About Last Night

…if every organ of criticism took the trouble of laying out its priorities, prejudices, and understanding of its mission? The Atlantic has done just that in its January/February issue, and the results are extremely interesting and gratifying. They bespeak an accountability that is refreshing to see. And aside from the wonderful High Principle of it all, the specific principles noted by Benjamin Schwarz lean toward the bracingly blunt. Last I checked, no content from this issue was yet available online, so here are some cullings:

We assume that our readers look to this section as a critical organ rather than a news source–which means that unlike, say, The New York Times Book Review, we don’t have to cover the waterfront. For example, we chose not to review Pat Barker’s latest, because although she’s an important novelist we admire, her most recent book happens to be very far from her best effort. Its review, we reasoned, would be unfavorable but, since it would also point to her obvious talent, would hardly be an evisceration; in other words, it would almost necessarily be equivocal and boring (that good novelists so often produce less than stellar novels largely accounts for the fact that fiction reviews are so often politely qualified and, well, dull).

So true, although somebody has to review such novels (hello, NYTBR), and the Atlantic‘s rationalization is of little help to those stuck with the task of establishing this presumed critical consesnsus in an interesting and readable way. Still, they’re right that some portion of the high number of dull book reviews out there are dull because they are responsible. In an ideal world, even reviews of middling books would be fascinating, but this task takes a special kind of ingenuity from a special kind of critic–a fairly rare commodity that most of us would probably rather see spent on books that are really occasions, or are objects of genuine controversy–and that, frankly, very few reviewers are paid well enough to be able to muster, even if that special kind of critic is lurking somewhere in them.

Moving along:

One aesthetic penchant does militate in favor of British writers specifically: we prefer wit, wryness, and detachment to zeal. Whereas didactic blather and a pedantic spirit still infect too much American fiction, we find that British authors often write with the kind of insouciant precision we prize (as does an American writer such as Lorrie Moore).

Not a characterization of American fiction that I much recognize, but still, it’s good to know where the book review editors stand. Better to own the prejudice than to pretend it doesn’t exist. And finally:

We run fewer than the predictable number of reviews of books on politics, public policy, and current affairs. This is partly because we assiduously cover these areas in other parts of the magazine, but mostly because a very high proportion of these titles are just godawful.

Not to put too fine a point on it or anything.

I just finished writing the first chapter of my Balanchine book, and now am headed for bed. Lots of accumulated work-for-money to do tomorrow, so don’t expect any staggeringly brilliant postings, but I promise to give you something worth reading on Tuesday, if not Monday night.

In the meantime, Our Girl’s rocking! So back to work for me. Read her instead.

Over at Golden Rule Jones, Sam takes notice of the 75th anniversary of I. A. Richards’ Practical Criticism, more than a bit of a relic as far as literary critical methods go, but excellent as a primer in close reading, and, sad to say, always good for some mirth at the expense of Richards’ guinea pig students. Richards’ book records what happened when the author, a Cambridge professor, removed identifying information from a set of poems that were all over the map in terms of quality, and asked his students to evaluate them. He is withering about the students’ reactions, which generally fell precisely opposite his own and the canon’s. Christina Rossetti, Donne, and Hopkins, if memory serves, are some of the literary lights that were unceremoniously snuffed out in the students’ judgment, while several pieces of doggerel were declared classics. Richards applies a high hand in diagnosing these failures of reading, and the results can be hilarious (and very good training).

George Orwell read Richards’ book in 1944, and wrote of the experience:

But still, some of the comments recorded by Dr. Richards are startling. They go to show that many people who would describe themselves as lovers of poetry have no more notion of distinguishing between a good poem and a bad one than a dog has of arithmetic.

Flipping back to the present, Haypenny Magazine is working the Richardsian angle with “Actual Comments Overheard in a Poetry Workshop” by Steve Caldes. (Link via Maud, who’s back!)

Somewhere out there, Jim McManus is shedding a tear. So is OGIC. So should anyone who never experienced Benny Binion’s Horseshoe Casino in downtown Las Vegas in person. Where else could you play dollar blackjack, have the cards lobbed cheerfully at your head, and get a great bowl of homemade gumbo at the honest-to-god lunch counter into the bargain?

Maybe Binion’s will re-open, but it’s hard to be optimistic. In retrospect I see that when they removed the million-dollar cash-horseshoe display, it was the beginning of the end.

UPDATE: The second link above, to a Los Angeles Times story, requires registration. This better news story does not.

We will always read Old Hag, foul though she may become….

“‘Do you consider love the strongest emotion?’ he asked.

“‘Do you know a stronger?’

“‘Yes, interest.'”

Thomas Mann, Doctor Faustus

My mother taught me not to blow my own horn, but I just ran across a recent on-line reference
to this blog that I wanted to pass along:

For a brilliantly informed and non-academic approach to culture, Terry Teachout is the guy. He’s the drama critic for the Wall Street Journal and the music critic for Commentary, but no, he is not what you might expect from someone who regularly contributes to both those magazines. He is tremendously well-informed, and tremendously interested in the world. In the course of a week, his subjects will range from recent architecture to obscure plays and ballets to classic cartoons to how high tech changes Middle America’s experience of culture, and then on beyond that. In his range of interests and enjoyments, he keeps goading me (in a good-natured way) to broaden my own horizons.

I’m posting that snippet of praise (by blogger Bruce Baugh) because it sums up with enviable precision what I try to do in this space. It’s nice to think that I’m hitting the mark, at least some of the time. Thanks much, Mr. Baugh, whoever and wherever you are.

Colby has a nice appreciation of Harvey Pekar, occasioned by the approach of the Oscars, where Pekar may well be an incongruous presence:

Mr. Pekar was inspired in the 1960s by a chance meeting with R. Crumb, the future dean of “underground comics,” who was then drawing greeting cards for a living in Cleveland. They met to trade old records, but when Mr. Crumb showed Mr. Pekar the quirky adult comics he was doing on the side, Pekar’s imagination caught fire. Crumb’s work, he noticed, was intellectual and satirical, but not realistic. Why couldn’t you have a “straight” comic book with a tone like Dreiser’s, or Celine’s, or Balzac’s? Thus was born American Splendor. Naturalism was coming to the comics page.

Meanwhile, in case anyone reading this site is for some reason still not regularly reading that site, Michael Blowhard takes l’affaire King-Hazzard in an interesting new direction, comparing how book people and movie people treat the relationship between art and trash. He does not find the book people’s way most productive, to put it mildly. Here are some out-takes:

In the world of books trash and art still don’t ride in the same section of the bus; the books mindset–at least the respectable-publishing mindset–is still segregationist. If the movie-world view is all about the vital connections between art and trash, and about how each is the lifeblood of the other, the book person’s imagination is taken up with the neverending struggle of art, talent and brains to do triumph over the forces of money, hustle and fame.

Also, of course, the simple fact is that, for many people, books equal school, while movies represent weekends, vacation, time off, romance and sex. And so living the books life becomes for many an attempt to continue living life as though in school. Here ‘s a Robert Birnbaum interview with the Boston Globe book reviewer Gail Caldwell . It’s an excellent interview, and Caldwell’s an excellent reviewer who does a first-class job. That said, what kind of person does she strike you as? She seems to me to be a born student, ever eager to sink her arms into her next assignment.

I find the gestalt of the book world oppressive; it gives me a pain and it makes me grumpy. I find the movie-person’s view of the arts much more congenial, whatever quarrels I may have with it. And I’m often left wondering: how can books people say of themselves that they love books when they look down their noses at 90% of the books that get published? They disdain not just Stephen King but also self-help books, visual books, and trash biographies; they relish little more than an intense discussion about what’s a “real book” and what’s not. (My staggeringly original response to this tiresome issue: They’re all books, for god’s sake.) IMHO, what books people love isn’t books; what they love is their own standards, and their fantasies about what literature should be.

I think that crime writers are, on the whole, better fiction writers than lit-fiction writers are. For one thing, they’ve got more respect for their readers’ pleasure; for another, they’re less bound up in their egos.

As usual at 2 Blowhards, the comments move the discussion forward vigorously. Speaking as a “book person” who has some difficulty observing this particular generic boundary, I find Michael’s comments compelling in the extreme.

Finally, Salon picks Brian Hall’s I Should Be Extremely Happy in Your Company as one of its best books of the year:

Hall tells the epic story of the Lewis and Clark expedition from a variety of perspectives, but it’s Lewis and Sacagawea who steal the show. This is a historical novel that’s unflinchingly honest but doesn’t serve a political agenda. It describes the arc of a grand and thrilling journey, but views the progress through the halting, thwarted, damaged psyches of those who make it, one complicated step at a time. Sacagawea is a stifled philosopher, scarred by losses greater than any of her companions can imagine–if they ever bothered to try. Lewis is valiant, depressed, infatuated with the wilderness and his co-captain and tormented by the impossible demands placed on him by his president and, especially, himself. Hall’s portraits of these travelers are never less than utterly convincing and his sense of the strangely fruitful intersection of great deeds and human failings is unforgettable.

Somehow this book slipped under my radar, which is surprising because I thought Hall’s tour de force The Saskiad was one of the best American novels published in the last ten years.