ICYMI, General Reader co-editors Ryan Boyd and Dan Pecchenino often also write for the quarterly Dialogist. Here is Ryan’s latest, a review essay on the poets Tony Hoagland and John Burnside.
Here is Dan reviewing Quan Berry’s Loose Strife.
Ryan again, this time on Major Jackson’s poetry.
We are always, if nothing else, on our grind.
In one of my classes, we just finished a unit on journalistic criticism, which ended with students writing their own brief review of an assigned novel. (It was Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. Most didn’t hate it, and I’ve read some excellent papers.) One of the things I emphasized to them was that reviewers have a major sociocultural function, which is to stand attentively amid the incredible, endless stream of artistic productions (books, films, clothing, music, whatever), and venture to make judgments about what’s good and what isn’t–about what is worth one’s time and what is not. There is too much stuff out there. Critics help us make decisions.
When it comes to film, Grantland’s Wesley Morris is my favorite American critic, but the New York Times‘ house expert, A.O. Scott, runs a very close second. He often writes moving, meditative reviews of new movies, but I like Scott best when he gets out his hatchet and goes hunting for bad, lucrative art. His treatment of the Adam Sandler/Drew Barrymore excreta Blended is a cruel classic. It opens this way:
Because life is short and I have other things to be upset about, I will not dwell on the offensive aspects of “Blended,” the new Adam Sandler comedy: its retrograde gender politics; its delight in the humiliation of children; its sentimental hypocrisy about male behavior; its quasi-zoological depiction of Africans as servile, dancing, drum-playing simpletons; its … I’m sorry. That’s just what I said I wouldn’t do.
Take caution, the review concludes, because the film “will make your children stupid.”
Hey, have you heard from those billboards? They turned the fan-fiction phenomenon Fifty Shades of Grey into a film. Yesterday Scott got around to it.
*ties napkin around neck, readies knife and fork*
Scott’s work has what Lionel Trilling would call a liberal imagination: it prioritizes and praises films that have a sense of variety, fluidity, complexity, and indeterminacy, and excoriates those with a wooden, simplified, comfortable view of human life. Thus, what makes Fifty Shades such an awful (and it sounds awful) “tale of seduction, submission and commodity fetishism” is primarily its etiolated depiction of human sexuality, which it manages to reduce to kitsch and cliché despite foregrounding BDSM sex, which would seem to offer plenty of opportunities to explore the strangeness of desire.
Jamie Dornan, the actor who plays the handsome bondage-loving plutocrat in the story, “given the job of inspiring lust, fascination and also maybe a tiny, thrilling frisson of fear, succeeds mainly in eliciting pity.” He has, observes Scott in a fantastic slash, “the bland affect of a model, by which I mean a figure made of balsa wood or Lego.” Meanwhile, the female lead character, who is named Anastasia (yeah, I know), “makes no sense. Her behavior has no logic, no pattern, no coherent set of causes or boundaries.” It seems that her main function is to be surprised by wealth, then fucked unconventionally, mostly off-screen of course.
Or not so unconventionally. Scott doesn’t indulge in the cheap snobbery that pegs all popular romantic narratives as melodramatic “women’s stuff,” and indeed you get the sense from the review that he was hoping the movie would be good. After all, it is going to make hundreds of millions of dollars anyway. The film “fall[s] back into traditional gender roles even as it plays with transgressive desires,” and “love . . . functions less as an emotional ideal than as a literary safe word.”
Trilling would approve. Not only is Scott willing to make judgments–no cheap aesthetic pantheism in his game–he makes them according to the only standard narrative art can really be held to: Does the text engage the frightening, glorious intricacy of human lives, or does it reduce them to pasteboard typology, received narrative, and worn-out, ersatz forms of knowledge? Well, which is it?
The weekend just pulled into your driveway. Let’s eeease the seat back, as the man says. Here are some links to help you be as intelligent and dynamic as you can be, however chill things might get between now and Sunday. Call us whenever you want.
A narrow Fellow in the Grass
Occasionally rides –
You may have met him? Did you not
His notice instant is –The Grass divides as with a Comb –
A spotted Shaft is seen,
And then it closes at your Feet
And opens further on –He likes a Boggy Acre –
A Floor too cool for Corn –
But when a Boy and Barefoot
I more than once at NoonHave passed I thought a Whip Lash
Unbraiding in the Sun
When stooping to secure it
It wrinkled And was gone –Several of Nature’s People
I know and they know me
I feel for them a transport
Of CordialityBut never met this Fellow
Attended or alone
Without a tighter Breathing
And Zero at the Bone.
I am well aware of the fact that much of the rest of the country is laughing at Los Angeles right now. “Oh, poor babies can’t deal with a wittle wain?” Laugh all you want. We accept your derision as the price we pay for living so well 350 days a year. But seriously, this rain IS NUTS. Last night, lightning struck just down the street from my house, and downtown got more rain yesterday afternoon than it had in the previous year. LA is uniquely poorly equipped to deal with this kind thing, which (as Ryan pointed out) John McPhee, Mike Davis, and Carey McWilliams have discussed in some of the classic works of Los Angeles naturalism (and LA naturalism is always at least 50% anthropology). So you could read those this weekend as you wait out the storm, or you could read some of the following;
Stay dry, kids.
No rambling original ruminations on literature tonight, only some great links with competent commentary. Stay safe this weekend. Read too much.
I don’t read Bookforum very often. I should really remedy this, especially if their articles are all as good as Doubleday editor Gerald’s Howard’s essay about The Long Voyage, the new collection of Malcolm Cowley’s letters edited by Hans Bak. Cowley, like Edmund Wilson, Maxwell Perkins, and Harold Ober, was a man who shaped the early- to mid-2oth century American literary scene even when he wasn’t in America. Or perhaps it’s more accurate to say that he helped shape this scene precisely because he got out of America for a little while. Howard writes:
Gertrude Stein gave the American writers who flocked to Paris in the ’20s their indelible tag, “the Lost Generation,” but it was Malcolm Cowley who first gave his cohort its enduring narrative of rebellious escape from, and chastened return to, America in Exile’s Return (1934), a memoir and generational “collective novel” that beat Hemingway’s A Moveable Feast to the punch by three decades. We take the near-mythic saga and achievements of this generation for granted today, but as Cowley writes in his elegiac retrospective chronicle and portrait gallery, A Second Flowering, his memoir was “howled down by older reviewers [who] ridiculed the notion that the men of the 1920s had special characteristics and that their adventures in Paris were a story worth telling.”
Had writing his literary memoirs been Cowley’s sole accomplishment, his letters would be worth reading. But Cowley did much more than write criticism and biography, including editing The New Republic, though this part of his career was tainted by his failure to side with the Trotskyites against the Stalinists in the battle for the future of Marxism. His most important contribution though was championing authors who might otherwise have remained obscure, Faulkner and Kerouac chief among these. It isn’t overstating the case to say that without Malcolm Cowley, William Faulkner wouldn’t have won the 1949 Nobel Prize. And without this award, Faulkner might have been forced to spend the rest of his life tinkering on Hollywood scripts to scrape together enough money to put out a novel here and there that would shortly go out of print. Cowley’s 1946 Portable Faulkner is one of the ten most important books of American fiction because it uses an author’s own works to make a case for his greatness. That’s the power of good editing, and even Faulkner himself was shocked by Cowley’s achievement.
Cowley is also responsible for On the Road getting published by Viking in 1957. It’s fashionable among some academics and writers to dismiss Kerouac (Capote famously called him a “typist”), but On the Road might very well be another of the ten most significant works of American fiction because it’s so threatening to middle-class domesticity. It reminds us (warns us?) that there are always people living on the fringes of American respectability who are just as smart and a hell of a lot more interesting than those living the lives they’ve been told they should. It provokes righteous indignation in older readers because it’s simultaneously naive and true: we have choices when it comes to how we lead our lives, and ultimately our regret-fueled misery is of our own making because we care too much about what other people think. It’s this disdain for respectability that connects Faulkner and Kerouac, making Cowley’s attraction to both writers less unlikely than it might at first seem.
So if you have an erudite wo/man of letters on your Christmas shopping list, you could do much worse than to buy s/h(e)im an 850-page volume of letters written by a man who changed American literary history for the better.
For most people, not reading is just about the easiest thing in the world to do. But if you’re someone who visits this site, you aren’t one of these people. We try to give you good writing, whether ours or written by others, to feed the need. So once again, here are some pieces we think are worth reading with your Sunday morning coffee (or whenever you get around to it).
As a blog person, I do my best to profit secondarily from brilliant friends. Rachel Monroe is one of these, and, lucky for you, she just wrote a cool piece about a cool book about American violence (et cetera) for the Los Angeles Review of Books. Stop looking out the windows! Stop checking Instagram! Go read!
The General Reader 