Category Archives: Other Critics

Was J.D. Salinger a Sex Monster . . . ?

Posted on by under Authors, Other Critics

. . . who abused women with his sex desires!?  This is the case Mikki Halpin lays out in a Salon.com essay that is light on particular evidence and heavy on the hate.  As she has it,

. . . I think there is another, more insidious reason that the literary establishment is so invested in the fictional, reclusive Salinger. It is a convenient cudgel with which to silence any discussion of Salinger’s personal life, particularly any revelation of unsavory truths about one of America’s most revered authors. Both Joyce Maynard and Salinger’s daughter Margaret were vilified for violating the great man’s privacy when they wrote about their own experiences with him and exposed his predatory, controlling relationships with women. Instead of exploring the insights these revelations might bring to readings of Salinger’s work (not to mention the women’s right to tell their own stories), critics dismissed their books as exploitative, attention-seeking stunts.

Well, Maynard was a publicity hound / groupie and a bad writer.  And if you’re going to assert that putative events from the man’s personal life can enrich our experience of his work, then you had better offer at least a brief example of such literary analysis.

Read the piece in full if you want, but be warned: it’s mostly boilerplate about Cruel Male Artists (Salinger is somehow guilty by association with, uh, Picasso) and vague aspersions about what Salinger was “really” like.   You will run into cant phrases like “troubled past” and  “unsavory truths.”  And the title is even ungrammatical (it should be history WITH women, not OF women–jeez).    Ultimately it seems like the big old man had a pretty normal romantic life, full of fuck-ups and stupidity and loss, just like anyone else’s.  For Halpin, though, this is all evidence of a deeper depravity–that of the Male Egotist.  Blurg.  Maybe try critiquing his actual books next time, and cool it with the hazy biographical attacks.  Ad hominem is boring.  Halpin is usually a solid, funny cultural observer, but this piece falls flat, stylistically and substantively.

-TGR

The Selected Wallace Stevens, finally

Posted on by under Authors, Book Recommendations, Other Critics

I should have written about this months ago.  Laziness got in the way, as usual.  But–ladies and gentlemen!–there is finally, finally, finally a Selected Wallace Stevens, edited by John N. Serio (one of the better academic poetry scholars around today) and coming in at an unusually robust (for a Selected anything) 352 pages, which is nevertheless much slimmer than the 500+ page Collected that was released just before the poet’s death in 1955 and about which little besides the cover and font has changed since.

Granted, you should still own the Collected, because any reader will find at least some fault with the inclusions and excisions made by an editor (even if that editor is the poet him/herself).  Whenever you can get more poems by a great poet, do it.  (Personally I find it comforting to have every poem in my library arsenal.)  But Serio has done a fine job of selecting both canonical and lesser-known pieces.  He clearly understood that the stuff in the Norton anthologies hardly begins to encompass or even suggest the immensity of Stevens’ achievement, and so he has included quiet gems like “Botanist on Alp (No. 1)” and “The Bed of Old John Zeller.”

The main appeal of any such selection is that it’s simply easier to lug around.  It won’t cause your messenger bag to bulge out weirdly or give you a shoulder sprain.  It is an everyday book.  And Stevens was a shaman of the everyday.  He found and exfoliated the utter weirdness of putatively ordinary things like ferns and glasses of water; that’s why having a volume you can peruse on the bus or in the dentist’s waiting room is so fitting.  Hats off to Professor Serio, whose Introduction to the edition you can read here.  It’s quite good, although the poems remain the reason for bothering with it.

-TGR

Boredom

Posted on by under Other Critics

In his Pensees, Pascal maintains that our experience of boredom–especially our efforts to minimize or avoid it–is one of the core elements of our humanity. It afflicts kings as much as paupers, and it’s both terrible and potentially redemptive; the specter of being bored scares the daylights out of most of us, but it also motivates a good percentage of our higher achievements. What is Ulysses if not, among other things, a 700-plus-page defense against the weird complex of frustration, longing, low-grade agony, fatigue, and nerves that we call “boredom”? (Ironic, then, that in mounting this defense the novel focuses on precisely the sorts of daily activities–running errands, buying lunch, having lecherous thoughts, walking around–that are themselves 1.) potentially very boring and 2.) minor bulwarks against boredom.) Same goes for lots of other books. I just happen to be sitting across the room from my copies of Joyce’s novels.

With all that in mind, check out this affectionate, covertly sad essay from the most recent New York Times Sunday Book Review (yes, they still do one). Written by Jennifer Schuessler, “Our Boredom, Ourselves” is organized around ruminations on how reading and thinking about books are acts which are bound up with the question of what exactly boredom is and what exactly it feels like and why exactly it keeps happening to most of us.

We read, and write, in large part to avoid it. At the same time, few experiences carry more risk of active boredom than picking up a book. Boring people can, paradoxically, prove interesting. As they prattle on, you step back mentally and start to catalog the irritating timbre of the offending voice, the reliance on cliché, the almost comic repetitiousness — in short, you begin constructing a story. But a boring book, especially a boring novel, is just boring. A library is an enormous repository of information, entertainment, the best that has been thought and said. It is also probably the densest concentration of potential boredom on earth.

Did any of you know that Dickens was the first person to employ “boredom” as a noun? I didn’t.  Especially fitting, I guess, that he introduces that usage in Bleak House, which is arguably (read: TGR’s opinion) the most entertaining (and profuse) meditation on confusion and existential torpidity in English literature.

And if you still find yourself un-bored by boredom, consider buying the aphoristic anthology Ennui to Go: The Art of Boredom, which seems entertaining and has a great cover and is available on Amazon for a dollar (used).

As John Berryman remarks in one of his Dream Songs, Life, friends, is boring–we must not say so. Yet we keep saying so.

Hitchens on Racism in North Korea

Posted on by under Other Critics

He might have gone halfway off the rails during the Iraq War debates, and I’ve never thought much of him as a book reviewer, but Christopher Hitchens still has the intellectual and linguistic tools to be very, very funny from time to time.  Funny, that is, in the classical sense, the comedic as a serious critical mode.  Witness his new Slate.com opinion piece about racial ideology inside the ghoulish North Korean regime.  The title alone should tempt you: “A Nation of Racist Dwarves.” Bonus points for spotting H.’s favorite adjectives (e.g. “despicable,” “fatuous,” “pathological”).

-TGR

Poetry Doses

Posted on by under Other Critics, Pooms/Poetry

Here are two dispiriting facts that become downright weird when paired.  1.) Few Americans today read poetry.  2.) Each year more poetry books are published in the United States than in any previous year.  I know, wha?

Still, you can find what you’ll like.  In an essay for the Contemporary Poetry Review, Joan Houlihan reiterates a bit of common sense Kingsley Amis once offered apropos of Larkin’s writing: the first few lines of a poem will tell you if it’s any good (that is, whether or not you want to spend time reading more of it).  This is the sort of thing we aren’t allowed to say in front of a class.  It’s true, though.

Although I don’t agree with all of her particular judgments (she swats Charlie Smith!), Houlihan’s main argument is smoothly persuasive.  She envisions a decent future for poetry, one in which what has happened to music over the past decade also happens to literary culture and is thus a huge, if non-traditional, boon for us scribblers.

As we move into the next decade, it seems very likely that a subset of all published poetry will, like music, become readily experienced or viewed for free, and that readers will “sample” poems and make any buying decisions based on these samples. Readers will become sophisticated enough in their own judgments, or tuned in enough to trusted recommenders wherever and however encountered, and soon the disappearance of reviews in mainstream periodicals won’t be missed. It may even turn out that the book of poems as physical object no longer holds us, cannot maintain its presence through the next ten years, cannot justify its 65 or more pages of poems all bound into one place—we might instead purchase only 5 or 10 poems at once, or a “mixed tape” of poems we love, or a subset of poems by a favorite poet. The packaging and distribution mechanisms are already in place; we, the readers, will only need to become proficient at making our own selections. Just be sure to read the first lines before you buy.

That said, I would still like to see more poetry reviews in The LA Times and my local alt paper and everywhere else.  It can’t hurt for more media outlets to pay at least a few smart people to read books and make brief comments on them.  Right, innit?  Anybody hiring?

-TGR

A New Map of America?

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

What would the U.S. look like if the Senate weren’t designed so that large rural places with low populations have more power than compressed urban centers where, you know, lots of Americans actually live?  What if all the states were about the same size in terms of residents?  James Fallows of the Atlantic Monthly has posted a cool “thought experiment” map (designed by Neil Freeman) on his blog, in which state borders have been redrawn the same way Congressional districts are–as population changes–without hugely altering the existing cultural / ethnic make-up (fragmented and complex as those are).  I would live in Mojave and be a native of Allegheny (I think–the map is kinda small).  You?  I especially like the new provincial names.

The Poetics of Staten Island

Posted on by under Other Critics

What’s inside the cultural imagination of NYC’s most derided borough?  What would a cultural history of it look like?  At Slate.com, SI native Jonah Weiner (great New York name) undertakes a short-form investigation.  Having only been exposed to Staten by the Wu-Tang clan and heard mostly awful things about it, I found this piece smart and wry.  It’s a skeptical embrace of “the strangest bedfellow in the city’s ménage à cinq, regarded as a little red state full of orange people who seem to have crash-landed on our blue planet.”

-TGR