One-Way Street

Poetry Slam

Giving new meaning to the phrase "poetry slam," Derek Walcott read a poem called "The Mongoose" at the the Calabash Literary Festival in Jamaica last week. The subject of the poem is none other than Walcott's fellow Caribbean writer and long-time nemesis, VS Naipaul. Walcott's poem begins with the lines, "I have been bitten, I must avoid infection/Or else I'll be as dead as Naipaul's fiction," and continues in rhyming couplets with a vitriol worthy of Alexander Pope:

Since he has made that snaring style a prison
The plots are forced, the prose sedate and silly
The anti-hero is a prick named Willie
Who lacks the conflict of a Waugh or Lawrence
And whines with his creator's self-abhorrence

Naipaul was too busy insulting people at the Hay Festival in Wales (he informed one audience they were "ugly") to comment immediately on Walcott's salvo. Naipaul seems to be on some sort of government grant to develop the most obnoxious personality he possibly can, so it seems unlikely that he'll remain silent for long.

The British literary tradition, which Naipaul has ensconced himself with unseemly insistence, has a way of slapping its most odious practitioners upside the head. Alexander Pope seems to have written these lines from "An Essay on Criticism" (1711) specifically for Naipaul:

Of all the Causes which conspire to blind
Man's erring Judgment, and misguide the Mind,
What the weak Head with strongest Byass rules,
Is Pride, the never-failing Vice of Fools.
Whatever Nature has in Worth deny'd,
She gives in large Recruits of needful Pride;
For as in Bodies, thus in Souls, we find
What wants in Blood and Spirits, swell'd with Wind;
Pride, where Wit fails, steps in to our Defence,
And fills up all the mighty Void of Sense!

eJane

Penguin Publishers reports that sales of ebooks in the first four months of 2008 have already surpassed ebook sales for all of 2007. According to Publisher's Weekly, the jump was largely attributable to the growing popularity of ebook readers in particular the often overlooked Sony Reader. Now that the ebook bandwagon finally seems to be leaving the terminal, Penguin is jumping aboard and bringing Jane Austen with it. Sometime very soon Penguin will initiate a series of what they're calling "enhanced ebooks," which are sort of lite versions of Norton Critical Editions. The first edition will be Pride and Prejudice, complete with a filmography, recipes, and nineteenth-century reviews. Evidently, scholarly and critical commentary won't be included.

Jane Austen is a logical candidate to initiate a line of ebooks: she started publishing just before mass market publishing really took off, but her novels are more tightly constructed than the "literary industry" novels of Balzac, Hugo, Dickens, and other novelists of the early mass publishing era. It would be entirely appropriate if she helped usher in another major realignment of the publishing industry.

Who Killed the Literary Critic?

Salon's Laura Miller and Louis Bayard have one of the more balanced conversations about the decline of literary criticism I've read in a while. Their conversation was prompted by Ronan McDonald's new book, with the apocalyptic title now required of a book about the decline of books, The Death of the Critic. McDonald is a lecturer in English and American studies at the University of Reading, and like all academics, he sees the university as the source of and solution to all the world's problems. Specifically, he blames the decline of literary criticism on cultural studies, which McDonald, like scores of conservatives before him, denounces as a peripheral, elitist practice that is nevertheless eating away at the core of Western values.

Miller and Bayard shrug off McDonald's central thesis, implying that McDonald is as every bit as out of touch with critical practice in the public sphere as the Spivak-reading multi-cultiis. Miller and Bayard disagree on the impact of bloggers on the decline of public sphere literary criticism. Bayard admits he gets a lot of sound literary criticism for free from bloggers, while Miller blames the larger shifts in the media landscape. In either case, McDonald ignores these two developments.  Miller and Bayard also blame the decline of literary criticism on the decline of the American novel since its mid-twentieth-century pinnacle. This line of argument sounds correct intuitively, but it also seems to be a generational phenomenon in which readers of a certain age remember the literary lions of their youth.

Miller and Bayard gush about the late Northrop Frye--a worthy subject of admiration--but express divided opinions about James Wood, perhaps the most prominent literary critic working today inside or outside the academy. Miller says that Wood "has a well-formed, if rather austere aesthetic but he seems to be the only one who actually adheres in it. Of all the people I've met who admire Wood's criticism I've yet to encounter anyone who actually subscribes to his fairly restrictive standards or taste. They like his writing and seem to feel braced by his rigor, but at the end of the day, they go home with Jonathan Franzen or Zadie Smith instead." Bayard is more enthusiastic about Wood, grouping him with those critics who, as far as Bayard is concerned, "can misinterpret and misevaluate to their heart's delight as long as they make the words dance." 

Interestingly, Bayard has hit upon one of the criticisms leveled against the post-structuralists (we can include cultural studies as a breed of post-structuralism): that critics make the same claim to aesthetic value as the literary works to which they're supposed to be subordinate. Roland Barthes is a far more elegant and intelligent writer than any number of celebrated novelists working today. 

Miller and Bayard agree that good criticism needs good literature, but it works the other way around, too. In fact, history shows that independent artists--artists who didn't have to depend on a patron--arose in conjunction with the independent critic. Except for a few historically anomalous periods like the mid to late nineteenth century, both writers and critics lived a perilous economic existence on the margins of popular culture. Take, for instance, Matthew Arnold, among the most eminent of Victorians. It's hard to imagine Arnold as a blogger (what would he call it? "Musings from Dover Beach"?), but he probably wouldn't have any other outlet today. No book review editor today would hand over column inches to a school inspector.

Elegant Graffiti

Boyd Tonkin of The Independent finds a terrific metaphor for Arab writing: the Moorish citadel in Granada, its interior covered with ornamental poetry in Arabic. Tonkin calls it "Europe's most elegant graffiti," and like graffiti, its florid craftsmanship is illegible to the public at large. It is a crime of writing. Arab writing has long flouted the law; now it is being asked to exculpate real and imagined crimes.

Despite Arab governments' support for literature across the region, writers are still jailed. Western news feeds are full of tales of repression, like the arrest and conviction of an Egyptian blogger who writes under the name Kareem Amer (presumably, he was imprisoned under his real name). He was convicted of insulting President Hosni Mubarak and an Egyptian university in his blog. Interestingly, insulting the university carried the stiffer penalty. Religious militants lurk everywhere, ready to harass anyone who writes a single heterodox line.

When despotic Arab governments aren't throwing writers into jail, they're handing out lavish awards. Two major literary prizes have recently been established: the International Prize for Arabic Fiction, commonly known as the "Arab Booker," and the Sheikh Zayed Awards, which are part of the emirate of Abu Dhabi's determined attempt to create a new Granada on the Persian Gulf.  All cultural awards are promotional to one degree or another, and these awards are no exceptions. These awards have raised the profile of Arab writing internationally, but equally important, they provide official endorsement of the novel as a genre, something the novel hasn't always enjoyed in a culture that has long considered the novel an irredeemably Western form of writing. Unlike lyric poetry, which is closer to the Muslim tradition of oracular verse, the novel is prosaic and secular, two qualities still regarded with suspicion in a region plagued by bureaucratic disinformation and a religious fundamentalism that has replaced secular dissent as the most popular form of resistance against tyranny.

After describing the daunting obstacles Arab writers continue to face, Tonkin argues we need to pay attention to the new Arab writing. By beginning his discussion of Arabic writing in Granada, the site of a European victory in the clash of civilizations, Tonkin suggests that translated Arabic literature is important because of "the perpetually rocky relationship between the Arab and European worlds" in which "[i]mperial bureaucrats, soldiers and scholars on one side; radical nationalists, pious militants and oil-rich oligarchs on the other – all have had their various axes to grind, and to wield." These crimes will be exculpated by a writing that is itself outside the law. Arab literature is the new "elegant graffiti," both illegal and admired, cryptic yet expressive, collective but inscribed where it isn't welcome.

On Beautiful Sentences, Again

One of the most popular search terms used to access this blog is "beautiful sentences." I mentioned the term in an entry that was really more about Stanley Fish, one of the leading literary theorists of the 1980s and 1990s, than it was about beautiful sentences themselves.  But all of these visitors looking for information on beautiful sentences -- I must get five or six a day -- got me to thinking about what constitutes a beautiful sentence, and why so many people are interested in them in the first place.

What, exactly, is a beautiful sentence? Is a sentence beautiful because it expresses a fine sentiment? Does it make us see something as beautiful? Can we say a sentence is beautiful in the same way a passage of music is beautiful? Fine writing, of course, has always been an enduring feature of literature, but there is a limit. In 1605 Francis Bacon warned against those who pushed "an affectionate studie of eloquence" to extremes, leading them "to hunt more after words than matter." Bacon's fellow Royal Society member Thomas Sprat was more forceful in denouncing the "vicious abundance of Phrase, this trick of Metaphors, this volubility of Tongue, which makes so great a noise in the World."

The idea that sentences should be beautiful is a relatively recent invention, dating back to Mallarmé (the beautiful sentence, like music, is a language without a speaker) and, further back, to the Romantic poets. The Romantics believed that a mystical balance could be struck between appearance (words) and idea (meaning) and that this balance was most effectively achieved by those blessed beings endowed with schöne Seele, or beautiful soul. Certain people had a sort of inner glow that illuminated everything around them. Rousseau saw it in Julie, la nouvelle Héloïse. Goethe's Wilhelm Meister has schöne Seele.

Voltaire had already sniffed out the problem of the beautiful soul before the concept was fully formed. Even the most luminous being, he realized, couldn't make everything beautiful. Confronted with the stinking mess that was London in 1802, Wordsworth had to call for help from Milton, who was thoroughly dead by that point.  Stendhal, Flaubert, and Proust steadily chipped away at the Romantic myth of the schöne Seele. But this demystification wasn't without its excesses, too. The wane Romantic with his finely wrought sentences became a straw man for the vigorous, lucid Victorian until we get to sentences getting churned out like so many pork sausages in George Gissing's New Grub Street. Finally, it took Wittgenstein to demonstrate that language doesn't really illuminate anything (what idea pops into your head when you hear the word "and" or "yet"?), so why bother with the whole question of language and representation.

Looking for beautiful sentences is a quixotic mission. A stray sentence that strikes us as elegant and pleasing also calls attention to the dull informative sentences around it. We look for a glimpse of truth in language that is distant from the workaday talk that forms our social, which is to say our real, lives. The more earnestly we look for beautiful sentences, the more we admit our reality is bereft of truth.

Modernism and Its Discontents

In his magisterial new book Modernism: The Lure of Heresy the intellectual historian Peter Gay makes some puzzling claims. Most comprehensive accounts of modernism divide it into at least two strains, one that saw something to retain in Western culture, and another that wanted to trash the whole thing and start all over again. But Gay claims that "liberalism" was the '"fundamental principle of Modernism."  Surely by "liberalism" Gay can't mean the way the word is currently used and abused in the United States. Gay is a historian, so perhaps he's referring to the eighteenth-century uses of the word to mean "open-minded" and "unorthodox." This early sense would accommodate André Breton's remark that "the simplest surrealist act consists of dashing into the street, pistol in hand, and firing blindly, as fast as you can, into the crowd."

There was a whole brand of modernism that was all about exploring the limits of unorthodoxy. If you want an overly vivid demonstration of this tendency, just watch, if your castration anxiety will allow you, the first scene of Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dalí's Un Chien andalou in which a man slits a woman's eyeball with a razor. But the modernist movement also includes the decorous T.S. Eliot, the fey artificer Andy Warhol, the dreamy mythologizer William Butler Yeats, and the solemn demythologizer Walter Benjamin. None of these people would be comfortable being labeled a "liberal" as the term is currently used. Benjamin certainly would have sneered at it as inadequate to what he was trying to do.

The second questionable claim Gay makes is his assertion that World War I inspired "few striking innovations in high culture." True, the most innovative artworks of the first two decades of the twentieth century were created before hostilities broke out: Duchamp's Nude Descending a Staircase (1912), Stravinsky's Rite of Spring (1913) and Picasso's Demoiselles d'Avignon (1907), but the most insouciant artwork of the century was created at the war's sour peak: Duchamp's Fountain (1917). Irish literature before the Great War was Yeats and John Millington Synge; afterwards it was James Joyce and Samuel Beckett. Ezra Pound spent the pre-war years tinkering with Symbolism and the fustier reaches of romanticism. After the war Eliot overturned everything in English poetry with The Waste Land. By comparison, the Second World War was aesthetically barren. Abstract Expressionism, the most original post-war movement, owed a considerable debt to interwar painting, while John Cage was Dada with a piano.

Then there's the great modernism/post-modernism divide. Gay argues that modernism eventually ran out of gas, then sold out.  Duchamp's Fountain and L.H.O.O.Q. (pictured above) are now art museum gift shop items. The theater of the absurd has been picked apart in heavily-footnoted Ph.D. dissertations.  Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein threw up their hands at any political commitment and reveled in the cheesier aspects of popular culture.  The last warhorses of antagonistic modernism are Günter Grass and Gabriel García Márquez. Among younger authors cutting edge lit is now about losing your memory.

But in his epilogue--maybe Gay wants us to see post-modernism as an epilogue to modernism--Gay pays a visit to Frank Gehry's Bilbao Guggenheim and sees in the brash curlicues signs of modernism's old anarchic energy. But in general, modernism "has had a good long run," Gay sighs, but now it's pretty much over with. Whether he's right or not is the subject of another book.

The Free Theatre of Belarus

Mark Ravenhill files an amazing report on something called the Free Theatre of Belarus. Although it sounds like Kafka's fictional Nature Theater of Oklahoma, it's an actual theater company managing a harrowing existence in Minsk. Known mostly for its retro Soviet government overseen by a lunatic president, Alexander Lukashenko, Belarus is also home to another holdover from Iron Curtain days:  Samizdat literature.

The Free Theatre of Belarus performs guerrilla style, staging performances in found spaces in the rickety margins of the capital city. Audiences receive text messages and email announcements of performances with only a few hours notice. Most of the members of the troupe have either been fired from the state theater or been arrested for dissonant activities, or both. Periodically the authorities descend upon a performance, round up everyone  who can't run away fast enough, and throw them in jail--women, children and foreigners included.

Revenhill says the performances and are polished and professional, despite the improvised performance spaces and constant threat of arrest. Many of the actors are classically trained under the old Soviet system so they have "stunning vocal and physical command" over their material. Their current repertoire includes a trilogy called, appropriately enough, Hidden Voices. The audience is underground art hipsters and, on the night Revenhill attended, "a French documentary film-maker, a German theatre-festival programmer, a couple whose formal dress picks them out as figures from sympathetic western embassies." No one was arrested that night, but sitting in the audience Revenhill admitted to guiltily "enjoying this feeling of fear as I wait for the performance to begin."

Despite official disapproval, the Free Theatre of Belarus managed to travel to Britain, where they're currently performing Being Harold Pinter and Generation Jeans on London's West End. Later this month they'll move on to Leads before returning to Lukashenko's theater of the absurd nation.

Podcasts from the Heptarchy

One of my first graduate courses in English was a research methods class taught by the department's sole medievalist. A few weeks into the term, once we got to know the professor well enough to ask such questions, a student asked him why he got interested in medieval literature in the first place. His answer was immediate and thoughtful, suggesting he'd been asked that question a lot. He mentioned the influence of a great teacher and an opportunity to do work in a relatively untrodden upon area of literary studies. Most of all, he said, was the period was appealing because it was so weird.

Some of that weirdness comes across in the podcasts on Old English literature by Stuart Lee, an English professor and occasional Director of Computing Services at Oxford University, which explains the podcasts. I'm a regular listener of Lee's podcast recordings of his lectures, available here and on iTunes. Each lecture begins with some shuffling of papers and a plea to mute cellphones. The lectures provide general historical context for the culture and literature of the pre-Conquest period. Lee delivers his lectures in the affable but exasperated tone typical of medievalists, who must deal continually with  misunderstandings about their period and the long shadow of J.R.R. Tolkien. Lee is an engaging lecturer--he typically speaks for 52 minutes or so without a break--and he keeps things moving along at a brisk pace. The only problem with the podcast is that Lee distributes handouts and shows film clips (most of them from really bad movies, an occupational hazard, I would think) that are not available online, at least outside the Oxford network. Podcast subscribers miss out on the film clips, which make the students giggle, as well as the beautiful illuminated manuscripts and the lines of Old English poetry Lee reads with flawless pronunciation.

In the latest podcast, on the science, religion, and magic of the Old English period, Lee displays a picture of a crucifix. Evidently it's quite an object. "I grew up with that crucifix," Lee comments. If that point is lost to podcast listeners, the rest of the lecture is fascinating. Lee specializes in the period between the Anglo-Saxon migrations in the fifth century to the Norman conquest in 1066--a huge period of time. England as we know it emerged during this period, and the story Lee tells in each podcast is how this nation came into being. In the religion podcast he explains why the ruling Anglo-Saxon elite dropped their Germanic belief system for Christianity. The pagan beliefs were more fun--lots of slaughters and feasts--but Christianity was better at addressing some of the knottier questions of existence, like the afterlife. Compared to the church of the High Middle Ages (or Christianity today, for that matter), Anglo-Saxon Christianity was a casual affair. Priests could marry. Ordinary people could marry and divorce as local circumstances allowed, to the complete indifference of ecclesiastical authorities. The Bible was freely translated into the vernacular. The Christian virtue of suffering was lost on the warlike Anglo-Saxons, who still saw the necessity of making other people suffer.  Lee tiptoes around magic and pre-Christian beliefs, mostly because they're not well documented, and partly because they've morphed into irritating (to medievalists) New Age pan-theisms. "Not quite accurate," is how Lee characterizes these still fashionable beliefs.

Lee never directly addresses the main question a dilettante medievalist like myself would ask: just how accurate is Lord of the Rings, anyway? From listening to his podcasts I've gotten the impression that while Lee respects Tolkien's work, it's not quite accurate. Still, the wanderlust and nostalgia for lost homelands in Rings comes through in Lee's Anglo-Saxons. So does their humor and their fierce loyalties to family and community. Maybe next term Lee will come up with a video podcast. If he does, I'll certainly watch it on my (still to be purchased) iPod Touch.

My 2007

This isn't a best of list. I wouldn't pretend to have read or seen or listened enough to designate anything as the best of its kind.  Rather, I've put together an idiosyncratic list of the books, films, buildings and technologies that I learned the most from in 2007.

Santiago Calatrava, The Chicago Spire. (Also here and here and here and here.)  Calatrava's 2,000-foot twisting tower is a high risk, high reward proposition. It could be the point around which the entire skyline coheres--what the Sears Tower was supposed to have been but never was. Or it could be an overweening presence that Chicagoans will be faintly embarrassed about, like an impulse purchase that we later regretted. Or it could be something in between, like the fat-man-in-the-bathtub renovation of Soldiers Field that we've learned to live with. Whatever it turns out to be, the Spire is emblematic of a renewed sense of architectural daring in the birthplace of modernist architecture.

The Kindle. Tech nerds have already dismissed Amazon's ebook reader based on a quick glance at Engadget (one wag said the Kindle looked like it was designed by the prop manager for Space 1999), but avid readers love it--at least those who have been lucky enough to get their hands on one. The furious debate about the Kindle has revealed how we read in 2007. It turns out that a lot of people are already reading on screens. It also turns out that people want to read more than books on an ebook reader. They want all the disparate material they read on a PC--HTML pages, PDFs, emails, Word documents, blogs--on a device that's as portable and easy on the eyes as a hardcover book. The Kindle has the potential to be not just the first commercially successful ebook reader, but an extension of the Internet as the new center of the public sphere. In other words, the Kindle isn't the death of the book, as some have feared, but the means to turn the Internet into a book.

John Armstrong, Love, Life, Goethe: Lessons of the Imagination From the Great German Poet. This was the year I started reading Goethe seriously, and he stands out from the vein of post-romantics, modernists, and post-modernists I usually read not just in the awe-inspiring equipoise of his prose and poetry, but in his exemplary life. Michel Foucault and many others have pondered how to break down the barriers between art and life, but Goethe actually did it. No wonder Nietzsche cited him as one of the prototypes of the Übermensch.

Daniel Kraus, Musician. Continuing with the theme of art and life, Daniel Kraus's documentary on the Chicago jazz musician Ken Vandermark is a clear-eyed look at the reality of a working artist's daily life. Most profiles of artists in the media arise from the appearance of an artwork and, as a result, tend to be little more than extensions of the publicity apparatus. Kraus's film doesn't try to get to the "real" person behind the work. Instead, Kraus takes a sociological approach by showing the prosaic struggles necessary to maintain a career as a creative artist in the early twenty-first century. And Kraus doesn't neglect the art: Musician also conveys the power of Vandermark's performances.

Michael Thomas, Man Gone Down. Junot Diaz's The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao was more fun to read, and Joshua Ferris's Then We Came to the End struck closer to home,  but Man Gone Down was the most moving novel I read all year. None of these novels were flawless: Wao had structural gaps, End resolved itself with a creaky plot device, and Man could have been 50 pages shorter. But each was distinguished by its narrative voice: Diaz's logorrheaic free indirect style, Ferris's innovative second person, and Thomas's realist first person. But of the three I think Thomas's novel will turn out to be the most influential and enduring. Plus, Thomas understands the vernacular of the tradition in which he's working better than Diaz or Ferris. Lots of novelists have tried to emulate the nineteenth-century novel form, usually by foisting all kinds of colorful minor characters upon the reader in misguided imitation of Dickens. Thomas takes an entirely different tack, combining Richard Wright with William Dean Howells--existentialist dread with a keen appreciation of New York City as spectacle. Man Gone Down is about seeing and invisibility as well as the city as a place of constant threat and unsuspected opportunity.

Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Berlin Alexanderplatz. Okay, so this is a DVD release of a made-for-TV miniseries, but Criterion's DVD package is a major event in the film world nevertheless. (Besides, this has been an extraordinarily busy year for me and I haven't seen nearly as many films as I wanted to. DVDs have pretty much been my cinema for 2007.) Fassbinder's 15-hour adaptation of Alfred Döblin's 1929 novel is demanding on several levels, not the least of which is Fassbinder's manic dramatic sensibility.  In its eccentric, excessive ambition, Berlin is one of the touchstones of modernist European cinema. Because of its formidable length and poor video transfers, it's never been accessible to a wide audience. The Criterion DVDs solved the poor video transfer problem, at least.

Alex Ross, The Rest Is Noise. I'll have more on this book in a future post--I'm nearly done reading it. It could have been called Everything You Want to Know about Modern Classical Music But Were Afraid to Ask Lest You Have to Sit Through a Clanking, Screeching Avant-Garde Work for Four Orchestras and a Barking Dog. This book has made a lot of "best of" lists because Ross managed to execute the daunting task he set before himself--tell the history of the twentieth century through its music, and make the history a pleasure to read. More importantly, he makes us actually want to listen to those unloved experimental pieces from classical music's post-Stravinsky period.

On Reading Edmund Wilson

Edmund Wilson enjoyed a professional life many English professors would love to have lived, but he rarely, if ever, makes it on to History of Literary Criticism syllabi. Wilson wrote on anything he wanted to write on, in exactly the ways he wanted to write about them. He had the good fortune to come of age during the flowering of literary high modernism, and part of the pleasure offered by the new Library of America editions of Wilson's work is reading a first-hand account of American modernism as it unfolded. The first volume of the Library of America set opens with a remarkable essay on F. Scott Fitzgerald, written in 1923. Fitzgerald had just published This Side of Paradise; The Great Gatsby and Tender Is the Night were still ahead of him. Wilson begins his review with invective worthy of Dale Peck. Wilson comes close to calling his fellow Princetonian a functional illiterate and proclaims, "He has been given imagination without intellectual control of it; he has been given the desire for beauty without an aesthetic ideal; and he has been given a gift for expression without many ideas to express." Then, in a characteristic turn, Wilson tells us that Paradise "commits almost every sin that a novel can possibly commit; but it does not commit the unpardonable sin: it does not fail to live." That last assertion, "it does not fail to live," would be greeted with incredulous laughter in an MLA session, but Wilson's evaluation of Fitzgerald's prospects as a novelist was dead on.

Wilson also had prescient things to say about Wallace Stevens and e.e. cummings, although he used a critical language closer to belle lettres than to post-structuralism. He's irritated by cummings's mannerisms (as I've always been), but his overall assessment of cummings's style is odd: Wilson says the broken lines and lack of punctuation appear "ugly" on the page. Wilson was an early champion of Ernest Hemingway--so early, in fact, that he's disappointed to discover that he wasn't the first American critic to review Hemingway's work. In his later life Wilson turned into a cranky misanthrope, but in the 1920's he was still susceptible to a celebrity worship. He pads his first writings on Hemingway with long quotes from letters Hemingway sent him thanking him for the early notices and promising to look him up the next time Hemingway was in New York. It's characteristic of Wilson to be star struck even before the novelist was a star.

We can't return to writing like Wilson did in the Twenties and Thirties. Only a person who had a nineteenth-century education in the classics written in dead languages would demand a novel have life. His highly opinionated and deeply felt responses to literary works have more in common with bloggers than professors--or newspaper book critics, for that matter. Reading the early Wilson is like an RSS feed from a blogger keenly attuned to an incomparably rich literary culture. He wrote with the blogger's freedom from institutional constraints with the man of letters' confidence he embodied a shared sense of aesthetic and ethical values. When literary modernism went into retreat after World War II, Wilson lost interest in contemporary writing, turning instead to the nineteenth-century literary culture of his youth. Consequently, his later writings failed to live.

Beowulfs

With Hollywood's recent proclivity for movies featuring bare-kneed men wielding massive swords, it's surprising that it took so long to get around to filming Beowulf, especially after Seamus Heaney's bestselling translation, when Beowulf was as close to being an American popular culture figure as he was ever likely to become. Maybe Hollywood's slow approach had to do with the poem's awkward narrative structure. I'm not a medievalist, so I don't know if the three-monster fight form was as prevalent in Anglo-Saxon times as the three-act sitcom structure is today. Most modern retellings of the Beowulf tale focus on the battles against Grendel and his mother, leaving out Beowulf's last battle against a dragon. The young Beowulf as the growling outsider is more appealing, or more dramatically gripping for modern audiences, than the later Beowulf, who is probably the only epic hero to lose a fight to a dragon.

Robert Zemeckis's adaptation keeps the dragon but reworks the narrative structure so that Wiglaf appears throughout the film, whereas in the poem he only appears during the last scenes. Like most directors of literary adaptations, Zemeckis remains true to some aspects of the original text, while changing others to suit his storytelling purposes or to satisfy contract terms worked out by CAA. Heorot is a reasonable facsimile of a medieval village, loaded with period details like public belching. Grendel's mother, played by Angelina Jolie working her curves and collagen lips to full effect, is shockingly alluring, but not outrageously so. An impossibly sexy Grendel's mother raises, obliquely, the long-standing question of Grendel's paternity. If I remember correctly from reading Heaney's translation, Grendel's father was an unnamed troll, but that may have been scurrilous rumor. In any case, Beowulf's themes include the lust for gold, the problems of kinship, and a pagan counter-offensive against Christianity, so a monstrous seductress at the center of the mayhem makes a certain kind of sense. Her character also makes a good foil for Robin Penn Wright's Wealtheow, who is repulsed by her husband's pleasures of the flesh.

Beowulf isn't cinematic only by virtue of its soggy villages, winsome heroines, and Germanic lusts. The tale is easy to graft onto the Oedipal trajectory of the classical American film style, albeit in inverted form.  Beowulf steps into a complex and bitter struggle over kingship and paternity. He hacks his way onto the throne, but in Zemeckis's retelling he's already slain his proper queen, Grendel's mother, played by the only A list star in the film and therefore, by the conventions of contemporary American cinema, the key token to resolving the hero's Oedipal conflicts. Once on the throne Beowulf comes to resemble Hrothgar, the bad father. Beowulf's Faustian bargain is resolved by the gender-bending dragon with its golden hide that looks like custom couture from Prada.

Like many film adaptations of classical literary texts, Zemeckis's Beowulf has been attacked for infidelities to the "original" poem. It should be noted, however, that Beowulf itself is a text under constant revision and reinterpretation. Seamus Heaney's celebrated translation of the poem failed to impress medievalists, who complained about all the Celticisms Heaney scattered about an Anglo-Saxon poem.  (Zemeckis's source was a new translation by Dick Ringler.) If you really want to be a stickler for historical detail, forget both Zemeckis's movie and your old college edition and listen to someone recite it from memory, which was how it was originally experienced. It's entirely possible that a storyteller in pre-Conquest England told a version of Beowulf with Wiglaf popping up in surprising places and Grendel's mother as a curvaceous beauty with plush lips.

The 95 Percent Principle

I have what I call a 95% principle, and it goes like this: a person can act like an anti-social jerk 95% of the time, and like a normally-adjusted human being 5% of the time, and people will say, "See, he isn't so bad. Under that rough exterior, he's really a decent person." Conversely, act like mature person 95% of the time, and lose one's composure 5% of the time, and people will say, "Oh, watch out for him. He's got a dark side. Keep your distance." Norman Mailer is a perfect example of the first case.

I'm not a fan of Norman Mailer, as I've indicated in the past. In the future his influence as a novelist, it's safe to say, will be nil. He repeated until the end that literature was a high calling, and yet his own literary career probably wouldn't have survived Barbary Shore and The Deer Park if he hadn't turned to journalism mixed with self-aggrandizement, a combination, his only truly original creation, that can be described as literature as performance art. He claimed he was venturing into unknown territory, but he never ventured very far from the East Coast establishment, which retained him as proof that New York could foster wild men artists as well as California could.

A couple of week ago The New York Times, one of his major enablers, wagged its finger at the exhibitionism of people walking around in their underwear in a Richard Meier building. Penelope Green lamented "a culture that continues to find new ways to display ever more intimate, and mundane, details of domestic life."

Then on Saturday the Times rolled out a hagiographic (well, mostly) obituary of Mailer and his monstrous exhibitionism. The Times characterized Mailer as a

a prodigious drinker and drug taker, a womanizer, a devoted family man, a would-be politician who ran for mayor of New York, a hipster existentialist, an antiwar protester, an opponent of women's liberation and an all-purpose feuder and short-fused brawler, who with the slightest provocation would happily engage in head-butting, arm-wrestling and random punch-throwing.

In other words, Mailer was an asshole--and he made sure everyone knew it. In many ways, being an asshole was his life's work; the Times obituary reminds us that it was a deliberate construct of Mailer's. Even his novels--especially the late, bloated ones--placed the author's own audacity in front of the story he had to tell. When Mailer managed patches of subdued, observant writing, the contrast was striking, making the novel seem deeper and more objective than it really was--the 95% principle, again, only in prose fiction. The lesson, I guess, is if you're going to be an exhibitionist, be a spectacularly obnoxious one, and make sure a bored reporter is nearby.

I would have thought that The Nation would have seen through Mailer's stunt politics. Written by John Nichols, The Nation's obituary is brief, ignoring his career as a novelist and domestic abuser. Nichols wants us to admire Mailer because he "did not rest on the laurels--and they were legion--earned for exposing the dark undersides of the presidencies of Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon." Nichols summarizes Mailer's "brilliant" attacks on George Bush, which repeated everything that was written about the president's follies in the Nation, Slate, Salon, the New York Times--any number of other publications, not to mention hundreds of blogs. Mailer's political writings about Bush administration weren't even the best offered by an American novelist. Far better, and more literary, was Philip Roth's pithy denunciation, uttered early in Bush's presidency, "he isn't fit to run a newsstand." While we could use a lot more political engagement from our novelists, Mailer's buffoonery is not the model they should emulate for a politically committed writer.

The Trouble with Biographies

I don't read enough biographies. I want to read Nabokov's biography, but the definitive version is  two thick volumes. How many butterfly hunts did he go on, anyway? I should just read Speak, Memory instead.  It's one manageable volume, and it's better written. I've been meaning to read Henry James's biography for years, but as I dither more versions of his life come out, and I still haven't read The Golden Bowl. Once, when I was in graduate school, I dreamt that I was reading a Henry James sentence that never ended. It went on for pages, through whole books. I awoke in terror at the prospect of getting trapped in an entire library of non-restrictive clauses.  Since then, when it comes to reading him I've been as tentative and uncertain as a Henry James hero.

Biographies are interruptions in my normal reading. I prefer the fiction to the author most every time. If a writer's biography is more interesting than his or her works, I get suspicious. Even well-written, engaging biographies have limited readerly appeal. They tend to be really long with highly predictable plot structures: birth, early discovery of genius, development of first great work, big personal crisis, development of first not so great work, another personal crisis, second great work, a period of cruising on their reputation, health crisis, bitter and useless old age, death. If the lives depicted in biographies aren't more contented than mine, they're at least more purposeful. The seventeen-year-old Jean-Paul Sartre could grit his teeth and repeat to himself, "I am a genius, I am a genius . . . " because, at seventeen, he was Jean-Paul Sartre, an actual genius, at least for a while. He was already the person he was going to end up being. One's own still unresolved life can only pale by comparison.

Both Mark Scroggins at the Culture Industry blog and Daniel Green at The Reading Experience are struggling with the issue of biography right now. Scroggins considers the issue of the popular biography. One purpose of the biography is to publicize the life of its subject, to set the person in our shared memories. A biography written only for specialists is certain to seal the dead in their tombs. However, biographies intended for wide audiences can suffer from the same benign editorial neglect and casual approach to facts as a business book. Ill-conceived biographies dashed off for a general audience do little to enhance the low status of biography in contemporary letters at a time when our personality-obsessed age could use a higher form of storytelling about the lives of the famous.

Green takes up the issue of biography as a form of criticism. Biography is considered kind of a low skill in literary studies, primarily because they can sometimes read like they're a research notes dump rather than a thoughtful examination of a life and its work. James Miller's biography of Michel Foucault is an exemplary instance of a critical biography. Other biographies I've read make its subject's art seem like a side job, like serving on a local government committee. As Green notes, "Biographies are the closest thing to long-form criticism published by most presses, and the closest most readers of newspaper and magazine reviews ever get to extended consideration of even the most famous writers." But few biographers venture to interpret the works with much relish. Perhaps the anxious indecisiveness that compels the biographer to mention every dinner party her subject attended also leads to critical reticence. To criticize means to make choices, to accept one thing and not another. It also exposes the reader as a judging agent. That's difficult when our age demands every scandalous detail of a famous person's life, but without questioning the motives behind that demand.

And Then We Came to the Awards

The Finalists for the National Book Award were announced yesterday, and among the nominated works is Joshua Ferris's Then We Came to the End, which is an important novel if for no other reason than it explores the last frontier for American fiction: the modern workplace. The novel takes place after the dot com collapse, a curious choice in terms of narrative interest, but Ferris perfectly captures the common workplace atmosphere in which nothing good ever happens--where, in fact, it often seems like nothing at all ever happens. Ferris's characters busy themselves by indulging in their obsessions with office supplies and revenge. At one point in the novel, as one character hurls a desk chair piece by piece into Lake Michigan, these obsessions converge. I became skeptical when the denouement began to take shape, but the ending is genuinely gripping. Hopefully, the NBA's will help people remember the title of Ferris's novel, one of the few works of recent American fiction in which people actually have jobs.

Doris Lessing Wins the Nobel Prize

Doris Lessing, who just won the Nobel Prize for literature, is one of those writers who gathered most of her material by the time she was 25. Her early life was a petit bourgeois version of an Isak Deneson story: birth in Persia, girlhood on a  Rhodesian farm, adulthood in a Communist clique in London. The Golden Notebook is both fiery and fusty, reflecting a time when women's problems were easier to define, if harder to escape. She got by largely on vehemence, the ability to force her vision of the world on those who never imagined that someone from her background even had a world view. Whatever chic lit is, Lessing's work is its exact opposite. But vehemence alone is no longer enough to escape the unfocused malaise that's the subject matter of much contemporary fiction by women.

How Is Your Short Story Feeling Today?

It seems that we can no longer talk about the state of a cultural form without talking about its death. I can't think of a single cultural form in perfect health: rap is dead, rock is dead but doesn't know it, jazz has died a thousand deaths, classical musical will die as soon as its last band of listeners finally totters into the grave, the novel dies once a generation, movies can't last much longer, television should have been aborted at birth, and architecture is alive and well, which can only mean it will die soon.

The short story, Stephen King tells us, is alive, but not so well. Fresh from a stint as the guest editor for The Best American Short Stories 2007, King testifies that he read too many stories that were

airless, somehow, and self-referring. These stories felt show-offy rather than entertaining, self-important rather than interesting, guarded and self-conscious rather than gloriously open, and worst of all, written for editors and teachers rather than for readers.

King claims that the readership for these stories are

other writers and would-be writers who are reading the various literary magazines . . . not to be entertained but to get an idea of what sells there. And this kind of reading isn’t real reading, the kind where you just can’t wait to find out what happens next (think “Youth,” by Joseph Conrad, or “Big Blonde,” by Dorothy Parker). It’s more like copping-a-feel reading. There’s something yucky about it.

King, who doesn't seem to have an off switch, makes a valid point, then pushes it too far. Suspense has been out of fashion in high brow American fiction since at least the 1920's, when suspense in absence of any other literary value ceased to strike readers as artful. Sensitive readers will find suspense in the smallest clues, and those are the readers for whom the best writers create fiction.

That most of these readers are themselves writers is neither yucky nor surprising.  Reading and writing are not separable acts. The reader who doesn't write is a leaky vessel best suited for the unsubtle novels of King's "glamour pony" writers James Patterson and Danielle Steel.

Yes, workshopped fiction is weak tea, but most American literary magazines are sustained by it. Writing workshops provide the bulk of material and the majority of readers for independent fiction publishing.  Stephen King can publish high-impact short stories only after years of releasing the monsters of his id, and he's only now cultivating the favor of a literary establishment made up mostly of--uh oh--other writers trying to figure out what sells.

Sprezzatura

My son and I are home with stomach flu, so I'm unable to process anything more complicated than Word Girl. Here are some links picking up on stuff I've been writing about recently:

Steven Clemons says we're not going to attack Iran, despite the current buzz in Washington that indicates we are. Bush is gun shy, for once, and he's dispatched Condi to find a third way between an aerial attack and "appeasement." Meanwhile, Cheney is plotting to force Bush's hand into an attack. Clemons' article is a rare account of Bush actually learning from his mistakes.

I'd rather see Stephen Greenblatt write more directly on Baldassare Castiglione's The Book of the Courtier, but he invokes the Renaissance concept of sprezzatura (nonchalance) in a highly personal reflection on sports, writing, and his own entry into college, complete with a sly contrast to Kaavya Viswanathan's more mercenary approach to making one's way through Harvard.

Salman Rushdie, with uncharacteristic brevity, crashed the National Book Critics Circle symposium on the future of book reviews and proclaimed, "I think it's rather unfortunate that some of the coverage tries to pitch print reviewing against the new media. I think they complement each other very well." By the way, the NBCC event shows that the newspapers v. blogs debate remains stuck in place.

Why didn't this collection stay home? It could have gone in the new Renzo Piano addition to the Art Institute of Chicago.

Atlas Retired

Ayn Rand, the pinup girl of libertarian supercapitalists everywhere, is in the news again because one of her most famous acolytes, Alan Greenspan, has published his memoir, The Age of Turbulence. Greenspan began his career with a "sideman psychology," tinkering with economic equations and playing the clarinet. Then his life changed one day when he met the "quite plain to look at" Ayn Rand, from whom he learned to assume the seigniorial viewpoint of the great egoist, or as Greenspan puts it in his flat, bureaucratic way, take a "macro view" of the world. Inspired by Rand, Greenspan went on to become the model of the acolyte as Übermensch, sucking up to six presidents while terrorizing Wall Street titans. Interestingly, he seems to have preferred the least Randian presidents for whom he worked--Ford and Clinton--and has nothing good to say about the most Randian of our recent chief executives, George W. Bush.

There are many CEO's who found their inner John Galt by reading Ayn Rand, and not simply because of the "greed is good" ethos she espoused.  I suspect her appeal has more to do with the ease with which her principles can be recast into standard business guru bromides, such as "only quality work counted, not who you are" and "excellence should be your goal." What I find interesting isn't that a dead novelist outsells Jack Welch, but that so many members of the Lear jet set entertain fantasies of being Howard Roark building his temple to the spirit of Man while slapping down all the second-handers who crave government regulation, which Rand regarded as one OSHA rule away from Stalinism.

Yet it's hard to reconcile the image of the contemporary CEO, that emblematic figure of risk-averse managerial capitalism, with Rand's brooding neo-Romantic artists. The world that these Rand-besotted CEO's helped create in the fifty years since Atlas Shrugged was published more closely resembles Adorno's totally administered society than Rand's egoist paradise. And for all her fear that the democratic herds would trample over the game-changing visions of her capitalist-artists, Rand's own tastes were decidedly populist. Her writing career began with Cecil B. DeMille, and she was said to be a fan of both the Romantic melodramas of Victor Hugo and Charlie's Angels. What would Rand think of American Idol and the way it ruthlessly chews up hapless strivers and heroizes preening conformists? For that matter, what would she think of the standard CEO retirement package, like the multi-million dollar set of perks (fresh flowers every day, a box at Fenway) Jack Welch enjoys in his lecherous old age? Richard Halley should have scrapped his Fifth Symphony and dedicated himself to cobbling together a conglomerate with a steadily eroding stock price.

Beckett for Babies

Yesterday my wife and I learned (re-learned, actually) a valuable lesson: never, ever mess with small children's nap schedules. We took a trip back to our old 'hood in Oak Park to pay my last respects to my favorite wine shop, Cabernet & Co., which was going out of business. By Sunday all that was left of the stock was a bottle of champagne, a couple of very pricey Bordeauxs, and an excellent riesling. I bought the riesling in anticipation of a nice Sunday dinner.

On the way back home the kids fell asleep for what couldn't have been more than five minutes. Consequently, they steadfastly refused to take their regularly-scheduled naps, so for the rest of the day we had to deal with a three-year-old and a six-month-old on extended crankiness benders. Finally by early evening they'd spent themselves and we got them to bed. I made some pork tenderloin and my wife and I sullenly consumed the riesling in peace.

In his last years, exhausted and ill, Samuel Beckett told George Plimpton why he continued to work:

With diminished concentration, loss of memory, obscured intelligence... the more chance there is for saying something closest to what one really is. Even though everything seems inexpressible, there remains the need to express. A child need to make a sand castle even though it makes no sense. In old age, with only a few grains of sand, one has the greatest possibility.

Diminished concentration, loss of memory, obscured intelligence--what an apt description of parenthood, which is why "Beckett for Babies" is such a brilliant idea. Stephany Aulenback at the Crooked House blog came up with the idea for a book of Beckett quotes for babies, but so far she hasn't found a publisher. Beckett knew all about filial struggles, having battled for much of his early career with the overwhelming influence of James Joyce. It's no accident that Beckett finally broke with Joyce--aesthetically, that is--and happened upon his own ground-to-the-nub aesthetic during a visit to his mother in 1945. As Aulenback learned from dealing with her own baby, lines like "Nothing happens, nobody comes, nobody goes, it's awful" perfectly express the existential crises my six-month-old daughter goes through four or five times an hour. The pared-down gloom of Beckett's prose expresses the mood in which you find yourself when confronted with a three-year-old who has thrown himself onto the floor because you stirred the yogurt and he wanted the fruit on the bottom and he didn't buy your attempt to unstir the yogurt. You try to point out that there's still quite a bit of fruit left at the bottom and gently suggest what he really needs is a nap, but your attempts to reason with him only provoke more crying. Beckett invented the language for living in a loud world where no one can hear you.

But if there's a limit to the lessons Beckett can teach us and our children, it's the one lesson he failed to learn from Joyce: try not to compromise your moments of happiness when they come, as they inevitably will.

Traces of the True

Yesterday I introduced Jacques Rancière's The Politics of Aesthetics. I'd like to take a closer look at his remarks about modernism, which, in all their ambivalence, bear a striking resemblance to Walter Benjamin's sometimes contradictory writings on modernism.

The full force of Rancière's claim that the political and the aesthetic are intricately related becomes clear when he takes up the issue of technology and the aesthetic. "The aesthetic regime of the arts," he writes, "is the true name for what is designated by the incoherent label 'modernity.'" Under the aesthetic regime the arts freed themselves from all the old rules, but, at the same time, neglected mimesis, the salient quality of the previous regime, the poetic. The loss of mimesis meant art cut itself off from the "spheres of collective experience." This appeal to the experiential nature of art and modernity is familiar from Benjamin, as well as Oakeshott and the British Marxists of the 1960's, when Rancière was an Althusserian. The Marxist tradition, in its Western European manifestation, mourned the general decline of experience in modernity, when cultural and economic forms had less and less to do with how people actually lived. Worse, the abstraction of economic relations--and modern art--drained ordinary experience of all substance and precluded most forms of collective political action.

And yet, virtually all of Rancière's examples of the aesthetic intervening in the political occur under the aesthetic regime of the arts, when art had supposedly retreated from collective experience into contemplation of its own perfect forms. In his discussion of Walter Benjamin's "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction" Rancière expresses some reservations about Benjamin's essay, as everyone does, then goes on to acknowledge how much he's learned from it--again, as everyone does. Rancière makes the startling claim that literature and painting were, in effect, the true leading edge of modernity. Following Benjamin, Rancière points out that literature discovered the subject matter of photography before photographers did. In fact, the great Realists Balzac, Hugo and Flaubert broke down the opposition between high and low culture long before reproductive technologies did. Rancière concludes,

On the one hand, the technological revolution comes after the aesthetic revolution. On the other hand, however, the aesthetic revolution is first of all the honour acquired by the commonplace, which is pictorial and literary before being photographic or cinematic.

This is where Rancière is far more interesting than his complaints about modernism. He says that literature conducted a symptomatic investigation of history long before historians or scientists did. By extension (Rancière himself doesn't make these claims), the economic theory of Adam Smith isn't possible without the rise of the pastoral tradition in English poetry during the eighteenth century, nor psychology possible without the Romantic poets. Freud himself once admitted that everything he discovered about the human psyche was already known to the Romantics. Stephen Greenblatt shows us in his study of Columbus's diaries in "Marvelous Possessions" that the entire conquest of the New World was made possible by writing.

Rancière concludes his remarks about technology's role in modernity with a Benjaminian flourish. As Benjamin knew, we can no longer see ordinary life directly because we no longer trust mimesis. Instead, as Rancière puts it, "the ordinary becomes beautiful as a trace of the true. And the ordinary becomes a trace of the true if it is torn from its obviousness in order to become a hieroglyph, a mythological or phantasmagoric figure." First of all, this is a pretty succinct description of Benjamin's critical practice. Second, the social sciences, with their dry empiricism and disdain for the figurative, were in fact founded upon the phantasmagoric nature of the true, only they've forgotten this origin. Rancière accuses modern art of just this type of forgetting, only to explain how we can't see ordinary life, the fertile ground of the political, unless we see it aesthetically.

Rancière's The Politics of Aesthetics

We've been taught that Richard III is a political play, but what about A Midsummer's Night Dream? Picasso's Guernica is obviously political, but can we say the same thing about Malevich's Black Square? If we were inclined to talk about Black Square as a political work, how would we do that?

Jacques Rancière's The Politics of Aesthetics: The Distribution of the Sensible gives us a way to talk about the political meaning of art that's both powerful and limited. He makes historical comparisons easy, but his theory of art and the political doesn't offer a means to read a work closely for its political implications, although he doesn't preclude such a reading. He also regards modernism as something of a historical dead end, a view I don't share. Rancière's theory of art and politics is worth considering, at the very least, because it's elegant and simple. According to Rancière, art is one means by which a culture determines what is perceived and what enters language, as well as who gets to do the perceiving and writing or painting. In short, art represents a distribution of the sensible. He says that art

is a delimitation of spaces and times, of the visible and the invisible, of speech and noise, that simultaneously determines the place and the stakes of politics as a form of experience. Politics revolves around what is seen and what can be said about it, around who has the ability to see and the talent to speak, around the properties of spaces and the possibilities of time.

Art has its own way of doing and perceiving, and changes in aesthetics cause epochal changes in ways people perceive and reflect upon the world around them.

In this short book Rancière provides few examples that exemplify this or that distribution of the sensible, but two examples stand out, each marking an important change in Western culture.

The first involves the arrival of Renaissance quattrocento painting, which introduced three-dimensional space in order to capture the immediacy of live speech and action. Giotto and those who followed him eschewed not only the iconic work of the Middle Ages, but also Plato's separation of art and living. The return of two-dimensional pictoral space in Modernism, Rancière claims, reflects a technology-saturated world of pages, screens, and interfaces between different media, including different artistic genres. Malevich's Black Square, for example, depicts the interface between typography and painting, a prevalent theme in a lot of explicitly political art in High Modernism. That this interface now strikes us as commonplace doesn't vitiate its initial impact or the political gesture of pointing to emergent forms of life.

Modernism not only broke down the neo-classical separation of the arts from each other, it also incorporated new subject matter into high art. The plein air painters of the mid-nineteenth century were one strain of the massive re-distribution of the sensible during the 1800's. Another was literary Realism, which emerged around the same time. Rancière discusses the proto-modernist Flaubert, who refused to give any particular emphasis to anything that found its way into his fiction. When Madame Bovary and Sentimental Education first appeared, they were hailed as democratic, even revolutionary works, "despite Flaubert's aristocratic situation and political conformism," Rancière dryly adds. For Rancière, Flaubert's indifference to the bourgeois material of his fiction

is the result of a poetic bias: the equality of all subject matter is the negation of any relationship of necessity between a determined form and a determined content. Yet what is this indifference after all if not the very quality of everything that comes to pass on a written page, available to everyone's eyes? This equality destroys all of the hierarchies of representation and also establishes a community of readers as a community without legitimacy, a community formed only by the random circulation of the written word.

This last remark, with which I disagree, points to an affinity Rancière has with Walter Benjamin, whom I also disagree with about the possibility of the novel as the basis for community, or less abstractly, of exchangeable experience. In my next post I'll talk more about Rancière's debt to Walter Benjamin.

The End of the PC and the Rebirth of the Book

On my train ride home last Friday the man seated next to me remained hunched over his iPhone for the entire ride as he read long articles on the Web. As the train approached his stop, he slipped the iPhone into his pocket, but in the fifteen seconds it took for the train to fully pull into the station, he had to check the phone again. As it happened, that same day I'd dropped by the Michigan Avenue Apple Store during my lunch hour to check out the iPhone. I must have appeared a little too interested because the store security guard stood next to me for a while. Apparently he was worried I was going to chew through the steel cable bolted to the iPhone and walk out with the unit.

My point isn't that Apple's new touch screen technology is irresistible--it is--but that it could develop into something that ebook technologies (Sony's and, soon, Amazon's) so far have failed to accomplish: become a true convergence device for reading. Ben Vershbow at if:book isn't especially impressed with Amazon's forthcoming Kindle. He focuses instead on Google's less splashy but potentially more important announcement that they will sell access to a selection of books.  Vershbow looks ahead a few years to when Google sells access to every book in its collection. Then things get really interesting:

By then a good reading device will almost certainly exist (more likely a next generation iPhone than a Kindle) and people may actually be reading books through this system, directly on the network. Google and Amazon will then in effect be the digital infrastructure for the publishing industry, perhaps even taking on what remains of the print market through on-demand services purveyed through their digital stores. What will publishers then be? Disembodied imprints, free-floating editorial organs, publicity directors...?

While I like the idea of ebooks, like a lot of people I doubt they'll ever completely replace books as physical objects. Everyone knows publishing houses have to adapt to the new conditions of the public sphere, including, I would imagine, people who work for book publishers. Some publishers have already been aggressively courting online communities for both producers and consumers of literature.

Perhaps we should be paying less attention to the impending end of the printed page and pay more attention to the impending end of the PC. The iPod didn't just kill off the CD and opened up a whole new decentered distribution system; it also killed off the giant stationary stereo system. Similarly, the desktop computer is still tied to its origins as a corporate workstation. Laptops aren't the answer, either. Even my ultraportable Fujitsu laptop is too bulky for spontaneous use--not to mention a backbreaker on my bike commute to the Purple Line station. Portable devices like the iPhone and the iPod Touch represent plausible alternatives to laptops and desktops as conduits to the Internet and as aggregators of reading, viewing, and listening material. The "nascent online communities" that Vershbow predicts will be the "new imprints" will depend not only on the infrastructure of Google and Amazon, but also on highly portable wireless devices. A fully decentered means of distribution won't really happen until the mode of consumption becomes fully integrated into the ways people actually read. Desktops and laptops (which are mostly used as desktops) not only lack the portability of a printed book, but also the intimacy of the paperback—or the iPod. Once reading on a wireless device becomes as engrossing and as personalized as writing in a book you own or listening to your idiosyncratic music collection, then a truly post-industrial publishing model will be possible. From the looks of that guy with the iPhone on the Purple Line, that moment may be closer than we think.

Why Is Academic Writing So Boring?

A few days ago in the Guardian philosophy professor Jonathan Wolff decided to figure out why academic writing was "boring." He laments, "That I ended up in a job where I have to spend half the day blinking my way through artless, contorted prose is a cruel twist of fate." Wolff ventures an explanation for why literary criticism is such a chore to read: Academic essays lack the suspense of narratives. "A detective novel written by a good philosophy student would begin: 'In this novel I shall show that the butler did it.'" He goes on to explain:

Academic writing needs to be ordered, precise, and to make every move explicit. All the work needs to be done on the page rather than in the reader's head. By contrast, good literature often relies on the unsaid, or the implied or hinted at, rather than the expressed thought. But as we tell our students: you will only get a mark for it if it is written down, however obvious, and however infantile it seems to spell it out. Such discipline applies all the way through as the pressures of writing for peer-reviewed journals are much the same. To call a paper "thorough" is high praise.

There's something to Wolff's explanation. As anyone who has published in an academic journal knows, the peer review process can suck the life out of any essay. It should be noted that the primary audience for most academic essays isn't students or general readers. Instead, academics--especially young ones trying to write themselves out of dead-end jobs--write for hiring and tenure committees.

Wolff is hardly the first person to complain about the tediousness of contemporary academic literary criticism. A larger question that Wolff doesn't consider is why anyone should care if literary criticism is so boring. No one seems to object to the dreadful prose produced in the physical and social sciences. Literary critics, to a greater extent than philosophers, have felt a responsibility toward a general readership. Literary criticism has had a special role in the public sphere since the 18th century, when the role of the literary critic first appeared. At that time cultural products became objects that had to be interpreted and evaluated, rather than just simply consumed or enjoyed. At a time when emergent capitalism was forcing people to become narrower and more specialized, critics were central to the project of becoming a well-rounded, educated person.

Another key moment in the history of critical prose was the arrival of structuralism in the American academy during  the 1950's and '60's. Structuralism offered a "scientific" means of interpreting texts, so that literary studies could lay claim to the same objectivity and rigorous methodology as the sciences. Literary criticism gained a powerful array of analytical tools, but at the cost of a language accessible to the general reader, who was abandoned to newspaper book reviewers, themselves now an endangered species.

There isn't an English professor in the world who doesn't long to approach someone reading The Five People You Meet in Heaven in an airport gate and slap them upside the head. However, re-engaging with a broad public audience is tricky. Critics could regress back to belle lettrism, which basically means sending mash notes to great authors. No one has the stomach for that. But the alternative is becoming Professor Eat-Your-Peas, insisting that a subway reader pour over every line in Paradise Lost.

There's a third way, but it's still in development. Some English professors like Michael Bérubé have ventured into the messy world of blogs, while MySpace is developing into another forum for discussions about literature. Developing a criticism that's a pleasure to read, or at least tolerable, means going back to criticism's roots in the early public sphere of open, and un-refereed, debate.

MTV’s Poet Laureate

mtvU may have an irritating acronym and a dubious business plan, but at least it showed some imagination in selecting John Ashbery as its first poet laureate. mtvU will broadcast snippets of his poems  to 750 colleges across the US as part of an effort to expose students to poetry and provide some cultural cover for Viacom's expansion plans in the 18-24 demographic.

Ashbery has taken a what-the-hell approach to the project. He doesn't get paid, but one or two students somewhere may be paying enough attention to read some more poetry. For the students who already read poetry--and there are more than one would expect--the project will be yet another well-meaning but somewhat puzzling publicity campaign, much like the 1990's vogue for poems in subways.

The mtvU presentations are slick and minimalist, and, I suppose, it's beside the point to object that they're not accurate representations of the experience of reading a full Ashbery poem. The short mtvU films lend the poems a formal closure the full poems lack. For instance, "Soonest Mended"