REMARKS ARE NOT LITERATURE, NOR ARE THEY CRITICISM

There is an amusing story in Slate where the editors queried numerous noted critics about what they individually considered the most overrated novels they had the misfortune to struggle with. The responses from a group including Amy Bloom, Stephen Burt, Tom Perrotta among others presented some dour words over a fine selection of iconic texts. The idea, it seems, was similar to that of the collection edited by rock critic Jim DeRogatis, Kill Your Idols, where he asked a significantly younger generation of pop music critics to write devastating reviews of what was basically the Rolling Stone Magazine canon of the Greatest Rock and Roll Albums ever made.

Without going into detail, I will say that the anthology was a great idea that landed on the sharp rocks by one negative review after another. Virtually no musician or band was as good as older scribes had claimed, a conclusion you expected given the title of the collection, but the sensibility was put down and sarcasm, cheap insults, a strained irreverence that , with the repetition of one review after the other, sounded practiced, more inauthentic than the alleged phoniness of the albums under review. It was a bad writing contest, the contestants vying to produce the most wretched Lester Bangs impersonation. Bangs, though, would have none of this; he bared his soul, he argued his reasons, absurd or irrational they might have been. He was a great writer. The point is that the Slate article is merely a chance for some payback: tired of the praise Joyce receives, have you had it with Salinger’s name sucking the air from the room, do you think Pynchon is all sizzle and no steak? Here is your chance to put these elevated middlebrows in their place. What we get are smart people, good critics, staying in the shallow end of the pool. It’s interesting that virtually any touted book that does not hold my attention beyond the first 200 pages instantly gets reassigned to the 'overrated" section of my book table, that stack of tomes I will give away, donate, sell as the opportunities arise. “Overrated”, though, is as overused a term as , say , “brilliant”, “masterpiece” or “groundbreaking”; hasty dismissals and instant praise without a cant-free discussion about why these judgments were rendered exposes the opinions as being as inflated as the book one seeks to bury . Or to raise. Time was when book reviews, even the reviews available in middlebrow magazines like Time, made you believe, even feel, the sluggish pacing and torpor a bad stretch of prose could have on a writer. These days the field is dominated by wisecracks that are suitable for photo captions.

Remarks of this kind are fine for the chit chat that comes with book group debates about the relative merits of emerging authors or the swan songs of authors who have died or seem about to; to disguise a selection of rhythmic grumbling as an article is something else. Our critical discourse is cheapened and reduced to something you can read while going to the refrigerator for another O’Doul’s. It’s not that I’m against subjecting a work to critical examination, it’s just that we seem to live in a time of instant opinions. Much of what passes for a critical debate these days sounds like a gaggle of disenfranchised booksellers vying to see who can produce the most quotable sound bite, negative or positive. It saddens me that we haven’t another John Leonard on the horizon, someone who could dig deep and give a complex reading of a book , yay or nay, and not leave the personality and heart out of the whole thing. It used to be 200 pages before I continued on with a book or put it down; these days I am in the same 50-75 page ratio of test driving a text. It’s simply that there are too many pleasurable writers to read to waste time trudging through something out of fool’s sense of duty. Gertrude Stein told Hemingway that “remarks are not literature”, and to that end I agree: literature is writing at length and writing that seeks to achieve something more remarkable than what the water cooler/coffee pot/ Good Reads cabal of laconic pedants offer as commentary. Even criticism that takes literature apart and inspects the workings of fevered personality taken to extreme graphomania ought to aspire to the level of the best books it takes under consideration. As it goes, though, remarks and not essays are the preferred method of judging new books, old and older. Remarks are not literature, nor are they criticism, but it is what people seem to read as the computers become repulsively more portable. It’s a bad cafe drink: just a rumor of coffee, lots of cream, heaping spoonfuls of white sugar

Received message. I can help you with correcting spelling and grammatical errors. Here is the improved version of your text: There is an amusing story in Slate where the editors queried a number of noted critics about what they individually considered the most overrated novels they had the misfortune to struggle with. The responses from a group including Amy Bloom, Stephen Burt, Tom Perrotta among others presented some dour words over a fine selection of iconic texts. The idea, it seems, was similar to that of the collection edited by rock critic Jim DeRogatis, Kill Your Idols, where he asked a significantly younger generation of pop music critics to write devastating reviews of what was basically the Rolling Stone magazine canon of the Greatest Rock and Roll Albums ever made. Without going into detail, I will say that the anthology was a great idea that landed on the sharp rocks by one negative review after another. Virtually no musician or band was as good as older scribes had claimed, a conclusion you expected given the title of the collection, but the sensibility was put down and sarcasm, cheap insults, a strained irreverence that , with the repetition of one review after the other, sounded practiced, more inauthentic than the alleged phoniness of the albums under review. It was a bad writing contest, the contestants vying to produce the most wretched Lester Bangs impersonation. Bangs, though, would have none of this; he bared his soul, he argued his reasons, absurd or irrational they might have been. He was a great writer. The point is that the Slate article is merely a chance for some payback: tired of the praise Joyce receives, have you had it with Salinger’s name sucking the air from the room, do you think Pynchon is all sizzle and no steak? Here is your chance to put these elevated middlebrows in their place. 

What we get are smart people, good critics, staying in the shallow end of the pool. It's interesting that virtually any touted book that does not hold my attention beyond the first 200 pages instantly gets reassigned to the 'overrated" section of my book table, that stack of tomes I will give away, donate, sell as the opportunities arise. "Overrated", though, is as overused a term as , say , "brilliant", "masterpiece" or "groundbreaking"; hasty dismissals and instant praise without a cant-free discussion about why these judgments were rendered exposes the opinions as being as inflated as the book one seeks to bury . Or to raise. Time was when book reviews, even the reviews available in middlebrow magazines like Time, made you believe, even feel, the sluggardly pacing and torpor a bad stretch of prose could have on a writer. These days the field is dominated by wisecracks that are suitable for photo captions. Remarks of this kind are fine for the chit chat that comes with book group debates about the relative merits of emerging authors or the swan songs of authors who have died or seem about to; to disguise a selection of rhythmic grumbling as an article is something else. Our critical discourse is cheapened and reduced to something you can read while going to the refrigerator for another O’Doul’s. It's not that I'm against subjecting a work to critical examination, it's just that we seem to live in a time of instant opinions. Much of what passes for a critical debate these days sounds like a gaggle of disenfranchised booksellers vying to see who can produce the most quotable sound bite, negative or positive. 

It saddens me that we haven't another John Leonard on the horizon, someone who could dig deep and give a complex reading of a book , yay or nay, and not leave the personality and heart out of the whole thing. It used to be 200 pages before I continued on with a book or put it down; these days I am in the same 50-75 page ratio of test driving a text. It's simply that there are too many pleasurable writers to read to waste time trudging through something out of fool's sense of duty. Gertrude Stein told Hemingway that "remarks are not literature", and to that end I agree: literature is writing at length and writing that seeks to achieve something more remarkable than what the water cooler/coffee pot/ Good Reads cabal of laconic pedants offer as commentary. Even criticism that takes literature apart and inspects the workings of fevered personality taken to extreme graphomania ought to aspire to the level of the best books it takes under consideration. As it goes, though, remarks and not essays are the preferred method of judging new books, old and older. Remarks are not literature, nor are they criticism, but it is what people seem to read as the computers become repulsively more portable. It's a bad cafe drink: just a rumor of coffee, lots of cream, heaping spoonfuls of white sugar.

6 ways of looking at a grouchy old man

Wallace Stevens found 13 ways of looking at a blackbird; Ishmael Reed's poem "Scrub Jays" imagines the birds looking back   at the man glaring at them, finding six stanzas of taunts. This is , in essence, a poem about aging, the gaining of some simple knowledge that was formerly obscured by ego and youthful exuberance. Where a younger man could sustain a good battle in protecting what he perceives to be rightfully and exclusively his, his apple trees and the fruit they bare,  running to and from his house with all manner of pesticide, rakes, air horns , convinced that he can make short order of this ordeal and restore the principle of property rights to his personal piece of earth, the body with time grows slower, muscles go soft, bones ache, the awareness arises that no amount of assertion of will can make settle anything permanently. The bird is the old man's inner voice, speaking in mocking tones under remains of the rhetorical veneer that refuses to acknowledge inevitability. It is not this bird, nor even birds in particular that will win this battle.

What good are apples
To old men, anyway
You have lost your bite
You have run out of
 Ladders to climb
Your ultrasonic solar-powered
Animal repellent
The Honda among dissuaders
Might rid your garden of
The capo cats, but
 The bandit raccoons
Within 48 hours  

What good are apples, indeed what good are things that one attaches one's name to and changes their essential nature from being something useful and with a function , or purpose, in a large and infinitely complex system of things and makes them mere trophies, souveneers of a conquest? With the ache of the limbs and the fading of light from eyes that no longer see things crisply, clearly, without ambiguity, the possession of things is an error, a mistake in perception.  Nature, in any event, turns out to be not a particular thing one does battle against, not a personality, a thing, a personality one defines the terms of their existence against. Nature merely is, that condition of existence within which all things exist and , more or less, abide by. This includes the deflating ego of many a strong willed man and woman who assumed their could change the terms of the condition . The tragedy, voiced by Reed in the voice of birds who mock him for his erring presumptions about his cosmology, isn't that we all become bitter old men yelling at kids and critters to get off their lawn, but that we might never realize that we didn't own the lawn in the first place.

Summer reading 3

The Women
by T.C. Boyle

We enter the world of Frank Lloyd Wright and the cult of personality that surrounded him at his compound Taliesin and find the iconic and inconsistently brilliant architect as the center who spent much of his time managing his reputation, manipulating his followers, student architects and engineers, into doing the grungy and tedious work of preparing his various projects, attempting to borrow money or extend his exhausted credit lines and, as the title suggests, wooing women and then betraying them. 

The upshot is that Wright is less than the Frank Lloyd Wright cult would have us believe, that he was without flaws; T.C.Boyle relishes the chance to exhibit the man as a self-creating blowhard, more persona than center, who was by historical accounts not the most thorough of architects. It wouldn't unfair to say that as an architect he may have been a splendid designer--his buildings have a majesty and grace only the truly touched seem to render with ease--but in technical aspects he was resoundingly incompetent, given to short cuts , half measures, and shoddy workmanship on the smaller , essential things, like safe and certified electrical work. 

To this day his buildings are crumbling, and the novel shows us the grandness that is his home, Taliesen, burning to the ground because the Maestro couldn't be bothered with a thorough inspection of the work that bore his signature. This is a fine comic novel, the latest in Boyle's ongoing series of historical fictions revealing the fun and folly of scorched earth originality. Imperfect humans are the creators of otherwise beautiful and useful things. 

One does wish that Boyle would finesse his sentences and paragraphs a bit more--he is a good prose stylist when he chooses to be, but too often and for too long his writing sounds rushed, which is ironic, really , considering that a main point of this novel, a group portrait of the lovers and sycophants surrounding Wright, is that Wright was a splendid and artful draftsman who didn't see to the smaller details of his designs. So to Boyle does not lift his passages from the mere , pleasurable hum they are and lift them to a richer music.

flag

Unmanageable

He wouldn't change his mind

so I mailed him a brick and a rose

postage due, of course,

because the wind had gone from my sails

and I was stranded at the bus stop

with no token, after dark,

falling asleep to the barking of dogs

behind a fence.

I wouldn't apologize

so she sold my books

and record collection

to a man who specialized

in another decade's glory,

I cried under her window,

I sang her a song

written in schemes that rhymed

and plots that didn't,

I cannot be sorry

for invisible gestures

committed while I spoke on the phone, I explained,

hooking my thumb on a belt loop

when I mentioned nothing

what you thought it might

when I mentioned

"cake" and "bombast" in the same sentence,

but you gather my hats all the same

and toss them to the oak tree

that hangs over your roof,

one hat per limb,

one duck bill spinning toward the gutter

where leaves burn, as if on cue,

or my, what shall I do?

The government wouldn't straighten its spine

and walk a straight line

nor speak something without qualification,

so we held our breath

and took on horrible lovers

who would take our money from our wallets and purse

after we are asleep ,

we buy things we don't want

on the basis of a cute photos of grand kids on cell phone galleries,

we get in the car we stole

and drive to the edge of the map

after which there is only the tile of the floor below us,

checkerboard pattern and spread out newspapers

where the cat takes his craps,

this world

gets so much larger

the more we complain,

the biggest box

Distinct purposes

There are times in the middle of the afternoon after I've finished what I think is an inspired poem when I have the momentary sensation--fleet! is the world--that all those wonderful metaphors and inverted oppositions were given to me by God Himself. I've been sober for twenty four years, though, and I have a strong feeling that if I ever heard God speak, he'd tell me to go ahead and have a shot of hooch. Faith I have, but not to the degree that I think a higher power uses me as a mouthpiece for his left over tropes. The feeling passes, and I disabuse myself that poems and prayer are linked in degrees more bountiful than rare. I think the distinctions between the two things are clear and crucial, as both modes of address are for distinct purposes.

Summer reading 2

 THE ARMIES OF THE NIGHT
by Norman Mailer

Anyone who has had difficulty with Norman Mailer's militant ego-- or just plain irritated with the prospect of a writer declaring himself the best scribe in the land simply because he was the only one with the temerity to reach for the crown vacated by Hemingway--won't find relief here in his award winning book 'The Armies of the Night'. Too bad for them, I say, because even though Mailer's self regard is legendary and obnoxious without redemption in lesser pundits, Mailer shrewdly uses the persona, the third person referenced 'Mailer', to engage the the collision of forces that made up the political sensibility of the 60s ; the counter culture, anti-war activist, avowed Marxist revolutionaries, feminists, black nationalists , yippees, hippees, crazies of all sorts converged on the Pentagon to protest the war in Vietnam and what was seen by many alternative life stylers as the fatally erring trajectory America had taken; all the sins of capitalism, white racism, imperialism and the like were now returning to the soil from which they came, demanding the bill be paid and the interest collected in full.

Mailer, someone who had announced early in his career, in his introduction to 'Advertisements for Myself', that he was obsessed with radically transforming the way his country came to see itself in the strange and terrifying world that was emerging in the post war period, comes off as the smartest guy in the room, someone conducting a running commentary on the tensions and contradictions that were coming from the estranged forces that composed the American Left. Much of the fun, though, certainly has to be the adventures of the swaggering, blustery, drinking and drunk Mailer as he wades through the issues and the worries that accompany movements that want to seize the future. There is an apt awareness of his own absurdity and celebrity, there is a realization that even his imagination cannot single handedly stop an a congery of policy evils already in place and being executed. What he could do, though, was maintain his sublime sense of irony and report, comment, opine and theorize with the quick witted verve that only the best stylists maintain.

This is a worthy read, an important document from a period of American which to this day refuses to be understood in retrospect. The

Summer reading

AMERICAN PSYCHO
by Brett Easton Ellis
I would be willing to accept the defense that Ellis’s quickie squib is in fact a satire of consumerism, a literary bit of photo realism if there was compelling art here. There isn't, however, and the defense falls apart. Ellis writes as if he had to submit this against a deadline, and he'd wasted his considerable lead time by living off his hefty advance. Ellis does a good job of diagnosing the narcissism of the eighties, but that by itself does nothing for either our understanding or empathy.
The emotionally neutered stretches of hacking, slicing, stabbing and bashing , juxtaposed against descriptions of material things that may as well have been photocopied from catalogues, is an interesting effect and achieves an ironic value soon on, but just as soon the effect is spent. And yet the detail goes on, as does the singularly flat line narration. Even the gross out factor wears thin and grows tedious; as with pornography, the power Ellis brings to the subject of hyper-violence isn't aesthetic, certainly. This reminds you of nothing else so much as someone taking pointlessly large doses of drugs in the vain hope of finding the rush and thrill of their first encounter. What Ellis has done is written a bad book who's only distinguishing element is that is all symptom. It does not deaden the reader to the horrors of psychotic violence, as most readers I encounter are sufficently offended and aghast at the amount of disheartening imagination Ellis can cast. Perhaps the ideal readership was supposed to folks like him, already deadened.


 THE DIAGNOSIS
by Alan Lightman

Out of the DeLillo playbook, a business commuter gradually loses the use of his limbs, and his confronted with medical experts who disguise their inability to treat him and render a diagnosis by having him submit to yet more tests. A novel full of comic moments and sleights of hand-- the father's relationship with his son is sad stuff, two-hankie time-- but there is strong feeling of what the world would be like if all the things that we plug into stopped giving us the illusion of information and clarity and instead added to our anxiety, increased oh-so-slowly another ten or twenty degrees. Lightman isn't the most graceful writer, but this novel works rather well. One will note the shared concern with DeLillo, who wrote a kind blurb for this novel: nominally intelligent citizens who realize too late their trust in the priesthoods of specialists and jargon masters have not only not aided them in their real or imagined crisis, but in fact made their lives worse.