September 25, 2007
On Gerhard Richter’s new cathedral window in Cologne
The invaluable website Sign and Sight has translated an article about Gerhard Richter’s new south transept window at the Cologne Cathedral. It is by Petra Kipphoff, was published in the Neue Zürcher Zeitung on September 13, and contains new-to-me information about Richter’s inspiration for the abstract design he eventually settled upon:
The cathedral architect's initial request came with the wish for a figurative motif. Not necessarily Joseph or the Virgin Mary, but maybe a modern martyr like Father Kolbe or Edith Stein. After a brief attempt Richter gave up the holy venture. In fact he would have returned the commission had he not accidentally, playfully, placed a template of the window's frame on a reproduction of one of his earlier colour field paintings. "I got a real shock," says Richter, "because it looked good, it was the only honest possibility."
There was more to it than meaning-resistant abstraction. The interplay of light and colour in the stained glass window also attracted Richter for its possibilities of new experience on old terrain. "The main problem of my painting is the light," he wrote back in 1964/65, by which he meant not the light of Impressionist plein-air painting but the instantaneous light of the photography that so often forms the basis for his paintings. From the early photos of family and friends to the sea and landscapes and the Baader-Meinhof cycle, light-generated photographs - preferably blurred and in the shades between grey and white - have provided the inspiration for Gerhard Richter's paintings. Only in the series of monochrome panels and the abstract works does light play no active role (here it is a matter of illumination rather than exposure). A stained-glass window, where the glass changes its coloration with the quality of the daylight, offers a new facet of this old theme that is the central issue.
Try this Flickr search for images of the window.
Posted in Art, Papers & Periodicals. Found always via this permanent link.
September 24, 2007
F. Scott Fitzgerald interview
I share a birthday with F. Scott Fitzgerald, who was born on this day in 1896. He happens to be among my favorite writers—I have read The Great Gatsby four times and This Side of Paradise twice (so far), and keep The Crack-Up at hand for regular browsing. Last week The Guardian published an excerpt of the author’s interview with Michel Mok, conducted on his fortieth birthday, September 24, 1936.
"A writer like me," he said, "must have an utter confidence, an utter faith in his star. It's an almost mystical feeling, a feeling of nothingcan- happen-to-me, nothing-can-harm-me, nothing-can-touch-me.
"Thomas Wolfe has it. Ernest Hemingway has it. I once had it. But through a series of blows, many of them my own fault, something happened to that sense of immunity and I lost my grip."
Morris Dickstein includes an essay on Fitzgerald, titled "The Authority of Failure," in his book A Mirror in the Roadway: Literature and the Real World. In it he describes the interview quoted above:
Into this picture [a time when Fitzgerald was publishing poignantly self-searching articles about his failure to take care of his talent] came a reporter for the New York Post, perhaps not so different from the Murdoch-driven paper it is today, a reporter with the ominous name of Michel Mok, to interview Scott for his fortieth birthday. There was a scent of blood in the water. Fitzgerald was under a nurse's care at an inn in Asheville, North Carolina, but he was still drinking, and the reporter described in wretched detail how he kept popping up for a thimbleful of gin from the makeshift bar, how his face twitched and hands shook as he described his life and made the usual drunkard's rationalizations.
The front page of the Post the next day told the whole story: "The Other Side of Paradise / F. Scott Fitzgerald, 40 / Engulfed in Despair / Broken in Health He Spends Birthday Re- / gretting That He Has Lost Faith in His Star." What had been eloquent if not wholly frank in Fitzgerald's own articles became pathetic in the tabloid version. Time picked up the story and gave it much wider currency. The effect on Fitzgerald was catastrophic. He thought he was ruined and took an overdose of morphine, but luckily vomited it up. He felt his credibility as a writer and a serious man was gone. The Post interview was perhaps the lowest point he reached in the decade, but it fixed his image as a washed-up, self-pitying writer, a miserable caretaker of his talent, the relic of a distant and unlamented era. (Even a decade later, when reviewers like Lionel Trilling wrote about The Crack-Up, Edmund Wilson's collection of his late friend's articles and letters, they would still point to the effects of the Post story on Fitzgerald's waning reputation.)
In a limited sense this image endures even today.
I agree with Dickstein that Fitzgerald's late writings are beautifully haunted by his "crack-up," and likewise hold up his 1932 essay "My Lost City" as an "emblem for this last phase of Fitzgerald's work." Its passage describing Fitzgerald's first ascent to the top of the then newly built Empire State Building is one of my favorites from his entire corpus:
Full of vaunting pride the New Yorker had climbed here and seen with dismay what he had never suspected, that the city was not the endless succession of canyons that he had supposed but that it had limits—from the tallest structure he saw for the first time that it faded out into the country on all sides, into an expanse of green and blue that alone was limitless. And with the awful realization that New York was a city after all and not a universe, the whole shining edifice that he had reared in his imagination came crashing to the ground.
Dickstein digs deep into this passage, but I'll let it stand. This will be today’s only post.
Posted in Books, Papers & Periodicals. Found always via this permanent link.
September 21, 2007
Weekend eye candy: Tama Art University Library by Toyo Ito
Here is an exterior view of the new Tama Art University Library in the suburbs of Tokyo, designed by architect Toyo Ito. For eleven more views of this spectacular-looking building, check out this September 11 post on the design blog Dezeen.
(NB: Photo by Ishiguro Photographic Institute.)
Posted in Architecture & Design. Found always via this permanent link.
The new Barney Rosset documentary, Obscene
The prolific film blog GreenCine Daily has all the information you’d ever want about Obscene: How Barney Rosset Published Dirty Books for Fun and Profit, a new documentary from directors Neil Ortenberg and Daniel O’Connor. The title is somewhat misleading, of course, as the “dirty books” it refers to are not your average Hustler fare. Rosset instead published, through his Grove Press and through the Evergreen Review, D. H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover, Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer, and the first US edition of The Story of O.
GreenCine’s post excerpts reviews from two other sites:
"You may not know Barney Rosset but the world we live in would be radically different without him," writes Todd Brown at Twitch. "Rosset is a fascinating subject, still possessed of a remarkably nimble mind well into his 80s, and gives refreshingly frank interviews. Better yet, he's also a bit of a pack rat and has maintained a sizeable archive of family movies, radio interviews, television appearances and the like, all of which have been made available to the filmmakers."
"Visually, however, the film never treads into the territory of he innovation and modernism that embody Rosset's life's work, instead limiting the story to an orthodox, chronological summary of what happened," adds Tom Hall. "I liked this movie a lot, especially because I believe so strongly in Rosset's principled stance that adults should be able to make up heir own minds about what books they read and images they care to take in... but I felt it could use an extra 'oomph' that more concern about the visual strategy (and the better integration of some of the film's talking heads in to the movie's storyline) might have delivered."
In the September/October/November 2006 issue of Bookforum, the writer Mike Topp visited Rosset at his Fourth Avenue apartment:
At eighty-four, Rosset is a startlingly lively man with pale skin, piercing blue eyes, and an encyclopedic recall. It was hard to believe that this was indeed the radical left-wing publisher who had been investigated numerous times by the CIA. Rosset extended his hand and seated himself, sipping a rum and Coke.
”This is a duplicate library. Many parts of my collection have been sold to Boston College, Boston University, the University of Texas, and the University of North Caroline. As a publisher, you pick up an incredible number of books.” His low-pitched cadence seemed more befitting an old-school gentleman publisher than today’s crop of bottom-line watchers.
Posted in Books, Film. Found always via this permanent link.
Sharon Hayes in midtown
At half past noon on Monday, the artist Sharon Hayes emerged from the UBS tower on Sixth Avenue (between Fifty-first and Fifty-second Streets), microphone stand and small amplifier in hand. She set them down on the sidewalk and, without preamble, began speaking the text of an anonymous love letter, catching and holding the eyes of passersby willing to meet her gaze. She spoke plainly, addressing a “you” seemingly far away, perhaps in the Middle East. The letter’s tone was melancholic and its details were specific to our moment, addressing not only the war, but also the steam-pipe explosion in Manhattan and other recent events; it began by mentioning the arrival of autumn. Fifteen or so people stood at the curb listening and watching; by the time she had recited the six- or eight-minute letter three times, seamlessly blending the end of one recitation with the beginning of the next, another ten office employees had stopped to take the measure of her action. The insertion of private woe into the impersonal environment resounded in me and—somewhat unexpectedly—brought to mind the Maximilian Colby song “Balance,” which combined an anonymous woman’s recording of Judy Grahn’s epic poem “A Woman Is Talking to Death” (1974) with a long, brooding hardcore song. (The mid-‘90s hardcore band is now so obscure it is difficult to learn about it online, much less hear its music.)
The performance, titled Everything Else Has Failed! Don’t You Think It’s Time for Love?, is part of Art in General’s twenty-fifth-anniversary exhibition, at the UBS Art Gallery. Hayes repeated it at 12:30 PM each day this week, each time reciting a different letter. Phrases recur, including “I am so much yours I am no longer myself,” and the sign-off, “… I choose my words carefully, and I say to you goodbye.” The dominant sentiment remains longing: “Why can’t you be my country?” the narrator asks at one point, encapsulating Hayes’s fusion of personal anguish and political circumstance. As the week progressed, repeat viewers could begin to stitch together a narrative: The two lovers had once been together in New York; the absent partner’s family demanded that she leave the United States; the left-behind partner offered to leave, too, but was rebuffed; now they communicate primarily by letter, with distress and bewilderment as the communicative motifs.
Who is the author of these letters? Each speculation colors the interpretation of the performance. Is it Hayes herself, and is this public “respeaking” (to use the artist’s term for her earlier performances) as harrowing for her now as it was when it was happening? (And is it an ongoing correspondence?) Is the narrator fictive, making Hayes’s story a mirror held up to the audience of office workers on their lunch break, expressing collective emotions otherwise unacknowledged publicly? Small details continually overturn one’s conclusions without breaking the spell of the performance. On Thursday, in mentioning a political protest in Washington, DC, the letter’s author mentions wanting to “tell the fucking President to call off the National Guard.” The phrase could as easily have been uttered in 1967 as in 2007.
That so profound a resonance can be achieved through such simple means is testament to Hayes’s talent. She has for several years been “respeaking” historical texts and creating other performances that commingle the private and the public; for further reference, see this May 2006 Artforum profile of the artist, written by Julia Bryan-Wilson. Everything Else Has Failed... will stay with me for a long time.
Posted in Art. Found always via this permanent link.
Valgeir Sigurdsson
Today’s Independent runs a profile of Icelandic producer and musician Valgeir Sigurdsson, who has produced records for Björk since 2000 and released his first album earlier this year.
Driving through the ash-black lava fields around Reykjavik airport to his home studio, the Greenhouse, the isolation that Sigurdsson's clients agree to becomes clear. It is here in the suburban sprawl in the hills around the city, in a street built for artists in the 1970s, that he and Björk first conceived their philosophy of "domestic music". "She would bounce crazy ideas off me, like making a song out of all the sounds in the kitchen," he says. "Quite early on, the conceptual side existed in [her Vespertine of 2001]: the intimacy of the vocal performance, and using chamber music, because that was created in the home.
"I've carried on that domestic way of working here," he continues. "It's full on. There's no divide between living and music. Will Oldham [aka Bonnie "Prince" Billy] created pressure for himself when he brought all his musicians here to Iceland in the middle of winter for last year's The Letting Go. It could fail, and it would be a disaster if it did. But taking musicians into my home feels like the right way to make music. It's obviously very personal, because you can't escape. I get really involved emotionally. Ending a project feels like ending a relationship."
I’ve listened to Sigurdsson’s album, Ekvílibríum, several times. Fans of Björk’s music will certainly find much to like in its sliced-and-diced organic sounds and plethora of guest performances. What surprises me is that no one seems to have yet made the connection to Cornelius, another musician who runs (ran?) his own label and whose music is marked by many layers brought together with stunning precision. (There is a reason, I think, that Cornelius named his 2000 album Point and Sigurdsson titled a track “Focal Point.”) On Ekvílibríum, as on Cornelius’s 1997 album Fantasma, every note identifies itself to the listener’s ear: Strings, electronic beats and clicks and pops, synthesizer swells, guitars, and vocals snugly interlock to create organic-seeming compositions. Most reviewers have been correct in identifying the two Sigurdsson tracks featuring Oldham—“Evolution of Waters” and “Kin”—as the album’s best, although I’m also partial to the syrupy strings of the short interlude titled “Before Nine.”
Sigurdsson performs with Nico Muhly and Sandro Perri on Friday, October 5 as part of New York's Wordless Music series.
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The Walrus on Lapham's Quarterly
The October 2007 issue of the Canadian magazine The Walrus—known semi-affectionately as the “Canadian wannabe Harper’s”— is now online. Its editor, Ken Alexander, who is something of a lightning rod in the Canadian publishing industry (see this summer 2007 Ryerson Review of Journalism article for more about that), writes a brief piece about former Harper’s editor Lewis Lapham’s new magazine, Lapham’s Quarterly:
If Norman Mailer and Gore Vidal were once “lions in winter” but have become frail before the mighty edifices of the news media, just-in-time delivery, and YouTube (as Don Gillmor recently explained in these pages), Lapham continues to fight, and with his latest project, Lapham’s Quarterly, he takes direct aim at the egotism of our age by challenging the very idea of novelty. His goal? To render mute the ignorant, dangerous, and useless conceit that everything has not already happened; that it has not already been said, written, and experienced; and that there is little to be learned by rooting around in the archaeology of mind and matter. If Mailer and Vidal, in their best selves and their best writings, were profoundly contemporary, Lapham has returned to where he began as an undergraduate student: to history. And yet the tension remains.
[ … ]
Months ago, Lapham generously sent me the original prospectus for the Quarterly for my comment and appraisal. … Unlike so much these days (resumés that are clearly truncated works of fiction, PR so ubiquitous that truth has been shipped offshore, and other scams high and low), the prospectus promised and Lapham’s Quarterly delivers. It is not the next big thing; it is the real thing, a must-read.
The October Harper’s contains a full-page advertisement announcing the quarterly will arrive on newsstands November 13. I’m somewhat daunted by the four-issue yearly subscription rate of sixty dollars, but will nonetheless pick up the debut, which is on the theme “States of War” and contains among its “correspondents” Thucydides, George S. Patton, Homer, Winston Churchill, and St. Augustine. For a taste of what's to come, the new quarterly's editors have maintained a blog of sorts, featuring a few posts a week, since late May: click here to read it.
As an addendum, the graphic that accompanies Alexander's piece depicts an eye. Its iris has clock hands, and at the cardinal points are the years 2001, 0, 1042, 1776. I can guess what is denoted by 2001, 0, and 1776; I'm less confident about what historically important event occurred in 1042. Wikipedia tells me that in that year Michael V of the Byzantine empire was deposed by popular revolt; that Empress Zoe married for the third time and elevated her husband to the throne as Constantine IX; and that Magnus I of Norway became King of Denmark. None of these events seem epochal, though it could be my ignorance that leads me to this conclusion. Perhaps the date was thrown in to the graphic as a red herring? Perhaps enterprising readers would feel inadequate about their grasp of history and therefore would be more willing to subscribe to LQ . . .
Posted in Papers & Periodicals. Found always via this permanent link.
September 20, 2007
Doug Aitken returns to familiar territory
Doug Aitken, an artist whom I respect but who I feel peaked approximately five years ago—his video installations since interiors, 2002, have increased in scale and complexity and budget, but not necessarily in quality—has returned to his early stomping grounds: the music video. Pitchfork has posted a new video that Aitken directed for the LCD Soundsystem song "Someone Great." As music blog Stereogum put it in its gloss on the vid,
Award winning/MoMA-commissioned short film maker Doug Aitken shot the "experimental film" for the track, which captures James's use of the mundane (phones ringing, lovely weather, not-bitter coffee) to hit at something interpersonal 'n' bigger ("you're smaller than my wife imagined / surprised you were human") with similarly trivial-yet-somehow-heavy shadows 'n' strolls. James ain't in it, but we're thinking he's comfy with the amount of mug exposure he got in his spaceman getup / Peter Gabriel facepaint.
For more commentary, keep an eye on this Google Blogs search.
Posted in Art, Music. Found always via this permanent link.
CJR panel discussion now available as podcast
On Tuesday evening I attended the Columbia Journalism Review’s panel discussion convened to explore the topic presented in Steve Wasserman’s September/October issue cover story, “Goodbye to All That”: The case of the vanishing (newspaper) book review. It was among the most lively panel discussions I’ve attended in months, with the Philadelphia Inquirer’s Carlin Romano and Wasserman butting heads over how to reach a mass audience—and what should be expected of them once you’ve done so. Wasserman’s original essay was discussed briefly in this earlier post, and the panel was summed up nicely (with video!) by James Marcus at House of Mirth. Now CJR has made available a podcast of the discussion. Kudos to the magazine for being both tech savvy and timely.
Posted in Around the web, Books, Radio. Found always via this permanent link.
Aaron Young's Greeting Card
Above is a view of Aaron Young's performance-cum-action painting Greeting Card, which took place on Monday night at the Park Avenue Armory on the Upper East Side. As art, and especially as a comment on Abstract Expressionist painting, I think the work left something to be desired. As an event, as pure spectacle, it succeeded brilliantly. To see perfectly coiffed Chanel-clad Upper East Side matrons in breathing masks; to gawk at Tom Ford, Sigourney Weaver, and the R&B singer Usher; to experience ten motorcycles running, indoors, in frantic patterns; and to then stand around afterward, looking at the silhouettes of friends and colleagues highlighted by light shining through drifting smoke was—to say the least—unique. Click the picture to see four more views.
UPDATE, 9/21: Roberta Smith makes several valid points in today's review of the event in the New York Times: "If there was any doubt that we live in a reasonable facsimile of the Gilded Age, it disappeared Monday night during “Greeting Card,” Aaron Young’s enormous paint-by-motorcycle spectacle in the vast, emptied-out drill hall of the Seventh Regiment Armory. [ ... ] As spectacle, “Greeting Card” was a bit thin and not as much fun as the anticipation. [ ... ] After “Greeting Card” is dismantled on Sunday night, Mr. Young will divide its 288 panels into individual paintings ranging in size from a single panel to as many as 150. These will then begin a second life as saleable works meant to hang on walls. Perhaps they will buy Mr. Young enough time to figure out a more profound way to make paintings or other kinds of art."
Posted in Art. Found always via this permanent link.
Thursday radio roundup
Interesting radio program segments from the last week:
Fresh Air: Maureen Corrigan discusses Janet Malcolm's new book, Two Lives: Gertrude and Alice and Terry Gross interviews David Cronenberg and Viggo Mortensen about Cronenberg's new film, Eastern Promises.
Weekend Edition Sunday: Liane Hansen speaks with Richard Oram of the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center at the University of Texas about the archives of Alfred A. Knopf. The discussion follows up on an essay by David Oshinsky published in the September 9 New York Times Book Review.
The Brian Lehrer Show: Brian Lehrer interviews Naomi Klein about her new book, The Shock Doctrine.
The Leonard Lopate Show: Steven Pinker discusses his new book, The Stuff of Thought.
The Treatment: Elvis Mitchell interviews Jeff Garlin about his directorial debut, I Want Someone to Eat Cheese With.
Bookworm: Michael Silverblatt interviews Miranda July about her new story collection, No One Belongs Here More Than You, and her new book made in collaboration with the artist Harrell Fletcher, Learning to Love You More.
Eight Forty-Eight: George Saunders, who was charming on David Letterman the week before last, discusses his new essay collection, The Braindead Megaphone.
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Paul Muldoon's good week
Not only will Paul Muldoon succeed Alice Quinn as poetry editor at The New Yorker, but yesterday it was announced that Muldoon has hired novelist Jeffrey Eugenides at the Center for Creative and Performing Arts at Princeton University, where he serves as chair. Muldoon was quoted as saying, "'We're thrilled to have Jeffrey Eugenides join our permanent faculty. He's quite simply the finest writer of his generation and we look forward to allowing Princeton students to be the beneficiaries of his extraordinary talent as a teacher."
Posted in Books, Papers & Periodicals. Found always via this permanent link.
"A tiny artist"
One can accuse Guardian art critic Jonathan Jones of many things. Not saying what he means is not one of them. His one-star review of Gary Hume's new exhibition at White Cube ends this way:
I almost want to apologise for reviewing an artist who is quite obviously falling apart, but I did go in hope of a decent comeback. After all, what is British art now? Some pretentious public sculpture that connives with popular delusions of omniscience. At least Hume never tried to be loved. But, even at his very best, he was never first-rate. Look closely into his shiny surfaces, and you will see a tiny artist trapped in the empty wastes of his own style.
One gets the feeling Jones argued with his editors over the assignation of that single star.
Posted in Art. Found always via this permanent link.
September 19, 2007
Three glances back
Three recent long-format essays have cast retrospective glances at aspects of literary and intellectual life as it was lived twenty to twenty-five years ago. I first came across Joseph Epstein’s “‘The Literary Life’ at 25,” which revisits the article Epstein wrote for the inaugural issue of The New Criterion. Near the beginning of the piece, Epstein notes:
My earlier essay, reread today, does not seem to me wrong so much as it seems a touch quaint. No mention is made in it, for example, of computers, let alone all they have brought forth in the way of benefits and distractions in connection with the literary life. Instead I wrote at some length about the university seeming to be taking over literature, offering jobs to writers who could not have survived on their writing alone, making so-called creative writing programs fashionable, valuing writers according to their multicultural credentials quite as much as their qualities as pure literary artists. This has all now become pretty much status quo.
He then savages academic literary criticism, literary politics (“it is a small but genuine national disgrace … that Hilton Kramer was never awarded a Pulitzer Prize”), the New York Intellectuals, Susan Sontag, European writers, English novelists, American intellectual journalism, playwrights, poetry (“the Darfur of twenty-first century literature”), male American novelists, and more. One can tell by the parenthetical excerpts included in that last sentence that Epstein, with his rhetorical excess, now paints the target on his own chest; as such, the essay is entertaining if not edifying.
The second article, Scott McLemee’s reconsideration of Russell Jacoby’s The Last Intellectuals: American Culture in the Age of Academe, appears in the current issue of Bookforum. It is an altogether more measured analysis of the earlier work’s place in contemporary letters, and ends on an oddly hopeful note: Perhaps the masses of untenured intellectuals who are “not very well integrated into the [academic] system,” might change the tenor of public discourse.
The third, which revisits Harold Bloom’s The Closing of the American Mind, was published in last Sunday’s New York Times Book Review. Here is an excerpt:
“The Closing of the American Mind” hit the scene at a time when universities were embroiled in the so-called canon wars, in which traditionalists in favor of centering the curriculum on classic works of literature faced off against multiculturalists who wanted to include more works by women and members of minorities. [ … ]
Today it’s generally agreed that the multiculturalists won the canon wars. Reading lists were broadened to include more works by women and minority writers, and most scholars consider that a positive development. Yet 20 years later, there’s a more complicated sense of the costs and benefits of those transformations. Here, the lines aren’t drawn between right and left in the traditional political sense, but between those who defend the idea of a distinct body of knowledge and texts that students should master and those who focus more on modes of inquiry and interpretation. However polarizing Bloom may have been, many of the issues he raised still resonate—especially when it comes to the place of the humanities on campus and in the culture.
Donadio then offers quotes from a number of prominent humanities professors, including Louis Menand, Mark Lilla, Tony Judt, Elaine Showalter, and others. All three articles make for engaging reading, for different reasons. If three examples mark a trend, what do these reassessments say about our moment?
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September 5, 2007
On (re)discovering writers
The Observer has published another literary list, this time asking fifty notable writers to name “brilliant but underrated novels that deserve a second chance to shine.” Owing perhaps in part to differences in reading habits on either side of the pond, not only are many of the books new to me, but several of the writers as well. The novelist Elizabeth Taylor garners three nods: from Jane Rogers for Mrs Palfrey at the Claremont, from Charlotte Mendelson for Angel, and from Jenny Diski for Blaming. (Perhaps her books are neglected in part because it is difficult to search for her on the Internet, that great digital spade exhuming neglected writing; she’s number two of the four Elizabeth Taylors registered by Wikipedia.) James Lasdun selected The Short Stories of Breece D’J Pancake, which also popped up recently at New York Times Book Review senior editor Dwight Garner’s blog, Paper Cuts. Here is what Lasdun has to say about the collection:
The improbably named Breece D’J Pancake was born in West Virginia in 1952, published some stories in the Atlantic, then shot himself at the age of 26 for reasons no one has been able to fathom. His dozen-odd stories were published posthumously in the States to great acclaim, then more or less sank from view. Cape published them here under the title Trilobites—nobody paid much attention. A small following of mostly southern and Appalachian writers has kept his name alive, but I think he deserves a place in the pantheon of great short-story writers. The best half-dozen or so of his brooding, beautifully constructed tales of life in the mountains and mining towns of West Virginia combine the terse economy of Hemingway with the dense eloquence of Faulkner and can be more touching than either. 'Hollow', about a young miner financially and emotionally at the end of his rope, is about the most powerful piece of short American fiction I know.
What are your recent discoveries? Similar lists—and by similar I mean British—have in the past led me to writers like Penelope Fitzgerald and Sybille Bedford. I enjoyed books by both, in particular Bedford’s memoir Quicksands and her travel book about Mexico, published both as The Sudden View and, later, A Visit to Don Otavio. More recently, a back-page NYTBR essay by the critic Morris Dickstein led me to John Williams’s Stoner, recently reissued by New York Review Books. I devoured it in twenty-four hours, unable to put it down despite its seemingly slow-burn plot: A farmer’s son enters the University of Missouri at the turn of the twentieth century, discovers and falls in love with the power of literature, and then settles into a stagnant career as a low-level English professor. The small rewards Stoner reaps from his work, frigid marriage, and seemingly dreary life, and the dignity they grant him, are beautifully rendered. Here are two passages. In the first, Stoner muses generally on love; in the latter, he looks back at particulars, thinking of the professor who introduced him to subject of his calling, his wife, and the woman with whom he had a brief but intense affair:
In his extreme youth Stoner had thought of love as an absolute state of being to which, if one were lucky, one might find access; in his maturity he had decided it was the heaven of a false religion, toward which one ought to gaze with an amused disbelief, a gently familiar contempt, and an embarrassed nostalgia. Now in his middle age he began to know it as a human act of becoming, a condition that was invented and modified moment by moment and day by day, by the will and the intelligence and the heart.
Later:
…Then he smiled fondly, as if at a memory; it occurred to him that he was nearly sixty years old and that he ought to be beyond the force of such passion, of such love.But he was not beyond it, he knew, and would never be. Beneath the numbness, the indifference, the removal, it was there, intense and steady; it had always been there. In his youth he had given it freely, without thought; he had given it to the knowledge that had been revealed to him—how many years ago?—by Arthur Sloane; he had given it to Edith, in those first blind foolish days of his courtship and marriage; and he had given it to Katherine, as if it had never been given before. He had, in odd ways, given it to every moment of his life, and had perhaps given it most fully when he was unaware of his giving. It was a passion neither of the mind nor of the flesh; rather, it was a force that comprehended them both, as if they were but the matter of love, its specific substance. To a woman or to a poem, it said simple: Look! I am alive.
My list of writers to discover seems endless. Recently, Patrick Kurp has introduced me to the names Evan S. Connell, Wright Morris, and Paul West; a friend in Los Angeles, who reviewed a new translation of Robert Walser’s The Assistant, recommended I begin with Walser’s Jakob Von Gunten or his Selected Stories; my girlfriend is heroically attempting to redress my ignorance about Canadian literature, to move me beyond Alice Munro. The horizon forever recedes, but I would never wish to meet it.
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On arriving in New York
Yesterday I finished reading Ian Frazier's Gone to New York, a charming collection of essays that takes the city as its subject. (Many were originally published in The New Yorker.) The last essay, "Out of Ohio," charts Frazier's escape from his hometown's gravitational pull and ends with his arrival in New York:
I hadn't seen a lot of cities then, and I didn't know that New York, to a traveler coming from the west, affords the best first-time, big-city view in the U.S.A. The guy from Costa Rica and I cruised across the long and splendid drumroll of open-sky swamp up to the Hudson River. Then we swerved down the elevated highway toward the Lincoln Tunnel, and the city suddenly and manifestly filled the windshield and side windows, rising from the Hudson as if lifted by eyelids when you opened your eyes. No skyline I know of is its equal; across the windows it ran, left to right, like a long and precise and detailed and emphatic sentence ending with the double exclamation points of the World Trade Center towers.
I too arrived via the Lincoln Tunnel, and while it wasn't the first time I had visited the city, I felt an equivalent rush of wonder at the city spread before me. Given Frazier's long essays about Canal Street, the F train, and Route 3 in New Jersey, each mapping in prose the area around one of his residences and all included in the book, it seems that he has never been separated from that sense of awe.
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September 4, 2007
Bergen, Norway
Taken June 27, 2007.
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Rebecca Solnit, "The Lower Ninth Battles Back"
The essayist Rebecca Solnit, fresh from her tour of duty in the "post-American landscape" of Detroit (published in the July 2007 Harper's), visits New Olreans's Lower Ninth Ward and lays out her thoughts in the September 10, 2007, issue of The Nation.
The list of who came to help sounds like the setup for a joke: A Black Panther, an accountant, a bunch of Methodists and the mayor of Portland walk into a bar. Or if you prefer, Brad Pitt, some graduate students, lots of young anarchists and the Sierra Club walk in. No one yet has assessed the scale of the volunteer influx to New Orleans, which has been compared to Freedom Summer during the civil rights era but has far outstripped it in sheer numbers. It's a safe understatement to say that more than 100,000 volunteers have come from out of town, and they have done and are doing everything from medical care, food preparation, demolition and construction to aid with red tape and planning.There is great dynamism here in the Lower Ninth, and determination, but the obstacles are huge, and many residents are still missing, far more than are back. Most of the returnees have lost family members to the Katrina diaspora, and the fabric of the neighborhood is still mostly holes. Dashiell evacuated to St. Louis with her daughter, her daughter's partner and grandchild. Only she returned, and she returned even though she was a renter who had lost everything in her home. That she loves the Lower Ninth is as clear as that she is a major force for its revival. Little more than a month after Katrina, she told the press, "We're not going down," and "We want to rebuild in the best, healthiest and most sustainable way." She told me this summer, "Our reputation was worse than the reality. Lower Nine was a synonym for poor, dark-skinned and crime-ridden."
In June, the University of California Press published Storming the Gates of Paradise: Landscapes for Politics, a collection of three dozen of Solnit's essays. Michael Pollan wrote one of the book's blurbs: "Rebecca Solnit is reinventing the genre we call American nature writing, finding provocative new ways to look at the intersections of landscape and politics." I've only skimmed the book thus far, but have enjoyed what I've read—even her foray into art criticism, in an essay on Richard Misrach's photographs.
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Steve Wasserman on the decline of coverage of books
The Columbia Journalism Review has published a consideration of book reviewing by former Los Angeles Times Book Review editor Steve Wasserman, the cover story from its September/October 2007 issue, online. (Wasserman is now a literary agent with Kneerim & Williams.) It is a long, thoughtful piece, more levelheaded than many of the ruminations published recently in newspapers, magazines, and on the Internet.
The terrible irony is that at the dawn of an era of almost magical technology with a potential of deepening the implicit democratic promise of mass literacy, we also totter on the edge of an abyss of profound cultural neglect. One is reminded of Philip Roth’s old aphorism about Communism and the West: “In the East, nothing is permitted and everything matters; in the West, everything is permitted and nothing matters.” In today’s McWorld, the forces seeking to enroll the populace in the junk cults of celebrity, sensationalism, and gossip are increasingly powerful and wield tremendous economic clout. The cultural conversation devolves and is held hostage to these trends. The corporate wars over who will control the technology of newsgathering and electronic communication and data and distribution are increasingly fierce. Taken together, these factors threaten to leave us ignorant of tradition, contemptuous of the habits of quality and excellence, unable to distinguish among the good, the bad, and the ugly.But perhaps this is too bleak a view. After all, 96 million readers is a third of the country. As John Maxwell Hamilton, a longtime journalist and commentator on Public Radio International’s Marketplace, writes in his irreverent and trenchant book, Casanova Was a Book Lover, “People who care about books care profoundly. What they lack in numbers they make up for in passion. A typical mid-1980s study illustrates the fidelity of readers to reading. Only half of the American public, the study found, had read at least one book in the past six months. Of those ‘readers,’ however, almost one-third devoured at least one book a week.”
And the book itself—compact, portable, sensuous—has yet to be bested as our most important information-retrieval system.
This essay is sure to receive much response. Click here to track it via Technorati, and here via Google BlogSearch. CJR will convene a panel at Columbia University at 7PM on September 18th; details can be found at The Elegant Variation.
UPDATE, September 6: Critical Mass, the blog of the National Book Critics Circle, has posted an interview with Steve Wasserman about the ideas discussed in his article.