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.

Ada Louise Huxtable on architectural follies

In Thursday's Wall Street Journal, architecture critic Ada Louise Huxtable discusses Frank Gehry's proposal for this summer's Serpentine Gallery pavilion and Jørn Utzon's Sydney Opera House, which is to be refurbished, as two types of architectural folly. In between the discussion she inserts these two paragraphs:

I am constantly asked if architecture is an art, and the desire seems to be less for enlightenment than for denial. The idea has never been popular with anyone but the architects themselves, who are always seeking to extend their aesthetic boundaries. The virtue of a folly is that it provides the freedom to explore without rules. Mr. Gehry's sensibilities are as sculptural as they are structural, and although some find the union disturbing in the way it transcends accepted definitions, he makes legitimate, brilliant architecture of the alliance. And yes, it is art, and there is no great architecture without it.

Clueless value engineers who define design as dollars (they will all get their due in some bean-counters' hell) do their best to remove the art from architecture, but you can't take the artist out of the architect. Le Corbusier painted. Richard Meier makes sculpture. Michael Graves is a fine colorist and collagist. Steven Holl designs in delicate watercolors. Frank Lloyd Wright called architecture the mother of the arts. All art is the product of an innate, visceral sense of balance, proportion, form and line, a feeling for surface, texture, color and contrast, an understanding of materials and their expressive potential that cannot be taught. The architect alone has the ability to visualize space multidimensionally and in scale; only the architect has mastered the complexity of its uses and interactions. But this is an art that must serve and satisfy real programs, costs and needs; it must engage with the real world. In the lovely, useless folly, art trumps reality for a moment of pure delight.

To read the rest, click here.

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

May 15, 2008

A positive development

It was with great pleasure that I discovered Wyatt Mason's new blog, Sentences, on the Harper's website. Mason has in recent years become one of my favorite literary critics, and his first two posts, on Josiah Mitchell Morse and a historical precedent for the subtitle of Martin Amis's new essay collection, give me reason to hope this will become one of the better literary blogs on the web.

Posted in Around the web, 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.

May 13, 2008

Adrian Searle on Richard Serra in Paris

Guardian art critic Adrian Searle visits the Grand Palais to see Richard Serra's exhibition in that venue's new "Monumenta" series of solo exhibition. An excerpt:

How sudden and decisive these steel plates feel, as if they had been stabbed into the concrete floor the moment we walked in. It takes a while to apprehend how mysteriously they choreograph the space, and our movements through it. As much as Serra deals with gravity, mass, weight, presence, a sense of the commanding and the impending, he also deals with duration, mental space and the unfolding of the physical experience in time and distance. But with the midday sun streaming through the roof, the whole space is a dazzle of light and shadow. It is difficult at first to comprehend what I am looking at: the walls, the floor and Serra's steel planes are zebra-striped in a camouflage of light and shadow. It feels like being trapped inside the gears of a solar clock. The iron art nouveau stairs and balcony writhe on one side. Later in the afternoon, when the sun is off the roof, the tension between the sculptural elements and the building reveal themselves and intensify. The skin of oxide on the milled corten steel softens to a grayish purplish glow. People down the other end of the building seem tiny, like the far-off figures in a Canaletto. Somewhere on the floor, dancers are rehearsing. Couples amble or walk apart pensively. Parents take photos of infants propped against tons of steel. Voices echo from far away.

The piece rambles on, with a quote from Serra about "when Obama becomes president," mentions the New Museum's "Unmonumental exhibition," and discusses how Searle's relationship to Serra's art has changed as he aged. To read the rest, click here.

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

May 12, 2008

From a 1957 profile of Pablo Picasso

On the website of The Atlantic, the editors have made available a July 1957 profile of Pablo Picasso written by Carlton Lake, then the Paris art critic for the Christian Science Monitor. It is part of their "Flashbacks" series, and is paired with other engagements with the artist and his work. An excerpt:

We passed into a large salon. The ceiling was well over fifteen feet high. Facing me, on the other side of the room, were floor-to-ceiling glass doors overlooking a terrace and gardens. The room itself and another, somewhat smaller, to my left, were filled with the same kind of overflowing accumulation of Picasso's work that I had encountered as soon as I crossed the threshold into the hall. It seemed a little bit like playing Ali Baba in modern dress. My eyes were racing from one corner to another trying to take it all in at once. Then I heard Jacqueline say, "Et voici Picasso." I turned and, across a distance of perhaps two feet, found myself looking down into Picasso's eyes -- as bright and penetrating as ever. He looked vigorous yet relaxed, and a long way from seventy-five. He was wearing saffron-colored duck slacks and a burgundy woolen shirt with a dark-brown sleeveless sweater over it; on his feet, a pair of canvas espadrilles. He led me into the dining room to our right, pulled up a chair for me near the head of the table, then settled his wiry, rugged little frame into a wicker seat beside me. Jacqueline sat down on the other side of him, facing me and completing a kind of semicircle. Picasso lighted a cigarette and looked over at me.

"Well," he said with a grin, "you've got me. Now what are you going to do with me?"

The profile is a long, informal, engaging read; there are many personal details. To read the rest, click here. To see the other articles in this "Flashback," here.

Posted in From the Archives, Papers & Periodicals. Found always via this permanent link.

Weekend notes

- Arthur Danto's essay "Unlovable," in the May 26 issue of The Nation, discusses the 2008 Whitney Biennial:

There has been oddly little excitement, let alone controversy, surrounding the Whitney Biennial this year. No one told me that it must be seen, no one said how awful it was. People wondered if the show had become obsolete, especially in late March, when Europeans thronged to New York City to see the Armory show and its galaxy of satellite art fairs--Pulse, Red Dot, Bridge, Scope New York and the rest. Why would anyone leave the glitter of these seductive displays to visit what was generally understood to be a drab exhibition that billed itself as a survey of where American art stands today? In any case, there would be plenty of American artists at the fairs who had already made the cut at one commercial gallery or another. I knew but a small handful of the eighty-one artists listed in the Whitney's press release, and few of those I did know were near the top of my list of favorites. (Some of them were near the top of my list of artists to be avoided when possible.) I could tell that this was mainly to be a show of "emerging artists"--the kind sought by enterprising collectors, funding agencies, younger curators and galleries out to make a name for themselves. Since the fairs were full of emerged, emerging and about to emerge artists, many just hatched from their MFA shows, it was hard to figure out what could be special or different about Biennial 2008.

- Dan Barber, chef of Blue Hill and Blue Hill at Stone Barns, contributed an editorial to yesterday's New York Times titled "Change We Can Stomach":

For decades, environmentalists and small farmers have claimed that this is several kinds of madness. But industrial agriculture has simply responded that if we’re feeding more people more cheaply using less land, how terrible can our food system be?

Now that argument no longer holds true. With the price of oil at more than $120 a barrel (up from less than $30 for most of the last 50 years), small and midsize nonpolluting farms, the ones growing the healthiest and best-tasting food, are gaining a competitive advantage. They aren’t as reliant on oil, because they use fewer large machines and less pesticide and fertilizer.

In fact, small farms are the most productive on earth. A four-acre farm in the United States nets, on average, $1,400 per acre; a 1,364-acre farm nets $39 an acre.

- For those of you who read George F. Will's review of Rick Perlstein's new book, Nixonland, you may be interested to see a long excerpt that was published in the April-May Bookforum.

- Bill McKibben has published an editorial announcing his new 350.org campaign at TomDispatch.com:

There's a number -- a new number -- that makes this point most powerfully. It may now be the most important number on Earth: 350. As in parts per million (ppm) of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.

A few weeks ago, our foremost climatologist, NASA's Jim Hansen, submitted a paper to Science magazine with several co-authors. The abstract attached to it argued -- and I have never read stronger language in a scientific paper -- "if humanity wishes to preserve a planet similar to that on which civilization developed and to which life on earth is adapted, paleoclimate evidence and ongoing climate change suggest that CO2 will need to be reduced from its current 385 ppm to at most 350 ppm."

[...]

A few of us have just launched a new campaign, 350.org. Its only goal is to spread this number around the world in the next 18 months, via art and music and ruckuses of all kinds, in the hope that it will push those post-Kyoto negotiations in the direction of reality.

- In the Washington Post Book World, Michael Dirda reviewed Albert Camus's Notebooks, 1951–1959.

- There was a profile of Vanessa Beecroft, loosely pegged to the new documentary about her attempt to adopt Sudanese twins, in last week's Los Angeles Times Magazine.

- "Measure for Measure," an essay by Jonathan Gottschall in the Boston Globe Ideas section, argues "literary criticism could be one of our best tools for understanding the human condition. But first, it needs a radical change: embracing science." I disagree with its content fairly vehemently, which is one reason why it's worth reading.

- Lastly, photographs of a lightning-streaked thunderstorm intersecting with the ash in the sky above the Chaitén volcano, in Chile. When I saw this, all I could think of was Ghostbusters: "Zuuuuuuuull......"

Posted in Around the web, Papers & Periodicals. Found always via this permanent link.

May 8, 2008

Katy Siegel interviews Richard Shiff

The Brooklyn Rail has published an interview with art historian and critic Richard Shiff by his onetime student, Katy Siegel. There are many interesting passages, among them this discussion of the relationship between art history and art criticism:

Rail: What are the issues at stake when a historian becomes a critic? Reading your essay about using art criticism to build a historical narrative, “On Criticism Handling History,” was the thing that made me want to be an art historian, but now the formula seems more pressing when reversed. So many historians have begun to dabble in the contemporary, but oddly don’t seem to bring historical skill or perspectives to the task.

Shiff: If my writing on living artists has a distinctive character, it would be for two reasons (no doubt shared with at least some other writers, but probably not many)—first, I’ve always got the long view of history in mind and probably see better than most of my peers that a great deal of what goes on now isn’t particularly unprecedented or innovative (the nineteenth century had its share of people who took a postmodernist stance toward the fundamentals of modernist practice—for every true believer, there was an ironic deconstructionist, but they didn’t have the word then). At the same time, I would fault many of my contemporaries for romanticizing the present by seeing it through moments of past history. They either understand the past era better, or, more likely, have simply romanticized it by identifying it with a figure they wish were right beside them in the present time. Walter Benjamin is a critical writer I myself admire for his remarkable acumen, but I wouldn’t apply his politics to the politics of our own time—it won’t work.

Rail: I am very interested in what you say about the way your peers think about the past and see the present through romantic versions of certain past moments. This seems particularly true about 1968. Could you talk a bit about that?

Shiff: The ideas of 1960s radical groups will not work now, so we have to be careful about how much we romanticize 1968. Yet, because significant elements of the social structures associated with modernity may not have changed all that much over the past two hundred years, understanding art of a century ago or two centuries ago helps us to discern what’s truly different about now and what isn’t. I don’t need to translate our time now into the Paris of 1914, the Berlin of 1939, or the Paris of 1968 just to function as a historically sensitive critic. Some of my peers seem to be in the habit of transposing historical moments, oversimplifying what they see as the social and political crises of the relatively recent past. They seem to think that history repeats itself. I don’t.

Rail: People are still talking about the “failure of utopia” and the “disappointments of modernism” as if events of the ‘20s and ‘30s are still uppermost in the minds of thirty-year-old artists. How do we connect our history to the past without mistaking it for the present? Do we in fact need to connect to the past?

Shiff: It seems pointless to note the failure to attain some kind of social utopia if the critic does no more than denounce the implied utopian promises of certain forms of art. Those promises tended to be made by critical interpreters more than by artists, so, at the very least, let’s not hold the artists and their art responsible for political fantasies that were the creation of the writers who were promoting the art. And, of course, a technique or an image that had a certain connotative value in the past may have a very different one now. A critic ought to be sufficiently sensitive to history to identify which aspects of traditional practice are being resisted, ignored, or actively discarded. Do techniques, subjects, and aesthetic attitudes change because the needs they once served no longer exist, or do they change because of an overriding ideological principle, such as (obviously) change for the sake of change? This can be a fruitful path of questioning but you can’t proceed down it if you have little understanding of the dynamics of past art within its own society.

Shiff goes on to discuss his new book, Doubt, what distinguishes artists, critics, and historians, the trouble with theory, the "tychic" element in reading and writing, and much else besides. To read the rest, click here.

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

May 4, 2008

Wendell Berry, "Faustian Economics"

I'm making my way through the new Harper's slowly, and only today read Wendell Berry's essay, titled "Faustian Economics." I encourage everyone who can access it to do so and read it. His call for an end to human exceptionalism, our insistent, delusional belief in the limitlessness of resources, is both urgent and compelling. That he also manages to put in a plug for the ways of thinking fostered by the arts is an additional benefit. Two excerpts:

If the idea of appropriate limitation seems unacceptable to us, that may be because, like Marlow's Faustus and Milton's Satan, we confuse limits with confinement. But that, as I think Marlow and Milton and others were trying to tell us, is a great and potentially a fatal mistake. Satan's fault, as Milton understood it and perhaps with some sympathy, was precisely that he could not tolerate his proper limitation; he could not subordinate himself to anything whatever. Faustus's error was his unwillingness to remain "Faustus, and a man." In our age of the world it is not rare to find writers, critics, and teachers of literature, as well as scientists and technicians, who regard Satan's and Faustus's defiance as salutary and heroic.

On the contrary, our human and earthly limits, properly understood, are not confinements but rather inducements to formal elaboration and elegance, to fullness of relationship and meaning. Perhaps our most serious cultural loss in recent centuries is the knowledge that some things, though limited, are inexhaustible. For example, an ecosystem, even that of a working forest or farm, so long as it remains ecologically intact, can provide opportunities of work and learning, and a fund of beauty, solace, and pleasure—in addition to its difficulties—that cannot be exhausted in a lifetime or in generations.

And:

It is the artists, not the scientists, who have dealt unremittingly with the problem of limits. A painting, however large, must finally be bounded by a frame or a wall. A composer or playwright must reckon, at a minimum, with the capacity of an audience to sit still and pay attention. A story, once begun, must end somewhere within the limits of the writer's and the reader's memory. And of course the arts characteristically impose limits that are artificial: the five acts of a play, or the fourteen lines of a sonnet. Within these limits artists achieve elaborations of pattern, of sustaining relationships of parts with one another and with the whole, that may be astonishingly complex. And probably most of us can name a painting, a piece of music, a poem or play or story that still grows in meaning and remains fresh after many years of familiarity.

To read the rest (the link may be subscriber-only), click here.

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

May 2, 2008

Joan Acocella on New Yorkers

The April issue of Smithsonian magazine carries a "travel" piece about New Yorkers by New Yorker critic Joan Acocella, author of the excellent essay collection Twenty-Eight Artists and Two Saints (among other books). An excerpt:

The other day I was in the post office when a man in line in front of me bought one of those U.S. Postal Service boxes. Then he moved down the counter a few inches to assemble his package while the clerk waited on the next person. But the man soon discovered that the books he wanted to mail were going to rattle around in the box, so he interrupted the clerk to tell her his problem. She offered to sell him a roll of bubble wrap, but he told her that he had already paid $2.79 for the box, and that was a lot for a box—he could have gotten a box for free at the liquor store—and what was he going to do with a whole roll of bubble wrap? Carry it around all day? The clerk shrugged. Then the man spotted a copy of the Village Voice on the counter and laid hold of it to use it for stuffing. "No!" said the clerk. "That's my Voice." Annoyed, the man put it back and looked around helplessly. Now a woman in line behind me said she'd give him the sections of her New York Times that she didn't want, and she began going through the paper. "Real estate? You can have real estate. Sports? Here, take sports." But the real estate section was all the man needed. He separated the pages, stuffed them in the box and proceeded to the taping process (interrupting the clerk once again). Another man in line asked the woman if he could have the sports section, since she didn't want it. She gave it to him, and so finally everything was settled.

This was an interesting show, to which you could have a wide range of reactions. Why didn't the box man bring some stuffing? If the clerk hadn't finished her Village Voice, why did she leave it on the counter? And so on. In any case, the scene sufficed to fill up those boring minutes in line—or, I should add, to annoy the people who just wanted to read their newspaper in peace instead of being exposed to the man's postal adventure. I won't say this could happen only in New York, but I believe that the probability is much greater here.

Why are New Yorkers like this? It goes against psychological principles. Psychologists tell us that the more stimuli people are bombarded with, the more they will recede into themselves and ignore others. So why is it that New Yorkers, who are certainly confronted with enough stimuli, do the opposite? I have already given a few possible answers, but here's one more: the special difficulties of life in New York—the small apartments, the struggle for a seat on the bus or a table at a restaurant—seem to breed a sense of common cause.

To read the rest, which is gentle and entertaining, click here.

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

April 30, 2008

Natalie Zemon Davis on Michel de Certeau

Natalie Zemon Davis, professor of history emeritus at Princeton and professor of medieval studies at the University of Toronto, has published a long consideration of Michel de Certeau's thought and life in the new issue of the New York Review of Books. She usefully contrasts Certeau with Michel Foucault and Joseph Ratzinger and, though the piece seems truncated at the end, it provides a good general-interest introduction to the French Jesuit scholar who is perhaps better known in the US for his book The Practice of Everyday Life than his writings on religion.

Especially important in the 1960s were the changes instituted by Vatican II. The once-proscribed Henri de Lubac was summoned by Pope John XXIII to have a leading part in the council; Joseph Ratzinger attended the sessions and wrote approvingly of the Church's new openness to the laity and even to "elements of sanctification" outside the Church itself (to quote the phrase from the council's text Lumen gentium). From Paris, Certeau responded more radically. For him the reforms endorsed by the council were a creative "rupture" with the unbending hierarchical patterns of the past. They called for "multiple languages of faith" to express people's experience instead of remote clerical language. In his view, Vatican II should lead the Church to immerse itself fully in all the issues of the modern world and to recognize how much it still had to learn about these issues—about war and violence, about birth control, and what went on in the city streets and in the press and television.

And:

Jesus Christ, Certeau argued, is the central figure, the Other, present but also absent; his coming and death founded Christianity, but the signifying event is not the crucifixion but the empty tomb; "the 'follow me' [of Jesus] comes from a voice which has been effaced, forever irrecoverable." Still the Christian wants to believe, Certeau said; wants to take the risk and follows a way to Christ; but the character of the Christian life must be understood according to historical circumstances. In the secularized world of the late twentieth century, with nonreligious structures dominating everywhere, Certeau argued, Church institutions alone could not be the site for Christian intervention in the world. In fact, Christian belief and practices could no longer be associated with a place, or even with a single social milieu like "the poor," but could be only an uncharted path, a wandering, without power: the person, armed with the "weakness of faith," tries always to make space for others and to open closed systems to difference and plurality. One printed version of his radio debate with Domenach quotes Certeau as exclaiming, "Christianity is something particular in the totality of history.... It cannot speak in the name of the entire universe."

To read the rest, click here.

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

April 24, 2008

"1968: Liberty or Its Illusion"?

In Prospect magazine, a symposium on the legacy of May 1968:

Many 68ers now feel ambivalent about their heritage. Was too much of value discarded? Were the hippies just carriers of a new strain of capitalism? What was the silent majority thinking?

The symposium features contributions from Brian Appleyard, Geoff Dyer, Timothy Garton Ash, Anthony Giddens, Michael Ignatieff, Pico Iyer, PJ O'Rourke, Roger Scruton, Slavoj Zizek, and more than two dozen others.

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

April 22, 2008

New Paris Review: Interview with Leonard Michaels

After dinner last night, I stopped by my favorite newsstand north of Chicago to purchase the new issue of Granta (see my Sunday evening post below). It hadn't arrived yet, however, so instead I bought the spring issue of the Paris Review. The issue contains a "lost" interview with Leonard Michaels, conducted in 1986 and published now for the first time. The magazine's website has a brief excerpt from the beginning of the discussion. I'll pick up where that passage leaves off:

Interviewer: In The Men's Club, did you find it difficult to get people out of the room? To turn from interior decoration, as Hemingway put it, to architecture?

Michaels: As I said, I found it too easy. My problem was less making a novel than in doing what I thought I'd achieved in short stories, so that my novel would have the virtues of a short story, just as a story should have the virtues of a poem. The density, the speed, and the sort of depth you can get in a short story, which I don't believe you see in most novels. The short story is less obligated to tell a great big lie about life.

Interviewer: A book is a big lie?

Michaels: I don't want to say that. I'm trying to get at something very particular. It's the idea that life is never apprehended with such fullness, and such consistency of feeling over a long period of time, as you typically find in novels. Maybe that's because novels want to tell you how to live, but people only live from one day to the next. They don't generally care about this great apprehension of the flow of things. They aren't so acquisitive of sheer being, so devouring. But that is what one tends to take away from a novel, this sort of accumulation, or experience of accumulation, that is not available in life itself. Dickens, for example, is a mighty genius. I'll praise him forever, but I prefer Kafka. He doesn't eat the world. How one lives is a matter of breeding, says Aristotle. Novels arrive too late for most of us.

I like pithy writers—collections of pensées—Kafka's diaries, Valéry's Analecta, La Rochefoucauld's Maxims, the reflections on art and life of Max J. Friedlander, many of Montaigne's essays, Leopardi's Zibaldone. There are two-page stories by Babel that are worth more than the complete works of other writers, just as there are a few poems by George Herbert worth more than all of Swinburne, not that I've read all of Swinburne or could, even with a gun to my head. On the other hand, The Sentimental Education, a long novel, is one of the best books I've ever read, and I'm also crazy about Clarissa and Wuthering Heights.

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

April 21, 2008

Foreign Policy's Top 100 Public Intellectuals

In its May-June issue, Foreign Policy has teamed up with Prospect magazine to compile a list of the world's top 100 public intellectuals. Here's a post from FP's wonderful blog, Passport, explaining how you can vote for your own top five; and here's a link to the list itself. The criteria is quite simple—the editors seem to have chosen subjectively, rather than attempt any algorithm for calculating public influence (as did Richard A. Posner, who made the FP list, in his 2001 book Public Intellectuals: A Study of Decline). Christopher Hitchens has written an essay "on the burdens and pleasures of making a living by ideas in our modern age," but it is only available to subscribers.

The editors' attempt to seek out those with public influence is ratified by my own experience as a reader: Despite the fact that many of these intellectuals specialize in fields in which I have little specific interest, in the past three years I've read articles, read books, or attended lectures by approximately two-thirds of those who made it.

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

Poussin: Two writers, two ledes

A week or so ago, The New Republic published Jed Perl's review of the Nicolas Poussin exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Now T.J. Clark has written a review, for the London Review of Books, of that exhibition and the simultaneous Gustave Courbet retrospective. Both are worth reading, and both have rapturous ledes. Here's Perl:

"Poussin and Nature: Arcadian Visions," at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, takes us deeper into the inexhaustibly complex relationship between nature and culture than any other exhibition I have ever seen. When Nicolas Poussin sets men and women amid vast landscapes, he is reflecting on our experience of the natural world, and nobody has more beautifully woven together sensation and imagination, instinct and intelligence, freedom and design. There is a curiously pungent juxtaposition of naturalistic immediacy and pictorial artifice in Poussin's landscapes, whether he is representing a darkly luxuriant tree, a placid lake, a cloud-strewn sky, an elegantly designed city, or a handsome Ovidian hero. Somehow, the immediacy and the artifice reinforce each other. The paintings are finally about our struggles to understand what we feel, to objectify the subjectivity of our experience. Poussin's admirers will not be surprised to see this seventeenth-century artist who is often pigeonholed as a chilly classicist re-framed as something of a romantic. What most people are going to be unprepared for is the big-heartedness of his vision as it is revealed in this epochal show.

Here's Clark:

Once or twice in a lifetime, if you are lucky, the whole madness of painting seems to pass in front of your eyes. It felt that way to me in New York this spring, in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, where two great exhibitions – one exploring Nicolas Poussin’s role in the invention of the genre we call ‘landscape’, the other an endless, stupendous retrospective of Gustave Courbet – are happening a few corridors apart. I stumbled to and fro between them day after day, elated and disoriented. They sum up so much – too much – of what painting in Europe was capable of, and they embed that achievement so palpably in a certain history. Behind the glistening meadows and the huntsmen in the snow one catches the smell of autocracy and public burnings, of permanent warfare and bankers with impeccable taste.

Clark, of course, is the author of The Sight of Death, a book-length "experiment in art writing" about two paintings by Poussin. The Poussin exhibition remains on view until May 11, and the Courbet retrospective comes down May 18. For more information, click here.

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

April 20, 2008

New Granta, new website

This review in The Guardian tipped me off to the presence of the new issue of Granta, the first to be published under the direction of new editor Jason Cowley. "In his editor's letter, [Cowley] writes of broadening Granta's view - it will publish 'new writing in whichever form or genre it chooses'. It will be 'more internationalist', there will be more photography and more reportage." The magazine features a new design (by Graphic Thought Facility), and with it also comes a new website (by Apt). The latter is of particular interest, as it seems like it will publish a fair amount of online-only content. The next issue, due out this summer, is titled "The New Nature Writing." To return to the Guardian review of the current issue: "While there are failures - Granta should be strongest in new British fiction, so it seems odd that the offerings are all American, from Annie Proulx, Rick Moody and Joshua Ferris - Cowley has emerged from his trial with plenty to be proud of. He is offering a promising future for an important magazine."

Posted in Around the web, Papers & Periodicals. Found always via this permanent link.

Susan Jacoby op-ed in the Los Angeles Times

Susan Jacoby, author of the new book The Age of American Unreason, has published an op-ed in today's Los Angeles Times titled "Talking to Ourselves": "Whether watching television news, consulting political blogs or (more rarely) reading books, Americans today have become a people in search of validation for opinions that they already hold. This absence of curiosity about other points of view is the essence of anti-intellectualism and represents a major departure from the nation's best cultural traditions." She goes on to cite Richard Hofstadter, whose 1963 book Anti-Intellectualism in American Life is the major precedent for her recent work; discuss the debasement of political discourse and the proliferation of news media in the US; and compare media coverage of General Petraeus's recent Congressional testimony to the Senate Watergate hearings. To read the full essay, click here.

UPDATE, 4/21: On a related topic, Alan Ehrenhalt reviews Bill Bishop's new book, The Big Sort: Why the Clustering of Like-Minded America Is Tearing Us Apart, in Tuesday's Wall Street Journal. Here is the lede:

The more diverse America becomes, the more homogeneous it becomes.

No, that's not a misprint; it is the thesis of "The Big Sort," Bill Bishop's rich and challenging book about the ways in which the citizens of this country have, in the past generation, rearranged themselves into discrete enclaves that have little to say to one another and little incentive to bother trying. "As Americans have moved over the past three decades," Mr. Bishop proclaims, "they have clustered in communities of sameness, among people with similar ways of life, beliefs and in the end, politics."

To read the rest, click here.

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

April 17, 2008

"Detectives On the Trail of Photography's Origins"

From today's New York Times:

The phone call was routine, the kind often made before big auctions. Sotheby’s was preparing to sell a striking rust-brown image of a leaf on paper, long thought to have been made by William Henry Fox Talbot, one of the inventors of photography. So the auction house contacted a Baltimore historian considered to be the world’s leading Talbot expert and asked if he could grace the sale’s catalog with any interesting scholarly details about the print — known as a photogenic drawing, a crude precursor to the photograph.

“I got back to them and said, ‘Well, the first thing I would say is that this was not made by Talbot,’ ” the historian, Larry J. Schaaf, recalled in a recent interview.

“That was not what they were expecting to hear, to say the least.”

In the weeks since Dr. Schaaf’s surprising pronouncement was made public, “The Leaf,” originally thought to have been made around 1839 or later, has become the talk of the photo-historical world. The speculation about its origins became so intense that Sotheby’s and the print’s owners decided earlier this month to postpone its auction, so that researchers could begin delving into whether the image may be, in fact, one of the oldest photographic images in existence, dating to the 1790s.

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

April 16, 2008

Wesley Yang on Seung-Hui Cho and David Samuels

Today is the one-year anniversary of the school shooting at Virginia Tech, during which Seung-Hui Cho killed thirty-two people and wounded others before committing suicide. Perhaps the most compelling piece of writing to yet emerge in response to that tragedy is Wesley Yang’s essay “The Face of Seung-Hui Cho,” published in n+1 issue six. An excerpt is available online; in the piece as a whole, Yang analyzes not only Cho’s actions but also, intriguingly, empathizes with the killer’s plight as an awkward, unloved Asian-American boy. It is a sober, balanced, and daring essay. I had wondered where I would next see Yang’s byline, and today encountered his review in the New York Sun of David Samuels’s The Runner.

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

April 15, 2008

W.J.T. Mitchell on Errol Morris's new film

In its May issue, Harper's has published a long and thoughtful review by W.J.T. Mitchell of Errol Morris's new film, Standard Operating Procedure (the link is to the Sony Classics site for the film). An excerpt:

The unauthorized, illegal, and unsuccessfully suppressed amateur photos taken by G.I.'s in Abu Ghraib prison are what remain as the icons of Operation Iraqi Freedom.

This fact cannot be explained by forensic methods, a shortfall made clear by Morris's own research into the mystery of the Hooded Man, misidentified by the New York Times as Ali Shalal Qaissi—called "Clawman" by the G.I.'s—on March 11, 2006. Morris used his New York Times blog post, "Will the Real Hooded Man Please Stand Up," of August 15, 2007, to clarify matters. In preparing to film Standard Operating Procedure, Morris had discovered (along with many other researchers) that the Hooded Man was actually Abdou Hussain Saad Faleh, nicknamed "Gilligan." Morris derives a lesson about photography from this; namely, "the central role that photography itself played in the mistaken identification, and the way that photography lends itself to those errors and may even engender them." It is as if photographs, by virtue of the authority we grant them, compounded with our own prejudices and preconceptions, "attract false beliefs—as fly-paper attracts flies."

Morris's skeptical deconstruction drew seventy-four responses, most of them sympathetic. Dozens of hypotheses were tried out and debated by the puzzle-loving insomniac readers of the Times website over the next few weeks. As the discussion proceeded, however, this kind of search for the "deep truth" behind the photographs began to run into a wall of resistance. Respondents pointed out that the whole search for the truth behind the photograph was missing a much larger point: that the actual identity of the Hooded Man is irrelevant to the power of the image. In fact, one might put it even more strongly and insist that it is precisely the anonymity of the Hooded Man that is the key to the power of the image.

The referent of a photograph, the real object or event "captured" by it, is not the same as the meaning it my acquire as a cultural icon. This meaning can be understood only by looking carefully at the photograph as a formal and iconographic entity, and by tracing its reception among viewers. If the sole photograph of the Hooded Man were the one taken from the side by [Sabrina] Harman, it would not be one of the most famous images in the world today. It is the frontal perspective and the symmetry of the figure that provide the formal conditions for its power. The question, then, is not "Who is the Hooded Man?" but (to paraphrase James Agee on Walker Evans) Who are you who will study this photograph, and what is your responsibility for it, and what will you do about it?

Mitchell goes on to assert that "Morris's reconstruction of [the conditions that surrounded the production of the images] will ... launch a whole new set of more deeply informed reflections on the meaning of Abu Ghraib...." To read the whole article, click here (you may need to be a subscriber for full access).

UPDATE, 4/17: More on the film from Variety deputy editor Anne Thompson.

UPDATE, 4/21: A bevy of links to discussion of the film has been posted to GreenCine Daily.

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

April 14, 2008

An interview with Tad Friend

MediaBistro's "So What Do You Do?" series occasionally snags interesting interview subjects, and this week's respondent is the New Yorker's Tad Friend. An excerpt:

How many people do you typically interview for a profile?

For a long piece, I probably have 60 to 100 conversations.

Are you serious? Wow. And a lot of that is just background -- people you're not even going to quote?

Yeah, a lot of it. I over-report so that I feel confident, when I sit down to write, that I know what I'm talking about. That confidence may be misplaced, of course, but I need to feel it. We have a bit of a luxury at The New Yorker in that you can take some time -- two to three months -- with certain kinds of stories and try to be authoritative.

How do you figure out who to talk to?

At the end of an interview, I always say, "Who else should I talk to?" And then they tell you two people and then those people tell you two people, and at a certain point everyone's telling you the same people you've already talked to and you think, "OK, I've kind of got it." Or everyone's telling you things you already know, which is comforting. You could probably write a profile that's three-quarters as good about two weeks in, but I like the feeling of knowing more, of giving myself more choices and collecting the little nuance-y details that encourage the reader to relax and trust you as a guide and companion. There is also the possibility that I'm just neurotic.

(Link via Emdashes)

Posted in Around the web, Papers & Periodicals. 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.

April 7, 2008

This week's reason why I won't let my New Yorker subscription lapse

What other publication caters to my both of my esoteric interests—contemporary art and early American history—in a single issue? This week's New Yorker features Peter Schjeldahl on Takashi Murakami at the Brooklyn Museum and Jill Lepore on the founders' attitude toward religion.

First, Schjeldahl:

My favorite part of “©Murakami,” a retrospective at the Brooklyn Museum of the juggernautish Japanese artist-entrepreneur Takashi Murakami, was the most controversial element in the show when it originated, at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, last October: a functioning Louis Vuitton outlet, smack in the middle of things, selling aggressively pricey handbags and other bibelots, all Murakami-designed. (Vuitton has reportedly done hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of business in Murakamiana since its deal with the artist began, in 2003.) The shop is lovely. Shelving units in chrome and white enamel, with recessed fluorescent lighting that sets brass fittings on the merchandise aglint, caress the eye. They provide a haven from the strident grotesquerie of what might be termed Murakami’s fine-art product lines: paintings, sculpture, and wallpapered environments that play off the charms of Japanese traditional and popular arts with close to no charm of their own. But, then, retail swank is an aesthetic lingua franca today, and equations of art and commerce, pioneered by Andy Warhol and colonized by Jeff Koons, among others, are, at least, familiar. The show’s less cozy aspects remind me that I have never been to Japan. I don’t like Murakami’s work, but my dislike, being moody, feels out of scale with the artist’s terrific energy and ambition. For the second time in a couple of months—the first being at the Guggenheim retrospective of the meteoric Chinese festivalist Cai Guo-Qiang—New Yorkers have a chance to absorb our new geo-spiritual fate, as provincials in a world of creative paradigms that no longer entreat our favor. That has to be good for us.

Now, Lepore:

On the subject of religious liberty in America, there are four indispensable, foundational texts: Jefferson’s 1786 statute (“Our civil rights have no dependence on our religious opinions, any more than our opinions in physics or geometry”); Madison’s 1785 “Memorial and Remonstrance Against Religious Assessments” (“The Religion of every man must be left to the conviction and conscience of every man”); Article VI of the Constitution (“No religious Test shall ever be required as a Qualification to any Office or public Trust under the United States”); and the First Amendment (“Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof”). These are at once statements of political philosophy and legal documents; philosophers argue about them within a specific intellectual tradition, and legal scholars read them to trace precedent. Martha Nussbaum takes both of these approaches in “Liberty of Conscience: In Defense of America’s Tradition of Religious Equality” (Basic; $28.95). But because these documents long ago rose to the status of American scripture, another way to read them is to conduct an exegesis, which is more or less what Garry Wills does in “Head and Heart: American Christianities” (Penguin; $29.95). Politicians tend to use them genealogically, naming their authors as forebears or, as the case may be, glaringly omitting them. (“My faith is the faith of my fathers,” Mitt Romney declared in a speech last December, skipping over Jefferson and Madison in favor of Brigham Young, John and Samuel Adams, and the seventeenth-century Puritan dissenter Roger Williams.) The legal, the exegetical, the genealogical—each centers on the Founding Fathers: What did they intend? What did they mean? What would they make of us?

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

Stanley Fish, "French Theory In America"

On the acceptance of the term deconstruction in mainstream American intellectual discourse:

It turned out, of course, that my conclusion was hasty and premature, for it was in the early ’90s that the culture wars went into high gear and the chief target of the neo-conservative side was this [French] theory that I thought had run its course. It became clear that it had a second life, or a second run, as the villain of a cultural melodrama produced and starred in by Allan Bloom, Dinesh D’Souza, Roger Kimball and other denizens of the right, even as its influence was declining in the academic precincts this crew relentlessly attacked.

It’s a great story, full of twists and turns, and now it has been told in extraordinary detail in a book to be published next month: “French Theory: How Foucault, Derrida, Deleuze, & Co. Transformed the Intellectual Life of the United States” (University of Minnesota Press).

The book’s author is Francois Cusset, who sets himself the tasks of explaining, first, what all the fuss was about, second, why the specter of French theory made strong men tremble, and third, why there was never really anything to worry about.

There's a whole lot more in "Think Again," Fish's New York Times blog.

UPDATE, 4/20: Scott McLemee discusses Francois Cusset's book in his weekly column, "Intellectual Affairs."

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

Michael Robertson, "Reading Whitman Religiously"

Michael Robertson, author of the just-published Worshipping Walt: The Whitman Disciples, has an essay in the current issue of The Chronicle Review on the nineteenth-century readers who considered Whitman a religious prophet as well as a poet:

Starting in the 1860s, Whitman attracted a diverse group of adherents who regarded him less as a great poet, an American successor to Wordsworth, than as a great spiritual leader, a successor to the Buddha and Jesus. John Burroughs, the 19th century's most popular nature writer, published two books and dozens of essays on Whitman, all with one central message: Whitman's "Leaves of Grass is primarily a gospel and is only secondarily a poem." Burroughs scoffed at the notion of classing Whitman with "minstrels and edifiers"; he belonged among the "prophets and saviours." Leaves of Grass offers "a religion to live by and to die by," according to Thomas Biggs Harned, a prominent attorney and one of Whitman's literary executors. "I can never think of Whitman as a mere literary man. He is a mighty spiritual force."

Those responses to Whitman may sound strange to 21st-century ears, trained by decades of aesthetically oriented criticism to ignore poetry's religious dimensions. However, in the 19th century, many readers were receptive to the concept of the poet-prophet.

Robertson discusses such figures as Anne Gilchrist, Richard Bucke, John Addington Symons, and J. W. Wallace.

Click here for the rest of the article, or here for the introduction to Robertson's book, which expands upon the subject.

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

April 6, 2008

Taylor Branch, "The Last Wish of Martin Luther King"

A quote from the civil-rights scholar Taylor Branch, in an New York Times:

Dr. King showed most profoundly that in an interdependent world, lasting power grows against the grain of violence, not with it. Both the cold war and South African apartheid ended to the strains of “We Shall Overcome,” defying all preparations for Armageddon. The civil rights movement remains a model for new democracy, sadly neglected in its own birthplace. In Iraq today, we are stuck on the Vietnam model instead. There is no more salient or neglected field of study than the relationship between power and violence.

We recoil from nonviolence at our peril. Dr. King rightly saw it at the heart of democracy. Our nation is a great cathedral of votes — votes not only for Congress and for president, but also votes on Supreme Court decisions and on countless juries. Votes govern the boards of great corporations and tiny charities alike. Visibly and invisibly, everything runs on votes. And every vote is nothing but a piece of nonviolence.

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

April 3, 2008

Herzog & Morris

The March/April issue of The Believer contains the transcription of a conversation between filmmakers Werner Herzog and Errol Morris conducted last autumn at Brandeis University. Click here to read it.

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

April 2, 2008

A survey of magazines

This week's New York Observer contains an overview of the state of magazines. As an employee of one publication and a subscriber to nearly two dozen others, I can't help but be interested. The profile of David Samuels is nice enough; the article full of anonymous quotes from young freelancers about the difficulty of their lives seems somewhat true to my own experience; the survey of magazine honchos about the future of the medium is pretty pathetic, and littered with exclamation marks. What is worth reading, however, is Choire Sicha's caustic portrait of Annie Leibovitz. Perhaps writing such a piece today is like shooting fish in a barrel, but at least he doesn't waste bullets.

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

March 25, 2008

"Edmund Wilson Among the 'Despicable English'"

I came across this essay by Isaiah Berlin while searching the New York Times for references to the historian Perry Miller. It begins:

I MET Edmund Wilson, I think, sometime in the early spring of 1946, after I had come back from Moscow to finish the job I was doing at the British Embassy in Washington. I had been in Washington during the war years, and my friend the Russian composer Nicolas Nabokov, who, like his cousin Vladimir, was a friend of Wilson's, thought that he might like to meet me (I had expressed my intense admiration for ''Axel's Castle'' and ''The Triple Thinkers'') and talk about Russian literature and other topics. Wilson refused. He was convinced that any British official could only want to meet him in order to rope him into the British propaganda machine. He was acutely isolationist: his Anglophobia, which in any case had been fairly acute, was increased by the reflection that England had once again managed to drag America into a dreadful and totally unnecessary war, and he had no wish to meet any representative of that country. However, once the war was over he evidently decided that he was no longer in any danger of being inveigled into pro-British activities, and asked me to lunch at the Princeton Club in New York.

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

Two articles on the state of language

Two articles discussing the state of language came to my attention yesterday. The first, "Euphemism and American Violence," by David Bromwich, Sterling Professor of English at Yale and the author of Hazlitt: The Mind of a Critic, decries the use of euphemism to cover over the realities of present-day violence. The article begins:

In Tacitus' Agricola, a Caledonian rebel named Calgacus, addressing "a close-packed multitude" preparing to fight, declares that Rome has overrun so much of the world that "there are no more nations beyond us; nothing is there but waves and rocks, and the Romans, more deadly still than these—for in them is an arrogance which no submission or good behavior can escape." Certain habits of speech, he adds, abet the ferocity and arrogance of the empire by infecting even the enemies of Rome with Roman self-deception:

A rich enemy excites their cupidity; a poor one, their lust for power. East and West alike have failed to satisfy them.... To robbery, butchery, and rapine, they give the lying name of "government"; they create a desolation and call it peace.

The frightening thing about such acts of renaming or euphemism, Tacitus implies, is their power to efface the memory of actual cruelties. Behind the façade of a history falsified by language, the painful particulars of war are lost. Maybe the most disturbing implication of the famous sentence "They create a desolation and call it peace" is that apologists for violence, by means of euphemism, come to believe what they hear themselves say.

The second, "Keeping a Civil Tongue," by the Korea-based scholar-critic B. R. Myers, analyzes why "language itself is losing its power to express moral disapproval" as part of a wider discussion of literary scholar Ian Robinson's work.

Both contain arguments that are worth considering.

Posted in 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.

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 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.)

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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.

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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.

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December 20, 2007

Alexandra Heifetz on independent bookstores

One definition of good criticism is that it reveals ideas that upon their disclosure seem to be self-evident. Such is the case with a review-essay by Alexandra Heifetz, managing editor of n+1, in that magazine’s winter 2008 issue. Discussing independent bookstores, Heifetz asserts:

Book Sense, a program launched by the American Booksellers Association in 2000, is probably the best-known of the cross-independent promotional tools mentioned in Reluctant Capitalists; it is certainly the most durable and dynamic. Paying-member bookstores get a website provided by the Booksense.com network. They are able to accept Book Sense gift certificates, which means that someone who votes “indie” can help a far-away friend make a purchase at the far-away friend’s local shop. In member stores, there are tables, shelves, or racks at the front displaying some of each month’s twenty Book Sense Picks, books which are also blurbed by participating independent booksellers in a free monthly newsletter and featured on the central website. The program has allowed the smallest new bookstores to open with an appearance of old-style handselling whether or not they have the inclination (or staff) to pick their favorites from the shelves. Major, established independents mix the Book Sense picks in with clerks’ favorites. Some tiny places let the Book Sense books stand alone.

What is strange about these “political” practices is that they may actually neutralize the uniqueness and independence of independents. Book Sense bookstores fight the good fight; but if you go to enough of the affiliates nationwide, you begin to see that the Book Sense aspect of them (except where it is downplayed, hidden, or mixed in with local choices) also creates a certain national homogeneity of taste, just the way the bigger corporations try to do. It pursues economic localism rather than the encouragement of a local or decentralized taste in books.

This seems to me true based upon my experiences in independent bookstores in Chicago, Boston, New York, Los Angeles, Toronto, and elsewhere. It is why I prefer Bookman’s Alley (in Evanston), the now-shuttered shop on Newbury Street (in Boston), Three Lives and Westsider (in New York), Family (in Los Angeles), and Ten Editions (in Toronto)—note that several of these stores do not have websites—to the somewhat larger, brighter, fresh-faced indies in each city. Heifetz nails something essential about this homogeneity with a later characterization of Book Sense taste: “The aggregate personality of Book Sense likes unsurprising, slightly literary novels and memoirs with a ‘universal’ hook, and thrillers and sci-fi with better than average prose. It skews in its choices toward titles from the big conglomerate New York publishers, while devoting significant room to occasional independent publishers.”

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

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 17, 2007

Dore Ashton on art criticism and the essay form

What I have noticed in the so-called postmodernist criticism is a marked tendency toward theory—not the ancient Greek notion of theoria, in which there is a suggestion of looking outward toward something, which after all is open—but the positing of a fixed structure to which all experiences must submit. We all know how many professional and academic writers title their works “The Work of Art and Society,” “The Work of Art and the Family,” “The Work of Art and the Gallery,” or “The Work of Art and the Elephant.” Such specificity in allusion is highly regarded. But not by me. Each person, as I see it, builds his own culture. He grasps materials according to his temperament, his background, his education, his own nature. In order to survive in a world of others, he knows he must acquire a knowledge of a number of things just because they are there. But in order to respire in a world of thought, he is always the hunter and the shaper, wielding both the bow and the lyre. The lyre, alas, has been repressed; in other words, the lyrical is usually derided. I can speak of my own case in which I have more than once been dismissed as an “impressionistic critic”—something quite expendable in my country. I often think of the definition of the lyrical poet given by a very logical and commonsensical thinker, John Stewart Mill. “The lyrical poet,” he said, “is not heard. He is overheard.”

I believe the best writing—or, if you prefer, criticism—about the visual arts is done by he who is explaining first to himself, and only then to the others. He asks himself why he responds so passionately to this or that painting or sculpture. I sympathize with artists who so often find the words about their works wanting. A painter, James McNeil Whistler, remarked: “A life passed among pictures makes not a painter—else the policeman in the National Gallery might assert himself.” Of course Whistler was an injured party, having been demeaned by a very famous critic, John Ruskin.

Read more at The Brooklyn Rail.

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

December 3, 2007

A talisman

Below is an excerpt from an interview between the curator Hans Ulrich Obrist and the artist David Robbins, published in the Summer 2007 issue of X-TRA. Robbins is discussing the advent of his Ice Cream Social project:

From the beginning of my involvement with art I was a man of pop theater, a TV kid, but I was articulating that theater via objects and images, in a context devoted to objects and images. I got the art context fundamentally wrong, and gradually built that misperception into an alternative to it. The visual art context is really designed for people who want to, or already do, seek to align their emotional and psychological lives with the neutrality of form, while theater more fully recognizes the narrative dimension of human life—tragedy and comedy. The art world is always suppressing the narrative line, looking for ways to take it out or play it down, to zero it out. I wanted a fuller embrace of the fact of narrative—we live, we die, there’s narrative—not in order to critique art but only because that position was more authentic to what I was interested in.

I was never a darling of the New York Times or of the Whitney—far from it, believe me—but there are many ways to have a career in the art world, many ways to have a valid history. Come to think of it, don’t you find it odd that whenever we think of an artist, in any field, who no longer appears active, we always think that it’s because they somehow “failed”? Really, isn’t it just as likely that they found not to their liking whatever system they were required to engage in order to get their work out—the system failed them, on the human level—and, in an act of maturity and self-possession, they moved on? Culture systems such as the art world may be all we have, but that doesn’t mean they’re good systems. From a certain perspective the art world is a deeply unhealthy network that brings out the worst in people. It’s too bad that the pursuit of beauty and knowledge should do that, but it does.

The more time I spent in the art context, the more uncomfortable I became with the faith-based dimension of it. I had to invent a way out, and into another kind of creativity.

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

September 25, 2007

On Gerhard Richter’s new cathedral window in Cologne

The invaluable website Sign and Sight has translated an article about Gerhard Richter’s new south transept window at the Cologne Cathedral. It is by Petra Kipphoff, was published in the Neue Zürcher Zeitung on September 13, and contains new-to-me information about Richter’s inspiration for the abstract design he eventually settled upon:

The cathedral architect's initial request came with the wish for a figurative motif. Not necessarily Joseph or the Virgin Mary, but maybe a modern martyr like Father Kolbe or Edith Stein. After a brief attempt Richter gave up the holy venture. In fact he would have returned the commission had he not accidentally, playfully, placed a template of the window's frame on a reproduction of one of his earlier colour field paintings. "I got a real shock," says Richter, "because it looked good, it was the only honest possibility."



There was more to it than meaning-resistant abstraction. The interplay of light and colour in the stained glass window also attracted Richter for its possibilities of new experience on old terrain. "The main problem of my painting is the light," he wrote back in 1964/65, by which he meant not the light of Impressionist plein-air painting but the instantaneous light of the photography that so often forms the basis for his paintings. From the early photos of family and friends to the sea and landscapes and the Baader-Meinhof cycle, light-generated photographs - preferably blurred and in the shades between grey and white - have provided the inspiration for Gerhard Richter's paintings. Only in the series of monochrome panels and the abstract works does light play no active role (here it is a matter of illumination rather than exposure). A stained-glass window, where the glass changes its coloration with the quality of the daylight, offers a new facet of this old theme that is the central issue.


Try this Flickr search for images of the window.

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

September 24, 2007

F. Scott Fitzgerald interview

I share a birthday with F. Scott Fitzgerald, who was born on this day in 1896. He happens to be among my favorite writers—I have read The Great Gatsby four times and This Side of Paradise twice (so far), and keep The Crack-Up at hand for regular browsing. Last week The Guardian published an excerpt of the author’s interview with Michel Mok, conducted on his fortieth birthday, September 24, 1936.

"A writer like me," he said, "must have an utter confidence, an utter faith in his star. It's an almost mystical feeling, a feeling of nothingcan- happen-to-me, nothing-can-harm-me, nothing-can-touch-me.

"Thomas Wolfe has it. Ernest Hemingway has it. I once had it. But through a series of blows, many of them my own fault, something happened to that sense of immunity and I lost my grip."

Morris Dickstein includes an essay on Fitzgerald, titled "The Authority of Failure," in his book A Mirror in the Roadway: Literature and the Real World. In it he describes the interview quoted above:

Into this picture [a time when Fitzgerald was publishing poignantly self-searching articles about his failure to take care of his talent] came a reporter for the New York Post, perhaps not so different from the Murdoch-driven paper it is today, a reporter with the ominous name of Michel Mok, to interview Scott for his fortieth birthday. There was a scent of blood in the water. Fitzgerald was under a nurse's care at an inn in Asheville, North Carolina, but he was still drinking, and the reporter described in wretched detail how he kept popping up for a thimbleful of gin from the makeshift bar, how his face twitched and hands shook as he described his life and made the usual drunkard's rationalizations.

The front page of the Post the next day told the whole story: "The Other Side of Paradise / F. Scott Fitzgerald, 40 / Engulfed in Despair / Broken in Health He Spends Birthday Re- / gretting That He Has Lost Faith in His Star." What had been eloquent if not wholly frank in Fitzgerald's own articles became pathetic in the tabloid version. Time picked up the story and gave it much wider currency. The effect on Fitzgerald was catastrophic. He thought he was ruined and took an overdose of morphine, but luckily vomited it up. He felt his credibility as a writer and a serious man was gone. The Post interview was perhaps the lowest point he reached in the decade, but it fixed his image as a washed-up, self-pitying writer, a miserable caretaker of his talent, the relic of a distant and unlamented era. (Even a decade later, when reviewers like Lionel Trilling wrote about The Crack-Up, Edmund Wilson's collection of his late friend's articles and letters, they would still point to the effects of the Post story on Fitzgerald's waning reputation.)

In a limited sense this image endures even today.

I agree with Dickstein that Fitzgerald's late writings are beautifully haunted by his "crack-up," and likewise hold up his 1932 essay "My Lost City" as an "emblem for this last phase of Fitzgerald's work." Its passage describing Fitzgerald's first ascent to the top of the then newly built Empire State Building is one of my favorites from his entire corpus:

Full of vaunting pride the New Yorker had climbed here and seen with dismay what he had never suspected, that the city was not the endless succession of canyons that he had supposed but that it had limits—from the tallest structure he saw for the first time that it faded out into the country on all sides, into an expanse of green and blue that alone was limitless. And with the awful realization that New York was a city after all and not a universe, the whole shining edifice that he had reared in his imagination came crashing to the ground.

Dickstein digs deep into this passage, but I'll let it stand. This will be today’s only post.

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

September 21, 2007

The Walrus on Lapham's Quarterly

The October 2007 issue of the Canadian magazine The Walrus—known