Archives for 2004

Some parts of the above are true….

My first retort is that just because your reviewers can’t think of anything to say doesn’t mean there’s nothing to be said…

Popular media can and does tell us a lot about ourselves as a culture. A good reviewer could easily find tropes of masculinity, or articulations of conservatism, in Tom Clancy, just as Anne Rice’s oeuvre has a lot to say about shifting attitudes towards gender and eroticism. Mysteries and thrillers reflect social attitudes about crime and punishment; George Pelecanos uses the genre as an effective instrument to talk about race relations as well.

I would only add that there is another, even more vital role to be played by smart reviews of dumb books: sending us into delirious fits of righteous laughter. Let me refer you to one of my all-time favorite reviews, which happens to fall into this category. It’s Lorin Stein writing two summers ago on The Emperor of Ocean Park in The London Review of Books:

Stephen L. Carter has written the kind of novel in which the bad guys say “very well” when they mean “OK”; in which the hero calls a visit from old friends “a delightfully rambunctious affair” and his rocky marriage a “tumultuous mutuality”; in which “homes” are “spacious,” jealousy “flames afresh” and eminent legal scholars spend dinner parties debating the existence of God. It is also the kind of novel–I am about to spoil the ending–in which the hero uncovers a vast conspiracy at the highest levels of government, resists the advances of a slinky assassin, faces down a gun-toting Supreme Court judge, and ends up getting promoted. The Emperor of Ocean Park is, in other words, an “airplane book,” as opposed to a “beach read”: it’s trash, but it’s Business Class trash, relentlessly high-toned, tastefully furnished and driven by a Rube Goldberg-like love of complication, minus the suspense.

American reviewers, partly out of deference to Carter’s serious polemics on race, religion and American politics, have tended to treat The Emperor of Ocean Park as a serious novel, which it is not; or as a thriller, which is simply unfair. When an Associate Justice of the Supreme Court looms up out of a dark and stormy night, semi-automatic at the ready, and tells the hero, “don’t play games with me .

Plato remarks in The Republic that bad characters are volatile and interesting, whereas good characters are dull and always the same. This certainly indicates a literary problem. It is difficult in life to be good, and difficult in art to portray goodness.

This reminds me a provocative remark I once stumbled on in which Simone Weil claimed the opposite: that in art, evil is boring and good interesting. I have never been able to track down the source of the quotation, and at this point I’ve lost the quotation itself. Does anyone know it?

Brick and mortar record stores don’t strike me as an extinct species. Tower records, let it be known, is crap. They have a wide selection, but not deep: their buyers are uninformed even in independent pop music, which is extraordinarily popular (“underground” and “below the radar” would be misnomers). Not to mention their prices cannot even vaguely compete with Amazon, even with added shipping charges. However, on the west coast there are three Amoeba (two in SF, one in LA) independent record stores that have maybe ten or twenty times the selection of a typical Tower. Their prices are comparable, if not cheaper than Amazon, they sell used, new, import, vinyl, and a huge volume of

Blogs for me are trial balloons, even the ones that pretend to be something else, and snark is part of the fun if also sometimes part of the trial. More selfishly, I’m attempting to gird myself for a writing workshop of the kind I’ve actively avoided for several years, and I am wondering, yet again, what compels me to sign up for these things. There’s submitting to the voluntary trauma of watching strangers pluck the veins from your writing or, worse, react not at all. And then there are the all too easily mocked bits that emerge when a group struggles to find something, anything to say about what you’re doing “on the page”….

Read the whole thing here.

The American painter Charles Demuth (1883-1935) was an artist who took a certain pride–aesthetic pride–in his carefully cultivated limitations. He didn’t hesitate to boast about them, as we know from the wonderful comparison he once made between his own talent and that of his more robust contemporary, John Marin. “John Marin and I drew our inspiration from the same source, French modernism,” Demuth said. “He brought his up in buckets and spilt much along the way. I dipped mine out with a teaspoon but I never spilt a drop.”

The humor, the exactitude, the unembarrassed self-knowledge–everything about that remark reminds me of another self-confessed American aesthete, the poet Wallace Stevens. Artists and writers of this persuasion–Henry James and Marianne Moore belong in the same company–cannot be expected to command the attention of a large public. Their work tends to be a little too special for mainstream taste, and the acclaim they enjoy tends to be posthumous. Yet their achievements are among the finest in American art and literature.

Demuth’s place in this constellation of talents would be more widely recognized if we saw his work more often, but exhibitions of his pictures have been a rarity lately–which is why the exhibition that Thomas S. Holman and Virginia Zabriskie have organized at the Zabriskie Gallery is an event to be cherished. Though it’s a long way from being the full-scale retrospective that’s needed, the show’s 31 items–mostly watercolors and drawings dating from 1907 to 1933–are more than sufficient to remind us of Demuth’s virtues….

Read the whole thing here. Then go see the show, and look for me.