January 30, 2008
My Unwritten Books review
My review of George Steiner's My Unwritten Books has just been published in the Detroit Metro-Times. It begins:
"Literary criticism should arise out of a debt of love," wrote George Steiner at the outset of Tolstoy or Dostoevsky: An Essay in the Old Criticism, his first book. Nearly 50 years after that study’s publication, and nearly a quarter century after the release of A George Steiner Reader, the eminent literary critic and philologist carries on his interrogations into the uses, both practical and exalted, of language. In recent years a shadow of wistfulness has descended upon the ardor that has run through the many books he has written since that conspicuous opening salvo. In 2003 he published Lessons of the Masters, an analysis of the personal encounter between mentor and protégé that took in not only Socrates and Plato and Jesus and his disciples but also college football coach Knute Rockne. Its valedictory tone likewise underpins his latest, and perhaps most disparate, essay collection, My Unwritten Books.
To read the rest, click here.
Posted in Books, Papers & Periodicals. Found always via this permanent link.
January 25, 2008
"Protestant antinomian" student radicals
In the current issue of The Nation, Maurice Isserman discusses memoirs by three 1960s-era radicals and one history of the SDS. He opens by referring to Elinor Langer's 1973 essay "Notes for Next Time: A Memoir of the 1960s," in which the writer and teacher, active in the civil rights movement, was "dismayed to discover ... that students ... were already in the process of idolizing her." Isserman continues:
The fate of the student movement of the 1960s, she argued, was determined when its leaders made the "curiously apolitical" decision to start thinking of themselves as revolutionaries:Because revolution was effectively impossible one did not have to dirty one's hands in compromise, nor mingle much with the hoi polloi (meaning: the middle class; the un-Chosen) along the way. And it was also ahistorical and smug, since it mistook revolution, a rare historical event, for a moral choice.
That the New Left "mistook revolution...for a moral choice" is the best one-sentence summary I've ever read of the complexities of late-'60s radicalism. I would suggest a corollary that seems implicit in Langer's essay. The movement's revolutionary turn was not so much a measure of its un- or anti-American character, as conservative critics would have it, but rather an indication that, if anything, the New Left might have been a bit too American for its own good. Its impatience with the half-measures of liberal reformism, its lack of interest in creating a stable constituency or institutional base, and its promotion of a politics of confrontation and risk ("putting your body on the line," as the saying went) revealed the movement as an exotic but recognizable descendant of the powerful Protestant antinomian tradition of radical individualism—one whose adherents defied social custom and religious law to follow the inner promptings of God's voice wherever they might lead. "John Brown is a good symbol for us," Langer noted in passing. "At one point he wanted to run a school for Negroes but he came to find the idea too small: he had to attack Harper's Ferry."
To read the rest, click here.
Posted in Papers & Periodicals. Found always via this permanent link.
January 24, 2008
Against Happiness review
The new issue of Bookforum is online, and it contains my review of Eric G. Wilson's Against Happiness: In Praise of Melancholy. The review begins:
Over the last decade, at least, authors have come out against bioethics, depression, capitalism, love, Christianity, common sense, Freud, and consolation, among any number of other subjects. Blame it on Susan Sontag. The polemical muscle of her 1964 essay “Against Interpretation” gave license to an essayistic discourse that, in announcing outright its position, is far more assertive than the open-ended, digressive ruminations of, say, Montaigne (“On cannibals,” “On repentance”) or the amused musings of Charles Lamb (“On the Inconveniences Resulting from Being Hanged”). Few agitators have wielded the polemical pen as well as Sontag, though, and in recent years, the familiar essay has largely become either a solipsistic memoir or a hectoring attempt at contrarian thinking. It was a pleasant surprise, then, to discover that Eric G. Wilson’s Against Happiness: In Praise of Melancholy is no mere coruscating squawk, but rather a lively, reasoned call for the preservation of melancholy in the face of all-too-rampant cheerfulness.
To read the rest, click here
Posted in Books, Papers & Periodicals. Found always via this permanent link.
January 11, 2008
Russell Jacoby on The Last Intellectuals at twenty
Apropopos this September 19 post noting three recent essays casting retrospective glances at literary and intellectual life twenty to twenty-five years ago, Russell Jacoby, the author of The Last Intellectuals, now revisits the topic he first addressed in that important 1987 book:
With some exceptions, the campus natives cried foul when my book appeared. Gray academics turned purple. The historian Thomas Bender judged the book "careless, ill-conceived, and perhaps even irresponsible." According to my critics, I missed the plethora of younger intellectuals outside the limelight; I overlooked the Foucauldian radicals who occupied academic crevices; I ignored the new forms of intellectual contestation; I prized an anti-intellectual simplicity; I pined for 1950s intellectuals and old white guys like Irving Howe and Lionel Trilling. In an era of theoretical advances, I championed the rear guard.
Have 20 years clarified this argument?
[ ... ]
Too many voices may cancel each other out. Bérubé himself has given up regular blogging to write books instead. Ortega y Gasset's fear almost a century ago of the "revolt of the masses" needs an update. We face a revolt of the writers. Today everyone is a blogger, but where are the readers? A New Yorker cartoon reverses the usual picture of a literary festival with book lovers lined up to get the author's autograph. The cartoon shows a table and a queue, but authors line up to see "The Reader," who sits behind the table. On the Internet, articles, blog posts, and comments on blog posts pour forth, but who can keep up with them? And while everything is preserved (or "archived"), has anyone ever looked at last year's blogs? Rapidly produced, they are just as rapidly forgotten.
To read the rest, visit The Chronicle of Higher Education.
Posted in Papers & Periodicals. Found always via this permanent link.
January 7, 2008
Visual Interlude
Brian Chippendale (performing as Black Pus) at D'Amelio Terras, New York, December 16, 2006
Posted in Music. Found always via this permanent link.
January 6, 2008
Review of photography books in Print
(Photograph courtesy Print)
My review of several books of photographs of life under war-torn or repressive regimes, including images from North Korea and Darfur, is in the February issue of Print magazine, on newsstands now. The editors have also published the article online. Here is the beginning:
Since the American Civil War, photography has played a central role in crafting narratives about conflicts and disasters, whether domestic or international, natural or man-made. As photographic technology has changed, so has our shrewdness in interpreting these documents, allowing for a seemingly limitless range of interactions among photographers, subjects, photographs, and viewers. To browse a stack of photo books containing images of repressively choreographed social life, famine, and war—in this instance, in North Korea, the Darfur region of western Sudan, and the former Yugoslavia, respectively—is to travel down myriad avenues of interpretation. Each book and every page requires a complicated recalibration of expectation and response.
To read the rest, click here.
Posted in Books, Papers & Periodicals. Found always via this permanent link.
January 4, 2008
Per Petterson profile
Per Petterson’s novel Out Stealing Horses, translated from Norwegian and published by Graywolf Press, was one of my favorite books read last year. Its plain lyricism is terribly affecting, and Petterson does a wonderful job of weaving together the two narratives featuring Trond, the book’s narrator—one occurring when he was a boy, stretching the length of a summer during World War II, and the other taking place in the present, as he settles into senescence in a small village in eastern Norway.
I saw Petterson read at 192 Books last autumn. I quickly came to identify the author with his narrator, and to admire him for what seemed to me like his tacit acknowledgement, as he batted away the more inane questions of the evening’s moderator, of the inherent silliness of book publicity. So it was somewhat surprising, then, to discover a lengthy profile of the author in the Los Angeles Times on Tuesday. (It originally ran on December 26 in the Washington Post.) Here is an excerpt:
In [a bookcase in his parents’ house] were "Leo Tolstoy, Dostoevski, Sigrid Undset, the Norwegian—all kinds of books," Petterson says. On a whim, when he was 12 or 13, "I just sat down on the stairs behind the bookcase and I just took a book out. I didn't know why. And I opened it." Eventually, he read most of what was there, including "Gone With the Wind" in a Norwegian translation.
"I thought it was fabulous," he says, laughing. "Wow, passion!"
A few years later, he read Jack London's "Martin Eden." The story of "this man sort of raising himself up by his own hair almost, and trying to break through the wall of culture," he says, "made me want to be a writer." So did works by the Danish-Norwegian author Aksel Sandemose and by Ernest Hemingway, who made Petterson wonder how such simple writing could have so much impact.
"I'm going to crack that code," he thought.
By the time he was 18, he knew that all he wanted was to write. There was a problem, though: He couldn't finish anything. "I was a coward," he says. "If I finished a story, I could see it was no good. I didn't want that."
Instead, he trained as a librarian, worked in a printing plant and finally got a job at an Oslo bookstore, where he became the foreign book buyer. "As long as I could sell it, I could do anything I liked," he says.
But he was miserable not writing.
To read the rest, click here.
UPDATE, 01/05: While browsing the New York Sun's archive of book reviews this morning, I came across this recommendation of Out Stealing Horses from Benjamin Lytal, one of the paper's regular critics:
Per Petterson's "Out Stealing Horses" (Graywolf, 258 pages, $22) was less anticipated, but numerous critics noticed it once it got here. Not as heady as W.G. Sebald, Mr. Petterson seems to have slid into American consciousness in a similar way, from a similar place: Their very reserved way of ranging out across the European terrain, with World War II persisting in the back of their minds, is very strange and impressive to us. One author I know compared it, very favorably, to Marilynne Robinson's "Housekeeping," and that comparison seems right: Ms. Robinson's highly personal views of American history have enabled her to write about its people and their landscape with such rare, poignant authority. "Out Stealing Horses" does the same, convincingly, for a northern Norway landscape we will probably never know. A tale not only of a mind in winter, but of a city man's mind in the country, the story is tough and graceful enough to please almost any reader.
Lytal also recommends Roberto Bolano's The Savage Detectives and Mahmoud Dowlatabadi's Missing Soluch.
Posted in Books, Papers & Periodicals. Found always via this permanent link.
January 3, 2008
Preview of the Fifth Berlin Biennial
My preview of the Fifth Berlin Biennial, opening this spring, has been published in the January issue of Artforum. Here is the beginning of the piece:
If there is any consensus regarding the contemporary mega-exhibition, it's that it is in need of reinvention. And, increasingly, a focus on performance and pedagogy seems to offer one way forward. The prime example here is Mai Abu ElDahab, Anton Vidokle, and Florian Waldvogel's attempt, albeit ultimately unsuccessful, to reimagine Manifesta 6 as an experimental art academy, but one could also mention Documenta 12, with its emphasis on workshops and colloquy, or New York's performance-only biennial, Performa, now heading toward its third edition. Displacing the emphasis from object to experience, performative and pedagogical tactics provide a way around what is now disparaged as the static nature of the Grand Show.
For the Fifth Berlin Biennial, opening on April 5, curators Adam Szymczyk, director of the Kunsthalle Basel, and Elena Filipovic, an independent art critic and curator, have extended this nascent tradition by dividing their exhibition into halves, which they call "Day" and "Night."
To read the rest, click here. (The link takes you to BrianSholis.com.)
Posted in Art, Papers & Periodicals. Found always via this permanent link.
Review of Jenny Erpenbeck's The Book of Words
My brief review of Jenny Erpenbeck's newly translated novel, The Book of Words (New Directions), has just appeared in the Village Voice. Here is the beginning:
Jenny Erpenbeck's The Book of Words derives much of its potency from the naïveté of its young, unnamed female narrator. In an unidentified South American country governed by a brutal regime, our guileless guide lives a cloistered life, shuttling between a well-appointed home and a walled-in private school. Gunshots heard from the playground are interpreted whimsically by classmates; concern about a woman dragged from a bus by her hair is shushed away by consoling parents. Like "The Old Child," the title piece of this German author's 1999 debut collection (published in English in 2005), The Book of Words effortlessly weaves together the quotidian and the horrific in paragraph-long vignettes.
To read the rest, click here.
Posted in Books, Papers & Periodicals. Found always via this permanent link.
January 2, 2008
From an interview with Lydia Davis
The poet Sarah Manguso interviews story writer and translator Lydia Davis in the January issue of The Believer. Among the treats is this exchange on style:
BLVR: In his biography of Beckett, James Knowlson says that Beckett chose to write in French because in French it was easier for him to write “without style.” You’ve said similar things about translating—that it’s an exercise in not imposing one’s own style on the writing. It sounds like the least postmodern position one can possibly take—that there’s some essential truth that style only cloaks.
LD: No, I wouldn’t say there’s some essential truth that is cloaked by style—if I’ve understood your question. I’d say that if I were to translate into my own style rather than preserving, insofar as I could, the style of the original, I would change the nature of the work in an essential way.
I tried, once, for fun, translating Laurence Sterne into more contemporary English. It worked to some extent—some of the narrative content was preserved, some of the humor, quirkiness, etc.—but it was painful. Each time I abandoned some phrasing of his in favor of an “updated” version, an essential, delightful peculiarity of the work was lost.
BLVR: So you’re talking about the need, as a translator, to avoid covering the writer’s style with one’s own. Beckett, on the other hand, seems to suggest the possibility of writing without style. Do you think that’s possible? Maybe he was referring only to writing without the burden of his own familiar English-language style.
LD: I don’t believe, in the end, that there is any such thing as no style. Even a very neutral, plain style, one that doesn’t use colloquialisms, lyrical flourishes, heavy supplies of metaphor, etc., is a style, and it becomes a writer’s characteristic style just as much as a thicker, richer deployment of idiom and vocabulary. I would have to go look for Beckett’s own explanation, but I can imagine that he might have been resisting a Joycean sort of profusion that would have been natural to him in both speaking and writing English.
To read the full interview, click here.
Posted in Papers & Periodicals. Found always via this permanent link.
January 1, 2008
Alan Bennett on Exit Ghost and the Upper East Side
Last January, on my other short-lived blog, Today In Letters, I posted an entry from Alan Bennett’s diary, a selection from which appears in the first issue of the London Review of Books published each year. Once again this year's selection is not available online (“for copyright or other reasons”), so here is one entry, posted to encourage you to pick up the magazine and read the rest:
1 November, New York. I have been reading Philip Roth’s Exit Ghost, which I’ve enjoyed (insofar as I can enjoy a novel about an incontinent, impotent, irascible old writer who is two years younger than I am). One of the ghosts who is making his exit is, as I understand it, Nathan Zuckerman himself, Roth’s eidolon or alter ego whose parallel life he has traced in half a dozen books. Another ghost laid to rest is that of Amy Bellette, who in The Ghost Writer was the much younger lover of the virtually forgotten writer E.I. Lonoff. In that book Zuckerman comes to identify Amy, mistakenly, as Anne Frank, who has survived the camp and lives on unrecognized. In Exit Ghost she turns up again and is now revealed now as Anne Frank but as a survivor nonetheless, only from Norway not Holland.
I had been reading this when we go into EAT on Madison and 81st for acup of tea and a piece of (very unsatisfactory) coconut cake. An oldish woman in a red coat and beret (and looking not unlike how Enid Starkie used to look) beckons me over, having read and enjoyed some of my stuff. She particularly liked A Question of Attribution, the play that dealt with the Queen and Anthony Blunt. She has an accent which I don’t identify, but she says she spent her childhood in Occupied Europe and what she liked about the play was all the lies that were being told, ‘Both of them lying. Him lying, her pretending. That was my childhood,’ she says. She doesn’t say whether she’s Jewish or whether the lies were vital and necessary to survival, and in my typical unwriterly fashion I fail to ask, perhaps because it’s so like a scene from Roth’s novel. As we go she calls out: ‘Stay alive!’
The whole episode is a reminder of what an archaeological site the Upper East Side is, with skeletal old ladies pushed (by their black minders) in wheelchairs up Madison Avenue, all with their stories to tell. It’s like a long lost city in some Middle Eastern wilderness where shards of history are lying about waiting to be picked up—or, in this case, talked to. But not by me, who is at a loss for words.