Path of Least Resistance

In my last post, I quoted Dan Green on John Updike, who "is increasingly reviled these days for his purported stylistic preciosity . . ." That may be true, but I know one writer who reviled him 30 years ago. In his 1976 review of Updike's A Month of Sundays (which appears in the essay collection, Something Said), Gilbert Sorrentino wrote this:

Mr. Updike is of that school that holds that characters are the sum of their parts; i.e., add layer upon layer of description touching upon modes of dress, manners, speech, habitations, possessions, mores, etc., and presto! we know who the character is and how he will act in a given circumstance; we know, that is, his reality. Conversely, if we know what he says and thinks, we know what he will wear, his tastes, and so on. The author partakes, in other words, of the tried and true novelistic signals in ordering his characters' activities and lives. An odd sophistry of causality inheres in such constructions. Jane, Marshfield's wife, is prim, proper, intelligent, educated, athletic. It routinely follows that she is sexually unsatisfying to Marshfield; she is civilized when she is confronted by his lover, and so on. His lover is slightly shabby, a trifle vulgar, rather embarrassingly emotional, and divorced. She, of course, lives in a raw, new housing development; she is crass when she meets Jane, etc. The reader almost expects Mr. Updike to make her chew gum and subscribe to the Reader's Digest. Marshfield's assistant is young, soupy-minded, liberal, "against the war." His attitude toward, for instance, young people with drug problems? You guessed it. And on and on. The signals flash, the attitudes stiffen, the characters "walk off the pages." This is the kind of characterization one expects from Neil Simon, an effortless sliding into the path of least resistance. It has little to do with the making of serious fiction.

Yet all these things that I touch upon are reckoned by Mr. Updike's admirers--and they are many--as strengths, not weaknesses, as wonders of truth, style, audacity, vision, even as indicators of greatness. But each page of this book throws up a wall behind which it is well-night impossible to discover the manifold realities of the world that the author chooses to deal with. We are given this world as seen by Mr. Updike, as interpreted by him. We are given wit and talent and we are given invention. But we are not given literature.

Oddly (and sadly) enough, this kind of fiction is often thought to be poetic, though it has nothing to do with poetry unless one conceives of the poem as a bauble. On the other hand, Hugh Kenner has termed this sort of writing "a surface scummed by iridescent prose." That strikes me as both just and exact.

Creating Writing

The other day, Dan Green wrote a post in response to Patrick at Litblog.com's misunderstanding of what Richard Powers was up to in his latest novel, The Echo Maker. Patrick basically accuses Powers of condescension toward his characters, an "inability to sympathetically portray characters whose mindsets are very different from his own". He then gives some examples that he claims are evidence of smug authorial intrusion, when frankly, as Dan observes, it should be clear that the opinions expressed are not those of an "omniscient narrator" but of the characters themselves. It would seem that the fact that the novel is told in the third person is confusing.

I bring this up because the rest of Dan's post is interesting. He talks about what he thinks might be common misconceptions about such third-person narratives. First, that the narrators are always "omniscient". Or, second, that the consciousness of characters depicted in such narratives are all, to some degree, "project[ions] of the consciousness of the writer". He's probably right that Patrick is assuming the latter with Powers. Dan then writes:

In either case, the aesthetic rationale for the development of modernist-era "psychological realism"--to extend realism to the reality of consciousness, to explore the way perception of reality shapes our understanding of it--essentially drops out. The merging of narration with consciousness has become invisible, now just the default approach of any narrative not related in the first-person, just the currently established strategy allowing the author/narrator to "say something." In my opinion, Richard Powers in The Echo Maker is attempting to retain something of the experimentation of modernist psychological realism--or at least its goal--but as I indicated in my post on the novel, its lackluster execution in this book is for me another signal that the technique has become increasingly shopworn.

Among other things, the reflexive use of the central consciousness narrator has made it more difficult to cultivate and identify style in the writing of fiction. Powers is still a sufficiently distinctive stylist that he is able to overcome to some extent the limitations of the strategy, but even in The Echo Maker the signature Powers style with its alliterations and startling figures and achieved rhythms is more restrained than usual. And in most ordinary literary fiction the strategy has become simply mind-numbing.

In the past, Powers' critics (and here I use the term in its "fault-finding" sense) have complained that his characters were not fleshed out, that his dialogue was unbelievable, that his prose was wooden. The latter complaint always struck me as way off-base, but the first two, and ones like it, just confused me. I mean, it never occurred to me to level these sorts of complaints, because it seemed clear to me that they were irrelevant. I felt similar confusion when friends told me that they didn't like, for example, Don Delillo's White Noise, because they didn't care about the characters--what happened to them, what they did, whatever. My initial reaction to such complaints was bewilderment. Was I supposed to care what happened to the characters in the novels I read? I thought there was so much else going on in Delillo, and in Powers, that the believability of their characters, and my need to care about them, seemed quite beside the point.

It wasn't until I started trying to find information about books online, and later reading blogs, that I realized that what I was objecting to, but having a difficult time articulating, was not only old-fashioned in some sense, but perhaps the dominant literary attitude, that in favor of "psychological realism", or the notion that the most important aspect of literature is "character". My tendency has always been to trust the writer and to take what he or she gives me. This does not mean that I simply like everything, but that if a novel doesn't have a certain feature--realistic characters, say--that I shouldn't assume that it's supposed to have it. The writing is the first thing.

James Wood, of course, is a major proponent of "character" in fiction. The first review of his I ever read was of John Updike's Licks of Love, which appeared in April 2001, in the London Review of Books (though I originally read it at the now-defunct FEED online magazine). After taking a couple of easy jabs at Updike's famous "abundance" of published words (the man is prolific, isn't he?), Wood then gets into the recurrence of certain themes and language in Updike's fiction over the years; the oral sex, adultery, wife-swapping, general misogyny. Wood writes:

In Updike's defence it is often maintained that these are the thoughts of his characters, not necessarily of their creator. But obsessions of this kind have recurred and overlapped thickly enough in his work to constitute, now, the equivalent of an artist's palette: this is how Updike chooses to paint the world.

Then:

The sentences have an essayistic saunter; the language lifts itself up on pretty hydraulics, and hovers slightly above its subjects, generally a little too accomplished and a little too abstract. In 'The Women Who Got Away', for instance, the narrator tells us of his old lover, and how 'her voice and its quick inspirations of caustic perception painted the world, which seemed to me rimmed with a vague terror, in bright fearless colours.' But is this perfect sentence, with its delicate deferral so characteristic of Updike ('painted the world . . . which seemed . . . in bright fearless colours'), the expression of a man who really felt the world to be rimmed with a vague terror? Or does the terror not seem a little too vague, as if the narrator were paraphrasing a novel for a New Yorker review? In the same story, when we are told, 'yet we did divorce, in painful piecemeal, as did Maureen and Rodney,' we attend to that fine phrase 'in painful piecemeal', but are distanced by it from its piecemeal pain: if it was so painful, why does it disport itself in such dainty clothes?

One of the dangers for the stylist such as Updike - and one of the ways in which prose is unlike poetry - is that prose always forces the question: who is thinking in these particular words, and why? Point of view, a boring topic to most readers, is the densest riddle for the novelist, since words are either directly ascribed to characters (first-person narration) or indirectly ascribed to them (third-person narration). By contrast, the poet's words are generally assumed to flow from the poet, who wishes, as it were, to draw attention to himself. But the novelist may not, and should not, always want to. There is no doubt that the pleasantly alliterative phrase 'in painful piecemeal' is rather fine; but is fineness what is needed here, or does it slide a filter between the reader and the supposedly pained narrator?

I admit that when I read this review I was mightily impressed, and at the same time felt inadequate. I hadn't studied literature, I just read it, as best I could, and I saw this as a closer reading than I feared myself capable of. These kinds of questions just didn't occur to me. Subsequent Wood criticism I've read has fallen into two camps, those that are interesting but seem to miss the point (such as his critiques of the so-called "hysterical realist" writers, such as David Foster Wallace or Thomas Pynchon or Don Dellilo, found in The Broken Estate), and those that are good and appropriate to the material at hand (in reviews of the new Edith Grossman translation of Don Quixote, and of Coetzee's Elizabeth Costello). When he's reviewing a book in which character does seem of paramount importance, I've found him compelling. Looking back on the Licks of Love review, it seemed to me that his method made sense. And, I read his review of Updike's latest novel, Terrorist (in which Updike imagines a Muslim schoolboy in New Jersey who is "tempted to become a suicide bomber"), approvingly. Wood says Updike "proves himself relatively inept at the essential task of free indirect style, of trying to find an authorial voice for his Muslim schoolboy". I wasn't terribly interested in the book anyway, and given my general views of both Wood and Updike, I guessed that Wood's assessment was essentially accurate.

But, to return to Dan Green's post. Dan has written a lot about this critical predilection for psychological realism; he has also written a number of posts taking issue with James Wood's criticism (see here, here, here). I read these posts, and the ensuing comment threads (some of which Wood himself has contributed to), with great interest. But I have often wished that Dan elaborated a little more--not on just the question of whether "psychological realism", or character, ought to be the primary purpose of fiction (which idea I think he criticizes quite effectively), but also on what might be going on in some of those narratives that are criticized as failing on specifically those grounds. In light of this, I find it quite helpful that he closes this recent post with the following about Updike:

Most of [Updike's] novels are conventionally related in the third-person, but his language typically exceeds that which his characters are capable of summoning, as in this passage from Villages (2004):

After Owen had left it behind, his original village seemed an innocent, precious place, but it did not strike him as that while he lived there. It was the world, with a fathomless past and boundaries that were over the horizon. There were snakes in the grass and in piles of rocks warmed by the sun. Sex and religion had distinct, ancient odors, familes perched like shaky nests on tangled twigs of previous history; and death could pounce in the middle of the night. . . .

Regular readers of Updike's work would no doubt find this recognizably Updikean. It draws on Owen's mental storehouse of memories and images, but does not dwell in his immediate awareness. It creates writing out of that storehouse. It moves in and out of Owen's awareness, weaving a style out of the character's thought processes plus a something else the writer brings in addition to plumbing those processes.

I perked up when I read this. That a novelist's language might "typically exceed that which his characters are capable of summoning" is certainly something Wood and readers like him appear to have a problem with. And I think it's also something that might lead readers to accuse a writer of intruding on his "story". But I see no reason why it should be wrong for a narrator to "draw on [a character's] mental storehouse of memories and images", but yet not be attempting to convey that character's moment-to-moment consciousness.

Updike "creates writing" out of his character's "mental storehouse". It seems to me that these other writers are not necessarily interested in the traditional creation and exploration of character at all, but are trying to "create writing" out of other things they have imagined (though with David Foster Wallace this at times takes the form of a rather extreme exploration of a character's consciousness; the character people don't seem to like that either). And I agree with Dan that Powers has gotten away from what was most interesting about his fiction: he created writing--rich, vibrant writing--out of his imaginative use of science and ideas and multiple narrative schemes. His novels certainly had characters, but they weren't really investigations of these characters. I loved The Time of Our Singing, but I have to admit that the writing in it was often less interesting, less chewy (to borrow an adjective from William H. Gass), than it had been in previous novels. And with that novel and the new one it appears that he has, unfortunately, taken his critics to heart, and tried to invest his characters with a psychological realism that his novels didn't depend on before. Powers is certainly entitled to do what he wants as a writer, and there is still much to enjoy in The Echo Maker (which, of course, won the National Book Award, so what do I know?), but I hope that his muse takes him elsewhere in future novels.

Banville on Amis

In December, I used the occasion of Daniel Soar's extremely negative review of Martin Amis' new novel, House of Meetings, to write a little about how and why I've drifted away from Amis in recent years. On balance, Soar's review appears to be the exception to the rule. The new issue of The New York Review of Books features another positive review, this one from John Banville (just to be gratuitous, here again is his famous pan of Ian McEwan's Saturday, which I've linked to more than once). I still don't expect to read the novel any time soon, but Banville is one of my favorite writers, and his review is very interesting and has definitely increased the likelihood that I'll read it at all (link by way of Jenny Davidson). Banville's conclusion:

House of Meetings is a rich mixture, all the richer for being so determinedly compressed. In fewer than 250 taut but wonderfully allusive, powerful pages Amis has painted an impressively broad canvas, and achieved a telling depth of perspective. The first-person voice here possesses an authority that is new in Amis's work. It is as if in all of his books he has been preparing for this one. In his depiction of a nation stumbling, terrified and terrifying, through rivers of its own, self-spilt blood, he delivers a judgment upon a time—our time— the spectacle of which, if it had been but glimpsed by the great figures of the Enlightenment on whose reasonings and hopes the modern world is founded, would have struck them silent with horror. Stalin and Stalin's Russia have provided Martin Amis with a subject worthy of his vision of a world which, as Joseph de Maistre has it, is "nothing but an immense altar on which every living thing must be immolated without end, without restraint, without respite, until the consummation of the world, until the extinction of evil, until the death of death," and in which, in the cruelest of Wildean ironies, the victims of tyranny survive to become tyrants in their turn, destroying even those whom they love most dearly. It is a bleak vision, assuredly, yet as always in the case of a true work of art, our encounter with Amis's dystopia is ultimately invigorating.

Readings on Iran

As it increasingly appears that the United States is gearing up for an attack of some kind against Iran, it's important to remember that, as with the attack and ongoing occupation of Iraq, such an attack would be wholly unjustified, whether in law, morality, or logic.

Why would we attack Iran? We are of course fed an ever-shifting array of pre-emptive justifications: Iran is developing nuclear weapons; Iran is a threat to Israel; Iran is aiding the Iraqi insurgency; Iran is led by a religious fanatic. Etc. In an excellent post at American Leftist, Richard Estes puts it thus:

There is a thread that ties all of [these] themes together, and that is the necessity to conceal the fact that a US attack upon Iran will be unprovoked and unjustified. A frightening corollary is the recognition that Iran may therefore legitimately target any country, any institution and any people around the world that facilitate this attack. Concealment of these extremely unpleasant insights requires something more, however, the burial of the history of the US, and the West generally, in regard to Iran for the last 100 years. [italics in the original post]

He then proceeds to sketch out the details of that history. Go read the whole thing. (I think that too many Americans, generally not the least bit acquainted with this history, are all too ready to accept some of the scaremongering propaganda, in large part because of the hostage crisis in the wake of the Iranian Revolution of the late 1970s.)

In a post about the escalation of the air war in Iraq, Lenin concludes:

The escalation in the Iraq war comes as further aggression is threatened, this time against Iran. When it comes, I am certain it will be a brief, but destructive air war. The ironies are too numerous to enumerate. One is that it is an axis of aggressive states that accuse Iran of aggressive designs. Another is that it is an axis of nuclear states that cries foul about Iran's alleged plans for nuclear weapons. A third is that states which have explicitly pursued a sectarian strategy and in broad daylight, for those not too blind to see, sent death squads roaming across iraq, are now accusing Iran of the same. And when they threaten Iran, they will cite some UN resolution as if they held these things to be holy texts. UN resolution 2625, which prohibits even the threat of aggression, will not be so highly spoken of. Finally, various throw-away stories about the human cost of the regime in Iran will be purveyed and then dropped like sizzling carrion when the bombs have done their business. They may even, while strafing the cities with tonnes of explosives, have the nerve to lob a few food parcels out of the airplanes. Didn't someone say the age of irony was over?

Too often, I think, we talk about other countries as abstractions, and most of the scenes we see from the Middle East are of desert and destruction. So it's important to remember that Iran is a real place with real people living their lives. Lives that might not seem all that dissimilar to our own. Please click here to view a video of some images of Iran that may be surprising* (published by Lucas Gray; link via Another Day in the Empire).

*I say "surprising". I labored over this word. Why should it be surprising? I have to admit that my own mental picture of Iran has been heavily colored by the idea that it's in the "war-torn Middle East"--images from both Iraq Wars, back through recent years to Beirut in the Eighties and sketchy memories from the hostage crisis itself. As a result, upon viewing this video, I was struck by the greenery and the modern buildings and the cars. I should know better.

iPod rundown - 02/07/07

Dial "M" for Musicology has issued an iPod random challenge, which has been picked up by Parlando, among others. I've done this twice before, in my first month of blogolalia. A fairly common practice, it seems. I wasn't sure at the time whether I wanted to make it a regular feature. In the event, I did not. Anyway, even before this challenge, I'd been thinking it would be fun to do it again. So, here goes. These are, then, the last 15 songs that I heard yesterday on my iPod:

1. Sun Ra - "Outer Nothingness": I don't have a lot of Sun Ra, and The Heliocentric Worlds of Sun Ra, Vol. 1, is the only one I have on the iPod. This is the more abstract Sun Ra, from the mid-sixties--no typical jazz groove or beat to speak of, but an insistent pulse of sorts, with ever-shifting horn fanfare. . .

2. Charlie Feathers - "Everybody's Lovin' My Baby": I'd never heard of Charlie Feathers before a few years ago, when I bought the 2-cd collection, Get With It, solely because it was on John Fahey's great Revenant label. I figured, if Fahey dug him, he must be worth checking out. I figured right. One of those early Sun Records guys, Feathers played some mean rockabilly.

3. Broadcast - "Tender Buttons": I'm new to Broadcast. I'd been hearing about them for a couple years now, got 2005's Tender Buttons cd last year. Excellent electro-pop; this track has very nice strummy guitar, pleasantly obliterated by electronic noise.

4. Liars - "Grown Men Don't Fall in the River, Just Like That": Which actually leads in pretty well to this high-energy neo-post-punk song from Liars' first album. I like Liars. I saw them play at the Black Cat in DC, in the wake of their widely reviled second cd. The show consisted entirely of songs from that cd, and was incredible.

5. The Pop Group - "She is Beyond Good and Evil": And here we have "real" post-punk. I bought the Pop Group's 1979 album Y as part of my effort to fill in some of the gaps with the less well-known (in the States) punk and post-punk and otherwise left-field artists. This is probably the best song on the cd.

6. M is the 13th Letter - "Napoleon": One of David Pajo's many solo projects. This is an easy-going, yet very Slint-like instrumental, found on his Hole of Burning Alms compilation.

7. Brian Eno & David Byrne - "A Secret Life": A short track from My Life in the Bush of Ghosts, just reissued on cd last year. I still haven't quite absorbed this album, but I definitely like huge portions of it. This track features guitar stabs, swirling sound effects, and vocal chant samples (like, um, most of the rest of the album).

8. Pet Shop Boys - "Was it Worth It?": When I got the iPod, I loaded a lot of cds onto it that had languished in obscurity in my collection. Discography was one of them; I'd bought it for one or two songs (basically "West End Girls" and a couple of others), but never really listened to it in full. As it happens, the Pet Shop Boys' chilly disco is perfect for the shuffle feature. This song is just fine.

9. Love - "Laughing Stock": I finally bought Forever Changes last year, and everyone is right: it's a fantastic album. Yet another album from 1967 that I like better than Sgt. Pepper. But "Laughing Stock" is a b-side bonus track on the cd, and it's nothing like as good as the regular album songs. I may have to remove it from the iPod.

10. Broken Social Scene - "Bandwitch": Broken Social Scene was one indie band du jour that I did appreciate. From my first listen, I liked the hell out of You Forgot It In People, which I found endlessly re-playable. Each song seemed to stand out. But the self-titled second cd, from which "Bandwitch" comes, is a much murkier deal, a kind of muddy soup of a record, with nothing grabbing my attention. I've found, however, that many of the individual songs work much better when they come up randomly, than the album did as a whole. This song is a good example. It's got a steady mid-tempo rhythm, like most of the album, and suggests a sort of communal groove, somehow, with voices bubbling up from the haze. . .

11. Mouse On Mars - "The Illking": I've cooled on Mouse On Mars in the last couple of years, but I was into them pretty heavily there for a while. This song is from Idiology, the last album I had much interest in. It's all electronic squeaks and orchestral string swells and sounds good coming up on my own personal radio like this.

12. The Rolling Stones - "Imagination": I love The Rolling Stones, and I like Some Girls just fine. This cover of The Temptations' "Just My Imagination" is good, but not exactly upper-tier Stones music. Incidentally, the Stones' Steel Wheels show at Veterans Stadium in Philadelphia was only the third show I ever attended (Living Colour opened).

13. William Parker Clarinet Trio - "Fence in the Snow": Over the course of 28 minutes, bassist William Parker and drummer Walter Perkins keep the music moving, with Perry Robinson on clarinet. This is beautiful free jazz from a wonderful album (the 2-cd Bob's Pink Cadillac set on Eremite), which I bought in the middle of my heavy out-jazz period, when I was buying pretty much everything by William Parker. You can go broke very quickly trying to buy everything by William Parker.

14. The Mavericks - "What a Crying Shame": See the Pet Shop Boys comment, above. Have had this cd for years, for no apparent reason. It's perfectly decent country, I guess, but not really something I care all that much about. Dude's voice reminds me of Roy Orbison's, when it doesn't remind me too much of Chris Isaak's. Anyway, this song is kind of lost here, trapped between the 28-minute William Parker free jazz and 12-plus minutes of 1970s Miles Davis coming next.

15. Miles Davis - "Moja (Part 1)": Ah, yes. Electric Miles, from Dark Magus. This stuff can be exhausting, these huge slabs of music that Miles was churning out in the early seventies, but I like it. I often find that I get to know music like this much better when it can flow over me, which is what happens when I listen to music with the iPod (I use it primarily at work or, if I'm too tired to read, on the train during my commute).

In many ways this list is not representative at all of my main musical interests. From this list, only Broadcast, with Tender Buttons, and Love, with Forever Changes, have albums that I listened to with any sort of regularity last year. Oh, and the perennial Rolling Stones. But in some sense, that very non-representativeness does represent my collection quite well. I have dabbled. I have been profligate. I've been afflicted with musical ADD. I have way too many cds.

Speaking of Gabriel Kolko

By coincidence, given the reference in my last post, I'd just started reading Gabriel Kolko's 1968 book, The Politics of War: The World and United States Foreign Policy, 1943-1945. Noam Chomsky mentioned this book in passing several years ago (I think in a ZNet forum), and it became something of a holy grail for me, since it's out of print and thus very hard to find. Before I finally found a copy, I'd read his previously mentioned books, The Triumph of Conservatism and Century of War, both of which are excellent.

The following is from the introduction to The Politics of War:

I have written this book as much to describe the actual condition of the world during World War II as much as the way the United States defined and quite as often misconceived the course of global realities. Yet what can be said about the seeming variability of a national policy that to the professional, much less the casual observer, has often seemed chaotic? To the extent that any system is haphazard or improvised, of course, no single theory or explanation will cover the phenomenon, and the fashionable tendency to believe that men of power are the victims of errors rather than the creators of them--and that perhaps reason or pressure by reasonable men will bring them back to the truth--has reinforced this homily. This assumption, so crucial to the premises of liberal political theory, implies that "democratic" power structures are not merely poorly informed but innocent, and that a true dialogue between virtue and power is possible. Such an image, postulating behavior as a series of bumbles, ignores the possibility that policies which are dangerous, destructive, or even do not work are very often quite consistent and necessary in forwarding interests or holding the line in defensive situations.

In attempting to appraise the conduct of policy one does not have to assume that history is determined or made up of repeated accidents. It is sufficient to study its pattern of functional behavior, to comprehend the assumptions formulated in response to challenging situations, and to perceive a policy and pattern that in some sense makes future responses predictable and in this sense inevitable. And quite beyond rhetoric are the institutional forces that do or can influence policy and power. If rhetoric is confused with reality, the banalities of speech writers, platitudes, and the convenient transformation of words into useful symbols rather than truth all become the basis of analysis and a substitute for comprehending action, clear definitions, and institutional imperatives.

On Marching and Politics

I haven't posted about politics as much as I expected to when I started this blog. This is because, in part, when I think of something to write about, all too often I imagine far-ranging, link-heavy, essay-length productions, and I've rarely had the time to devote to bringing something like that together. And frankly, there's much to write about, and others do an excellent job as it is, so that it often doesn't seem crucial that I add my own voice to the din.

For what it's worth, we did indeed attend the anti-war rally/march last Saturday. There were a lot of people there, though nothing like the 500,000 organizers were hoping for. Thankfully, it was a beautiful day and rather warm, given these finally semi-frosty mid-winter days. Like most such events, there's a certain element of boredom, standing around, waiting for the things to start. The speeches we heard were unremarkable. Among others, we heard Susan Sarandon, Medea Benjamin, Jesse Jackson (whose ability to string together cliches in barely intelligible sing-song fashion remains unmatched), and Jane Fonda (who was actually mildly interesting, as she addressed her reluctance to speak at such Iraq War-related events because of all the crap that's been said about her since Vietnam; she also noted how much longer it took veterans to come out against Vietnam, as opposed to Iraq).

I have some ambivalence about marches. Any given march, of course, doesn't do anything, if by do we mean, you know, "stop the war". But I still feel like I ought to go to them, and to more of them than I do. It's not like it's hard, especially when the event is in DC--I live in Baltimore, after all. My wife, Aimée, has a long history of going to these sorts of events, and loves to shout and sing the songs and get into it. I, generally, do not. I'm not much of a shouter of slogans, and I tend to, alas, treat them cynically. At least that's my default position. We went down on one of several school buses rented for the occasion by the Baltimore Nonviolence Center. We found ourselves on the bus with an old activist, dressed as Santa Claus, trying to teach the bus several songs he'd written to the tune of Christmas carols. My groan-ometer went off, and I got reflexively irritated when he propped his ass right in front of my face as he tried to lead the singing. But I want to get more involved, even if I think certain protest practices are ossified relics of an earlier time.

At Long Sunday, Jodi Dean asked "What's the use of marching.... again?" She's marched in the past, and was set to march this time, but her bus was cancelled. Still, she wants to know what good it does. I think we all ask this question, if we're not simply dismissing them out of hand. She says:

Some want to say that peace marches helped end the war in Viet Nam. Better analyses emphasize that it took congressional balls, the willingness to stop funding the war. "Ending" segregation (or at least legal segregation for a short time) also had more to do with the Supreme Court and with Johnson's push for the Voting Rights Acts--not demonstrations.

I'm not sure what these "better analyses" are. I haven't looked into it closely, but this paragraph seems to dismiss the role of the public--in the form of demonstrations and other activities--in creating the environment in which "congressional balls" and "Johnson's push" might have been politically more likely. That said, there is a sense in which marching seems especially impotent. Millions marched against the start of the War against Iraq, and the war still happened, didn't it?

Jodi goes on:

Some will emphasize the good it does for the protesters--really, it's about them, their feel good moments, their ability to see themselves as part of the solution, their connecting with others, face to face. I admit, this isn't nothing. This is something; something that matters. But, weirdly, it requires the conceit that this be denied, that the actual purpose be something else. So, the most valuable aspect of the march is not what can be openly stated as its most valuable aspect.

In many ways, this is the purpose of these events: to get people together who share a common cause. There is some joy in this, in recognizing that one is not isolated in one's opposition. Some take issue with this, as blandly and clearly articulated through Henry Perowne, the main character of Ian McEwan's "neoliberal polemic" of a novel, Saturday:

All this happiness on display is suspect. Everyone is thrilled to be together on the streets – people are hugging themselves, it seems, as well as each other. If they think – and they could be right – that continued torture and summary executions, ethnic cleansing and occasional genocide are preferable to an invasion, they should be sombre in their view.

Aside from the stupidity it takes to think that the binary posed here is what was at stake, McEwan (given his personal statements about the war, I'm going to go right ahead and ascribe this view to the him) is simply unable to recognize that, though the cause be difficult and the enemy horrific, there truly is joy to be had in working together, in collective action. Anyway, he clucks his disapproval. This same point about marching is made well in Foreign Policy in Focus, in a piece on "The Point of Protest" (link via the comments the Long Sunday thread):

We know from the poll numbers and the voting patterns that the U.S. public is against the Iraq War. But to stand on the Mall and see the great mass of people in all its kaleidoscopic diversity—anarchists, grandmothers, active-duty military, veterans, students, religious groups—is to feel an authentic surge (for peace). The protesters walked around the Capitol to remind Congress that we have their backs. If in their weakness they slip backward, if their newfound resolve to end the war falters, we will help them find their balance again.

FPIF's youth and activism editor Saif Rahman received a lot of responses to his article on why to march against the war. A minority argued that demonstrations are pointless because they haven't changed U.S. policy. The truth is, it's never easy to change a state's foreign policy. Ending the Vietnam War took a decade. Preventing the U.S. government from entering a full-scale war in Central America took up virtually all of the 1980s. The battle of Seattle is still ongoing. Shouting in the streets is only one tactic alongside whispering into the ears of legislators, organizing in various communities, developing a media strategy, and so on.

So marching and demonstrations and the like are merely parts of a strategy of action, and the gathering of people in and of itself can be a joyous and empowering activity.

At the end of Jodi's post, she writes "this may be the worst part of all: the protesters confirm the fiction of democracy, the fiction of a responsive political system, when we know full well that this is lacking." I think there is some truth to this, certainly among the speakers at such events, and among liberals in the crowd. I harbor no such illusions, but still find the events worth attending and participating in.

I mentioned some of the speakers last week. Not appearing were any of the Congressional Democratic leadership. This is because Democrats have not as yet followed through on the apparent promise of the last election, are not calling for troops to be pulled out of Iraq on any kind of useful timetable, have taken "impeachment off the table", are utterly Zionist in perspective on Israel, and generally agree with the prevailing Bush line on Iran--that it is a threat, that it can't be trusted, that the United States has the right to tell it what to do. There hasn't been more movement from the Democrats on Iraq, because they're not just "in a rough spot" because they happened to have voted for the war, due to so-called intelligence failures. They are directly implicated in the imperial project and always have been. They just disagree with how the current war's been conducted.

I could write at length about this, and maybe I will, but this particular post has already gone on long enough. I do want to refer you to some excellent posts by Arthur Silber, over at his blog Once Upon a Time. Silber and his blog are new to me (I just came across it via this post at This Modern World), though it appears that he's fairly widely known in blogland. Everything I've read of his so far has been just fantastic. His recent, not yet finished, series called “Dominion Over the World” can found here: Part I, Part II, Part III, Part IV, Part V. Part I addresses the point I made above, how Iraq is "the Democrats' War, too". In Part IV, he discusses "corporatism"--the entanglement of big business with government, and the subsequent creation of policy. In the course of reading that post in particular, I was reminded of Gabriel Kolko's book, The Triumph of Conservatism, in which the Progressive Era is revealed to be nothing of the kind (I hate when liberals in their ignorance approvingly mention Teddy Roosevelt and trust-busting), and then he actually refers to Kolko's book! I was already impressed, but this definitely caught my attention. Silber writes:

In its most critical respects, the Progressive movement (from 1900 up to World War I) was a nationalist movement, and that nationalism fed directly into overseas expansionism and militarism. These are not separate issues, but the same issue, as we shall explore. Moreover, contrary to many people's views (including many of today's liberals and progressives, who appear to be woefully ignorant of this period in our history, which allows them to bestow undeserved praise upon its achievements, that is, praise from the perspective of their own policy preferences), the Progressive movement in many ways culminated in the triumph of already-vested big business interests. It was, as Gabriel Kolko titled his pathbreaking book, The Triumph of Conservatism, not "progressivism."

Go read the whole series, as well as his year-old series on "walking into the Iran trap", catalogued here, and which concludes here, as far as I can tell. In the first post of that series, he writes about the unimportance of intelligence for the creation of policy--he doesn't argue that intelligence is unnecessary, but that it has nothing to do with the policy pursued:

It may indeed be comforting to think that decisions of war and peace are made on the basis of facts, cold, clear logic, and "secret information" (information that is accurate, I hasten to add) -- but history, including our most recent history, does not support that view. We might think that is the correct method that should be utilized in pondering the fates of many thousands of soldiers and innocent civilians -- and indeed, it is the right procedure, if leaders were amenable to being directed solely by facts and what is in their nations' best long-term interests. But if leaders were ultimately moved by such factors, World War I would not have witnessed years of endless slaughter, it would not have lasted as long as it did, and it might not have begun at all. And if our own political and military leaders focused on those factors that ought to serve as their lodestar to the exclusion of all else, we would not have had the nightmare of Vietnam then -- or the nightmare of Iraq now.

The opposition conclusion [. . .] is that "irrational motives" impel foreign policy decisions.

This is a major theme running through Kolko's work, especially his monumental study, Century of War (some passages of which I quoted here).

So far everything I've read of Silber's at Once Upon a Time as been well worth reading.

(Interestingly, I was doing some Googling, and I saw references to Silber as an Objectivist of some kind or Libertarian, and an earlier blog called Light of Reason--not, it would appear, to be confused with other blogs with the same name. I was confused, because few Libertarians I know of would discuss American "corporatism" in the manner in which he does. Some further research suggested to me that he might be loosely described as a "free market, anarchist, anti-interventionist, libertarian"--the part that confuses me there is definitely the "free market" modifier. I don't quite know what all that means, or if it's accurate, and I haven't yet read anything by him that isn't about American foreign policy in some way. I can say that what he does write about American foreign policy is comprehensive, systematic, and, minor quibbles aside, fucking right on.)

More on Children of Men

In my last post, I'd meant to include links to some other interesting responses to Children of Men. I'm glad I didn't; it gives me the opportunity to do so here, and say a little about them without overloading the original post.

At I Cite, Jodi Dean actually posted first about P.D. James' novel:

No more playgrounds or toy stores. The last generation moving through schools which are then boarded up or repurposed. Initial efforts to solve the problem as well as initial warfare, chaos, and espionage, are ultimately abandoned in the wake of an overwhelming global ennui. In a way, it's a strange sort of big Other--a big Other that knows that it is dying, that it will not exist. This makes me think differently again about the non-existence of the big Other today--it may not exist, but it posits its existence in the future.

Commerce, it seems, grinds slowly to a stop. The last cars are made about 15 years after the last generation is born. There is a geriatric science and various evangelists appear from time to time offering if not hope then at least momentary respite from the gray present. Academics give courses for adults. Apparently, the state sponsors pornography--people have lost interest in sex. Adults from less privileged countries are shipped in as guest workers and treated horribly. People become even more involved with their pets. Anglicans argue over whether pets can be christened. Could there be a stock market, a bond market, without a future? Mortgages? Is this a variation of the only way to imagine a[n] end to capitalism? Imagining only a lack?

This addresses, I think, some of the complaints some have had about the logic of the movie. Also, it occurred to me after writing my post, that one of the reasons Britain would have to restrict immigration--given the downward pressure on population worldwide--is that we are told that the rest of the world has more or less collapsed, while "only Britain soldiers on". If this is true, then Britain would be overloaded with immigrants--or, at least, anxieties . Jodi also posted a passage quoting Žižek talking about the movie; he will be featured on the dvd release. In another post, Jodie talked about Žižek and the movie again:

To imagine the world of Children of Men is to imagine an end to capitalism--no borrowing against the future. But it is also to imagine an end of meaning, the impossibility of sense insofar as the horizon that structures a world, that makes meaning possible, is missing.

The question of immigration and migration is also discussed at this excellent post about the movie at the naked gaze, and in the comment thread there.

k-punk's post about the film touches on, much more eloquently than I did, what I was trying to say about youth and culture. For him, the question the film asks is "how long can a culture persist without the new? What happens if the young are no longer capable of producing surprises?" Also from k-punk's post:

. . . the film is dominated by the sense that the damage has been done. The catastrophe is neither waiting down the road, nor has it already happened. Rather, it is being lived through. There is no punctual moment of disaster; the world doesn't end with a bang, it winks out, unravels, gradually falls apart.

[. . .] Children of Men is a dystopia that is specific to late capitalism. This isn't the familiar totalitarian scenario routinely trotted out in cinematic dystopias

[. . . ] public space is abandoned, given over to uncollected garbage and to stalking animals (one especially resonant scene takes place inside a derelict school, through which a deer runs). But, contrary to neo-liberal fantasy, there is no withering away of the State, only a stripping back of the State to its core military and police functions. In this world, as in ours, ultra-authoritarianism and Capital are by no means incompatible: internment camps and franchise coffee bars co-exist.

alas, a blog also has a thoughtful response to the film.

Many of these posts have discussed, sometimes in great length, an aspect of the film that I did not address at all, its pretty overt Christian symbolism and imagery. It's not difficult to see the birth of a baby, symbolically, in terms of humanity's salvation, and Clive Owen's Theo plays something of a Joseph to Kee's Mary. Apparently, James' novel is a much more reactionary Christian work, which is not in as much evidence in the film. Žižek , in the item quoted in Jodi's post cited above, aside from saying that the film "gives the best diagnosis of the ideological despair of late capitalism. Of a society without history", praises the movie for subverting its reactionary source:

. . . Children of Men is a model of a kind of materialist subversion of a reactionary classic, because the novel is obviously a spiritualist Christian parable of resuscitation, bringing new life and so on. The novel ends with baptizing. It’s clear Christian parable. The film is a model of how you can take a reactionary text, change some details here and there and you get a totally, a totally different story. I would say that it’s a realist film, but in what sense? Hegel in his esthetics says that a good portrayal looks more like the person who is portrayed than the person itself. A good portrayal is more you than you are yourself. And I think this is what the film does with our reality. The changes that the film introduces do not point toward alternate reality, they simply make reality more what it already is.

Or, as the naked gaze put it:

through the use of Nativity and other Biblical iconography Cuarón performs a double inversion: sublating historical specificity in favor of quasi-ahistorical biblical iconography, but then taking that same iconography and reinvesting it with historically specific connotations from the recent past (thereby re-anchoring the film in contemporary political concerns inspired by not only the conflict in the Balkans, but also 9/11, the Iraq War, global immigration debates, etc.).

Children of Men (2006)

We saw Children of Men nearly three weeks ago, and I've attempted a couple of passes at writing about it, with little success. The short version is that it was the most visceral movie-going experience I've had in many years. I was emotionally affected by this film to an extent not at all typical for me. (In what follows, there may be some spoilers, if you're worried about that kind of thing, but not too many, I hope.)

Matt Zoller Seitz, in his mixed review at The House Next Door , wrote that the movie is "superbly crafted and compelling throughout, and filled with note-perfect performances", but that, finally, "it stops being about what it purports to be about and becomes a paean to its own proficiency". Needless to say, I disagree with the latter. But I bring up Seitz's review because he also describes the movie as "not so much an allegory as a depressive leftist projection". There is some truth to this. The movie, as any preview will tell you, takes place 20 years in the future, in a fascist Britain and a condition of world-wide (and unexplained) longterm infertility. Immigrants and political prisoners are rounded up and kept in camps or ghettoes. City bombings are so routine as to be virtually ignored. People go about their business while the world around them has already fallen to pieces. There are references to disasters: nuclear attack in Africa, "catastrophe" in New York, a flu pandemic. England itself looks like a constant warzone.

In various ways, then, the movie seems to embody many of the worst fears and nightmares we on the left (myself included) often have about "the way things are going". Economic instability, environmental degradation, political imbecility, current and projected resource shortages: all of these and much else contribute to a sense of hopelessness, that the problems the world faces are simply too huge, and the political will too lacking and elite power too overwhelming, to do much of anything.

The movie is often said to be about a "dystopian future", but my first instinct in describing the images is to refer to those we can see on the news or internet every day. In a comment to this Lenin's Tomb post (which is not about the movie but about "the death of liberalism" and is excellent; I highly recommend reading it), Richard Estes invoked the movie, writing that the post "highlights a curious aspect about the way the film has been reviewed. Critics consistently describe it as a dystopian vision of the future, while it is fairly evident that there are many people around the world who live in such conditions right now. [emphasis in original comment]" Indeed. Instead of merely being a "leftist projection"--except insofar as most of the privileged West largely does not currently face the conditions shown in the film--the film is about the problems of the world today. Images of prisoners with black hoods over their heads, of checkpoints, of references to "homeland security", make this point more explicit (too explicit for some).

So, the movie is political, but not in the sense that it attempts to articulate a coherent program for change.

A brief run-through of the story: Former activist Theo (Clive Owen), now largely apathetic, gets dragged into a plot by his ex-lover, Julian (Julianne Moore), who works with a group called the Fishes. They want him to procure travel papers for a young woman named Kee (Claire-Hope Ashitey), who it turns out is pregnant. There hasn't been a live birth in more than 18 years, so this is huge. Julian's plan is to get Kee to a shadowy group called The Human Project, which may or may not exist. The Fishes as a group have their own plans. Intrigue and action ensues.

As I mentioned, the movie appears to nod in the direction of present-day left-wing concerns, but its images of left-wing activity are problematic. The Fishes are just as murderous as the government, just as bad as the fascists. They are depicted as nothing more than an extreme radical faction, willing to use Kee and her baby for whatever political aims they may have, which are never really articulated. We don't know what their aims are, and it doesn't appear that we're meant to care. The apolitical Theo--the former activist, now a successful professional--emerges, with the death of Julian, as the only character with a functioning moral compass and the strength to take any positive action. So the film appears to scoff at the notion of any kind of collective solution to anything. Also, Kee's guardian is a woman named Miriam (Pam Ferris), who is a figure of ridicule, spouting New Age mumbo jumbo about everything happening for a reason, mocked in a scene where she stumbles trying to do T'ai Chi. And yet, she does sacrifice herself for Kee and the baby.

Some critics have complained that no explanation is given for the inability to procreate. Others have taken issue with some of the logic of the film. If the population is dwindling, for example, what reason would the government have to lock up immigrants? Would there not then be an excess of resources? (See this thread at Cinemarati). I don't think questions like these ultimately matter (though they are interesting). The movie makes no attempt to answer the many questions that it raises. It offers the idea of hope, in a world that appears utterly hopeless (in which people believe, with reason, that there is literally no future), but this hope is tentative, potentially illusory. For all we know, the much-anticipated Human Project doesn't exist.

A minor closing observation: all the music in the movie is "oldies", from 50 years ago to today. We clearly hear radio stations refer to classics from 2003, for example. I wondered about the role of music in a society and nostalgia. The society of the movie has no future, so nostalgia for the music of the past (when the future existed) is strong. Who makes art when there is no future? Does the question make sense? In the movie, the character who Theo visits to obtain the travel papers collects famous art or artifacts (Picasso's Guernica is on one wall; the floating pig from Pink Floyd's Animals tour can be seen outside the window). He seems to be protecting it from destruction (if memory serves), as if society no longer had any use for it. All the pop music, anyway, is old. Obviously, even those songs that are new now would be old then, but the movie seems to treat all of the music as nostalgia. No youth, no pop music, it's all looking back.

Inventing Authenticity

Dial "M" for Musicology, in a short post about "American Idol" contestants, who so often appear to believe that sincerity is the key to performance:

. . . performance isn't always, or even often, a matter of sincerity. George Burns is supposed to have said, "sincerity is everything -- if you can fake that, you've got it made." So true. In my classes I often like to point out that the artistry of singers like Bob Dylan is largely directed at fashioning a rhetoric of authenticity. You hear Dylan's hard-prairie voice on The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan and think, ah, the splintery authenticity. But the chewed-up R's and flat vowels and the moments of high intensity where Dylan overshoots the pitch are just as carefully crafted as the portamenti on a Frank Sinatra album. What's particularly impressive about Dylan's sixties albums is how he was coming up with a whole new vocal-performative code for each album. It's a remarkable acheivement: between 1963 (Freewheelin' Bob Dylan) and 1967 (John Wesley Harding) he invented half a dozen ways of being authentic.

End the War on Iraq

This Saturday, we will be attending this:



Please join us if you can.

Unfilmable

Via this discussion at Jeff VanderMeer's blog, I came across this entertaining list of "unfilmable novels". The list includes One Hundred Years of Solitude, Ulysses, Beckett, Proust, Vonnegut's Cat's Cradle, Flann O'Brien's The Third Policeman, etc. There are well over a hundred comments, with readers chiming in with their own pet nomination for unfilmable novel. I've had discussions like this before, and I always feel like people are talking about different things when they say a book "can't be made into a movie". Often people are simply worried that their favorite novel will be sullied by some hack screenwriter's attempt to force it into 90 minutes or two hours. Or they think that it's just too much, they could never "get it right". Something like The Lord of the Rings was thought unfilmable, I suppose, because of the sheer scale, along with the problem of special effects. In the event, of course, those obstacles were overcome, and yet, to hear some Rings enthusiasts (e.g., my brother, who has not only read the trilogy countless times, but has read The Silmarillion at least four times, which is just wrong) tell it, the movies succeeded on the level of spectacle, but missed the point--the essential theme--of the books (by, for example, leaving out the scouring of the Shire). Perhaps. But that's another thing readers worry about, the undermining of theme to please some imagined desires of a mass audience. Obviously, there's no rule that says this must necessarily happen, so it's not really relevant to the question of "unfilmability".

What, then, are we talking about when we say a book is "unfilmable"? I think that visual imagery (special effects) does not qualify; that's only a question of filmmakers' (and effects makers) imagination and ingenuity (which is not to say that any given reader would approve of a given filmmaker's interpretation). Similarly hugeness of scale: a novel's length might make it unlikely to be filmed, but that's not the same thing as "unfilmable". I think what we mean, in principle, by "unfilmable" is that we think that a film version would not be able to be the same as the book, would be unable to provide the same aesthetic experience, or even approximate the experience of the book. In some respects, I think readers need to get over this: movies are not the same as books. It seems silly to write it, but somehow necessary. Movies should be treated as independent of their source material.

Well, ok, we approach the movie as its own thing. Great. But I think the question of the filmability of certain written works is still of interest.

Jan at Jahsonic has attempted to define the characteristics of a novel that might make it unfilmable. He came up with two: plotlessness and philosophical introspection. And in an earlier post "on the nature of the 20th century reading experience", he described a kind of reading experience in which the book "is so good that it provides a unique experience that cannot be duplicated in any other medium". In both posts he offers Martin Amis' Time's Arrow as a perfect example of this. It's an interesting selection. Certainly reading Time's Arrow (in which the story is told in reverse order) can be a disorienting experience. I recall having to adjust myself to the normal flow of the day after having been immersed in the book. And of course Amis has a distinctive prose style. But the story, surely a movie could be made of the story, including its reverse order? In the wake of Christopher Nolan's Memento? It seems to me that it could be, but that's not to say that the experience of reading the novel would be replicated. It would be a different experience, if possibly still disorienting. Here, of course, we end up reducing novels to their content--where's the story underneath all this literary gunk, anyway?

Looking at it this way, I think there are novels that can't be reduced so simply to their content (even so, I object to the reduction elsewhere), which are therefore effectively unfilmable. As mentioned above, Jan suggests plotlessness and philosophical introspection. Neither of these strike me as anathema to film.

In the comment thread to one of the Jahsonic posts, Harry Tuttle mentions Georges Perec’s La Disparition (which famously was written without the letter 'e'). And here I think we get to the crux of the problem. Experimental fiction. Formally inventive fiction. I'm thinking of the recent work of David Markson (what would be the point of a movie of This Is Not A Novel?). Or Gilbert Sorrentino. Or, imagine the "stories" in Stanley Elkin's novels without his wondrously inventive prose. Unthinkable. These narratives must be read. I think these books and many others highlight what is finally unfilmable about even more conventional novels. If too often novels are reduced to what they're "about", formally experimental novels draw our attention to how they are made, to how they achieve their effects, which might remind us to think more about how the others are made. I think that any book or story or whatever can be the source material for a film, but that which is literary about a novel--that which makes it a novel--cannot be transmitted to film, because reading is the whole point.

In the course of writing this post, I noticed that Steve at This Space has touched on this today, too. He says, in response to Jahsonic's question, What makes a novel unfilmable?:

"Being a novel" would be my first suggestion. A novel should be a novel because it cannot be anything else. The hype generated by an adaptation as an adaptation indicates a lack of faith in its original form, most obviously a lack in the original's cultural authority, but also the residual lack inherent to all art. A question borne on this lack is the one that excites me, drives my entire interest in writing: what cannot be written?

I like that: "a novel should be a novel because it cannot be anything else". Of course, the rest of this paragraph suggests much else to think about, many other potential posts (the kinds of writing we often find at Steve's blog). But, not wanting to be any more long-winded here than I already am, I'll end on this note.

Animal Collective

Scraps has finally had a chance to listen to Animal Collective, their 2005 album Feels specifically, and likes what he hears. This reminds me that I meant to post something about them last fall but did not, because I seem to be pathologically incapable of posting something quickly or spontaneously. . . Anyway, the occasion of that post would have been the re-release of their 2001 live album, Hollinndagain, which covers the period between Danse Manatee and Here Comes the Indian. I'd noticed an unfortunate tendency among reviewers to hail the release while lamenting the apparent turn away from the free-form noisy music of those records toward the more polished or, as some put it, "poppy" recent albums, such as Feels and Sung Tongs.

Don't get me wrong, I love the early Animal Collective recordings, especially Spirit They're Gone, Spirit They've Vanished (which I was just cool enough to get when it was released by Avey Tare and Panda Bear, before the official Animal Collective name took hold) and Here Comes the Indian, and I would welcome a return to a more free-form approach. But not because there is anything wrong with what they've been doing. There is nothing to lament, not when they can make music as wonderful as that found on Feels. At around the same time that I meant to post on this, I spent about two days listening to that album's "Banshee Beat" on more or less continuous repeat. It might just be the most gorgeous eight-plus minutes of music released in the last few years.

Voice of a Generation

I have the Vintage paperback edition of Murakami's Dance Dance Dance, discussed in my last post, and, as is all too normal, the book comes with many review-blurbs touting Murakami and Dance Dance Dance to the skies. I enjoy reading blurbs. Sometimes they're so over-heated that they can't help but make me smile. Then there are the ones that appear on every book by a given author, like Updike's famous blurb on Nabokov, who, of course, "writes prose the only way it should be written, that is, ecstatically." But most blurbs are fairly boring, and in more recent books, which have many, many blurb pages, only serve as additional voices in a chorus praising the book. Others make grandiose claims about the writer (who is invariably the next great whoever, or who combines the wit of x, with the crisp style of y, and the zing of z). The blurbs on the Murakami generally don't say much. He is compared to Philip K. Dick and Mishima. Sex and mystery and rock 'n' roll and sci-fi and "the future" are all invoked.

But there is one blurb I thought I'd share with you. It's right there on the front cover, and it grabbed my attention, in part because I have no idea what it means. From The Washington Post Book World: "A world-class writer who takes big risks. . . . If Murakami is the voice of a generation, then it is the generation of Thomas Pynchon and Don DeLillo." It's bad enough when a reviewer writes about someone as "the voice of a generation", but it's not clear to me how Murakami, being 12 and 13 years younger, respectively, than Pynchon or Delillo, could be the "voice of [their] generation". If I had to guess, I'd say that the reviewer was trying to invoke Pynchon and DeLillo as comparisons and ended up with this trainwreck of a sentence. Or, by invoking them, the review is saying that Murakami transcends their influence. Murakami is like them, he or she might be saying, only better. Or, the reviewer was trying to say that Murakami is the Pynchon or DeLillo of his own generation. Or that he's the Japanese Pynchon or DeLillo. Not that any of these are of any help, either, mind you, but at least they make a little bit of sense.

Dance Dance Dance, Haruki Murakami

I want to try to post some shorter comments on books I read, instead of only writing about those books that I feel I can write about at length. So here goes.

Dance Dance Dance is the first Murakami book I've read. I really wanted to like it. For one thing, it was a holiday present from my father-in-law. I've been interested in trying some Murakami for some time, and he had no way of knowing this, so it was an excellent gift. Alas, I'm afraid I had a number of problems with it.

Murakami is often said to be in the vein of some of the so-called post-modern novelists, such as Don Delillo. Superficial evidence in support of this, I suppose, is that Dance Dance Dance is packed with pop-culture references, mostly Anglo-American, many of which seem to serve no purpose other than as surface noise. There's a mystery, and an element of the supernatural--an old hotel that "lives" inside a modern hotel. (I've noticed Murakami has been tagged with the "magic realism" label, too.) The novel opens with the narrator recounting a dream of this older hotel, which leads him to set off in search of a woman he'd lived with four years prior. This search doesn't seem to mean too much to him, nor does he seem to care all that much when he finds out what probably happened. He is adrift in his life, personally and professionally, and, indeed, he seems to drift from encounter to encounter in the novel, most of which are with a famous movie actor he went to school with, a thirteen-year-old girl and her inattentive parents, and a clerk at the new hotel, with whom he more or less falls in love.

My main problem with the novel was with what I felt was a flabby prose style. Of course, not having any familiarity with Japanese, I have no way of assessing the quality of Alfred Birnbaum's translation. (I am, however, aware of controversy surrounding the various translations of his work; as is so often the case, The Complete Review has a lot of links on this, as well as other Murakami-related items). The English is all I have to go on, and the English generally did not excite me. Often, it was just plain drab, barely functional. There were, yes, numerous isolated stretches in the novel, when it appeared as if the story might be getting somewhere, when the prose was much more crisp, and I found myself enjoying the plot, turning pages quickly, interested. But this rarely lasted long, and on many occasions I got bogged down and had a hard time continuing. The narrator's thoughts on ennui and the modern condition were rendered uninteresting by this flabbiness (I lost count of the number of times the words "advanced capitalism" appeared). There was a certain repetition of detail that could have served to underscore the narrator's position, but which the prose instead made boring. His conversations with the movie star, which often amounted to the actor complaining about how he'd rather have simpler life, were similarly repetitive and even more tedious. It's as if Murakami, as a writer, was more interested, or more skilled, in moving the plot along than in exploring his themes, and this was reflected in the variable quality of the prose.

I'm aware that I'm being vague here and that specific examples would be more convincing. Unfortunately, I have neither the time nor the inclination to go back and scour the book in search of examples of what I'm talking about. So I'll just leave off here (so much for "shorter", eh?).

Meme-y Goodness

For the first time, I've been tagged for one of those memes, by Dan Barrow at The End Times, which is a new blog to me. It's the old "five things you probably didn't know about me" meme. So, in the spirit of blogular community, then, here goes:

1. I hate both peanut butter and bananas. In fact, I'd prefer not to be in the same room with someone who's eating them. It's borderline pathological.
2. The first recording I ever had was a cassette copy of Waylon Jennings' Greatest Hits. It's awesome.
3. I have never smoked any kind of tobacco.
4. I've seen Gone With The Wind approximately fifteen times. I have no good explanation for this.
5. From the ages of roughly ten to 25, I spent most of my time playing, watching, or reading about sports. As a result, instead of, say, memorized poems or philosophical concepts, my brain is filled with huge amounts of more or less useless sports-related knowledge. This does help me when playing games like Trivial Pursuit, though, so I've got that going for me.

Ok. Now the passing this along part. I think many people have done this one, so I wasn't sure who to pick. But, anyway, I tag Parlando, New Moon Hazel, and my good friend over at Lilymania. Crucial update: Comments to my next post have reminded me that I'd meant to also tag Brandon at No Trivia with this important meme, but forgot, so I'm doing it now.

One wakes within us

I have removed the drab "superficial thoughts, etc" line from the description above, in favor of a passage from Gene Wolfe's tetralogy, The Book of the New Sun; thanks to Scraps (in a comment on this blog) and Lars (in, for example, these posts) for putting Wolfe and this series on my map. Since I will no doubt change the description again, I also reproduce the lines here:

The difficulty lies in learning that we ourselves encompass forces equally great. We say, "I will," and "I will not," and imagine ourselves (though we obey the orders of some prosaic person every day) our own masters, when the truth is that our masters are sleeping. One wakes within us and we are ridden like beasts, though the rider is but some hitherto unguessed part of ourselves.

Wrong Again

American Pastoral is not my favorite Philip Roth novel, and I've complained about the fact that it is, in my opinion, consistently over-praised, while the masterful Sabbath's Theater, for example, is all too often ignored. That said, I do like it, and there's no question that it has some great writing in it. For a variety of reasons that I won't go into here, I feel compelled to post the following passage (which had been brought back to my attention via this interview with Peter Carey by Robert Birnbaum in 2003):

You fight your superficiality, your shallowness, so as to try to come at people without unreal expectations, without an overload of bias or hope or arrogance, as untanklike as you can be, sans cannon and machine guns and steel plating half a foot thick; you come at them unmenacingly on your own ten toes instead of tearing up the turf with your caterpillar treads, take them on with an open mind, as equals, man to man, as we used to say, and yet you never fail to get them wrong. You might as well have the brain of a tank. You get them wrong before you meet them, while you’re anticipating meeting them; you get them wrong while you’re with them and then you go home to tell somebody else about the meeting and you get them all wrong again. Since the same generally goes for them with you, the whole thing is really a dazzling illusion empty of all perception, an astonishing farce of misperception. And yet what are we to do about this terribly significant business of other people, which gets bled of the significance we think it has and takes on a significance that is ludicrous, so ill-equipped are we all to envision one another’s interior workings and invisible aims? Is everyone to go off and lock the door and sit secluded like the lonely writers do, in a soundproof cell, summoning people out of words and then proposing that these word people are closer to the real thing than the real people that we mangle with our ignorance every day?

Vital Musics

At his fine new blog Parlando, frequent Existence Machine commenter Scraps has a nice appreciation of Joan Armatrading, as part of his ongoing and interesting "Songs Project". I've never listened to any Armatrading; in the main, I haven't gone back and sampled much of the singer-songwritery stuff from the 1970s like I have other music from the past. Unfairly, it carries a negative connotation in my mind. No doubt just as unfairly, or at least inaccurately, I have Armatrading lumped in with Janis Ian, who I also know next to nothing about. Anyway, in his post Scraps writes that, of the singer-songwriter albums, it's one of the most underrated. He suggests that this might be:

. . . because an album by a black Caribbean woman in 1976 that wasn’t soul, reggae, or even folk — it’s just a straight pop-rock album — was bound to fall between the cracks. There’s nothing arresting about it, nothing eccentric or groundbreaking; there’s nothing special about it, except ten straight excellent songs; there’s nothing notable about it, except that it’s perfect.

Elsewhere, in an interesting mini-essay on generationality in music, as part of janedark's year-end music wrap-up (albums and singles, respectively; this is from the albums post), jane writes:

. . . to put the matter crudely, generationality happens where genres are both historical enough to have generations, and alive enough to be worth renewing. That aliveness is, of course, as much a story about money as about other kinds of emotional or libidinal investment. That hip-hop and country were the scenes of substantial generationality this year in one ways tells us what we already know: that these are the leading forms of indigenous music here in the hegemonoculture, where the greatest investments are made. Or at least it reminds us of that, since we seem to be so good at forgetting it every fifteen minutes. It’s not just that these musics are popular, and thus abstractly “populist,” and so should be reckoned with on those grounds; it’s also that they’re the most musically vital, the living forms, and if one’s way of measuring songs can’t recognize that, it’s the measure that’s got to go.

I admit that I don't always know what jane's talking about, and I'm not sure I do here. Somehow the implications of both of these posts are connected in my mind, where I have a number of questions percolating about music: What makes a music vital? Is it originality? Innovation? I do not listen to much pop country (though I have jane to thank for first alerting me to the awesomeness of Miranda Lambert), but what contact I do have with it does not make me think of it as terribly innovative. So I doubt that it's a necessary component to what he's talking about. How important is it? We seem to have certain ideas on what constitutes innovative or experimental anyway. I subscribe to and enjoy reading The Wire, which of course has the sub-heading "Adventures in Modern Music". And, while it does cover mainstream rap inside its pages, aside from the occasional primer, that's about it. At his excellent new blog, No Trivia, Brandon Soderberg writes:

If 'Wire Magazine' had any balls, if the magazine was honestly interested in “adventures in modern music” and dropped their elitism, their rap coverboys wouldn’t be lames like MF Doom or Edan. Three-Six Mafia would have made the cover a decade ago. So would The Neptunes and Timbaland, even Jazze Pha or Kanye West. Are Broadcast or Boards of Canada more “adventurous” than a Phizzle production like ‘So What’? The magazine’s year-end list might include ‘Late Registration’ or something, but it’s more like them conceding to it so they don’t look totally out of touch.

In his post, Soderberg (who I came across via the second comment to this entertaining Status Ain't Hood post by Tom Breihan; anyone who refers to J.D. Considine as "prick of all pricks" is worth a look from me) is writing about electronic musician Tim Hecker and rapper Young Jeezy. As it happens, I have one album by each artist, and like them both, though they are not the albums under discussion. Soderberg says:

While I was writing my Hecker review, I kept thinking of [Young Jeezy's] ‘The Inspiration’ and how 'Inspiration' and [Hecker's] 'Harmony...' are more alike than any of the other albums I’ve written about. If I had to compare ‘The Inspiration’, I’d say it is sonically similar to Three-Six Mafia ‘Most Known Unknown’, ‘M83’s ‘Before the Dawn Heals Us’, and the aforementioned Hecker album. A weird group, but seriously: What makes Tim Hecker avant-garde and Young Jeezy (and his producers) stupid mainstream rap? The music is primarily created through sampling and electronics. Those soundtrack to 'Thief' whips and beeps on [Jeezy's] ‘Hypnotize’ sound a lot like the in-and-out helicopter-sounding whooshes that provide the backing to [Hecker's] ‘Dungeoneering’. More importantly, the songs are after the same feeling: Some kind of claustrophobic, scary world-collapsing paranoia that occasionally breaks open into minor joy. The way ‘Dungeoneering’ lets up towards the end and segues into the next track is a lot like the feeling Jeezy provides with a defiant chorus or Shawty Red or Timbo provide the listener with through a change-up of the beat. What about those sub-level basstones that suddenly push forward on a lot of ‘The Inspiration’s tracks? Electronic music, especially the kind Hecker makes, is all production. The minor details and subtle shifts are what make it good. The organ stabs on ‘Whitecaps of White Noise I’ sound a lot like DJ Toomp’s now signature synth-tone. This stuff isn’t that different!

This is good stuff; he's saying a lot of interesting things here and in the rest of his post. Of course, I'm drawing attention to the point about avant-garde versus pop. The tendency to miss the innovation in pop, while hailing as "experimental" those underground moves that are finally not much different, or even merely recapitulate experiments of the past, is still strong. It's an interesting question as to why this is, one I'm not going to venture answering here, though I have my ideas. (In many respects, I think it's simply a matter of taste and exposure.) But, looking again at the quote from Scraps at the top of this post, I sometimes wonder why experimentation or innovation matter so much. Or maybe I wonder why they matter to me so much. I know I've sort of chased my tail a lot, trying to hear various so-called experimental musicians, attempting to keep abreast of the new. Since I've been forced in the last three years to recognize what critics and listeners like Soderberg have been arguing, that mainstream rap, and pop generally, can plausibly be shown to be as innovative or fresh as the most self-consciously underground music, the situation has become untenable for me; as a listener I am more overwhelmed than ever. Sometimes I just want the merely excellent, the satisfying musical experience.

On Writing and Not Writing

Many writers have written eloquently about why they write. For me, the more appropriate essay might be "Why I don’t write". In my life I've oscillated between two extremes of perception when it came to writing. On the one hand, writers have something to say and a burning desire to say it, and so they have to write, and, if the writer is sufficiently talented, art simply flows onto the page. On the other hand, writers work hard at the craft of writing, laboring sentence by sentence, page by page, burnishing the prose until it gives off its particular luster, unique to that writer. In the event, the truth appears to be some combination of the two poles. In the first instance, I haven't written, I've told myself, because I've felt that I have nothing to say and that I feel no burning need to write. In the second instance, I've had a hard time imagining myself doing the work.

Doing the work, that’s the rub, isn't it? In recent years, as I've become more and more immersed in literature, the problem has presented itself again, in a different form: the work needed now is how to become a better reader. Attend to the words on the page, follow up on allusions, write about what I read. These are what I know I need to do, what I want to do. But still, I perceive the kind of work that might be necessary to be a better reader, and by extension a writer at all, and I blanch at the effort required. All too often, I've been able to slide by with a minimum of effort. I have, indeed, tended to make something of a virtue of this. But writing, like life, is not easy. When I read what other people have written about this or that book that I've read, I overlook as insignificant those observations that I also made myself. William H. Gass, writing about Paul Valéry's prose pieces in his preface to his own Fiction and the Figures of Life, wrote that Valéry "dared to write on his subjects as if the world had been silent." Too often, I do quite the opposite. I don’t write because the world has emphatically not been silent. Many things have already been said about a great many things, so I discount my own thoughts as obvious or unoriginal, even when thinking or writing for myself. As if the obvious is not important; as if originality is to be valued above all else. As if the less obvious and more original ideas and writing magically appear unbidden without work.

I don't tend to make Resolutions, but one thing I want to do this year is be freer with what I write. I am continually astonished by writers and what they dare commit to words, to write down at all, let alone publish for others to see. When I say "dare", I'm not really talking about shocking or controversial content, although certainly I find myself amazed that Philip Roth, for example, writes about sex the way that he often has. Not because I'm a prude, but because often it's simply embarrassing. Perhaps not a great example. Here's another one: when I read fiction that plays with form, or where the writer has adopted an extreme form, I am often impressed with the commitment. I've started reading Thomas Bernhard's Correction and, once again, as in Bernhard's other works, there are the lengthy sentences, the huge blocks of words, the accretion of detail, the repetition.

And then there's the willingness to address time-honored subjects, "as if the world had been silent" or even in full acknowledgment of the distinct lack of silence. Last year, I read Walter Benjamin's memoir Berlin Childhood around 1900. At the end of the book, there is a brief piece called "The Moon", excised by Benjamin in the 1930s, but published anew with this latest edition. In "The Moon", he writes:

When the nightlight, flickering, then brought peace to my hand and me, it appeared that nothing more remained of the world than a single, stubborn question. It may be that this question nested in the folds of the door-curtain that shielded me from noise. It may be that it was nothing but a residue of many past nights. Or, finally, it may be that it was the other side of the feeling of strangeness which the moon had brought on. The question was: Why is there anything at all in the world, why the world? With amazement, I realized that nothing in it could compel me to think the world. Its nonbeing would have struck me as not a whit more problematic than its being, which seemed to wink at nonbeing. The moon had an easy time with this being.

I find this passage beautiful, but I'm struck by the commonality of the anxiety. Why the world? Not an original problem. Benjamin troubled himself to write it down, and wrote beautifully about it, yes, but it's the trouble to write it down that interests me here. In the past, I would have told myself that there was nothing especially interesting about the question, or about having had the question, and any thoughts I might have had surrounding it I would have consigned to oblivion, because I simply wouldn't commit the simple question to the written word, which meant, further, that I wasn't able to develop the line of thinking, that I was consigning all related thoughts similarly to oblivion, that I was therefore not developing my thinking. My modest goal for this year, then, is to allow myself to commit more thoughts to words, to write more. To overcome the amorphous fears preventing me writing. Seemingly simple, but a world away from my established non-practice.