Category Archives: Culture

The New York Times on the Kindle

January 26, 2008 By in Books, Culture, Links Tags: , , , , Leave a comment

A New York Times article called “Freed From the Page, but a Book Nonetheless” discusses the Amazon Kindle, which I don’t like. But I agree with the article’s conclusion:

The object we are accustomed to calling a book is undergoing a profound modification as it is stripped of its physical shell. Kindle’s long-term success is still unknown, but Amazon should be credited with imaginatively redefining its original product line, replacing the book business with the reading business.

I just analogize the Kindle to mp3 players before the iPod in the sense that it shows promise but just isn’t there yet. When it is there—less expensive, better interface, easier content management and acquisition (and what a vile phrase that is)—I will be too.

Bridge of Sighs

January 4, 2008 By in Books, Culture Tags: , , , , , , , Leave a comment

Richard Russo said he’s been in Seattle to promote every one of his books, and I wish I’d been to previous talks, as his droll yet earnest comments at Elliott Bay went on for the perfect length of time—unlike Bridge of Sighs, a quality book made less so by its length. Around page 400 I was ready for the other cover. Still, it’s his third excellent book in a row, and one in which Russo said he identifies more with the protagonist than any of his other novels. That protagonist is Lou C. “Lucy” Lynch, one of the three main characters in a novel stuffed with as many minor characters as Tolstoy. I think Russo would be pleased with the comparison to Tolstoy, though Russo also has the advantage of being funny, though without easy one-liners I can quote without context.

The novel itself is largely about interpreting life. Russo said that he’s rapidly approaching 60—too rapidly, I heard him think—and the time when, according to him, any way you slice it, it’s half over. He says the central question becomes, “What has this been about and how did I get here?” That’s certainly the topic of Bridge of Sighs, a novel partially told by a man (mis?)remembering his childhood. The technique annoyed me as often as it interested me, and yet the annoyance helped build interest as I remembered with Lucy, whose childhood friend Robert Noonan is painting the bridge referenced in the title. It’s too obvious a metaphor for a writer as sophisticated as Russo, and it’s also been long used by Whitman and Hart Crane, though for Russo the metaphor is one that shifts with the characters who observe it, and by the end it has come to have enough meanings that perhaps it has shed all of them and simply is.

His characters—Lucy, his wife Sarah, and their somewhat-friend Robert Noonan–are everymen (and woman) set up as a continuum, with Lucy “hat[ing] the very idea of change,” Noonan being change incarnate, and Sarah the sensible woman between them who has antecedents in Victorian literature. Lucy is attempting to understand all three, including himself, while he is “trying to square the past as I remember it today.” Ah: the past, mentioned again, as you can’t help when discussing this book. What I liked most from Russo’s talk was a comment pertinent to the issues in Bridge of Sighs and one that I’ve implicitly realized and tried to incorporate in my life: if you go back far enough, you see how someone came to be the way they are. Russo said that in his work and life he asks “What’s the initial assumption?” Why do people go down the “stupid, hateful path,” or at least a path that seems stupid and hateful to outsiders. His forceful language struck me because most of the time he hedged his answers in response to the world’s ambiguity, but in this he didn’t, presumably because it is ingrained in his novels. The question he’s always trying to answer gives an impressive texture to Bridge of Sighs and his other novels, and in it he writes about people in a way similar to Robertson Davies; Davies summarizes how he fits with the English tradition of sympathy in part because he writes about people as people—”[…] their sorrows and their distresses are made sometimes more poignant by the fact that they don’t know why things are happening to them[,]” in an interview.

Russo’s asking “What’s the initial assumption?” also explains the characters in his novels, many of whom have failed in the conventional sense of acquiring money, power, prestige, social standing, and usually all four together—if you go far enough back, they have reasons for staying in places that Seattlites and other coastal city dwellers condescend to (imagine New Yorkers’ opinions of upstate, or of Maine). The question scales up, too: if you go back far enough, you might see how a city, state, country, or even world came to be the way it is. Call it the cellular automata of the individual. I heard elements of Davies in this too, as when he says in 1970, “[…] I am depressed by the readiness with which people attribute to the Russians, or the Chinese, the evil passions and tendencies that make them dangerous themselves, without any awareness of what they are doing.” Well spoken: and a reminder of what Kundera writes about concerning the internationalism of literature and the interconnectedness of life that too many overlook.

The reading continued in an ambling way, like the novel, and it helped me see the humor I’d missed in the first 140 pages. Hearing a scene in which a man’s married mistress breaks up with him, followed by a confrontation with the husband and non-friend, gave them the lunacy you can miss from just the text. Still, the novel had flaws that couldn’t be covered up from sound: the dialog sometimes meandered, but perhaps that is the nature of trying to thrash out causation and understand life. It ranges from interpersonal relations to the undercurrent of populist anger at decline of small-town life—although I’m not sure when, historically, small-town life was really healthy and wonderful, especially given books like Sinclair Lewis’ Main Street—combined with the fatalistic realization that not much can be done to reverse the slide. In this respect, small-town life functions as a metaphor for aging: things are changing, perhaps for the worst, but there’s only one way to go. For Lucy Lynch, moving isn’t an option, and I suspect it isn’t for Russo, either.

Bridge of Sighs is worth trying, and my complaints about its length are preempted by Lucy when he says, “If this narrative seems whimsical simply by virtue of its being untrue, all I can say is that it’s even more realistic than the truth […]” Well, maybe, but it seems whimsical mostly because it is often whimsical, like part of Russo’s discussion. I would’ve liked to ask Russo if he knows of or likes Robertson Davies, and whether my supposition about his work defending small towns and their inhabitants is accurate. But time ran out before we could go back and see his initial assumptions, so we are left with Russo’s novels and interviews. Despite the length of Bridge of Sighs, I will read his next one even if it’s 1,000 pages.

A Simple Plan

December 29, 2007 By in Books, Culture Tags: , , , , , , , , , , 1 Comment

James Fallows reminded me of Scott Smith’s A Simple Plan, a novel that is anything but simple and about a deceptively easy opportunity for huge money. Taking the cash, however, cascades into hell like a modern version of Christopher Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus, published nearly 400 years earlier.

A Simple Plan follows societally unimportant men as they squabble for money each thinks will give him a place in the larger world. I don’t know whether Smith thought of the legend of Faust—which has also been covered by Goethe and Thomas Mann, but it is hard to miss the parallels, with power in the form of money coming at the expense of spiritual and moral well-being, ultimately leading toward an end that, as we are told early, is unlikely to be good. Within 30 pages, Hank says he might’ve turned the money in to Sheriff Jenkins “before it had a chance to unravel and entangle us all,” but his choices toward dancing with the devil eventually leave him with nowhere to go but forward into darkness.

Modern literature doesn’t necessarily need a literal manifestation of the devil to present his offer. Hank begins succumbing to the metaphorical lure even before encountering Jenkins, saying: “The dynamic of [the] relationship [between him and Jacob] had shifted, I realized. I was in control now; I was the spoiler, the one who would decide what happened to the money.” A page later, the vague sense of the supernatural is invoked when Hank says the find is “like a gift from the gods.” But the gods don’t often give gifts unencumbered by strings. This interplay among fate, power, and choice plays throughout the novel, with each choice making it harder to give up the money until finally Hank feels he can’t, leading inexorably to the end. This end is different than Marlowe’s Faustus but still a study in the ways of power, this one not from a pygmy rather than epic point of view.

A Simple Plan also implicitly argues that three can keep a secret if two are dead, as Benjamin Franklin said. Corpses pile up early and eventually to tragic proportions, leading one away from the real (how can cops miss so many?) and toward the traditional forms of tragedy. This interplay between old and recent literary developments, as well as the greed and compassion of the characters, gives A Simple Plan lasting resonance, as does Smith’s direct, understated, and mostly excellent writing (an exception: “My heart was beating thickly in my temples”). Most often, though, the prose never impedes and usually enhances the story, with Hank’s pathos mingling with monstrousness as he chooses a path that is at first horrifying and then, to the reader, more horrifying still as consorting with the devil becomes more normal.

Last post on North Korea

December 28, 2007 By in Culture, Links Tags: , , , ,

Christopher Hitchens writes a condemnation of North Korea that lambasts the current U.S. approach or lack thereof without proposing exactly what should be done. It complements this post about the New York Philharmonic’s plan to give a concert there and this post about the Nazi economy.

The Rest is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century

December 27, 2007 By in Books, Culture, Life Tags: , , , , , Leave a comment

Finding a book that lives up to expectations and ecstatic reviews is too rare, as many books don’t. The Rest is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century is an exception, telling the story of music in the most tumultuous century along with its politics and art. Or does it cover politics and art through music? You can’t entirely tell, which must be intentional in a book lively and quick as a gliding melody.

Many of his Ross’s descriptions about musical culture could as much be about literature as music; in Weimar Republic of Germany, he writes: “every violent act or image seems to foreshadow the catastrophe to come. But it is too easy to write the story of German culture from 1918 to 1933 as the prelude to the next chapter.” Elsewhere, the same point is made about modernism, about audience acceptance, about difficulty, and about politics. One point in particular can be said about literature, and it’s a paraphrase of Theodor Adorno: “[…] modernism can bring forth its own kind of kitsch—a melodrama of difficulty that easily degenerates into a sort of superannuated adolescent angst.” That’s especially true if you can stretch modernistic tendencies of the ones Adorno describes out to today, as A Reader’s Manifesto attacks exactly this idea.

The critical acclaim I mentioned is real: see, for example, Steven Johnson and Maud Newton’s excerpt. I think The Rest is Noise inspires praise because it is learned but not pedantic, historical but not dull, even-handed in its descriptions of musical stylistic and political warfare, and, above all devoted to music itself, rather than to numbing ideology. In an early section, Ross writes about Richard Strauss’ Guntram, the hero who, at the end of the opera, leaves his order, his beloved, and “the Christian God.” Strauss’ mentor was alarmed, but Ross describes why Strauss wrote the opera as he did: “Guntram’s order […] had unwisely sought to launch an ethical crusade through art, to unify religion and art. This was Wagner’s mission, too, but for Strauss it was a utopian scheme that contained ‘the seeds of death in itself.'” The theme of extremes goes on toward the middle of the book, when composers accused each other of fascist tendencies in each others’ music, and by the end Ross shows examples of modern critics who berate pop or classical music for pop’s supposed emptiness or classical’s supposed beauty. But if Ross has a main thesis it is that music is music, regardless of labels or dogma.

Throughout The Rest is Noise, Ross almost shudders at the divisiveness in all its manifestations, from the beginning when he writes that “Fin-de-siecle Vienna offers the depressing spectacle of artists and audiences washing their hands of each other, giving up on the dream of common ground,” to the masterful first sentence of the epilogue, “Extremes become their opposites in time.” Instead Ross unifies common themes and idea while still being able to judge, making a strong case that in music, as with all art, ceaseless miscegenation strengthens rather than weakening the end product.

EDIT: Alex Ross visited Seattle, which I wrote about here.

An unusual cinematic occurrence

December 23, 2007 By in Books, Culture, Links Tags: , , , , , , , Leave a comment

I saw two movies on two consecutive weekends both of which I enjoyed. It feels like years since two somewhat proximate movies that were any good have even been in theaters, let alone run on consecutive weekends. Atonement captures the spirit of Ian McEwan’s book (we’ll see if they try On Chesil Beach) and Charlie Wilson’s War manages to be fun, engaging, political, and probably not too inaccurate. It’s based on George Crile’s Charlie Wilson’s War: The Extraordinary Story of the Largest Covert Operation in History, a book in my Seattle Public Library queue. Not being the only person to have done this in response to the movie, I’m somewhere around 50, meaning the wait is going to take a while.

Now that I’ve mentioned movies, go read Caleb Crain’s The science of reading and its decline to make yourself wonder about the decline of the world and such:

[… T]here is no one looking back at the television viewer. He is alone, though he, and his brain, may be too distracted to notice it. The reader is also alone, but the N.E.A. reports that readers are more likely than non-readers to play sports, exercise, visit art museums, attend theatre, paint, go to music events, take photographs, and volunteer. Proficient readers are also more likely to vote. Perhaps readers venture so readily outside because what they experience in solitude gives them confidence. Perhaps reading is a prototype of independence. No matter how much one worships an author, Proust wrote, “all he can do is give us desires.” Reading somehow gives us the boldness to act on them. Such a habit might be quite dangerous for a democracy to lose.

This concerns the National Endowment for the Arts’ recent “To Read or Not to Read,” covered here by the New York Times, with more background material in a July by me. This can’t be good for the clerisy.

The New York Philharmonic consorts with the enemy

December 22, 2007 By in Culture, Links Tags: , , , , ,

As long as I’ve hit music once, I might as well again: Terry Teachout wrote an excellent column on The New York Philharmonic’s decision to play in Pyongyang, North Korea:

For three days earlier, Zarin Mehta and Paul Guenther, the president and chairman of the Philharmonic, had shared a platform with Pak Gil Yon, North Korea’s ambassador to the United Nations, and announced that America’s oldest orchestra would be playing in Pyongyang next February. It horrified me — no other word is strong enough — to see them sitting next to a smirking representative of Kim Jong Il, the dictator of a brutally totalitarian state in whose Soviet-style prison camps 150,000 political prisoners are currently doing slave labor.

This column is particularly salient because I’m going to post about The Wages of Destruction: The Making and Breaking of the Nazi Economy shortly, and if Hitler has a modern heir he is Kim Jong Il. Camp 22 in North Korea is a modern descendent of Hitler’s “work” camps.

EDIT: The promised post is here.

Life

December 21, 2007 By in Books, Culture Tags: , , , , ,

“Aaron Copland, whose story will be told in later chapters, once pointed out that the job of being an American artist often consists simply in making art possible—which is to say, visible. Every generation has to do the work all over again.”

—Alex Ross, The Rest is Noise

Philip Pullman profile

December 12, 2007 By in Books, Culture Tags: , , , , , 1 Comment

I mentioned Philip Pullman again as a contract to the execrable fantasy described here; I wrote about Pullman’s wonderful His Dark Materials trilogy here. Now I’ve come across an interview with Pullman. A sample:

“I had been thinking about the central question, which is the innocence and experience business, and the transition which happens in adolescence, for a long time. I’d been teaching children of the same age as Lyra, children who were themselves going through this physical, intellectual and emotional change in their lives. The biggest change we ever go through really.” Once, when I interviewed Pullman in front of a packed house at the National Theatre, he drew a big laugh when he explained what was so special about this age: “Your life begins when you are born, but your life story begins at that moment when you discover that you are in the wrong family.”

This article, like so many appearing now, is coming about thanks to the movie version of The Golden Compass. Originally I’d planned to watch, until critics panned it; the Seattle Times‘ review is typical, saying the movie “has a by-the-numbers feel to it.” In other words, the movie appears to be what the studio sought: a slot machine instead of a story, and by jettisoning the latter is also seems to have lost the former.

These are the best?

December 11, 2007 By in Books, Culture, Links Tags: , , , , Leave a comment

I’ve looked at the New York Times‘ 100 Notable Books of 2007 with special attention to the fiction and can’t help but wonder if this is the best we’ve got. I discussed The Abstinence Teacher here and here, but Perrotta was better live than in print. The Bad Girl never lived at all; Harry Potter might have improved with age but I’m not about to find out. House of Meetings was better as history and essay than novel and The Savage Detectives overrated. I read five pages of Tree of Smoke in a bookstore and suspect B.R. Myers‘ slam is probably deserved. The Yiddish Policemen’s Union was likable but not lovable.

Of the books listed, On Chesil Beach deserved its place, as did The Indian Clerk (more on that in the next few days). Of the ones I discussed in the paragraph above, a few were outright bad, but most were as The Indian Clerk says of the novels of Henry James: “[…] I admire them yet I cannot love them” (italics in original). So I feel about most picks from The New York Times, which, even if I admire them, I can’t really see how they would inspire love.

That brings us to the New York Times‘ 10 best books, with two fiction books of limited interest to me, two already discussed, and one that I actually plan to read: Joshua Ferris’ Then We Came to the End. The nonfiction was better, with Jeffrey Toobin’s The Nine and Alex Ross’ The Rest is Noise, a book en route after I read a chapter online.

These year end lists—there are too many to bother linking to most—remind me how important the Everyman’s Library and Library of America are, as both feature excellent quality in thought and production; I suspect that I, like many others, will return to the books in their catalogs long after most copies of Harry Potter have been pulped and resurrected as grocery bags.

EDIT: Added a link to The Indian Clerk.