Category Archives: Other Critics

Jill Lepore on patriots and tea parties

Posted on by under Other Critics, The Moronic Inferno, the polis

Jill Lepore teaches American history at Harvard and frequently contributes to The New Yorker, among other magazines.  She’s a witty, deeply learned, but accessible writer and thinker, and her newest essay is a history of a particular kind of political language: allusions and appeals to the “original” intents / ideas of the men pop culture calls the Founding Fathers.  One might think that conservatives are the ones who tend to use this rhetoric, but as Lepore shows it has actually been a tool for abolitionists, gun nuts, antiwar activists, white supremacists, black civil rights warriors, Howard Zinn, Richard Nixon, and now, most loudly, that gang of older, affluent whites led by Glenn Beck and Sarah Palin (among others) which calls itself The Tea Party.  (You know, they’re the ones who hate high taxes and so despise Barack Obama because he cut taxes by $300 billion during his first year in office.)  Lepore’s approach and general attitude toward various movements in past and present U.S. politics is good-humored; nonetheless, she emphasizes that while there have been plenty of annoying, self-righteous “originalists” on the American left, the right is where you go to find truly batshit, destructive appeals to the Fathers:

Originalism in the courts is certainly a matter for debate. Jurisprudence stands on precedent, on the stability of the laws. But originalism has long since reached beyond the courts. Set loose in the culture, it looks like history but it’s not. It is to history what astrology is to astronomy, what alchemy is to chemistry, what creationism is to evolution. The history that Tea Partiers want to go back to is as much a fiction as the Lost Cause of the Confederacy.

A lot of this stuff is founded on those old American pastimes, anti-intellectualism and historical ignorance–Gore Vidal is right to call us “The United States of Amnesia.”  Lepore, however, argues that there is within this a more particular problem: few of us listen much to professional historians.  TV has no use for them.  Rarely does someone who isn’t a Washington, D.C.-based journalist get interviewed on MSNBC or CNN or wherever.  The declining role of historians as public intellectuals

left a great deal of room for a lot of other people to get into the history business. Today’s reactionary history of early America, reductive, unitary, and, finally, dangerously anti-pluralist, ignores slavery and compresses a quarter century of political contest into “the founding,” as if the ideas contained in Thomas Paine’s “Common Sense,” severing the bonds of empire, were no different from those in the Constitution, establishing a strong central government. “Who’s your favorite Founder?” Beck asked Palin in January. “Um, you know, well,” she said. “All of them.”

The essay is compelling.  You can read it here.

-TGR

link + link + link + picture of a poet

Posted on by under Other Critics

For your Wednesday morning contemplation:

Is Dorothy Parker still relevant? Has her poetry held up? The New Criterion thinks so.

Here’s a picture of W.H. Auden. Trust me, he was handsome when he was young.

Martin Amis talks about the friend who was a source for many of his male anti-heroes.  An interview that was published in The Telegraph (London) last summer.

There’s a fresh-to-death new edition of H.W. Fowler’s piquant (and still useful)  Dictionary of Modern English Usage.  Toronto’s Globe and Mail reviews this classic. Has anybody else noticed a lot of journalism about grammar guides lately?

-TGR

Great on Depression

Posted on by under American Masculinity, Book Recommendations, Other Critics

The New Yorker has two very good book critics, James Wood and Louis Menand, both of whom teach literature at Harvard.  Unfortunately, only one of them is routinely interesting (being interesting and being good* as a critic are two different things, as you realize if you read a lot of criticism and book reviews).  This would be Menand, who has a cool essay out which surveys some recent books on psychiatry / psychology and the problem of depression.  His main contention is that difficulties in defining the best methodologies for mental-heath treatment are closely connected to the enormous complexity of depression, which remains at best problematically defined and understood, despite the fact that it affects hundreds of millions of human beings and has garnered decades of attention from the best psychological thinkers and practitioners around (also some of the worst).  Trust me, you will like this, whether or not you’ve ever dealt with The Noonday Demon.

-TGR

* By “good,” I mean whether or not someone accomplishes the book critic’s basic task of explaining what a text is generally about and convincing some readers that they might like to read it.  Interestingness has mainly to do with the writer’s voice / style / poetic verve / whatever I’m no theorist.

Arts & Letters Daily

Posted on by under guides and nudges, Other Critics

This is a website you would probably enjoy checking out two or three times a week.  It’s an efficient, diligently updated little compendium of the best new arts & culture journalism.  Recommended if you like thinking, books, music, politics, philosophy, sex, art, history, that sort of thing.  Speaking personally, I’m able to appear somewhat educated because I visit here.  It’s cheaper than a messenger bag.

-TGR

How male was the “American Century”?

Posted on by under American Masculinity, Authors, Other Critics

Writing for The Guardian, in preparation for a new BBC radio series on U.S. literature called “Capturing America” (soon to debut, I guess), Mark Lawson ponders the influence of the generation of American novelists who reached adulthood during World War II, who ascended to fame in the 1950s and ’60s, and who held their star-posts until recently, until old age and death caught up: Mailer, Heller, Bellow, Roth, Updike, Salinger, and others.  Lawson provides a pretty good overview–and I stress “overview” (it is after all a newspaper article)–of the last half-century of American letters, and his understanding of the current core debate among critics and scholars (How accurate is it to frame a cadre of mostly male, mostly white writers as the leaders of national literary culture?) is nuanced.  Viz.,

This triumphalist but nostalgic position holds that these writers took advantage of their nation’s geopolitical power – and a media culture and bookstore customer-base which regarded serious writers ­seriously – to create a superpower of the pen to match the financial and military clout of the US during what became known as the American century.

The counter-argument is that this army of old soldiers was very male and masculine and white in its concerns – tempered only by a grudging, late admission to the halls of fame of writers such as Toni Morrison and Joyce Carol Oates – and that the standard narrative of 20th-century American literature is partial and distorted. This case is made persuasively in Elaine Showalter’s recent book: A Jury of Her Peers: American Women Writers from Anne Bradstreet to Annie Proulx.

Literary history is impossibly messy and almost always contentious (celebrating some people means not celebrating others, or at least not celebrating them as much), and so this debate is unwinnable, really.  But even if you don’t believe that Bellow, et al. constitute the “greatest generation” of American writers (and personally I don’t even think there is such a thing as any “greatest generation,” not ever), it is hard to write off the achievement of books like Herzog and The Catcher in the Rye, and you will probably find Lawson’s apercu fair and sophisticated, which is impressive, given the short format he’s working in.

He also works in the usual worries about The Death of Serious Literature–

Updike, in [his] last interview, reflected on having twice been pictured on the cover of Time magazine, part of the nation’s honours system, to mark the publication of Couples in 1968 and Rabbit Is Rich in 1982. Now, the novelist who takes that prize is Dan Brown. And so the changing of the guard in American fiction is arguably not just generational but cultural: the large, interested readership who lined their shelves with Updike’s Rabbit Quartet, Bellow’s Herzog, Mailer’s The Naked and the Dead, Roth’s Portnoy’s Complaint and other bestsellers of serious literary merit had perhaps migrated to the quick-read thriller and the confessional memoir.

–without sounding like a hysterical pessimist.  Literature will keep getting written, and, as long as our educational system doesn’t totally collapse (50/50 odds?) people, at least some people, will keep reading it:

. . . intelligent literary culture will adapt to the new conditions of the marketplace and may be revived, as the country always has been, by immigration. The Jewish-American, Irish-American, ­African-American and European-­American writers of the great postwar generations may be followed by authors who are, say, Indian-American (Jhumpa Lahiri, left, with Unaccustomed Earth), Dominican-American (Junot Díaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao) or Korean-American (Chang-rae Lee, whose novel The Surrendered, published this spring, extends the nation’s rich war literature by treating the ­Korean war from an Asian perspective). With these books and others, a new phase is beginning.

Kinda pat, but true.  And by the way, if you haven’t done so yet, you really, really need to read Oscar Wao.  Diaz is the troof.  Happy reading,

-TGR

Saturday quick reads

Posted on by under Authors, Other Critics

As you bask in the sun or rest from shoveling snow . . .

– I am usually wary of essays that start with things like “Posterity hasn’t had much trouble knowing what to do with Emily Dickinson” (really?  I’ve read a lot of feminist criticism, and it seems like the opposite is truer), but hey, it’s about Emily Dickinson.

–The Economist with a trifle on music.

– How should you teach The Merchant of Venice to contemporary college students?  A reflection on Shylock, the historically contingent nature of reading, and the pleasures of education from a university professor.

– Do you like no-fi Boards of Canada dancehall pop?  Yeah?  Well then get on Washed Out.  He rules.

-TGR

Sex, please

Posted on by under Other Critics, sports, The Moronic Inferno

Did you know that The Weekly Standard has female writers?  I know, weird, right?  Anyway, one of them, Charlotte Allen, has just written an interesting, if belated, essay on the recent phenomenon of Pick-Up Artists viz the bigger question of what the (mostly heterosexual part of ) the dating/sex/love/relationship landscape looks like in 2010 America.  Preview: not so great.  Allen makes an extremely sensible point most feminist critics of people/phenomena like Tucker Max, Neil Strauss, and roissy in dc are loathe to bring up: these guys might be assholes, but goddamn are they popular with young men AND a lot of young women.  Something big and not necessarily pleasant is happening to American sexual culture, and just writing off these guys and their fellow travelers won’t explain or contest or stop anything.

In sum, while the piece is occasionally reductive, and I sometimes can’t tell whether the author is celebrating or bemoaning the present state of things (or both), it’s still punchy and entertaining and, for TWS, surprisingly reluctant to blame left-wing ideologies for everything.  A recommended read.

-TGR