Category Archives: Culture

Mid-July links

July 12, 2008 By in Books, Culture, Links Tags: , , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment

* More Wood here, by way of a few blogs. See my last post here. Find How Fiction Works here.

* I’d love to think that reading helps one become less socially awkward, as argued here. Repeat after me: correlation is not causation. But the article gives an example of how readers of a New Yorker story did better on social reasoning tests than those given a random essay, and this research complements that done on fiction and empathy.

As for the original claim, I will say that, speaking from experience, if reading helps one become less socially awkward, it certainly took a long time for the effect to kick in around these parts.

* I’d forgotten about The Literary Book of Economics: Including Readings from Literature and Drama on Economic Concepts, Issues, and Themes, but it complements the econ-for-dummies books I like and gives numerous examples of the intersection of economics and literature, since the two express one another more often than many of their respective practitioners think.

* Maybe I was too quick to dismiss the possible value of film as an agent of social change. This link courtesy of Freakonomics. Besides, in my post on The Devil’s Candy, I went into an extended rhapsody about Friday Night Lights, so perhaps I should be wary of too much bashing, despite Twilight of the Books.

(Before I concede too much, however, I’ll ask for the the paper detailing people’s tendency to protest the government thanks to T.V., or how T.V. is a medium easily monopolized by the powerful, as in Russia.)

* Speaking of film, this time combined with politics, Frank Rich in The New York Times has a great column that further explains why it’s hard for me to get ideologically attached to political parties in the U.S. or excited about politics:

You have to wonder what these same kids make of the political show their parents watch on TV at home. The fierce urgency of now that drives “Wall-E” and its yearning for change is absent in both the Barack Obama and McCain campaigns these days.

* You might notice that links having little if anything to do with books go at the bottom of link posts, today isn’t an exception. Clive Crook writes about education and immigration idiocy. Fortunately, this is an issue both parties can be wrong about, further explaining why I find it impossible to affiliate with either.

More on How Fiction Works and someone else's review doesn't

July 10, 2008 By in Books, Culture, Links, Philosophy Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment

In The Australian, a nominal review of James Wood’s How Fiction Works is really a discussion of Wood’s work more generally. It also shows why I shirked writing a deep review of How Fiction Works, as I I have more than a few quibbles:

If Wood doesn’t “get” the overall trick of an author’s writing he tends to dismiss it. This was most evident in his notorious Guardian review (reworked in The Irresponsible Self) of “hysterical realism”, a term Wood has coined to sum up the work of a whole slew of contemporary novelists that includes Don DeLillo, Zadie Smith, David Foster Wallace, Salman Rushdie and Thomas Pynchon.

Is this an issue of not “getting” the works, or of getting them too well and not liking or caring for what they represent? To me, DeLillo and Pynchon in particular have long been overrated. I remember trying to read them in late school and early college and thinking, “why are these awful writers so highly praised?” At the time I didn’t realize that they were a reaction against earlier literary trends and that they were trying to be stylistically unusual merely for the sake of being stylistically unusual, or for obscure philosophical points without writing actual philosophy. Paul Graham seems to have had a similar experience with actual philosophy. Wood gets this, and probably better than I do, and I’m not the only one who’s noticed the overpraised and under-talented; one thing I very much appreciate about A Reader’s Manifesto is its willingness to engage with writing, rather than politics surrounding writing, or whatever propelled DeLillo to fame.

To return to the review:

While another critic might see the impulse towards jam-packed, baroquely hyperreal novels as a legitimate and thoughtful, albeit varyingly skilful, response to our postmodern world (a mimetic reflection of the different status of information in an age of instant and indiscriminate communication, say, or an attempt to “wake up” a form whose traditional gestures are now the cliched staples of Hollywood cinema) […]

The problem is that these techniques aren’t mimetic: in trying to mimic the supposed techniques that they implicitly criticize, they don’t reflect information, but chaos; they aren’t hyperreal, but fake. And I’m not convinced modern life is so different in terms of “the different status of information in an age of instant and indiscriminate communication.” Information isn’t indiscriminate: I still choose what to read and what to watch most of the time; if I’m exposed to ads, it’s because I choose to be. In some essays, Umberto Eco discusses how he sees ideas and battles from the Middle Ages underlying much of everyday life, and the more I read, the more I tend to trace the lineage of intellectual and personal ideas backwards through time. Although our technological and physical world has changed enormously in the last two hundred years, I’m not sure the purposes to which we put technology and power (conquest, sex, etc.) has much. That isn’t to say literary style hasn’t evolved, as it obviously has, and my preference tends toward novels written after 1900. Ideas have shifted and evolved too. Still, techniques used by modern authors like the hyperrealists just because they can be used doesn’t make them an improvement. Furthermore, not all of Wood’s loves are mine—I just finished Henry James’ The Portrait of a Lady and wouldn’t have if I didn’t need to. But I have seldom read a stronger argument for the capital-N Novel than I have in How Fiction Works, and even when I sometimes don’t find Wood persuasive, the power of his argument and depth of his reading always compels me to think more clearly and deeply about my own positions and thoughts.

More on How Fiction Works and someone else’s review doesn’t

July 10, 2008 By in Books, Culture, Links, Philosophy Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , 1 Comment

In The Australian, a nominal review of James Wood’s How Fiction Works is really a discussion of Wood’s work more generally. It also shows why I shirked writing a deep review of How Fiction Works, as I I have more than a few quibbles:

If Wood doesn’t “get” the overall trick of an author’s writing he tends to dismiss it. This was most evident in his notorious Guardian review (reworked in The Irresponsible Self) of “hysterical realism”, a term Wood has coined to sum up the work of a whole slew of contemporary novelists that includes Don DeLillo, Zadie Smith, David Foster Wallace, Salman Rushdie and Thomas Pynchon.

Is this an issue of not “getting” the works, or of getting them too well and not liking or caring for what they represent? To me, DeLillo and Pynchon in particular have long been overrated. I remember trying to read them in late school and early college and thinking, “why are these awful writers so highly praised?” At the time I didn’t realize that they were a reaction against earlier literary trends and that they were trying to be stylistically unusual merely for the sake of being stylistically unusual, or for obscure philosophical points without writing actual philosophy. Paul Graham seems to have had a similar experience with actual philosophy. Wood gets this, and probably better than I do, and I’m not the only one who’s noticed the overpraised and under-talented; one thing I very much appreciate about A Reader’s Manifesto is its willingness to engage with writing, rather than politics surrounding writing, or whatever propelled DeLillo to fame.

To return to the review:

While another critic might see the impulse towards jam-packed, baroquely hyperreal novels as a legitimate and thoughtful, albeit varyingly skilful, response to our postmodern world (a mimetic reflection of the different status of information in an age of instant and indiscriminate communication, say, or an attempt to “wake up” a form whose traditional gestures are now the cliched staples of Hollywood cinema) […]

The problem is that these techniques aren’t mimetic: in trying to mimic the supposed techniques that they implicitly criticize, they don’t reflect information, but chaos; they aren’t hyperreal, but fake. And I’m not convinced modern life is so different in terms of “the different status of information in an age of instant and indiscriminate communication.” Information isn’t indiscriminate: I still choose what to read and what to watch most of the time; if I’m exposed to ads, it’s because I choose to be. In some essays, Umberto Eco discusses how he sees ideas and battles from the Middle Ages underlying much of everyday life, and the more I read, the more I tend to trace the lineage of intellectual and personal ideas backwards through time. Although our technological and physical world has changed enormously in the last two hundred years, I’m not sure the purposes to which we put technology and power (conquest, sex, etc.) has much. That isn’t to say literary style hasn’t evolved, as it obviously has, and my preference tends toward novels written after 1900. Ideas have shifted and evolved too. Still, techniques used by modern authors like the hyperrealists just because they can be used doesn’t make them an improvement. Furthermore, not all of Wood’s loves are mine—I just finished Henry James’ The Portrait of a Lady and wouldn’t have if I didn’t need to. But I have seldom read a stronger argument for the capital-N Novel than I have in How Fiction Works, and even when I sometimes don’t find Wood persuasive, the power of his argument and depth of his reading always compels me to think more clearly and deeply about my own positions and thoughts.

The Devil's Candy: The Bonfire of the Vanities Goes to Hollywood — Julie Salamon

July 9, 2008 By in Books, Culture, Reviews Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment

By most accounts, The Bonfire of the Vanities is a terrible movie, and a not inconsiderable number of people think the same of the book. Consequently, reading Julie Salamon’s The Devil’s Candy: The Bonfire of the Vanities Goes to Hollywood might seem like an exercise in shallow masochism, but the book isn’t and tracks both the making of movies and the formation of and interaction among small, hierarchical groups charged with an overarching goal containing innumerable amorphous steps that must be defined before they can even be executed. I wish I could phrase the preceding sentence in something like English instead of consultant-speak, but it nonetheless expresses a true idea about The Devil’s Candy, which is also the story of a cultural industry most people don’t understand, or understand poorly, and yet has an outsized impact on how people think and feel. Running through it like the Mississippi through the United States is money:

During [de Palma’s] twenty-five years in the business, he’d seen a lot of astute, intelligent boys like Schwab [the second-unit director] come and go. They knew everything there was to know about film but were too proud to sell themselves. So many of them never got it, that in the movie industry art was a product and the only way to succeed way to figure out how to move the merchandise.

The same sentiment is voiced again:

[Orson Welles’] films didn’t make money; he hadn’t been able to get a picture financed in town since he’d made “Touch of Evil” in 1957 [… at an American Film Institute (AFI) banquet,] Welles gave a thank-you speech that ended with a pitch for money.

Those who manage money well succeed, and those who don’t are thrown overboard; money is behind numerous decisions for good or ill, and the knowledge that tickets must sell inform, for example, racial issues in casting and the script. Decisions about who to cast hold the The Bonfire of the Vanities back as executives and others attempt to simultaneously pander and avoid controversy, entirely missing a central point of Wolf’s book—that the media conflagration around race is what feeds the bonfires of racial tension as well as the self-immolating media itself. Were The Bonfire of the Vanities book not set among high-financiers, The Devil’s Candy demonstrates that it could be set among Hollywood moguls, perhaps with scenes like the one depicted at the beginning of Chapter 6. It offers a heavily ironic tone that I won’t give away, but such metaphoric scenes appear throughout, showing the principals in the movie apparently unaware or unselfconscious of the art they try to strip mine, no matter how much they say they care about the environment. And the more they try, the worse it gets. As Salamon describes de Palma thinking, “Racial Balance. Racial balance! What was he, the ACLU?”

That’s not to say The Devil’s Candy is an angry, anti-political correctness screed: it isn’t, and its purpose is to reveal how decisions that seem laughably bad in retrospect can seem reasonable at the outset. Though I’m tempted to analogize to Iraq, I won’t save through paralipsis. The Devil’s Candy also shows the inherent tension between art and commerce, with movies being pulled toward the latter, which also means they’re more likely to try and blunt rough edges or pull their punches in hopes of winning the bet. Of one change from book to movie, Tom Wolfe observes:

You know, there is an etiquette, particularly on television—and in the movies too, I guess—which say it’s okay to raise the question of racial hostility only if somewhere toward the close of the action you produce an enlightened figure, preferably from the streets, who creates a higher synthesis and teaches everyone the error of their ways. As the drama ends, everyone heads off into a warmer sunset.

[…]

I was criticized for not doing that. But life is not like that. To me reality is extremely important in fiction as well as in nonfiction. I don’t think you can understand the human heart if you move from reality.

Incidentally, this is the same problem a self-indulgent movie like Crash has, and a property of the healing character like the one played by Samuel L. Jackson in Black Snake Moan. One very impressive, unusual aspect of the TV show Friday Night Lights is its ability to avoid the sermonizing Wolfe condemns; I was skeptical of the show, as I am of any TV show, and only picked up the DVDs after seeing it recommended by The New Yorker and then James Fallows. The publication and man, respectively, are not known for pulling their artistic punches the way Hollywood does. Read the articles at both links, which better describe how Friday Night Lights is the rare example of art transcending its medium—which The Bonfire of the Vanities movie apparently did not. Even the example above, which involved the casting of Morgan Freeman in lieu of a judge of Jewish descent, as in Wolfe’s book, brought other problems; de Palma thinks Morgan is unprepared thanks to stardom:

There was something about the money and the fame and the adulation that made them [stars] stop doing the boring work they did automatically when they were struggling. Everyone tells them they’re great, and they start to believe it.

It’s a system de Palma contributes to, and the sense of this movie being a manifestation of systems and incentives grows as The Devil’s Candy progresses. Notice that de Palma blames “money,” although it’s money that drives movies. And it’s a system that rewards those who can operate from within, although at some personal cost:

De Palma decided he had to try, and he approached the project [of winning back studio exec girlfriend Kathy Lingg]—his deliberate strategizing gave the courtship the feel of a project as much as a romance—with the force and logic he would apply to a movie he wanted to get going.

I’m not female, but if I were, I don’t think I’d want to be a de Palma project, especially considering how many of them end up as bloodbaths.

The making of The Bonfire of the Vanities says more about America and life than the movie itself. For example, Salamon writes:

The social stratification was the only certainty on a film set. The players were always different, but the status was constant. And almost everyone was angling for better status. The camera operator wanted to be cinematographer; the cinematographer wanted to direct. The secretaries wanted to be associate producers; the p.a.’s, the production assistants, wanted to be anything that wasn’t the lowest rung on the latter. The stand-ins wanted to act. Everyone was working on a script.

This tendency was apparently exacerbated by the book and the expectations surrounding it, as “the idea took hold that this particular movie could be the definitive vehicle of dreams, big enough and flashy enough to carry along a great many people—the stretch limo of hope and ambition.” It wasn’t, and the fault is better placed on those towards the top than those towards the bottom. Status is hard-gained and easily lost, and blame is also easy; of a test audience, de Palma thinks, “They didn’t have a clue.” Maybe not, but if you’re in mainstream cinema, you better be ready to sell—as he’d apparently forgotten when he thought he was making art. “Money didn’t seem to mean anything, and yet it meant everything,” means that it means everything.

The Devil’s Candy implies that money corrupts to some extent, but that everyone involved, including watchers, is complicit. Look at what the book calls “the emergence of infotainment as a regular feature on local news shows[, which] resulted in a complex symbiosis between the studios and the journalists who followed the film industry for television.” But if those journalists have become derelict in their duty as independent voices, it’s only because we, the people, keep watching them despite their questionable province, like eating foul sausages prior to Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle. At one point, someone

designed his own diorama showing hyenas disemboweling a gazelle. He loved the juxtaposition of this image against the society crowd. “When you think about animals, and these people, you realize that’s what they are,” he said. “Beautifully dressed animals.”

Is he talking about the society Wolfe depicted in his novel, or could he also be talking about Hollywood, media celebrities, readers, and all of us? Such is the pleasure of The Devil’s Candy that it could be any or all of them.

The Devil’s Candy: The Bonfire of the Vanities Goes to Hollywood — Julie Salamon

July 9, 2008 By in Books, Culture, Reviews Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment

By most accounts, The Bonfire of the Vanities is a terrible movie, and a not inconsiderable number of people think the same of the book. Consequently, reading Julie Salamon’s The Devil’s Candy: The Bonfire of the Vanities Goes to Hollywood might seem like an exercise in shallow masochism, but the book isn’t and tracks both the making of movies and the formation of and interaction among small, hierarchical groups charged with an overarching goal containing innumerable amorphous steps that must be defined before they can even be executed. I wish I could phrase the preceding sentence in something like English instead of consultant-speak, but it nonetheless expresses a true idea about The Devil’s Candy, which is also the story of a cultural industry most people don’t understand, or understand poorly, and yet has an outsized impact on how people think and feel. Running through it like the Mississippi through the United States is money:

During [de Palma’s] twenty-five years in the business, he’d seen a lot of astute, intelligent boys like Schwab [the second-unit director] come and go. They knew everything there was to know about film but were too proud to sell themselves. So many of them never got it, that in the movie industry art was a product and the only way to succeed way to figure out how to move the merchandise.

The same sentiment is voiced again:

[Orson Welles’] films didn’t make money; he hadn’t been able to get a picture financed in town since he’d made “Touch of Evil” in 1957 [… at an American Film Institute (AFI) banquet,] Welles gave a thank-you speech that ended with a pitch for money.

Those who manage money well succeed, and those who don’t are thrown overboard; money is behind numerous decisions for good or ill, and the knowledge that tickets must sell inform, for example, racial issues in casting and the script. Decisions about who to cast hold the The Bonfire of the Vanities back as executives and others attempt to simultaneously pander and avoid controversy, entirely missing a central point of Wolf’s book—that the media conflagration around race is what feeds the bonfires of racial tension as well as the self-immolating media itself. Were The Bonfire of the Vanities book not set among high-financiers, The Devil’s Candy demonstrates that it could be set among Hollywood moguls, perhaps with scenes like the one depicted at the beginning of Chapter 6. It offers a heavily ironic tone that I won’t give away, but such metaphoric scenes appear throughout, showing the principals in the movie apparently unaware or unselfconscious of the art they try to strip mine, no matter how much they say they care about the environment. And the more they try, the worse it gets. As Salamon describes de Palma thinking, “Racial Balance. Racial balance! What was he, the ACLU?”

That’s not to say The Devil’s Candy is an angry, anti-political correctness screed: it isn’t, and its purpose is to reveal how decisions that seem laughably bad in retrospect can seem reasonable at the outset. Though I’m tempted to analogize to Iraq, I won’t save through paralipsis. The Devil’s Candy also shows the inherent tension between art and commerce, with movies being pulled toward the latter, which also means they’re more likely to try and blunt rough edges or pull their punches in hopes of winning the bet. Of one change from book to movie, Tom Wolfe observes:

You know, there is an etiquette, particularly on television—and in the movies too, I guess—which say it’s okay to raise the question of racial hostility only if somewhere toward the close of the action you produce an enlightened figure, preferably from the streets, who creates a higher synthesis and teaches everyone the error of their ways. As the drama ends, everyone heads off into a warmer sunset.

[…]

I was criticized for not doing that. But life is not like that. To me reality is extremely important in fiction as well as in nonfiction. I don’t think you can understand the human heart if you move from reality.

Incidentally, this is the same problem a self-indulgent movie like Crash has, and a property of the healing character like the one played by Samuel L. Jackson in Black Snake Moan. One very impressive, unusual aspect of the TV show Friday Night Lights is its ability to avoid the sermonizing Wolfe condemns; I was skeptical of the show, as I am of any TV show, and only picked up the DVDs after seeing it recommended by The New Yorker and then James Fallows. The publication and man, respectively, are not known for pulling their artistic punches the way Hollywood does. Read the articles at both links, which better describe how Friday Night Lights is the rare example of art transcending its medium—which The Bonfire of the Vanities movie apparently did not. Even the example above, which involved the casting of Morgan Freeman in lieu of a judge of Jewish descent, as in Wolfe’s book, brought other problems; de Palma thinks Morgan is unprepared thanks to stardom:

There was something about the money and the fame and the adulation that made them [stars] stop doing the boring work they did automatically when they were struggling. Everyone tells them they’re great, and they start to believe it.

It’s a system de Palma contributes to, and the sense of this movie being a manifestation of systems and incentives grows as The Devil’s Candy progresses. Notice that de Palma blames “money,” although it’s money that drives movies. And it’s a system that rewards those who can operate from within, although at some personal cost:

De Palma decided he had to try, and he approached the project [of winning back studio exec girlfriend Kathy Lingg]—his deliberate strategizing gave the courtship the feel of a project as much as a romance—with the force and logic he would apply to a movie he wanted to get going.

I’m not female, but if I were, I don’t think I’d want to be a de Palma project, especially considering how many of them end up as bloodbaths.

The making of The Bonfire of the Vanities says more about America and life than the movie itself. For example, Salamon writes:

The social stratification was the only certainty on a film set. The players were always different, but the status was constant. And almost everyone was angling for better status. The camera operator wanted to be cinematographer; the cinematographer wanted to direct. The secretaries wanted to be associate producers; the p.a.’s, the production assistants, wanted to be anything that wasn’t the lowest rung on the latter. The stand-ins wanted to act. Everyone was working on a script.

This tendency was apparently exacerbated by the book and the expectations surrounding it, as “the idea took hold that this particular movie could be the definitive vehicle of dreams, big enough and flashy enough to carry along a great many people—the stretch limo of hope and ambition.” It wasn’t, and the fault is better placed on those towards the top than those towards the bottom. Status is hard-gained and easily lost, and blame is also easy; of a test audience, de Palma thinks, “They didn’t have a clue.” Maybe not, but if you’re in mainstream cinema, you better be ready to sell—as he’d apparently forgotten when he thought he was making art. “Money didn’t seem to mean anything, and yet it meant everything,” means that it means everything.

The Devil’s Candy implies that money corrupts to some extent, but that everyone involved, including watchers, is complicit. Look at what the book calls “the emergence of infotainment as a regular feature on local news shows[, which] resulted in a complex symbiosis between the studios and the journalists who followed the film industry for television.” But if those journalists have become derelict in their duty as independent voices, it’s only because we, the people, keep watching them despite their questionable province, like eating foul sausages prior to Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle. At one point, someone

designed his own diorama showing hyenas disemboweling a gazelle. He loved the juxtaposition of this image against the society crowd. “When you think about animals, and these people, you realize that’s what they are,” he said. “Beautifully dressed animals.”

Is he talking about the society Wolfe depicted in his novel, or could he also be talking about Hollywood, media celebrities, readers, and all of us? Such is the pleasure of The Devil’s Candy that it could be any or all of them.

Entertainment and the novel

July 1, 2008 By in Books, Culture, Philosophy Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , 1 Comment

“Entertaining” is often thrown around and almost never defined, and its implicit definitions have assumed such a plethora of meanings that I’m not sure it still has any meaning, like a symbol so overloaded—the white whale, roses—that it collapses under its epistemological baggage. The issue arises because some correspondents and one commenter in Science Fiction, literature, and the haters wrote about it; the commenter says of science fiction readers:

They are looking for entertainment–space opera–and not a metaphysical journey. Just my 2 cents worth, adjusted for the cost of living since the expression first appeared.

Maybe: but what does “entertainment” mean in this context? Or in the context of any novel or work of art? Does it mean novelty? Continuity? Plot? Structure? Or some combination thereof? As one interrogates what entertaining means, one gets closer and closer to being a critic. Most of the usage about it seems to imply that challenging or unusual novels aren’t entertaining, or at least aren’t as entertaining as those novels that seem to dominate bestseller lists like locusts dominating a field of grass. Umberto Eco gives his thoughts Reflections on The Name of the Rose (which is only apparently available, and used at that, in the UK):

The reader should learn something either about the world or about language: this difference distinguishes various narrative poetics, but the point remains the same. The ideal reader of Finnegans Wake must, finally, enjoy himself as much as the reader of Erle Stanley Gardner. Exactly as much, but in a different way.

Now, the concept of amusement is historical. There are different means of amusing and of being amused for every season in the history of the novel. Unquestionably, the modern novel has sought to diminish amusement resulting from the plot in order to enhance other kinds of amusement. As a greater admirer of Aristotle’s Poetics, I have always thought that, no matter what, a novel must also—especially—amuse through its plot.

There is no question that if a novel is amusing, it wins the approval of the public. Now, for a certain period, it was thought that this approval was a bad sign: if a novel was popular, this was because it said nothing new and gave the public only what the public was already expecting.

I believe, however, that to say, “If a novel gives the reader what he was expected, it becomes popular,” is different from saying, “If a novel is popular, this is because it gives the reader what he was expected of it.”

The second statement is not always true.

Perhaps, but what of a novel with a strong plot expressed in unusual ways, like Ulysses? And even then, what is the difference between a “strong” and “weak” plot? The more I try to imagine how I would define them, the more they slip through my hands.

Elsewhere, Nigel Beale says a good book needs:

1) to find and revel in funny, beautiful, thought-provoking phrases, 2) dwell on profound paragraphs that contain useful truths about life and human nature, 3) lose myself in the lives of exceptional characters.

I’m not sure if that counts as entertaining or not, and, if so, why it does and others don’t. It also gels with Eco’s comment about modern literature decoupling entertainment from plot. Some novels I love don’t have much of Beale’s second criteria, or at least not explicitly—like Elmore Leonard, for example. And is a character exceptional for what the person does (explorer, astronaut, spy?) or for how the person is described (like Marilyn Robinson or Tom Perrotta’s novels).

Entertainment also seems to drift with experience: what I found entertaining at 12—like Robert Heinlein—I can’t or can barely read now, and what I like now—such as To The Lighthouse—I wouldn’t have accepted then. For me, entertainment involves novelty in language and content, and the more I read, the harder that becomes to achieve, and so for prolific readers (or, I suspect, watchers of movies), one has to search harder and harder for the genuinely novel. Demands grow higher, perhaps helping to open the supposed rift between high and low, or elite and mass, culture. When entertainment is cited as a factor of pleasure or not, I think many of those who use it are talking past one another, and without turning this into a philosophical discussion—too many of those turn into word battles, as Paul Graham says at that link: “Wittgenstein is popularly credited with the idea that most philosophical controversies are due to confusions over language.” Richard Rorty deals with the same issue less pejoratively in Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity. Those who would talk about entertainment should also be ready to talk about what they mean, but it appears too few are.

Blue Angel — Francine Prose

June 30, 2008 By in Books, Culture, Reviews Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , 4 Comments

Francine Prose’s Blue Angel (2000) bears more than a little resemblance to Richard Russo’s Straight Man (1997), which isn’t bad—both are smart, funny novels that use English departments as a launching rather than end point to explore politics, society, and life. Bad novels become mired in their time and place; good novels transcend them by making a particular time and place a metaphor or microcosm for something bigger. Sure, it’s easy to mock academic (or business, or families, or any number of other social configurations) life, as structure can easily ossify and become stultifying, but using these structures as a base instead of destination helps transcend them, as both Blue Angel and Straight Man do. From similar beginnings, however, Blue Angel and Straight Man diverge based on their protagonists’ decisions, and in Blue Angel the choice eventually leads to a hilarious and astonishing Kafka-esque tribunal scene.

Blue Angel is based around two theoretical premises: the fundamental imbalance of knowledge between novelists teaching creative writing and know-it-all, under-literate students taking said classes. I feel confident making the second generalization because I was one of those students—now I’m not in the classes but am otherwise similar. The second premise involves sexual politics and power, or lack thereof—while it’s wrong, wrong, wrong for professors to sleep with students, Blue Angel implies that it’s not always the professor who has the power. In addition, a plot point involving the latent sexual tension in many relationships is irresistible as a device in novels where very little else is otherwise at stake. And what kind of tension is going on in Blue Angel? Is it gender, power, class, or something else? They intersect and morph, much like in The Bonfire of the Vanities, and Prose leaves the battle lines deliciously ambiguous. I can’t remember who said it, but I read that one way of propelling a novel is to get two people who shouldn’t sleep together to do so and then see what happens.

This used to be easier, when sex outside of marriage was completely taboo and divorce led to societal suicide and extreme social censure. Now you have to go a bit further. Marriage plots don’t work nearly as effectively when most people aren’t virgins when they marry and quickie, no-fault divorces mean that a bed decision can leave you back in the same fundamental position you once were six months after accidental nuptials. Ian McEwan exploits the cusp of this revolution in On Chesil Beach, but writers who set stories in contemporary times have to deal with contemporary mores. Prose does effectively through the hothouse atmosphere of an English Department, where Ted Swenson finds that he’s teaching “[…] every Tuesday afternoon, [when] Swenson’s job requires him to discuss someone’s tale of familial incest, fumbling teenage sex, some girl’s or boy’s first blow job, with the college’s most hypersensitive and unbalanced students, some of whom simply despise him for reasons he can only guess: he’s the teacher, and they’re not, or he looks like somebody’s father.”

Is Swenson trapped? If so, by what, or whom, except himself? It’s not obvious, and Swenson is aware of the dilemma: “But like convicts who love their shackles, nearly all [professors] chose not to escape” Blue Angel and Straight Man imply one can leave this vast, masturbatory game if you have sufficient ironic distance to survive, perhaps tempered with the unpleasant realization that you might be too weak, timid, or self-satisfied. The game is more serious and less serious than it appears, depending on the narrator’s mind at any time, and this is made more difficult when writing teachers aren’t performing the first part of their jobs and have reasons—in Swenson’s case, “[…] once more he’s [Swenson] siphoned all his creative juices into a brain-numbing chat with a student. He’s ruined the day for writing, and his punishment is to face yet another of the problems with not writing, which is: how to kill all that time.” The reality is that Swenson isn’t a writer: if he were, he wouldn’t complain about writing, he would simply be doing it. In an interview Robertson Davies discussed how he produced innumerable novels while working as a publisher and, later, while teaching. Swenson is, like many of his students, simply making excuses.

He’s also not so different from Ruby, his daughter, than he’d like to think, though she is underdeveloped and a mere figure. This might be intentional, as recriminations over her place haunt the conversations between Swenson and Sherrie; perhaps this strained distance is the norm for parents and their children rather than the exception. There are some other problems than the portrait of Ruby—for example, as so often happens in novels, the scenes involving computers are poorly done. Ruby also says, “The Women’s Studies Department had to threaten a class-action lawsuit before they’d even investigate.” This makes no sense, because there is class or group of people to file suit—only a single organization or entity. Granted, it could be the character’s mistake, but Blue Angel doesn’t show this to be the case. Elsewhere, however, Prose nails details, as when Angela Argo, the improbable temptress, takes a class in “Text Studies in Gender Warfare.” Blue Angel could recursively be an assigned text in such a class, given its minute reading of the bizarre sexual politics overlaid on the wider culture in tun overlaid on whatever biological human instinct hides under the veneer of modern discourse. References to churches, religion, and Jonathan Edwards peter out towards the end of Blue Angel, which is a shame because they offered a rich vein of allusions for a novel with more than a little secular sin and, it implies, mindless persecution instead of the high-minded search for justice and truth that the university is supposed to cultivate. Blue Angel is far deeper than its premise suggests, and its self-aware humor gives it enough heft to bite into a situation that could easily degenerate into silly farce.

J.K. Rowling, sexism, and literary merit

June 19, 2008 By in Books, Culture, Links Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , 2 Comments

Colleen Lindsay’s The Swivet is worth reading, and from it comes an article about women in science fiction and fantasy that uses Harry Potter as a launching pad to argue that sexism animates some attacks on Harry Potter and female science fiction and fantasy authors more generally. I don’t think it motivates Bloom’s criticism of Harry Potter, and it certainly doesn’t motivate mine. The first two novels, which I read, weren’t all very good because they were cliché-laden and deprived of magic sentences. Why they’re so much more popular than the rest of the voluminous fantasy pile is unclear, and I attribute it to the vagaries and mysteries of books and place. Alas, some attackers of Rowling are fools, like at least one Harvard student:

Writing in the university paper, the Harvard Crimson, student Adam Goldenberg rips into Rowling as “a flash in the pan”, “a petty pop culture personality” who “tricked parents into letting their kids read books filled with sex, murder, and homosexual role models”. Furthermore, “writing bedtime stories is lame”.

One can, however, reach the right conclusion—that Harry Potter isn’t very good—using faulty reasoning, and just because someone uses faulty reasoning doesn’t mean their conclusion is incorrect in and of itself. If the article wanted to make a larger point not by citing Harry Potter, but one of the less-known female fantasy writers it deals with in the fourth paragraph—none of whom I know well enough to comment on.

I suppose that, being male, my argument could somehow be latent sexism emerging, though it seems unlikely given that one of the greatest fantasy, science, and speculative fiction writers of all time is Ursula K. Le Guin, who I used as an example of one of the few transcendent science fiction writers. Jane Smiley is one of my favorite modern writers—her work is uneven, but Moo and A Thousand Acres are excellent—and Flannery O’Connor’s short stories and novellas are masterpieces. Perhaps the “subtle mechanism” described only applies to fantasy and science fiction, but even there I’m not sure it’s truly at work, and separating where the many legitimate attacks on Rowling end and the possible sexism begins isn’t an easy task. Because there are so many legitimate attacks to be made, I’m not sure it can be done save through critics aren’t all that serious in the first place.

As long Rowling is in the air, I will give her credit for her commencement speech at Harvard, which has gotten a tremendous amount of deserved attention in blogs and the media: it’s funny and deep, while the temptation to keep throwing on positive adjectives is difficult to resist. I only wish Harry Potter had been up to the standards of that speech, in which case this post wouldn’t have been written.

So Many Books: Reading and Publishing in an Age of Abundance

June 18, 2008 By in Books, Culture, Reviews Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , 2 Comments

Gabriel Zaid’s So Many Books: Reading and Publishing in an Age of Abundance contributes to the problem it describes: how we’re to comprehend millions upon millions of books, many of which strive for attention in a world limited by time more than anything else. Despite this, and books’ relatively low profile in the mass media, they retain individual power and power over individuals—as Zaid says, “[…] the conversation continues, unheeded by television, which will never report: ‘Yesterday, a student read Socrates’ Apology and felt free’ ” (11). On the same page, he calls a personal library one’s “intellectual genome,” a brilliant phrase that I’m sure I’ll be using. Delightful turns of phrase and ideas continue throughout what could easily devolve into a polemic but doesn’t.

So Many Books is surprising for being so witty, meditative, and fast; I half-expected a ponderous beast and instead found a lithe and economical essay. It tells us we can own books we haven’t read; that the library as trophy room is a somewhat silly metaphor (16), and that “Socrates criticized the fetishization of the book” (18) before I did. Zaid presents figures that demonstrate what the Dictionary of Literary Terms & Literary Theory, 4th Edition, says: “If proliferation is a sign of incipient death then the demise of the novel must be imminent.” As reading by the great studied mass declines or holds steady, writing proliferates, perhaps contributing to what I have long suspected: “To say ‘I only know that I’ve read nothing,’ after reading thousands of books, is not false modesty” (23). Indeed: after at least a 1,000, I’ve only begun to perceive the vastness of what’s out there, like the early astronomers who began to realize how cosmic the cosmos really are. We’re not left bereft of hope in this situation; statistics are inadequate representations of a journey, “and maybe the measure of our reading should therefore be, not the number of books we’ve read, but the state in which they leave us” (24). So many wonderful quotes in six short pages implies a great deal of thought per page.

Later chapters, like the cost of reading and the supply and demand of poetry, are closer to obvious. Still, Zaid’s observations about the time and storage cost of books are accurate, and he says: “Today it is easier to acquire treasures than it is to give them the time they deserve” (36) or “Just finding and keeping interesting books is very expensive, for readers and librarians” (87). The latter is particularly relevant as I ponder the five boxes of books sitting a few from me, representing just under half my owned intellectual genome, the entirety of which will shortly be transported with much labor and expense to Arizona. Zaid goes on spinning thread after thread of interrelated book thought, tying together ideas that seem disparate. He precedes John Lanchester, whose comments regarding the Library of America are encapsulated by Zaid’s description of complete works and critical editions as “monuments are designed for ceremonies, not conversations” (45). They can be a sign of an author’s worthiness and of the publishing diversity Zaid celebrates despite or because of his ruminations on how books affect us and our world.

Literature and science fiction redux, with taste as a bonus

June 17, 2008 By in Books, Culture Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , 8 Comments

Science Fiction, literature, and the haters spawned great comments and e-mails, including responses from both the agents I referenced. The one who gave a minimum word count said that the agency he and a partner founded is relatively new, and the advice regarding word count and sequels comes from editors, and until they have more experience, they’re hewing to those guidelines. The other agent said that calling Pearle Transit “too literary” was a poor choice of words and that, although he admired aspects of it, the novel didn’t get him excited. Both replies, in other words, were reasonable and show that the agents care. Other would-be authors might want to take note: rejection is rarely as personal as it might seem. In addition, I’m reminded of this passage from Orwell, who discussed the problems with book reviewing:

[…] the chances are that eleven out of the twelve books will fail to rouse in [the reviewer] the faintest spark of interest. They are not more than ordinarily bad, they are merely neutral, lifeless, and pointless. If he were not paid to do so he would never read a line of any of them, and in nearly every care the only truthful review he could write would be: “This book inspires in me no thoughts whatever.”

Most agents probably feel like that about most books. I just wrote a post expressing how Doctor Faustus roused nothing it me, though I perceive its technical merits. The latter can’t even be said of A Confederacy of Dunces, though it’s widely admired.

In other reactions, several people, including Big Dumb Object and agent Colleen Lindsay, pointed out the Clarke Awards shortlists. Thanks for the tip, and I’ll be reading some of them, although 2008 winner Richard Morgan’s first book, Altered Carbon, embodied some of the negative qualities discussed in my post. Still, very few authors write first books that are their best, and Thirteen is in my queue. I also noticed that Cryptonomicon was on the shortlist for 2000, but it’s not really science fiction.

One other thing I noted was the absence of any correspondents who said, “This is a great book that deserves a spot in the literary pantheon.” Likewise, I’d hoped for citations or links to essays that get deep inside great books. Where is the James Wood (see here too) of science fiction? Perhaps he already exists in Stanislaw Lem—his book Microworlds should arrive soon—but if the genre has as much material as some of the commenters and e-mailers say, it should also have its great critics. To paraphrase Saul Bellow without his racial connotations, I’d love to read them.

One commenter went in the opposite direction and said: “The reason as I see it that almost all science fiction writing falls short of literary merit is that its audience wants it that way.” I’m not convinced: although I pointed out a general trend toward the lack of literary merit in science fiction, it’s a law, and if it is, I’m wary of making correlation into causation. Furthermore, plenty of bad literary fiction exists, just like bad science fiction—but the literary canon pushes the upper bounds of knowledge and language in ways and volumes that science fiction hasn’t, at least to my knowledge so far. That’s in part why I’m writing these posts: it’s a process of searching, and I’m trying not to assume the very opinions I’m asking about it.

A few correspondents wrote that I had no idea what I was talking about and, implicitly, that there is no such thing as literary merit. I suppose both are possible, but they seem highly improbable; stating that there is an element of opinion in every artistic judgment is not the same as believing that every opinion is the same, and I also referred those writers to the “big three” books I’d mentioned about art and writing, which are the best reflections on what makes great literature and what makes great literature great I’ve found. Milan Kundera’s The Art of the Novel belongs there too. Alas, there is no short checklist that can be easily explained, and so the stack of reading necessary to really enter this conversation is intimidatingly high, and many of the accusers do not appear to have done it; such correspondents might not see the river because they’re in a valley and don’t have the fortitude to climb the mountain. Granted, at the top of the mountain they might look in the opposite direction I do, in which case I’d like to hear their opinions. Along these “everything is relative” lines, I once argued to a professor that Shakespeare and Joyce were way overrated and only read for historical reasons and because other people had read them.

Oh, how I want to take that back.

In Richard Feynman’s hilarious Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman!, he writes about his lessons in art and his visit to the Sistine Chapel, when he recognizes the masterpieces and the lesser works without a guide:

This was a terrific excitement to me, that I also could tell the difference between a beautiful work of art and one that’s not, without being able to define it. As a scientist you always think you know what you’re doing, so you tend to distrust the artist who says, “It’s great,” or “It’s no good,” and then is not able to explain why, as Jerry did with those drawings I took him. But here I was, sunk: I could do it too!*

To be sure, there is an element of opinion in virtually any form of art and criticism, and just as there is in some fields more scientific: in economics, should we value making the resource pie larger through public policy like lower tax rates and flatter tax rates, or should we try and distribute what we have more evenly? Nonetheless, some people simply know much more about the trade-offs involved, and by the same token, some know far more about books and literature than others. The closer you get to hard sciences that are describing rather than interpreting the world—math, physics, chemistry, and the like—the farther you get from pure opinion, but as soon as you reach the application phase, judgment calls arise again: what would be more useful to sell—product derived from X or from Y? What would be a more useful use of physicists during World War II: having them build mechanical calculators and the like, or having them work on the atomic bomb? Someone had to make those decisions, and they’re closer in some respects to artistic choices than to ones regarding proof and experimentation.

In art and literature, there aren’t experiments, but taste exists. Not everyone’s is the same but not everyone’s is equal, either. Mine is well-developed enough to have some opinions of at least some validity, I hope, and I’m looking for others who can say the same, and who know something of science fiction—hence my appreciation of those who pointed out the Clarke Awards and made other suggestions. If I read through the Clarke books and decide I’m wrong, you’ll probably hear about it in a year or two. Although I’m not a scientist, I do have interest in all intellectually honest fields and all intellectually honest practitioners in those fields, and so I turn again to Feynman, who described what he wants to instill in Caltech grads and what they should inculcate in themselves: “It’s a kind of scientific integrity, a principle of scientific thought that corresponds to a kind of utter honesty—a kind of leaning over backwards.” Literary critics should hold themselves to the same standards, and I strive to. How well I succeed I will leave to others to argue.

* Although I quote poetry sometimes, I almost never analyze it here because I’m like the person without a real sense of what great visual art is: not having read widely and deeply enough in poetry to have developed my sense for what makes it bad, mediocre, good, and great poetry, I’m mostly silent, though appreciative.

EDIT: Added Feynman quote to the last paragraph.