Category: literature

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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.

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Will I never learn?

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 by Anna Politkovskaya, some gifts for friends, and a couple of discounted comic collections. I began my trek to the checkout line, resigned to carry both a bag of books and my work-bag (laptop inside) a few blocks along 13th to my friend’s place, where I would pick up my overstuffed overnight bag (Amy stayed last night too, which cut her morning commute from 2 hours to 10 minutes) before walking back down the block to the car.

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.

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Explain that to St. Peter, mon General

It’s all a bit of a blur after I invented wine.

–Bacchus

Doing the Islands with Bacchus, a collection of comics by Eddie Campbell, is one of my all-time faves. Consisting of a travelogue of Bacchus and friends around the Greek islands, the comics relate the “real” stories behind some of the Greek myths, along with digressions on the history of fashion, the art of vinoculture, the discovery of champagne, and the nature of the afterlife (or afterdeath, as it turns out). Importantly, Campbell achieves this while keeping his characters as characters. That is, they don’t simply recite facts, but rather bring different perspectives and styles.

The Last of the Summer Wine, a 24-pager narrated by Bacchus’ companion Simpson as he, Bacchus and Hermes travel to Naxos by boat, is a marvel. The story manages to convey the glory of ancient Greek culture, make wry observations (verbal and visual) about the power of myth, and lead to a wonderfully poignant conclusion about the essence of love. Maybe it’s that inner classics-geek I’ve been referring to lately, but the final page of that comic always chokes me up.

I bring all this up because Campbell recently wrote about one of his major influences on those comic strips: the books of Walter James. I’d never heard of James before this, and with good reason. Sez Campbell, “He was an Australian wine maker who wrote several volumes of diaristic thoughts on just about everything, but mostly about winemaking and his enthusiasm for reading. They were published between 1949 (Barrel and Book,) and 1957 (Antipasto) and amounted to six volumes, of which I’ve managed to find four.”

Give Eddie’s post a read, take some delight in the excerpts of James’ writing, and tip a little libation to Bacchus, wouldja?

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Monday Morning Montaigne

I was pretty excited when I saw that the next essay in my Montaigne collection was Of Friendship. I saved it till Saturday morning, figuring I’d be able to spend the day ruminating on his ideas of the subject and how they jibed — or failed to jibe — with my own. Unfortunately, I found this essay pretty unenlightening and, well, boring.

Of Friendship is intended to introduce poems by Montaigne’s dead friend, political philosopher Etienne de La Boetie, but what it focuses on is the character of their “once in three centuries” friendship. In the process of describing the intense, four-year relationship the men shared, Montaigne proceeds to dismiss the possibility of true friendship between a man and

  • his dad (too much respect)
  • his brother (too much sibling rivalry)
  • a girl (too much lust; a 16th century version of When Harry Met Sally)
  • a fag (see above, and note “[T]hat other, licentious Greek love is justly abhorred by our morality.”)
  • more than one guy (too much sharing)

So I was let down, especially because my brother and my wife are two of my closest friends, there are a number of other friends I’d (essentially) go to the end of the earth for, and I once contemplated having two guys killed to avenge a brutal assault on a queer friend of mine (not that we shared that other, licentious Greek love or anything).

Anyway, rather than pass on any excerpts from that stuff, I thought I’d share with you the opening to the essay. It mirrors my own tendency to start off strong and end up all over the darned place:

As I was considering the way a painter I employ went about his work, I had a mind to imitate him. He chooses the best spot, the middle of each wall, to put a picture labored over with all his skill, and the empty space around it he fills with grotesques, which are fantastic paintings whose only charm lies in their variety and strangeness. And what are these essays of mine, in truth, but grotesques and monstrous bodies, pieced together of divers members, without definite shape, having no order, sequence or proportion other than accidental?

“A lovely woman tapers off into a fish.” [Horace]

I do indeed go along with my painter in this second point, but I fall short in the first and better part; for my ability does not go far enough for me to dare to undertake a rich, polished picture, formed according to art.

Fortunately, the next few essays are Of Moderation, Of Cannibals, and Of the Custom of Wearing Clothes, so I figure there should be some more entertaining posts in the weeks ahead.