One-Way Street

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.

Fauxbama

Tomorrow night Saturday Night Live will debut its new Fauxbama, played by Donald Glover. In terms of true misanthropic rage so crucial to the genre, SNL's political satire was surpassed long ago by The Daily Show. Nevertheless, the SNL presidential caricature is a tradition in American television, and the choice of the actor to play the president has more cultural importance than the president's choice to serve as, say, the Secretary of Energy.

Although SNL has always satirized the candidates in the presidential campaigns, Fauxbama seems to be debuting prematurely. Obama still seems like an undefined figure, and because he's the only Democratic presidential candidate with any wit (the usually wit-challenged Republicans have two witty guys on their side, McCain and Huckabee), Obama has already co-opted any comic foibles that may have emerged so far. Here in Illinois Obama has been visible as a workaday politician for years, and so far the comic material is pretty thin. In fact, Obama can be kind of boring. His acceptance speech after winning his seat in the US Senate in 2004, for instance, was notable mostly for poor Michelle Obama holding her exhausted daughter as Obama droned on about airport expansion, or whatever he was talking about. Michelle looked like she wanted to say out loud, "Let's wrap it up, Barack. This kid's getting heavy."

What hasn't emerged yet in Obama is that kernel  of identity around which a comic persona can be formed. By kernel of identity I mean something more existential than a mere foible. Rather, the basis of SNL political satire is usually some personality trait that can't be reduced any further: Gerald Ford's clumsiness, George H.W. Bush's unpredictable syntax, Bill Clinton's body. At first glance this trait functions to deflate an important political figure--a classic strategy in political satire. But on SNL this trait takes on a different dimension. Through repetition the trait becomes less familiar and more mysterious. Will Ferrell's George Bush prompts us to ask, What's that smirk really trying to tell us?

The deep structure of SNL's political satire becomes clearer when one considers its least typical presidential caricature, Phil Hartman's Ronald Reagan. Every other presidential caricature is built upon a minor but immediately visible quality. Only the faux Reagan appeared as somebody completely different from his public persona. Hartman played Reagan as both a vague, genial fool and, as soon as the cameras moved on, as a crack schemer, directing his underlings with all the gruff certainty of a mob boss. It's significant that the most genuinely transformative president we've had since 1975 had, as his SNL comic identity, a political figure who actually changed things.

By contrast, every other president's caricature expresses the futility of trying to change American political culture. Every joke starts off in a different place, but always comes back to that mysterious, unchanging kernel of selfhood: Gerald Ford always falls down. A Saturday Night Live broadcast is a microcosm of the modern presidency. A commanding figure dominates a very small stage for a brief period of time, offering the promise of something new when all we're looking for is the same joke repeated over and over again. Then it's cut to commercial, and the next cliché is trotted out and ridiculed for our reassurance.

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.

The Public Sphere Goes Paperless

I've written in this space before about my conditional enthusiasm for ebooks. Today Amazon announced its new ebook reader, the Kindle. Based on a breathless Newsweek article, I placed it on my Amazon wish list. I still have some questions about the device, but the prospect of having instant access to Amazon's catalog without taking up more shelf space at home is tantalizing, although I know it's also an invitation to bankruptcy.

In his wide-ranging Newsweek cover story on the Kindle, Steven Levy clearly thinks he's happened upon a history-changing device, and he may be right, although it may have more impact on the history of electronic devices than on the history of reading itself.  He points out that the Kindle appears to resolve some of the problems that have dogged the Sony Reader. The Kindle has a wireless connection, offers a connection to an established bookseller with a huge inventory (although the backlist will take a while to come online), and allows full-text search and annotation. On the other hand, the Kindle is still black and white (evidently color E Ink is still a ways off) and it's pricey--$400.

And the Kindle is an electronic device intended to replace the printed book, a proposition that people are making a bigger deal out of than they should be. One commonly-voiced objection to ebooks is that they're not immersive, as if oblivion were the goal of all reading. Does Amazon's ebook reader offer the same immersive experience as a print book? Theoretically, yes, depending upon how old you are. As several people have pointed out, a computer screen is already the primary mode of reading for people under twenty or thirty. That ebooks will play a major role in publishing and reading seems beyond dispute at this point; the only question is how quickly, and how deeply, they will penetrate the market for books in the United States. Will the Kindle do the trick? Will it be the iPod of books? Without seeing the device, it's hard to venture a guess. Maybe.

Levy realizes that speculation about ebook technology has moved on to questions of reading on a screen to writing itself. Writing will change, and so will the public sphere itself. "Readers will read in public. Writers will write in public," is the slogan of digital text advocates, including the people at the Institute for the Future of the Book, who run the terrific if:book site. Levy quotes Bob Stein, the head of the Institute, wondering aloud about the future of the model for authorship that has existed since the Renaissance: a lone writer cut off from his or her readers until the work is finished. The discussion doesn't start until the work is published.  In the new model, readers will be able to meddle while the work is in process. The public debate will begin on day one of the writing. As Levy has it, "the notion of author as authoritarian figure gives way to a Web 2.0 wisdom-of-the-crowds process." In a lot of ways, that day has already arrived, too. Then again, I wonder why people want an ebook reading experience that is immersive while demanding that writers open up their processes. 

The reason why the Kindle is such a big deal has less to do with the fate of the book, which is just a technology, albeit an incredibly important one, than with the nature of the Internet as a medium for writing. Breakthroughs in online audio and video get all the publicity, but the digital revolution in writing is even broader and more profound. The Internet now has a near monopoly on the public sphere as a realm of open debate about culture and politics. The free exchange of writing became all the more inevitable when two major print media outlets, the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal, either eliminated or scaled-back their paygates. The public sphere is quickly going paperless. It's also encroaching more upon the private sphere than perhaps any other time since the late 1700's. In this context the Kindle is merely riding the wave, rather than on its leading edge.

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.

Blogs in the Public Sphere

Yesterday's post on the decline of the traditional book review got me to thinking about the public sphere, a term I throw around a lot in this space without adequately defining what I mean by it. Also, I think it's worthwhile considering for a moment how blogs fit into the public sphere, especially now that the traditional print media and blogs are heading toward a cantankerous merger.

The concept of the public sphere arises out of our double articulation as subjects in a democratic state: we have a private self (oikos in the Greek) and a public self  (bios politikos, literally public life). In The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society Jürgen Habermas traces the emergence of the public sphere in the transformation of the village market, with its face-to-face transactions and localized economy, to the stock companies of the 1500's and 1600's. Global market enterprises like the East India Company needed state apparatuses (courts, navies, etc.) to support them, while the public demanded some sort of accountability from the trading companies. Thus, what had started off as a private transaction became a public interest. Newsletters started during this period as privileged communications between managers and investors, but the state, serving public interests, opened up the newsletters to public consumption, leading eventually to newspapers.

Other institutions of the public sphere developed as economic relations became more complex. In England, coffeehouses became gathering places of merchants, workers, and writers. In France, the more exclusive salons became a public forum for ideas. (The differences between the coffeehouses and the salons may account for the differences in British and French cultural life today.) The public that formed around the coffeehouses became the earliest audiences for public interest journals such as Addison and Steele's Tatler, which first appeared in 1709. These journals functioned much like blogs do now: dispensing personal opinions on politics and everyday life. By the end of the 18th century the function of the art critic arose, and a new self-consciousness developed in art, literature and philosophy. Through the figure of the critic, art became a matter of public discussion, and through the journals, middle class life itself became a subject of debate. Not coincidentally, this is also the period in which the novel emerged to make the most intimate reserves of the self a matter of public consumption, thus giving shape to the bourgeois subject.

In the 1800's, things got a lot messier. New interests and ideas emerged in the public sphere, but oftentimes they couldn't be reconciled with received interests, leading to the tyranny of dominant opinion. Figures as diverse as John Stuart Mill and Karl Marx complained the hardening of opinion around established interests. Mill denounced the "yoke of public opinion" while Marx examined public opinion as false consciousness. During the 19th century a consumer culture arose. Consumer choice became a new basis of the private sphere; the other foundation was the newly constituted nuclear family segregated from the brutal competition of high capitalism. Consumption was at once a private family matter and the site of a "pure" individuality. Finally, in the political realm problems that we're familiar with now began to emerge, such as the discrepancy between election results and public opinion.

Maud Newton tells the story of Rolling Stone writer Anthony DeCurtis sneering at bloggers, "blog on, little honeybees, blog on." She retorts, "we have, thanks!" Richard Ford recently dismissed the typical literary blogger as "some guy sitting in his basement in Terre Haute." DeCurtis and Ford are clinging to established public sphere interests now under siege by bloggers who speak from the privatized realm of the cultural consumer. Traditionally, people were supposed to shut up and buy, but as the history of the public sphere teaches us, in order to be rational the public sphere must draw upon the private. As for the frequently-voiced complaint that bloggers are little more than exhibitionists, too idiosyncratic and self-indulgent to be taken seriously, Habermas reminds us that since the ancient Greeks "Subjectivity, as the innermost core of the private, was always already oriented to an audience." Hence, the blogger.

The Disappearing Book Review

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution recently laid off its book editor, and, as layoffs tend to do, the downsizing spread panic and dread throughout the workers who still have jobs. Newspapers are full of news about how newspapers across the country are reducing the space devoted to reviewing books. The latest report is in the New York Times, which has started to publish book reviews in its Sunday Arts section, possibly a sign that the Book Review is about to get phased out. Motoko Rich's article is mum on that development, but the article is blunt about the prospects for book reviews in large-circulation dailies:

For those who are used to the old way, it’s a tough evolution. “Like anything new, it’s difficult for authors and agents to understand when we say, ‘I’m sorry, you’re not going to be in The New York Times or The Chicago Tribune, but you are going to be at curledup.com,’ ” said Trish Todd, publisher of Touchstone Fireside, an imprint of Simon & Schuster. “But we think that’s the wave of the future.”

The disappearing newspaper book review has less to do with the state of contemporary American literature than the state of the American newspaper, which is pretty dismal. While the trend toward eliminating newspaper book reviews is matter of concern, it's really more of a marketing issue than a literary one.

But if book reviews get reduced to the space, say, now reserved for TV reviews, what will really be lost? Traditional book reviews tend to be bland--tepid in their convictions and gentle in equal measures in their praise and criticism. On the whole they're not as well written as film reviews, although they're probably taken more seriously. Only rarely do they offer any kind of interpretive analysis, and almost never do they broach the larger issues invoked by the books they consider. Too often newspaper book reviews are really just consumer guides to buying books. How much do they really add to the public sphere?

It hardly needs restating that the most important recent development in the public sphere in this country is the emergence of the blogosphere. Yet casting the decline of the newspaper book review as a battle between print media and bloggers oversimplifies a broader trend. Maud Newton, who, along with Jessa Crispin, is among our best literary bloggers, said of the decline of the traditional book review,  “I find it kind of naïve and misguided to be a triumphalist blogger But I also find it kind of silly when people in the print media bash blogs as a general category, because I think the people are doing very, very different things.”

Blogs are just one venue for a revived and expanded public sphere. During a discussion of Claire Messud's The Emperor's Children on Slate's Audio Book Club, Stephen Metcalf mentioned that he thought intellectual culture in the United States was moving outside the academy and into the public sphere centered around a newly revived urban culture. This is a percipient observation, one that I've been meaning to look into further. In any case, this development in the intellectual life of the country, if it's in fact happening, is larger than newspaper book reviews. That Metcalf's idea appeared in the context of a podcast published by an exclusively online journal is indicative of a positive change in how we work together to understand our own culture. Where would that idea ever have appeared in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution?

Dowager Rap

Negotiating the popular music scene as one gets older--older than 25, that is--is a tricky business. By the time one reaches 25 a whole new set of musicians have grabbed the top spots in the hit charts and the music that seemed so fresh in high school gets worked into the rotation on the "classic" rock stations. Live trough a couple more of these cycles and you start to wonder if the whole genre isn't going to pot.

The nagging sense of permanent decline can make it difficult to survey the current music scene objectively. For quite a while now I've had the general impression that rock music has hit a dead end. Other people must be noticing the same thing because rock's current moribund state even has a name: Rockism. Rap is an even trickier domain to survey for someone outside its target audience, but it seems to have fallen into a comfortable groove of familiar gestures. Now that rap seems to be living off its inheritance perhaps a good name for its current state would be Dowager Rap. The entire American music scene seems like it's just going through the motions.

Yet, at the same time, there's more exciting and innovative music available than ever before. Certainly more than I could get my hands on when I was a kid. Take a quick visit to Calabash Music or Other Music and you'll find amazing music from all over the world--including lively corners of the United States and Canada. Montreal--Montreal--is now hot. It's mainstream music that's boring. Then again, it's always been boring to anyone who truly cares about music.

Kelefa Sanneh, who probably has the most adventuresome tastes of the New York Times's music critics,  reports on the current state of rap and finds it under siege, yet again, but also growing distressingly bland and irrelevant. The current denunciations of rap music after l'affair d'Imus cite rap music as it used to be--compelling enough to denounce. In fact, Sanneh says, "hip-hop isn’t in an especially filthy mood right now. It sounds more light-hearted and clean-cut than it has in years." Like rock music, part of rap's claim to authenticity is its outsider status. Rap's and rock's central contradiction has been the way both genres mass market that outside status. Rap's Naughty Three Words have become commodities, and they now have all the bite of an aerobics workout soundtrack. Sanneh concludes with these troublesome questions:

For all the panicky talk about hip-hop lyrics, the current situation suggests a scarier possibility, both for hip-hop’s fans and its detractors. What if hip-hop’s lyrics shifted from tough talk and crude jokes to playful club exhortations — and it didn’t much matter? What if the controversial lyrics quieted down, but the problems didn’t? What if hip-hop didn’t matter that much, after all?

Rap still sells, a lot, but it's become harder to discern broad social conditions in its songs. However, it may be that rap has grown too diverse to speak about it as a unified phenomenon any more. Diversity will reduce its relevance in the public sphere, making it harder to denounce or rally around. But at this point political irrelevance may preserve its creativity. Offshore bastard forms of rap and rock are creating whole new forms of music. Some of the best rock, for instance, is being created south of Miami. Eventually, perhaps, rock and rap will be like the blues: roots music that's present everywhere, but attracting a small number of devotees to its original form. If that's the case, then we're already moving on to the next big thing, which, frankly, we could use. Maybe I'm just a geezer from the tight-pants days of New Wave, but I can't believe people are going to miss all those baggy pants.

Politics of the Virtual World

You'd think the French would be the last people who would get involved in something like this: Molly Moore of the Washington Post reports that all four major candidates for president of France established campaign offices in Second Life, a web site that describes itself, redundantly, as an "online digital world." The site's tag line is "Your World. Your Imagination." This sounds suspiciously like George Bush's political credo, but the French seem to be taking the politics of Second Life very seriously. The French are the second largest group of Avatars, as the inhabitants are known, after Americans, and there have been some lively political skirmishes in Second Life. What would Montaigne say?

I'm not sure what to make of this. In online world terms, I'm still stuck in its text-based prehistory. Back in the 90's I signed on to a MUD upon the recommendation of some grad student friends. The MUD was supposed to be a discussion group of some kind--something serious like cultural studies. I entered the first room and was immediately greeted with a one-line text message: "Welcome. Let me give you a hug." I immediately bolted from the room and never returned to a virtual world. Since then online worlds have come a long way, of course, and Second Life is generally regarded as one of the best of its kind. Online digital world technologies may soon break out of their fantasy-world confines and into the business world, which is already in the same neighborhood as the fantasy worlds. Developers and investors are looking into applying Second Life technologies to virtual offices. Someday soon we'll gather around a virtual conference table and discuss SOX controls--dressed in dark cloaks, I hope. But if I end up in another damn cubical in a Second Life office, I'm going to be pissed.

Anyway, the French electorate is having a good time in Second Life. They're squabbling over the presence of the National Front on Porcupine Island, a shopping mall. Some gullible Avatars are devoting hundreds of man-hours to maintain Ségolène Royal's campaign headquarters, which is made of wood to express her concern for the environment. (I hope her headquarters isn't made of wood from rare species in the virtual Amazon.)  Three Democratic presidential candidates--Clinton, Obama, and Edwards--have established campaign offices in Second Life. According to reports, however, the American political sites are moribund compared to the French ones, although someone took the trouble to vandalize John Edwards' headquarters--one of his fired bloggers would be my guess.

Somehow something must be wrong with a polis located in a fantasy world. Or maybe you could say that virtual world politics are consistent with Montaigne's reaction against Machiavelli stripping the world of value and enchantment. Since Montaigne's solution was generally sunnier than Shakespeare's reaction to the same predicament, perhaps the French are more at home in a virtual political world than we are. After all, for six years now Americans have endured a government that's been operating in the same kind of mytho-Christian dream world as many of the online virtual worlds. Live in the virtual world too long and it begins to look worse than the real one.

W.H. Auden and the Public Sphere

This year is the centenary of W.H. Auden's birth, and beginning today Slate's Book Club is discussing his career. So far the discussion has the drab title of "Auden at 100," but expect a "But Was Auden Any Good" headline before the debate is concluded. Meghan O'Rourke opens the discussion with an excellent précis on Auden, focusing, like many reviews of his entire career, on the "second" Auden, i.e., the political poet of the 1930's. This Auden (his readers like to divide him up into separate entities) is that now almost extinct creature: the poet in the public sphere. O'Rourke says Auden's poems

spoke to the cultivated reader of op-ed pages (and there was no Sanskrit in them, as there was in Eliot's poems). And the search for a common idiom in which to combat the soapbox orthodoxies of fascism helped Auden shape gems like "In Memory of W. B. Yeats" and "Musée Des Beaux Arts," which direct a moralizing public rhetoric at an intimate audience—at the individual. These are pretty great poems. And given poetry's almost total isolation from public discourse today, there's something deeply appealing about Auden's quest to establish a poetry of public intimacy.

In the age of MySpace, "public intimacy" has taken an entirely different meaning, but poetry used to play a much larger role in public discourse. Since William Blake poetry helped developed what Habermas referred to as the "saturated and free interiority" necessary for someone to participate in the critical function of the public sphere. Blake, for his part, traced the transformation of the benighted Babylonian masses to the One Man chatting over tea in "spiritual fourfold London."

Auden's contribution to a politicized poetry was to make certain historical developments figurable. Although he didn't emigrate to America until 1939, but Britain changed so much between the year of Auden's birth to his decisive turn toward public poetry in 1931 as to become a completely different country. Britain, in a sense, emigrated from him. But at the same time, interwar Britain could also be a placid, complacent, forgetful place. The Great War had passed with neither an invasion nor an occupation. Britain had won the war, more or less, the Empire was intact, the General Strike had collapsed, and the slaughters of Verdun were remembered as "sacrifices." Only the Liberal Party seemed to have suffered at all. Yet in 1930 Auden had the prescience to write,

Shut up talking, charming in the best suits to be had in town,
Lecturing on navigation while the ship is going down.

At a moment when al-Qaeda is dispatching suicide bombers to assassinate the vice president of the United States, our military is pre-occupied with an unwinnable war, and the international markets are getting jittery, who among our poets will make the "darkness visible," as Wordsworth put it?

N.B.:  with apologies to Frank Bidart: In an earlier version of this post I mentioned Frank Bidart, who won the  $100,000 Bollingen Prize in Poetry the day before. Bidart was the handiest poet available, and, for a moment at least, representative of a certain institutional standard of aesthetic value. I had hastily, and unfairly, characterized Bidart as a tinkerer with punctuation. Bidart's poetry is far more vigorous and wide-ranging than that; it's even political from time to time. (Karl Marx makes an appearance in Bidart's 2005 collection Star Dust.) My point about contemporary American poetry came from a remark make by the executive director of the Academy of American Poets, Tree Swenson, who had praised Bidart for being "enormously groundbreaking in terms of typography" and "using tons of odd punctuation and strange spacing." I'm all for formal experimentation, but is the Academy of American Poets asking readers to look to such purely formal experiments as the very best American poets can do? I think that's why we're so nostalgic about Auden: he used innovative poetic form to say something larger about our world.

And by the way, if you get the chance to see Frank Bidart read in public, take it. He's a terrific reader of his work.

Books and Water Cooler Talk

The loss of an independent bookstore is always reason for sadness, although I think the damage to literary culture can be overstated. A lot of people were upset that Logan Fox closed his Micawber Books in Princeton, NJ after 24 years of operation. Fox has a variety of gripes about the publishing world and the media, including this one that opened the New York Times article on the closing of his store:

Logan Fox can’t quite pinpoint the moment when movies and television shows replaced books as the cultural topics people liked to talk about over dinner, at cocktail parties, at work. He does know that at Micawber Books, his 26-year-old independent bookstore here that is to close for good in March, his own employees prefer to come in every morning and gossip about “Survivor” or “that fashion reality show” whose title he can’t quite place.

Jerome Weeks over at BookDaddy points out that books "have rarely been a topic of conversation in offices or parties" unless the people involved happened to have all read the same book. Weeks explains,

It's extremely rare that any book achieves the kind of near-instantaneous cultural penetration that a movie or TV show or sports spectacular does -- only a new Harry Potter or Bill Clinton's memoir gets that kind of saturated exposure, and it requires that kind of everyone's-heard-about-it impact to spark casual conversation.

Weeks is right. If anyone still has the energy to throw or attend a party right now, it's unlikely that you'll hear anyone making small talk about Colm Toibin's new collection of short stories or Vikram Chandra's Sacred Games, two of the hottest works of fiction right now. The casual talk about cultural objects--novels, television shows, films, ballets, whatever--are really extensions of the promotional and marketing segment of the culture industry. Independent bookstores are an integral part of this segment, albeit one with a different set of priorities than most of the publishing industry.

But there's also a distinction between water cooler chit chat about books and the discussion of ideas those books raise. Public sphere discussion of ideas runs on a completely separate cultural cycle. As Weeks notes, "limited access plus long-term aesthetic experience = slow public impact." Logan Fox complains no one spends four hours in a bookstore anymore (did they ever really do that?); now people spend four hours a week reading blogs and other online venues for considering books. Reading blogs and online journals, and listening to podcasts, I've noticed a set of writers who seem to be undergoing a modest revival: Italo Calvino, Iris Murdoch, Marshall McLuhan, and F.A. Hayek. Henry and William James have been enjoying a renaissance for a couple of years now. Spinoza was practically the philosopher of the year last year. So what if people are talking about  Project Runway or 24 around the water cooler. Those aren't the only conversations going on.

The Gross Clinic and the Public Sphere

With a week to go to the deadline for meeting the $68 million offer for Thomas Eakins's The Gross Clinic, Philadelphia mayor John Street has withdrawn his nomination to designate the painting as an historical object. Thomas Jefferson University, which has owned the painting since 1878, has already arranged to sell the painting to Wal-Mart heiress Alice Walton unless the city can match her offer. Evidently the Philadelphia Museum of Art and the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts are pretty close to raising the $68 million to keep the painting in Philadelphia. Anne d'Harnoncourt, director and chief executive of the Museum of Art, says she's "optimistic," adding "Things are moving very fast." Meanwhile, Thomas Jefferson University has been generally tight-lipped in public, but has howled in private over what it regards as its right to sell off the painting, considered the finest work of art in the city and one of the masterpieces of American art, for unspecified "strategic purposes." Unless the city arts institutions can raise the money, The Gross Clinic will be carted off to a museum, yet to be built, in Bentonville, Arkansas.

As the Philadelphia Inquirer's Stephan Salisbury notes, the battle of The Gross Clinic raises complex issues regarding art in the public sphere. A lot of artworks that have been bought with public funds and/or displayed in public spaces don't always enjoy curatorial care. A city-owned mobile by Alexander Calder disappeared during a renovation and was feared lost for 20 years before turning up pretty much where it was supposed to be all along--in storage. Another Eakins work, The Agnew Clinic, hung in a University of Pennsylvania building for decades before getting blasted by steam from a broken pipe. It's now on more or less permanent loan to the Philadelphia Museum of Art where, one presumes, it's kept a safe distance from radiator pipes.

Given the costs of maintaining artistic masterpieces, the temptation to sell these works is considerable. Philadelphia's historic, and often cash poor, churches own countless artworks that would fetch good money at auction. As Jefferson's closed-door deal with Walton demonstrates, by the time the public finds out an artwork is being sold, it may be too late. Some Philadelphians have proposed setting up an emergency fund to rescue artworks from the clutches of auction houses and acquisitive heiresses looking for some quick prestige. But some fear that an emergency fund will only encourage emergencies, tempting property owners to forge hasty selling contracts just to get city arts money.

So far the only solution seems to be frantic appeals to civic pride. It's good to see Philadelphia's maligned civic leadership coming together to try to keep The Gross Clinic in the city where it was created.

Conservatives, Liberals, and the Public Intellectual

Conservatives have been complaining for years that there aren't enough conservatives in the college teaching ranks. My immediate response: be careful what you wish for.  I've never really thought of conservatives as being actively excluded from the academy; rather, the academy seems like a natural place for liberals. To take literature seriously and hold the life of the mind in some esteem while growing up in the Midwest is to place oneself immediately in opposition to the smug anti-intellectualism of the American heartland. The irony of being a bookish liberal in the Midwest is reading canonical writers--reading pretty much any novels except Stephen  King's--marks one as one part dangerous subversive to nine parts ridiculous nerd. I can still remember the taunts from conservative business and economics majors, "After you graduate you can come work in our factories."

Mark Bauerlein, an English professor at Emory University, says conservatives have been excluded from the academy because traditionally intellectuals have been distinterested, magisterially  removed from the economic and political interests of their times. To point out that this has never really been the case is to miss Bauerlein's point: conservatives have been successfully linked with power and money by liberal polemicists. Consequently, they've been excluded from teaching freshman composition for less than what a kindergarten teacher makes. Bauerlein's larger point is that conservative thought has a respectable intellectual pedigree that has nothing to do with the ranting of the Fox provocateurs.

Bauerlein is certainly right about the intellectual integrity of the conservative tradition. However, the disinterestedness part still needs some work. Bauerlein speaks in (mostly) admiring terms about Dinesh D'Souza's The Enemy at Home: The Cultural Left and Its Responsibility for 9/11. D'Souza starts his book off with Ann Coulter-like rhetorical fraudulence, blaming practically every Democrat who held office in the last 30 years for the terrorist attacks of  9/11. After this bit of red meat for the base, D'Souza moves on to what Bauerlein sees as the real value of the book. D'Souza claims that Muslims in the Middle East are offended by American popular culture and, as Bauerlein explains, "American culture is the expression of left-wing ethics, the prevailing whatever-floats-your-boat individualism." Of course, the prevailing whatever-fills-up-your-Tahoe economic individualism is OK, and certainly not to blame for anything that's going on in the Middle East. If D'Souza wants to ram through this hoary conservative tenet, then fine--he can be the one who tells News Corp they have to cancel American Idol.

It's interesting that Bauerlein choses to discuss D'Souza, a Hoover Institute fellow and known irritant to liberals, rather than a working conservative university professor quietly lecturing on de Tocqueville and Burke. Surely Bauerlein knows one. He takes Lewis Lapham--admittedly not the most balanced liberal commentator in the public sphere--to task for denouncing conservatives for setting up an alternative academy in think tanks and journals. Bauerlein's choice is interesting because Michael Bérubé, who Bauerlein cites as an example of a liberal with weak polemical skills, made his reputation as an advocate for a return of the public intellectual, that largely extinct figure who engaged in debate within the public sphere rather than the academy. Part of the defensiveness of liberal college professors is that conservatives dominate the public sphere. To a far more successful degree than liberal academics conservatives have reinvented the public intellectual. I could name a dozen professors wearily grading final exams right now who would trade their tenure for Dinesh D'Souza's book contract. Yes, more conservatives in the academy would balance out the political spectrum, but the academy shouldn't be the only forum for ideas.

Long Live Paris Hilton!

Rebecca Traister has had enough: she writes in Salon, "Paris Hilton, that creepy dollie, must be destroyed. Metaphorically, of course." But not before Traister can recount the Rabelaisian excesses of our national heiress: answering her cell phone during sex, misplacing her Chihuahua, corrupting Britney Spears, and generally being a bad seed in American celebrity culture. (Traister doesn't mention her date with Brian Urlacher, the rapid-fire mumbler who plays middle linebacker for the Chicago Bears. When asked about the date, Urlacher shuddered and said something about how busy she was, a reference, perhaps, to her constantly ringing cell phone.)

Paris Hilton isn't the first blond who served as a kind of free-floating signifier for bad taste in American culture. The phrase "famous for being famous" was practically invented for Zsa Zsa Gabor, that puff pastry of a celebrity in the 1960's. But Traister sees in Hilton a much more malevolent force. This pink-clad sociopath rules over the Page Six kingdom like Sauron:

The other almost-supernatural aspect of Hilton's reign of harebrained horror is the way that she herself remains intact while those around her wither. Hilton is like some kind of Dorian Gray cockroach. While her buddies waste away and collapse and see their careers flushed down the celebrity toilet after having been in her presence, she grows stronger: appearing on more magazine covers, getting bigger record contracts, attracting more attention, sleeping with more of her fading friends' boyfriends. Even her Plasticine exterior seems unravaged by her excessive behaviors.

She is, frustratingly, indestructible.

But even Traister admits Hilton is a creature of American celebrity culture, stating ruefully, "There is no question that we are culpable, as readers and writers and photographers and Web surfers and consumers -- addicted to the empty calories and steady buzz of hating on Hilton." One gets the feeling that Traister wants to return to a People magazine fairyland of sweet red carpet ingénues and Tom Cruise. If there's a redeeming quality to Hilton it's her seigniorial contempt for those at the margins of celebrity culture--all those D-list busybodies who fill in when the A- and B-listers are in rehab or at home pretending to raise all those kids they've adopted from Africa.

What good will it do for the public sphere if we exorcise Paris from it? We'll be stuck with noxious cretins like Lindsay "Firecrotch" Lohan running around unchecked. Are we better served by returning to the ongoing debate about the cultural value of Britney Spears? It's too much to hope for that the space in our public sphere currently occupied by Hilton will be filled with something more socially productive, like a national discussion of the Iraq Study Group or the distribution of wealth in the United States. We might as well keep her around, if only to keep people like Brandon Davis off the streets. Just watch out for a blond in a red Ferrari with a Chihuahua in her purse.

Our Wild Ride to November 7

I've been bracing myself for a vicious political season, and sure enough, it's happening. The Washington Post has a compendium of vicious political attack ads, most of them coming from the GOP. Taken together, they are a catalog of outrage. Admittedly, the story is a bit distorting; we don't usually see all the political fisticuffs that occur in obscure congressional districts in mid term elections. However, the outlandishness of the attack ads are a wonder to behold. They're like prying open the unconsciousness of right wing evangelicals and revealing the roiling fears and desires inside. Although there are exceptions, like Wisconsin, generally speaking the redder the state the more outlandish the smear tactics. Here in the Chicago area, the bluest part of blue state Illinois, we've been subjected to relatively sly attack ads accusing Tammy Duckworth, an Iraq war veteran who lost both legs in combat, of cutting and running on the war. Who knows what kind of mayhem is going on downstate.

The most dismal aspect of these smear tactics is that they are explicitly aimed at the GOP's conservative base--the so-called values voters. The GOP has nothing to offer these voters except jacking up their fears, which is starting to look like an end in itself for everyone involved. The feckless and irresponsible Republican Congress can't promise anything useful for the republic with a straight face. His feeble exercise in rearranging the deck chairs on the cruise ship Iraqi Freedom now over with, George Bush is running like a bride late for her wedding to the specter of gay marriage  in New Jersey. With its grotesque imaginings, anarchic disregard for the mores of middle class life, and general semiotic emptiness, this election is starting to look less like an exercise in democratic processes than a Halloween episode of The Simpsons.

Laura Kipnis's Shoes

The New York Sun takes a puzzling look at Laura Kipnis, who's in New York publicizing her new book The Female Thing: Dirt, Sex, Envy, Vulnerability. I haven't read the book, so Sheelah Kohlathar's approach to her subject may be appropriate, but there's a curious fascination with Kipnis's body in the article. There's a detailed description of her skin and clothing you'd normally see in a Vanity Fair piece on Scarlett Johansson. Kipnis has "white, almost translucent skin and angular features brought out by pink lipstick and smoky eyeliner." Her shoes are "tweed wedges with maribou poufs on the toes." In one cringe-inducing observation . . .

Whose Metaphors?

Steven Pinker takes on George Lackoff, the Berkeley linguist who argues that the Democrats can take possession of Congress if only they can get the electorate to use different metaphors. Before I get to Pinker's criticisms, there's very large point in Lackoff's favor: conservatives have undertaken the long march to change the metaphors by which we define public policy. "Tax relief" and "death tax" have become common parlance. The latest innovation, "Islamic fascism," is struggling for acceptance. And Lackoff is right in his claim that Democrats are playing a losing game by playing on the Republicans' turf.

Ghastly Reporting on the Antiterrorism Bill

I know the blogosphere is aflame with posts on the Antiterrorism Bill, but it's too nauseating to let pass without comment. Today's New York Times editorial cuts through the illusion of objective reporting on the issue. "Ghastly" is exactly the word to describe the bill--and the reporting on it. The Washington Post's Dan Froomkin has an excellent review of the terrible reporting on an issue that will define our democracy in the early twenty-first century. It appeas that the rules of journalistic engagement that have been in place since the runup to the Iraq war appear to still be in place: credulous reporting of a one-sided and entirely dishonest and distorted debate. Once again, Fox News takes the lead by airing, without correction, House Majority Leader John Boehner's amazingly brazen display of disinformation.

Stop Smiling

Jack Shafer writes a fan letter to his favorite magazine, Stop Smiling, edited in Chicago by "old men trapped in young men's bodies." Shafer declares, "practically anything gray or rotting can provide Stop Smiling with editorial sustenance." This is meant as praise, and, surprisingly, he's right.

Two other magazines to keep in mind are The Virginia Quarterly Review, which has just released its Fall 2006 issue with a fiction supplement, and N+1, which is overdue for a new issue. But the editors haven't been completely unproductive this summer: they've come out with totebags!

Culture and the Long Tail

The Long Tail concept has already reached its long tail point: yesterday I heard someone use the term in a meeting to refer to a project milestone date extending far last its original deadline. Chris Anderson's The Long Tail is this year's beach reading for the MBA set. The idea of the long tail is simple: A few hits make a lot of money very quickly before demand rapidly drops off, but never to zero. After the weekend herds rush to The Pirates of the Caribbean, there's your parents waiting patiently to rent it in October. If you're a theater owner, you want Pirates off your screen as soon as the frenzy stops, but if you're an aggregator like Amazon or iTunes you can make money selling stale copies to stay-at-homes in every corner of America. The theater manager has a lot of overhead: popcorn oil, the sullen kid trolling the lobby with the dust bin on a stick, Twizzlers getting stale in the back room. You don't have time to wait for the dawdlers to come in. But iTunes can store the soundtrack (or soon, the movie itself) for a cent or two a year in a disk array. Any stray hits still make a worthwhile profit.

So far, brilliant. But Tim Wu writes, "like many business books, The Long Tail commits the sin of overreaching." The new economy and its rules still haven't taken over. As Wu points out, there's still a lot of really big money--like Exxon's $371 billion in revenues in 2005--in grimy old economy businesses that deal with tangible things, like oil. While it seems to be able to expand its profits easier than Google can expand its disk arrays, Exxon is still bound by the laws of the physical world, not to mention the laws of classical economics, i.e., the buy low-sell high kind.

The Long Tail may be dubious as investment advice, but it does accurately describe a cultural phenomenon. Since the nineteenth century the economics of mass media has slowly and relentlessly stamped out folk culture. as out folk culture gets digitized, or originates as digital, it will be protected by new economic rules. Now if we could only get our cars to work according to the new economy.

What's a Film Critic for, Anyway?

It's high summer and our movie theaters are filled with a slightly above average assortment of popcorn movies and, here and there, second-tier film festival entries. So it's time for film critics to fret, as they do every July, about their own reason for being. This week is the New York Times' A.O. Scott's turn to answer the question film critics get all the time: What is wrong with you people?

Scott recasts the question as critics see it: Why do we go sniffing after art where everyone else is looking for fun, and spoiling everybody’s fun when it doesn’t live up to our notion or art? At first glance the problem seems to be the conflict between elite and popular taste, with elite tastes completely irrelevant when  the box office is good. However, the real issue is not the definition of a critic, but the definition of movies. Scott writes,

Movies, more than any other art form, are understood to be common cultural property, something everyone can enjoy, which makes any claim of expertise suspect. Therefore, a certain estrangement between us and them — or me and you, to put it plainly — has been built into the enterprise from the start.

I would amend this by claiming that people feel a sense of ownership over their own deeply personal tastes rather than the movies themselves, and that movies merely offer the opportunity to feel that something personal may be communal.

Anyway, Scott locates the critic not in the space between the people and their shared property, but between the people and the film industry. He says that critics' "love of movies is sometimes expressed as a mistrust of the people who make and sell them, and even of the people who see them." Movies may be privileged shared cultural objects, but they're also mass market objects like any other. Critics occupy the uncomfortable space within this contradiction. In this sense, they sacrifice themselves for our pleasure. "We take entertainment very seriously, which is to say that we don’t go to the movies for fun. Or for money. We do it for you."

In other words, critics are really just like us, except they suffer for us and expatiate us for the sin of marching off to see Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest. Critics hail the revelatory moments American commerce occasionally throws our way, and suffer through all the dreck that Hollywood spreads around, so that we can be spared the terrible knowledge of how truly awful American cinema can be.

Mea Culpa

If I were housesitting, the plants would be dead, the fish floating. Summer in Chicago...fireworks everywhere,  meats grilling, container gardening...all the while trying to think of witty and/or insightful dispatches for OWS. I've arrived at the following conclusion, I don't have much to say.

This may be news to the editor of OWS who entrusted me w/ this, his forum. He's been around for my rants about ugly condo construction in Chicago, terrible wayfinding at airports (except you Heathrow, I love everything about you and your clear signage) and the misery of over-airconditioned spaces. You see, I'm a ranter, a seether, a complainer...not a writer.

 

The Selling of Public Space

The headline suggests the old artist compromising his talent for commercial considerations story, but NicolaIi Ouroussoff's real point is that public space in New York City, and by extension, pretty much every major city in the United States, was long ago handed over to private developers. Speaking of a Brooklyn project called Atlantic Yards, which is a collaboration between Frank Gehry and the hack developer Bruce Ratner, Ouroussoff writes,

For Brooklyn residents who oppose Atlantic Yards, the Gehry-Ratner partnership is a natural target. But much of their anger should focus on the city and federal governments, which are apparently delighted to give developers responsibility for building and maintaining parks and pedestrian thoroughfares. That decision has changed the character of our cities as much as any single event in the past half century. Once commercial forces rule, such spaces are no longer really public.

The status of public space is one of the least appreciated issues in America right now. The issues manifests itself in New York in various ways, most notably as the cranky "Disneyfication" of Times Square. But in other cities and towns the issue so often comes down to this: is there a place you can encounter your fellow citizens that doesn't require you to buy something?

Get Chicago Lit

Julia Keller, who I knew back when she was writing on television in Columbus, OH, has a long story on keeping tabs on the literary scene in Chicago. Literary communities are hard to build, but literate people tend not to move in herds.

British Faculty Vote to Boycott Israel

In a shocking, and appalling, development, a British faculty union voted to sever all contacts with Israeli universities unless Israeli professors come out in opposition to their government's policies regarding the Palestinians. Opponents of the boycott pointed out,

Israeli academics as a group are among those in Israeli society most sympathetic to the Palestinian cause and among those most likely to question decisions of Israel’s government. But the provision has also infuriated many academics in Britain and elsewhere because it effectively sets up a political litmus test for Israeli academics (if they take certain stands, they are OK to deal with), and the idea of subjecting academics to political tests offends standards of academic freedom in Britain, the United States and elsewhere.

Academics should be more politically involved, but in Britain they're in such a rush to gain relevancy they're tripped over their robes and knocked their heads into those quaint medieval walls.

Buchanan, Harding, and Bush

George W. Bush may not be the worst president in the history of the republic, but he's in the bottom three. Florida Atlantic University professor Robert Watson says,

When history renders its cold assessment of George W. Bush, I believe he will find himself alongside Harding and Buchanan as one of the worst presidents in American history. Bush's legacy will likely be that of death, deficits and deceit, and it could well take this nation a decade or more to recover from his presidency.

Literary Communities

Gina Frangello, the executive editor of Other Voices, has a long post in her blog about literary communities--or how they don't really exist, at least in Chicago. She tells a story about an Other Voices fundraiser in which a bunch of people tried to work their connections to get in free, which, of course, defeated the purpose of the event. That literary people are cheapskates is only part of the problem. Getting in for free means you're part of the community. It's the outsiders who have to pay.

She also has some good pointers on supporting your local literary community.

Link via Bookslut.