James Wood on Paul Auster’s novels

In a new essay in The New Yorker, the sometimes great James Wood takes on one of America’s best-known “postmodern” writers, Mr. Paul Auster.  He doesn’t like what he finds.  I’ll let you read the full article, which is available for free online, but the gist of it is that Wood considers Auster’s basic language slack and derivative for no reason, and his juxtaposition of realist narrative framing and po-mo legerdemain to be tiresome:

Auster . . . wants both the emotional credibility of conventional realism and a frisson of postmodern wordplay . . . What Auster often gets instead is the worst of both worlds: fake realism and shallow skepticism.

Similar things have been said about Wes Anderson, with equal justification.  Still, I personally like Auster’s New York Trilogy a lot, and I am consistently charmed by Smoke, a film (starring Harvey Keitel!) for which he wrote the screenplay.  But judge for thyself, gentle reader.

-TGR

articles from the Internets

From the (London) Times Literary Supplement, John Barnard takes up this old question: did all the nasty critical press John Keats got during his short life hasten his physical decline?  (Yes, educated people used to care intensely about what newspaper literary critics said.)  For an older take on this conundrum, have a look at Shelley’s great elegy for Keats, “Adonais,” which makes claims similar to Barnard’s.

From the language wars, two interesting articles.  In The American Conservative, Peter Wood reviews a somewhat skeptical new book on Strunk and White’s Elements of Style.  This new study finds good old S & W to be a little stiff in some places, and uncharacteristically unclear about their principles in others.  Meanwhile, Liam Julian takes an equally intelligent look at another classic writer’s guide, the re-released and newly edited Fowler’s English Usage (first published in 1926 and still indispensable for anyone who cares to write anything well in English).  It’s very unhip–if you are an academic–to mention books like Fowler’s, because, faced with university students who can’t write grammatical sentences in the language they grew up speaking, the rulers of various campus Writing Programs would have teachers focus on, uh, not grammar or style.   (Such topics are “conservative” and “old-fashioned” and supposedly of little use to today’s student–hence it’s much more kosher to teach things like Computer Literacy and blog design and interactive group projects).  I wonder why our students continue getting clumsier and dumber?   But it keeps writing professors and pedagogical “theorists” in business on many an elite campus, even if the kids at said campuses can’t tell the difference between a plural and a possessive noun (or just don’t care–they long ago got the message that that’s OK).

Christopher Hitchens on some of our nation’s current top-dog demagogue’s weirder connections and more glaring idiocies.  Yes, yes, another article on why Sarah Palin is evil and dangerous to a democracy.  The Hitch is still lucid at times, and when he’s on, it is great fun to read him.

LASTLY, an NPR piece on the relation between race, language, and nerdiness.  The gist of it is that white nerds borrow slang from black English far less than their more socially popular Caucasian peers do.  Not sure about that–I myself am a giant nerd who grew up listening to and (sometimes) parroting hip-hop language–but nonetheless it is fascinating.  And you needn’t even read, because it was on the radio!   (thanks to Mary Claire for this one).

-TGR

Good Book about Wallace Stevens: James Longenbach, “The Plain Sense of Things”

I know a lot of you like Wallace Stevens. Although English teachers conventionally stress the “difficulty” of his poetry, my perception—gleaned from years of being that slightly too observant person at the coffee house, the friend who looks at your library while nervously smirking about people who look at other people’s libraries, the dude inspecting your book on the bus, a guy who will bloviate about literature on first dates (thereby often assuring no second dates)—is that he is genuinely popular. As far as poetry goes, that is; although I don’t like admitting it, I realize that the serious novel has a much bigger audience than serious poetry.

About Stevens’ reputation as an especially demanding poet. To a certain extent it’s a fair one: if for no other reason than his opulent language, Stevens demands a great deal of attention. That said, like all great poets he also makes you love him at the same time, and hence desire to pay attention. Love is at the heart of reading and is the basis of one’s taste in books.

Part of the Difficult Poet rep is the idea that Stevens’ poetry is cut off from history, from the real life we all agree to live, as if he were just a Connecticut dandy. Since the 1950s, when the New Critics got hold of him and used Stevens to help make generations of college students think poems are otherwordly, atemporal puzzle boxes, that misperception has dogged him. Without denying the complexity of Stevens’ work, James Longenbach does a lot to correct this image in Wallace Stevens: The Plain Sense of Things (Oxford, 1991). Longenbach gives the requisite biographical details from Stevens’ life, which was outwardly bourgeois (guy was an insurance exec at The Hartford) but inwardly astonishingly complex. He also reads Stevens’ poetry in relation to contemporary history: this means dealing with the Great Depression and nuclear war as much as with the influence of writers like Emerson and Yeats, and Longenbach does it masterfully. A poet himself,with a writer’s intuitive feel for the work of other writers he likes, Longenbach is also a professor of literature, and he brings the scholar’s deep, wide perspective to his aid. Stevens comes across as an artist who spent his entire life meditating on the relation between art, the making and consumption of which demands time away from other concerns, and history, which is public and involves all other people as much as it does the writer, which is those “other concerns.”

The Plain Sense of Things is lucidly written, not dogmatic, and thoroughly humane. This is criticism written by a great teacher. As such, it’s entertaining if you have any interest in poetry. If you do suffer from that interest, you might consider scanning a chapter or two of Longenbach, whose work can also be found in shorter formats at places like Slate.com. The Google will point you there.

 

What’s the matter with Heidegger?

Martin Heidegger was a dick, because he was a loyal National Socialist until 1945.  By temperament not much of a flag waver or fist raiser, certainly, but an academic toady at the University of Freiburg, where he supervised the firing of all Jewish faculty.  He is also one of modernity’s most imposing thinkers (if you like Hannah Arendt, you can thank Heidegger, her teacher and longtime lover).  If you think environmentalism is good, you can thank Heidegger (among others, duh).*  In conjunction these two things make liberal academics a little uneasy.  Does Nazism infect his philosophy?  If so, to what extent?  Can we separate the man from the body of theory?  Is the theory itself even corrupt?  These are some of the questions Tim Black takes on in “Why they’re really scared of Heidegger,” a lame title for a pretty sharp essay on the great mid-century German philosopher.  (It’s published by the spiked review of books, a division of spiked, whose website, by the way, is really hard to navigate.)  Black comes down on Heidegger’s side of the case, finding his philosophy, if not his personal life, to be largely clear of fascist inclinations:

. . . Heidgger’s influence is such that any attempt to see the fascist thread loses itself in the weave and weft of an immense, largely leftish legacy. In Germany itself, such radical, or semi-radical, icons as Herbert Marcuse or Jurgen Habermas, or liberal paragons like Hannah Arendt, were all at one stage in thrall to the ‘secret king of thought’, as Arendt herself dubbed him. In France, his impact was even more spectacular. From the identikit Heideggerian existentialism of Jean-Paul Sartre, to the post-subject, anti-humanist philosophising of Louis Althusser or Jacques Derrida, Heidegger provided the inspiration.

Heidegger is a fascinating thinker.  I’ve never tackled Being and Time, but certain essays, such as the two I talk about just below, along with “The Origin of the Wort of Art,” have been enormous influences on my own mind and taste.  His reputation for Derrida-level density is deserved, but unlike the Frenchman he isn’t a cruel sophist.  There is something essentially poetic about Heidegger’s ideas and apparent temperament, and I think this is why poets like Wallace Stevens and A.R. Ammons were interested in him.

-TGR

* My own experience is that although Heidegger’s critique of industrial modernity aligns somewhat with the weird tribalist nature worship the Nazis went in for (their whole theory of the volk, the born holders of the German earth), the Nazis were in reality hypocrites: wartime Germany was a modern industrial machine and despoiled the earth as much as any other form of capitalism.  Further, and more importantly, his argument in “The Question Concerning Technology” and  “Building Dwelling Thinking”–that maybe we shouldn’t treat the entire planet like a stockpile of “natural resources”–is a sane one.

Oh man

Men’s studies or masculinity studies or whatever is heating up.  It has been for awhile, but now some of the best of it is trickling down into middle-class highbrow magazines.  The Chronicle of Higher Education, for instance, has just published “The Puzzle of Boys,” a compact survey of recent books  (most of them academic, but aimed at general smart readers), arguments, and controversies in the field.   In other words, it is a good way to brush up on this stuff–which is absolutely fascinating viz-a-viz American culture.  Thomas Bartlett underscores that while malehood is just as complicated as any other segment of the gender spectrum, few people have thought seriously about it.  And that’s a major lacuna, given that men still dominate most of the nation’s institutions.  The end of the essay describes what happens to boys when they get to high school; it is particularly sad.

Closely connected to boyhood is, of course, manhood.  Michael Kimmel, a sociologist who teaches at SUNY-Stony Brook, has written two cool books about American masculinity.  Manhood in America: A Cultural History (Oxford UP, 1996, 2005), now in its second edition, is the gold standard.  Or at least one of them, as TGR understands things.  Kimmel is, essentially, a pro-feminist man who hasn’t given up on the importance of distinctly male identities.  Guyland is more contemporary and will appeal to you if you are depressed by things like Judd Apatow and Maxim.  It’s kinda dark out there, lads.

Happy Thanksgiving!

-TGR

your pre-Thanksgiving buffet

Don’t fill up too quickly, mes amis.

Salon.com’s Laura Miller reviews Tinsel, a new Christmas-culture book which focuses on how Americans in the suburbs and exurbs celebrate the holiday.

Theodore Dalrymple (great name) examines the baleful influence of Le Corbusier for City Journal.  If you’ve ever been discombobulated by the preponderance of huge, bare, concrete-intensive spaces in American and European cities or have wondered why post-WWII U.S. planners decided it would be awesome to carve up cities with new freeways and other roads where nobody can, well, walk like humans should, read this.

From Seattle’s alt paper The Stranger, a depressing report on the status of marriage equality and LGBT rights in my home state, Virginia, which has just elected a closet psychopath as governor.  His kids also look like blonde larvae.

A.J. Jacobs explores the alternately discomfiting and liberating possibilities of Radical Honesty.  This also entails a trip down to VA.  The RH movement–if you can call it that–is probably more interesting as a thought-experiment than an actual program for living one’s life, but it and its main guru, Brad Blanton, are fascinating.

Blast from the past: poet J.D. McClatchy reviews One Art, the large and wonderful collection of Elizabeth Bishop’s letters.  As with many poets, the organizing theme of the writing and the life is loneliness.  Then again, aren’t we all familiar with that?

-TGR

 

Jonathan Safron Foer is a prig

Let me make a distinction, a personal one that nevertheless applies to and frames the experience of anybody who reads seriously.  It has to do with why one dislikes what one dislikes–negative responses are as complicated as adulatory ones.  On one side of dislike, there are writers whom I personally find distasteful or don’t consider entertaining or elevating, but whom I nonetheless respect as writers.  In other words, although their work isn’t to my taste, I acknowledge that they are doing something worthwhile with language.  I place, for instance, Ezra Pound, Gertrude Stein, and Toni Morrison in this category; other readers will certainly disagree and identify their own outliers according to their standards of taste.

Then there are the hucksters, the charlatans, the low-talent frauds, and the bad thinkers.  Here we are dealing not with matters of taste, but with the question of basic talent.  Jonathan Safron Foer, Brooklynite, hipster storyteller, media darling, and, now, ersatz moralist, has little to none, and so he falls into this category.  Falls hard.  Although he does pick nice fonts for his books.

In this essay, Jennifer Reese reviews–and largely eviscerates–his new, fatuous, astonishingly arrogant manifesto Eating Animals.  As she points out so elegantly, JSF, reputedly a strong thinker, somehow manages to conflate a perfectly sane argument (industrial farming is ecologically ruinous and morally almost indefensible) and a crude, pompous, whiny jeremiad against people who aren’t vegetarians (actually, aren’t vegans, as Reese shrewdly notes).  Eating Animals is a piece of agitprop disguised as journalism, and its “priggish, condescending, naive” tone, notwithstanding JSF’s claims that the book is objective and open-minded, does nothing so effectively as spur reactionary anti-intellectualism:

The populist conservative case against coastal liberals is that they are smug elites who think they know everything because they went to fancy colleges, eat arugula, and name-check Derrida. As a coastal liberal, I think the rap is often cynical and unfair. But Foer’s account of his field trip to the abattoir suggests how a folksy moose butcher like Sarah Palin gets on a presidential ticket.

His is the worst kind of specious argument, one whose high moral seriousness blinds him to counter-arguments that might contest and complicate his own: e.g. primates have always been omnivores (as Michael Pollan reminds us), and almost every aspect of modern life, our clothing, our cell phones, the fruits and vegetables we eat, buses we ride, are part of a manifestly unsustainable economy (see Elizabeth Kolbert on this).  Eating Animals evinces a troubling tendency of many of my fellow lefties:  a willingness to critique only certain limited, authorized facets of the world we all live within.  If Las Vegas is Official Fun, meat-eating is, for some people, ground for Official Opprobrium.  Apple makes products that are poisonous out of poisons, but one doesn’t expect JSF to mount an attack on iPods.

Instead, a myopic self-satisfaction stands in for real ethical debate.  Did you buy that organic salad pre-packed from the grocery store?  Then kudos to you, smiles Foer.  Are you a hunter who killed, dressed, and cooked the venison on your table?  Do you raise chickens in your backyard?  Do you fish?  Eat fish?  Buy organic half-and-half?  Ever step on a bug?  Then, he grumbles, you are morally despicable, that is to say not in line with Mr. Foer, whose career thus far provides an excellent example of how readily most critics and readers mistake sputtering emotion for genuine moral passion.   Fuck you, you sanctimonious dweeb.

Then again, we should be nicer.  After all, in fifty years nobody will remember the poor guy.

-TGR

PS: Reese’s essay will be one of the last publications of Double X, the online women’s magazine that spun off earlier this year from a Slate.com blog.  The editors announced today that they’re shutting down.  For the usual current reasons.  Double X was never much good–although it was far less inane than glossier, celeb-obsessed Jezebel–but they did publish interesting pieces like this one from time to time.  Hard times, folks, hard times, especially if you work in the word business.

global English and language extinction

In addition to being an astute political commentator–one who has, ironically, often been caricatured by liberals as a crypto-reactionary, even though his ideas and temperament are quite similar to President Obama’s–John McWhorter is also a heavyweight linguist who used to teach at Berkeley and is now a lit professor at Columbia.*   This fascinating, typically stylish essay questions the notion that the globalization of English is necessarily a cause for worry about “cultural imperialism.”  Along the way McWhorter makes some shrewd observations about how languages change over time and space, why they die out, and the relations (and non-relations) between language and culture in general.  Good read.

-TGR

*True, he accepts the label “social conservative,” but he’s one in the same way Andrew Sullivan is, i.e. more of a British-style righty, with no time for the crudity that passes for conservatism in the contemporary U.S.  Pro-LGBT rights, an environmentalist fellow-traveler, open to gradual rather than radical social change (like Edmund Burke and, as Sullivan has pointed out, like the President himself).