Guy's Library

New Article Online Today

2012-02-07T17:43:00.004-05:00

I've got a new essay up at Bookslut today. This one looks at the life and career of Stefan Zweig:

Most literary revivals fail. Some don't -- sometimes Edmund Wilson edits a few posthumous volumes of F. Scott Fitzgerald's work and succeeds in saving the author of The Great Gatsby from oblivion. But most "lost" writers stay that way, despite the efforts of the editors, publishers, and critics who try and reintroduce them. Stefan Zweig is not quite obscure in the English-speaking world -- several of his books remain in print and he still attracts high-profile fans like Joan Acocella, Clive James, and the late John Geilguld -- but he seems forever perched on the cusp of a revival that never quite comes.

You can read the whole think here. Enjoy!

A Quick Update, and a New Essay

2012-01-24T11:50:00.004-05:00

I had hoped to get the new version of the site going by now, but things have been crazy so... Anyway, to tide you over, I have new essay up at The Millions today called Fragmentary: Writing in a Digital Age. I actually wrote another piece for them a few months back, celebrating Shakespeare's Henry V on St. Crispin's Day.

If you're new to the site, I've got some links over on the right to some selected pieces elsewhere online. I'd especially encourage you to check out my article archive at Bookslut, which has got a lot of my reviews from the last few years. Thanks!

Changes Coming

2011-06-18T18:53:00.003-04:00

The blog is going to remain dark a little longer. I have an idea for a new iteration of the site, and will probably not resume posting until it is fleshed out. In the meantime, you should follow me on Twitter, for all my latest book-related thoughts.

New Article Online Today

2011-06-06T20:26:00.002-04:00

Hello. I wanted to check in to let everyone know about a new article I have at Bookslut. This one is a feature looking at the work of Victor Serge:

It would be a stretch to say that this is Victor Serge’s moment -- he remains largely unknown to the general public -- but his work is certainly enjoying more attention now than it has for quite a while, especially in North America. Though never the household name his fans and supporters George Orwell and Andre Gide were, Serge holds an important place in twentieth century letters. After all, Wallace Stevens wrote poetry about him, and no less a personage than Susan Sontag declared him to be “one of the most compelling of twentieth century ethical and literary heroes.” He participated in almost every major radical political movement of the first half of the twentieth century, from the Russian Revolution, to the Spanish Civil War, to the French Resistance during World War II, before dying in Mexico in 1947, isolated and broke. In fact, one of the reasons Serge isn’t more widely read is that details of his fascinating biography sometimes overwhelm any discussion of his writing.

Born Victor Kibalchich, politics dominated his life literally from the beginning -- he was born in Belgium only because his anti-czarist parents had been exiled from their Russian homeland. Serge saw himself first and foremost as a revolutionary, beginning his career with the European anarchist movement before traveling to Russia in 1919 to join the Bolsheviks. Most of his career was spent writing nonfiction tracts in favor of revolution, or in advancing radical ideas. During the early days of the Soviet Union, Serge worked for the Communist International (Comintern), writing propaganda on behalf of the Party. Despite his early, vocal support for the Soviet state, however, Serge became one of Stalin’s earliest and most ardent critics -- he is reputed to be the first person to call the Soviet Union a “totalitarian state” -- which led to his repeated imprisonment and, in 1936, he was permanently exiled from the USSR.

Serge first turned to fiction during his long battle against Stalin, beginning his first novel, 1930’s Men in Prison, at the age of thirty-nine. Though he came to the form late, Serge’s novels are among his most powerful, and most significant, works, and in recent years, his fiction has finally begun to earn him a wider audience.

Read the full article here. Thanks!

I'm still alive

2011-05-17T17:46:00.002-04:00

Sorry blogging's been so light. I've got some other projects going on, and they've been eating up my time. I'll be back blogging soon, but In the meantime you can follow me on Twitter here.

Song of the Week

2011-04-22T18:28:00.004-04:00

I saw PJ Harvey twice this week, so I figured I'd make "Down By the Water" song of the week:

On Rereading and Rereading Again

2011-04-18T20:20:00.005-04:00

I've talked a lot about Faulkner lately, but I've got two reviews on Bookslut this month. I wanted to touch on the other briefly. John Armstrong's In Search of Civilization: Remaking a Tarnished Idea makes an effort to revitalize discussion of the concept of "civilization." The thing that struck me most about the book was Armstrong's discussion of rereading, a subject that is important to me too. As I say in the piece:

Armstrong wants us to invest all experience with the seriousness with which an artist invests her work.

This seriousness can often be downright countercultural, such as when he examines the reading habits of the artist Poussin. In contrast to contemporary readers, who have a limitless digital library available to them online, the painter is said to have owned only nineteen books, which he reread continuously. Armstrong calls this a “beguiling” situation, and meditates on the virtues of rereading: “Rereading [books] allows for the thoughts in them and one’s own thoughts to grow together; for the secrets of the works to be carefully and slowly appraised, for the content to be thought over and thought through.” The point is not that the reader should emulate Poussin and limit oneself to only a handful of books, but that Poussin’s example offers an inspiration for us to reread more ourselves.

I enjoy reading new books, of course. But there is something profound about returning to the same books over and over again. We usually have our most profound conversations with friends and loved once. In part, this is because we already know their thinking so well, and that gives us a certain freedom to push an argument we might not have otherwise--we have already gotten the basics out of the way and are able to dive deeper, building on previous conversations and experiences together.

Books are the same way--each reading builds on the last, allowing us to see something new in the text we weren't ready for the first time around. It allows a certain intimacy with the work. As Armstrong points out, "the thoughts in [books we reread] and [our] own thoughts to grow together" over time, as each reading allows to go further and further into a given text. Which in turns helps us to develop our own thoughts. Whether you call it "civilized" or not is up to you, but it is certainly valuable.

A Man of the World

2011-04-17T18:17:00.006-04:00

Last post, I zeroed in on a small part of my review of the anthology Faulkner and His Critics (which you can read at Bookslut). I wanted to touch on that same passage again:

...one can’t help but think that it would be equally interesting to read Faulkner’s work alongside that of writers such as Mario Vargas Llosa, to expand the conversation in a way that might shed light on both Faulkner’s influence on contemporary writing and how his work is read outside the United States. Unfortunately, this largely falls outside contemporary academic concerns, so it is not addressed in Faulkner and His Critics.

There is a logic behind this--literature relies heavily on the use of language, and reading in translation means that you are only seeing a writer's use of language via an intermediary (namely the translator). It's entirely reasonable for an academic expert to be sensitive to that problem, and to concentrate on works written in the language she herself is expert in.

But in the case of Faulkner, it is a mistake. A number of Latin American writers in particular--not only Vargas Llosa, but Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Jorge Luis Borges, and others--refer to his work in some way, and ignoring them leads to a diminished reading of Faulkner's work. That's not a novel insight--a number of critics have looked at Faulkner's influence abroad, particularly on Latin American authors. But, apparently it is still possible to put together an anthology about one of our most "international" writers and not once manage to mention anyone working in another language.

Writing in translation--especially that written outside of Western Europe--is overlooked in the US. And that's too bad. People often blame the American publishing industry for this problem, but it's broader than that (after all, Faulkner and His Critics is not a product of corporate publishing). Each of us as readers ought to keep this in mind--because it's really easy to perpetuate this mistake in our own reading, sticking to books in our native tongue because they are more accessible. This not only deprives us of reading some great works, but makes our conversations about writing narrower than they should be.

Faulkner and His Descendants

2011-04-14T20:47:00.004-04:00

I wanted to return to my review of Faulkner and His Critics again tonight. One thing that disappointed me about the anthology was that, with the exception of Erik Dussere’s essay “Accounting for Slavery: Economic Narratives in Morrison and Faulkner," none of the pieces talked about Faulkner's relationship to writers that came after him:

While this makes sense -- both New Criticism and the literary theories that followed it are very rooted in “the text” itself -- it is a big missed opportunity. ...one can’t help but think that it would be... interesting to read Faulkner’s work alongside that of writers such as Mario Vargas Llosa, to expand the conversation in a way that might shed light on both Faulkner’s influence on contemporary writing and how his work is read outside the United States. Unfortunately, this largely falls outside contemporary academic concerns, so it is not addressed in Faulkner and His Critics.

Here, I'm thinking of a novel like Vargas Llosa's The Green House, where the destruction of a brothel both has unforeseen consequences stretching decades into the future and symbolizes the decay of a particular kind of small-town life (here in Peru instead of Mississippi). Vargas Llosa takes Faulkner's observation about the way the past can crowd into our everyday lives and expands on it, showing how different kinds of institutions can both become and perpetuate moral and literal corruption.

Faulkner always puts me in mind of other writers. Think of Ralph Ellison. Faulkner was the defining American modernist of his era and Ellison was the defining American modernist of the generation after. As Harold Bloom notes in How to Read and Why, Ellison's Invisible Man "fuses naturalism and symbolism in his novel, rather has Faulkner did in As I Lay Dying." And of course, Ellison often conceded Faulkner was an influence on his work. When I read Invisible Man last year, Faulkner was close to my mind often. And now, when I return to Faulkner, Ellison's book will be coming with me, too.

I mention this because it illustrates that Faulkner's writing (all good writing) is a living thing--something that is part of contemporary literature, even though Faulkner himself is gone. That isn't a particularly academic point, and as a result I am not surprised to see it unpreemphasized in an academic collection. But it's an important part of what makes me return to Faulkner's work.

Faulkner and Beauty

2011-04-12T15:59:00.006-04:00

Recently I reviewed Faulkner and His Critics for Bookslut. I wanted to return to that book now, to touch on something that didn't make it into my article.

In his essay "'So I, who had never had a war...': William Faulkner, War, and the Modern Imagination" Donald Kartiganer makes the blunt claim that Absalom, Absalom! is "Faulkner's greatest novel." This is interesting in part because it puts to lie the idea that contemporary (Kartiganer published the piece in 1998) academic critics never make judgments of quality, but it is more important because it underscores the way Absalom, Absalom! looms over the rest of the collection. Four (out of nineteen) essays are devoted specifically to that novel, while another three also address the book in some way, making it the most discussed work in the anthology.

I think this makes sense--I agree with Kartiganer that Absalom, Absalom! is Faulkner's greatest achievement. This is the kind of statement that takes time to defend, and a blog is not the best place to do it. But I wanted to bring it up, and at least point out the novel's greatest strengths, in the hopes it will encourage someone to read (or reread) it. Absalom, Absalom! is an epic work, tracking the Sutpen clan across several generations, from their humble origins, to the social and economic successes of the family patriarch, Thomas Sutpen, to the family's post-Civil War decline. It deals with class, race, and Freudian themes. It is ambitious and intellectually deep. But none of that makes it Faulkner's greatest book.

It is, quite simply, beautiful. Faulkner's novels always contain well-wrought language, and Absalom, Absalom! is where his command of English is at its peak. And that is what makes it such an essential read. Take any sentence, whether it be elevated--"God may mark every sparrow, but we do not pretend to be God, you see."--or base--"'He chose. He chose lechery. So do I. But go on.'"--and it will be striking. I care a great deal about characters, I care a great deal about ideas--but what makes a book truly great is its use of language.

Good writing uses language to create a truly viable world between two pages. I suppose you could call this the "sublime," if you're in the mood to sound like a 1950s English professor--but a better description would be "consuming"--in the sense that the words envelop the reader, pulling her into the world of the book. It's actually really simple--Absalom, Absalom! moves me because I find it beautiful, the same way I find Kandinsky's Improvisation 28 (second version) beautiful. It strikes me as important to say that sometimes--that writing moves us because we find it beautiful--precisely because it is such a difficult experience to describe (think how hard it is to define "beauty"). It is always the simple things we are at risk of forgetting. And so we need to keep reminding ourselves of them.

Two Reviews

2011-04-04T19:49:00.002-04:00

I've got two new reviews up at Bookslut today. I wanted to give a little preview of them here on the site. The first looks at the philosopher John Armstrong's In Search of Civilization:

John Armstrong sets a difficult task for himself in his latest book, In Search of Civilization: Remaking a Tarnished Idea. Right up front he acknowledges that, “with the possible exception of God, civilization is the grandest, most ambitious idea that humanity has devised.” All the same, the word makes a lot of people uncomfortable, due to its past associations with colonialism and imperialism. Unlike some of his fellow philosophers, however, Armstrong is unwilling to give up on “civilization” as an ideal, seeking instead to redefine the term in a way that emphasizes its greatest strengths while rescuing it from the “bad company” it has sometimes kept.

The second focuses on Faulkner and His Critics, a new collection about William Faulkner drawn from the pages of Modern Fiction studies and edited by John N. Duvall:

William Faulkner is one of the defining figures of American modernism, so it’s no surprise that Modern Fiction Studies, a journal dedicated to modern and contemporary literature, would publish a book focused on his work. Faulkner and His Critics collects more than half a century’s worth of MFS essays about the Nobel Laureate, exploring all of his major novels. It is a dense, occasionally difficult book, geared at a somewhat narrow academic audience, but it is also well organized and some of the pieces are very illuminating. Editor John N. Duvall, who also edits MFS itself, has assembled the collection thematically, instead of by date of publication, to avoid the trap of “tell[ing] a familiar story of the changing critical reading practices over the last six decades.” Duvall sees four major concerns among Faulkner’s critics -- myth/religion, temporality/history, gender/race, and modernism/modernist technique -- and groups the essays accordingly.

Read them both here and here.

Song of the Week

2011-04-01T18:59:00.005-04:00

One reason blogging was so light this week is that I went to see LCD Soundsystem on Tuesday and it took me several days to recover from all the lost sleep. The band's last show is this weekend, and as a "goodbye," I'm posting "New York I Love You, But You're Bringing Me Down" as song of the week:

More Google

2011-04-01T16:10:00.003-04:00

See Part One here

I wanted to return to the Google Book settlement today. Last time I looked at supporters of the court decision invalidating the settlement. Today I wanted to spotlight some people who disagreed. The most adamant defense of the settlement I've found comes from Wired's Ryan Singel, who thinks "the world will be poorer for the decision.":

So here we have it. Google was naughty for not asking permission from every schmuck in the world who owns a copyright, before it dared to try to create the library of the future. A library that would let anyone with a net connection — rich, poor, blind and sighted alike — search, sample, read and buy nearly any book ever published (at least those published in the United States).

But it’s exactly that naughtiness that allows innovation to flourish, despite copyright holder’s claims to own every aspect of their work — as we’ve seen in the development of player pianos, radio, television, cable and satellite broadcasting, as well as online search and media companies...Google already has a de facto search monopoly in the U.S. because its search engine is markedly better than those of its competitors. And even without the settlement, Google will continue to include in its search results snippets from the books it has scanned without permission. Blocking Google from selling and displaying orphan books won’t prevent Google from retaining 70 percent search-market share.

I agree with Singel that fair use ought to cover Google's Book Search feature--which displays small snippets of books based on a keyword search. But I strongly disagree with other parts of this article (more on that later). A more interesting point is made by the libertarian blogger Julian Sanchez, who says:

Instead of ginning up exceptions to a general prohibition on copying just to permit publicly valuable use of content, maybe we should just admit that “copying” no longer makes sense as a primary locus of intellectual property regulation...The thing to bear in mind is that the particular regulatory trigger is usually a proxy for some more complicated underlying set of interests. If a technological change means a set of activities that were previously unregulated are now effectively highly regulated (or vice versa), we should think very hard about whether we want to preserve the existing formal architecture or—as I think will usually be the case—the same balance of interests.

Unlike Singel, however, Sanchez get the underlying point of the decision, saying in a later post:

The ruling rejecting the Google Books settlement suggests, plausibly enough, that any general solution to the problem of orphan works is more properly the task of Congress than any kind of private agreement. I’ll admit to being a bit puzzled about why this hasn’t already happened. I take it for granted that our current lunatic copyright policy can be adequately explained by the fact that concentrated incumbent entities—RIAA and MPAA—are in a better position than dispersed consumers and amateur creators to lobby for legislation reflecting their (perceived) interests. But it seems like everyone ought to have an interest in resolving the orphan works problem. Content owned by incumbent content firms—and especially content currently generating revenue—is by definition not “orphan works.”

Sanchez doesn't really dispute the decision, so much as use it an an occaison to look at copyright in a different way. Which is a good idea.

More to come

Just Google It

2011-03-28T21:20:00.003-04:00

I've been meaning to post about the collapse of the Google Books settlement for quite a while now. Basically, I haven't had time to put together a long post, so I kept putting it off. But now I figure I can always start small, and then continue over the next few days.

Here are the basics, for those who don't already know (per the NY Times):

The company’s plan to digitize every book ever published and make them widely available was derailed on Tuesday when a federal judge in New York rejected a sweeping $125 million legal settlement the company had worked out with groups representing authors and publishers... [C]iting copyright, antitrust and other concerns, Judge Denny Chin said that the settlement went too far. He said it would have granted Google a “de facto monopoly” and the right to profit from books without the permission of copyright owners.

People are still processing what this means--there's a lot of uncertainty, as this report from Publishers Weekly makes clear. But Chin's ruling has generated some applause from the book world. For example, Dennis Loy Johnson at Melville House has declared, many of us are clear on the fact that overall, the decision is a very good thing for book culture." And Robert Darnton took the opportunity to call for a noncommercial replacement:

A coalition of foundations could come up with the money (estimates of digitizing one page vary enormously, from 10 cents to $10 or more), and a coalition of research libraries could supply the books. The library would respect copyright, of course, and it probably would exclude works that are now in print unless their authors wanted to make them available. It would include orphan books, assuming that Congress passed legislation to free them for non-commercial use in a genuinely public library.

More to come

Song of the Week

2011-03-25T19:04:00.003-04:00

This week's song is "Bellbottoms" by the Jon Spencer Blues Explosion:

Talking Translations

2011-03-24T21:05:00.006-04:00

The Best Translated Book Award finalists were announced today. As you can probably guess, the award is for the best new translation/translated book to appear in the US. The award attracted some attention in October when Melville House, publishers of last year's winner, decided to boycott this year's addition of the prize after it accepted sponsorship money from Amazon. (The Boston Review has a great piece detailing the behavior that prompted the boycott.) But it's still a great award and the nominees are really outstanding. Here they are:

The 2011 BTBA Fiction Finalists (in alphabetical order by author):

The Literary Conference by César Aira, translated from the Spanish by Katherine Silver (New Directions)

The Golden Age by Michal Ajvaz, translated from the Czech by Andrew Oakland (Dalkey Archive)

A Life on Paper by Georges-Olivier Châteaureynaud, translated from the French by Edward Gauvin (Small Beer)

The Jokers by Albert Cossery, translated from the French by Anna Moschovakis (New York Review Books)

Visitation by Jenny Erpenbeck, translated from the German by Susan Bernofsky (New Directions)

Hocus Bogus by Romain Gary (writing as Émile Ajar), translated from the French by David Bellos (Yale University Press)

The True Deceiver by Tove Jansson, translated from the Swedish by Thomas Teal (New York Review Books)

On Elegance While Sleeping by Emilio Lascano Tegui, translated from the Spanish by Idra Novey (Dalkey Archive)

Agaat by Marlene Van Niekerk, translated from the Afrikaans by Michiel Heyns (Tin House)

Georg Letham: Physician and Murderer by Ernst Weiss, translated from the German by Joel Rotenberg (Archipelago)

I want to single out two of them right now--one book I've read and one I plan to read. The book I plan on reading is Cesar Aira's novella The Literary Conference. I mentioned Ghosts a while back on the blog. At the time I said, "It's an extraordinary book, that manges to follow the nonlinear style of "though" without resorting to a stream-of-conscious style. It's genuinely new and very, very interesting." That still seems about right to me. I'm looking forward to reading this book too.

The other book I wanted to call out is Jenny Erpenbeck's Visitation. It was one of the best new books I read all last year:

I first encountered Erpenbeck a few years back when I reviewed her outstanding novella The Book of Words. One thing that is striking about both books is Erpenbeck's use of repetition. She will often take simple phrases and use them as "themes" associated with a particular character...

Erpenbeck uses these phrases the way a film director uses a score--to accentuate details, the throw certain situations into stark relief, to draw the audience into the story. Kurt Vonnegut uses the phrase "So it goes" to similar effect in Slaughterhouse Five. However, I've never come a across someone who uses so many difference "cues" of this sort, in so many places, and in so many ways. It is a remarkable achievement, one that is not as flashy as most "experimental" writing, but that is far more daring--and far more moving--than any other recent literary experiments I can think of.

I'm glad to see Erpenbeck get some attention for the novella. And hopeful this will encourage publishers to bring out even more of her work in the US. She's a really fascinating writer.

Talking IP

2011-03-23T13:21:00.004-04:00

The Millions has got an interesting conversation with the visual artist Alfred Steiner--who's also an intellectual-property lawyer. It explores a lot of the same issues I try to talk about on the blog, so I figured I'd point it out.

First, Steiner makes a very good distinction between visual artists like himself and other creatives--such as writers and musicians--who rely on reproduceable content:

[A]s an artist your livelihood, in general, depends on your sale of unique objects, or small editions of objects. So copyright is not as important to you as it is to a musical artist… Because contemporary artists don’t sell millions of copies. The fact is in the art world when one artist copies another artist, it only helps the artist being copied because the more people who imitate you or are influenced by you – the more that happens, the more it shows you’re part of the ongoing story.

But that doesn't mean restrictive copyright is in the best interest of writers. After all, the primary reason to promote copyright is to encourage innovation--to give people an incentive to write new things. As Steiner points out:

You could argue that one interesting analog is fashion. There’s no intellectual-property protection for fashion, but I don’t think anyone would argue that fashion lacks for innovation. So, do we really need to protect the author for his entire lifetime plus 70 years to encourage innovation? I don’t think so.

The entire conversation is worth checking out.

A sideways glance at "Lolita"

2011-03-21T19:37:00.003-04:00

I just wanted to call attention to a piece at The Millions by Lydia Kiesling, looking at Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita. Lolita is, of course, one of the most contradictory novels in the English language, in that it is both very ugly (in terms of its subject matter) and very beautiful (in terms of the language it uses) at the same time. Kiesling captures this tension well, writing:

To be sure, it is a very disgusting book. The rape of Lolita: “a last throb, a last dab of color, stinging red, smarting pink, a sigh, a wincing child,” after which the fiend Humbert buys “four books of comics, a box of candy, a box of sanitary pads, two cokes, a manicure set,” and so on... And yet this book, with its veritable panoply of horrors, is maybe the most bracing and perfect work of art I know. Nabokov said “for me a work of fiction exists only insofar as it affords me what I shall bluntly call aesthetic bliss.” By that arresting measure, Lolita is a triumph, the ne plus ultra of the novel form.

There is something fascinating about the way Nabokov can make such an ugly, repellent story not only interesting but aesthetically profound. Essentially, his skill as a novelists is able to transcend even the most horrifying material. As Kiesling puts it, "What this book does for me, with its unparalleled linguistic verve, is remind me of what language and art can do. Art restores us to life’s possibilities even as it offers solace from life’s trouble. "

Song of the Week

2011-03-18T19:17:00.001-04:00

After a brief absence, Song of the Week returns with Beck's "Lost Cause":

Cultural Omnivores

2011-03-17T19:46:00.004-04:00

I like a wide range of cultural stuff, some of it very highbrow (I did just spend two months reading nothing but Shakespeare), some of it "low" (I like old horror movies), some of it both at once (I'm a big Stooges fan). So I really enjoyed Linda Holmes message on NPR's site looking at "cultural omnivores."

She starts off by noting that according to a new study put together by the National Endowment for the Arts, that the reason cultural events (plays, opera, etc.) are seeing declining attendance is not because their core audiences are declining, but that cultural omnivores--people that enjoy TV, popular music, or movies, but also enjoy highbrow cultural events--are disappearing:

Omnivores both dropped in number between 2002 and 2008 and stopped going to as many events. They made up 15.1 percent of the population in 1982, but only 10.1 percent in 2008. That's a drop of a third, and that's a lot. There are certainly other factors — arts education is declining, for instance — but it's interesting that there's a sharper decline in omnivores than in pure highbrows.

She speculates that some of this is caused by the way people promote highbrow culture. Many of us who cherish "highbrow" culture feel a bit overwhelmed by the ever rising influence of pop culture:

It can be nearly impossible to turn the volume down on all that cultural and entertainment stuff, even if you don't intend or want to turn it off entirely. And the current constancy and volume of popular culture feels, to people who don't particularly care about it, like an offensive, exclusionary, vulgar encroachment.

And that feeling tends, in turn, to drive people to an entirely logical defensive posture and eventually to frustrated aggression. Within the hostility toward television, you often find a fiercely protective attitude toward books. Within the hostility toward genre fiction, you find a fiercely protective attitude toward literary fiction. And within the hostility toward e-books, you often find a fiercely protective attitude toward paper books.

When you project hostility to pop culture, you risk coming off as a bore. And that just drives away the curious. And Holmes thinks this is a mistake. In other words, when you make Shakespeare sound like broccoli, lots of people will avoid Shakespeare--and never learn that he is actually very entertaining. As Holmes puts it: "Fun and art are natural allies."

For what it's worth, a big reason I blog about books is that I really enjoy them, and I honestly think others will enjoy the books I like too. I also find the very best books to be fulfilling in a very particular way, and they offer an experience that I have not found in other media. That's part of the fun.

On Falsehood and "Double Falsehood"

2011-03-15T20:56:00.005-04:00

I wanted to take the occasion of Classical Stage Company's staging of "Double Falsehood" to look in on the controversy surrounding the play. It purports to be an adaptation of the lost Shakespeare play Cardenio. Double Falsehood first appeared in the eighteenth century, well after Shakespeare's death. Until recently, Double Falsehood was best known for being mocked as a bad forgery by Alexander Pope in his poem "The Dunciad."

Basically, the play's writer, Lewis Theobald, claimed he based the text on a copy of Cardenio--but never produced Cardenio itself (he claimed it was destroyed after he wrote his own version). Pope, and the rest of he and Theobald's contemporaries, dismissed the story as an obvious hoax. Recently, however, The Arden Shakespeare (among others) has decided to admit the play into the wider Shakespearean canon.

I have not seen CSC's production. I'm more interested--at least for today's purposes--in the play itself. Ron Rosenbaum, the critic who played an important role in debunking those who once tried to claim "The Funeral Elegy" was the work of Shakespeare, is again resisting calls to include a "new," disputed work in the canon. I find his argument compelling, so I wanted to call attention to it:

This move is "brand extension" that demonstrates yet another triumph of marketing over art. And one that will have lasting—and unfortunate—consequences for the reputations of both Arden and, alas, Shakespeare as well ...Proponents of Shakespearean involvement in Double Falsehood are always quoting passages in which Theobald uses phrases that Shakespeare used. Voila! Must be Shakespeare's work! Really, that's the quality of most of the argument.

But the fact the same words and phrases in both Shakespeare and Theobald doesn't meant that Shakespeare wrote Theobald's play; all it means is that Theobald read Shakespeare.... There's no shadow of lightning in Double Falsehood. It's a baseless fabric.

His fundamental case rests on the same ground as Pope's--the play just isn't very well written. As Rosenbaum says, "You have to read the whole play to understand how truly, madly, deeply bad it is." The play has even prompted a measure of agreement between Harold Bloom and Stephen Greenblatt--two Shakespeare scholars often at odds (that's a deliberate understatement)--with Bloom calling Double Falsehood a "palpable forgery" and Greenblatt declaring "I wouldn't trust Theobald as far as I could throw him."

So everyone is a little leery hear. As Rosenbaum notes, even the editor of the Arden edition admits there are problems with Double Falsehood:

It seems that the poor editor, Brean Hammond, attended a recent colloquium on Double Falsehood and heard an extremely "skeptical presentation" by the highly regarded Shakespeare scholar Tiffany Stern. And so, Hammond concludes, obviously fearful of embarrassment: "Stern built up a case [against Shakespearean authorship] convincing enough to render any editor of the play cautious and cautious is what I hope this edition has been."

I'm skeptical (all right, more than skeptical) of the play myself. But I do like CSC a lot, so I'm curious to see what people make of their production.

Check this out...

2011-03-05T15:15:00.003-05:00

Broadcastr opened to the public this week. It's still in Beta, but it's an interesting site that I wanted to plug here on the blog. It's basically a mix of You Tube and social media, only it's built around audio recordings instead of video. The people at Electric Literature put it together.

I admit being a bit biased in the site's favor because they recorded one of my stories in the run-up to the launch (I'll post a link and some more info when it's up). Now that the site's running, you can record and post your own stuff too. Anyway, go check it out.

Limitations

2011-03-01T19:10:00.004-05:00

Yesterday, I took a look at a recent interview with David Shields conducted over at the Rumpus. There's one last exchange I want to look at today:

Rumpus: I’d say you’ve developed an inveterate bias.
Shields: No art without bias.
Rumpus: The artist should embrace all forms.
Shields: Nope. Gotta choose.

This is a big point of disagreement I have with the book. I think Shields is wrong to say that artists have to "choose" a particular form. If anything, an artist should be attentive to their own work, and let the form flow from there. I understand that Shields is speaking more about his own approach--that he finds it artistically appealing to let the form (namely the lyric essay) come first and then work from there.

Shields worries that the novel is too bound by a particular set of conventions, so much so that the form itself is no longer worthwhile. There is a lot of dull nonfiction in the world--ever read a newspaper column?--but that isn't the fault of nonfiction. I feel like Shields personal preference for the lyric essay makes him especially sensitive to mediocrity in fiction. That's fine--but it leads him to miss the fact that certain stories--and certain ideas--work well in the novel format.

Reality Hunger is inspiring reading because it is great to watch someone wrestle with how to write in a digital world. But it is important as readers not to get so caught up in the book that it limits how/what we write ourselves. I think it is a mistake to "choose" one form, because it limits how you think about your work.

Reality Hunger (Slight Return)

2011-02-28T20:10:00.006-05:00

David Shields's Reality Hunger is out in paperback. He recently talked about the book with Caleb Powell over at the Rumpus. It's an interesting exchange, because Powell pushes Shields on one of the book's core arguments--that the novel as a form is no longer interesting.

Powell disputes this, using the rather straightforward, conventional novel Bastard Out of Carolina as an illustrative example:

A long time ago someone close to me told me she was raped, that she had been impregnated by her stepfather, and then had an abortion. When she told me I acted like she had a venereal disease. I avoided her. I lost contact. Years later I felt regret, and I wanted to understand her experience. I read Bastard out of Carolina. Through story, character, even setting and plot, through a novel, I learned about her reality at “ground level.” This reality obliterated something inside me... I’m trying to show, by one exception, that you may be wrong. That a novel, even if it’s a roman à clef, offers compelling art. I’d say that 99% of novels don’t do it, but this may also be the case with 99% of lyric essay/collage etc. The novel is equal to other forms in this respect.

It won't surprise anyone to hear that I find Powell's argument compelling (well, compelling in the sense that it expresses something I already believe).

Shields replies not by trying to convince Powell he is "wrong" to like Bastard Out of Carolina, but by explaining his rationale for Reality Hunger:

How can we not take full advantage of the digital materials now available to us? I can’t argue with your experience or anyone else’s. I’m just saying that for me I can’t read such works anymore. They feel hackneyed and predictable. I’m trying to develop an aesthetic flag to fly under for people who share this...My goal was never to convince you or anyone else. It was just to write an ars poetica for myself, to figure out what it is I love and why, and if there are any like-minded individuals who find the argument useful, then I’m delighted.

Though I do not agree with Shields about the fate of the novel, I keep coming back to his book. I do so largely because it succeeds on its own terms--which are the terms he lays out above. It is, ultimately, a personal document detailing one writers efforts to forge a literary milieu that he can thrive in as a writer and a reader.

The digital environment lays out a lot of challenges to us as both readers and writers. I respect Shields in large part because he is one of the first writers I am aware of to grapple with these challenges in such a serious, detailed manner. Even though I don't share all of Shields's conclusions, I find the process by which he reaches them to be quite illuminating. Which is, I suppose, why I continue to write about this book.

The Long, Slow Work of the Critic

2011-02-20T14:48:00.007-05:00

See Parts One, Two, and Three

I wanted to add a quick addendum to my discussion of Mark Edmundson's essay "Narcissus Reads a Book." Edmundson really dislikes commercial fiction:

If Stephen King and John Grisham bring pleasure, why then, let us applaud them. Let's give them awards. Let's break down the walls of the old clubs and colleges and give them entry forthwith. The only really important question to pose about a novel by Stephen King, we now know, is whether it offers a vintage draught of the Stephen King experience...What's not asked in the review and the interview and the profile is whether a King book is worth writing or worth reading. It seems that no one anymore has the wherewithal to say that reading a King novel is a major waste of time.

I don't read a lot of commercial fiction either. And I actually see his general point--the defining characteristic of commercial fiction is that it doesn't challenge its audience. Since there is not enough time to read every great book ever written, every minute we spend with something less-than-great is "taken away" from the time we could be reading something like Moby-Dick. And that is, in some sense, a loss. But people read for different reasons. And one of those reasons is to relax. There's noting wrong with wanting to relax. It gives people pleasure. And pleasure is not a bad thing.

The truth is, certain books--really great books like Moby-Dick--require a certain investment of energy and time. And we don't always have that to give. I actually don't think the Dan Browns of the world compete with books like Moby-Dick for readers' time. They compete with movies, or music, or video games. Commercial fiction exists to entertain and to relax. And when done well--as in the work of, say, William Gibson--it can also make readers think a little too.

The job of a critic is not to devalue commercial fiction per se--though there is nothing wrong with calling a mediocre book mediocre. The job of critics is to make an argument on behalf of "deep reading" itself--to let readers understand that certain books are worth an investment of time and energy. Simply scolding readers doesn't accomplish this--what does this is good, well-written criticism that lays out just what makes a great book great.

These kinds of essays are very hard to write, of course, but that's the point. Everything about great books comes as a challenge--reading them, understanding them, writing about them. But in every case, this challenge is worth it--that's the ultimate difference between a book that is great and a book that is merely difficult. A great book gives back as much as the reader or critic puts in.

This is what I was driving at yesterday--it is our job as critics to make an argument one reader at a time on behalf of books we find worth reading. That is a long, slow task--but it is a worthwhile one.

Not-So-Ordinary Folks

2011-02-19T17:47:00.006-05:00

See Part One and Part Two

I just wanted to wrap up my look at Mark Edmundson's essay on contemporary reading habits by making my case for the value of critics today. The biggest disagreement I have with both Edmundson and other "critics of critics" like Neal Gabler is that I see no reason to think that critics are somehow unimportant or even marginalized.

Obviously the days when a small subset of professional and academic critics could set commercial taste--in books and in other media--is over. Gabler is correct that "ordinary folks," via Amazon reviews, social media, and "ratings" are more relevant to selling books than professional critics are. But that doesn't mean critics themselves are obsolete. It just means that their role is different.

The job of a critic is not to make money for publishing houses. The job of a critic is to make an argument and make it well. Criticism is itself a form of writing, and its purpose is to inform its own readers, to challenge its own audience. Sometimes this results in a critic helping to draw an audience to a particular writer, the way Edmund Wilson helped point readers to F. Scott Fitzgerald's work after the novelist's early death. Sometimes, however, the critic must content herself/himself merely with starting a conversation.

That conversation used to be fairly small, because there were only so many national outlets for literary criticism. Now it is online, and as a result is is much more dispersed. Which means that a lot of really novel, original arguments might get lost.I sense this is why Gabler sees so much conformity among critics--because the "loud" chorus praising, say Freedom, is drowning out the quieter case for a book like Allegra Goodman's The Cookbook Collector. But that case is out there, if you look.

Critical authority is now much more complicated. It needs to be earned on a case by case basis. Edmundson worries that this loss of authority means that readers will not acquire the tools to appreciate good criticism--and thus never learn to appreciate the absolute best, most challenging literary works. He is particularly worried about academia--though it apparently doesn't occur to him that writing programs, which are creating their own canon, are filling some of this void on campuses.

I worry less about this loss of authority, because I think there is a lot of good, nontraditional criticism available online. Ultimately, though, the reader has to seek it out on their own. I'm okay with that, because the same technologies that Gabler's "populists" can use--social media, the web in general--can just as easily be used by critics.

I trust that a good argument will work--not with everyone, but with someone. People read as individuals, and the job of a critic is no different from the job of any other writer--to reach readers on an individual basis, one at a time. This isn't very glamorous, but it is important. And it is easier now than ever.

Song of the Week

2011-02-18T18:41:00.003-05:00

Sorry I've been so bad about posting. Here's a video to hold you over. It's "The Last Words That Maketh Murder" from PJ Harvey's really, really good new CD "Let England Shake." (Yes, I know that's two songs in a row from one album. I like it that much.):

Reading for Influence

2011-02-13T15:18:00.002-05:00

See Part One here

Yesterday I mentioned some problems I have with Mark Edmundson's essay about what he sees as the unwillingness of critics to make distinctions of value between books that are genuinely worth reading and books that are mere diversions. But there is one point he makes that I find very convincing--namely his view of what reading ought to be.

Edmundson explains:

The intervening voice in Milton (and in Ovid, Milton's original in this) is a source of influence. Is it possible that in the world now there are people who might suffer not from an anxiety that they might be influenced but rather from an anxiety that they might never be? ...Reading in pursuit of influence—that, I think, is the desired thing. It takes a strange mixture of humility and confidence to do as much.

The idea of "reading in pursuit of influence" is a very challenging one--it means that a reader should seek out work that is deep enough to in some way touch our lives. Reading becomes not just a diversion in this case, but a profound, personal experience. As Edmundson says, "To be willing to be influenced, even up to the last, is tantamount to declaring that we'll never be perfect, never see as gods see—even that we don't know who and what we are, or why (if for any reason) we are here, or where we'll go." In this telling, reading becomes an expression of our humanity.

This is reading at its very best--when the reader is open to a text, willing to grapple with it on its own terms and allow it to change how he or she sees the world. Very few books can live up to that standard, of course. But it is certainly a wonderful experience to encounter something so well written, so full of life that it changes the way you look at the world. I suppose this is why I spent the last few weeks returning to Shakespeare--every time I read his poetry I hear the English language differently, notice nuances in its grammar and phrasing that I didn't notice before; every time I encounter his characters, I am made to think about the complexity of human beings, their contradictions.

I don't think that this is all reading has to be. Sometimes I read just to relax. And that's a good thing too--sometime human beings need to relax. But it is good to call attention to the idea of "reading for influence," because to read a book profound enough to have that kind of impact on us is a valuable experience. And its certainly a good thing for critics to call attention to those kinds of books.

More to come

I am nothing if not critical...

2011-02-12T15:04:00.007-05:00

I've been meaning to post about Mark Edmundson's piece "Narcissus Regards a Book," which popped up on the Chronicle of Higher Education's site a few weeks ago.

Edmundson is disappointed in contemporary reading culture, which he sees as "an unprofitable wing of the diversion industry." His biggest complaint is that contemporary critics (particularly in academia) are unwilling to draw distinctions between books that are truly great and books that are merely diverting:

The academy failed and continues to fail to answer the question of value, or even to echo the best of the existing answers. But entertainment culture suffers no such difficulty...Media no longer seek to shape taste. They do not try to educate the public. And this is so in part because no one seems to know what literary and cultural education would consist of. What does make a book great, anyway? And the media have another reason for not trying to shape taste: It pisses off the readers. They feel insulted, condescended to; they feel dumb. And no one will pay you for making him feel dumb. Public entertainment generally works in just the opposite way—by making the consumer feel like a genius. Even the most august publications and broadcasts no longer attempt to shape taste. They merely seek to reflect it.

There is a lot of problems with this. The most obvious is the simple fact that it is a very grand, sweeping argument and grand sweeping arguments--while great theater--are usually wrong. We all know there are a number of literary critics writing today who have no problem trying to shape the taste of readers--most obviously James Wood, who has had a regular platform at the very high-profile New Yorker. And while I'm not a fan of BR Myers, his recent (very negative) take on Jonathan Franzen's Freedom for the Atlantic was certainly an effort to shape people's point of view. And both are clearly working in the "media." The New Republic is so eager to print critical reviews that they've been called the "designated haters" of lit culture. And I haven't even mentioned Harold Bloom, who has no problem criticizing popular writers like Stephen King and JK Rowling.

But putting that aside, Edmundson is probably right that critics don't set taste the way they used to. The next question is why not? He points to the timidity of academic critics:

Not much more than 20 years ago, students paraded through the campuses and through the quads, chanting variations on a theme. Hey, hey, ho, ho—they jingled—Western culture's got to go. The marches and the chants and the general skepticism about something called the canon seemed to some an affront to all civilized values...The professors who should have been providing the arguments when the No More Western Culture marches were going on never made a significant peep. They never quoted Matthew Arnold on the best that's been thought and said—that would have been embarrassing. They never quoted Emerson on the right use of reading—that might have been silly. (It's to inspire.) They never told their students how Wordsworth had saved Mill's life by restoring to him his ability to feel. They never showed why difficult pleasures might be superior to easy ones.

In this telling, because academics are unwilling to make--and more importantly defend--distinctions, readers no longer understand why distinctions matter. In a sense, Edmundson worries that these professors, rather than undermine capitalism the way some of them hoped to, have instead abandoned literature entirely to the market, where the only value that matters is how much a particular book sells.

Interestingly, Neal Gabler recently wrote a piece in the Guardian pointing to another cause of critical timidity, namely conformity:

In America nowadays, critics usually travel in packs, afraid to stray lest they be left wandering by their lonesomes outside the conventional wisdom. What is novel is the vehemence of this consensus, the insistence that these things were not just good but somehow the very best, and the way in which this consensus immediately entered the larger culture. There was a period of a month or so late last summer and early autumn whenThe Social Network, Freedom and Boardwalk Empire were so ubiquitous that you could scarcely pick up a newspaper or magazine, watch a TV show or listen to a radio show without reading or hearing about them. Even President Obama had a copy of Freedom tucked under his arm to take on vacation.

Despite this conformity though, critics have been unable to convince most readers (and viewers) that they are right--after all, Freedom is popular, but it's not Stephen King popular. To Gabler, the problem is not that critics aren't setting standards, it's that no one cares. He sees this as an outgrowth of American culture itself:

This is hardly a recent occurrence occasioned by the internet and other democratising elements. It actually began at the country's inception when political opposition to England bled into a form of cultural opposition as well. Europe was seen as effete, corrupt, supercilious and haughty. By contrast, ordinary Americans saw themselves as manly, honest, commonsensical and populist, and early on they tried to fashion a culture that manifested these characteristics – an American culture divorced from any European antecedents, a democratic culture...The point isn't that the traditional critics are always wrong and these populists are right, or even that these comments are overwhelmingly negative or invariably take on the critical consensus. More often than not, they aren't and they don't. The point is that authority has migrated from critics to ordinary folks, and there is nothing – not collusion or singleness of purpose or torrents of publicity – that the traditional critics can do about it.

Basically, both Edmundson and Gabler feel that the traditional critic is largely obsolete--Edmundson thinks it is by "choice," as critics have given up trying to set standards, and Gabler blames cultural populism, which has been strengthened by technology.

More to come.

On Ownership and Reading

2011-02-05T16:45:00.002-05:00

I saw an interesting post at Library Thing that I wanted to spotlight, not because I'm convinced its correct, but because I think it's worth thinking about. The basic point is that e-books change our relationship to books, and this has implications for the publishing and writing communities:

We used to own our books. With most ebooks we own them in name, but effectively we lease them....Once you realize your Kindle book is not fully yours, you’ll accept it being mostly not yours. Google Ebooks are a further step away from ownership. Eventually you get to a faucet model, as music has done, either low-price (Netflix) or free (Pandora, YouTube).

The risk of this, of course, is that it will devalue the idea of intellectual property itself:

When authors’ work is reduced to a limitless soup, available through shiny digital spigots at cheap, but limited, rates, it’s hard to see where problem with piracy really lies, and easier to rationalize cheating authors. As devalued ownership feeds piracy, rising piracy in turn devalues ownership. Anyone with an internet connection can rapidly assemble a “library” of books it would have once taken years to build–so why bother building one?

Of course, this line of thinking apparently assumes that paper books will die out. Which I think is wrong for a lot of reasons--mostly thought because I think that reading on paper is a quieter, more immersive experience, and over the long term e-books and regular books will split into radically different media that appeal to people at different times and for different reasons.

This doesn't mean I think publishing won't change--common sense says that the paper book market will eventually be (much) smaller, and that tells me the most important paper-book publishers will be independent and less profit-driven than the conglomerates that dominate publishing today. And I expect most paperback books--maybe all--to eventually be sold via print-on-demand technology.

But the idea of downloading text-only files and reading them on a dedicated e-reader like the Kindle is a purely transitional thing. It just doesn't make much sense. The format doesn't utilize any of the strengths of the digital world--its connectivity, its potential for the use of sound and video alongside text--and it seems very, very open to piracy. Time will tell if I'm right, of course.

Political Aesthetics

2011-02-02T15:25:00.009-05:00

Book reviews are usually interesting precisely to the extent that they are not timely. But that can be liberating, since a good reviewer knows that they need to take a long view about a particular writer or book. A good example of this is Paul Berman's latest piece for the New York Times Book Review, where he looks at a collection of essays by Irving Kristol, the man known as the "godfather of neoconservatism."

Berman catches something important when he quotes Kristol's declaration:

I have reached certain conclusions: that Jane Austen is a greater novelist than Proust or Joyce; that Raphael is a greater painter than Picasso; that T. S. Eliot’s later, Christian poetry is much superior to his earlier; that C. S. Lewis is a finer literary and cultural critic than Edmund Wilson; that Aristotle is more worthy of careful study than Marx; that we have more to learn from Tocqueville than from Max Weber; that Adam Smith makes a lot more economic sense than any economist since; that the Founders had a better understanding of democracy than any political scientists since; that . . . well, enough.

Some of this is a bit rigged--his point about the Founders is an apples-and-oranges comparison between political leaders on one hand and the scholars studying them on the other, and as Berman observes, "not even Karl Marx would dispute that Aristotle outranks Marx." But if you put those aside, what remains is essentially a rejection of a specific artistic movement--modernism.

Think of it--Joyce, Proust, early Eliot, and Picasso are all the very pinnacle of modernist literature and art. Wilson's Axel's Castle was a major intellectual exploration of literary modernism, and much of his early work was dedicated to proselytizing on that movement's behalf. Even Weber's theories fit reasonably well alongside modernist concerns. But lots of people don't like modernism. What's notable here is that Kristol framed all of this in political terms--according to Berman, he presents his observations in an essay about "conservative dogma." In a sense, his politics are an aesthetic choice.

I don't share Kristol's politics. And I prefer modernism to what came before it--in fact, I enjoy Joyce's work so much that I even wrote my master's thesis on Ulysses. But, even though I studied literary theory in grad school and I'm well aware that some people look at aesthetic choices in political terms, I'm still surprised that Kristol sees this as a fundamental political issue. In fact, Kristol's outlook is quite similar to the radical literary theorists he often derided. He agrees with them that aesthetic choices are primarily political--he just disagrees on the "right" choices. I don't know what to make of that, but it's interesting.

Evolution

2011-02-01T20:20:00.003-05:00

Today, I came across a piece in the Times Literary Supplement about Roland Barthes's book The Preparation of the Novel, which has just been translated into English for the first time. As the TLS explains:

The Preparation of the Novel comprises the notes of the third and last lecture course Roland Barthes delivered at the Collège de France, cut short in 1980 by his untimely death. Although the three lecture series were posthumously published in French in the order they were given, Columbia University Press have brought out the final course before the first one (How To Live Together, their translation of the second appeared in 2005) – an indication of just how intriguing a book this is.

I'm in Barthes generally, so any newly translated work is of interest. But what's particularly exciting about this particular set of lectures is that it signaled an evolution of Barthes's views:

Instead of the detailed textual analysis of the longer form that the preliminary discussion of the haiku led the reader to expect, the emphasis shifts from a definition of the novel as genre to an ethical one: “what I’m calling Novel is not a particular historically determined genre but any work in which egotism is transcended”. Moreover, if the term “novel” raises questions, “work” does so even more in the context of the writer who had famously called for literary studies to move away “From Work to Text” (the title of one of his most anthologized pieces). In The Preparation of the Novel, Barthes acknowledges the “about-face” in his position, recognizing the major contribution his essay “The Death of the Author” had made to the tendency in literary-critical circles to “erase the author in favour of the text”...Gone is the valuing of the “writerly” text which obliges its reader to participate in the creative process: the principal qualities of the desired work are now readability, a clear narrative structure, and a lack of metalanguage or self-reflexivity

This is fascinating, because here Barthes is revising his own ideas. It's important to question your own work. Sometimes people get wedded to a particular set of ideas because they're afraid of being seen as "inconsistent." It's always encouraging to see someone remain open-minded late in their career, even to the point of letting their ideas evolve beyond their own most famous book.

I've always been drawn to Barthes's "Death of the Author" theory because it rightly clears space for the reader's contribution to a given literary work. This revision doesn't really change that, it just acknowledges the role of the individual writer's imagination and craft. Without reading the book, I can't really judge this revision--though it seems worth exploring.

What I really want to do is direct...

2011-01-31T20:25:00.004-05:00

Yes, he was a playwright--but Shakespeare was a director (and actor) too. Reading the Tempest always makes me think of Shakespeare the director. Mainly because its protagonist, Prospero, is something of a director himself.

Yes, Prospero's magic comes (in part) from his magic book. But that books was written long before the magic of the play (ie, the magic we see). Prospero never works that magic directly--every spell, every enchantment goes through the sprite Ariel. Prospero looks in his book, gives Ariel some direction, and then Ariel performs a spell. It's a pretty close analogue between an actor and a director.

The most impressive piece of magic--at least theatrically--that Prospero performs is the summoning of the spirit Ceres in Act 4, Scene 1. Tellingly, when Ceres appears, the stage directions indicate that he is "played by Ariel." The sprite is quite literally an actor here--playing the part of a "god." And the entire scene plays out under the watchful eye of Prospero, who has put it together as an entertainment for the young lovers Miranda and Ferdinand.

And then there is Prospero's famous final speech, spoken directly the audience after the play's action has ended:

Now my charms are all o'erthrown,
And what strength I have's mine own,
Which is most faint: now, 'tis true,
I must be here confined by you,
Or sent to Naples. Let me not,
Since I have my dukedom got
And pardon'd the deceiver, dwell
In this bare island by your spell;
But release me from my bands
With the help of your good hands:
Gentle breath of yours my sails
Must fill, or else my project fails,
Which was to please. Now I want
Spirits to enforce, art to enchant,
And my ending is despair,
Unless I be relieved by prayer,
Which pierces so that it assaults
Mercy itself and frees all faults.
As you from crimes would pardon'd be,
Let your indulgence set me free. (Epilogue, 1-20)

There has always been a romantic urge to see this as Shakespeare's "farewell" to the theater. Of course, this is complicated by the fact that he worked on at least two more plays after The Tempest. But it is unquestionably a self-referential speech, and in a sense posits Prospero has the "director" of The Tempest--here thanking us for watching the play and asking us for our applause.

From the "Induction" scene at the beginning of The Taming of the Shrew, a comical bit at a tavern that shows that Shrew itself is being staged in the bar as part of an elaborate prank on a drunkard, to Hamlet's "directing" of Hamlet via his "instructions" to the players (Act 3, Scene 3), to Iago's effortless manipulation of the events in Othello (a play where everything happens according to Iago's design), Shakespeare is often self-consciously theatrical.

I don't have the time or the inclination to draw this out into a great theory of Shakespeare the playwright drawing on the experience of Shakespeare the director--besides' plenty of critics have done that already. But I've been reading a lot of Shakespeare this month, and the constant references to theater, the characters who seem to "direct" in play after play, is really standing out for me. It's only one aspect of the plays--and even the most interesting. But it is striking.

Song of the Week

2011-01-27T22:20:00.003-05:00

PJ Harvey's got a new album coming out soon. To tide you over until then, here's her new video for "The Last Living Rose." Enjoy!

Theatrical Awareness

2011-01-27T15:09:00.003-05:00

Rereading Othello, I'm struck again by Iago. In a play with a number of incredibly well-written characters--Othello, Desdemona, etc.---Iago dominates. Almost everything that transpires, from the falling out between Desdemona and her father, to the deaths of Roderigo, Othello, and Desdemona, is Iago's doing. And his conversations with Othello are uniformly amazing.

What's interesting about Iago, though, is that he is at once a very "real" character, in the sense that he exhibits a believable inner life, and a very theatrical one. He is famously brimming with resentments--angry that Othello passes him over for promotion, suspicious that his wife Emilia has had an affair with Othello--but his motivations are ultimately opaque. When Othello and Cassio demand answers at the end of the play, asking Iago why he has behaved this way, Iago's reply is simply, "Demand me nothing. What you know, you know." (5.2.353)

Perhaps, Iago does what he does because it is great theater. That's not a jest--the play would not exist without Iago. And unlike, say, Edmund in King Lear (whose manipulations bring him power and wealth), he doesn't really gain much from his villainy. He does what he does seemingly just for the sake of doing it. It's almost as if he is putting on a show for the audience, doing what he must to wring great poetry out of Othello and the others.

"Theatrical awareness" isn't unusual in Shakespeare. Think of when Hamlet directs the players:

Speak the speech, I pray you, as I pronounced it to
you, trippingly on the tongue: but if you mouth it,
as many of your players do, I had as lief the
town-crier spoke my lines. Nor do not saw the air
too much with your hand, thus, but use all gently;
for in the very torrent, tempest, and, as I may say,
the whirlwind of passion, you must acquire and beget
a temperance that may give it smoothness. (3.3.1-8)

He is, in effect, taking over his own play here, telling the other actors onstage how they should perform their lines. Beyond that, he is using this set of players (the actors in Hamlet) to put on a reenactment of Claudius's murder of the former king--he is essentially directing a flashback sequence.

Hamlet, like Iago, is both "real" and theatrical. He is a fully believable character with a fully believable psyche, but his also seems conscious that he (or at least everyone around him) is in a play. That isn't even limited to this scene. He is aware that Claudius is a murderer, but he hides the knowledge behind a veil of madness. He uses he theatricality--his awareness of himself as a piece of theater--to manipulate the characters around him.

However, while Hamlet dominates Hamlet, he doesn't abuse his dominance. If anything, he consciously avoids taking advantage of it. In fact, he very famously puts off really taking over the play by putting off his efforts to avenge his father's death. Meanwhile, Iago dominates Othello the play, and extends that dominance to Othello the character.

In a sense, it could be said that Iago becomes "aware" of the theatricality around him and becomes drunk on the power this awareness gives him. Hamlet, on the other hand, becomes self-aware... and blinks. That may be why one is a villain and the other, despite his cruelty to Ophelia, is ultimately seen as a hero. Hamlet doesn't abuse his power. Iago does.

On Reading Oneself

2011-01-24T19:59:00.004-05:00

I finally had a chance to read Louis Menand's piece about The Feminine Mystique from last week's New Yorker. While assessing its importance, Menand observes:

But why a book? Why not a court case, or a boycott, as in the case of the civil-rights movement—something that challenged existing law? There were plenty of laws enforcing the second-tier status of women in 1963. Why was a long and semi-scholarly study by a magazine writer the catalyst for a social change that might have got under way years before? The answer may have something to do not with the status of women but with the status of books. In the early nineteen-sixties, books, for some reason, were bombs....

As Coontz puts it, about Friedan, “Books don’t become best sellers because they are ahead of their time.” But people like to be able to point to a book as the cause for a new frame of mind, possibly for the same reason that people prefer anecdotes to statistical evidence. A book personalizes an issue. It has an Erin Brockovich effect: it puts a face on the problem; it sets up a David-and-Goliath drama.

Like a lot of people interested in reading "as such," I don't spend a lot of time writing or talking (or even thinking) about books as vehicles for social change. In fact, I think that books are a very ineffective way to promote political change, when looked at versus, say, conventional organizing. But I still think Menand has a point. Books are an inherently personal medium.

If you read the blog regularly, you already know that I think of reading as a kind of performance. Like a musician playing a piece of music, a reader brings a book to life by engaging with the text and using their imagination to give voice to the narrative, visualize the characters, and in general make sense of the words on the page. This is a very intimate act--made more so by the fact that the reader is not only the "musician" but the audience. You are performing in your own head, for yourself alone.

This means the books can be inspiring in a very particular way--a book like Darkness at Noon, for example, changed many people's minds about Stalin by creating an effective emotional representation of what it feels like to be at the mercy of state terror. Again, the point here is not the books make for political change--almost none do. But books, because they are so personal, can help us to untangle our own thoughts, our "inner life," in a way almost no other art can.

Betty Friedan's book inspired political change not because it convinced people to think differently. It inspired change because it helped people articulate something they were already thinking. As Menand quotes from Stephanie Coontz, “Books don’t become best sellers because they are ahead of their time.” But books often resonate precisely to the extent that they help people know themselves better--they help make the reader's own thoughts more intelligible.

Everything has its place

2011-01-23T16:15:00.004-05:00

I've been too busy to blog this week, but I've still been reading Shakespeare. I actually decided to read some of his plays that I never got to before--such as King John and Coriolanus--in addition to rereading the ones I already know. Since my "complete works" is way to have for the train (I have an old Pelican addition, which is compact, though not as well footnoted as my Arden paperbacks), I decided to download the plays to my e-reader.

While I'm not a big fan of the e-reader in general, I do think it's better suited for plays than it is for novels. Writing for the stage is meant to have a certain momentum--you certainly can't "flip" back from the Third Act to the First in the middle of the production. So the "caged" reading style of an e-reader--where skimming is difficult, and flipping back and forth between different parts of a text is inconvenient and awkward--is less of a liability. While there were moments when the device still drew attention to itself, for the first time I could understand why some people might be all right reading on a device instead of paper.

That said, the device still does call attention to itself. Reading footnotes is much simpler on paper--your eye drifts down to the bottom of the page, sees the note, and plunges back into the text automatically. On the device, it takes a pinch of conscious thought. And that's ultimately why I can't fall in love with e-readers. Active reading--skimming, flipping forward and back, reading footnotes--requires conscious effort, and that pulls the reader out of the text. This isn't the end of the world, but it does diminish the reading experience just a bit.

Some people might consider the trade-off worth it. In the case of Shakespeare's lesser-known works, I actually agree. I like having something to read on the train, so the Complete Works isn't always a good option. And I don't have a bottomless supply of money where I can afford to go out and rebuy all of these plays in paperback--I can buy the ones I know I'll keep rereading again and again (I just grabbed a new copy of Othello to replace one that essentially distinguished on me), but common sense says that there is a limit to how many plays I can do that for. And in those cases, I guess the e-reader will do.

That said, I still very much prefer print. It's just an easier, more convenient medium. And I still believe that its advantages guarantee it will endure.

Chekhov and Shakespeare

2011-01-17T18:30:00.004-05:00

Today is the anniversary of Anton Chekhov's birth. Coincidentally, I saw Classic Stage Company's production of Three Sisters yesterday. It was a really moving take on one of Chekhov's best works, and I really enjoyed it.

Since I've been reading so much Shakespeare lately, I can't help but think of the two playwrights together. Shakespeare and Chekhov are my two favorite dramatists (which makes me feel a bit conventional, but sometimes conventions come about for good reasons), and they both share a profound ability to create fully rounded, psychologically complex characters. What interests me most in theater--really in all literature--the way a good writer can suggest the inner life of a particular individual.

Where the two differ, of course, is in the context those characters operate in. Shakespeare's characters see themselves at the center of events. Often, this is because they are at the center of things--the histories and most of the tragedies are about political leader, ranging from Hamlet the Danish prince, to Othello the decorated military leader, to Lear the king, to Henry V, hero of English history. And his characters are often subject to interest from ghosts, sorcerers, and other supernatural beings (think of A Midsummer Night's Dream, Macbeth, the Tempest, or even Hamlet, which all feature supernatural elements). These are inherently interesting people in inherently interesting situations.

Meanwhile, Chekhov almost always writes about people who see themselves at the periphery. Three Sisters is a great illustration of this. The Prozorova sisters are living in a kind of exile at their late father's country estate. They are bored with their small town and dislike their dull, unfulfilling jobs. All of them--especially the youngest sister, Irina--pine to return to the Moscow of their youth. But they never make it their. It's a very sad play, but not a tragic one. The sisters aren't undone by some great tragic flaw--they are just stuck.

Chekhov's characters are often stuck. In The Seagull, Nina and Konstantin both aspire to becoming artists--but they never manage to achieve any success at it. Uncle Vanya's title character nearly commits suicide due to unrequited love and a hatred of his dull, unchanging life--but as the play closes he merely returns to keeping track of his affairs and forces his life back to normal. All of these plays feature characters who are pretty well off--they own property, they have servants--but their lives are unmeaningful.

Certainly Hamlet gets himself "stuck" too, in the sense that he takes a long time to face off with his murderous uncle. But he is always at the center of things, and he knows it. At one point, when Hamlet is talking to an acting troupe, he tells them: "Speak the speech, I pray you, as I announced it to you" (3.2.1) and then lecturing the actors on the proper way to act. In a sense, Hamlet is directing Hamlet itself here. So he might be too "indecisive" to avenge his father--but he is also sure enough of himself to appoint himself director (by the way, one of Shakespeare's best features is the fact that he's more formally daring then even the modernists).

This sums up the difference between Shakespeare and Chekhov quite nicely--even Shakespeare's most "paralyzed" character is capable of literally taking charge of his own play, while Chekhov's Prozorova sisters can't even prod themselves to go on a simple trip to the city.

"Conscience is but a word..."

2011-01-15T13:58:00.004-05:00

I followed Richard II with a very different Shakespeare play--Richard III. Where Richard II is so overwhelmed by his office that he becomes paralyzed as Bolingbroke moves to usurp his crown, Richard III acts. He is always several steps ahead of everyone else in the play, manipulating his own family as he moves to make himself king.

Richard III sums up his view of the world when he declare "Conscience is but a word that cowards use,/Devised at first to keep the strong in awe." (5.3.327-328). He sees the opportunity to become king and he takes it--though it requires murdering a slew of people, including his wife and brother--and his two young nephews, who are just children.

In spite of his behavior though, Richard III is fun to watch--mainly for the way he constantly brags to the audience about his actions. Unlike many other Shakespearean characters, whose soliloquies give us a glimpse of their innermost thoughts and feelings, Richard III speaks to the audience as a way of showing off. As a theatrical technique, it's a great idea. He revels in his evil so much that he becomes fascinating.

However, once you get past that, Richard III is a bit of a cartoon (albeit one that is extremely well drawn). Ultimately, he is just evil--and his motivations (greed and lust for power) are all too obvious. Compare this to Hamlet's Claudius. Like Richard III, Claudius is a usurper who kills his own brother. But unlike Richard, he is troubled by what he has done--to the point where he cannot even allow himself to pray for forgiveness, realizing "Words without thoughts never to heaven go" (3.4.103)

In the play's final act, Claudius conspires with Laertes to kill Hamlet. To insure the plan works, Claudius provides Hamlet with a poisoned drink. But then, unexpectedly, Claudius's wife Gertrude picks the cup up instead. Claudius loves his wife, but if he admits the drink is poisoned, he will lose everything--everyone will know the king is a liar and a murderer. But Gertrude will live.

He tries to stop her, shouting, "Gertrude, do not drink" (5.2.317), but he can't bring himself to tell her the truth--he is trying to murder his stepson, the prince. So she ingests the poison. Claudius knows he is choosing his crown over his wife, and he knows that it is wrong. But he loves power more than he loves her, so he lets her die. His evil hits harder than Richard's does precisely because it is so believable.

This is what ultimately makes Hamlet so much better than Richard III--its characters simply have more depth. Richard may be one of Shakespeare's most watchable characters, but he lacks an interior life. And that is why Richard does not stand alongside Claudius--to say nothing of Othello's Iago or King Lear's Edmund--as one of Shakespeare's best villains.

(He's still a lot of fun though.)

Song of the Week

2011-01-14T18:58:00.001-05:00

This week's song is "Tell Me" by Brooklyn's Sharon Jones & the Dap Kings. Enjoy!

The Craft of Rereading

2011-01-13T18:52:00.003-05:00

I like contemporary fiction. A lot. In the last year, I've read new novels by Sam Lipsyte, Arthur Nersesian, and Jenny Erpenbeck that are interesting, intelligent, and (most importantly) fun to read. Yet I've spent the last few weeks reading nothing but Shakespeare. And every year I make a point of rereading The Great Gatsby. And I return to any number of other authors from time to time.

Some of this is rather simple--I return to books I like, and some of the books I like happen to be very old. But I also think there is a value in rereading "classics," especially for writers. Some of this is because books become classics for a reason--ie, because they're good--and it is inspiring to read good writing. Also, classic books can be a challenge--many of them are dense, many of them demand that the reader do a lot of thinking in order to really appreciate them--and writers need challenges.

That's where the rereading comes in. In the past, I've compared reading to a performance--meaning that a reader "plays" a text (in his or her mind) the way a musician plays the notes on a musical score. And just as a musician plays a particular piece of music better the more they practice it, a reader comes to "understand" a particular book better the more they reread it. By rereading a book, we can better see how it operates--how the writer is able to conjure a certain mood or develop a certain character or plot point. This can help us in our own writing, if only because it helps give us a better sense of writing as a craft.

Certainly taste matters, and not everyone is going to like every canonical book, so I'm not recommending any particular novel, play, poet, or writer. But I do recommended returning to something that has stood up over time. Sometimes a book resonates with us because it tells us something about the moment we're living through. That's a good thing--but it's not the only thing a writer need to be tuned in to.

Reading classics--books that have the depth to retain an audience over time--is a way to guard against being swept up in our own moment. Yes, languages and forms evolve over time--but words are still words and sentences are still sentences. In fact, seeing what holds up across decades and centuries can give a writer a better idea about what really makes the language work. And, more importantly, suggest good ways to make the language work for you.

Again, I don't pretend this is really radical advice. But there's a tendency to overlook obvious things precisely because they are so obvious. And that's a mistake.

"The rest is silence."

2011-01-12T13:34:00.008-05:00

One of the interesting things about rereading Shakespeare is that different editions of his the same play may differ. Shakespeare never had his dramatic works professionally published (they were only performed), so the versions we have today were put together after his death. This is a bit of a scholarly issue, so most readers don't think about it--but it is actually really important because different editions make different editorial choices.

Usually when I read Hamlet, I prefer the second Arden version, put together by Harold Jenkins in 1982. This year, however, I used a different publisher's version--I reread the Jenkins just last year, and I still remember it enough that I figured I could compare the two.

The differences are minor, but noticeable. The line that sticks out to me is 5.2.363, Hamlet's death. Jenkins's edition goes directly from Hamlet's famous last words ("The rest is silence") to the stage direction "Dies." The version I read this year adds a sort of moan in between them: "O! O! O! O!"

It seems like a small change, but it genuinely undermines the power of Hamlet's last speech--"the rest is silence" works better when the rest actually is silence. The moaning contradicts the language of the play. And it is rather ugly (especially compared the the poetry of "the rest is silence," which is one of Shakespeare's most powerful depictions of death).

I like Jenkins's edition of the play precisely because it seems like every time he faces a choice between different "versions" of a line, he selects the most beautiful one. The book is heavily footnoted, and he also has convincing scholarly grounds for his choices--but honestly, I have come to see that while the notes are very helpful, what matters most is that the text reads better than in other versions of the play.

As I've gotten older, I've come to see that literature matters primarily to the extent that it succeeds as art. Theoretical and scholarly concerns are interesting--and I'm sure the editor who used the "O"s in their edition of Hamlet felt there was a good reason to do so--but they are secondary to the act of reading itself. To put it another way--literary scholarship and literary theory are both quite interesting, but neither is as interesting as literature itself.

Despite literally hundreds of pages of footnotes, appendices, and research, Jenkins's version of Hamlet puts the highest value on the reader's experience--because it is the most beautiful text, and that's what matters. So, of course, in 2006 Arden replaced it with a newer "third edition" of the play, put together by another editor. O! O! O! O!

[Edit 1/14/11 - Looking at this now, I realize I might have given the impression that the Arden's third edition Hamlet uses the "O!" line. It doesn't. It's actually a pretty good text. But it isn't as good as the Jenkins-edited edition.]

Words Matter

2011-01-11T18:54:00.004-05:00

I enjoyed Henry V so much that I though I'd return to the beginning of Shakespeare's "Henriad," Richard II. Richard II is one of Shakespeare's underrated plays (yes, even Shakespeare has underrated plays). It's not really studied or performed as much as, say Henry V. But I really love the language of it--it might be Shakespeare's most beautiful play (which isn't the same as saying it's his best).

It isn't Shakespeare's most dramatic play--it lacks the depth of his great tragedies (such as Hamlet or Macbeth), it isn't as epic as Henry V, and it doesn't really have a lot of humor (Falstaff wouldn't come along until Henry IV Part I). But it's very moving, especially as the formerly quite vain Richard begins to realize that he is in over his head as sovereign (he is eventually deposed by his cousin, the eventual King Henry IV). While Richard lacks any self-awareness as a ruler, he is very reflective as a human being, and he gives some of my favorite soliloquies.

His speech 3.2.144-177, contains one of my favorite lines in all of Shakespeare: "For God's sake let us sit upon the ground and tell sad stories of the death of kings." In a sense, the speech's very occurrence sums up Richard's flaws. Faced with danger, he becomes reflective and moody, meditating on all the ways kings before him have been usurped--instead of trying to rally his forces and fight back. He's Henry V's total opposite. (Think of Henry's speech before the battle of Agincourt, where he faces odds just as long.) But this reflective nature makes Richard a great poet.

There are many reasons to read Shakespeare. His characters have a depth that outstrips that of many real people. He is capable of shifting between high tragedy and bawdy comedy with an ease no other dramatist can match. He is wildly experimental, and so his work still seems fresh centuries later. But the most important reason I return to him is simply that he wrote beautiful words. And Richard, though a terrible leader, speaks some of the most beautiful poetry in the English language.

Literature and Prejudice

2011-01-09T12:54:00.007-05:00

I saw the Public's production of The Merchant of Venice yesterday, and I wanted to jot down a few thoughts about it.

It's impossible to write about the play without discussing its anti-Semitism. Almost every character--even Portia, who is otherwise one of Shakespeare's most interesting heroines--exhibits a casual anti-Semitism that is genuinely appalling. And no effort was made to soften it, or to soften the way Shylock often behaves as a caricature. Al Pacino played Shylock as he is written--meaning that he was portrayed as a villain and no effort was made to alter the play to make him sympathetic.

As Slate's Jason Zinoman who said of the production:

Pacino captures the spirit of the character without simplifying him. Shylock may have started as a simple archetype—based on Marlowe's prototypical Jewish villain—but Shakespeare couldn't help but make him more complex and compelling. Other productions that have set out to be faithful to the original play have gone further in portraying Shylock as a vile stick figure, but that too does the play a disservice. Pacino finds a way to humanize Shylock without making us feel sorry for him. For all his faults, his Shylock holds onto his dignity... In the end, by not fighting the unpleasantness of the character, Pacino actually avoids making him a stereotype.

The rub is that it is impossible not to sympathize with Shylock, no matter how awful his actions. He is a brutally abused man--people spit on him, call him a dog, assault him. A group of Christians in Venice conspire to help a friend of theirs run off with Shylock's daughter, guaranteeing Shylock will never see her again. (The line where Shylock utters, "I had a daughter" is truly moving, even when no effort is made to call attention to it.) And more.

Ultimately, the play is not one of Shakespeare's greatest works--despite some beautiful poetry--because it does not manage to escape the prejudices of its time. I was genuinely troubled by certain scenes. But what this production accomplishes is using the play as a means of getting the audience to think about anti-Semitism, to confront head-on what a society looks like when prejudice is pervasive and common. That is no small feat, and it is one they can acomplish because the play as written, despite its considerable flaws, has enough depth to make it possible.

In that way, it made me think of the recent controversy over efforts to censor The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Twain, unlike Shakespeare, was consciously trying to argue against the prejudices of his day. But, like the Merchant of Venice, Huck Finn is a book that offends many people. Not just for its use of racial slurs, but for its closing chapters where Huck and Tom Sawyer "rescue" Jim (he has already been freed from slavery, the boys don't tell him so that they can have "fun" setting up a prisoner escape)--chapters which are rightly disconcerting to modern readers.

Both Huck and Merchant depict societies that are pervasively prejudiced, and both contain scenes that are unquestionably offensive. But both are works of art that when used properly can help readers learn about history and about human nature. And this is important. While both works should be taught or performed with care, neither ought to be suppressed. I have read both, and I honestly feel the better for it.

Song of the Week

2011-01-07T18:09:00.003-05:00

I've been listening to a lot of jazz lately, so I figured I'd post an excerpt of Miles Davis's score for Ascenseur pour l'echafaud (called Elevator to the Gallows in the US). As a bonus, you get to watch really beautiful footage of Jeanne Moreau walking around Paris (and yes, the entire movie is this well shot):

"Once more unto the breach..."

2011-01-07T15:43:00.003-05:00

See parts one, two, three, and four

After Macbeth and Hamlet, I've moved on to Henry V. Henry's speeches to his soldiers are the most remarkable part of the play--his St. Crispian's Day Speech (4.3.18-67) is the most famous and the most quoted (especially when he calls his soldiers a "band of brothers"). It is genuinely inspiring, and a really amazing piece of writing. But the exchange that sticks out in my mind is a more modest one.

In the second scene of Act I, the bishops of Canterbury and Ely make a presentation to Henry showing that he has a right to claim the throne of France, via his Great Grandfather's line. The audience knows that the bishops are doing so for cynical reasons--they are hoping a war will distract Henry from a plan to confiscate certain properties from the church. (Or, to be more idiomatic, they don't want to pay taxes.)

Henry is eager to hear them, though. In fact, he has already sent messengers to France asserting his rights to certain dukedoms there. The chance to expand on that claim is welcome. And when Canterbury makes his presentation, Henry accepts it instantly--he asks no questions, he doubts nothing the bishop has said. Everyone involved wants the war to happen anyway; the presentation is a formality.

And yet. The bishop's case is actually pretty well thought out. Henry's claim is that his great-grandmother was the rightful heir to the French throne, and that the law used to deny her that title (on the grounds that a woman couldn't be the sovereign of France) shouldn't have applied. He makes a decent case--the principality that actually passed the law in question was a part of Germany, not France (meaning it shouldn't apply to the French monarchy), the Bible allows women to inherit so there are no religious grounds to deny a woman the throne, etc. In effect, we are left with a very cynical speech that might actually be correct.

So the war is just, in the sense that Henry might actually be correct to assert his claims in France. But it is also very cynical, in the sense that no one involved really cares whether those claims are just or not. The justice of the war is an accident. This is an interesting irony--it allows us to identify with and admire Henry's heroism, but it also allows us to see through the war that allows him to act heroically. This ambivalence--even amid so much pageantry--is what makes the play so fascinating. At least to me.

Two Shadows

2011-01-06T19:29:00.005-05:00

See parts one, two, and three of my Shakespeare discussion

I'm going to see the Merchant of Venice this weekend (yes, the one with Al Pacino), and it's put me in a Shakespeare mood. So after I finished Macbeth I moved on the Hamlet, and now I'm giving Henry V a go. It's a lot of fun--I try to reread Shakespeare every so often. And reading a number of plays all in a short time period is interesting, because you can't help but read them "together," noticing certain common threads or uses of language.

I can be rather traditional sometimes; my favorite Shakespearean soliloquy is an obvious--Macbeth's speech upon learning of his wife's death:

She should have died hereafter;
There would have been a time for such a word.
To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow,
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day,
To the last syllable of recorded time;
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!
Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage
And then is heard no more. It is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury
Signifying nothing. (5.5.17-28)

What struck me this time is that some of the language here is anticipated in Hamlet (which was written earlier than Macbeth), where the protagonist declares: "A dream itself is but a shadow" (2.2.279). Hamlet also share's Macbeth's seeming ambivalence about life in general, particularly in the graveyard scene, where he observes that even Alexander the Great is now dust.

If you were in the mood to stretch the text a bit, both "Life's but a walking shadow" and Hamlet's graveyard speech could be read as proto-existentialism, in the sense that both dwell on the absurdity of life. But I just find it interesting the way Shakespeare uses the word shadow in both plays to suggest insubstantiality. It's a minor thing--almost an arbitrary one. But it still jumped out at me, because it suddenly linked the two texts.

I like when one book reminds me of another. Even in the most simple ways. It makes me read differently--because it reminds me this text doesn't exist in a vacuum, that I've read other works that might deal with similar subjects (maybe even ones written by the same person). And that helps reveal the craft involved--the ways a writer has distinguished one work from another, they way they have put their own spin on a common theme. Basically, it helps me read closer, and that's a good thing.

A simple case

2011-01-05T18:47:00.003-05:00

Literary criticism, like all criticism, is inherently ambitious. After all, a critic sits in judgement as a matter of course. You not only "decide" what is good and bad (or at least what will be called good or bad in a particular article) but what is being discussed. The implication is not only that "this" topic is interesting, that it is worth the reader's time, but that a particular critic's point of view about this topic is interesting too. As a result, any work of criticism--even a humble blog post--risks becoming pretentious.

Today, I mentioned to someone that I was rereading (some) Shakespeare. There's first reaction was to congratulate me--because they thought that was a noble thing. I guess I see what they mean, in the sense that Shakespeare can be challenging and because there are so many other (easier) ways to spend one's leisure time. They meant it as a compliment. And that was nice. But it was also wrong.

Here's the rub--I genuinely enjoy Shakespeare. A lot. There are plenty of canonical writers I've never been able to get in to (Milton, for one) and plenty more I have yet to read. But I've always enjoyed spending time with Shakespeare.

Writing about him is difficult, especially in the confines of the blog. Praising just feels redundant--after all, so many people have praised Shakespeare that it has its own name (bardolatry). And there's been so much written about his work that it is nearly impossible to come up with something new to say about it (at least something simple enough to put down in a blog post).

So why write about him at all? After all, I don't write about everything I read. Basically I'm blogging about Shakespeare precisely because I don't think reading him is all that "noble." It's fun--because his language is beautiful and I enjoy reading beautiful language. That's it. And I think that a lot of readers, who might only know Shakespeare's plays through a badly-taught high school English class, would really enjoy his work if they returned to it as adults.

I want to blog about Shakespeare because I like reading him and this is a blog about reading. Shakespeare isn't broccoli. Sure, I do find myself reading "better" after reading Shakespeare--in the sense that his use of the language helps me better see what literature can do. But that's true of plenty of writers I don't like. In truth, I'm enjoying my return to Shakespeare (I've moved on to Hamlet) because I enjoy Shakespeare.

And what's the point of blogging if you don't make the case for what you like.

Be a Man

2011-01-04T18:42:00.006-05:00

See Part One here.

One of the things that's interesting about Macbeth is that the play's dialog contains so many references and appeals to the characters' masculinity. More interestingly, these appeals are almost always a means of manipulation--and they are undertaken by both the heroes and villains of the work.

Almost every major killing is facilitated by an appeal to the manhood of the killer. The most famous example of this is Lady Macbeth's exhortation to her husband, who is having second thoughts about deposing Duncan (this making himself king):

What beast was't then
That made you break this enterprise to me?
When you durst do it, then you were a man;
And, to be more than what you were, you would
Be so much more the man. (1.7.47-50)

But it's not the only time it happens. Later, when Macbeth assigns two murderers to assassinate his friend Banquo (who Macbeth sees as a threat), he echoes her words, telling the murderers: "Now, if you have a station in the file,/Not in th' worst rank of manhood, say't..." (3.1.102-103).

More interestingly, Duncan's rightful heir, Malcolm, uses the same technique to encourage his ally Maduff (who eventually kills Macbeth in battle) to fight against the usurper, telling him to"Dispute it like a man" (4.3.119).

These aren't the only three times this sort of things happens--but they're the most important. In every case, a major character is encouraging someone to kill an important figure (Duncan the king, Banquo the war hero, and Macbeth the king, respectively). And they do it by essentially telling the prospective assassin to "be a man."

This is a blog, not a scholarly journal, so I won't delve to deeply into it here. But it is striking that three very different characters would use the same technique to get their way. It's also interesting that the noble Malcolm would echo the villainous Macbeth (and Lady Macbeth) in trying to motivate his most important ally.

More to come.

Rereading Shakespeare

2011-01-03T20:30:00.003-05:00

I'm rereading Macbeth right now. I suppose this is an outgrowth of reading Marias's A Heart So White back in November. That novel frequently refers to Shakespeare's play. In fact, the title comes from something said by Lady Macbeth.

I feel like it's good to return to Shakespeare every so often. Some of this is because of Shakespeare's influence. Marias is not the only writer to invoke Shakespeare's plays, and even more writers are influenced by him. Let's be honest, Shakespeare looms so large that every English language writer is influenced by him, whether they realize it or not. Returning to his work helps us to read those later writers better.

And, also, Shakespeare's plays are just really good. They're old and some of the language is dense, so they take a bit of an effort to read. But they're also really beautiful and really insightful about human nature. Anyway, Macbeth is one of my favorite books so I'm happy to return to it.

More to come.

Looking Forward to 2011

2011-01-01T15:19:00.003-05:00

Since I've spent the last few posts looking back on books published in 2010, I figured I'd spend today looking forward to a book about to be published in 2011--a new edition of Victor Serge's Conquered City that will be published by NYRB on January 11.

A few months back I wrote about Serge's Unforgiving Years, which is one of the best novels about World War II I've ever read. At the time I said:

Unforgiving Years takes a look at the Second World War (along with the years immediately preceding and following it) from the perspective of two disillusioned Soviet intelligence agents. One, D (his "real" name might be Sasha...maybe), turns against Stalin and flees Europe just before the war breaks out. Another, Daria, stays with the USSR and experiences the war firsthand in both Leningrad and Berlin. Serge uses D to show how those who believed in communism came to be disillusioned by the USSR's brutality, while allowing Daria to give readers a window into Soviet life during wartime... Millions of people fought Hitler while still suffering under the other great tyrant of the 20th century [Stalin]. When you think of it, that's a really interesting story.

In another post I observed:

Unforgiving Years is not so much the story of D or Daria's disillusionment, but the story of what comes after their disillusionment. Very few political novels delve into this. It's easier to connect with an audience by dramatizing someone finally removing the scales from their eyes--think Winston Smith in 1984 (before O'Brian gets to him). D and Daria live emotionally bleak lives, because the thing that gave their lives meaning--the Party--has betrayed them. The soldier on powered only by the will to exist. To live. It makes the book an unforgiving read (pun not quite intended), but it also gives it depth.

Conquered City looks at that disillusionment in a different context--the civil war that followed the Bolsheviks rise to power. Serge was a firsthand witness to the violence endemic to the Soviet state. Life in a society of pervasive state violence is not an easy thing to write about. But Serge does it as well as--maybe better than--any other writer I can think of. He doesn't have the name recognition of other great chroniclers of Communist disillusionment, but he deserves it.

One Last Look at 2010

2010-12-31T11:12:00.004-05:00

I wanted to take one more glance back at my reading habits in 2010. In addition to the blog, I also review books for Bookslut, so you should check out my reviews there. One piece I want to circle back to is my review of Purge by Sofi Oksanen:

This is a novel of big issues -- the aforementioned sex industry, the Soviet annexation of Estonia after World War II, the Chernobyl disaster, the tumultuous years immediately after the breakup of the USSR. It’s a lot to take on, but Oksanen manages to keep her focus tight on her two protagonists -- the old woman, Aliide Truu, and the Russian girl, Zara...

Purge is a serious book, but not a dour one. It has a thriller’s air of suspense -- Pasha’s pursuit of Zara is relentless and parts of this novel can easily be read (and enjoyed) as a simple chase. But there is a tragic core to this story that will reward closer attention.

It's a great book; one of the best I reviewed all year. Check it out.

Of course, the highlight of the year for me (reading-wise) was the number of longer "classic" books I got around to. It's a bit embarrassing to admit I waited so long to read Invisible Man, Moby Dick, and One Hundred Years of Solitude, but I'm glad I did it now. Books that hold their audience across several decades usually do so for a reason. While it's really enjoyable to read new books, it's more important to read good books.

Invisible Man is more than half a century old, so it's not like it gets lots of press anymore. Which means it's easy to "forget" it's there. There are lots of places to read about books, and most of them focus on new titles. I don't blame them--the less other people have said about something, the easier it is to write about it (there's not much in the way of new takes on Moby Dick at this point). So I try to mix thing up here at the blog--both to give a more accurate picture of my reading habits and to push great books (even if they're old).

Hope that's helpful. Regardless, enjoy the new year. And thanks for reading...

Song of the Week

2010-12-24T09:34:00.003-05:00

It's Christmas Eve, so this week's song is the Ramones' "Merry Christmas (I Don't Want to Fight Tonight)." Happy holidays everybody!

Looking Back at "Mesopotamia" and "The Ask"

2010-12-24T09:05:00.005-05:00

I reviewed quite a few books for Bookslut this year. Today I wanted to look at one of those books in particular, Arthur Nersesian's Mesopotamia, as well as mention another book that I haven't had time to blog about, Sam Lipsyte's The Ask.

Both are dark satires about contemporary American life. Nersesian's is a bit funnier (to me), while Lipsyte's is a bit darker. Both demonstrate why it's so interesting to read new books, as opposed to concentrating exclusively on "classics." Classics are usually a safer bet, but good contemporary lit is interesting because you can read it in its original context.

Context matters because both of these books are about current events. In my review of Mesopotamia (which also appeared 0n Powell's Review-of-the-Day blog), I said:

This is satire, of course, and it’s supposed to be over the top. By design, the book often edges into shaggy-dog territory. But the craziness only serves to let Nersesian take aim at his true target -- the national media. Allusions to the original Mesopotamia (i.e., Iraq) and the subprime mortgage crisis drift just below the surface, giving bite to the book’s comedy. Very sneakily, Nersesian has managed to write a book of ideas (albeit a very funny one).

The Ask is also a book of ideas. Its protagonist, Milo, is a failed artist working at a mediocre university in New York. To keep his job, he's forced to work with Purdy, a former college friend who is now rich and influential. The book touches on the current economic crisis, the place of the arts in American culture, the war in Iraq, and other topical issues. It also looks at parenthood, failure, and loneliness.

I mention the two together because I think it's good to mix contemporary books into your reading habits. Novels can't solve social problems--but because they give us a quiet place to think, they do offer us a place to rethink our own ideas about things. It's not that The Ask or Mesopotamia will make you see the last few years in American history--ultimately, they are funny stories that are worth reading because they are good books, first and foremost--but they will give you a chance to think about those years. And it's nice to think.

Looking Back at "Reality Hunger"

2010-12-23T19:05:00.005-05:00

Since it's the end of the year, I figured it might be interesting to look back on what I've been writing about. No single book has occupied my blog this year more than David Shields's Reality Hunger. It wasn't my favorite book published in 2010, but it was in certain ways the most unavoidable.

Some of this is because Shields touched on topics I was already interested in. One of those is plagiarism, something I wrote about quite a bit this year. On first reading Reality Hunger, I observed:

Creative artists need a different set of rules--one that recognizes that different artists can use the same bits of texts for wildly different ends. The whole work--in form and content--is what we judge for originality. And sometimes originality requires borrowing (the way Shakespeare "borrowed" from Plutarch). As Shields puts it, "Art is a conversation, not a patent office." A strict definition of plagiarism makes that conversation impossible. And that benefits no one.

This still seems right to me (of course, it's only been a few months, but whatever). The most interesting--and ultimately important--aspect of Reality Hunger is the way it tries to clear space for writers to use the kind of "sampling" that has become so common in music and the visual arts. Shields didn't invent literary sampling, of course, but he is its most visible practitioner right now, and Reality Hunger (which is almost completely made up of "samples") is an adroit use of the technique. (Though I agree with N+1's Marco Roth that the technique has limitations).

Where Shields and I disagree, of course, is in his preference for the lyric essay over fictional forms. My thoughts at the time were:

Ultimately, anything that is a product of language--essay, novel, memoir, blog post--is a story. Shields says "The story's not important; what's important is the way the world looks." Well, the way the world looks is part of the story.

An essay is only a story about a process (thinking) that has taken place in a writer's mind. I might be able to convey my thoughts to you in this post (if I write it well), but ultimately, you cannot climb into my head and think with me. Language must mediate our exchange. I actually prefer fiction for this reason--fiction, when done correctly, acknowledges its status as "story"--it acknowledges that it is being mediated by language (or narrative or plot). It is honest about its dishonesty....

[N]ovels are capable of addressing their status as "stories" head-on, through narrative devices that call attention to their status as creations of language (read Atonement for a good example). That's what keeps fiction vital--its flexibility.

Writers like Borges and Dos Passos use nonfiction interludes to support their fiction. Essentially both show that the "blurring" between genres Shields is so enamored of is something that has long been practiced by novelists and short story writers. Shields knows this, of course, and he would (presumably) reply that he prefers the "essay" aspects of Borges and Dos Passos more than he enjoys the plot of, say, the USA trilogy. My belief is that neither writer would be able to achieve what they do in "nonfiction" without the fictional architecture woven through their work.

It's fun to argue with a text. Which is why I keep coming back to Reality Hunger. It has its flaws--parts of it are unconvincing (especially where he talks about reality TV) and he strains too hard to project an "avant-garde" tone--but it is a very intelligent, well-argued book. I read it several months ago, and I still think about it--still argue with it. Ultimately, that is the mark of a book worth reading.

Final Thoughts on "USA"

2010-12-13T19:10:00.004-05:00

I finished USA last night. It took me about a month in a half, which isn't too bad considering the book clocks in at 1240 pages. (It's my blog, I'm allowed to brag... even if I'm bragging about something that isn't really that hard to do.)

Now that I'm though with it, I wanted to call attention to an interesting take on the book published by the NY Times in 1997. Like me, the critic (Richard Gilman) was struck by the book's structure:

Structurally, ''U.S.A.'' falls into four components: long sequences of more or less straightforward narrative; much shorter ''biographies'' of prominent Americans -- Woodrow Wilson, Henry Ford, Thomas Edison; ''Newsreels'' composed of headlines, fragments of songs, bits of advertisements; and passages called ''The Camera Eye,'' autobiographical impressions of public events the novels deal with. It was these elements that gave ''U.S.A.'' its avant-garde standing...

I agree with Gilman that the biographies and the "Newsreels" are the most interesting parts of the trilogy, and I also agree that the "Camera Eye" segments are the least (they're certainly the most dated). Gilman ultimately has mixed feelings on the trilogy, complaining that the primary narratives don't hold up well:

Cautionary tales about failed lives, with a dozen or more major characters and scores of minor ones, they are only sporadically capable of seizing the imagination and are, stylistically, more pedestrian than I had remembered... Unlike Fitzgerald or Hemingway, whose writing, whatever its failures, issued from distinct sensibilities, Dos Passos was basically a reporter on a mission, wielding a style whose chief virtue was efficiency.

I don't agree (OK, I agree Dos Passos doesn't write as well as Fitzgerald or Hemingway at their best, but that's a pretty high standard). I enjoyed the narratives, and found myself genuinely interested in the characters. The book is a lot to take on, of course, and not every character rings true. But enough of it works to make the trilogy quite compelling. It is a great novel.

However, while it is a remarkable book in many ways, it doesn't belong to the very top rank of American novels the way, say, Invisible Man of The Adventures of Augie March does. I mention Ellison and Below specifically because they are just as ambitious as Dos Passos--all three books have a similar sprawling reach and all three clearly aspire to being Great American Novels (good for them; ambitious is a good trait in a writer). But Ellison and Below both choose to channel American culture through the "education" of a single character. Dos Passos spreads his net much wider, looking in on dozens of primary and secondary characters. This is an instructive difference.

This is the point of the book--USA is about the wide sweep of American life at the beginning of the century. But the promise of America is a promise of individualism, and USA by its nature cannot really comment on this promise the same way Augie or the Invisible Man does. Those novels both filter everything through a single organizing intelligence. We see their title characters not only explore and react to America, but also interpret it. In effect, the characters of Augie and the Invisible Man become America. Dos Passos character never get that chance.

But a novel can be a classic--a great work--without measuring up to Invisible Man or The Adventures of Augie March. And USA, in all its sprawling, chaotic glory is certainly a great novel. The biographies in particular are among the best prose I've read all year (and considering I've read both Invisible Man and Moby Dick in 2010, that's saying something).

On Reading and Rereading

2010-12-11T15:20:00.004-05:00

I just wanted to follow-up on yesterday's post really quickly. Rereading Borges, I'm struck with the feeling that I understand him now in a way I didn't before--that I'm reading him more fully now. Almost as if I'm really "reading" him for the first time. This is certainly not true.

I think this feeling comes from the act of reading itself. I'm fond of comparing reading to a performance--a readers "plays" a given text in their mind the same way a musicians "reads" a particular musical score while performing it. And just as every performance of a particular symphony is different--even if the orchestra and the score are the same--every reading of a particular book is unique. At the very least, the fact that you've read something before means you will look at it differently, because you will have some notion of what is coming (the surprise is gone).

Since I'm writing about Borges, I might as well make a psedo-Borgian observation and say that there is no such thing as "rereading"--that a book changes as we read it, and we can never go back and "reread" it the way we did the first time. That's not exactly true--the words are unchanged, and that matters--but it feels true. When you really get lost in a book, it does seem to be new again, in the sense that you're just reading--instead of looking around for the phrases and scenes you enjoyed before, you're just worrying about the ones you're finding now.

Anyway, my point is that it's good to reread, and it's especially good to reread a writer as good as Borges. A simple observation, but it's worth remembering all the same.

Song of the Week

2010-12-10T17:52:00.003-05:00

I went to go see Tricky last night, so I figured I'd make "Overcome" the song of the week:

Fiction, Nonfiction, and Borges

2010-12-10T15:47:00.004-05:00

David Shields's Reality Hunger wasn't my favorite "new" book I read this year (out of the books published in 2010 that I've read so far, I enjoyed Jenny Erpenbeck's Visitation the most), but it was certainly the most inescapable. I thought about Reality Hunger more than almost any other book I read all year.

Coincidentally, I decided to reread Borges's Labyrinths this week. I actually hadn't looked at it in years--sometimes we get so caught up looking for new books to read that we forget to return to old ones. The best part of rereading is that you can see how the book "changes" for you based on what you've read since. When I first encountered Borges, it was the dreamlike, surreal images that stood out for me--most obviously the infinite Library of Babel (which this blog was originally named after). But now, I imagine in part because Reality Hunger is so much on my mind, I find myself concentrating on the way Borges blurs the line between fiction and nonfiction.

In a sense, Borges's fiction is a "reply" to (or anticipation of) Shields's Reality Hunger. What I mean by that is that Borges shows that fiction is in some respects more "open" than the imaginative essay, Shields's preferred mode of writing. The most striking illustration of this is "Deutsches Requiem," a long monologue by a Nazi who feels that Germany's defeat in World War II doesn't change the fact that Nazism has "won" the war, since violence is now the defining feature of human life: "What matters if England is the hammer and we the anvil, so long as violence reins and not servile Christian timidity?"

It doesn't matter if the narrator of the story is "correct"--what matters is the link Borges's story makes between Nazism, Nazi Antisemitism, and violence itself. It is not quite an idea so much as it is a meditation on the nature of violence and hatred. By exploring the idea through the mind of someone who endorses it (the narrator), Borges makes it both more accessible and more plausible than he could otherwise.

An idea doesn't need to be "correct" to resonate in fiction. It just need to make the reader think. While Shields rightly observes that one can write an essay merely to follow an idea to its logical conclusion (without being convinced that conclusion is true), fiction can do that easier. Basically, Borges doesn't need to convince us (or himself) that the narrator of "Deutsches Requiem" is correct in order to make us think. Borges merely needs to create a plausible character and allow the reader to inhabit that character's mind. In effect, he writes an essay via a mind (and worldview) that is not his own.

What Shields enjoys about the lyric essay is he opportunity to watch another human mind wrestle with an idea. Borges's work shows that a writer can do this through fiction just as easily. The most interesting thing about Labyrinths in particular is that it collects both fiction and essays together in one place, allowing the reader to see how Borges works in both forms. What's most interesting about that is how similar Borges's essays are to his fiction--how he works through similar ideas and themes, and how he uses similar narrative techniques.

Shields is very emphatic that the tools of fiction can be of great use to the writer of lyric essays. Borges shows that this goes both ways--that ultimately, good fiction can appropriate the intellectual, curious, inquisitive power of the lyric essay just as easily.

Good Form

2010-12-09T18:51:00.004-05:00

One quick point I wanted to make before I finish up USA is that the structure of the novel makes a big impression on me. In a work of this length (more than 1200 pages in the edition I'm reading), different elements work on different levels. The broad sweep of the novel strikes a chord, of course. And the individual characters are all compelling in their own right. But I find the it's the small, rather simple, structural innovations that I think about.

As I've said before, I really, really like the short biographical interludes between chapters. They form a kind of parallel narrative in their own right, and illuminate the main stories of the trilogy very effectively. To be honest, I'm surprised more writers haven't stolen the device. It merges fiction and nonfiction in a way that feels very contemporary--in a sense, the essays (which are satirical, augmentative, wistful, and even snarky, depending on the occasion), perfectly embody the kind of nonfiction writing David Shields praised so heavily in Reality Hunger.

I'm also a fan of the "newsreels" Dos Passos drops between many chapters. It's a really simple thing--cut out pieces of headlines, speeches, and newspaper articles, then drop the fragments together in a "stew"--but it really does suggest the rise of modern media exactly the way Dos Passos intends it to. It's nothing I've never seen before--it reminds me of movie montages, where the director will show the passages of times by flashing headlines and playing radio clips--but it still works. One reason for that is that USA deals with the rise of the modern media--with characters ranging from the working-class printer Mac (The 42nd Parallel), to the public relations executive J Ward Moorehouse (especially in The 42nd Parallel and 1919), to the singer/actress/dancer Margo Dowling (The Big Money).

Anyway, my point is how you tell a story often makes just as much of an impression as the plot. This is especially true in USA, where characters come and go (there are dozens of "main" characters across the book), different historical events pass (from economic crisis, to war, to boom, and then back to crisis). USA is essentially a generational tale, and the style of the book--its varries plot lines, its weird experimental pieces, are really capture the disorientation of the Lost Generation--more so than any individual piece of the trilogy.

I enjoy when a writer can figure out how to mirror his characters' lives in the way (s)he talks about those lives. Though USA's stylistics moves are quite simple, they accomplish this role really well.

A few words about indie bookstores...

2010-12-06T19:02:00.005-05:00

I try not to get too involved in talking about publishing news too much on the blog. Basically, there are a lot of other sites that do that, and it's simply more fun for me to write about whatever books I'm reading at a given moment. But saw two pieces of news today that I think are worth commenting on.

First comes word that Borders and Barnes & Noble might merge (or, rather, that a hedge fund will loan Borders the money to buy out B&N, which is up for sale). The thing that jumps out at me about this is that people seem to be equating the fate of these two big-box chains with the fate of bookstores everywhere. And I don't think that's a good idea.

Borders and B&N are both based on a very specific business model--have big store with a wide selection and use your market share to force publishers to buy in to "co-ops" and keep down prices. The internet has eroded some of the advantages of having certain kinds of big-box stores (look what happened to Circuit City), and as a result both B&N and Borders are having some trouble. I understand that this is a big deal--especially if you work at Borders or if you live somewhere where B&N is your only local bookseller--but it doesn't signal the death of publishing, or of bookselling.

Industries evolve over time. That's natural. It seems to me that independent bookstores are better suited to sell books in an environment where large numbers of people buy books online (at Amazon, for example) or download e-books. Coincidentally, today also brings news about Google's new electronic bookstore. What's interesting about the Google eBookstore is that it will allow independent bookstores to sell e-books via Google. Hopefully, this will help indie stores thrive.

Small bookstores are important because they are idiosyncratic. That's how they survive--by playing a curatorial function for their shoppers. But the side benefit of this is that small, independent bookstores foster a local literary community. They have readings, they have "staff picks" actually picked by the staff (meaning there is someone in the store than can actually talk to you about a book), and, since they don't have the floorspace of Borders or B&N, they have to put some thought into what they stock.

I live in walking distance of three genuinely great indie bookstores--Powerhouse and PS Bookshop in DUMBO and Book Court on Court Street. All three are genuinely different from each other--Powerhouse sells mostly art books (especially ones published by their own press) and puts on art exhibits, PS is a (well-stocked) used bookstore, Book Court holds readings with literary writers like Stephen Elliott or Jonathan Franzen and has a great selection of titles by NYRB Classics. I often drop in one of them just to browse--just to be in the store(s).

To me, local bookstores are an integral part of a vibrant literary culture. The fact that they have to put care into what they stock means that their shelves are a kind of conversation--"this is what we think is worth carrying"--and a smart bookstore will pretty quickly build up a rapport with its customers (or at least learn about their reading habits).

There is something to be said for that. Communities need support systems; local independent bookstores are ours. And I just wish more of the people writing about publishing industry "news" took that into account.

Objectively Speaking

2010-12-04T14:49:00.004-05:00

This week, I had a chance to read Gabriel Garcia Marquez's Clandestine in Chile. The book is a piece of reporting about the filmmaker Miguel Littin's efforts to secretly film a 1985 documentary about life in Pinochet-era Chile.

The book's original intention was to celebrate Littin's act of civil disobedience (he was legally not permitted to enter Chile, much less make a movie there).Pinochet is long gone, of course (he left power in 1990, and died in 2006 while awaiting trial for human rights violations). The book is still an interesting read though, in large part because of how it was written.

The entire book is written in Littin's voice and from Littin's perspective. Garcia Marquez essentially wrote a memoir from Littin's point of view--meaning he writes "as" Littin, not himself (or as an "objective" narrator). The result is a work of creative nonfiction where it is impossible to say exactly where the reporter ends and the subject begins.

It becomes, in effect, an experimental challenge to how we read journalism. Instead of the journalist presenting himself as an unbiased observer, here he literally takes on the persona and voice of his subject. In one sense this is an extreme take on journalistic objectivity--the journalist disappears altogether and the subject is the only person we hear from at all. In another sense, though, the book negates journalistic objectivity--as Garcia Marquez not only takes Littin's side but fully subsumes his own voice into the director's.

What makes it work is the way Garcia Marquez avoids calling the reader's attention to what he is doing. He never breaks character, never drops Littin's persona. The experimental nature of the book is all but invisible--meaning the reader has to find it himself/herself. Which means it rewards an active, enthusiastic reader.

This looks interesting...

2010-11-30T19:33:00.000-05:00

I just figured I'd post a link...

http://www.broadcastr.com/

More to come

Out of Time

2010-11-30T15:03:00.003-05:00

People always talk about the web in terms of how quickly it can disseminate information. And this is true--it's instantaneous and that makes it really east to report on events as they happen, whether by live-blogging or via Twitter. But the really interesting thing to me is the way the web makes timeliness less important.

Online, everything stays in the present tense. Take book reviews. In print, you have the most recent issue of a newspaper or magazine. That issue has a set number of reviews about books that have just been released... and nothing more. As a result, current reviews are much easier to find--open the magazine, and there they are--where to find old reviews, you need to go to a library and dig. Online, though, old reviews can be stored right alongside new ones. In a sense, the advantages of "newness" are reduced.

I'm thinking about this, because it is a big part of what I do with this blog. For the most part, this is an outlet for me to talk about what I'm reading. And I don't only read new books--just take a look at my last post, about USA, a trilogy published eighty years ago.

I suppose I could spend my time talking only about new books in an effort to be timely. But books aren't timely. That's the whole point of the medium. Reading is a "present tense" activity. A text is permanent--the USA I'm reading is the same USA someone else could've picked up in the 1930s. But the text is only half of the equation. The other half is the reader himself or herself.

A writer is a performer in a way. And just as a particular musician will play a given piece of music in a unique way (even if the notes themselves don't change), each reader reads in their own specific way. Which means that while a particular text may be fixed, the book itself is not. So there is always something to add to the conversation (aside: a conversation isn't an act of critical analysis--it's an act of enthusiasm, a desire to talk about what moves you).

This is a long way of saying that I like that the blog isn't timely.

Fiction, Nonfiction, and "USA"

2010-11-28T15:56:00.004-05:00

I've been making my way through John Dos Passos USA trilogy for a few weeks now. One of the things I really enjoy is the way Dos Passos integrates nonfiction pieces--especially short biographies of historical figures--into the text.

Dos Passos uses these mini biographies to hint at the main arc of the trilogy. In the first book, The 42nd Parallel, he highlights labor activists like Eugene Debs and Big Bill Haywood. 1919, he talks about Teddy Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson. In the final book, The Big Money, we read about Henry Ford and Thorstein Veblen.

USA is over 1200 pages long; as a result it's about a lot of things. But on one level it charts the rise and fall of the radical labor movement in the US, as it flowers in the economic crisis of the turn of the twentieth century, is marginalized during World War I, and is finally swamped in the face of the postwar rise of big business. The biographical sketches chart this, moving from activists like Debs to politicians like Wilson who came to power promising reform but then cracked down heavily on labor (particularly the IWW), through the rise of businessmen like Ford and intellectuals like Veblen.

This is a really interesting story, because transitions are always interesting stories. What appeals to me though is Dos Passos ability to mix genres. Decades before David Shields, Dos Passos used the essay as a way to give context to--and comment upon--his own fiction. While USA is far less radical in most respect than other American modernist works like Invisible Man or the novels of William Faulkner, the use of nonfiction pieces within the novel is a really excited experiment. And it works really well, because it helps make the arc of the trilogy--the path from activism to war to postwar boom--accessible without making it obvious.

Thoughts on the NYC/MFA divide

2010-11-27T12:34:00.004-05:00

I've been meaning to post about a piece in the latest issue of N+1. Lucky for me, Slate has recently posted it online (sometimes procrastination pays off). In the essay, Chad Harbach asserts that literary culture in the US is now divided into two distinct spheres:

It's time to do away with this distinction between the MFAs and the non-MFAs, the unfree and the free, the caged and the wild. Once we do, perhaps we can venture a new, less normative distinction, based not on the writer's educational background but on the system within which she earns (or aspires to earn) her living: MFA or NYC.

The idea is that writers are shaped by how they make their living--by teaching in MFA programs and applying for grants and fellowships, or by trying to make it in the New York publishing world (and sell a book for a big enough advance to cover the cost of living in New York).

The real interesting part of Harbach's thesis concern "canon building" (ie, what writers people in these two spheres admire):

One of the clearest signs of that divide is the way that different groups of writers are read, valued, and discussed in the two different "places"...The contemporary New York canon tends to be more contemporary than canon—it consists of popular new novels, and previous books by the authors of same. The MFA canon works differently. The rapid expansion of MFA programs in recent decades has opened up large institutional spaces above and below: above, for writer-professors who teach MFA students; below, for undergraduate students who are taught by MFAs (and by former MFAs hired as adjuncts). All told, program fiction amounts to a new discipline, with a new curriculum. This new curriculum consists mainly of short stories

Stark divisions like this are always overly simple, of course. I live in New York and I don't have an MFA (I decided to go for a plain old MA in English instead--for what it's worth, I think more writers should go that route), but I love Junot Diaz's Drown and Denis Johnson's Jesus's Son--both part of Harbach's "MFA canon." But I get the point that NY publishing is very novel driven (novels sell better) and many MFA programs are short-story driven (stories are easy to workshop). It will be interesting to see how this plays out in terms of what writers endure over time.

The one disappointing part of the article is that Harbach doesn't talk about the two branches of the literary community I find the most interesting--indie publishing and the online lit world. Neither fit into Harbach's thesis--the online world tends to be geographically dispersed and driven by readers; the indie world tends to make little money but has a huge NYC presence.

But that's a minor quibble. Overall the piece is really thought-provoking, and makes a number of good points. Read it here. Or, even better, go pick up the latest N+1 at an independent bookstore (it's quite good).

I'm pretty sure I've heard this one before...

2010-11-26T13:20:00.003-05:00

The internet has changed the way we write. Certain things are easier now--instead of going to a library to do research, we can sit home and use Google, which means the process of doing research is no longer "separate" from the process of writing. The web also offers a lot of new ways to publish, along with a lot of new writing forms (blog posts, "tweets," etc.), and different forms require different writing processes.

Ben Greeman recently wrote something for the Daily Beast suggesting another way the internet has changed writing:

Thanks to places like Google, the Internet is now the equivalent of an instant patent search that allows you to search for recurrences of phrases, puns, neologisms. Here, though, is the root of a larger issue: The cure is far worse than the disease. The Internet’s search capabilities, which permit easy detection of unoriginality, also have a chilling effect on originality...The first spark of an idea—whether a short story, a song lyric, a newspaper headline, a movie title, or a joke about an oddly dressed neighbor—is tenuous at best, and conditions need to be perfect not to douse it before it can kindle something more substantive. If the Internet moves us toward a get-there-first-or-not-at-all world (that phrase, by the way, seems all new, at least according to Google), then hundreds of thousands of newly born “proto-ideas” (1180 results) will end before they have a chance to “flower into genuine articles of faith” (9 results).

This is a really serious concern. Basically, Greenman worries that the internet might make us self-conscious of our ideas, that we might check them on Google to make sure they're "original," and then, when we see that thousands of other people have already done something along the same lines, we will put our idea aside. That the fear of being accused of plagiarism (or merely lack of originality) will make us timid about pursuing certain ideas.

Of course, the real "problem" goes deeper than the internet. The problem is a matter of confidence. Ultimately, being a writer requires a willingness to be criticized--even a willingness to look foolish. To put it another way, good writing is always original, even if the underlying plot of a given story recalls something else (after all, Shakespeare wasn't the fist person to write about Julius Caesar).

A writer needs to be confident enough in their own abilities to follow up on their ideas--a writer need to be confident enough to write. Some of that means being smart enough not to punch an idea into Google and check out the "competition." If something interests you, write it down. And worry about the rest of the world later.

Reading Marias Reading Shakespeare

2010-11-24T15:30:00.005-05:00

I don't have the time today to go deeply into the novel, but I wanted return briefly to Javier Marias's A Heart So White, in order to talk about then novel's relationship to Shakespeare's Macbeth.

A Heart So White opens with a suicide--or, rather, the description of one. Juan, the narrator, is talking about the death of his aunt, Theresa, who shot herself soon after her marriage to Juan's father, Ranz (after Theresa's death, Ranz married her younger sister, Juan's mother).

Throughout the novel, Juan/Marias repeatedly invokes Lady Macbeth's suicide, using it the way an opera might utilize a particular musical cue. This works on two levels--in the context of the story, it helps illuminate Theresa and Ranz's relationship (which I will return to later), and in the context of the reader's interaction with the text, it helps call attention to a particular aspect of Macbeth.

Marias pays particular attention to the way Lady Macbeth feels implicated in her husband's crimes: "She hears his confession of that act or deed or exploit and what makes her an accomplice is not that she instigated it, but that she knows about the deed and its accomplishment. She knows, she knows what happened, and therein lies her guilt."

This is an interesting take on the play--and on storytelling itself. After all, as readers/viewers of the play, we know what happened too. Does that mean we share in Lady Macbeth's guilt? Marias is writing a novel, not a dissertation, so that question isn't answered by A Heart So White. It's enough, though, that he makes us ask it--because now we can return to Macbeth with fresh eyes. And if we're lucky, Macbeth will suggest a new way of looking at A Heart So White.

I've always believed that the best literary "criticism" is literature itself--meaning that the most fascinating responses to Macbeth come from the playwrights and novelists that have grappled with it in their own work. Besides, anything that sends me back the Shakespeare is a good thing.

POP!

2010-11-23T20:56:00.006-05:00

Mario Vargas Llosa's Nobel win led to a quick flurry of coverage for a number of Spanish-language authors. A number of critics talked about Javier Marias's work; I've been meaning to read him for a while, and this finally gave me the push to take up his novel A Heart So White.

I've also been thinking a lot about Lorin Stein's critique of American literature. More accurately, his complaints have gotten me to think a lot about American literature as such--what makes it different from other literary communities, what works, what doesn't. As a reuslt, certain elements of Marias's work are striking me differently than they might have at another time.

One think I notice is that like the German writers I just read a few weeks back, Jenny Erpenbeck and WG Sebald, Marias doesn't really engage popular culture directly. What I mean by that is that his work doesn't talk much about pop culture figures or artifacts, and he doesn't immerse his characters much in pop culture. I call attention to it, because it strikes me that popular culture is a key subject in recent English-language fiction.

Almost all of my favorite recent American novels engage pop culture on some level. Junot Diaz's The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao is immersed in sci-fi and fantasy (to the point where he compares Trujillo to Sauron); comic books are essential to Jonathan Lethem's Forterss of Solitude and Michael Chabon's The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay (Fortress of Solitude also looks at popular music); Mary Gaitskill's Veronica is set in the world of modeling; etc.

Certainly, there are well-regarded American novels that don't touch on pop culture--but there are a lot that do. And while I can think of British writers that do this (Zadie Smith, Nick Hornby), I can't think of too many translated books that treat pop culture with so much fascination. Think of it--all of the books above use pop culture as an organizing principle. You could say that, on one level, all of them are about pop culture. I can't think of one translated book that does the same thing.

I'm sure some of that is a marketing issue--an American publisher probably wouldn't rush to put out a novel that comments extensively on cultural and entertainment figures unknown to American readers. But I can't help but wonder if pop culture looms a little bigger in contemporary American lit--that it's a subject of particularly keen interest to American (or at least English-language) writers.

I don't have an elaborate theory about this; it's just something that struck me while reading Marias. On a separate note, A Heart So White is really great--and I'll be sure to put another post up about the book soon.

Song of the Week

2010-11-19T18:58:00.001-05:00

Song of the week is back. Here's Curtis Mayfield with "Pusherman":

Character History

2010-11-17T12:02:00.004-05:00

I've been reading a lot of ambitious books lately. Two of my most recent posts have looked at Jenny Erpenbeck's Visitation and WG Sebald's The Emigrants. Both are experimental works that use language and postmodern literary techniques to illuminate different aspects of Germany's horrible (and horrifying) twentieth century.

Coincidentally, I am also making my way through John Dos Passos USA trilogy now as well. I've recently finished the first part of the series, The 42nd Parallel, which weaves several different narrative threads into a portrait of America on the eve of World War I. It is experimental in its own way--peppered with short biographical sketches of real-life figures like William Jennings Bryan, Eugene Debs, and Thomas Edison, as well as "newsreel" interludes (featuring pieces of newspaper articles and headlines), and other narrative tricks.

What these three books have in common is that they use experimental narrative techniques to talk about larger themes. All three books talk about war, and the way wartime changes a country. Dos Passos also explores the early twentieth century labor movement and the US's prewar economic troubles, while Erpenbeck and Sebald look at the way violence and displacement shape us as individuals.

None of these books is didactic. They never lose their characters in history. And that's why I wanted to talk about them together--they are all books about characters first and foremost. Their ambition is not in providing an historical account of a particular time period, but in exploring how "history" impacts different individuals.

I though of this last night reading Lorin Stein's complaint that too few American writers tackle important themes. A lot has happened in the US over the last decade and a half--the Clinton impeachment, the Florida recount, 9/11, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the rise of social media, the economic crisis, the election of our first African-American president---and this ought to serve as a challenge to American writers. Not because we ought to all churn out USA-style epics about American history, but because writing stories about contemporary American characters means writing about the context those characters exist in.

History is important to writers because it changes people, whether they realize it or not. And we all live through history. What's remarkable about Visitation and The Emigrants is that they are essentially small-scale stories. They are about lonely people, who leads relatively ordinary lives. Erpenbeck and Sebald tell their stories, and in so doing touch upon wider themes. This, to me, is true writerly ambition--to tell a universal story through an individual story. And it's a lesson that all writers ought to take to heart.

Well, nothing's perfect...

2010-11-16T21:34:00.004-05:00

I don't have time for a long post tonight, but I wanted to call attention to some remarks made recently by Lorin Stein, the editor of the Paris Review (via):

He added the quality of writing in America has declined steeply in the past few decades... Stein said he does not enjoy a lot of the short fiction and poetry that is published in magazines today. When he looks at submissions to his magazine, he said, he is searching for pieces that could be “stuck up on the fridge” — stories and poems that resonate because they are about real life. Young writers do not have enough life experience to tackle the important themes that only fiction can illuminate, Stein said, so they write about writing instead.

There's a lot here. Some of it I agree with; some I don't. I think it's always a mistake to generalize about the writing of a given time period. The truth is, only the very best writing survives over time. Which means if want you read something written, say, in the 1930s, your options will (mostly) be limited to the very best books written in the 1930s. The rest is long out of print and forgotten. Over time, other readers have sorted out the good and the bad, and now our choices are limited to the stuff they deemed "good." But if you want to read something written today, you need to do the sorting yourself. That's frustrating, and it leads people to generalize about all the "bad books" out there today. But that doesn't make it true.

However, Stein puts his finger on a weakness of a lot of (though not all) contemporary writing. There is always a need for books to take on human beings as such--what Stein calls the "big themes" we learn about through life experience. And many writers today shy away from big themes in favor of "well crafted" stories about...well, not much. And certainly there are literary magazines that fall into the trap of privileged "craft" writing over "messier" stories written with heart and ambition. (I write fiction, and so am not naming names. It's my blog, I'm allowed to wimp out when I want to.)

More to come...

Repetition

2010-11-15T18:20:00.006-05:00

Last week I had the chance to read Visitation, the latest book by Jenny Erpenbeck to be translated into English. I first encountered Erpenbeck a few years back when I reviewed her outstanding novella The Book of Words. One thing that is striking about both books is Erpenbeck's use of repetition. She will often take simple phrases and use them as "themes" associated with a particular character.

Visitation is set on a lake in Germany. It serves an an anchor as the story moves through several generations of owners, through the Weimer Republic, the Nazis, the division of Germany after the war (the lake house is in the communist East Germany), and then into reunification. This is a tumultous sequence of events, to say the least, and just like The Book of Words, Visitation contains scenes of staggering brutality.

In both works, Erpenbeck uses language to underscore the horror of the events she describes. For example, in Visitation she describes the Jewish family that owns the lake house in the 1930s in a very full, formal manner. For example, one young member of the family is called "Doris daughter of Ernst and Elisabeth twelve years old born in Guben." As in The Book of Words, it becomes a kind of mantra.

This is no mere formal device. Doris is at this point has seen her entire family carries away family and is now hiding from the Nazis. She clings to this mantra--this long, formal naming ritual, as a way to maintain her identity: "But as long as this sentence still stands, her name is still Doris and she still exists: Doris daughter of Ernst and Elisabeth twelve years old born in Guben." These words affirm Doris's humanity--and the humanity of her parents, Ernst and Elisabeth. They give her comfort, but more importantly for the reader, they lay bare the way that the Nazi's policies are trying to deny Doris's basic humanity.

Throughout the book, repetition and language are used to underscore both the horrors the lake house's inhabitants endure--in addition genocide and war, there are several rapes on the property, and at least one suicide--and the humanity of those suffering. A homesick writer is always represented by the typed hope "I a-m g-o-i-n-g h-o-m-e," the gardener at the center of several rumors is followed by the expression "in the village, they are saying..."

Erpenbeck uses these phrases the way a film director uses a score--to accentuate details, the throw certain situations into stark relief, to draw the audience into the story. Kurt Vonnegut uses the phrase "So it goes" to similar effect in Slaughterhouse Five. However, I've never come a across someone who uses so many difference "cues" of this sort, in so many places, and in so many ways. It is a remarkable achievement, one that is not as flashy as most "experimental" writing, but that is far more daring--and far more moving--than any other recent literary experiments I can think of.

Sebald's Memory

2010-11-06T14:14:00.003-04:00

I had a chance to read WG Sebald's The Emigrants this week. I've also read his novels Austerlitz and The Rings of Saturn. All of them are great, but I enjoyed The Emigrants the most--so for what's it's worth, that's where I'd encourage you to start if you're looking to read Sebald.

What's most interesting about Sebald is the way he handles memory. The Emigrants is a series of four related (though not explicitly connected) biographical essays. The narrator has known all four to varying degrees, and is now piecing together the particulars of their lives. Often, the narrator will "turn over" the story to someone else--he seeks out people who knew his subjects well and asks them what they can remember. This leads to second and thirdhand information entering the text. The narrator is remembering someone else remembering something that the biographical subject said.

In a lot of ways, Sebald anticipates the best of David Shield's Reality Hunger, by exposing the element of uncertainty (fiction) inherent in all memory. This is compounded by the fact that Sebald inserts photos and other visual evidence into his stories, giving his "novels" an element of nonfiction.

The Emigrants expands on this by showing how memory acts in the context of human suffering. There is a lot of real pain in this book--many of its characters commit suicide. It is (very subtlety) set amid the backdrop of the Holocaust and World War II, so that's understandable. But Sebald concentrates not on physical pain so much as emotional suffering. The book is best captured by one sequence where he declares:

I gradually understood that, beyond a certain point, pain blots out the one thing that is essential to its being experienced--consciousness--and so perhaps extinguishes itself; we know very little about this. What is certain, though, is that mental suffering is effectively without end.

In that sense, memory is a curse, because it is memory that is the source of "mental suffering." In a way, the most certain memories are the ones that cause pain, because they aren't "memories" at all--they are permanent components of the characters' lives.

Book People Can Be Funny Too

2010-11-04T21:03:00.003-04:00

This is usually a pretty "serious" blog, so I figured I'd post some lit humor as a change of pace. Here are James Joyce and Samuel Beckett playing golf. (Sort of.)

Enjoy--but don't watch it at work...

Not So Obvious

2010-11-01T20:08:00.003-04:00

The Millions has an interesting rebuttal to BR Myers review of Jonathan Franzen's Freedom. I don't want to talk to much about the piece itself, since so far I've only read excerpts of the novel (not the whole thing), but there is one point in there that bears repeating: "It’s surely no commendation for a critic that we know what he’s going to say about a novelist before we’ve read the review. Or before either of us has read the book."

This is great advice for a reviewer. Don't get me wrong, reviews need to be intellectually honest. Otherwise, what's the point in reading them. But there is a natural risk for a critic to look at a book exclusively on their own terms--in the context of their wider views about writing, contemporary lit, or (most worryingly) the critic's own personal "brand" (ie--"my reputation is that I am a combative critic, so I will write a very brutal review in order to satisfy that reputation, even if I don't think the particular work merits it").

When I write reviews, I always try to look at a book on its own terms first--what the writer is trying to do, and whether or not that works. Of course, I have opinions, and if I don't like something I'll say so. But the point of a review is to inform the reader--to participate in a broader conversation about the work in question and how it fits both into the wider literary environment and our own individual reading itineraries.

The hope is that each review will be "different" in the sense that each book reviewed is different and the reviews will reflect this. Ultimately, predictability in a critic is a sign of laziness. It's a product of falling back on a familiar reviewing "formula" rather than starting fresh with each book. And there is nothing less interesting to read than lazy criticism.

Ghost Stories

2010-10-31T14:39:00.005-04:00

It's Halloween, so I figured I'd talks a bit about horror literature--especially against horror movies, which have long been the dominant form of "scary" entertainment.

Movies are a more passive medium than books--you get a story, you watch it in sequence, and that's it. Novels and short stories require a bit more engagement--the reader needs to imagine the characters, the settings, all of it. To put it simply, the reader needs to actively participate in creating the story. The very best ghost tales--The Turn of the Screw being the most obvious example--take advantage of this, and build a strong layer of ambiguity into the story. But in a sense those stories succeed precisely to the extent they go beyond "scaring" readers.

As paradoxical as it sounds, I think the appeal of horror stories (for many) is that they're relaxing. You spend a limited period of time in a frightening situation, and then you walk away. You get a cathartic "scare" and that's it. Books ask a little more. They ask you to really immerse yourself in a story--to collaborate on it. And it seems like that kind of effort demands a bit more of a payoff than just a visceral thrill.

Dan Chaon's "The Bees" is a "horror" story, but it is also something more. And what sticks with you when your done are its psychological insights, not its scares. As a result, it's not really much of an escape. Think of it this way--when you watch a horror film, the monsters are in a little box a good distance away from you. When you read a horror story, the monsters are in your own head. That experience can be described in many ways, but "escapist" probably isn't one of them.

Song of the Week

2010-10-29T18:02:00.005-04:00

When I came up for the idea of posting "Halloween" themed videos for October, I knew right away I'd be ending with this one. Here are the Ramones:

All the Time in the World

2010-10-29T15:49:00.005-04:00

I started reading John Dos Passos' USA recently. I'm not quite sure how to blog about it--it's a sequence of three novels that (at least in the Library of America edition I own) comes to over 1200 pages--but I guess that's something I'll figure out along the way.

I've been making it a point lately to go back to certain longer, "canonical" books that I've always meant to read but put off. These are mostly books I've had for a few years that I just never got too. In every case--particularly with USA--the length of the work in question was the reason I avoided if for so long.

In an interview with the Guardian, Philip Roth made the claim that "If you read a novel in more than two weeks you don't read the novel really." I don't agree with that exactly--it took me more than two weeks to read Moby Dick, and I certainly felt like I "read" it--but I think there is some truth there.

Books are different from other works of art in that they are usually absorbed over a long(ish) period of time. The longest movie, play, or musical performance is still taken in over the course of one sitting. When you look at most visual art--painting and sculpture especially--you almost always are taking in the entire work at once. But with novels, you usually end up reading them in over the course of (at least) a few days.

There are exceptions--a short work like By Night in Chile, for example, is best read in one sitting. And I can think of some longer novels that I've taken in all at once--I got through all of Roth's original Zuckerman Trilogy in three days, going through a novel a day. But it can take hours and hours to get through a novel, and for the most part, it's hard to find that much free time in a single day. Or week.

As a result, I often shy away from books that are significantly longer than 400 pages. The amount of time you spend with a book changes how you read it. It's easier to truly immerse yourself in a work if you get through it in a matter of days, as opposed to months. You'll more easily remember the minor characters and slight plot diversions, for example, and they will help you get a sense of a book's wider ambitions (especially if the book is a sweeping multiyear epic like USA).

But anyone with a full-time job knows how hard that is. I used to react to this by putting off longer works until I has a lot of free time. But now, I've changed my mind. Ultimately, I'd rather read a great book over a long period of time than read it never. A well-written long novel is a very particular experience--sweeping, messy, and all-encompassing. It take a special kind of effort. And I for one am making a point of giving that kind of effort.

So far, it seems to be working out well. I'll end up reading fewer books this year, even if I cover the same number of pages. But I've really enjoyed my trip though the canon.

Final Thoughts on "Love"

2010-10-26T19:57:00.003-04:00

I'm finishing up Love in the Time of Cholera now. As you would imagine, the lives of Fermina Darza and Florentino Ariza eventually come back together, and the two are able to have a love affair in their old age.

It's a really beautiful sequence. But the most striking thing about it (for me) is that it focuses on love between two elderly people. Not because there's something strange about people have relationships in their seventies--lots of people have late-life marriages, after all--but because I can't remember ever reading a novel that culminated with one.

It's a minor point in the novel, I suppose, but it serves as an interesting contrast with a lot of other literary love affairs (from Romeo and Juliet forward) that focus only on the young. In a sense, this is addressed right in the text. When it becomes clear what is going on between Fermina and Florentino, Fermina's own children are somewhat horrified--they find love a bit, well, unseemly among people as old as their mother. I can't help but see the book as (in part) a rebuke to that.

Of Stories and Storytelling

2010-10-23T18:26:00.003-04:00

Lately, I've been making my way though Love in the Time of Cholera by Gabriel Garcia Marquez. Oddly, though I read a lot of different Latin American works, before this year I largely neglected him. Some of it, I think, is that he is such an iconic figure that it felt almost beside the point. I've read a lot of magical realism, and almost all of it was said to be somehow derived from his work. It's not my favorite style of writing, so I assumed I wouldn't like Garcia Marquez much either. For example, I felt the magical realist parts of Everything Is Illuminated were rather twee and diminished the book considerably.

I read One Hundred Years of Solitude earlier this year, though, and I liked it enough to want to engage with more of Garcia Marquez's work. I enjoy Cholera more, though I'm moving through it a bit slower than I expected too. Interestingly, the book it reminds me of is one that it doesn't outwardly resemble in the least--William Faulkner's Absalom, Absalom.

The stories themselves have nothing in common. Love in the Time of Cholera is the story of two longtime loves--Florentino Ariza's unrequited love for his youthful "first love" Fermina Darza and Fermina Darza's slow-building love for her husband Juvenal Urbino, while Absalom, Absalom is about the rise and fall of the the ambitious Stupen family. But the books are very similar as reading experiences. Both are epic in scope, taking place over many years, and both place a heavy emphasis on language.

I think Absalom, Absalom is the most aesthetically beautiful book I have ever read. It uses very long sentences and very complex metaphors to take a seemingly pathetic family and elevate them into something poetic. It is slow reading because it is so dense, Faulkner makes you linger on every line to understand just what is happening. It can be exhausting at times, though the book repays the effort.

Garcia Marquez is similar in that he too is willing to use very long sentences (at least, they're long in my translation) and very complicated metaphors in order to take a rather foolish infatuation--Ariza ends up pining over the same woman for more than half a century, which, when you think of it, is really kind of pathetic--and turns it into something moving. Language and beautiful images make the book rewarding, just as in Absalom, Absalom.

I enjoy a good story, of course, but I prefer good storytelling--a good use of language, inventive imagery, etc. Both Garcia Marquez and Faulkner understand the difference, and as a result their books compliment each other well (if unintentionally). Ultimately, I should admit that I prefer Faulkner, though that's certainly a matter of taste. The important thing is that I'm enjoying the book I'm reading now.

Song of the Week

2010-10-22T18:57:00.003-04:00

Continuing with October's Halloween theme, this week's song is "Attack of the Ghost Riders" by the Raveonettes:

Okay, look back...

2010-10-20T19:45:00.005-04:00

Building on my last post, I figured I'd look back to another of my favorite books, Denis Johnson's story collection Jesus' Son.

The book's title, of course, comes from the song "Heroin" by the Velvet Underground. And that's what most of these stories are about, at least superficially--heroin addiction. But, like the Velvet Underground, Johnson uses sordid subject matter to create something really beautiful.

He does this through his use of language. I like the way Johnson creates sentences--even when his books don't work, they are beautiful to read. Sometimes reading is primarily an aesthetic experience, where it's about losing yourself in a book's narrative style or voice. And few writers's work is as aesthetically appealing (to me) as Johnson's is.

Jesus' Son is his best-known work, and rightfully so. It uses the beauty of Johnson's writing to give us a window into the mind of it's drug-addled narrator. One particular passage, from the book's first story, "Car Crash While Hitchhiking," is illustrative.

The narrator (he is not quite named, other characters only refer to him as "Fuckhead") is in the hospital after an automobile accident. He is fine, but another man involved in the crash has died. As Fuckhead looks on, his widow gets the news: "She shrieked as I imagined an eagle would shriek. It felt wonderful to be alive to hear it! I've gone looking for that feeling everywhere."

It is a depth of emotion that Fuckhead himself can't muster. He feels nothing himself, and so her pain is alluring. This is the character in a nutshell--he subjects himself to poverty, rootlessness, and a string of relationships so fleeting they can't even be called "failed" because he is trying to feel something. Paradoxically the drugs he takes to "feel" also leave him too numb to feel.

It's a pretty simple story, but it's also a very moving one. It's also the one aspect of drug addiction that resonates beyond drug culture--because ultimately, we all want to feel something. Why else we turn to literature in the first place?

Don't Look Back

2010-10-16T16:21:00.004-04:00

Since this blog is mostly about my current reading, I don't always get a chance to talk about my favorite writers. I reread when I can, but I usually focus on books that are "new" to me. I thought it might be interesting to periodically look back on some books I enjoy, even if I'm not reading them right this second. Hopefully it'll turn into a semi-regular feature.

Anyway, I wanted to start with Ernesto Sabato. Sabato is an Argentine writer, who's best work was done in the middle of the 20th century. I first encountered his work in a novella called The Tunnel, which I found one day while browsing at the Strand.

The Tunnel is essentially a piece of existentialistic fiction, not far removed from Camus's The Stranger or Sartre's Nausea (I picked up the book in part because I was reading a lot of existentialist fiction at the time). But the book isn't a straight, European-style take on the crisis of the individual. Instead, Sabato gives us a narrator (a painter named Castel) who is truly dangerous.

Like Meursault in The Stranger, Castel eventually descends into murder. But where Meursault acts almost inexplicably, the murder is a product of his own obsessions and penchant for violence. In a lot of ways, Castel's actions are inevitable--he has become obsessed with a lover and in the end his obsession leads him to destroy her.

What makes this especially fascinating is the way Castel seems to delight in his own awfulness. As he explains: "I receive a certain satisfaction from proving my own baseness, in confirming that I am no better than the lowest of the low around me." As a result this is a very dark book. Making it even more haunting is Sabato's spare, intense prose. As Dedi Felman explained in Words Without Borders:

This lean book may thus jolt contemporary readers. It reminds us that when we lost taut characterization, we also lost books that pricked our conscience with their discomfiting portraits of the human psyche pushed beyond rationality. Uncushioned by postmodern garrulousness, art disturbs with human truths. The uncontrollability of human passion, precisely bounded, here comes across not as melodrama but as icy documentary.

It's stuck with me for years. In a lot of ways, it reminds me of Dostoevsky's Crime in Punishment, the way it puts you in the minds of a killer and then just leaves you there. It's hard to find The Tunnel in English (the edition I have, published by Ballantine, is out of print), but it's worth the effort.

The Value of Craft

2010-10-12T20:43:00.003-04:00

I'm finishing up Cost of Living. I have no idea if Mavis Gallant is widely studied in Creative Writing departments, but she ought to be. There's a great sense of craft in work. The important thing, though, is that she balances it with good characters. I think that young writers (really all writers) would benefit from using her stories as a point of reference.

Gallant has a great grasp of the language--she is brief, insightful, and has a very clean style. It's good to experience that style firsthand, if only to see that "well crafted" writing really can be used to tell emotionally engaging stories. For someone like me, who can be suspicious of overly "crafted" writing, it's nice to be reminded that good technique is really valuable in the hands of someone who knows how to use it.

I'm not a great believer in "models"--in the sense that I think a writer should worry about developing their own voice instead of trying to imitate a favorite precursor--but I do believe there is something to be learned by exposing oneself to other people's work. As I've said before, being a better reader is the most important step to becoming a better writer.

Famous Last Words

2010-10-09T12:50:00.005-04:00

Also see Part One, Part Two, Part Three, Part Four, and Part Five.

I promised a while back that I'd wrap up my discussion of Roberto Bolaño. Since he came up in yesterday's post, I figured now was as good a time as any to keep my word.

So far, I've been talking about just why I think Bolaño has attracted such an audience in the US, while other great Latin American writers (such as Cesar Aira, for example) have not. But Bolaño's popularity, while interesting, isn't all that important to a reader. What matters is his work itself. I'm a big fan of Bolaño's writing, and I before I finish blogging about him, I'd like to explain why I personally am so drawn to his books.

Bolaño is very difficult in a lot of ways, in the sense that he doesn't do much to accommodate the readers. One thing he doesn't worry about is making his characters sympathetic. In fact, he sometimes goes out of his way to make them detestable. Look at Nazi Literature in the Americas. It's a "biographical encyclopedia" of fictional Nazis. Everyone in the book is a monster, except for a few characters who are "merely" pathetic boors. I can't think of any collection of characters as uniformly repellent.

But that is part of the point--Bolaño is exploring the way literature is used to make myths, the way it can inflate even the most horrible of people or political movements. As Stacey D'Erasmo observed:

Who said literature has no real power to affect history? Not Bolaño — for him, literature is an unnervingly protean, amoral force with uncanny powers of self-invention, self-justification and self-mythification. The mythmakers, he suggests, certainly do matter. If Hitler had won, for instance, the not entirely absurd stories in this encyclopedia would be the prevailing stories of the culture. Is Nazi poetry an oxymoron? Not a bit of it, posits Bolaño. On the contrary, it’s all too possible.

Literature's "amorality" is a recurring theme in Bolaño's writing. And to really explore that theme, Bolaño needs to show us an "amoral" literature. The risk, of course, is that this will make the book unreadable. And not everyone likes Nazi Literature, in part because its characters are so off-putting. But I think literature's "amorality" is an interesting topic, in the sense that it pushes us as readers to use our own judgement.

Bolaño's books tell us that we must be engaged as readers, that we must be aware of what the writer is doing and question his or her motives. I think that's a very brave thing to write about, because in many ways it implicates Bolaño (as a writer) in his own critique.

But that bravery wouldn't amount to anything if the stories weren't interesting. And I actually find Nazi Literature to be really fascinating--in part because it is so good at stripping bare the myth-making process that is at the heart of so much writing. (Words Without Borders has an excerpt, "The Many Masks of Max Mirebelais," that will give you an idea of the of the book's strengths and weaknesses.)

Nazi Literature also poses a stylistic challenge to the reader. It's a "reference" book, after all--not exactly a genre known for its readability. Bolaño does that sort of thing a lot--he makes few concessions to readability.

Look at The Savage Detectives. Most of the book is a fictional oral history of an obscure Mexican poetry movement. Like Faulkner's As I Lay Dying, each "narrator" has a distinct voice (which is an astonishing technical achievement for a writer). But even Faulkner made more concessions to the reader than Bolaño does here (in As I Lay Dying, the narrators take turns, chapter by chapter, and it is always clear who is "speaking" at any given moment).

In Detectives, the narrators keep coming--there are way too many to keep track of, and they aren't always identified. The effect is that the reader is constantly being knocked off guard, constantly getting lost and doubling back to sort out the "story." The novel forces you to read it on its own terms.

I love that Bolaño is such a challenge to read--because he is always interesting, and always worth it. Basically, he gets away with things that other writers cannot. And I enjoy watching him do that. It's an appeal similar to that of punk rock--he manages to make an adversarial stance compelling.

Interestingly, he also anticipates David Shields' complaints about the "uncompelling" nature of fiction in the face of nonfiction by constantly tweaking nonfictional forms. "Real" people are constantly popping up in Bolaño's work--Pinochet is a character in By Night in Chile, Nobel laureate Octavio Paz turns up in The Savage Detectives, etc. In fact, the visceral realist poetry movement chronicled in The Savage Detectives is openly modeled on the infra-realists, a poetry movement Bolaño was associated with in the 1970s.

Essentially, Bolaño's fiction is a challenge to nonfiction--in his work, all writing is myth-making, and therefore suspect. Or, to put it simply, everything is fiction. (Bolaño's career is the antithesis of Reality Hunger.) Bolaño suspects fiction--because it is amoral--but he also makes the case for its importance. In Bolaño's books, words matter. Pinochet couldn't use the literary priest at the center of By Night in Chile if that priest's writing weren't "worth" using.

Song of the Week

2010-10-08T19:35:00.004-04:00

In keeping with my "scary video" theme, this week's song is Sonic Youth's "Death Valley '69." I actually wrote about the video last year for the Brooklyn Rail, in my review of the Museum of Modern Art's Looking at Music: Side 2 exhibit:

I found the clip at one of the television-sized video stations placed throughout the gallery, and immediately grabbed a pair of headphones. About two minutes later, a young woman decided to watch along with me. I craned my neck to see past her, then—slam! She threw down her headphones after about 30 seconds, jumping back as if struck by an invisible fist. The video kept going; I started bobbing my head. A couple of minutes passed, and then some guy in a blue shirt was stepping in front of me. I craned my neck again, kept watching, then—slam! Blue Shirt fled as if he thought the people onscreen were going to jump out and eat him.

The thing is, I don’t blame them for hating it. Death Valley is loosely based on the Manson killings, which means the video is very noisy and very, very violent. I had fun with it—I like noise, and I don’t mind movie gore. But those things repel a lot of people. They’re supposed to.

Don't say I didn't warn you. (And please, don't watch it at work.)

Thinking Small

2010-10-08T18:44:00.003-04:00

I didn't have time to blog yesterday, but I still wanted to comment on Mario Vargas Llosa's winning of the Nobel Prize for Literature. To be honest, I have a mental list of writers that I "root" for when it comes to the Nobel, and Llosa has been on it for a while (now if Chinua Achebe or Philip Roth could win next year...). I especially enjoy his novel The Green House, which does a wonderful job of illustrating the way memory and the past intrude into the present (in many respects, Llosa is similar to Faulkner, actually, particularly in his treatment of the past).

Also, I'm pleased to see a writer from Latin America recognized. For the last few decades, really since just after World War II, Latin America has produced one of the most consistently interesting literary communities. Certainly, it's futile to generalize about an entire continent, but South America in particular has produced a lot of my favorite authors--Roberto Bolaño, Julio Cortazar, Ernesto Sabato, etc. The fact that the continent had been unrecognized by the Nobel since 1982 (the entire Spanish language has been unhonored since 1990).

Of course, everyone's been tying to the Nobel for weeks now, speculating about it and highlighting presumed candidates. The Millions put together a particularly nice piece about Latin writers (including Llosa) they thought might win. But it was a name they overlooked that got me thinking today.

I just read Cesar Aira's novella Ghosts a last week. It's an extraordinary book, that manges to follow the nonlinear style of "though" without resorting to a stream-of-conscious style. It's genuinely new and very, very interesting. Aira got a little bit of attention before the Nobel, but he wasn't seen as a "top candidate." Some of that is that he isn't as internationally famous as, say, Llosa. But I can't help but wonder if part of the problem is also that he specializes in novellas and short works.

It seems that big, sprawling books--and the people who write them--tend to get more acclaim than those who think "small." Recently on the blog, I've talked a lot about Roberto Bolaño. It's telling that Bolaño's fame in the US began with the translations of his two longest works--The Savage Detectives and 2666. They're big, sprawling, and ambitious--and that attracts attention. But, as someone who reads Bolaño a lot, I actually feel like his most interesting work is the short novels/novellas that New Directions has been rolling out since before The Savage Detectives broke. By Night in Chile in particular is just brilliant--in less than 150 pages, it takes on Pinochet, the Catholic Church, sexuality, torture, art, criticism, literary celebrity... even literature itself. But it is such a small work--best read in one sitting--that it hasn't drawn as much curiosity as his longer ones.

At the moment, I'm reading Mavis Gallant's short story collection The Cost of Living. Gallant has more control as a writer than almost anyone else I've read. And her long association at the New Yorker means that she's had a great deal of influence on short fiction over the last few decades. In a lot of ways, the quintessential "New Yorker story"--a quiet, well-crafted narrative focused on everyday (though often upper-middle class) people that leads to an "epiphany"--is a Mavis Gallant short story. But she is never mentioned in the same breath as contemporaries like Philip Roth--even though she writes just as well, and is just as influential.

I can't help but think that some of that is that she is primarily a writer of short fiction. Like Aira, Gallant is slightly overlooked because her work isn't "ambitious" in the obvious way a long, sprawling epic like Freedom is ambitious. (To be honest, I enjoy Gallant's writing more than I do Jonathan Franzen's).

To put it simply--short stories and novellas can be just as rewarding as novels. That doesn't have much to do with the Nobel Prize, of course, but now's as good a time to say it as any.

Once more unto the breach...

2010-10-05T23:21:00.004-04:00

I talk about e-readers a lot on the blog. One reason is practical--e-readers are new, and a lot is being written about them. But another reason is that I honestly don't like the way digital reading is often covered in the press and online.

As I see it, there are three threads in this discussion. The first is the opportunity e-readers offer writers to re-conceive what a "book" can be. The most obvious manifestation of this is the rise of "apps" that integrate non-textual elements. In the long term, I strongly believe that we'll see new kinds of texts grow out of the e-reader format--ones that are interactive and linked to other texts and articles (like blogs). This is a very speculative topic. since it hasn't happened yet. Ultimately, it's up to writers to come up with something new; until then, there isn't much to say about it. (Which is why I tend to talk about this less than I talk about other aspects of e-readers.)

The second thread is a personal one--how an individual reader reacts to digital texts. As I've said before, many times, I've not enjoyed my experiences with e-readers. This is a personal thing, and ultimately each reader will have a different experience. I worry I sometimes give the impression that I'm somehow against e-readers. I'm not--I'm actually very curious to talk to people who enjoy them. (I know some already.) But this blog is about my own personal reading experiences, and as a result my own ambivalence about e-readers is going to get most of the space. That's the nature of blogging. (Though you're always welcome to share your own experiences in the comments section.)

The last thread is the "business" angle--meaning the way certain companies and cultural figures have tried to hype e-readers (usually to sell them). Recently, I objected to Nicolas Negroponte's contention that people who prefer paper books are clinging to a "romantic conceit." There's nothing more annoying then when someone confuses their own personal experience with a universal one, and one reason I blog about this so much is because I want to do my part to remind people that we all react to different media in different ways.

The other side of e-reader coverage, though, is the way some writers pass along "data" that isn't particularly clear, and use it to make much to broad a point about digital reading. Mobylives made a good point today about one current example of this:

Two surveys from last month provide a rosy picture of the impact of eReaders on literacy... we would like to venture that the value of these surveys is probably nil. What type of person, after buying a new Kindle or iPad, would admit that they read less than before? What child, when offered a new toy, wouldn’t promise to behave better?

Look, e-readers are very cool and have lots of possibilities. We’re excited too. But in the end, technology isn’t a cure for behavior. When these exercise machines were invented, I bet someone said that one day, no one would ever be fat.

The point isn't that e-readers are bad, or that people who like e-readers don't actually use them. It's that there isn't any real data either way about whether or not e-readers change people's reading habits. There simply hasn't been enough time to do any kind of serious study. Certainly Amazon and Apple have a vested interest in making e-readers seem as revolutionary as possible (because who doesn't want to own something revolutionary?), but those of us that don't work for Amazon's marketing department have no reason to play along.

Rather than jump at every bit of data and try to make some sweeping argument, it would be interesting to see more people just talk about e-readers on a personal level. After all, that's the only level that matters--how you, as an individual reader, react to different media and formats. (And, most importantly, to different books and stories.)

A new review

2010-10-05T16:28:00.003-04:00

I've got a new up at Bookslut today. This one takes a look at Sigrid Nunez's new novel, Salvation City. It's about the end of the world (sort of), so it might make interesting Halloween reading. Though don't expect any slasher theatrics:

Post-apocalyptic novels thrive on stark imagery. Violence, devastation, and death are par for the course -- the most prominent recent example of the genre, Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, infamously offered us a human baby on a spit. So the most shocking thing about Sigrid Nunez’s Salvation City is her decision to forgo shocking us -- at least, in the sense that she avoids deliberately provocative images and situations (i.e., no one cooks an infant).

The setting is still grim, of course. Influenza has ravaged most of the Earth’s population, and the United States teeters on anarchy as the illness makes the most basic services impossible. But we never see the real horror of the plague, the Hollywood-style depths of physical suffering it implies. Nunez is more interested in illuminating the lives of the “survivors,” particularly that of an orphaned teenager named Cole.

You can read the rest here. Bookslut's also got a good interview with Nunez up on the site (this one's not by me, though), that you can read when you're done. Check out both when you have time...

Song of the Week

2010-10-01T18:47:00.002-04:00

Song of the week is back. Since it's October, I figured make this a "theme" month and post videos and songs vaguely related to Halloween. To start, here's the Yeah Yeah Yeahs with "Heads Will Roll":

Kids Today...

2010-09-29T21:07:00.004-04:00

A lot of people have been talking about the Scholastic poll indicating kids are interested in e-readers. I've talked about this topic a lot, so I'm not going to go on about it at length here. But I wanted to call attention to a post I just saw on InteloQuence:

Another statistic that may well get educators worried was that 25% of the kids thought SMS conversations with friends constituted reading (only 8% of parents agree). And then there's the fact that 28% of kids thought reading posts or comments on social networking sites was reading, and just 15% of parents see it the same way. Certainly Net comms are changing reading habits, and there's a whole list of "new" material to read online, so the definition of "reading" is going to evolve--it's just a question of whether it's desirable or happening too fast.

I actually don't worry too much about whether or not SMS conversations (etc) are "reading" or not. On a basic level, they are (you read them, don't you?), and kids are very literal when they answer questions. The key thing here, the reason the post interests me, is that I agree the definition of "reading" will evolve as more people read digital texts.

One of the reasons I am so certain that the printed book will endure is that I strongly believe digital texts will evolve into something different from traditional novels and memoirs. They'll likely be interactive and will probably connect to outside sources, the way blogs do. As a result, reading them will be a different experience from reading on paper.

I don't think that's a bad thing (after all, I am blogging). But I do think that people who enjoy a certain kind of reading will continue to turn to paper books.

On Critics and Readers

2010-09-26T12:42:00.006-04:00

I've been meaning to comment on a recent piece in the Guardian about book critics. It observes that writers have a tendency to take an antagonistic attitude toward critics (or at least to negative criticism):

But you don't have to be a critic to know this. A cursory glance at the majority of broadsheet books pages would show that most reviewers are not "wannabes" – most of them are also published writers. Gone are the days when the critic was in one corner and the author in the other, two different species eyeballing each other before the fight to the finish. It's a strange hybrid, this author-critic creature. I can't think of another art form where the "practitioner" and the critic overlap like this. Where are the dancers who are also dance critics? Where are the playwrights who also write theatre reviews? Where are musicians who critique bands? Only in literature does this overlap occur, although writers, it would seem, would prefer to believe that it doesn't. Writers would prefer to believe that critics are separate, and that their separation means they're the enemy, and out to get them.

I think there's some truth to that. The overlap is not such a new thing, though--for years, many critics, from Lionel Trilling to Harold Bloom to Susan Sontag have also tried their hands at fiction or poetry. After all, writing is writing, and it's hard to stick to just one form (fiction, nonfiction, poetry, whatever) without getting bored.

But, the article misses one key point. Criticism isn't just about writing; it's about reading. Essentially, when I write a review, I'm trying to share the thoughts I had while reading a given book--it's an outgrowth of the experience I had with the novel, memoir, etc. And that is the real value of criticism--it allows us to have a conversation with another reader. In my experience, a good critic helps me to see a work fresh, to notice something I might not have seen on my own (at least not at first glance), to read better. I think this is where the overlap comes from--to write well, one must read well; and to read well, one must become a bit of a critic (if only in your own head).

The critic does have certain obligations, of course. When I write criticism, I try to do so responsibly--not for the writer's sake, but for the reader's. If I'm reading a review, or a critical essay, chances are I'm interested in the book being discussed. Which means I want to hear about it. This means that even a negative review needs to engage in a text. A book review is not a performance piece, and I don't have much time for a critic so in love with his or her own voice that they neglect to tell me (as a reader) anything useful about the book's voice.

But a good, well-written piece of criticism helps us to sharpen our own reading skills. This is as true of a negative review as it is of a positive one. Which means that negative reviews, to the extent they help us become better readers, are ultimately a good thing for writers (even if they're not "good" for the particular writer whose work is being panned)--because writers cannot thrive without good readers.

Or to put it simply--not everyone likes every book, so don't take it personally when you get a bad review.

"That's not a place, it's a dream."

2010-09-25T13:45:00.004-04:00

I just finished Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man. Basically, after Moby Dick, I figured it would be good to go back and dig up some other classic novels I've always intended to read. Invisible Man is rightly a classic, in some ways I liked it more than Moby Dick, and it's always hard to write about a truly great novel. It just seems redundant--anything I could say about the book is already contained within it.

But I did want to make one quick observation about the way the novel treats New York City. In a lot of ways, Invisible Man is about the Great Migration, in that it concerns an African American from the rural South who moves to New York City. What's interests me is the ambivalence most of the characters feel for their new home.

On the bus to New York, the nameless protagonist (the "invisible man") encounters a veteran he knows slightly. When the invisible man tells the vet he's off the New York, the vet replies: "New York! That's not a place, it's a dream."

Later, the vet's point is clarified by another exchange, this one between the invisible man and his landlord, Mary, who has also come North as part of the Great Migration: "And you have to take care of yourself, son. Don't let this Harlem git you. I'm in New York, but New York ain't in me, understand what I mean?"

It's a minor part of the book, but it underscores the narrator's wider ambivalence, which makes it worth noting. Ellison uses ambivalence to great effect, using it to both bring the reader closer to the invisible man and to keep the reader at a distance, depending on the situation.

Anyway, it's a really beautifully written--outside of Faulkner, I can't think of any American modernist who uses the language so well--so make a point to read it when you get a chance.

The Structure of Books

2010-09-18T14:36:00.003-04:00

The other day, I returned to a topic I find myself thinking about a lot--the idea that there are subtle "cues" built into print books that e-readers don't really capture all that well. I noticed a post by Steven Berlin Johnson that, while exploring another aspect of reading, illuminates this problem well:

When I was writing Ghost Map, I had this wonderful breakthrough where I realized that I could structure the book where each chapter would simultaneously be a day in the chronology of the epidemic, but would also naturally connect to one of the book's major themes: in other words, day one was cholera, day two was John Snow, day three was miasma, etc. That allowed each chapter to advance the narrative clock, but also work as an almost standalone essay. I was -- and still am, actually -- as proud of that deep structure as I am of just about anything else I've written. But not one single review mentioned it, and to this day, not one reader has brought it up in conversation about the book.

The funny thing about it is that I'm sure that people who enjoyed the book were in fact enjoying that deep structure; they just weren't fully aware of it.... On some level, there is something like an unconscious processing of the information, but it's not an unconscious that looks anything like the Freudian version. Our brains unconsciously process external information all the time, of course, but usually these are hard-wired skills, more nature than nurture. But a chord progression or a chapter from a non-fiction book are pure works of culture; our brains didn't evolve dedicated resources designed to appreciate their subtle arts. Yet somehow we appreciate those deep structures, even as they fly beneath the radar of our consciousness.

Johnson is talking about the way the book is organized, not the medium that the book was designed to be read in. But I can't help thinking that the same point applies to print--novels, memoirs, and other literary forms that evolved in the age of the bound codex are structured to facilitate a particular kind of reading experience, one that relies on subtle visual and tactile cues to enhance the reading experience. These cues are not inherent in the human brain--they are the product of a particular medium as it evolved over time.

It's something I was all that aware of until using an e-reader for the first time. Before, I was never consciously aware of the novel's subtle structural cues, but I really, really missed them when they were gone. That's a personal thing, of course, and I certainly have no argument with other readers who don't miss them. But this is the core of my ambivalence about e-readers.

I have a feeling, over the long term, the two technologies--the book (bound codex) and the e-reader will separate, with stories written for e-readers taking on a new, different "deep structure" to utilize the particular strengths of their medium. And that will be a really interesting process. As a writer myself, I look forward to (possibly) even participating in it. But, for certain kinds of stories and certain kinds of reading experiences, the paper book will retain its advantages.

Song of the Week

2010-09-17T19:03:00.002-04:00

In honor of my new piece about Nick Cave's Grinderman 2, I figured I'd post something from his other band, the Bad Seeds. Here's "Dig, Lazarus, Dig!":

New Review

2010-09-16T21:00:00.003-04:00

I've got a new music review up at Venus. This one looks at Grinderman 2, the latest from Nick Cave's Grinderman project:

Brash, lecherous, and slightly unhinged, Grinderman’s 2007 debut issued an unexpected challenge to an indie universe that no longer celebrated any of those traits. Grinderman reveled in noise, sex, and attitude and was all the better for it. It was so musically powerful, it even seemed to reinvigorate frontman Nick Cave’s “main” group, the legendary Bad Seeds,” whose ensuing 2008 release Dig, Lazarus, Dig!!! was one of the best rock albums of the past few years.

That artistic success means Grinderman 2 was not only inevitable, but highly anticipated...

Read the rest here.

On Creative Writing

2010-09-15T19:53:00.004-04:00

Today I just wanted to acknowledge Elif Batuman's essay in the London Review of Books about Creative Writing programs. There's a lot to it, and I'm certainly not about to try and address the whole piece (instead, I'll just encourage you to check it out for yourself). But there is one particular thread of her argument that I felt was worth looking at here:

Formed in the shadow of New Criticism, the creative writing discourse still displays ‘not a commitment to ignorance, exactly, but … a commitment to innocence’. This commitment, this sense of writing being produced in a knowledge vacuum, is what turned me off the programme to begin with. Contemporary fiction seldom refers to any of the literary developments of the past 20, 50 or a hundred years. It rarely refers to other books at all. Literary scholarship may not be an undiluted joy to its readers, but at least it’s usually founded on an ideal of the collaborative accretion of human knowledge.

I wouldn't put things this way, but is some ways, I share this ambivalence about Creative Writing. Like Batuman, I went to graduate school to study English, not Creative Writing. My thinking, then as now, is that to write well, one must first read very well. That the best "training" on being a writer is to read as widely as possible--and to constantly challenge yourself to read difficult, complex, and sophisticated books.

To understand how to write a novel, one should learn how a novel "works"--and the best way to see that is by looking at how the form has evolved, how other writers have made use of it, and how far others have managed to push it. It's also good to see how others have used the language, since this can open up possibilities that you wouldn't think of on your own.

I also don't see why these approaches need to be mutually exclusive. It it entirely possible to be well read, to be immersed in books and reading, and still choose to get an MFA. I can certainly think of plenty of writers whose work I enjoy (Michael Chabon, David Foster Wallace, etc.) who got MFAs. But Batuman is actually somewhat hostile to certain practices that Creative Writing programs encourage:

The value placed on creativity and originality causes writers to hide their influences, to hide the fact that they have ever read any other books at all and, in many cases, to stop reading books altogether. One telling result of this value is a gap in quality between American literary fiction and non-fiction today. Many of the best journalistic and memoiristic essays in the world today are being written in America. I think of myself as someone who prefers novels and stories to non-fiction; yet, for human interest, skilful storytelling, humour, and insightful reflection on the historical moment, I find the average episode of This American Life to be 99 per cent more reliable than the average new American work of literary fiction.

To be honest, I disagree with Batuman about the quality of contemporary fiction--I can think of several novels written in the last ten years that I honestly and truly consider "great" (Fortress of Solitude being a recent example). But I also think that, like David Shields (who she praises), Batuman is making an argument that is worth hearing. Also, there is a real risk for any writer--MFA or no MFA--to get so wrapped up in their own work that they overlook the importance of reading. And to me, Batuman is at her strongest when she shows why this is such a serious mistake.

Make sure you check out the piece.

Bolaño's Politics

2010-09-14T15:29:00.004-04:00

Also see Part One, Part Two, Part Three, and Part Four.

For the last few weeks, I've been returning to Roberto Bolaño, trying to explore why his writing has resonated in the US at a time when that of so many other Latin American authors has not. Since today is primary day in New York, I figured now would be a good time to touch on the political side of Bolaño's work.

Bolaño is not a political writer the way, say, George Orwell is a political writer. In a very real sense, Bolaño uses politics as a means to telling a wider story about human nature. But it is no accident that Distant Star's central figure, the torturer Carlos Weider, is German (though he works for Chile's Pinochet), just as it is no accident that the reactionaries of Nazi Literature in the Americas are "Nazis" and not merely "fascists."

Reading Bolaño's Chilean books together, it is not hard to see that he is linking the totalitarianism of Pinochet to the totalitarianism of Hitler. But he does so not by comparing their "ideologies," per se. It is torture and repression that interest Bolaño, and it is torture and repression that link the two regimes.

In a sense, Bolaño's true interest is in using political evil as a way to discuss violence itself (instead of using a depiction of violence in order to facilitate a discussion of politics). This is most evident in Bolaño's posthumous novel 2666s. Parts of the novel are set amid World War II, and one of 2666's key characters, the novelist Archchimboldi, is revealed to be a German WWII veteran named Hans Reiter. In many ways it is Archimboldi who ties the novel together, connecting the European literary experts of "The Part About the Critics" with the city of Santa Teresa, Mexico, site of hundreds of unsolved murders (and the setting of most of the novel).

The violence Reiter sees in the war ties in to the violence overrunning Santa Teresa--the war and the murders are almost parallel events, each in turn deepening our understanding of the other. And, ultimately, Bolaño offers no clean explanation for either. In effect, it it political writing without politics--in the sense that Bolaño is interested in political violence as violence, first and foremost.

(More to come.)

Song of the Week

2010-09-10T18:50:00.001-04:00

This week's song is "The Seed 2.0" by the Roots. Enjoy.