John Barth, favored or disfavored, has remained one of my favorite writers. And the press he’s getting for The Book of Ten Nights and a Night is some of the best he’s had in years. The Houston Chronicle says that it’s as good as Lost in the Funhouse. And Lemony Snicket himself rips open a bag of pomo nuts in the Chronicle.

Dan Green has weighed in on the political art argument continued over at Scribbling Woman. I’d like to clarify just what being an aesthete (since the conversation has now shifted towards these nutty dichotomies) really means. An aesthete, whether an artist, a scholar or a dilletante, recognizes certain sensibilities that speak to her. It could be plotting or prose in literature, symbolism or contours in art, mise-en-scene or editing in film, or tempo and timbre in music. Ultimately it’s about trying to understand the immediate visceral impulse, trying to dissect response through theory, or using specific examples to explain why a piece of art works. But it doesn’t preclude political awareness, nor does it suggest that consciousness cannot operate outside the boundaries of artistic understanding.

The purported “disdain” has more to do with being subjected to a plodding novel that isn’t working, that isn’t stirring the juices, and that, frankly, falls flat on its ass — all because the author needs to convey some didactic point or otherwise interfere with the extant mechanisms that allow art to flourish. The immediate example that was tossed around the blogosphere last month was Tim Robbins’ play Embedded, the excerpt of which speaks for itself. Robbins, as I noted, has made some compelling films. But when he adopts a heavy-handed poise with such dialogue as “The message of the new Hitler’s evil has been unrelenting and omnipresent,” it does nothing but preach to the converted. Where’s the nuance in that? It limits the spectrum of communication, and any inveterate aesthete can see that the dialogue’s lack of nuance destroys the intent. Now if Robbins had considered the text in relation to subtext, as he did when turning the 1960s lefty folk singer into an arch conservative in Bob Roberts, it might have worked. If he had predicated his work with additional meaning, such as irony or metaphor (Dr. Strangelove‘s “Gentlemen, you can’t fight in here. This is the war room.” or my previously cited Cat’s Eye example come to mind), then not only would his play be more aesthetically sound, but it could operate as a conduit that allowed each individual to ascertain their own private meaning.

I would suggest that the reader/audience member is guided in some part by her subconsciousness and experience, and that politics is one of many things that influence their response. But it is not entirely contingent upon it. For example, since I grew up poor, I developed a bias against the rich, particularly the avaricious and complacent rich. This in turn shaped my politics and has in turn prevented me from sympathizing with art that explores privilege. Lost in Translation was a good film, but its portrayal of rich WASPs kvetching about their La Dolce Vita existences simply did not speak to me. I’m reading Julia Glass’ Three Junes right now and, while I admire the plotting and the structure, the characters vacationing in Greece and “suffering” in Scotland leave me lukewarm. I’ve tried to respond to this by deliberately reading books or experiencing art outside my paradigm.

To go back to Dan, he suggests that the aesthetic stance is a pragmatic one. And speaking for myself, I would agree, if only because my desire to understand art has left me groping beyond emotional response and into cause-effect, specific examples, sometimes placing a work within the purview of current theory. It is the natural progression for anyone to take. And if moving beyond a febrile formalist trying to find every known political quality within a piece of work, a pursuit that strikes me as a dull, tedious and incomplete way of understanding, well then you can throw my ass into the aesthete ghetto too.

The Nebula Award winners are up, complete with a photo in which everyone’s looking remarkably glum and a porky Harlan Ellison is talking with Robert Silverberg. (My goodness. Was the moment really that bad?)

NOVEL: The Speed of Dark by Elizabeth Moon
NOVELLA: Coraline by Neil Gaiman
NOVELETTE: “The Empire of Ice Cream” by Jeffrey Ford
SHORT STORY: “What I Didn’t See” by Karen Jay Fowler
GRAND MASTER: Robert Silverberg

Next Up: the Hugos.

The second volume of Kill Bill is a marked improvement upon its predecessor, in that the viewer, rather than being bombarded with the first volume’s THC-inspired stylistic excess, is invited to pick the finest toy from a Cracker Jack box. Alas, a toy is still a toy. Like the first film, Tarantino tries to have it both ways. He wants you to sympathize with his paper-thin characters, here serviced by repeated moments of Uma Thurman sobbing in anguish. But he also wants you to buy into the comic book absurdity of Gordon Liu balancing his entire weight on the edge of a sword. Sure, the latter image is fun (though not as enjoyable as a later swordfight in a trailer mobile home). But with Liu repeatedly fingering his wispy, spirit gummed beard and throwing it off to one side, I had to wonder if I was supposed to enjoy this juvenile joke, or the whole film was an inside joke, or I’ve simply grown tired of movies that aren’t cemented in anything even remotely real. Do the repeated shots of Thurman’s feet represent Tarantino’s camera as fetish? And what’s with all the flabby ass jokes? Awareness of physical deterioration?

Kill Bill Volume 2 is a mess. It’s an enjoyable mess. But it’s also the mark of a filmmaker throwing in the towel, perhaps to fight again another day with his promised World War II movie. The usual Tarantinoisms are here. We have a Mexican standoff. We have a lecture on Superman. We have an eyeball kicked around on the floor. And if you close your eyes while David Carradine is speaking and change the modulation, you can just see Tarantino delivering his own dialogue with the same intonations. None of it is real.

There is one great seedy moment at an unpopulated bar where Michael Madsen is trying to explain to his employer why he’s twenty minutes late, and the bar owner, doing lines of coke and ordering some scantily clad cosnort to sit, begins crossing off days of the week that Madsen is supposed to work. The moment doesn’t add anything at all to the story, except perhaps to explain some of the circumstances which have turned Madsen into a margarita-swilling, rocksalt shotgun-firing, sad sack ex-assassin. But didn’t the scene before this with David Carradine already establish this? Is Tarantino cognizant of the maturity he displayed in Jackie Brown and does he miss it?

The disorganization here, which caused Tarantino to split Kill Bill into two movies, left me wondering if Tarantino was trying a grindhouse take on Leone, if only through length alone. But as goofy as Once Upon a Time in the West is, the film was still about something. Henry Fonda may have been the American West’s cinematic face inverted into a ruthless villain, but the film’s story was strong enough to transcend homage. There were dreams and plans and characters learning to live with loss (whether through Charles Bronson’s vengeance or Claudia Cardinale carrying out her late husband’s plans for a railroad post). By contrast, “real life” in the Kill Bill universe involves snuggling up with your daughter and “popping in a video,” almost indistinguishable from a Lifetime TV movie. Hardly the place where grand plans are forged. In fact, the film comes across as black and white as its wedding rehearsal prologue.

Tarantino, at 41, is too old for these adolescent hijinks. In fact, it’s rather interesting to me that the Kill Bill films have come while another major Miramax king, Kevin Smith, was recently derided for his segue into “adult” territory with Jersey Girl. But at least Smith tried something different. Is it possible that Tarantino is too frightened to evolve? Women are presented as one-dimensional objects and repeatedly misunderstood by Tarantino (to the point where women cannot understand easy-to-comprehend pregnancy test instructions) — all this while Tarantino remains too prudish to expose his candid and potentially creepy feelings for them on screen, much like his hero Brian De Palma. (And is Thurman’s inability to understand Cantonese a slam on former Tarantino girlfriend Mira Sorvino, who is fluent in the language?)

Perhaps I should be relieved that Kill Bill Volume 2 offers a return to long takes, dialogue-centered scenes and snappy repartee. But it’s doubtful that Tarantino can spend an entire career riffing on the same theme and be regarded with any staying power. Then again, when the bar’s as low as it is in Hollywood and accounts are regularly fattened, ingenuity is the first commodity to go. In Tarantino’s case, it’s a grand shame.

[UPDATE: It would appear that Tarantino’s content to keep the formula. In a Newsweek interview last year, Tarantino noted, “If I were to just keep expanding on that ‘Jackie Brown’ thing, you know, in 15 years’ time I would be making some really geriatric movies. The thing is, I don’t need to prove that I can do that with each new movie—because I’ve already proven I can do that. This time I wanted to grow as a filmmaker by what I consider exciting filmmaking.” What’s worse? “Geriatric” movies or infantile ones?]

Laura Miller rails against the first person plural. Of course, I did too back in January, which may make the NYTBR officially three months behind blogs. Then again, if they’re going to refer to cyberpunk as “the bratty offspring of science fiction,” while failing to mention The Diamond Age‘s influence (particularly with its thoughts on nanotechnology, storytelling and advertising) or give credence to fruitloop Richard Pipes, then perhaps they’re not as sui generis as they think. Then again, they do have Choire again this week.