— The Un-Usable Past, Walter Benn Michaels, The Baffler. Rather mixed feelings on this article!
If only to remind people that TODAY IS THE BIRTHDAY OF BOTH FREDRIC JAMESON AND SARAH MICHELLE GELLAR!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
“Incest and miscegenation!” Pa yelled as he entered the room where Billy and Dolly sat. Billy fled through the doorway, too panicked for ratiocination, and wound a peregrinating dotted line around the yard and by P.J., the deaf and dumb youngest brother.
Famous Readers Narrate the Funny Pages, McSweeney’s. Link thanks to Comics Curmudgeon, of course.
Honestly, though, if you want a Benjy parallel, Jeffy’s the only appropriate choice.
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Article on Edward Jones in the Post. Worth reading in full, although it’s a typical bio-feature in that it spends too long elaborating on his hermitage and not long enough talking about his fiction. In my opinion. But still good.
I think I got the link from The Millions. Thanks, guys!
Also, audience poll: short stories or Known World? I pick short stories (Lost in the City particularly) a thousand times over.
A needed answer to “Bolaño Inc.”
However, there’s one thing doesn’t exactly get said in this article, but occurred to me upon reading “Bolaño Inc.” Castellanos Moya and Edmond Caldwell and their ilk see an uncomfortable tension in the way Bolaño has been received in America: he’s been decontextualized — stripped of the literary and political content of his works, his revolutionary politics and tastes reduced to penny-adventure fun and games — but at the same time he’s become the token for the whole of Latin American literature.
This is probably a fair accusation. But it’s not much of an insight. Anything that finds any success in translation in the US is treated as though it’s the emanation from the deepest soul of a country — or continent, or other-half-of-the-world, or whatever. Half of a Yellow Sun is compared to V.S. Naipaul, because, uh, Adichie is also a post-colonial writer, I guess. But she’s also compared to Dickens. Any Central or Eastern European writer is, inevitably, either resisting Soviet oppression, dealing with the aftermath of Soviet oppression, or conspicuously avoiding engaging with Soviet oppression.
So that all sucks. But lazy references and generalizing are useful tools for reviewers and readers: it helps anchor an unknown work in a relatively small pool of common knowledge. The point is to get people to read the fucking book, and once the fucking book gets read, all of the vapid associations and generalizations cease to matter. Anybody who reads The Savage Detectives or 2666 isn’t going to think “I just read the only important thing to come from Latin America since Chronicle of a Death Foretold.” They’re going to think, “Shit, I know nothing about Mexican modernist poets, and they seem pretty cool. I wonder if I can find something in translation?
Generalizing and decontextualizing are bad, of course, and one popular author in translation probably won’t act as a leading edge for literature from his or her place of origin. (Pamuk isn’t exactly driving a renaissance in Turkish lit in America.) But the idea that Bolaño is somehow special in the way he’s been hijacked and repackaged — and the idea that his books won’t stand up to the marketing — seems to me more than a little naive. Smash the market and all that, but given the way the world is going, we should be glad that inventive radical lit is making it to a mass market at all. Right?
I just discovered a set of Eliot poems online, written during his college years, that are apparently not collected in even the most exhaustive collections. This makes sense: they’re mostly pretty bad. It’s interesting, though, to read the little poem “Spleen” (probably the best of the lot) —
Sunday: this satisfied procession
Of definite Sunday faces;
Bonnets, silk hats, and conscious graces
In repetition that displaces
Your mental self-possession
By this unwarranted digression.Evening, lights, and tea!
Children and cats in the alley;
Dejection unable to rally
Against this dull conspiracy.
And Life, a little bald and gray,
Languid, fastidious, and bland,
Waits, hat and gloves in hand,
Punctilious of tie and suit
(Somewhat impatient of delay)
On the doorstep of the Absolute.
— and to think that it became Prufrock.
So I just ordered Krakatoa: The Day The World Exploded and The John McPhee Reader from Paperback Swap. (I know you were all on the edges of your seats.) (I still have two credits left! Send along suggestions!)
“What happened to libraries?” GM asked me earlier. Well, for one thing, homeless people hang out there. But also you can’t keep the books! And I have a perilous track record with things I have to return. Netflix has a warrant out for my arrest, probably, and I was 5 minutes and a full cross-campus sprint to the library away from not receiving my college diploma. (Which would have sent my poor parents into a breakdown; it was bad enough that at my post-graduation luncheon my father learned that “my” - ie his - car had been totaled. Thank you, passive voice!)
Anyway, I like to keep books so I can lend them out to friends and scare away potential suitors. Which is why I got the John McPhee collection; I think I’ve probably already read most of the essays within (Encounters With the Archdruid is one of my very faves) but I just want to have it on my shelf.
Oddly, twenty minutes after placing the order I was trolling mah Google Reader and came upon this, about McPhee’s Coming Into the Country:
Survey the nonfiction cannon, if you will. Its avant garde is dazzling: I defy anyone to argue that better words than Tom Wolfe’s could be found to capture the Merry Pranksters, or that any writer could top David Foster Wallace on the topic of a luxury cruise. Atop the heap, however, are a very few writers like John McPhee whose style is so understated, malleable and subservient to his larger purposes that he does not write badly on any subject.
(snip)
You should read this book. It must be the kind of thing that sits on the unvarnished shelves of Gay Talese, William Langewiesche and Lawrence Weschler. “A grizzly, no slower than a racing horse, is about half again as fast as the fastest human being.” There, I’ve given you a taste.
Hey now! a) Kinda Baader-Meinhof-y, no? and b) “An author who writes on the sex trade” and I will now have something in common, according to the imaginings of Conor Friedersdorf.
Blog about John McPhee to your heart’s content. Assembling California was somehow the most exciting book I read last summer.
It would be consistent with my character and attitude toward Twitter if I was annoyed by this, but I actually think the examples listed are funny and clever. But I don’t quite get it — are they all from a book? I went to jamesjoyce and all he says is something about a VW and “Go Phillies!” which I’m pretty sure wasn’t in Ulysses or Portrait or Dubliners. Maybe it was in Finnegan’s Wake.
There’s an interesting upwelling of Polish lit in this pretty good interview from the New Yorker’s books blog:
Who are your influences?
The impact of any particular writer on your own work is hard to discern. I read a lot of Borges, for example, but I don’t necessarily see that reflected in my work, which is a little disappointing. It’s there, or I hope it is, just not operating at a level I’m aware of. Sometimes there’s a lot of Mario Vargas Llosa in what I do (I believe), and on good days, I hope to find some Kapuscinski, some Bruno Schulz, some Tadeusz Konwicki as well. But in the end, these are just guesses. You never really know where anything comes from.
I have to say I didn’t see a whole lot of Konwicki in either of his books, but I’m happy to see the somewhat underexposed (in America) author get a reference in a place other than academia and Philip Roth. It’s interesting, actually, to read Roth — especially The Counterlife and Operation Shylock — in conjunction with A Minor Apocalypse and The Polish Complex, since they share a lot of the same beauty and cleverness and a lot of the same annoying flaws, as well. (Does every nubile young woman really want to get with nasty middle-aged authors?)
Schulz, on the other hand — well, once I tried to read The Street of Crocodiles on a flight, and couldn’t get past the first five pages. I’m a philistine.
Reblogging yourself: the worst sin of all?
I’m not sure I buy this. But it’s still interesting:
More often, though, as in the Rosemary episode, we seem meant to accept Liz’s Jack-ward drift, if not cheer it on outright, as part of her maturation. Jack is a target of the show’s ridicule, but even as his worldview is satirized, it’s often presented as inevitable. Yes, he’s an unfeeling, creatively inept conservative, but he’s also peerless when it comes to real-world maneuvering. When Liz gets in over her head at work, in life, and in love, Jack is both her foil and her life coach, on hand to swoop in and save the day.
I think it says less about 30 Rock itself than the weird inclination towards “balance” in a lot of television comedies. A show like The Simpsons, which clearly leans left, carefully makes sure to lampoon left-wing ideals; a show like Family Guy, which leans right (I think), seems to try to be even-handed in its dismantling of sacred cows. A lot of this is market-driven — you don’t want to alienate people with your politics, and dogmatic politics can sometimes be murderously unfunny.
But there’s also critical premium placed on politically cautious fiction, particularly fiction with left-wing sympathies that ultimately depicts those sympathies as useless or pointless. Small-c conservatism is the order of the day for most reviewers. Think about how much earnest praise Orwell has received for all of the “English values” bullshit he spewed during the Second World War, a bunch of crap about meat pies and shopkeepers that totally glossed over all of the ways in which he had previously shown how meat pies and shopkeepers are basically empty images that obscure real cruelty and oppression. Critics applaud people who entertain radical ideas, but end up concluding that whatever political/economic system we live in now is the best of all possible systems, because we live in it, and believing anything else is either naive (starry-eyed socialism), cruel (cold-hearted rightism), or violent (Communism, anarchism, fascism, whatever). Maybe it’s a natural inclination of people attached to institutions like the press, which is keyed to a certain class and needs continuity and middlebrow stability to survive. Or maybe conservative values really do make the best literature (broadly interpreted), because maybe literature really is just mimetic and can’t sustain any sort of critical motion without becoming turgid and didactic or just plain boring.
I guess I need some examples and some clearer thinking.
I’ll follow up on this tumblr with some examples, to justify my sin, but any given installment of the Times Book Review (or, you know, the books page of The New Republic or The New Yorker or even the NYRB) yields up decent criticism with very cautious politics.
