John Burdett’s Bangkok Tattoo, his second in a series of “mystery” novels featuring a Buddhist cop named Sonchai Jitplecheep, created some controversry with its attitude toward the sex trade in Thailand and its supposed creation of stereotypes of Westerners. The novel received many good reviews, but few reviewers seemed to notice that Bangkok Tattoo is an excellent post 9-11 novel in the way that it shows the influence of that event on other parts of the world. Jitplecheep’s involvement in the investigation of a murdered CIA agent and his encounters with two jaded/incompetent CIA operatives also on the case, provides a fascinating view on the fantasies we’ve fed ourselves while taking on an enemy that is not a nation but a state of mind. on several levels, from the mysteries of his violent past to his conversations. Perhaps one of the main points of Burdett’s novel is how the rest of the world has to live with America’s rather unimaginative interpretation of “terrorism” and it’s equally unimaginative response to terrorism.

The genius of the novel is how it manages to deal with these themes in a non-didactic way while still being successful as a mystery-thriller, a study in extremely deep characterization as we find out more about the murdered CIA agent, and a fascinating look at the effect of American policies on moderate Moslems.

In this case, you can clearly see the damage a genre label does to a book. Burdett’s Bangkok Tattoo is several things at once, does them all successfully, and yet to most people it’s, on the surface at least, a lurid sex-and-violence-filled mystery novel. This kind of categorization tends to limit and dull discussion about a book.

Anyway, if you haven’t checked out Bangkok Tattoo, you should.

I never want to hear the phrases ‘It was just like a TV show,’ or ‘It was just like a movie,’ or any variation on those in word choice or arrangement, ever again.

A few nights ago on the 10 o’clock news—which I never watch and shouldn’t have—the lede for a story about a local bail bondsman who (1) was kidnapped, (2) was tortured, and (3) escaped, was the following: “If you were a TV writer for a show like LAW & ORDER, you’d probably come up with a story like this.” That was the anchorman’s introduction, after which the show went to an eyewitness who said essentially the same thing: “It was just like a TV show.” Must we revel in our detachment?

The bondsman was tortured for days and that’s how his story’s introduced. No focus on the pain/suffering. Focus rather on his story’s similarity to an episode of your favorite cop/lawyer show, which by the way has stories “ripped from the headlines.” TV reflects reality, reality is compared to the TV show and then turned into a TV show—and so on and so on until we can’t live through any sort of life-drama without seeing ourselves as fictional figures at the center of a television show that must, therefore, have some epiphanic moment, or closure, and end with a song by Los Lobos.

I wouldn’t level the same complaint at those who—of 9/11—said, “It was just like a movie.” That was an incapacity to describe a tragedy whose magnitude we’d never witnessed except in films and so is forgivable. What happened to this bail bondsman goes on every day, though. We are capable of a fitting description. By reducing his story to the level of an L&O plotline, we’re reducing what he suffered through and the achievement of his escape. We aren’t doing his story justice.

Neither would I complain the same of someone who says, “I feel like a character in a novel,” because the long forms of fiction and non-fiction writing allow for a fuller approximation of reality. Television shows and movies are, by necessity, boom-boom-boom, from set piece to set piece, from one emotional drama to the next. Every scene/shot is essential. Meanwhile, novels can afford to include sections that reveal only character, that focus on the events of everyday life. So, novel readers are allowed this, thanks.

I hate this even more: “Everyone tells me I should have my own reality show, because blah blah blah…” Such statements are always followed by the most boring stories you’ve ever heard.

Finally you have returned, John Rambo. Where have you been?

At first, this trailer appears to advertise a serious drama. The Goldsmith score, the Christian prayer, the debate about whether to interfere in a genocide until a pretty American blonde is killed. By the end, it looks like it’d easily belong sandwiched between PLANET TERROR and DEATH PROOF.

The way craggy-faced ole Sly says, “John” and “long time” at the trailer’s beginning breaks my heart. JOHN RAMBO and ROCKY BALBOA are obviously his double aught attempts to deconstruct his iconic, superheroic characters from the ’80s. They’re equivalent to THE WATCHMEN, in a way. Rocky’s now a gentle old man, managing a restaurant and wearing his huge spectacles and cute hat to the supermarket. Rambo’s still the loner, caressing his cross in solitude, but older now, more pacifistic. UNTIL, a horrific act occurs that rips him from his peaceful life and forces him to become a decapitating, throat-ripping badass. To which I say, YES.

And I will be there for the midnight screening. Fourth row center. You can count on me, Stallone.

Please pardon my momentary resurgence, but a recent newspaper piece must be addressed. After this post, I will disappear once again to a week of purging and packing, leaving this fecund territory to the kind and vibrant guest bloggers.

The most elitist words I’ve read in a newspaper recently were from Richard Schickel. The piece, written by a divorced transplant from Milwaukee who received a mere bachelor’s degree at the University of Wisconsin* (curiously, this “education” is elided from Schickel’s online resume, as well as Schickel’s lengthy article about revisiting Milwaukee), declares criticism to be work “that requires disciplined taste, historical and theoretical knowledge and a fairly deep sense of the author’s (or filmmaker’s or painter’s) entire body of work, among other qualities.”

In fact, this article is something of a cannibalization of Schickel’s more level-headed Harper’s article from January 1970, in which he also evoked Sainte-Beuve:

Ideally, of course a critic is not a performer, not a walking edition of Consumer Reports, not a foppish snob of the sort George Sanders defined for us (with the historical help of George Jean Nathan) in All About Eve. Ideally, and especially if he is functioning in a mass journal, he should be, I think, a well-informed leader of the theoretically endless discussion between artists, commercial interests, and the audience.

Actually, it was Joseph L. Mankiewicz, who wrote and directed All About Eve and put the words in Sanders’ mouth, thus defining this notion of foppish snob. Sanders was merely the actor. And I’m troubled by the idea of a critical viewpoint being interwoven with commercial interests.

But no matter. The question then is whether Schickel, in his reviews, truly has the chops to live up to his own critical definition.

Here is a man who spends half of his review of Lucky You speculating upon how Curtis Hanson’s film perform at the box office. For the “disciplined taste” portion of Schickel’s review, we are told that the film has “a touch of romance, a touch of suspense and a touch of wildness.” I was unaware that good criticism involved emulating a Betty Crocker cookbook.

Here is a man who declares of the late Adrienne Shelly’s film Waitress, “It appears to be a true reflection of her spirit.” Did Schickel personally know Shelly? Or is he buying into what the newspaper articles represented Shelly to be? And if the latter, what bearing does this any of this have on the film in question?

Here is a man who begins his review of Perfect Stranger with this lede: “Halle Berry is, in my opinion, the most beautiful woman in the world.” Schickel has apparently confused writing a review in Time with sliding a Viagra prescription form across a pharmacy counter.

It is clear from these recent samples that Schickel is no Wilson or Orwell, and certainly no Dan Green. That a man with decades of journalistic experience would be writing such trite summations is a testament to his flaccid abilities.

And if these dubious exemplars of “disciplined taste” aren’t enough, here also is a man who wrote a bitchy article in the December 1971 Harper’s about the small audiences that received him as a lecturer. “We could all have met in Uncle Ralph’s living room,” wrote Schickel.

We thus form a clearer picture of Schickel’s motivations, which are not so much about being a critic, but about commenting in a gossipy and digressive matter upon “commercial interests,” the sinuous and sensational qualities of the artists in question, and, above all, the grand desire of being read and received in person by bounteous audiences. This would seem to work against the very “hairy-chested populism” that Schickel is bemoaning.

I do not disagree that criticism, whether appearing in print or online, should be written at the highest level possible and should be as all-encompassing and interconnected as it can under the rather frazzled circumstances. I am now working on a review. Within twelve hours of landing in San Francisco and still suffering from jet lag, I made a trek out to Berkeley to obtain and read a hard-to-find, out-of-print volume to put this author — which falls into the “inflated” reputation and “trash culture” that Schickel refuses to take seriously — into context. I have done this neither to win over audiences, nor because of hubris or the need to be “showy” or “quotable.” I do this because it is my job and I do it as honorably and as honestly as I can, no matter who the author or the media outlet. And if I ever remarked about an author’s physique or third-hand gossip associated with an author within a review, I would hope that readers would roundly pillory me for such wankery.

That latter consequence is what comes from the blogosphere being a democratic medium. It is a beneficial mechanism that acknowledges merit (or lack thereof). Why can’t bloggers (or anyone for that matter) comment upon a book? How then are they to form and develop their own literary opinions and sensibilities? And instead of declaring them parasites, why can’t the critical community learn to assist or encourage them?

Schickel fails to understand that, by way of expanding options in a democratic medium, it remains ever more possible to find “oases of intelligence and delight,” if one looks hard enough. He seems inured to even contributing to these potential oases. He presumes that criticism and the joyful archipelagos of art must remain perennially dictated by a select mainstream elite.

But how does one live life, whether as human or reader, with any personal growth or joie de vivre when one is incapable of overturning a few rocks or occasionally rejecting this imperialism? How can one maintain “disciplined taste” if one is in an ivory tower, perched too high to hear the splendid susurrations of the street?

* — If Schickel is to cast aspersions upon Dan Wickett’s personal background (as opposed to his work), it seems only fair to do the same with Schickel. I do not know what area Schickel’s BA was in (he has, indeed, been less than forthcoming about it), but I have been apprised by the University of Wisconsin — Madison that confirming such a detail can be done through the National Student Clearinghouse, of which I cannot get a human being on the phone to set up an account and thus perform a verification of his degree.