Category: literature

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April Supergenius’ Day!

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.

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I guess that’s a quintessential “you had to be there” comment, but hey. Here’s to friends.

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Monday Morning Montaigne: Of Cato the Younger

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.

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Response and responsibilities

For a month or two, Slate has been running excerpts from Clive James’ new book, Cultural Amnesia, which it describes as a “re-examination of intellectuals, artists, and thinkers who helped shape the 20th century.” The excerpts are presented as A-Z profiles, and some are compelling enough that I put the book on my Amazon Wish List. (However, since I know I won’t get around to reading it for quite a while, I’m figuring I’ll end up buying the paperback in 2008 or ’09. Or I’ll find a remainder/surplus copy at the Strand, as is my wont.)

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.

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Lynch Mob

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.