A podcast about books & life — not necessarily in that order
We had a happy little 65th birthday party last night for my longtime friend Chip Delany. I’ve known him for a less than a decade, now that I think about it, but I guess that’s pretty long. Anyway, we had a lovely meal at a little restaurant called Vince & Eddie’s, and bantered about all sorts of subjects, including American Idol, Ecstasy, and Equine Therapy.
I guess that’s a quintessential “you had to be there” comment, but hey. Here’s to friends.
Yeah, yeah, I know: who cares about what Montaigne has to say about Cato the Younger? Well, as usual, M. uses the occasion of a brief (3+ pages) essay on Cato to digress into the nature and impact of poetry.
The essay begins with a gorgeous little passage about M.’s unwillingness to judge other people by using himself as a baseline:
I believe in and conceive a thousand contrary ways of life; and in contrast with the common run of men, I more easily admit difference than resemblance between us. I am as ready as you please to acquit another man from sharing my conditions and principles. I consider him simply in himself, without relation to others; I mold him to his own model.
From here, there’s a little digression about how virtue doesn’t exist in “modern times,” which unfortunately put me in mind of the great Ali G monologue about “Respek”:
Respek is important. Da sad ting is, there is so little respek left in the world that if you look up the word in the dictionary, you’ll find it’s been taken out. You should learn to Respek everyone: animals, children, bitches, mingers, spazmos, lezzies, fatty boombas, and even gaylords. So to all you lot out there, but mainly to the normal people: Respek, westside.
But that gets us off the subject, namely Montaigne’s vivid description of poetry, its audience, its critics and the chain of art:
We have many more poets than judges and interpreters of poetry. It is easier to create it than to understand it. On a certain low level it can be judged by precepts and by art. But the good, supreme, divine poetry is above the rules and reason. Whoever discerns its beauty with a firm, sedate gaze does not see it, any more than he sees the splendor of a lightning flash. It does not persuade our judgment, it ravishes and overwhelms it.
The frenzy that goads the man who can penetrate it also strikes a third person on hearing him discuss it and recite it, as a magnet not only attracts a needle but infuses into it its own faculty of attracting others. And it is seen more clearly in the theater that the sacred inspiration of the muses, after first stirring the poet to anger, sorrow and hatred and transporting him out of himself wherever they will, then through the poet strikes the actor, and through the actor consecutively a whole crowd. It is the chain of our needles, hanging one form the other.
Booyakasha.
Intrepid Comics Reporter and VM pal Tom Spurgeon just posted a list of the Top 50 Comics from 2006. I’m nowhere near as devoted a comics reader as I used to be, but it’s pretty gratifying to see so many worthy projects out there.
For a month or two, Slate has been running excerpts from Clive James’ new book, Cultural Amnesia
I thought the Terry Gilliam one went off the rails a bit, pursuing a discussion of torture that probably could have been written without including Gilliam’s masterpiece, but it’s still an engaging essay. With a number of the other essays, James appears to be pursuing the question of artists’ responsibilities in the world, vis a vis the political tumult of the 20th century. (It’s not only about artists, but they seem well represented in the 110 profiles the book contains.)
Thus, the discussion of Borges has to get at his relationship with Argentina’s junta, while the take-no-prisoners profile of Sartre posted today questions the nature of JP’s resistance during the war as well as his avoidance of the truth about the Soviet Union. (It also touches on the subject of the necessity of bad writing, a favorite topic of mine.)
The excerpt that I enjoyed the most — I haven’t read them all — is the one discussing Rilke and Brecht, even though I haven’t read much of Rilke beyond his poetry and know nothing of Brecht’s work. The essay contrasts Rilke’s art-for-art’s-sake with Brecht’s art-as-politics, and finds Brecht wanting. (Okay, it finds Brecht a noxious scumbag.) But James goes on to make an interesting and subtle point about the relation between the artist — particularly the ‘word artist’ — and his beliefs, and perhaps between the artist and the audience.
Give it a read (and go check out some of the others) and let me know what you think.
If you haven’t read the comics of Jim Woodring, your consciousness has probably not been adjusted into a position that will enable you to appreciate the spring tour of Pupshaw & Pupshaw.
Please read The Frank Book
Official VM buddy Paul Di Filippo has joined (and helped launch) a new blog: The Inferior 4!
His co-conspirators include Liz Hand, Paul Witcover and Lucius Shepard! Of the three, I’ve only read work by Shepard before, but I’m sure they’ll provide some entertaining posts, so check ’em out!
(Oh, and here’s the ref for the name of their blog)
Even though it’s been a hectic week, I’ve managed to farm up more interesting links that I just didn’t have time to write about!
Continue reading “Unrequired Reading: Mar. 23, 2007”
I was grooving through Guy Rundle’s review of Steven Soderbergh’s recent film noir, The Good German, for a while. I thought the writer did a good job of explaining why the film is not the experimental triumph some critics have lauded it as, but rather a nice little mannerist exercise:
You could say it’s an interesting experiment, but the trouble is we already knew what it establishes. We’ve been theorising film noir for a half-century now, and no genre in cinema history has been more written about. In other words, The Good German is not an essay in experimentation, but in mannerism — the characteristic of mannerism in any art form being the exhaustive exploration of permutations for their own sake, beyond any usefulness they might once have possessed. Mannerism tends to break out when there has been a tremendous burst of artistic innovation and quality — as there was in Hollywood in the Thirties and Forties, and again in the Seventies — and a way to further revolutionise the form has not yet been fully conceived.
I thought he was making a good argument against overpraising movies such as Far From Heaven and Kill Bill; I enjoyed the latter, mainly for its affection for trashy movies. It wasn’t high art, and it had some dull moments, but it entertained me.
That said, Rundle lost me when he tried to compare the development of movies to the novel. He complains that cinema is stuck in “the existing framework of popular film – that of externalised third-person realism – has been utterly exhausted in the 70 years since the classic Hollywood style came together.”
What does it need to do? Go Joycean!
The next step — a popular cinema that incorporates the significant representation of internal psychological states, shifting points of view, discontinuous story as more than novelty elements within a traditional presentation — has not yet been substantially attempted.
And who’s going to lead the way? David Lynch! [insert sound of record-needle skipping off its groove here]
In that respect it’s no coincidence that the one director to come from outside the film world — David Lynch, a one-time surrealist painter — has been the only mainstream director to at least make the attempt at such a leap into the full incorporation of non-realist techniques into popular genres. But by now half the movies in the multiplex should be using the techniques that Lynch and others have developed in works such as Lost Highway and Inland Empire.
Wow. I don’t know where to begin. I can understand complaining that art films should be taking more chances, but to complain that big budget multiplex films should be incorporating techniques from Lost Highway is mind-blowing. I’ve seen my share of attempts at “portraying psychological reality” in moderate-budget movies (like In the Cut and Demonlover) and let me tell you: they make for awful, self-indulgent movies with storytelling that comes off as arbitrary and half-assed.
Moreover, the reason they’re not part of “popular cinema” is because the public avoids these flicks in droves. Which is to say, I can understand blasting the critical fawning over mannerist exercises, but I don’t see how that leads to the thesis that hundred-million-dollar movies (the aforementioned multiplex flicks) need to venture into the realm of “non-realism.”
In fact, you could argue that the implausibility and impossible action sequences are a filmic reaction against “realism,” but I’m just talking outta my butt.
Oh, sure, I know you all think it’s easy being me. I know how you envy the dashing, romantic, debonair life of a pharmaceutical trade magazine editor who lives in a quiet, no-restaurant town a little beyond the suburbs. But it’s not all wine and roses, I tellya!
Take today, for example. Last night, I crashed at a friend’s apartment on 13th St. so I could get to an 8:30am presentation at the Waldorf. No problem, except that the presentation went on till noon with a short coffee break. That ran out of coffee. So I grabbed some scorched Starbucks in the lobby and figured I’d get something to eat on the way back down to the garage where I’d parked the night before.
Unfortunately, it was awfully cold out, and I’d forgotten that there aren’t any restaurants up around the Waldorf. I figured I’d pass on the street-meat kiosk, since I wouldn’t have anywhere to sit down and eat, and caught a cab down to 13th St.
Perhaps I was getting a little punchy with hunger, but I thought, “Well, as long as I’m in the area, I may as well stop in at the Strand on the way back to the car.”
And that’s where my troubles began.
See, dear reader, it’s one thing for me to go without food (and with crappy coffee) for a while. It’s another to be in a low blood sugar mode while walking around a giant used bookstore.
Now, I’ve never been a huge fan of the Strand, in part because it’s not a very serendipitous bookstore for me. For some reason, I can’t just meander around, pick something up, and start unspooling creative threads all around the labyrinth of the mythocreative mind. Maybe the shelves are too tall in the sides of the store, or the selections are too extensive. I’m not sure. But I have far greater luck when I go to a place like the Montclair Book Center.
That said, I usually find books to buy at the Strand. I just don’t find inspiration.
So I picked up a bunch of books today, including a collection of journalism about Chechnya
And that’s when I saw it:
Yep: 11 volumes of the 20-volume Complete Works of George Orwell edited by Peter Davison (reviews here). Never released in the U.S., and exorbitantly expensive to order from the UK.
So, minutes later, I found myself slinging my work-bag over my shoulder and hauling 2 enormous bags of books down 13th St. Where the overstuffed overnight bag awaited. Somehow, I got back down the block with all 4 bags; my slanted shoulders were not happy and kept shrugging the non-Strand bags off. But I got to the garage, picked up my car, and figured I’d just get out of NYC and get something to eat back in NJ.
I spent the next 45 minutes sitting in various stages of traffic and regretting that decision. Only two things got me through the trip home: the promise of White Manna and Howard Stern playing an audio clip of David O. Russell flipping out on Lily Tomlin. And $125 in Orwell books. Okay, so maybe it is pretty easy being me. I’ll shut up now.