Monthly Archives: May 2008

Seventeen Seventy-What?

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I've just gotten around to watching the first episode of the much-touted HBO mini-series "John Adams." Not bad, even verging on impressive. The writing is sometimes stiff but sometimes very clever; I loved the part when Robert Treat Paine is trying to get Adams to join the patriots' cause, complaining, "They've taxed our paper, our glass… the lead in our paint!" which plays with anachronism without actually committing it; and John Adams's reference to "our forefothers" in his delegate acceptance speech. Who does John Adams have in mind as forefathers? Pilgrims? The soldiers of the French and Indian War? We forget that our forefathers had forefathers.

But I found the jumping-around in time a little confusing; in the beginning of the episode, it is 1770 and the Boston Massacre has just occurred, during which Adams has had to defend a group of British soldiers.  Then the case is over, and in the very next scene someone is talking about the Boston Tea Party– which took place in 1773. Nevertheless, none of Adams's children has aged a day. Then, from one scene to the next, Abigail is heavily pregnant, and the already-born kids still haven't aged.

This small details aside, I would have to say my biggest regret is that, apart from a Massachussetts state hymn, there is no singing.

Live from Tokyo, it’s Tuesday links

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I forgot how much I hate Tokyo.

Forget that it's the fugliest city I've ever seen. Forget the constant barrage of pachinko noise, cigarette smoke, and fluorescent lights.  Forget the men who hover and breathe on you stammering in incomprehensible English. Forget the unmistakable smell of feet permeating through the humid, sweltering city. The worst part is:  I can't get Amazon's Used Book Sellers to deliver to Japan.  "International Shipping Available" my ass.

But it's not without its attributes. For one thing, N lives here, and I can put up with a lot in order to be with him. For another, I'm a karaoke freak in the way only a musical theatre nerd can be.  And there are some very pretty neighborhoods that don't smell like feet, and the food is pretty decent, as long as it's been cooked and doesn't have that weird miso/green tea/old man taste to it. Yesterday I headed over to Ueno Park with a friend of N's who was visiting and saw some lovely bonsai trees. (Photos up soon on Flickr) N and I explored Yoyogi Park on Sunday and had some fun with the cos-play kids. And then, of course, there's the shopping, on which more later.

So maybe "hate" is too strong a word.  It's not the worst place to be. And it's not the Third World, either. That said, the day N quits this job I will shed no tears.

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If you haven't read Middlemarch, you should. If you have, you should read this article (and then you should reread the novel).

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I'm not a big proponent of MFA programs– my feeling is if you can't figure out what you're doing from extensive reading, you have little business being a writer– but then, I've never seen one from the inside. So I'm glad to see a writer whose work I respect very much feels similarly.

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"Who Killed the Literary Critic?" asks Salon. Let me save you all a little time and energy: the literary critic isn't dead, regardless of what that goof Brit McDonaldperfectly nice Irishman is going around saying: "Ronan McDonald, the author [of The Death of the Critic], is a lecturer in English and American
studies at Britain's University of Reading, and he's particularly
exercised by what he sees as the loss of the 'public critic,' someone
with "the authority to shape public taste." I wouldn't say it's the critic who is dead, so much as this particular moment doesn't seem open to that kind of critic. Which is not to say the moment won't come again. It may not be so far off as all that. (Via The Millions)

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Speaking of critics, I really want to read this biography of  Raymond Williams.

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John Berger's classic 1972 BBC documentary Ways of Seeing is now up on YouTube (via TEV, via ReadySteadyBook, via someone named Rowan)

around the internet on a tuesday

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Ah, it’s good to be back compiling lists of links on a Tuesday morning. 

I’ve written briefly (here) of my feelings for Alberto Manguel, so it was a thrill to find this New York Times piece on his library.  If I could speak with Mr Manguel himself, however, I don’t think I would engage him in a conversation about the alchemy of reading, as I might have in the past; no, today I would ask him for advice on how to make a nomadic lifestyle compatible with a serious book habit. I leave for Tokyo on Thursday and I will be there for over three months, so I will need many books in that time; plus, I’ll be writing the first chapter of my dissertation and will want the collected works of Elizabeth Bowen with me to do so. My solution the past few trips is to have one suitcase for the clothes and another for the books, but I anticipate extra fees in the near future.  It seems like it would be an expensive proposition to mail them to Tokyo. And figuring out the research library at a Japanese university seems overly daunting. What to do?

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"Why have there been no women artists?" Linda Nochlin’s 1971 essay inquires, before embarking on a long career of discovering and recuperating the work of women artists as far back as the Renaissance. Thirty-odd years on, Ingrid D. Rowland writes, reviewing Nochlin’s latest book for the NYRB,  Women artists win!

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"London is not one place but plural; 2000 years of history – compressed into a single space – can be found with every step," writes Leo Hollis in The Guardian Blogs. And Francise Prose looks at three interwar London novels by Patrick Hamilton in the NYRB (yes, again, sorry).

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John Litchfield reports for the Independent that the original manuscript of the First Surrealist Manifesto (1924) will sell at Southeby’s tomorrow for an estimated 1M€, angering art historians and amusing André Breton’s ghost.

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Finally: I haven’t said much about the anniversary of May 1968, not because I think there’s nothing more to say on the subject, but because, well, I’ve been busy.  So I refer you to that wondrous enigma of a blogger called Spurious, who provides an intriguing rundown of the events in a post organized around the writer and philosopher Maurice Blanchot.

Who said there’d be cake?

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Crosleycake2
I Was Told There’d be Cake, Essays by Sloane Crosley. Riverhead Books, $14.

When this book was published last month, the general buzz around the internet was about how nice and well-liked its author was ("the Most Popular Publicist in New York," according to the New York Observer)  and what a cool a website she had for her book.   I  rolled my eyes at the coverage, but the author’s name struck me.  I racked my brain trying to figure out why. Then it hit me: she went to a very small New England college with one of my best friends.  You don’t forget a name like "Sloane."*

So I picked up the book at McNally Robinson last week, read it in one sitting, and find I have only good things to say about it! I’m as shocked as you are.

Through all that buzz (and this episode of Titlepage) I had heard there was a "bit" about My Little Ponies, I had heard there was an essay in which someone takes a dump on her bathroom floor; but the essays are about so much more than 80s references and scatological mishaps.  What I like– really like– is that Crosley’s writing goes a step beyond hipster referentiality.  She’s admirably self-aware.  She knows the pony thing is a weird, un-funny tick, and she spends some time thinking about why she does it and how to move on from it.

The funniest moment, for me, is when her boss throws a manuscript at
her head– all the more so because in my first job out of college (in PR, ironically) I too had a boss throw something large at my head (an office phone).  But it isn’t only the relate-ability of the scrapes
she gets into, or the randomness of them, or  Crosley’s way with
sarcastic commentary.  What’s appealing in these essays is their mix of the specific and the
universal– the reflexive reference to pop culture (from Travelocity to
Tamagotchi) are cradled in narratives that evoke weird rituals from out of another era
altogether (the all-girls Christian summer camp she attended in New Hampshire, to which she is fiercely loyal today) or those which are intensely of our era (being asked to be a bridesmaid for a friend she hasn’t seen from high school; Bridezilla hijinks ensue).

She’s not out to postulate, to theorize, or to wax emotional, but to entertain; she is the kind of person who consoles her roommate when his bike is
stolen from their 5th floor fire escape that "if thieves had found a
way to take it, they probably deserved it: Plus they had left his
helmet, which I found to be a kind gesture."  And that is funny, and quirky. I wouldn’t go so far as to say there is a questioning of the self here, a frequent attribute of the memoir genre, but rather the self on display as a very particular self.  The essays take you somewhere that feels familiar– but there is always a bit of unique Sloane-ness that is a reminder of why we read other people’s personal writing. Because they ask themselves the same questions that we do, but they sometimes come up with better answers.

For what it’s worth, I’d say that the essays do seem to be so rooted in the now looking back at the past that it misses the feeling of what it felt like then. The memories  seem not to be valued so much for their own sake but for the present moment’s sake.  An attempt to understand the me-now without really coming to terms with the me-then.  The me-then seems like a performance to shore up the me-now: another variation of the pony tick.

She is acutely aware of her readers’ expectations and levels of incredulity (on one page she mentions
she had a job interview on Sept 12 2001 and got the job; on the next
page she says "most people don’t believe it when I tell them I had a
job interview that day").  Perhaps this anticipation is the key to what makes Sloane Crosley so
well-liked– you can’t accuse her of anything she hasn’t already
accused herself of.  The key to success,
Sloane-style: "Nothing was beneath me but the sidewalk." This may well be the case.  But what makes her a good writer– and far more worthy of our interest than if she were simply likable, down-to-earth, and entertaining (not in themselves inherently literary attributes)– is her sense of language. 

Her chapter on being a lapsed vegetarian, or a pescatarian, or whatever you want to call it, calls for an end to such labels: "The words are secondary to the sentiment." It is precisely this idea that makes middlebrow writing so tiresome, the privilege of the sentiment over the word, the plot over the language. But Crosley’s next sentence belies her previous statement: "Praise be to wheatgrass.  Artichoke me with okra and baptize me in beet juice. Juices saves." Ok, it’s a bit cutesy– purposely so–but it has bite.  We are far from Carrie Bradshaw-style punning, with its desperation to make pedestrian language sound witty.  In Crosley’s domain the words are the things that carry the jokes.  It’s not just about the obscurity of the details, or the out-of-left-field references. It’s not about the cheap laugh. There is a certain eccentricity at work here, and it will be interesting to see what she comes up with next.

* (So that’s a disclosure. In case one were needed.)

All the sad young literary “girly men”

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Whoa, stop the presses. A crazy-bad article by Choire Sicha has run in the New York Observer! Choire! You’re not making any sense! And you’re claiming the reason men can’t write anymore is because "men’s thoughts have become smaller and more interior; and so their books have become more miserable, more antisocial." Meanwhile you’re lauding women writers for being "terrifying," invoking Durgas and Rhea, and wishing for the heyday of Norman Mailer! Now there’s a fella who liked the ladies, rest his soul. As secretaries.

What you seem to be implying is that women writers are a force to be reckoned with only when their books are about big topics ("Ursula Le Guin, who’s been tirelessly writing about war and
conflict for the last 40 years in a way that no one has before or
since, just published the big and lovely Lavinia, in which she picks up the history of the Latins where Virgil couldn’t be bothered to tread").   It sounds like you’re nagging at the boys for leaving the "rearranging seaboards and raising mountains" to the women.
 
"’When did men get all the baggage?’" you quote one "interview subject" from 2004, thus implying that baggage is, always has been, always will be, the domain of the ladies.  "Another suggested that they were just Frenchmen manqué.  Which is why they want books. Bernard-Henri Lévy has books!" I don’t even know what that means. But that is one hairy chest. Nothing more manly than a hairy chest and a puffy white shirt. Nothing says "pirate" more than BHL. So what’s your point?

It seems to come down to some kind of inarticulate nonsense toward the end that involves Marilyn Robinson and a "dark night of the prole."  Why don’t you go off and think about this for awhile, and come back when you’ve got an argument? Until then, take your warbooks to the seaboards and cast them to the wind. Give me a short story told from the perspective of a snail in Kew Gardens. Give me interiority and subjectivity and inquiries into the human experience, no matter how minute. Keep your Norman Mailer. Leave Keith Gessen alone. 

Being a Highly Effective Web Person

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Hi there. I’m trying to get out from under my jetlag and the joys of some bacteria I picked up on the plane, as well as a pile of other work I set for myself to do this week, on my stopover in Paris in between New York and Tokyo. Which means the blog isn’t up to speed yet. But it will be. Oh, it will be.

For now, feast on this (I assume) well-intended article in Granta: "The Web Habits of Highly Effective People." I defy you to read it and not end up feeling like an ineffective loser. 

And speaking of ineffective losers, it’s a short jump to procrastination nation. If you suffer from this malady, you’re not alone! says Jessica Winter on Slate: Truman Capote and Ralph Ellison are right there with you.
They had it so bad they died before they could finish their major projects. (FYI: This article is particularly well-written, and really worth a read. Even if it does mean you put off your work for a little while.)

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Redthread_2

The last week or so has seen an odd confluence of Anglophone inquiries into French honors and decorations:

  • As Kylie Minogue is awarded France’s cultural knighthood, as a Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres (previously bestowed upon such artistic luminaries as Ella Fitzgerald and Bruce Willis), John Litchfield for the Independent asks, exactly what does it take to get one of these things? A guide to the different French civilian awards, who gets them, and how, after the jump.
  • The New York Times explains the Légion d’Honneur and the strange red lapel-thread American dry cleaners try to snip off.