May 25, 2006
Lapse
This site is in the midst of another posting lapse of indeterminate length, due to other obligations. I did manage, however, to update BrianSholis.com with a selection of recently published texts.
Posted in Miscellaneous. Found always via this permanent link.
May 19, 2006
DIY Art Project #2
1) Determine the dates of the four major art fairs—the Armory Show, Art Basel, Frieze, and Art Basel Miami Beach—in a given year.
2) Determine the dates exactly opposite those of the fairs.
3) Go to the "right place at the wrong time"—Basel in the winter, London in the spring, Miami in the summer, and New York in the autumn—and organize art-related events, especially ones that make the art market their theme or that would not normally find a place in the market.
4) Skip the fairs themselves.
Posted in . Found always via this permanent link.
William St. Clair on "the political economy of reading"
William St. Clair, in an essay printed in the May 12 Times Literary Supplement, attempts to reorient our understanding of the relationship between printed matter and its readers' "mentalities." The essay, a condensed version of the John Coffin Memorial Lecture in the History of the Book, is not available online in its TLS form, but the original can be found in PDF form here. A few excerpts:
Literary and intellectual histories, two of the disciplines that have traditionally attempted to retrieve mentalities, have mainly been written in accordance with the "parade of authors" convention. The writings of the past are presented as a march past of great names, described from a commentator's box set high above the column. In literature, we see Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton, Wordsworth, Tennyson. . . . In philosophy Hume is followed by Adam Smith, Rousseau, or whichever names the writer wishes. According to the parade convention, those texts which have later been judged to be the best of their age, or the most innovative in a wide sense, are believed to catch the essence, or some of the essence, of the historical situation from which they came. It is a convention centred on newly written works that, for the most part, denies an active role to readers. Another convention that has come in more recently, I call the "parliament of texts." This presents the writings of a particular historical period as debating and negotiating with one another in a kind of open parliament, with all the members participating and listening. Thus, when news of the French Revolution reached England, there was an outpouring of books and pamphlets that discussed its implications, and took the debate from questions of immediate policy to philosophical concerns about the nature of human society, the role of the State, the justifications for political, social and gender hierarchies, and much else.Under both of these conventions, the historian chooses the texts that march in the parade or sit in the parliament. . . . However, as ways of understanding how mentalities may have been formed by the reading of books, neitehr approach is complete or satisfactory. For one thing, any study of the consequences of reading in the past ought to consider those books that were actually read, not a more recent selection.
And then:
A political economy of reading can begin with the economic aspect of political economy. The "history of the book" is, among much else, the history of an industry, one which has parallels with, for example, pharmaceuticals and information technology, in which intellectual property is central. . . .Over the whole print era, the links, both general and particular, between texts, books, reading and wider consequences appear to be secure. For example, the persistence of rural, religious, pre-Enlightenment constructions of Englishness into the industrialized urban world, the emergence of a distinctively working-class sceptical urban reformist culture, and the persistence of believe in astrology and other ancient supernatural systems, despite the efforts of Church and State—in all these cases, the overlap is with books and readers, not with authors and texts. . . . If I am right, and it is accepted that reading can be shown to have shaped mentalities, then the implications are immense. For, having disconnected outcomes from traditional text- and author-centred approaches, we have connected them to other ways of understanding complexity.
Because there is such a precedent for this type of inquiry—the work of Adam Smith, for example, as mentioned in the description of the full lecture given on the page linked above—St. Clair's ideas seem natural, as if they should have already been in the air. And yet I don't think I've come across, in a publication aimed at a more-or-less general readership, an essay that uses these methods to consider histories of publishing and reading. I can't vouch fully for the original lecture, as I've only read the TLS-edited extract, but the latter is fascinating, so the former may well be worth a look, especially among those litbloggers who read this site.
Posted in Books, Papers & Periodicals. Found always via this permanent link.
May 18, 2006
Updike on Houellebecq in the New Yorker
By the third column of this review, I thought, Of course John Updike is going to tear apart Michel Houellebecq:
Houellebecq and Hugh Hefner alike offer the ailing world a panacea of self-righteous hedonism. The twinkle in Hefner’s eye becomes a furious glare in Houellebecq’s. Their connoisseur’s emphasis on the physical perfection of the naked young women whom they present as pieces of Utopia verges on pedophilia; Daniel1 writes, “The dream of all men is to meet little sluts who are innocent but ready for all forms of depravity—which is what, more or less, all teenage girls are.” Houellebecq’s spokesmen insist that sex is not merely an aspect of life, or merely one of its pleasures: “All energy is of a sexual nature, not mainly, but exclusively, and when the animal is no longer good for reproducing, it is absolutely no longer good for anything.” [ . . . ] Houellebecq’s solemnly blunt descriptions of sex acts are notorious, or as notorious as such things can be in a sex-saturated age; but it is one thing to propagandize for sex and another to integrate it, as more than “naughty bits,” into the conflict-ridden flow of incident and psychology that make up a novel.
The catch is that Updike himself offers Hef-style hedonism; it’s exactly his softcore sensibility that is turned off by the dissociated raunch Houellebecq peddles.
UPDATE, 9/1: Last night I finally read James Wood's take on the French author, subtitled "pornographic novelist Houellebecq's hidden conservatism," published in the August 28 issue of the New Republic. A few excerpts:
For despite apparent evidence to the contrary, Houellebecq is not a nihilist but a moralist—and a moralist who consistently idealizes heterosexual love. This is why, though it is often hard to like his fiction, it is possible to admire the strange tortured creature who writes it.[ . . . ]
One can see why Houellebecq has excited such ecstatic reviews. It is exciting to encounter a vision of such furious logic, unafraid to do its angry computation on the page, bold with social and moral outrage. And Houellebecq's vengeful conservatism, though familiar in many ways—the 1960s is once again the culprit, with Charles Manson the inevitable fruit of all the enjoyable excesses—can indeed fire into brilliance. The best chapter in his best novel, The Elementary Particles, mobilizes this conservatism to argue, with unexpected power and rectitude, that Huxley's Brave New World, far from being a dystopia, is actually "our idea of heaven: genetic manipulation, sexual liberation, the war against aging, the leisure society." And note the canny way in which Houellebecq's critique is at once left-wing and right-wing. Right-wing, in that unrestrained sexuality is pinned on the degradations of the 1960s and on American self-indulgence; left-wing, in that unrestrained sexuality is likened, in Marxist fashion, to the ravages of the capitalist market.
This must explain some of Houellebecq's success with young readers in a post-ideological age.
Posted in Books, Papers & Periodicals. Found always via this permanent link.
May 17, 2006
MP3 of the Moment #4: Junior Boys, "Teach Me How to Fight"
I don’t remember when I downloaded the Junior Boys’ debut album, Last Exit (read reviews here). It must have been sometime in late 2004, when the group was riding to prominence on a wave of MP3 blog attention. I immediately took to the group’s intimate, yet chilly, bedroom electro-pop; the record’s best songs seemed like the perfect soundtrack to the liminal moments on either end of a long night out—dressing up for the bar or club, or, more pertinently, lying awake in bed at four in the morning, unable to sleep. “Birthday” and “Last Exit” were both released on EPs or as singles, and were treated to remixes courtesy of big-name musicians (Fennesz, Manitoba). But, returning to the album again recently, it’s “Teach Me How to Fight” that I cannot stop listening to. The song possesses all of the group’s signature elements: quiet, insistent, micro-house-style beats (here nestled in granular texture); atmospheric keyboard melodies; and singer Jeremy Greenspan’s whispery, come-hither vocals.
The group’s second album, So This Is Goodbye, comes out on August 14th from Domino Recording Co. (You can read all about it on this post at k-punk.) In the meantime, “Teach Me How to Fight” is available for download at the bottom of the middle column.
UPDATE, 9/13: Jonathan Liu raves about the new album at the New York Observer, in a column titled "When Sexy Met Indie."
Posted in Music. Found always via this permanent link.
A.M. Homes, This Book Will Save Your Life
Richard Novak, the narrator of This Book Will Save Your Life (Viking), A.M. Homes’s new novel, is a self-aware Chauncey Gardiner/Forrest Gump type, who, after he wakes up one morning with a sinkhole in his yard and a pain that started as a “knotty cramp in his back, a strange tightening from his gut up into his chest,” blunders through Los Angeles in search of the life he worked so assiduously to buffet himself from. In the process, he cobbles together a makeshift family that consists of a philosophically inclined immigrant donut shop owner; a world-famous actor who happens also to be a four-star chef; a Gyrotonics instructor who lost a breast to cancer; a depressed housewife who leaves her family by getting out of the minivan at a stoplight; and a Salingeresque cultural icon living next door in Malibu, among others. It’s implausible, and Homes knows it, so her prose speeds along at an amazing clip (I finished the 372-page book in about four hours), allowing the reader to suspend disbelief and enjoy the immensely entertaining tale. The breakneck pace also limits the insight to be drawn from the text; there were several passages in which it was apparent that Homes was communicating something of emotional significance—or, at least, something quite funny—and the ineluctable forward movement undercut the complexity.
I’m unfamiliar with Homes’s earlier writing, save for a piece included in The Anchor Book of New American Short Stories, but from all that I’ve read about her, this novel is a tonal, if not a stylistic, departure for the writer. Much of the acidity prevalent in the earlier fiction has been bled from This Book Will Save Your Life, making for a curious hybrid—a novel by a quintessentially New York writer transplanted to sunny Los Angeles. (Homes nonetheless seems good at pinpointing the vanities and pretensions of LA residents. Perhaps this is a New Yorker’s view.) All told, I enjoyed the book, and would like to read another. To those who know her work, which should I read: The Safety of Objects or The End of Alice?
I also plan to see Homes read on June 7 at 192 Books in Chelsea.
Posted in Books. Found always via this permanent link.
Wes Anderson, My Life, My Card
After reading this piece on Slate.com about Wes Anderson's new, immensely enjoyable two-minute film—a commercial for American Express—I waited for a second article to appear so that I would have an excuse to link to it. Well, Slate.com itself answered my wishes, publishing this piece on Monday evening:
Wes Anderson's new film is a lustrous widescreen ode to moviemaking. It's an ultimate movie-movie, a cinephile's wet dream that is, actually, a spoof of François Truffaut's 1973 movie about movies, Day for Night. In fact, Anderson's film is better than Day for Night: It's more complex because it doesn't just fetishize movies the way that Truffaut did. Plus, it's shorter.
It's titled, "Dear Wes Anderson, Why does it take you so long to make a movie?" and goes on to analyze the (relative) slowness of the "American Eccentrics" (Anderson, Spike Jonze, David O. Russell, Sofia Coppola, etc.), who only make a new movie every few years. Make what you will of the author's argument, but be sure to enjoy the short film.
Posted in Around the web, Film. Found always via this permanent link.
May 16, 2006
A sneak peek at Olafur Eliasson's "Light Lab"
While in Frankfurt this weekend, I had the pleasure of taking a tour of the new Portikus building, designed by architect Christoph Mäckler. One highlight was an up-close peek at Olafur Eliasson's "Light Lab" installation, the first of a series of twelve. The work has made the building an instant icon—I saw countless tourists posing on the banks of the river with its orange neon arc in the background. Here's a sneak peek at how simple are the means by which Eliasson makes this commanding image.
Posted in Art. Found always via this permanent link.
Three interviews with Philip Roth
The response to Philip Roth's Everyman, officially published last week but on bookstore shelves for almost a month, has been almost universally rhapsodic. I've never read Roth, embarrassingly enough, and have begun Portnoy's Complaint to begin my education. To mark the occasion, here are links to three interviews with the writer, at the Los Angeles Times (April 30), on NPR's "All Things Considered" (May 2) and on Terry Gross's "Fresh Air" (May8).
Posted in Around the web, Books. Found always via this permanent link.
May 14, 2006
Temporary hiatus
I've spent most of the past week in Berlin and Frankfurt, and apologize for the lack of posts. I expect to resume posting by the middle of this week. There are many photos from the trip posted here.
Posted in Miscellaneous. Found always via this permanent link.
May 5, 2006
New and recent books
I spent part of yesterday evening perusing the websites of a few (mostly academic) publishers, and have compiled a partial list of new and recent books I'm looking forward to.
From MIT Press: Louise Lawler: Twice Untitled and Other Pictures, edited by Helen Molesworth (10/2006); Cindy Sherman, edited by Johanna Burton (part of October Files; November 2006); and David Wojnarowicz: A Definitive History of Five or Six Years on the Lower East Side, edited by Giancarlo Ambrosino and featuring interviews by Sylvère Lotringer (October 2006). I have also heard that Douglas Crimp is writing a memoir of his life in New York in the '70s, to be titled Before Pictures, and suspect that MIT will release it.
From Houghton Mifflin: Cynthia Ozik, The Din in the Head (June 2, 2006).
From Farrar, Straus, Giroux: Seamus Heaney, District and Circle (May 2006) and 20th Century Germany Poetry: An Anthology, edited by Michael Hofmann (December 2006).
From Routledge: Matthew Smith, The Total Work of Art (October 28, 2006) and Art and Morality, edited by Jose Bermudez and Sebastian Gardner (June 28, 2006).
From The New Press: Immanual Wallerstein, European Universalism: Rhetoric of Power.
From the University of Minnesota Press: J.K. Gibson-Graham, The End of Capitalism (As We Knew It) (available now); Theodor W. Adorno, Philosophy of New Music, translated, edited, and with an introduction by Robert Hullot-Kentor (May 2006); Giorgio Agamben, Language and Death: The Place of Negativity, translated by Karen E. Pinkus with Michael Hardt (September 2006); and Vincent Kaufmann, Guy Debord: Revolution in the Service of Poetry, translated by Robert Bononno (available now).
From Harvard University Press: Walter Benjamin, Berlin Childhood Around 1900, translated by Howard Eiland, and A Loeb Classical Library Reader (both available now).
From the University of California Press: Cécile Whiting, Pop L.A.: Art and the City in the 1960s (March 2006).
Lastly, from Yale University Press: Eva Hesse Drawing, edited by Catherine de Zegher (June 5, 2006) and Hesse's Datebooks, 1964/65: A Facsimile Edition, introduced by Sabine Folie (August 28, 2006).
My next purchase: Stuart Kelly's The Book of Lost Books.
Posted in Books. Found always via this permanent link.
May 3, 2006
Two small, good things
From the May 2 press release—not yet online— announcing the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts' "Andy Warhol Arts Writing Initiative":
However, in order for writers to do their best work and for its impact to be felt broadly in the culture, the infrastructure of the field must be reinforced and the importance of writers' work recognized and rewarded.The Andy Warhol Arts Writing Initiative takes a two-pronged approach to this task: one aimed at improving the viability of independent, progressive art publications through capacity-building grants and one aimed at sustaining the work of individual arts writers through project-based grants.
Related: Frieze magazine announces £2,000 international art writer's prize.
Posted in Art, Miscellaneous. Found always via this permanent link.
May 2, 2006
Rochelle Gurstein, "Mourning in America"
Leon Wieseltier has lately commissioned several articles that seem destined to be talked about, among them James Wood's May 1 New Republic cover story, "What Harold Bloom Can Teach God," and Rochelle Gurstein's "Mourning in America," a review of Joan Didion's The Year of Magical Thinking and Donald Hall's The Best Day the Worst Day: Life with Jane Kenyon published in the same issue.
Gurstein's essay begins straightforwardly enough, noting that "at the time of our most desperate need, we find ourselves abandoned to our own devices," and goes on to discuss C.S. Lewis's A Grief Observed, the thread that stitches together her discussion of the two newer books. She notes that the "scarcity of memoirs of grief raises the possibility that even in our society of manic self-exposure, there still remains a taboo surrounding deaths that are not caused by natural disasters or human violence, the kinds of hideous things we routinely see in photographs in the media." There is truth to this, and a wide body of literature discussing the same topic. What is interesting to me is that Gurstein finds significant flaws in the approaches both contemporary authors took to their accounts (which "could not be more different"), and her criticisms seem to leave little room for writers of death-focused memoirs working today.
After noting that the "static quality of Didion's matter-of-fact style serves her well in capturing the tedium of the hospital routine," Gurstein goes on to say:
[Didion observes] her every move from the outside . . . . This same spectatorial habit of mind is at work when Didion reports that the night her husband died she appeared so completely self-possessed that a social worker described her to the attending doctor as "a pretty cool customer" . . . . There is a difference between the distance that provides understanding and the distance that yields irony and an effect of superiority.Didion's minimal style runs into difficulty when it approaches anything having to do with the interior dimensions of things.
Hall's book, in which "every detail is heartbreakingly immediate and particular," nonetheless "all too easily becomes overly familiar, even intrustive," raising "vexing questions about which kinds of things can be disclosed in public and which should remain unsaid."
The question of what can appear in public is even more pressing when it comes to descriptions of physical suffering and death . . . . There can be no doubt that these poems [in Without, Hall's 1998 collection] testify to the depth and the tenderness of the couple's love for each other; but their very delicacy raises the question of whether anyone should be privy to such intimate moments. How, one wonders, can such intimate moments maintain their character if outsiders are looking over their shoulders? [ . . . ] I suspect that even the heartbreaking beauty of Hall's rendering of the moment of his wife's death . . . does not in the end save it from the charge of invading Jane Kenyon's privacy and his own.
Apart from the absurdity of charging a writer invading his own privacy, how does Gurstein reconcile this assertion with what seems like disappointment that this mini-genre's landscape is so sparsely populated? If the writer's response should not be clinical, self-aware, synoptic, and it should also not be intimate, precise, unsparing, what should it be?
While Gurstein is generous to Without, and especially to its titular poem, she is less so toward The Best Day the Worst Day, and so it seems that the answer is A Grief Observed. The "aesthetic amplitude" featured in Hall's poems matches the "spiritual reach" of Lewis's meditation. But must a prose writer working today rely on religion (or some other external bulwark)? I should hope not.
Posted in Books, Papers & Periodicals. Found always via this permanent link.
n + 1 issue four
I picked up the new issue of n + i last night, and every piece of writing I have read so far—the letters to the editor and contributions to the "American Writing Today" portfolio by Vivian Gornick and Gerald Howard—has mentioned (or was written by) James Wood. Is Wood the "N" in n +1?
Gornick's essay, on memoir and criticism, is especially interesting because neither of the two writers on whom she focuses are American. (Given that she is perhaps the most eminent contributor, could this be the strongest statement about American writing in the whole portfolio of nine essays?) She attempts to correct publishers' consensus that German writer W. G. Sebald was a novelist, noting that "Sebald is transparently what I will call a memoirist." She continues:
Every instinct for literature that I possess tells me that his is the odd but striking voice of a nonfictionist writing to puzzle out a position that will let him include himself in what he experiences as a ghost-ridden universe, at whose wavering edge he stands, alternately staring out at the emptiness beyond, and back at the silence of a world now peculiarly motionless. The "ghosts" are everything that has come before: the sum of human history, which the narrator connects to with an associativeness that is unaccountably deep, moving, mysterious. War, fable, architecture; medicine, philosophy, trade routes; old newspaper scandals, hotel lobbies, buried resort towns; literary unhappiness and political martyrdom—he remembers them all with an act of recall so strong that the connections transmuate his feeling into hope rather than despair . . . . We are here, this writing tells us, not to mourn lost worlds but to see things as they are: to take in the is-ness of what is. Consciousness is our only salvation.
The last line of the above paragraph would doubtless provoke an assenting nod from Wood. Later in her piece, Gornick deftly summarizes in one paragraph what other critics of Wood's writing have spent pages and pages (or, more precisely, screens and screens of weblog real-estate) concluding:
James Wood is a strong critic because he comes alive when he is reading. He may not understand better than anyone else what his time and place is about, but he knows when the book in his hand hits a nerve. I feel the same; it's only that Wood's nerve is located in a different part of his reading body than mine. Which means that it takes a great number of critics to piece together a revealing portrait of a literary period; one that reflects the way it feels to be reading and writing at this time, in this place.