Month / May 2008

by Edward Champion

Solving the Literary Critical Crisis

Nigel Beale points to some startlingly reactionary remarks from Salon’s “Internet Killed the Critical Star” article. Now that I’ve read this “discussion” a second time, Nigel is right. Why would anyone go to the trouble of reading a literary critic if there is “no intention of ever opening books they tout?” Is Miller really so recalcitrant a reader that she’s incapable of picking up a book that James Wood has liked and deciding for herself whether it’s any good? Is she seriously suggesting that there isn’t a single work of fiction overlapping her tastes and Wood’s tastes? This strikes me as a sad, incurious, and mononuclear existence. Perhaps Miller prefers a supplemental relationship with literature, as opposed to something that involves the book itself!

Here is my solution to the literary critical “crisis”: To ensure that those practicing literary criticism still maintain some passion for books, I think that all literary critics should be asked what they read for fun. Not a list of the greatest books. Just the last thing they read for fun. If the literary critic cannot name a single book that made them laugh, filled them with joy, or otherwise caused them to get excited over the last year, then the guilty literary critic should be banned from writing for any newspaper or periodical for a six-month period until they can truly embrace a love for literature. This should weed out the dullards and the dimwits and the humorless individuals who transform the promising pastures of literary criticism into soporific fallow.

by Edward Champion

Roundup

  • First, R. McCrum was against blogs. And now he’s for them. Or was he for them before he was against them? Or was he against them before being for them before being hopelessly confused? There seems to be a common trait among those who rail against litblogs without providing sufficient examples: schizophrenia. (via Jeff)
  • It seems I’m not the only person having strange moving-related conversations. Last night, I spent fifteen minutes talking with a stray dust jacket. It did not respond back. This is most certainly a sign that I am ready to occupy the new premises.
  • Does James Bond prefer Bentleys or Aston Martins? And why are so many auto executives getting their panties in a bunch over this? We all know that Bond is promiscuous with the ladies. Why not the cars too? Hell, I’d like to read a James Bond story in which he must penetrate a muffler in order to protect national security.
  • If you thought your place was a mess, you haven’t seen Josh Freed’s apartment. Freed has made a documentary about his right to clutter, defying what he calls “the tyranny of the tidy.” Fred doesn’t appear to have heard of Langley Collyer, who experienced a more naturalistic tyranny when he was crushed by his own detritus and rats were masticating upon his body when it was discovered. (via Bibliophile Bullpen)
  • Incontrovertible evidence that book covers can be compared to a ZZ Top song. (via Booklist)
  • So Borders is now jumping back into online retailing with a vengeance. I’m sure the B&N buyout offers had nothing to do with this.
  • Hanif Kureishi has described university creative writing courses as “the new mental hospitals.” Furthermore, Kureishi doesn’t seem to understand that most American campus massacres have involved a pistol or a rifle, not a machine gun. If you’re going to be a writer, shouldn’t you at least get the details right? Unless, of course, Kureishi is listening to his dog right now and planning upon sending a letter to Jimmy Breslin. In which case, we should probably be worried. (via Bookninja)
  • In space, nobody can hear you scream. In fact, you don’t really need to. Because your jaw will be left drooping down by these amazing photos.
  • Murakami interviewed: here and here. (via Orthofer)
  • Terry Eagleton on anonymity.
by Edward Champion

RIP Sydney Pollack

I have long been baffled by the suggestion put forth by hip film folk that Tootsie is an “overrated” picture. The film may not be on the level of Some Like It Hot, but it is nonetheless the kind of elaborate comedic farce, a natural descendant of Lubitsch, that nobody makes anymore. It is funny, immensely subtle, and full of wonderful performances (well, save Jessica Lange, a one-note performance that arose from a one-note character). It is a rare film in which the side characters are just as essential as the protagonist. It offers fascinating takes on gender through physical gesture. (Just watch Dustin Hoffman’s movement as he begins inhabiting Dorothy Michaels’s mannerisms over the course of the film.) The screenplay was infamously put together at the last minute, and it could not have happened without Sydney Pollack at the helm (and Elaine May on the revisions).

Pollack is now dead. And I will forgive him somewhat for the many turkeys he helmed over the past fifteen years. He didn’t always succeed. (Random Hearts is a mangy dog, Out of Africa is an overlong bore, and the less said about his atrocious remake of Sabrina, the better.) But the man gave us Tootsie, Jeremiah Johnson, and The Electric Horseman — all intelligent and well-crafted films directed at popular audiences. He always cast a major leading man in his films, whether it was Harrison Ford, Dustin Hoffmann, or Robert Redford, who could be counted upon to deliver some modest human insight for mass consumption. Today, this seems like almost a quaint notion.

He was also a fascinating, if limited actor. In addition to the agent in Tootsie, I cannot forget Pollack’s fine performance as Jack in Husbands and Wives. The scene in which Pollack tries to leave a party with Lysette Anthony is one of the most harrowing depictions of a seemingly confident middle-aged man seeing his world crumble right in front of him. We realize at that moment just how much Jack relies on others to feed his being. Pollack was the only person who could have played that scene.

I’ll miss Pollack, because I can’t think of anyone who will replace him. He wasn’t the greatest filmmaker in the world. But he stood out in large part because today’s emerging filmmakers seem more interested in spectacle over substance. I suppose this is what sells tickets. But Pollack understood that the true spectacle lies in fascinating human moments. He may have focused mostly on lighter fare. He may have made mainstream movies. But when his films delivered, it was the natural spectacle that commanded your attention.

by Edward Champion

Literary Skeleton Crew

There remain four books in the old apartment: Iain M. Banks’s Excession (which I am currently reading), Steven Gillis’s Temporary People (which I hope to get around to reading quite soon!), a galley of The Letters of Allen Ginsberg (which I hope to read after all the other books I have to read, which are now sitting in the new apartment), and my trusted Random House Webster’s Unabridged Dictionary. There are a handful of oversized volumes now in boxes, but I choose to leave these contents alone. Cardboard bottles for makeshift vintners, ready for an odor tendered by topography and not by time.

The dictionary, being a dutiful and invaluable companion, will most certainly be the last volume transported. You never know when an impulse to flip through the seven crevices might kick in. I’ll feel sufficiently settled in once dictionary and desk have migrated. They remain attached not so much at the hip, but certainly with an invisible tether. I now find myself pondering this old apartment denuded of books and remain preternaturally excited about these preternatural limitations: a veritable jig and tonic! A mere four books sitting in for a cast of thousands! A skeleton crew! I’ve opened up the Ginsberg book and located this one-paragraph letter that Ginsberg wrote to Eisenhower:

Rosenbergs are pathetic, government will sordid, execution obscene. America caught in crucifixion machine, only barbarians want them burned I say stop it before we fill our souls with death-house horror.

This was 1953. It didn’t do any good. No doubt a present Ginsberg type scribing a current message to the President along similar lines might become a “No Fly” list candidate. Unless, of course, the President has received a remarkable spate of hate mail. This remains unknown. He’s certainly not sharing with us.

Did Ginsberg have only four books to work from? Probably not. Did he consult the books he had to write this letter? Probably not. But he did read newspapers.

There remains, for the present time, an Internet connection. But Bartleby is no substitute for a good book. Control-F makes everything too easy. Better to plunge into textual anarchy and unferret some strange passage, such as the one above.

And what does Mr. Gillis give us? A random flip to page 102:

The machine was an old ink wheel mimeograph, silver-grey with a smooth metal cartridge and a round plastic bottle of blue ink loaded into the underside.

I approve of the E over the A in “grey.” I was terrified of reading beyond the word “blue,” for I had hoped that the “round plastic bottle of blue” might connote bottled water, some eccentrically designed machine. But with “ink,” this ambiguity was sullied!

The unabridged points out that the word “mimeograph” was “formerly a trademark.” One of Edison’s lost patents, now liberated into the lingua franca. Even though nobody really uses a mimeograph machine anymore. Will LaserJet suffer such a fate? Will there come a point in which nobody will really remember HP and the word “laserjet” will become released from corporate avarice? A hundred years from now, some amateur etymologist will flip through the unabridged dictionary and see “formerly a trademark” for “laserjet” (with the crude caps humbled), with the meaning somewhat transmuted and no mention of the parent company. But today, we must tread carefully. LaserJet is a registered trademark.

If America remains “caught in crucifixion machine,” then certainly there is hope within the native tongue. And would such a line of inquiry have been pursued had I been surrounded by all of my books? Perhaps there is something to be said for Spartan literary studies.

by Edward Champion

Life is an Occupation

Roger Ebert on Studs Turkel: “The lesson Studs has taught me is that your life is over when you stop living it. If you can truly ‘retire,’ you had a job, but not an occupation. Observing people like Studs and the author Paul Theroux, and the great sports writer William Nack, and directors like Robert Altman and Sidney Lumet, I have seen those whose lifelong occupations absorb them, and who are not merely maintaining, but growing. How astonishing it was to learn that Altman made great films after having a heart transplant!”