May 16, 2008

LRB: Foster on Serra; Eagleton on anonymity; Kopelson's diary

The new issue of the London Review of Books has a number of goodies. Highlights include Hal Foster's blow-by-blow recount of the decision-making process that led to Richard Serra's sculpture now at the Grand Palais in Paris, Terry Eagleton's review of Anonymity: A Secret History of English Literature (arriving on US bookstore shelves in August), and the diary of academic literary critic Kevin Kopelson, author of the engaging small book Neatness Counts: Essays on the Writer's Desk (which I first blogged about on March 15, 2006).

From the Foster text (which is decidedly not a review):

Serra decided on plates 17 metres high and four metres wide; absolutely vertical, they are anchored only shallowly in the ground, and nothing supports them at the surface. This size turned out to be an excellent match of technical necessity – the plates are about the largest that can now be milled – and aesthetic scale: at just under half the height of the nave, they hold their own against the architecture but do not overwhelm the viewer (only about 15 centimetres thick, they appear almost elegant). Yet this resolution of size still left the questions of number and placement, and there could be no trial run. Serra calculated that 100 feet might be the right interval to create a rhythm that would at once articulate the architecture and motivate the viewer; more plates might interfere with the former and/or intimidate the latter, while fewer might make the ground feel a little arid. This formula makes for five plates over the 200 metres of the nave, with one placed directly under the cupola, and this is what Promenade consists in.

The particulars of placement remained, however, and here Serra was cued by the axis of the nave, to which all the plates are strictly perpendicular. To scatter the plates would be to lose the power of this strong line; to overlap them would be to destroy the centre in another way. So Serra decided to set the plates at a very slight angle (1.69 degrees) from the axis: some are positioned on the central line at the bottom and 20 inches away at the top, while others are 20 inches off the central line at the bottom and plumb at the top. These deviations create, with simple means, a great tension; one feels drawn through the piece as through a slalom course. Yet this energy might feel forced if the rhythm were only one of alternation, so here again Serra mixed things up: from the Champs Elysées side to the Seine side, the pattern of lean vis-à-vis the centre is in-in-away-away-in.

Eagleton begins his piece thusly:

All literary works are anonymous, but some are more anonymous than others. It is in the nature of a piece of writing that it is able to stand free of its begetter, and can dispense with his or her physical presence. In this sense, writing is more like an adolescent than a toddler. I might pass you a note at a meeting, but a note is only a note if it can function in my absence. Writing, unlike speech, is meaning that has come adrift from its source. Some bits of writing – theatre tickets or notes to the milkman, for example – are more closely tied to their original contexts than Paradise Lost or War and Peace. Fiction (since it is imaginary) has no real-life original context at all, and hermeneutically speaking can therefore circulate a lot more freely than a shopping list or a bus ticket. Literary works are peculiarly portable. They can be lifted from one interpretative situation to another, and may change their meaning in the course of this migration. Waiting for Godot as performed in San Quentin prison is not quite the same play as Peter Hall’s first London production. We cannot simply put Auschwitz out of our minds while watching The Merchant of Venice. Writerly meaning does not always trump readerly meaning.

Kopelson's playful ramble ends up by asking, "Have I become, then, Grover Cleveland?"

Posted in Art, Books, Papers & Periodicals. Found always via this permanent link.

May 14, 2008

Review of Shotaro Yasuoka's The Glass Slipper and Other Stories

My brief review of Shotaro Yasuoka's collection The Glass Slipper and Other Stories, out next month from Dalkey Archive Press, is in this week's Village Voice. The introduction:

Success greeted the Japanese author Shotaro Yasuoka, now nearly 90, immediately upon the publication of the short stories that make up The Glass Slipper and Other Stories. With frugal, occasionally lyrical prose (translated by Royall Tyler), these works, from the early 1950s, prize emotional and psychological depth over narrative propulsion, and feature hapless, illness-prone, passive narrators. "Like someone who's just fallen asleep," muses one, "I was drawn along through the empty city as if by an irresistible force."

The city is Tokyo, emptied out by the ravages of World War II, and Yasuoka's misfits glide through it in search of a decent job or some other sense of direction.

The whole review is only twice as long as this teaser; to read the rest, click here (and scroll down; it is the last of four short pieces).

Posted in Books, Papers & Periodicals. Found always via this permanent link.

A dissent from Susan Jacoby

As Mike O'Connor notes in his post at the blog U.S. Intellectual History, many have praised Susan Jacoby for speaking hard truths in her new book, The Age of American Unreason, including his USIH blog colleagues. Yet he has his reservations:

I have two particular concerns with this book. The first is that Jacoby's ire is disproportionately aimed at conservative examples of "unreason." The first chapter, for example, is on the debasement of language in U.S. culture. Focusing particularly on the increased use of the term "folks," she notes that "there is no escaping the political meaning of this term when it is reverently invoked by public officials in twenty-first-century America." (3) The implication suggested by this way of speaking is, of course, that there are some of us who are "folks," and others--presumably intellectual and cultural elites--who are not. Yet the populist worldview articulated by this rhetorical trope is much more strongly representative of a conservative cultural orientation than a broader American one. By criticizing it, Jacoby comes across as taking sides in an argument rather than, as she intends, offering a criticism of the debate itself. Another example concerns what appears to be Jacoby's bête noire (it comes up repeatedly throughout the book): the fact that the settled scientific consensus over evolution can actually generate a controversy. This issue, she writes, "owes its existence not only to a renewed religious fundamentalism but to the widespread failing of American public education and the scientific illiteracy of much of the media." (22) Again, the challenge to evolution comes exclusively from the right. Criticizing it, therefore, clearly constitutes an argument against a specifically conservative form of anti-rationalism.

[...]

My second beef with the book is that many of Jacoby's own observations--often in the form of asides--are every bit as unreasoned as those found on a political blog or cable talk show. At one point she declares that "anyone who says that he or she was unmoved by Armstong's walk on the moon is either lying or was stoned at the time." (218)

This is of particular interest to me because I am fifty-odd pages in to Freethinkers: A History of American Secularism, Jacoby's last book, and am enjoying it but discovering similar limitations to her pugnaciousness. To read the rest of O'Connor's post, which discusses The Age of American Unreason at some length and links to other commentary on the book, click here.

Posted in Around the web, Books. Found always via this permanent link.

May 4, 2008

Spring 2008 NBCC Good Reads list

The National Book Critics Circle, an organization I joined several months ago, has published its seasonal Good Reads list, in which recommendations from active book reviewers and book-review editors are tallied "as an alternative to the many best sellers lists available." My fiction nomination came in tied at number four with six other worthy titles, and my nonfiction nomination did not make the cut. (I believe, however, that a brief blurb I wrote about the book will be posted to the NBCC site soon; I'll link to it if/when that happens.) The top three in each category are:

FICTION
1. Richard Price, Lush Life, Farrar, Straus & Giroux
2. Jhumpa Lahiri, Unaccustomed Earth, Knopf
3. Steven Millhauser, Dangerous Laughter, Knopf

1. Nicholson Baker, Human Smoke: The Beginning of World War II, The End of Civilization, Simon & Schuster
2. Drew Gilpin Faust, This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War, Knopf
3. Mark Harris, Pictures at the Revolution: Five Movies and the Birth of the New Hollywood, Penguin Press

POETRY

1. Grace Paley, Fidelity, Farrar, Straus & Giroux
2. Frank Bidart, Watching the Spring Festival, Farrar, Straus & Giroux
3. Eric Gansworth, A Half-life of Cardio-pulmonary Function, Syracuse University Press

To read the rest, click here.

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April 30, 2008

Review of David Samuels's Only Love Can Break Your Heart

My review of David Samuels's new essay collection, Only Love Can Break Your Heart, has just been published in the Detroit Metro Times. Here's the opening paragraph:

David Samuels belongs to an increasingly rare species: journalists who can parachute into an unfamiliar corner of America, establish their bearings quickly and extract a compelling narrative at once universally recognizable and resonant with idiosyncratic particularities. Not only is the species endangered; if you follow media trend pieces, so is its habitat. The number of magazines willing to support writers, especially younger writers, who embark on odysseys in which days' or weeks' worth of experiences are chiseled into 10,000 to 15,000 illuminating words seems to decrease monthly. Samuels has benefited from writing for the best of those that remain — Harper's, The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine — and his new essay collection, Only Love Can Break Your Heart, is a patchwork composition that yields surprising insights into American existence. It is a testament to the particular pleasures and value of long-format narrative journalism.

To read the rest, click here.

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April 29, 2008

Marilynne Robinson, then and now

The contributors to Reading Room, the New York Times blog dedicated to discussing books in depth, are currently focusing their energies upon Marilynne Robinson's 1980 novel Housekeeping. Click here for the moderator's introductory post.

Last Thursday, I had the pleasure of attending a lecture by Robinson at DePaul University in Chicago. She read two essays, one of which will be published in a forthcoming issue of the Harvard Divinity Bulletin. I typed up a portion of my notes and e-mailed them to Patrick Kurp, of the blog Anecdotal Evidence, and he excerpted them online in this post:

Underpinning the first paper she delivered was her assertion that nothing is as complex as the human mind, and that various deterministic theories (Freud, economic rationalism, selfish-gene theory, etc.) do harm to this fact. She doesn't understand "why human beings are so persistent in their attack on what is most distinctive about them." She then asserted that "if you do not believe in thought you cannot believe in faith" and, in a swipe at Christopher Hitchens and his ilk, that "those who attack faith devalue thought." Later on in the essay, she praised Calvin's assertion that "an encounter with the other is always an encounter with God," said that she tries to live by that understanding, and stressed that reverence is the proper way of relating to the "shining garment of reality" in which God reveals himself constantly.

Lastly, an excerpt of Robinson's 2007 commencement-day speech at Amherst has been published in the current issue of Harper's. The full text of the speech, titled "Waiting to Be Remembered," is available online at Amherst magazine.

Posted in Books. Found always via this permanent link.

April 28, 2008

David Kolb, Sprawling Places

My review of David Kolb's book Sprawling Places is now online at the New Haven Review. Click here to read it.

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April 26, 2008

Winslow on Benfey

Today's Chicago Tribune contains the first review I've seen of Christopher Benfey's A Summer of Hummingbirds: Love, Art, and Scandal in the Intersecting Worlds of Emily Dickinson, Mark Twain, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and Martin Johnson Heade, a book I've been looking forward to for months (despite its off-putting, laborious subtitle). The reviewer, Art Winslow, states:

Setting his stage, Benfey notes that Todd and Heade, Dickinson and Higginson, Beecher and his novelist sister Stowe, "were fanatical about hummingbirds." They wrote poems and stories, and drew and painted hummingbirds, tamed live ones and collected stuffed ones—in short, represented an "informal cult of hummingbirds" with origins that hewed back to the Civil War. Why the obsession? Here is the branch on which Benfey's book balances:

"Americans during and after the Civil War gradually left behind a static view of existence, a trust in fixed arrangements and hierarchies. In science and in art, in religion and in love, they came to see a new dynamism and movement in their lives, a brave new world of instability and evanescence. This dynamism, in all aspects of life, found perfect expression in the hummingbird."

This is a handy unifying image-theme for a writer offering up cultural interpretation, and for the most part it proves utilitarian in linking the otherwise somewhat disparate parts of Benfey's story.

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April 24, 2008

Marshall Berman on New York in the 1970s

Last autumn, Dissent magazine published an edited version of Marshall Berman's introduction to New York Calling: From Blackout to Bloomberg, an anthology he edited with Brian Berger. Here's an excerpt:

There will be more to say about rap as time goes by. I only want to say one thing now. “The Message” (1982), the first international rap hit, by Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five, has a provocative quatrain that’s in tune with my overall theme. People often miss this quatrain, which seems to drop from the sky: They pushed a girl in front of a train, / Took her to the doctor, sewed her arm on again. / Stabbed a man right through the heart, / Gave him a transplant and a brand new start.

Hegel says that “spirit is a power only by looking the negative in the face and living with it.” “Living with it is the magical power that converts the negative into being.” Well, that’s the message. In New York in the 1970s, this meant that social disintegration and existential desperation could be sources of life and creative renewal. A whole generation of kids from America’s worst neighborhoods broke out of poverty, violence, and ghetto isolation, and became sophisticated New Yorkers with horizons as wide as the world. As the Clash in “London Calling” in 1979 affirmed that “London is drowning, I live by the river,” these kids from the Bronx could tell the world not only that “We come from ruins, but we are not ruined,” but that “We shall overcome.” Their voices became the voice of New York Calling. Their capacity for soul-making in the midst of horror gave the whole city a brand new aura.

New York feels like a very different place today.

The introduction is informal, personal in tone. The book contains over two hundred photographs and essays by Berman, Berger, Edmund Berrigan, Anthony Haden-Guest, Jim Knipfel, Margaret Morton, Tom Robbins, Luc Sante, Robert Sietsema, Brandon Stosuy, John Yau, and others.

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April 10, 2008

Interview with Thomas Bender about American Higher Education Transformed

Inside Higher Ed publishes a brief interview with the historian Thomas Bender, whose essay collection Intellect and Public Life: Essays on the Social History of Academic Intellectuals In the United States (Johns Hopkins, 1992) impressed me greatly when I first read it several months ago. Now he has edited, with Wilson Smith, a collection of documents relating to American higher education (one of his academic specialties). The interview's introduction:

The history of American higher education since 1940 is full of dramatic changes — the growth of the modern scientific enterprise, desegregation, the impact of the GI bill, the campus unrest of the 60s, and so forth. Wilson Smith and Thomas Bender set out to tell that story with documents — from both establishment figures and their critics — in American Higher Education Transformed, 1940-2005, just published by the Johns Hopkins University Press. The book is a sequel to earlier work by Smith and Richard Hofstadter examining earlier periods in the history of American higher education. The new volume includes the Supreme Court decisions that upheld affirmative action and that dealt blows to faculty and graduate student unions; essays by Adrienne Rich and Lani Guinier; the Port Huron Statement; Allan Bloom and his critics; and the presidential report that led to the growth of community colleges.

And one of the questions:

Q: How did the tone of documents change during the period you studied?

A: This is an interesting question. I would say that there was a sense of anticipation at the beginning, looking forward to new challenges related to the position of the U.S. after the war. Their sense was that higher education would (and should) be moving to the center of American society. Hence it must be modernized, democratized, and expanded to meet that challenge. This is clear in both the curricular documents (“The Red Book”) and in the President’s Commission on Higher Education, which was concerned about exclusion based on race and class, or Vannevar Bush’s vision for science. Midway the complexity and tensions, contests and constraints produced a very different tone. There is little self-confidence toward the end of the story, the result of a sense of being displaced from the center.

(Link via Cliopatria)

Posted in Around the web, Books. Found always via this permanent link.

April 9, 2008

New York Sun; Howe on McDougall

The New York Sun, the six-year-old weekday paper, has fantastic arts coverage, in particular its book reviews, which are published throughout the week but arrive in bulk each Wednesday. I visit the site every Wednesday morning. Critics Adam Kirsch, Eric Ormbsy, Benjamin Lytal, Hua Hsu, and Otto Penzler consistently publish insightful, well-written, well-informed reviews of books that are occasionally esoteric but never uninteresting. While the newspaper has recently re-designed its website and is still porting its archives and fixing bugs (like author bios occasionally appearing in the midst of the review text), now seems like an appropriate time to mention it because the editors have roped in a 2008 Pulitzer Prize winner, Daniel Walker Howe, to write a review. His piece is about Walter A. McDougal’s Throes of Democracy: The American Civil War Era:

Although political history is the strong skeleton of his account, Mr. McDougall fleshes it out with social, economic, and intellectual history. His descriptions of the important consequences of public literacy and numeracy in facilitating the industrial revolution are excellent. He accords the German immigrants the importance they deserve and seldom receive from historians. His treatment of the military history of the Civil War imparts new interest even to a subject one thought was familiar.

Howe received the Pulitzer Prize for What Hath God Wrought: The Transformation of America, 1815–1848, part of the Oxford History of the United States. Click here for a piece Howe posted to the Oxford University Press blog.

Posted in Books, Papers & Periodicals. Found always via this permanent link.

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.

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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 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

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.

December 31, 2007

J. M. Coetzee: A brief comment and several reviews

(Photograph by Tony Cenicola for the New York Times)

I have just completed the last book I will read this year: J.M. Coetzee’s new novel, Diary of a Bad Year. Each review of the book has of course discussed its three-stream or three-band structure. The first stream, at the top of the page, presents a series of brief, sharp essays by a character only minimally different in biographical detail from Coetzee himself; they reflect on politics, ethics, and many other aspects of contemporary life. Beneath that, separated by a thin black line, is an interior monologue created by that character during the essays’ composition. Beneath another black line that begins twenty-five pages in, the reader encounters the thoughts of Anya, a young woman the Coetzee doppelgänger hires to type the essays printed at the top of the page. Several reviewers have noted that readers can choose whether to read the three streams simultaneously or consecutively. But, having read them simultaneously, the extreme control Coetzee exerts over this potentially unwieldy configuration gives reading them simultaneously a richness that I cannot imagine would come forth if read the other way.

At the outset of the novel, Coetzee and the book’s designer have arranged the text such that no sentence runs from one page to the next, thus giving the reader a natural pause with which to skip down to the next stream; only after forty-two pages does a sentence run across the gutter, causing one to read ahead with one narrative and then circle back to catch up on the next. By this point, all three streams have been introduced and the reader is relatively comfortable with how the pages are divided. Only then does Coetzee begin to push and pull the structure. Roughly halfway through the novel, the streams begin diverging fairly sharply in pace and tone, giving the story as a whole a fascinating kind of elasticity; on page 107, the third stream—recording dialogue between Anya and her boyfriend, Alan—not only fits with what came before it on page 106, but might also be seen to offer a comment on the stream just above it. Later still, Coetzee presses further, introducing a temporal malleability in which the streams no longer march in lock step, but lag behind and pass each other like runners in a race. The three tales remain bound together in the reader’s mind, and feeling the tension this generates offers a pleasure that conventionally structured novels, in which one can easily discern flashbacks and the like, rarely convey.

There is much to be said about the book, but aside from this comment on structure I leave it to professionals. Here are links to reviews by James Wood in the New Yorker, Judith Shulevitz in Slate, Hilary Mantel in the New York Review of Books, and Kathryn Harrison in the New York Times Book Review.

Coincidentally, when I read books I often make notations in the margin, and I was surprised to discover that the spread depicted above, in a photograph that accompanied Harrison’s review, was one I marked as being particularly important (I placed an asterisk next to the second stream). Did an editor purposefully choose a potentially important spread to reveal, or is this mere coincidence?

UPDATE, 01/01: Richard Eder reviews the novel in today’s New York Times. He picks up on another aspect of the interplay between the streams that I neglected to mention: As Anya becomes more fully embodied as a character, C.’s short essays dwindle in power (and length, as if he were losing his ability to concentrate).

And from here on, the pages divide: the top third, C.’s philosophical opinions; the middle third, his account of Anya, as well as his feelings; the bottom third, her account of C., as well as hers. Gradually the last two parts grow more vivid, while the opinions grow dustier. Anya expands into her reality; C. deflates, magnificently, into his.

UPDATE, 01/02: The Village Voice publishes a review of the novel by Allen Barra.

UPDATE, 01/04: Art Winslow reviews the book in the Los Angeles Times.

UPDATE, 01/07: Adam Begley reviews the novel in the New York Observer.

UPDATE, 01/10: Amelia Atlas reviews the book for the Barnes & Noble Review.

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December 19, 2007

A review of John Berger's Hold Everything Dear

My review of John Berger's new essay collection, Hold Everything Dear: Dispatches on Survival and Resistance (Pantheon), has been published in the Detroit Metro Times. Here is an excerpt:

"Stories are one way of sharing the belief that justice is imminent," writes John Berger in Hold Everything Dear, his new, raggedly uneven collection of recent essays. A humanist concern for justice marks these texts, which range in length from two pages to 20 and are characterized by Berger's messianic sense of conviction. His fervor is inspiring when he bears witness to the perseverance of individuals in battle-scarred lands or dilates on poems, films and photographs. But more often it is off-putting, as he grandiloquently and unmindfully rages against multinational corporations, the current U.S. administration, Israel's occupation of Palestine, and what he calls the delocalization of the entire world.

To read the rest, click here.

Posted in Books, Papers & Periodicals. Found always via this permanent link.

December 10, 2007

Women and the Making of the Modern House review

My review of the Yale University Press reissue of Alice T. Friedman's Women and the Making of the Modern House has been published in the Detroit Metro Times. Here's an excerpt:

When this book was originally published in 1998, Alice T. Friedman's recourse to letters, memoirs, and newspaper and magazine accounts charted relatively new territory for an architectural historian. The portraits of six modernist houses, interwoven with profiles of the creators and their clients, still make for engaging material. (A stray reference to the late Philip Johnson living at his Glass House "to this day" bears evidence that the text has not been updated for this paperback edition.) Friedman's revisionist narrative aims to show how the confluence of feminist thinking and the utopian social aims of modernist architecture caused a radical rethinking of domesticity. It's a fascinating thesis that holds interest beyond the case studies presented in this volume.

At her best, as in chapters featuring Truus Schröder and Constance Perkins, the actively engaged clients of Gerrit Rietveld and Richard Neutra, respectively, Friedman gives ample evidence of the congenial tugs of war that led to the creation of masterpieces and documents the satisfaction each woman got from living in her home.

To read the rest, click this link and scroll to the middle of the page.

Posted in Books. Found always via this permanent link.

December 2, 2007

"What's wrong with the American essay"

Truthdig.com has published an essay by Cristina Nehring, nominally a review of the 2007 edition of “The Best American Essays” series, under the heading “what’s wrong with the American essay.” The text has made its way rapidly across the web (see this Technorati search, or this Google Blog search); I came to it via this post on Anecdotal Evidence, Patrick Kurp’s blog. Describing the contemporary essay as “an apologetic imitation of the short story,” Nehring, who contributes regularly to The Atlantic, Harper’s, and the London Review of Books, says that the problem extends far beyond the middling prose and limited ambition of our essayists:

The problem, of course, is not merely our essayists; it’s our culture. We have grown terribly—if somewhat hypocritically—weary of larger truths. The smarter and more intellectual we count ourselves, the more adamantly we insist that there is no such thing as truth, no such thing as general human experience, that everything is plural and relative and therefore undiscussable. Of course, everything is plural, everything is arguable, and there are limits to what we can know about other persons, other cultures, other genders. But there is also a limit to such humility; there is a point at which it becomes narcissism of a most myopic sort, a simple excuse to talk only about one’s own case, only about one’s own small area of specialization. Montaigne thought it the essayist’s duty to cross boundaries, to write not as a specialist (even in himself) but as a generalist, to speak out of turn, to assume, to presume, to provoke. “Where I have least knowledge,” said the blithe Montaigne, “there do I use my judgment most readily.” And how salutary the result; how enjoyable to read—and to spar with—Montaigne’s by turns outrageous and incisive conclusions about humankind. That everything is arguable goes right to the heart of the matter.

Kurp adds: “Well, yes and no. Argument, without wit or style, is tiresome.” In recent reviews of art exhibitions and books, I’ve found myself praising outsize ambition, even if it leads to errors or other shortcomings. As Nehring writes:

Today’s essayists need to be emboldened, and to embolden one another, to move away from timid autobiographical anecdote and to embrace—as their predecessors did—big theories, useful verities, daring pronouncements. We need to destigmatize generalization, aphorism and what used to be called wisdom. We must rehabilitate the notion of truth—however provisional it might be. As long as persons with intellectual aspirations are counted idiots for attempting to formulate a wider point, they will not do so, and even if they dared, most editors would not publish them and most critics would not praise them.

Posted in Around the web, Books. 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

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.

September 20, 2007

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.

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.

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

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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July 31, 2007

Poverty

It is dire poverty indeed when a man is so malnourished and fatigued that he won't stoop to pick up a penny. But if you cultivate a healthy poverty and simplicity, so that finding a penny will literally make your day, then, since the world is in fact planted in pennies, you have with your poverty bought a lifetime of days. It is that simple. What you see is what you get.

Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek

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October 3, 2006

Sam Lipsyte hits the road with Michel Houellebecq

Any minute now Michel Houellebecq, the bad boy of French literature, is going to do something very, very bad. It’s true I’ve been on the road with him all week and his behavior has been impeccable, but something’s got to give. There’s too much history. What about his purported obsession with sex clubs and prostitutes? What about his penchant for hitting on female journalists, explaining that only one night with him will guarantee the real story? What about the time he called Islam “the stupidest religion”? Surely, the man’s going to bust out with something reprehensible, and now, in his smoke-filled semi-suite at the Bel Age in L.A., is as good a time as any. He flies back to Europe tomorrow.

More from the October issue of The Believer here.

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September 27, 2006

Kirk Varnedoe, Pictures of Nothing

I was going to post this later in the week, but decided to make today an all-Gopnik day.

Next month, Princeton University Press will publish Kirk Varnedoe's 2003 A.W. Mellon Lectures in the Fine Arts as Pictures of Nothing: Abstract Art Since Pollock. Earlier in September I skimmed through PDFs of its chapters, each of which hews closely to one of the six lectures delivered three summers ago. The volume is prefaced with a short appreciation by Adam Gopnik, Varnedoe's close friend, sometime collaborator, and an occasional visual-art critic. From that preface:

Working only with notes, though of course drawing on a lifetime's reservoir of looking and thinking, the seemingly crafted and pregnant sentences present on these pages really were improvised by the speaker in the course of an hour's talking.

It was not an irresponsible or offhand improvisation—he knew more or less what he wanted to say and had often rehearsed it, in his own mind and at length with listeners. (And, of course, he worked with an outline and a huge number of slides, which played a mnemonic role.) But the words came ringing out, every Sunday, fresh and unplanned, just as the reader meets them here. Much was premeditated but more was improvised: looking at the images almost always inspired an unexpected thought, instantly blended into the body of the argument, and here preserved. He supposed these lectures to be his last and intended them to be his most important work, his testaments of faith.

The transcribed lectures do indeed maintain fidelity to what I assume was Varnedoe's extemporaneous voice, a quality that, when combined with his unwillingness to stray too far from exegesis of the works themselves, give the book a refreshingly anachronistic feel. Here are a few excerpts from the opening lecture, in which he sets out a game plan:

For many people, who think and write about culture, this moment [the mid-1950s, ed.] marks an even larger watershed between the end of modernism and the inauguration of a postmodern world, a great divide between the world of, say, Henri Matisse and Picasso and that of contemporary art. I am not one of those people, however, and this dichotomy is not what I am here to talk about. [ . . . ] What we want to do is cut through the gas and grab the ideas that flow out of and drive us back toward such confusing, gritty particulars of experience, rather than the ideas that constantly and confidently blend such things into soupy generalities. [ . . . ] I take this topic ultimately because it seems to me one of the most legitimate and poorly addressed questions in modern art. Put another way, I want to ask whether there is any grounding for abstraction, a "logic of the situation," to borrow a term from E.H. Gombrich. [pp. 6-7, 8, 25]

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Gopnik on Proust's letters

Last Tuesday I listened to the New Yorker critics Joan Acocella and Alex Ross discuss criticism; last night I listened to the New Yorker staff writer Adam Gopnik discuss Marcel Proust’s letters. This took place at NYU’s Maison Francaise, and marked the republication, earlier this year, of The Letters of Marcel Proust, selected and translated by Mina Curtiss and introduced by Gopnik. Two actors read three-to-five-letter selections of missives in rough chronological order, displaying the novelist’s development from late-nineteenth-century aesthete and social butterfly to daring, “morally sound” commentator, a “caterpillar slowly working his way inch by inch across society and Western consciousness.” Gopnik’s lip curled upward, conspiratorially, at some of the rhetorical excesses and “almost sycophantic” flattery Proust bestowed upon those he beseeched.

Several of Gopnik’s comments stood out, though I’m sure some are variations on what he has written for the book’s introduction, which I have not read. He suggested that we read writers' letters for either love of their writing or out of fascination at the author’s winningness, placing Henry James in the former category (“I sometimes prefer his letters, which say ‘yes’ to perception and ‘no’ to tedious plots, to his late novels”) and Proust and Chekhov in the latter. He claimed that it was around 1907–08 that a “sharp conviction emerges” from the dandyish flattery of the earlier letters. He noted how courageous Proust’s position that “the only people who defend the French language are those who attack it,” expressed in a letter written around that time, must have been in that era, as it still holds a charge now.

Gopnik was, of course, asked when he first came to Proust, and expounded at length on reading Moncrieff’s translation—his favorite, “a masterpiece of English writing” and “the perfect balance between languages that draw from Shakespeare (English) and Racine (French)”—with his girlfriend (now his wife) in the summer of 1977. He also mentioned a “Talk of the Town” piece by John Updike about reading Proust in New York in the 1950s, which I came home to pull from the Complete New Yorker DVD archive but could not find. Nor could I find it by scanning the indices to Hugging the Shore and More Matter. Instead I offer, below the jump, one of Gopnik’s own “Talk” pieces, from the issue of September 17, 1990, that compares Proust’s house in Illiers to his co-op on Broome Street.

My favorite comment from the letters read last night: “I’m too lazy to write about things that bore me.” If only I had the fortune—or the will—to abide by that.

Continue reading "Gopnik on Proust's letters"

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September 26, 2006

Guilty pleasure: Great Monasteries of Europe

&On Sunday afternoon I had the pleasure of visiting St. Patrick's Cathedral. I often spend time in churches, even though the joy I derive from them is, with my distanced, entirely secular appreciation of what they represent, limited to the aesthetic register. Perhaps "guilty," used in the title of this entry, isn't the right word to describe this pleasure. Either way, the visit caused me to spend time with Great Monasteries of Europe (Abbeville Press, 2004), a massive, lavishly illustrated volume that I recently came across. I admire the rigor of any disciplined life, including that of the men and women who cloister themsleves within monasteries' walls, but, given the sumptuous visual evidence in this book, it is plain that "monastic" does not necessarily equate to "ascetic." If you come across this book it's well worth flipping through; it's better than any shelter magazine. Below is the upper church, seen from the east, of San Francesco in Assisi, Italy.

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September 21, 2006

Concerning War: A Critical Reader

Further to my post about the book I coedited, today I came across Concerning War: A Critical Reader, published by BAK, basis voor actuele kunst (Utrecht) and Revolver (Frankfurt am Main). From its publicity copy:

Concerning War . . . presents new and anthologized texts by artists and writers who analyze the possibilities for critical artistic responses to the contemporary world as a site of global war. [. . .] This is the first publication in the BAK Critical Reader Series.

The book, a pocket-size paperback edited by Maria Hlavajova and Jill Winder, contains the following essays: an introduction from the editors; Ross Birrell, "The Gift of Terror: Suicide-Bombing as Potlatch"; Boris Buden, "Let's Do Nothing: On the Limits of Public Activism"; Jordan Crandall, "Unmanned"; Bregje van Eekelen, "Words, War and Imagination: On the Political Trajectories of Everyday Vocabulary"; Boris Groys, "The Fate of Art in the Age of Terror"; Viktor Misiano, "The War in Chechnya Did Not Take Place"; Irit Rogoff, "Engendering Terror"; A discussion between Martha Rosler and Maria Hlavajova, "Deconstructing the Allegories"; Sean Snyder, "Some Byproducts: Thoughts on the Visual Rhetoric of PSYOP"; and Hito Steyerl, "The Violence of Images: Documentarism and Documentality."

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Diana Athill on . . . sketching nude models?

Having just read Doug McLennan's paean to the Guardian's arts coverage (in his new blog, Diacritical), with which I largely agree, I must admit to being puzzled to find, among today's stories, famed nonagenarian editor Diana Athill discussing the difficulties and pleasures of drawing the human form. A somewhat absurd pretense for an article by her, but it's engagingly written. It begins:

Twice—once during my 70s, once in my 80s—I went to evening classes in "drawing from life". In both classes I was the only student whose aim was to reproduce the appearance of the model. What the other, much younger, students appeared to aim at was marks on paper that gave what they hoped was the effect of modern art, for which an accurate representation would not do. To them my attempts must have seemed boring and fogeyish; to me, their efforts appeared an absurd waste of time.

I still think I was right. This may well be because I am old, but being old doesn't necessarily make one wrong. I would like to examine why I think that, and why I am unable to regard as art anything that does not involve the mastery of a skill.

I point to it is not only because it is well written (and how different from my own "style," such as it is), but also because it affords me the opportunity to mention Stet: An Editor's Life, her winning memoir, which was published a few years ago. Here is the promotional copy on the back of my paperback edition:

Diana Athill's Stet is "a beautifully written, hardheaded, and generally insightful look back at the heyday of postwar London publishing by a woman who was at its center for nearly half a century" (The Washington Times). Stet is a must-read for the literarily curious, who will revel in her keenly observed, devilishly funny, and always compassionate portraits of such great literary figures as Jean Rhys, V.S. Naipaul, Norman Mailer, Philip Roth, Modecai Richler, and others . . .

I remember being particularly engaged by her story of visiting Jean Rhys late in the author's life, and the (relative) destitution and mental incapacity into which Rhys had fallen. So too with her stories of André Deutsch and their early years together at his eponymous publishing company. It's a quick read, and recommended.

Posted in Books, Papers & Periodicals. Found always via this permanent link.

September 20, 2006

Robert Hullot-Kentor's new book of essays on Adorno

I first heard about Robert Hullot-Kentor's forthcoming book, Things Beyond Resemblance: Collected Essays on Theodor W. Adorno (Columbia University Press) a few months ago, both from a friend at the office and also a reading group I had briefly joined. It comprises over twenty years' worth of the philosopher and translator's essays on Adorno's work. Word earlier this week from another friend, an artist who knows Adorno's writing very well, reminded me of its imminent publication, and, by coincidence, I came across a copy yesterday. (I love how things come into one's field of vision not long after one opens one's eyes.) I skimmed it before and after last night's lecture, and found much to make me want to plunge in earnest into Adorno's writings, something I am rather sheepish about admitting I haven't done. From the introduction and the few essays I scanned, Minima Moralia: Reflections on a Damaged Life and Negative Dialectics seem most closely related to issues with which I am regularly engaged. Is there a better "first book" to read if one is embarking on an Adorno odyssey?

The first Hullot-Kentor essay I turned to is titled "Ethics, Aesthetics, and the Recovery of the Public World," which was originally delivered as a lecture in 1995. At the very end of the text, he makes an assertion that throws into question a lot of my thinking about recent art that I'm drawn to: “The aesthetics of this cultural moment is a postmodernism that shuns the forming of a critical microcosm by preference for a form of montage that never gets beyond juxtaposition.” Before that, however, is this brief passage ("Section IV"), which I'll reproduce in full:

The need for the recovery of the public world is in a sense obvious. But if such a recovery means reaching back to what was lost, it is credulously retrospective. The public world has always served as a façade for economic manipulation. Ever since the French Revolution institutionally established the division of the individual into citoyen and bourgeois, the former’s ostensibly equal political rights have served to justify the latter’s right to unequal economic prerogative. Even in those exceptional periods—well documented by Habermas—in which a public world did flourish, when a degree of tact did exist between private interest and the plausible role of the citizen, this has cloaked the fact that equal exchange has always been a violent act of unequal accumulation. And, even when it is not invoked by name, the idea of the public readily functions to mask actual tensions.

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"Criticism and the Arts" panel (a longish report)

Given past experience with panel discussions, and common assumptions one brings to them, I didn’t have the highest hopes for one titled “Criticism and the Arts,” held last night at Hunter College. It featured Joan Acocella (of the New Yorker, Greil Marcus (author, most recently, of The Shape of Things to Come: Prophecy and the American Voice, Alex Ross (of the New Yorker and the weblog and forthcoming book The Rest Is Noise), and Mark Stevens (of New York magazine), four eminent critics one must respect no matter one’s opinion of their opinions. Thankfully, the panel was moderated adroitly by Wendy Lesser (of the Threepenny Review), and the brisk pace—two questions from Lesser to all four panelists; two more questions thrown open to them generally; three or four questions from the audience—engaged until the end, when it was “time for wine and fizzy water, so you’ll feel this is more of a conversation than an opportunity for us to talk at you.”

I found it somewhat surprising that I generally agreed with what all four critics said, though whether that surprise is rooted in disappointment that I’m affected by the same factors that influence their work (and no longer am independent firebrand, however self-styled) or pride that I can claim similar methodological concerns remains to be determined. Acocella came off as the seen-it-all chronicler (an aside: I've been particularly taken with her recent writing on books, notably this introduction to Stefan Zweig's Beware of Pity; Ross the obsessive stylist and last-ditch proselytizer for an increasingly marginalized art form; Marcus the storyteller who sneaks autobiography into each ruminative, "mystical" association; and Stevens the skeptic—both about the use of an institutional “we” and attendant overidentification with one’s platform and an art market seemingly out of control. There were few insights about criticism in the abstract, but plenty about these writers’ practice.

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Posted in Art, Books, Miscellaneous, Papers & Periodicals. Found always via this permanent link.

Good news: Boston Review Books

Yesterday MIT PressLog announced that the press will be working with the Boston Review to publish a series of books titled, simply enough, Boston Review Books. From the announcement:

Boston Review Books are accessible, short books that really take ideas serioiusly. They are animated by hope, committed to equality, and convinced that the imagination eludes political categories. The editors aim to establish a public space in which people can loosen the hold of conventional preconceptions and start to reason together across the lines others are so busily drawing.

The first two books are out, and more, including "a searing indictment of the American penal system and an encouraging account about the potential foreign aid has in reducing poverty" are to come. I've read the Boston Review for seven or eight years, since my time in Boston, and maintain my subscription. Perhaps its focus on politics is part of the reason why I neglected to renew my subscription to the NYRB, as I mentioned in a post yesterday. (I should add that since mentioning it I've thought about resubscribing as a birthday gift, despite having access to its full contents online; there's something about holding the paper in your hand . . .)

Posted in Books. Found always via this permanent link.

September 13, 2006

Sontag, Didion, and intellectual crushes

Perhaps I’m flogging a dead horse here, what with my earlier mention of Sontag’s journal entries published in Sunday’s New York Times Magazine, but now that I’ve actually read them, I wanted to pull out the aphoristic sentences that caught my eye, either because the made me think anew or because they resonate with my own experience. I also was reminded yesterday (via Maud Newton) that Joan Didion’s collected nonfiction—all 1,160 pages of it, under the title We Tell Ourselves Stories in Order to Live—will be published next month by Everyman’s Library. I have great affection for both of them as writers, which of course comes out in public as a kind of fanboy crush, not unlike the ones admitted to by Craig Seligman in his book Sontag and Kael: Opposites Attract Me, one of my favorite nonfiction books of 2004.

So, those aperçus:

On Keeping a Journal. Superficial to understand the journal as just a receptacle for one's private, secret thoughts—like a confidante who is deaf, dumb and illiterate. In the journal I do not just express myself more openly than I could to any person; I create myself.

The journal is a vehicle for my sense of selfhood. It represents me as emotionally and spiritually independent. Therefore (alas) it does not simply record my actual, daily life but rather—in many cases—offers an alternative to it.

[ . . . ]

Till now I have felt that the only persons I could know in depth, or really love, were duplicates or versions of my own wretched self. (My intellectual and sexual feelings have always been incestuous.)

[ . . . ]

The writer must be four people:
1) the nut, the obsédé
2) the moron
3) the stylist
4) the critic

1) supplies the material
2) lets it come out
3) is taste
4) is intelligence

a great writer has all 4—but you can still be a good writer with only 1) and 2); they're most important

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Posted in Books, Papers & Periodicals. Found always via this permanent link.

September 8, 2006

The Uncertain States of America Reader

(Detail view of cover of mock-up made by designers)

As I publish this entry the Serpentine Gallery is celebrating the opening of "Uncertain States of America," curated by Daniel Birnbaum, Gunnar B. Kvaran, and Hans Ulrich Obrist. As I mentioned in a parenthetical aside in this entry in June, I was asked by the three of them as well as Serpentine Gallery director Julia Peyton-Jones to edit an anthology of recent writing about contemporary art, politics, and the current cultural climate in the United States. The first of two editions of that volume, called The Uncertain States of America Reader, is being released tonight to coincide with the exhibition. (A second, expanded version will be published later this autumn by Sternberg Press.) This edition contains seventeen texts, is designed (by my friends Stuart and David of Dexter Sinister) to feel like an academic reader, and can be obtained now at the Serpentine Gallery, soon at the Walther König bookshop, and, a little bit later, in a few other locations around Europe for an intentionally low price—£6, I think. (The Sternberg Press version will be more widely distributed.)

Quickly realizing the scope of the project after I was initially invited to undertake it, I asked Noah Horowitz, who was hired by the Serpentine as an exhibition organizer and is a PhD candidate at the Courtauld Institute of Art, to coedit the anthology with me. Here is a brief excerpt from our coauthored introduction, which is available in full at BrianSholis.com:

In recent years, many have noted the fashionableness of art that addresses its broader social context. The translation of Nicolas Bourriaud’s Relational Aesthetics into English in 2002 and the ongoing debate about this set of essays is one prominent example of this tendency. Others pertain to the intensification of discussion about the Internet’s (virtual) social power and the agency of extra-gallery/museum practices, the latter of which inspired "The Interventionists," an exhibition curated by Nato Thompson and presented at MASS MoCA, North Adams, Massachusetts, in the summer of 2004. What has perhaps changed since the re-election later that autumn of George W. Bush is the zeroing in of (primarily European) interest in American art and artists. One could cite "Uncertain States of America," "USA Today" at the Royal Academy of Arts, London, "This Is America: Visions of the American Dream" at the Centraal Museum, Utrecht, The Netherlands, and even "Day for Night," the 2006 Whitney Biennial (curated by Chrissie Iles and Philippe Vergne, Europeans now ensconced in American institutions), as evidence of this trend.

This is undoubtedly a moment marked by a serious interest in the actions America is taking on the world stage—actions that have been described as cause for "grave concern." We do not attempt to authoritatively engage these concerns here, but we do think that this sampling of discourse by and about a country’s visual artists leads to insights about its politics and society not gained elsewhere. [ . . . ] At the very least, it gives a sense of what it is like to live in the United States now, and it occasions some inspired debate.

(Table of contents of mock-up made by designers)

This edition of the book reprints the following texts:

"From the Critique of Institutions to an Institution of Critique" by Andrea Fraser

"Eric Buell, Art Mover" in John Bowe, Marisa Bowe and Sabin Streeter, eds., Gig: Americans Talk About Their Jobs

"Boundary Issues: The Art World Under the Sign of Globalism" by Pamela M. Lee

"Itinerant Artists" by Miwon Kwon (excerpt from One Place After Another)

"Tent Community: On Art Fair Art" by Jack Bankowsky

"American Mutt Barks in the Yard" by David Barringer (excerpt)

"Was ist Los?" by Seth Price

"When Procedures Become Market Tools," Johanna Burton and Isabelle Graw in conversation

"New Live Queer Art" by Matt Wolf

"Renigged" by Hamza Walker

"Sublime Humility" by Paul Chan

"When Thought Becomes Crime" by the Critical Art Ensemble

"Startling and Effective: Writing Art and Politics After 9/11" by Alan Gilbert

"The State, Spectacle, and September 11" by Retort (excerpt from Afflicted Powers)

"Torture Culture: Lynching Photographs and the Images of Abu Ghraib" by Dora Apel

"Notes from New York" by Molly Nesbit

Trisha Donnelly, 2006

Also from our introduction: "The present volume is not a ‘portrait of the exhibition’s artists in text’ (an early, and mightily optimistic, vision). Nor is it a top-down survey of all that is novel and noteworthy in today’s art world. Cognisant of this exhibition’s ambitious modus operandi, to represent ‘a “new” vision in American contemporary art,’ we realize, of course, that some may view this publication as nothing but such a list, a currency-enhancing invocation of already-prevalent curatorial/critical interests. And we understand that such a publication indelibly sanctifies its content, that it operates as a value filter or, as Isabelle Graw observes in these pages, a ‘“sound bite” in order to underline claims for art historical importance or theoretical erudition’. Yet it is our underlying hope that this Reader belies such a roll-call of erudite endorsements, and that its contents engage audiences in unanticipated and fundamentally informative manners."

So, I hope that if your travels take you to London or wherever else this volume may be sold, you'll consider looking it over and purchasing a copy. I'll be sure to post a notice when the expanded version is available later this autumn.

UPDATE, 9/12: Adrian Searle reviews the exhibition in the Guardian:

The overall tenor is sophisticated, charmless, disaffected and at times deliberately damaged. The collision of artists and works is also often incomprehensible. The pile-up of stuff might be, in part, collaborative, but the effect is merely wearying, a sub-Kippenberger-ish turn-off. [ . . . ] But does any of this tell us very much about America? To coincide with the exhibition, the Serpentine is publishing The Uncertain States of America Reader, a number of recent essays on art theory, the art market, 9/11, Abu Ghraib and the war on terror.

But the book has more heft than most of the art in the show. In the end there's too much here that is silly, opaque and, to be honest, immature. How seriously should we take Uncertain States of America?

Well, at least he says something nice about the book, if you consider "heft" a good quality in a reader. Phew.

Posted in Art, Books. Found always via this permanent link.

September 6, 2006

One last Sontag collection, and more books coming early next year

I had heard rumors that FSG was to publish one last Sontag essay collection, and the Winter 2007 catalogue, which arrived in my office mailbox over the weekend, has proof. It arrives in February (January according to the FSG website, January 23 according to Amazon), will be 224 pages, and is called At the Same Time: Essays and Speeches:

"A writer is someone who pays attention to the world," Susan Sontag said in her 2003 acceptance speech for the Peace Prize of the German Book Trade, and no one exemplified this definition more than she. Sontag’s incisive intelligence, expressive brilliance, and deep curiosity about art, politics, and the writer’s responsibility to bear witness have secured her place as one of the most important thinkers and writers of the twentieth century. At the Same Time gathers sixteen essays and addresses written in the last years of Sontag’s life, when her work was being honored on the international stage, that reflect on the personally liberating nature of literature, her deepest commitment, and on political activism and resistance to injustice as an ethical duty. She considers the works of writers from the little-known Soviet novelist Leonid Tsypkin, who struggled and eventually succeeded in publishing his only book days before his death; to the gre