvious and wonder why people doubt it. Why is it unthinkable that the greatest artist in European history lived during our lifetimes? Picasso's works revolutionized not only painting but sculpture, graphic arts and even pottery. In the Western tradition, only Michelangelo comes close to the breadth of Picasso's achievement, but Picasso is more innovative, more revolutionary (this is surely a function of the times in which both men lived). Michelangelo's art records no break with the past as definitive as Cubism, for example.

Pablo Picasso, Still Life with Glass and Lemon, 1910

Pablo Picasso, Guitar, 1912

Late self-portrait by Picasso

Greatest Breasts: Eva Green's bosom should be declared a World Heritage Site. Natural wonders this stunning deserve preservation (and Sherpa guides).

Eva Green doing the Venus de Milo thing in 'The Dreamers' (2003)

Greatest Movie Goddess (pre-1950): Marlene Dietrich. She defined sexy, sultry cosmopolitan sophistication. I fall in love with her again every time I watch The Blue Angel.

Marlene Dietrich with Ernest Hemingway

Greatest Movie Goddess (post-1950): Catherine Deneuve. She was always beautiful and will always be beautiful. Exquisite actress too.

Deneuve at the peephole in Bunuel's 'Belle de Jour' (1967)

Greatest Writer of the Twentieth Century: Marcel Proust. A la recherche du temps perdu is my candidate for the century's premier work in the art of prose. Read it in English in the deservedly classic translation by C.K. Scott Moncrieff, et al. Other translators have since tried their hands, but Moncrieff definitively captured the organically proliferating Art Nouveau nature of Proustian prose.

Proust on his deathbed, photographed by Man Ray

MEMO TO THE CRITERION COLLECTION

2011-03-06T21:30:00.000-05:00

I am hereby officially begging (I am on bended knee as I type this post, a rather uncomfortable position), yes, begging the Criterion Collection to acquire and release the following films on DVD. Some of them are currently unavailable in the U.S. in any form.

Providence (1977), directed by Alain Resnais. An award-winning film by a leading director and starring John Geilgud in a critically-acclaimed performance. This is the only major Resnais film unavailable on DVD, and it seems like a natural for Criterion.
Face to Face (1976), directed by Ingmar Bergman. We live in a world where Porky's is available on DVD, but two of Bergman's major works are not. Surely the apocalypse is near...
From the Life of the Marionettes (1980), directed by Ingmar Bergman. Only available in the US in overpriced VHS format. (Porky's, on the other hand, can be purchased at any WalMart...)
The Decameron (1971), directed by Pier Paolo Pasolini. The first film in Pasolini's 'Trilogy of Life.' This is available on DVD from MGM, but as one of Pasolini's most beautiful films it deserves the full Criterion treatment.
The Canterbury Tales (1972), directed by Pier Paolo Pasolini. The second film in Pasolini's 'Trilogy of Life.' It can be watched in streaming video from Netflix, but is unavailable on DVD.
A Thousand and One Nights/Arabian Nights (1974), directed by Pier Paolo Pasolini. Third film in the 'Trilogy of Life.' Likewise viewable from Netflix but not on DVD. Criterion should consider a box-set release of the Trilogy of Life. It would be a wonderful complement to their impressive DVD of Pasolini's Salo, a film the director made as a kind of 'answer' or 'antidote' to the trilogy.
Chimes at Midnight (1965), directed by Orson Welles. A great actor and greater director directs himself in the role he was genetically engineered to play, Falstaff. The labyrinthine legal tangles of the Welles estate have kept this major film out of circulation for many years. If the problems are ever resolved, I'd love to see a Criterion disc with a commentary track featuring Jeanne Moreau.
The Compleat Guy Maddin. Criterion did a wonderful job with Maddin's Brand Upon The Brain! I'd like to see them do likewise with his entire body of work. Maddin, a Canadian surrealist (yes, that phrase is redundant), is my candidate for North America's greatest contemporary filmmaker. If you don't know his work, go to Netflix and check him out. Once you've seen a Maddin flick, David Lynch will look very corporate to you.

DECEIT, DESIRE AND THE NOVEL by Rene Girard

2011-03-05T11:58:00.002-05:00

A literal translation of this book's French title, Mensonge romantique et verite romanesque (Romantic Lie and Novelistic Truth), would've been preferable to the melodramatic Deceit, Desire..., but whatever you call it, it's a disappointing work. It's sad when a book that begins as promisingly as this one crashes so quickly into reiteration and repetition. And reiteration. And repetition. And more repetition... The first chapter is amazingly good, the kind of criticism that forces us to go back and reconsider everything we've ever read in light of Girard's new paradigm of 'triangular' (or 'mimetic,' or 'imitative') desire. But from then on--and for the remainder of Girard's career to his present extreme old age--engaged criticism devolves into paradigmatic application. Girard has spent his entire career seeing mimetic desire everywhere--and probably never once imagining that its ubiquity is a product of projection. If the fox knows many things and the hedgehog knows one big thing, Girard is a hedgehog extraordinare, the intellectual as monomaniac, a dreary Johnny-one-note. (Among contemporary intellectuals, true foxes are rarer than polar bears in Trinidad. Camille Paglia thinks she's a fox, but she's an inverted Socrates who knows less than she thinks she knows. Edward Said could probably be considered a fox. Jean-Paul Sartre was a fox. Beauvoir? Well, The Second Sex was a foxy book. But I can't think of anyone above ground who still fits the bill--an indication of the extreme overspecialization that's crippling the contemporary mind. Noam Chomsky's almost a fox, but his vast knowledge of language, politics, philosophy, history, etc. is not matched by an equal appreciation of music, literature, or the other arts; Edward Said had a breadth of mind Noam does not possess.)

Since this work--and Girard's entire career--can be described in terms of projection and obsession, it's surely notable that in this book about desire and its vicissitudes, the name Sigmund Freud appears only once and is relegated to a footnote. Freud, who recognized mimetic desire half a century before Girard and called it the Oedipus complex and whose life's work was a tracing of the devious deviations of desire, is this book's unacknowledgeable precursor, the Bloomian 'strong father' from whom Girard must swerve into the protective enclave of Structuralist scientism. In the book's own terms, Freud is the secret mediator of Structuralist desire. Freud, as much as Saussure, is the thinker Structuralists imitate while thinking themselves original (in their arguments against originality). Psychoanalysis is the intellectual unconscious of this text, and perhaps of Structuralism generally. Hence, Girard's imprisonment of the Freudian contribution inside the blocky text of a footnote. And so it becomes apparent that Deceit, Desire and the Novel unintentionally exemplifies the very process it describes: Girard's swerve away from Freud is a mark of the deceit in this book's/author's desire to interpret the novel.

SEXUAL PERSONAE: ART AND DECADENCE FROM NEFERTITI TO EMILY DICKINSON by Camille Paglia

2011-03-04T22:00:00.003-05:00

Camille Paglia has balls--bigger than Harold Bloom's, harder than Chris Matthews's, shinier than Alec Baldwin's in Glengary Glen Ross. It doesn't really bother me that some of her opinions are goofier than a cartoon dog (and some are just plain stupid). With Paglia we're forced to take wheat with chaff, gold with garbage; at her worst she's as self-embarrassing as Charlie Sheen, but at her best she's the most genuinely transgressive, mind-blowing literary critic of her generation. Sexual Personae blew through early-90s P.C. America like a pussy-scented hurricane. Call it Hurricane Camille. (She did.) I was an undergraduate English major when this book appeared, and I remember reading it eagerly, thrilled to have found the book I had wanted to read for years, the kind of book no one wrote anymore, a kind most American academics would've dismissed as a priori impossible. Sexual Personae is a big, broad, Texas-size work of intellectual synthesis that goes far beyond its subtitle to offer a vision of the evolution of Western (European and American) culture from pre-history to Oscar Wilde. In many ways it's a throwback, a 19th-century kind of book, a Golden Bough for the age of AIDS and body-piercing. But what impressed me more than the book's scope was its attitude. Here was a scholar speaking directly and passionately about art, with an absence of politically correct cant and theoretical dogma--both of which were in overabundant supply on American campuses of the early 1990s. This is not to say that Camille is not dogmatic. One of the more infuriating aspects of her work (I find Paglia's entire oeuvre infuriating and exhilarating in equal measure) is that she is guilty of virtually all the faults she criticizes in other critics. For example, she instructs her readers to despise dogma and yet adheres dogmatically to a biological essentialism and determinism that blinds her to sociopolitical causation and produces an untenable contradiction when she takes an implicitly constructionist view of homosexuality. (This latter contradiction is probably the largest and most serious crack in Sexual Personae's worldview. Her celebration of sexual rebels only makes sense in a context of Sartrean free will that directly contradicts the terrible--and deliberately overstated--determinism of her opening chapter.) She's also guilty of that universal sin of the theoretical critic, trimming artworks and artists so they fit the procrustean bed of the critic's chosen theory. This is most obvious in her relative treatment of Wordsworth and Coleridge, where she ignores the dark side of Wordsworthian nature so the poet better fits the Apollonian side of her Nietzschean critical paradigm and contrasts more sharply with her Dionysian Coleridge (also a caricature). She's not really anti-dogmatic in her work; she simply adheres to old, unfashionable dogmas (e.g. the Apollo / Dionysus duality; traditional notions of masculinity and femininity, etc.). Sometimes this is charmingly quixotic; sometimes it's simply obstinate. But enough generalities. What makes this book worth reading is its author's elephantine, Spenserianly-armoured balls. Big bronze bell-clapper balls. Sexual Personae contains more entertainingly outrageous sentences than any other book ever written by an American academic:

"For a fetus is a benign tumor, a vampire who steals in order to live." (11)

"The Latinist Fred Nichols tells me that a verb in Martial, used in poetry for the first time by Catullus, describes the fluttering movement of the buttocks of the passive partner in sodomy. There were, in fact, two forms of this verb: one for males and another for females." (133)

"The excretory voiding of one person into the mouth of another is Dionysian monologue, a pagan oratory." (239)

"A hundred nuns linked by dildos!...The orgiast nuns are like a polysyllabic Greek or German noun, spawning prefixes and suffixes and hyphenated by dildos." (241)

"William Blake is the British Sade, as Emily Dickinson is the American Sade." (270)

"Significantly, Dickinson shows little concern with disease. Her sadomasochistic horrors are confined to piercings, slashings, hackings, scorchings and dislocations." (654)

Sensational sentences aside, the best and most valuable parts of Sexual Personae are the Sade-istic reinterpretations of Spenser and Dickinson, the pages on Sade (although Paglia is wrong about the Marquis; she calls him a "great writer and philosopher," but most of the time he's a poor writer and a mind-numbingly monotonous philosopher), the readings of Donatello's David and Michelangelo's Giuliano de Medici, and the chapter on Swinburne and Pater, which rescues two of Victorian England's best writers from the oblivion of the unread. The book's most important contribution to literary theory--still largely ignored--is Paglia's concept of Decadence, which she defines as an Apollonian freezing of the Dionysian. This is a powerful notion and deserves further development and broader application.

Nothing in Paglia's subsequent books rises to the level of these sections of Sexual Personae. There are a few very good pieces in her other two essay collections (in Sex, Art and American Culture I recommend the "cancelled preface" to Sexual Personae, "Junk Bonds and Corporate Raiders," and the MIT lecture; in Vamps and Tramps only "No Law in the Arena" comes close to the best of SP), but Paglia's post-SP career describes a disappointingly downward arc into banal pop-culture criticism (her Salon column) and dubious political bloviation. (Her little BFI book on Hitchcock's The Birds was good; I was unimpressed by Break, Blow, Burn.)

The fact that this book seems to have had little to no effect on academic literary criticism is hardly an indictment. Sexual Personae isn't a self-ghettoizing academic book; it's a defiantly popular one that pointedly ignores the common non-wisdom that equates 'popular' with 'non-intellectual.' It was written for readers, not teachers. It's a book to be read, re-read, and argued with. I have major disagreements with Paglia, but the fact remains that her goddamn book is a blast, blast, blast...

On Christopher Nolan's film INCEPTION (2010)

2011-03-02T12:20:00.001-05:00

Christopher Nolan's well-reviewed film Inception didn't impress me very much. I expected a more difficult film and was disappointed to find a movie that could be easily followed by anyone familiar with Modernist and Postmodernist narrative strategies. (Having recently read Infinite Jest, I had no trouble following Inception.) Nolan is always careful to tell us exactly where we are at every moment of the film, and the only genuine ambiguity is the cheap and facile one created by the final shot. But my biggest disappointment was due to the film's poverty of imagination. This is a dream-film that understands nothing about dreams. While it takes place almost entirely (or perhaps entirely) inside dreams, its two hour and twenty-eight minute running time contains only one convincingly dream-like image, the freight train barrelling down a city street. The rest of the movie is too rational to create a convincing dream-world. Its only interest lies in what it unintentionally tells us about contemporary reality. The viewer's true 'totem,' the spinning top that tells us about Inception's status as dream or reality, is its MPAA rating. Who has PG-13 dreams? Answer: movie executives. The entire movie is being dreamed by an exec at Warner Brothers. Hence, like its difficulty and imagination, Inception's intelligence has also been greatly exaggerated. The film's sole value is as an unintentional revelation of corporatist ideology, several fundamental tenets of which can be abstracted from the movie:

1.The world is defined by corporate competitions in which even outlaws like Dom Cobb must choose a corporate side.

2. Governments are irrelevant because corporations control them. (Ken Watanabe can make Leo's murder rap vanish with one phone call; Watanabe-san is the film's David Koch.)

3. Resistance to corporate domination is useless. (The film doesn't even attempt to imply otherwise.)

4. There are no problems that cannot be solved by expert application of technoscientific rationality. (This valorization of reason is the reason underwriting Inception's too-logical dream-world.)

5. Sexuality does not exist (Has any movie about dreams ever been so sexless? Everyone who watches Inception should immediately afterward screen Caligula, just to even things out.)

6. The mind is structured like a computer game. (This 21st-century revision of Lacan is Inception's master principle; it probably contains all the others.)

Anyone interested in seeing a superior film on the dream/reality theme that is not a piece of stealth corporatist propaganda should check out Luis Bunuel's Belle de Jour. Then go on to Discreet Charm of the Bourgoisie, The Phantom of Liberty, Viridiana, The Exterminating Angel, Un Chien Andalou, L'Age d'Or, etc., etc. They're all available from Netflix (a corporation, alas...).

Ezra Pound's WWII radio broadcast scripts online

2011-02-27T13:45:00.000-05:00

The worst embarrassment in the history of American Modernism is the fact that one of its greatest poets, Ezra Pound, passed through World War Two with his lips firmly pressed to Benito Mussolini's ass. When Pound did come up for air during those years, it was only to spew lame-brained, pro-fascist, anti-Semitic bile over Mussolini-controlled radio. This should serve to remind us that great poets can also be major assholes. Harold Bloom has written that Pound's broadcasts "ought to be read by admirers of his poetry, since they feature virulent anti-Semitic diatribes, exactly contemporary with Hitler's Holocaust..." There is also the matter of The Cantos, Pound's large-scale masterpiece and one of the undeniable monuments of Modernism. Some Pound scholars would prefer to think that the poet of the Cantos is somehow a different man from the fascist ranter of the radio broadcasts, but even a cursory reading of the Cantos shows that this is hardly the case. Some of the poems are infected with the same strains of anti-Semitism and fascism we find nakedly displayed in the broadcasts.

I've recently discovered that all of Pound's scripts are now online at the following webpage: Ezra Pound WWII Broadcasts. Anyone interested in reading Pound's worst writings (that judgment is both moral and aesthetic) can now do so.

PNIN by Vladimir Nabokov

2011-02-24T21:47:00.001-05:00

Near the middle of Pnin, Nabokov pulls out of his stylistic hat a gorgeously lyrical sentence that proves there's nothing necessarily fallacious about imitative form:

The brook in the gully behind the garden, a trembling trickle most of the time, was tonight a loud torrent that tumbled over itself in its avid truckling to gravity, as it carried through corridors of beech and spruce last year's leaves, and some leafless twigs, and a brand-new, unwanted soccer ball that had recently rolled into the water from the sloping lawn after Pnin had disposed of it by defenestration. (108)

Look beyond the alliterative music of this lovely line and notice that it's an overloaded, 'flooded' sentence that flows meanderingly down the page in a formal parallel to the swollen stream it describes. This is writing and wit of a very high order.

Unfortunately, the novel is not as good as its best moments. Pnin contains beautiful, unexpected passages on painting (94-98) and an equally unexpected, moving digression on the Nazi genocide (133-135), but as a whole it's an oddly disjointed novel, a loose collection of academic episodes that can be read as a more traditional precursor to that academic novel to end all academic novels, Pale Fire. Pnin's most important relationship, that between Pnin and the unnamed, Nabokov-like narrator who is 'unmasked' in the last chapter as Pnin's erotic and professional rival and who is possibly--or even probably--Nabokovianly mad, is a distant but distinct pre-echo of the relationship between Pale Fire's John Shade and his mad annotator, Kinbote. To better understand Pnin, however, we should perhaps ignore this precursorial significance and think more deeply about the relationship itself. For it seems that Pnin's narrator, a shadowy and almost purely grammatical presence until he usurps Pnin's story and academic position in the surprising final chapter, significantly changes over the course of the novel. (And this change itself might be Nabokov's sly, subtle parody of the obligatorily altering 'round' characters prescribed by E. M. Forster and his followers.) In the beginning, the narrator is a cruel caricaturist of his central character, inadvertently constructing a case study in the cruelty of the comic. But just as we the readers begin to settle comfortably into this interpretation, this appreciation of the narrator's ironic unreliability, that narrator becomes more sympathetic toward his antihero, even as he vanquishes him. (It's easy and costs nothing, of course, to sentimentalize those we have destroyed, but the narrator in the novel's latter half exhibits sympathy toward Pnin, not sentimentality.) The turning point may be the aforementioned passage on the Holocaust near the end of chapter five: these pages mark the narrator's unwritten realization that he's telling a tale more tragic than comic, that his caricatural project is foredoomed because his real subject is the impossibility of comedy in a world of genocide, death camps and the Gulag... But I hesitate to push this idea any further. Like all Nabokovian word-worlds, Pnin is a place of irony abounding. It is a realm where all interpretations are but castles built on quicksand. A deconstructive reading might find the novel issuing in an aporia (what a surprise!) between Pnin's and the narrator's versions of Pnin, but this attempt comes quickly and obviously to shipwreck on the fact that we only have 'Pnin's version' as mediated through the narrator, a character who knows Pnin, for the most part, at second- and third-hand--who doesn't really, in short, know Pnin at all. So if this text does in fact vanish into a postmodern fog, it's not the De Manian pea soup of undecidability but the more immediately troubling ground-cloud of individual unknowability. And aren't we all lost in that fog? this novel finally asks. Forced to know the characters of our world through the mediation of others, we muddle through a life that's half-mystery, half-conjecture, only to find ourselves at the end of it in thrall to that ultimately unsettling other, memory, that unreliable narrator inside our heads. Yes, we too are such stuff as Nabokovian novels are made on. And our little lives are rounded with copyright pages.

"Time and Narrative in A la Recherche du Temps Perdu" by Gerard Genette

2011-02-22T11:34:00.001-05:00

Gerard Genette, a good example of the critic as technocrat, whose commentary on Proust's masterpiece contains such illuminating lines as "...the relationship between the time of events and the time of the narrative could be summarized as follows: N(arrative)1=H(istory)4; N2=H2; N3=H4; N4=H2; N5=H4; N6=H1(Swann's love); N7=H3," opens this brief (and obvious and labored) essay with a "hypothesis" that is surely the reductio ad absurdum of reductive literary criticism: "...all narratives, regardless of their complexity or degree of elaboration...can always be considered to be the development of a verbal statement such as "I am walking" or "He will come" or "Marcel becomes a writer." " Genette grants that this is a "rudimentary analogy" but then proceeds to base his entire argument (in a sentence that is, incidentally, a little masterpiece of the non sequitur) upon its "strength." The structuralist commentary that follows contains no insights that could not be gained from a reading of Proust and is thus, quite literally, worthless (and as such, it's probably the worst entry in an otherwise impressive anthology, Essentials of the Theory of Fiction, Hoffman and Murphy, eds.) And so as I read the essay, my mind kept returning to that opening paragraph and an activity that I'll call "Gerard's Game": the moronic reduction of complex fiction to denuded, 'see Spot run'-style statements. Here are a few that came to mind:

Ahab chases a whale (Moby Dick)
Caddy leaves home (The Sound and the Fury)
Connie gets laid (Lady Chatterley's Lover)
Gatsby loses everything (The Great Gatsby)
Sebald walks (The Rings of Saturn)
Austria sucks (pretty much anything by Thomas Bernhard)
Tristram tells a tale (Tristram Shandy)
Hamlet sees a ghost (Hamlet)
Lad kills Pop, fucks Mum (Oedipus the King, sounding like a classic tabloid headline)
Bloom poops, walks, drinks, wanks, thinks (Ulysses)
Marlow does the Congo (Heart of Darkness)
Burroughs does smack (Junky)
Randy Romans roam the Roman realm (The Satyricon)

This could go on indefinitely...

Genette's fundamental "hypothesis" tells us nothing about the books in question, but I'm intrigued by its similarity to the "high concept" pitches so beloved by Hollywood executives ("It's Field of Dreams meets Rambo"). I guess all unimaginative technocrats think alike. (Well, of course they do. That's how they recognize one another.)

"Plot in the Modern Novel" by J. Arthur Honeywell

2011-02-21T13:17:00.001-05:00

Honeywell's brief 1968 essay "Plot in the Modern Novel" (included in the admirably readable anthology Essentials of the Theory of Fiction, edited by Michael J. Hoffman and Patrick D. Murphy) outlines a historical narrative of the development of novelistic plot that is as powerful as it is questionable. Building on the work of R.S. Crane, Honeywell writes that 18th-century novelists "tended to construct their plots around definite beginnings and endings" (the novel-initiating birth and novel-terminating marriage of a Fielding hero, for example), while 19th-century novelists "began to subordinate the problem of beginnings and endings to the problem of constructing a logical sequence of events." So far, so good. All of this is greatly oversimplified, but the relative privileging of beginnings and endings as opposed to 'middles' captures the way 18th-century novels generally feel 'looser' and closer to the picaresque than the more carefully structured works of the following century. The Honeywell scheme continues into the twentieth century with the contention that Modernists turned away from 19th-century causational structure and toward "structuring the events of the novel so as to present a coherent 'world' or vision of reality." Along with these supposedly distinct--but actually interpenetrating--tendencies, Honeywell finds three corresponding tendencies of plot movement: reversal of fortune in the 18th-century (Tom Jones, Clarissa), reversal of moral intention in the 19th century (Crime and Punishment), and in Modernist novels "a movement from appearance to reality constituted by the emergence of structural patterns which give coherence and intelligibility to facts previously seen as unrelated and incongruous." Honeywell's description of Modernist plot tendencies initially reads like a pretty good description of the process of understanding Joyce or Proust, but the more I think about it, the less it satisfies me. Its most glaring weakness is a reliance on that hairily hoary critical cliche, appearance versus reality. (That's the way it's expressed, as I recall, in elementary literature textbooks: appearance versus reality, as though we are to imagine a football game between the two: the fist-pumping Hemingwayish he-men of Reality against a cadre of opiate-fogged Wildean aesthetes who wave their perfumed handkerchiefs in support of Appearance. It's a duality with all manner of nasty little sociopolitical undertones; homophobia and misogyny are but the tip of its berg.) First of all, the revelation of reality was less a twentieth-century innovation than a nineteenth-century fetish and one of the important engines of 19th-century novelistic production (think of all those Zola novels no one reads anymore, all dedicated to anatomizing a hard, 'scientific' reality beneath the appearances of French society). Bumping this tendency up to the next century in order to preserve a moralistic view of 19th-century fiction is woefully ahistorical. If we focus instead on Honeywell's description of the Modernist process of the revelation of reality, we still face the problem of Honeywell's understanding of appearance and reality as a simple opposition. It's truer to the facts of twentieth-century literature to view them as a dialectical pair. While the 19th-century saw reality as the material basis of existence and appearance as a sentimental veil, Modernism exploits and constructs a dialectic of appearance and reality. Material reality determines appearances, as in the vulgarist Marxism (when someone once accused me of being a vulgar Marxist, I corrected him thus: "I'm a fucking vulgar Marxist!"), and appearances also determine reality, as in the most decadent Wilde-ism. Much of Modernist literature, up to the present day, concerns itself with the latter side of this dialectical interpenetration: the way appearance (or representation, or discourse, or [place your favorite jargon word here]) constructs a 'reality' that demands Nabokovian scare quotes. There is much more in the heavens and hells of Modernist literature than is dreamt of in Honeywell's philosophy.

FIRST LOVE AND OTHER SORROWS by Harold Brodkey

2011-02-21T11:24:00.000-05:00

Anyone seeking an introduction to the work of Harold Brodkey should probably leap right into the story "Innocence" from Stories in an Almost Classical Mode and not bother with his debut collection, First Love and Other Sorrows, published in 1958 and seriously dated today. There's not much to be said about the stories in First Love save that they're Fifties New Yorker stories and typical of that breed, less interesting than Salinger and much safer than Cheever at his risky best. Brodkey was in his twenties and still searching for his voice when he wrote these works. There are a few brief flashes of the writer who will emerge in the Classical Mode stories, but for the most part these are unexceptional works, apprentice Brodkey. Get a copy of Classical Mode and check out "Innocence" if you want to read a writer who can pull off sentences like "To see her in sunlight was to see Marxism die." (I'm still not entirely sure what that means, but it sounds wonderful. In a subsequent sentence, Brodkey attempts an explication, but he only shows us that he doesn't really know what it means either--a fact that, curiously, takes nothing away from the brilliance of the sentence.)

Finite Notes on INFINITE JEST : part 2

2011-02-18T06:00:00.004-05:00

(Continued from the previous post)

DFW in the heart of the heart of William Gass Country

11. "Dave, dude, why's your book so white?" This is not an idle or PC-motivated question. Whenever we consider a work as large and seemingly all-embracing as Infinite Jest, we should think about what it excludes and/or marginalizes. There are African-American characters in IJ, but they are without exception minor and/or stereotypical. In terms of memorable characters, this novel is as white as a Woody Allen film. A brief early scene narrated by Clenette in the first person (37-8) seems to promise an expansion of the novel's range into the African-American housing projects of its Boston milieu, but the end of the novel leaves this promise unfulfilled and Clenette never becomes more than a minor resident of Ennet House, an extra, a 'figurant.' In the early scene, Wallace briefly opens a window upon a true American hell a world away from the absurdist pseudotragedies of E.T.A. But that window is just as abruptly closed and never really cracked again. This single scene aside, the color line is a boundary IJ doesn't even attempt to cross.

12. The book's first truly batshit barrage of endnotes comes on page 53 in a paragraph discussing recreational drugs. This is a rare case where Wallace's favorite fallacy (the one about imitative form) serves him well. The footnotes druggily break up the documentary realism of the text, sending the reader to the back of the book and then back to the text in a dopily confused state, not quite remembering the beginning of the sentence he's now reading, forced to read it again, then encountering another superscript numeral, flipping 900 pages to the signified endnote, reading it, flipping 900 back pages to the text, maybe finishing the sentence, maybe encountering yet another endnote. It's enough to give the soberest of readers a taste of pothead consciousness.

A still from Michael Powell's Peeping Tom (1960)

13. William Shakespeare shakes hands with Michael Powell when we read Infinite Jest intertextually. The novel's relationship to Hamlet is obvious (the title, Hal as Hamlet, Tavis as usurping uncle Claudius, James Incandenza as the Ghost, Avril as Gertrude, E.T.A. as Elsinore), so obvious, in fact, that we should be suspicious of it. It seems more a facile parody of Modernist intertextuality than a genuinely powerful and deepening relationship to another work. More important, I think, is the book's less obvious relationship to Michael Powell's great 1960 film Peeping Tom, a movie that reads today like Hitchcock postmodernized. (In one of the flashbacks to James Incandenza's youth, we glimpse several Peeping Tom posters on his bedroom wall [502].) Like Psycho, Peeping Tom is a thriller and shocker, but unlike Psycho it is a completely self-conscious film, commenting directly, not symbolically, upon the medium of film and its potential for sadistic cruelty. In a scene crucial to understanding the film's significance for IJ, we learn that the central character, an obsessive serial killer-cameraman, was in childhood the object, and hence the product, of his father's sadistic filmed experiments. Once again, "They fuck you up, your mum and dad..." It's also worth noting that Hamlet's father didn't do him a bit of good, either.

14. Speaking of intertextuality, Wallace explicitly references the influence theories of Harold Bloom on page 911 and note 366, and his reference is so unaccountably angry and palpably defensive that we can only diagnose a major anxiety of influence on the part of our author/narrator. More seriously, this is Wallace at his most petty, using his novel to score an easy and trendy academic point. (When IJ was written, Bloom was an anti-PC lightning rod and seriously out of fashion in English departments.) Likewise, the book's earlier reference to Bret Easton Ellis is a case of killing a fly with a howitzer. The sad truth is that DFW today, mouldering in his grave, is a more talented writer than BEE (or Bloom, for that matter) ever was.

15. Kate Gompert. Suicidally depressed 21 year-old Kate Gompert is the most uncompromising and affecting character in this entire novel, and perhaps the biggest bone I have to pick with the late Mr. Wallace concerns his failure of her. For this is a case where we actually can speak of an author failing one of his characters. When she is introduced in a 10-page scene beginning on page 68, she seems (like Erdedy) to be destined for a major role in IJ, but (also like Erdedy) we only have a couple scenes and a few brief glimpses of her thereafter. (It occurs to me that in both these scenes DFW is playing with readerly expectations, artificially heightening and then gradually dashing them.) She is a character strong enough to carry an entire novel and to be at least the equal of Hal and Gately in this one, but after the strong intro, Wallace uses her briefly and then drops her cruelly to her death. And the word 'uses' is carefully chosen. Kate Gompert provides the thin, U.H.I.D.-style veil through which DFW tells us all he knows firsthand about the suicidal depression that will eventually kill him. If you read nothing else in Infinite Jest, read pages 692-698, where Wallace dons the mask of Kate Gompert's free indirect narration to write a 12-years premature suicide note. They're some of the most brilliant and moving pages ever written about suicide, and they're well worth the price of the book. When Wallace is done with them, however, he's pretty much done with Kate. A couple hundred pages later she falls unwittingly into the hands of the sadistic "wheelchair assassins" and presumably becomes a "test subject" victim of Infinite Jest V. The character Wallace created deserves better than this; her author fails her.

16. Another note on Wallace's prose. One of his stylistic tics, the sentence-terminal supernumerary adverb, is a sign of pernicious David Markson influence, really. Wallace overvalued Markson's Wittgenstein's Mistress (a book I, obviously, didn't like very much), and Hal's interior monologue in the last 100 pages of the book has a decidedly Marksonian flavor. Compare the paragraph on pages 897-898 that begins "After a time, Sleepy T.P. Peterson..." with any page of Wittgenstein's Mistress, and you'll see what I mean.

17. Coach Schtitt's philosophy of tennis and life provides Wallace with an opportunity to state the novel's thematic core on page 84. (IJ is filled with explicit statements of its themes; Wallace is no obscurantist; he wants his book to be understood; and IJ's not really a difficult novel compared to, say, Gravity's Rainbow or even Sebald's Vertigo. Infinite Jest is too long, but not too hard.) What I'm calling the 'thematic core,' then, is the essential tragic bind of human life, what Schtitt calls "the real gem: life's endless war against the self you cannot live without"(84). That line is Infinite Jest bounded in a nutshell.

18. The first flashback to James Incandenza's childhood (157-169) takes the form of an extraordinary dramatic monologue spoken by Incandenza's father and concerning his own father--a little tennis lesson in the familial etiology of alcoholism and depression. This is one of the many surprises hidden inside Infinite Jest, a novel that turns out to be Sam Shepardishly rich in American monologues--and even includes one Irish monologue that's scatologically, floor-rollingly hilarious.

19. The maternal side of the novel's parent-child theme lies at the heart of the fatally entertaining final film by James Incandenza, Infinite Jest V. Of what does this mysterious, unsurvivable movie consist? By novel's end it seems that most of the film is an apologetic monologue spoken by a dazzlingly beautiful mother-figure to a camera mounted in a crib and giving a baby's-eye view of the woman. Most of the novel's discussions of the film present its content as secondary to its technique, a wobbly lens developed by Incandenza that mimics the blurry vision of infancy. But since yet another of the themes of IJ is the use of technique as a flight from psychological self-investigation (whether that technique be the dogma of Alcoholics Anonymous, the systematic regimens of sports training, or the science of optics), we should probably read 'against' the novel here and think about the extraordinary power of the film's content. It's a powerfully regressive, infantile, infantilizing image that cuts deeply into the viewer's psyche and activates pre-oedipal centers of polymorphous perverse pleasure. Need we wonder why 'subjects' would saw off their own fingers to keep watching this thing? It's simultaneously the most pleasurable and the cruelest film imaginable.

20. Wallace stated in a 1996 interview that the form of the first draft of Infinite Jest (not, importantly, the shorter final draft that became the published book) was based on the Sierpinski gasket, a fractal-like triangular form from which an infinite number of progressively smaller but angularly identical triangles have been removed:

Fragments of this original formal conceit (along with a Sierpinski gasket poster in Pemulis's dormroom) apparently survive in the published version as a fascination with synecdoche and self-similarity (e.g. many of the films described briefly in the Incandenza filmography can be interpreted as miniature versions of the novel in which they are contained, small identical triangles within the larger one; likewise the monologues and self-contained narratives that repeat on a smaller scale the themes and rhythm of the novel as a whole).

21. But it's more helpful to visualize the final published version as a much simpler geometrical form, an ellipse with its twin foci at Hal Incandenza and Don Gately, E.T.A. and Ennet House, the upper class and the underclass. Hal and Don never meet in the book, but the borders between the places and classes they represent are more porous. Both Mario and Hal visit Ennet House (although only Hal enters), Ennet House residents work at E.T.A., some Ennet residents are middle-class professionals. Over the course of the book we can perceive the foci of the ellipse moving closer together, promising to form a perfect circle.

22. That promise remains unfulfilled at the end of the novel. In fact, the ending isn't much of an ending at all, except for Fackelmann, whose horrifying Peeping Tom-meets-Clockwork Orange death is left mostly to the reader's imagination. To any readers disappointed by the inconclusiveness of Wallace's conclusion, I can only scream: What, you expected an ending?! You expected a novel called Infinite Jest to actually end unjestingly?!?! In fact, this novel doesn't end (how could it?), it stops. Its language ceases, but its story continues in Wallace's cleverest and most audacious formal move. The story continues in that great, unwritten, year-long arc of space-time that connects page 981 to page 3, the ending to the beginning (which is also the end of the story). This circularity is the 'infinite' aspect of the book's form, its circular synthesis of endlessness and boundary. And at some point along this unwritten arc, as we know from Hal's flashback and Don's flash-forward in the text, princely Hal meets the recovering Falstaffian Don Gately (the ellipse becomes a circle) to exhume Hal's father and recover the master of Infinite Jest V, probably in an effort to save either Orin or Joelle (or both) from the tortures of the A.F.R.... But none of this actually happens. It's only implied, pointed toward, represented--like everything else in the book.

Finite Notes on INFINITE JEST : part 1

2011-02-17T06:05:00.003-05:00

David Foster Wallace and Gromit
(image stolen from here, with ironic apologies to Michael Ward)

1. This book and I have a history. Long ago, shortly after the last Ice Age (the Vanilla Ice age), when Infinite Jest was first published and hyped to the Moon (hell, to Jupiter and beyond the infinite), I saw the author on Charlie Rose and, to put it mildly, I was not especially impressed. I watched Wallace, with his bandanna and his grad student angst, and I thought: jackass poseur. Nonetheless, something about the interview--and the hype; I'm not immune--led me to pick up his book and give it a try. I read the opening scenes and concluded that IJ was a seriously overrated, and not particularly well-written, late addition to the School of Barth--in short, not worth my time. The book impressed me so little that I eventually gave my copy away. Fast forward about a decade to see me ordering the tenth anniversary edition of IJ from Amazon. Something about the book had stayed in the back of my mind, and I decided to give it another chance. This time I read the first hundred pages before concluding that it was a weak pastiche of Barth, Pynchon, etc. and, as before, not worth the required reading time. I skim-read the bulk of the book, finding a few scenes of interest, and then returned it to the shelf. Four years later--a week and a half ago--I retrieved it and decided to force myself to read the damn thing, the whole damn thing, footnotes (endnotes, technically) and all. Imagine my surprise when at page 150 I realized that I was no longer forcing myself, that the book held me and compelled my forward progress and was (gasp!) actually worth the time. I still have serious criticisms of and reservations about Infinite Jest, and I read the book with some resistance throughout, but this reading has forced me to more positively reevaluate both the book and its author.

2. First things second: You'll need two bookmarks to read IJ properly, one for the text and one for the endnotes. This fact places the novel in rather elite company upon my bookshelf: My only other two-bookmarks-absolutely-required books that I can recall at the moment are The Annotated Lolita and Allen Mandelbaum's great translation of Dante's Divine Comedy (available in three extensively footnoted paperbacks from Bantam Classics). It probably doesn't need to be said that both these works kick IJ's ass--but I said it anyway. And if you're trying to decide which English translation of Dante to read, take Hugh Kenner's advice and mine: choose Mandelbaum.

3. In the beginning is the end. The first scene of Infinite Jest (Hal Incandenza's ill-fated university admissions interview) is chronologically the last scene of the story. This perfect inversion of fabula and syuzhet is the sort of thing that would've caused the Russian Formalists to cream their jeans--if they had worn jeans, and if the Party had approved of cream--but Wallace is doing something more and riskier than mere formalist play. The fact that this scene is the end of the story is not made immediately clear and the reader cannot be certain of it until he has read the final page, but the realization/suspicion came to me somewhere around page 80, and it utterly transformed the tenor of that opening scene. What upon first reading seemed a fairly standard bit of postmodern dark comedy became a much darker and even tragic scene, a tragedy of postmodernity. This movement from comic to tragic recurs in many different scenes throughout the novel and should be considered one of its signature rhetorical devices. It's probably the most effective way in which Wallace critiques postmodern fiction even while writing it.

4. The opening interview scene and the lengthy Erdedy scene that follows hard upon show us, respectively, the best and worst of Wallace as a narrative artist. The interview scene effectively places the reader inside the monad called Hal Incandenza and permits us to feel the pathos of his crippling self-consciousness and surreal inability to communicate (both 'postmodern conditions' par excellence, the latter being one of the novel's major themes; I'm surprised, in fact, that Wallace doesn't explicitly quote Cool Hand Luke at some point, given that throughout Infinite Jest we have scenes of a tragicomic "failure to communicate." He probably does quote it, somewhere), and it achieves all of this in a prose that is both fluid and metaphorically rich. The Erdedy scene, by contrast, finds Wallace in full fallacy-of-imitative-form mode (a mode all too familiar to readers of his late story collection, Oblivion), evoking the obsessed, repetitive, boring life of a drug addict through deliberately boring and repetitive prose. Granted, we are inside Erdedy's consciousness, but the representation of oppressive boring obsession need not itself be oppressively boring. Only one passage in this entire section impressed me: Erdedy sees/imagines a bug crawling in and out of a hole on a girder that supports his stereo and thinks of his stoned self in terms of the bug: "It occurred to him that he would disappear into a hole in a girder inside him that supported something else inside him. He was unsure what the thing inside him was and was unprepared to commit himself to the course of action that would be required to explore the question"(20). Here is the infinity of Erdedy's subjectivity bounded in a nutshell. His overwhelming desire is to disappear into the lack that defines his self, a lack he simultaneously acknowledges and refuses to examine, a refusal aided by the very substances that help him disappear. It's the first appearance of an idea crucial to the novel as a whole: characters seek oblivion in flight not only from the world but from the self, from the psychological traumas that they, Bartleby-like, prefer not to explore, the deep, individual, psychological factors beyond the reach of pop discourses of therapy and recovery. This is the scene's key passage; the rest might as well be silence. I suspect that Wallace places this scene--one of the work's most tedious--close to the beginning as a challenge to the reader. Only those readers who make it out of Erdedy's room can explore the riches hidden beyond.

5. Most of the time, Wallace's prose fails to impress me. I'm not a fan of his hyperactive transitional 'and so then but's, and his like totally like compulsive use of the word 'like' never ceases to annoy me. Even as I read some of Infinite Jest's best sections--and there are many amazing ones that stand out like prime numbers in the novel's endless but not insoluble equation--I usually heard Wallace's prose rattling and buzzing in my mental ear like a mild case of tinnitus. One aspect of the Wallacian style that I find interesting and worthy of deeper thought is its frequent deployment in free indirect narration of 'dictionary' words that the character upon whom the narration is focalized would never use. Poorly educated and unread drug thug Don Gately, for example, uses the adjective 'Nietzschean' at one point. A critic biased against Wallace (James Wood, to pick a name out of thin air) would interpret this as a failure of free indirect narration and congratulate himself on catching DFW in flagrante. But a complete reading of IJ shows us that something much more complex is going on here. Most of the time, Wallacian narration is an interplay of two distinct voices: the voice of the character represented via free indirect narration and the voice of the narrator (who both is and is not, must be and cannot be, Hal Incandenza). Wallace, that is, elaborately constructs a series of free indirect narrative voices only to deliberately puncture their fabrics with alien words. This creates a tension between the characters' and the narrator/author's voices that's more 'realistic' than the elaborate ventriloquism of free indirect or first-person narration. It foregrounds the constructed nature of the text, the linguistic foundation of all its representations. (It's also worth noting here that Wallace defuses potential criticism by foregrounding this very technique late in the book, when the feverish Gately is 'lexically raped' by the wraith of James Incandenza.)

6. One fruitful way to read Infinite Jest is to listen for those moments when it indirectly comments upon itself:

The whole thing is almost too involved to try to take in all at once. It's simply huge. (67)

The whole thing's unpleasant and dry and repetitive and mostly dull. (1012 n.110)

...[I]s the puzzlement and then boredom and and then impatience and then excruciation and then near-rage aroused in the film's audience by the static repetitive final 1/3 of the film aroused for some theoretical-aesthetic end, or is Himself simply an amazingly shitty editor of his own stuff? (947)

It is an index of Wallace's deliberateness as an artist, of the extent to which he knows exactly what he's doing, that some of the harshest criticisms to be levelled against IJ are to be found within the book itself.

7. To state the most obvious and scariest thing about this novel: it's fucking huge. Infinite Jest is a 'loose, baggy monster' (one of the Leavis siblings, I think, on Dickens's huge late works). It's baggier than a pair of hip-hop pants, and its individual parts are hypertrophied like its athlete characters' arms and legs. It has the body of a Dickensian megalosaurus, the oversized legs of a field goal kicker, and a brain the size of the M.I.T. student union. It's so enormous that it excretes almost a hundred pages of endnotes--in which pile of scat some of the book's best and most important passages are to be found.

8. The annotated filmography of James O. Incandenza in the multi-page note 24, for example, is a miniature comic-satirical masterpiece that brings Borges to mind. Incandenza is surely the greatest American avant-garde filmmaker never to have existed. Even if he hadn't created the fatally fascinating Infinite Jest V (and he didn't, of course, due to his aforementioned nonexistence) his reputation would've been secured by the Artaudianly cruel The Joke (two cameras trained on a cinema audience that watches itself onscreen until its self-consciousness turns into rage) and the dialectically mind-blowing Cage III - Free Show, synopsized thus:

The figure of Death...presides over the front entrance of a carnival sideshow whose spectators watch performers undergo unspeakable degradations so grotesquely compelling that the spectators' eyes become larger and larger until the spectators themselves are transformed into gigantic eyeballs in chairs, while on the other side of the sideshow tent the figure of Life...uses a megaphone to invite fairgoers to an exhibition in which, if the fairgoers consent to undergo unspeakable degradations, they can witness ordinary persons gradually turn into gigantic eyeballs. (988 n.24)

It's Hegel's master-slave dialectic transferred to the society of the (sadistic) spectacle, resulting in American literature's most horrible reimagining of Emerson's transcendental 'transparent eyeball.' Romantic nature epiphany becomes sideshow horror in a world where spectation is all.

9. Because Infinite Jest is also a horror novel. Yes, it is screamingly funny at times, and it fits easily into the comic tradition of the novel from Cervantes to Sterne to Joyce to Pynchon (a tradition we might as well call the 'history of the novel,' sidelining the nineteenth-century novel of 'high seriousness' and its social realist descendants as an important aberration, but an aberration nonetheless), but much of its comedy walks a black-comic tightrope and often tumbles into tragedy, and some other scenes give us sheer, unadulterated, nearly unbearable horror: Hal's nightmare of the 'face in the floor' (the novel's scariest moment, worthy of Stephen King at his best), the horrible death of Bobby C., the even more horrible death of Lucien Antitoi--impaled on a broomstick that's forced down his throat in a parody of fellatio and rammed through his gastrointestinal tract until its end protrudes from his anus like a surreal erection, a homophobic execution comparable to the finale of Marlowe's Edward II.

10. And while we're thinking about the nightmarish images of Infinite Jest, let's consider Orin's Magritte-ish oedipal dream in which his mother's disembodied head is bound face-to-Bergmanesque-face with his own, firmly tied like an unremovable phylactery (46-47). If we think about the subterranean connection between this dream and Orin's brother Hal's nightmare of being trapped on a gargantuan tennis court the lines of which demarcate "systems inside systems"(67) too convoluted to comprehend, we might come close to uncovering one of the most important secrets this novel asks about. (See note 10a below.) For IJ is an enormous "systems novel" that concerns itself with the various systems that form and inform the subjectivities of its characters (and by implication, its readers)--sports, the academy, addiction, AA, religion, social class, etc.--and the most fundamental of these systems, the one that the novel repeatedly indicts as the etiological site of psychopathology, is the modern nuclear family. Philip Larkin's "This Be The Verse" might as well be the epigraph to Infinite Jest:

They fuck you up, your mum and dad.
They may not mean to, but they do.
They fill you with the faults they had
And add some extra, just for you.

But they were fucked up in their turn
By fools in old-style hats and coats,
Who half the time were soppy-stern
And half at one another's throats.

Man hands on misery to man.
It deepens like a coastal shelf.
Get out as early as you can,
And don't have any kids yourself.

10a. The following quote from Kundera is probably apposite to any consideration of the relationship between the characters in Infinite Jest and their author:

The characters in my novels are my own unrealized possibilities. That is why I am equally fond of them all and equally horrified by them. Each one has crossed a border that I myself have circumvented. It is that crossed border (the border beyond which my own "I" ends) which attracts me most. For beyond that border begins the secret the novel asks about. The novel is not the author's confession; it is an investigation of human life in the trap the world has become. -- Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being

TO BE CONTINUED

The Paris Review Interviews and KCRW's 'Bookworm' archive online

2011-02-03T17:24:00.000-05:00

I've been spending altogether too much time recently digging around in a couple of amazing online literary interview archives. Most readers already know that a large number of the classic Paris Review Interviews can be read online at no charge. (More fool me for buying two volumes of these interviews a couple of years ago.) The Harold Bloom interview is especially enjoyable. I'll probably be reading my way at random through many of the others over the next several years.

Less well-known is the enormous online archive of audio interviews recorded for Michael Silverblatt's gloriously highbrow and unapologetically intelligent KCRW radio program "Bookworm." Here you can listen to twenty years worth of highly informative 30-minute interviews with the likes of W. G. Sebald (listen to his gorgeous Germano-British accent), Camille Paglia (who gives new meaning to the word 'motormouth;' she seems to have downed a bottle of amphetamines with a Jolt Cola chaser immediately before her 1993 interview), William T. Vollmann, David Foster Wallace, Alexander Theroux, William H. Gass, and just about anyone else a serious reader wants to hear seriously interviewed. And Silverblatt is a very good interviewer, knowledgeable and impressively well-read. Just listen to the first two questions he asks Sebald, and then ask yourself, "Why doesn't this guy have a show on PBS?" (America's best writers deserve better than a few predictable minutes around Charlie Rose's big round table.) Check out the Bookworm archive--but be warned: it's a labyrinth of Daedalus, and you might not find your way out.

Lezama, Arenas, Beauty and Dictatorship: A Quote for Egypt

2011-02-03T13:49:00.000-05:00

Last night I watched from the safety of a television set half a world away as the citizens of Cairo fought for their freedom and--to put it bluntly--their lives against a mob of Hosni Mubarak's paid thugs. (And not particularly well-paid, either. According to news reports reaching the U.S., the going rate for a headbreaker in Cairo is half a chicken. That's exactly how much a human life is worth to Mubarak and his cronies.) As I watched the nighttime battle of stones and Molotov cocktails taking place around the massive Cairo Museum, one of the treasure houses of human civilization, the anti-Mubarak demonstrators on Tahrir Square impressed me as the most courageous people in the world right now. They are risking nothing less than everything in an increasingly desperate struggle to achieve the basic human rights that we in the liberal 'West' take for granted: the right to free elections, freedom of speech and assembly, freedom from arbitrary arrest, freedom from being dragged to a torture chamber and electrocuted. If the defenders of Tahrir Square lose, their leaders will disappear one by one and reappear a few weeks later as broken men and women, the tortured 'confessors' at their own show trials. We have seen this sickening spectacle too many times in too many countries to sit back and watch it happen again--this time in the cradle of our culture. The citizens of Egypt are fighting today against an ugliness that will become even uglier before the present crisis ends. The ugliness of Mubarak's fascism is equivalent to the totalitarian ugliness Reinaldo Arenas writes against in his memoir, Before Night Falls, in a passage paraphrasing the great Cuban poet and novelist Jose Lezama Lima:

A sense of beauty is always dangerous and antagonistic to any dictatorship because it implies a realm extending beyond the limits that a dictatorship can impose on human beings. Beauty is a territory that escapes the control of the political police. Being independent and outside of their domain, beauty is so irritating to dictators that they attempt to destroy it whichever way they can. Under a dictatorship, beauty is always a dissident force, because a dictatorship is itself unaesthetic, grotesque; to a dictator and his agents, the attempt to create beauty is an escapist or reactionary act.

The anti-Mubarak protestors have now become soldiers of freedom, allies of beauty. May they always remain so--even after they win.

A TOMB FOR BORIS DAVIDOVICH by Danilo Kis

2011-02-02T00:05:00.003-05:00

On this fete de groundhog, this 129th anniversary of the birth of James Joyce, I've just finished reading the best-known work of Joyce's Yugoslavian reader, Danilo Kis. Somewhere in Philip Roth's The Ghost Writer, a character remarks upon the historical irony by which Kafka's darkest fantasies (an atmosphere of general paranoia, absurd accusations, arbitrary arrest and execution, secret attic rooms) became the reality of the next generation of European Jews. Kis (whose work was introduced to the English-reading world in the great Penguin 'Writers From The Other Europe' series, edited by Roth) comes at the tragedies of midcentury Europe from the other side. Instead of reading Kafka into reality, Kis tells ostensibly realistic tales in a style that evokes both Kafka and Kafka's Argentine disciple, Borges. And instead of focusing on the crimes of the Nazis (presumably a politically 'safe' subject in Tito's Yugoslavia), Kis here writes of the crimes of our late, unlamented century's other titanic ideological monster, Djugashvili the Terrible. With only one exception, all the stories in A Tomb for Boris Davidovich are variations on a single theme: the tragic irony of Stalinism. Kis explores the terrible ironies that result when an ideal for which you are willing to die is hijacked by people who are even more willing to kill you. (The one story that doesn't deal explicitly with Stalinism, "Dogs and Books," the tale of a 14th-century pogrom, is thematically related to the Stalinist tales and can be understood as an attempt, not entirely successful because too forced and explicit, to thematically expand the book into a more general statement on a 'tragic sense of history.') This is a necessary book--probably more necessary than brilliant. For Kis's variations are of uneven quality, and once you've read the first two, the rest are fairly predictable. Boris begins strongly, with two tales of impressive formal originality and moral force, "The Knife with the Rosewood Handle" and "The Sow that Eats Her Farrow." The next two, "The Mechanical Lions" and "The Magic Card Dealing," contain interesting passages but impressed me less. The title story is very good, an impressive Kafkazation of Koestler's Darkness at Noon with perhaps a dash of the later chapters of 1984 thrown in. The last two tales are shorter and lesser works, although the book's final line, on writing and testicular elephantiasis, is an instant classic. So while A Tomb for Boris Davidovich doesn't impress me as much as it impressed William Vollmann, for example, it's still artistically and historically important enough to demand to be read.

ONLY YESTERDAY: AN INFORMAL HISTORY OF THE 1920'S by Frederick Lewis Allen

2011-01-26T20:35:00.000-05:00

Originally published in 1931, Only Yesterday has aged remarkably well. This cultural portrait of manic Twenties America as seen from the depressive early Thirties remains an essential text for anyone who wants to understand the texture of life among (mostly white, mostly middle-class) Americans in the 1920s. And within that parenthesis is the rub. For Allen largely concerns himself with the white urban bourgeoisie, and his book seriously slights African-American culture, completely ignoring the Harlem Renaissance writers and only superficially mentioning jazz. The white working class is likewise marginalized, portrayed alternately as an either too-violent or too-complacent mob. This is not a work of 'history from above,' and Allen should be commended for breaking with that long-standing tradition, but nor is it Zinn-like 'history from below'; it's definitely written from and to the Oreo-white 'middle' of Twenties and Thirties America. These blind spots are mostly outweighed, however, by the book's journalistic immediacy. Penned soon after the facts it records, this is a 'first rough draft of history' that effectively puts the reader inside the 1920s, when Prohibition reigned and Al Capone ruled, when business boosterism reached levels of comic absurdity and 'Babbittry' became a word. Allen does a surprisingly large amount of debunking, for the myth of the 'Roaring Twenties' seems already to have been well-established by 1931, but Only Yesterday, with its manic energy--this is a work of nonfiction as readable and fast-paced as a best-seller (at least until the latter pages bog down in the minutia of the 1929 Wall Street crash)--also plays a part in the solidification of that myth. Yes, Lindbergh is debunked as a mere "stunt flyer," but the discussions of fads and fashions read like a long series of footnotes to Fitzgerald--and remain highly valuable as such. Long shelves of books have subsequently been written about topics that Allen (often rather impressively) dispatches in a page or paragraph, and as a popular history of the decade, Allen's work has been superseded by Geoffrey Perrett's amazingly good 1982 book, America in the Twenties, which deserves to be considered the standard comprehensive book on its topic, but Allen's book is valuable today not so much for its pioneering role in history writing (Perrett writes that "Only Yesterday virtually created popular social history in the English-speaking world."), as for its telling anecdotes and its inclusion of details that other historians exclude, such as the detailed description of how to start a Model T Ford, a complicated process that involved two controls on the dash, a crank on the front end, and a lot of luck. It's been almost a century since Allen's 'yesterday,' but in passages like this his book still has the power to take us there.

ZIZEK: FOLLOW THE FOLLOWER

2011-01-26T17:43:00.000-05:00

There's a very astute, incisive and philosophically rigorous critique of the Zizek-Lacan critical theory cabal in the sixth chapter of Walter A. Davis's Death's Dream Kingdom: The American Psyche Since 9-11. Davis does plenty of philosophical and psychoanalytic 'heavy lifting' there (in a chapter that also contains one of the clearest critical explications of Lacan I've ever read), so I'll limit this post to a couple of superficial thoughts about Slavoj Zizek's use of popular culture and his position as the reigning rock star of critical theory.

First, Zizek owes much of his Jimmy Page-like status to his use of 'easy' pop culture references to explicate concepts otherwise hidden in the notoriously obscure Amazonian jungle of Jacques Lacan's prose. (Lacan's prose is difficult enough to be worth a parenthetical digression. In one of the footnotes to the book mentioned above, Davis offers this explanation for the difficulties and densities of the Lacanian style: "For Lacan every utterance must gesture in three directions simultaneously: contempt for other thinkers, self-aggrandizement, and the search for opacity.") In Zizek's works, a given theoretical concept--the "obscene supplement," desire, objet petit a--is exemplified via a critical reading of a movie or TV show or some other popular phenomenon. (One of Zizek's more ingenious examples of obscene supplementation involves a deconstructive reading of The Sound of Music that shows how the film's German villains are inscribed as anti-semitic caricatures of Jews while its heroic Austrians are inscribed using the imagery of fascist kitsch.) This is a fun and powerful way to teach Lacan, and Zizek has spent the past quarter-century producing book after book in which Lacan's ideas are exemplified via the works of everyone from Alfred Hitchcock to Halldor Laxness. But all of Zizek's cultural references, high and low, are forced to follow an unwritten but adamantine commandment: Thou shalt only exemplify Lacan; Thou shalt never criticize Him. Once Hitchcock's Vertigo, for example, has served its Zizekian exemplary purpose, Zizek metals his pedal and speeds on to the next example before the complexities of Vertigo (or any other cultural artifact) lead him into reflections that might undermine Lacan or Hegel or Marx. Zizek takes big Quarter Pounder-size bites out of art, but he never allows artworks to bite back. This is the fundamental superficiality of Zizek's relationship to art: artworks are only and always exemplary; they can never be permitted to criticize the Master. (I hereby challenge anyone to find a single example in all of Zizek's work that proves this statement wrong. Show me one time--just one!--when Slavoj permits a work of art, or even a work of kitsch, to undermine or contradict or even critique a basic Lacanian-Zizekian concept.)

With regard to Zizek's Claptonesque status in Theoryland (Tito-era walls all over Slovenia must surely wear the graffito "Slavoj is God," n'est-ce pas?), I think that as a popularizer of Lacan and an original leftist thinker he deserves all the attention he can get. But he should not be considered a 'leader' of anyone or anything (or for that matter, of any Ding). Lacan was arguably a 'leading' figure; while he worked in the wake of Freud and would've had no career without his illustrious Austrian predecessor, his Structuralization of Freudian thought was a powerful and arguably revolutionary move--not revolutionary in Freud's 'Copernican' sense, perhaps, but at least it allowed him to credibly play the role of leader of a recognizable ecole. Zizek, on the other hand, never really rises above the level of Lacanian explicator. He's a born follower, and his academic followers around the world are all playing the time-honored game of Follow The Follower. Like a parody of Lacan's theory of language as an unending chain of signifiers, the Zizekians follow Zizek who follows Lacan who follows Freud, and all their reams of Zizekian signifiers, full of Lacanian sound and fury, signify--you guessed it--nothing much.