Category: books

Sam Lipsyte’s The Ask: the Disgust and the Pity

Ivan Kreilkamp3 Comments

Sam Lipsyte’s The Ask will probably long remain the funniest and best novel filed under this Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication data:

1.  College administrators– Fiction.  2.  College benefactors — Fiction.  3.  Education fund raising — Fiction.

Because god forbid this cheapskate thrifty consumer should actually buy a new hardback book (sorry, Sam), I first read his previous novel Home Land while I was waiting for this one to come from the library.  They have a lot in common, to the point that Home Land feels a bit like a first run at this one (which is deeper and more emotionally nuanced, though Home Land is also hilarious).  The narrator/protagonist of both is a similar character, a middle-aged (39 in The Ask, a bit younger in Home Land I believe) middle-class fuck-up confronting his own failure (in career, friendship, love, sex) and the success of his former friends and classmates.  In both novels the guy struggles with an educational institution — in Home Land he’s trying to submit class notes for his high school alumni newsletter; in The Ask he’s in effect graduated such that he dwells on his college days and is trying to keep his job as a fund-raiser for Mediocre University of New York City.

Lipsyte is just a very very funny writer.  I’ll share two of my favorite passages in The Ask. Here he describes his wildly-successful former college buddy Purdy who made a fortune with some kind of 1990s tech/internet music enterprise.

Still, he had been ahead of his time with his online music outfit.  It might sound ridiculous now, but he had been one of the first to predict that people really only wanted to be alone and scratching themselves and smelling their fingers and staring and screens and firing off sequences of virulent gibberish at other deliquescing life-forms.  So for us he provided new music and photographs of fabulous people making and listening to the new music, as well as little comment boxes for the lonely, finger-smelling people to comment on the looks and clothing of the fabulous people…

That captures the tone and worldview pretty well.  A Confederacy of Dunces came to mind for me; there’s a similarly disgusted, hilarious bile directed at contemporary culture.   This passage is also typical in its seething jealousy — Lipsyte is a poet of self-hating envy.  Milo hates and resents Purdy for being a winner in such a corrupt, crappy, stupid game, and he can’t break out of his self-destructive spiral of envy/self-hatred/self-pity/rage.

It also struck me that The Ask is oddly similar to Man Gone Down by Michael Thomas.  Screw-up artist father in contemporary Brooklyn, trying to hang on to his shaky marriage and to be a good father despite himself; encounters with successful friends from long ago; somewhat desperate unemployment leading to bouts of last-ditch manual labor.  The tone is 180 degrees different — Man Gone Down isn’t funny in the least (I kind of admired it but actually didn’t finish it) — and the vector of sociological analysis is all different too.  Man Gone Down is about an African-American (half white) man in a world of white privilege; The Ask is about a white man “of many privileges and zero skills” who played his cards slightly wrong (he intended to be a painter) and is on the verge of falling out of the middle class entirely.

Here’s another passage that cracked me up.  Milo, with his 3-year-old son (the novel’s very funny on parenting, daycare, etc), is having a coffee with the mother of another kid.  He thinks they’re flirting heavily, and he’s decided he doesn’t have it in him to cheat on his wife, so he’s going to disappoint the woman by pulling back.  Then she mentions her boyfriend.

“Boyfriend?”

I watched her face register what I, and only I, it turned out, had been mulling, saw the surprise there, the disgust, the deeper disgust, the moral judgment, the slight flattery, the steepening dive into new realms of physical revulsion, followed by pity’s steadying hand.

So hilarious.  “Pity’s steadying hand” killed me.  In post-college days Lipsyte was the cape-wearing singer of a sort-of grunge band called Dung Beetle, singing under the name Sam Shit.  There’s definitely something rock-and-roll and improvised-feeling in the novel’s wildly creative and obscene invective — Milo and Lipsyte could be what Sam Shit turned into — but the writing is also very precise and exact.  This passage captures the self-pity and disgust that well up out of the narration.  Lipsyte’s protagonists have a bit of a hangup about the physical ideal embodied by preppy WASPs; the novels are partly about being white and privileged but not quite privileged enough or as much as it seemed back in college, not secure or coolly confident in one’s privilege, not handsome, not fully in control of one’s body, emotions, life or career.  (Can’t find the line now but at some point someone says to Milo something like: 400 years of white male privilege and you can’t do any better than this?)

Home Land is pretty amazing as surreal satire — witness for example the Kid, the world’s champion masturbator, who makes dream-like appearances as a wandering cowboy sage continually pondering the question, “how much whang can a man spank?”  But The Ask goes deeper and is both uproarious, affecting, and pretty unsettling — it’s really fricking bleak.

Here’s an interview.… And a good Jennifer Scheusler NYRB review.  And the A.O. Scott think piece linking The Ask to Hot Tub Time Machine (he totally has a point, actually).

I Built 1% of this Wall

Ivan Kreilkamp5 Comments

I spent last week reading, among other things, George Eliot on the sanctity of skilled manual labor (Adam Bede) while Sarah constructed a stone wall in our front yard.  It was pretty funny.  In the evenings we’d both be saying “Whoo!  Long day!  I’m tired!” but I was tired from sitting in the library/cafe turning pages slowly, reading about Adam and Seth building cabinets and coffins, Sarah from heaving big slabs of limestone, chipping at it with hammers, rearranging the dirt and gravel, etc.

This wall has actually been a going concern for two years.  Sarah’s been working on it off and on with our friend Jack and a few other colleague/sidekicks of Jack’s.  It’s sat unfinished for the last year and now Sarah’s been making a push to complete it.  (Aha!  I realize that I wrote about this project, then the “New Wall Project,” back in the Fall of 2008.)

This is a “dry-laid” wall, meaning that it’s made without mortar, simply by fitting the pieces of limestone together neatly.  Sarah and Jack bought four tons of limestone in the end, 1/2 ton at a time in a truckload.  It costs $80 per ton (pretty good deal, $320 for all of this stone).  The pieces were cut by saws with smooth edges, so they needed to be “split-faced” — chipped away with a carving tool — to make them look more natural.

Yesterday I laid aside the Victorian fiction for the morning to help Sarah with some of the stone-lifting, digging, and root-cutting.  It’s good exercise, my arms were tired afterward.  She thinks that strenuous digging is the perfect exercise for psychological health, I think partly for evolutionary-biology-related reasons, and that instead of aerobics or step classes at the gym, people should just spend an hour digging dirt.  Probably true.

I asked her if she thought it was a fair estimate to say that I contributed 1% of the labor on the wall.  She didn’t really dignify that with a response, but I think it’s about right.

We were joking that passersby would say, “wait, who’s that pale man in the huge sun hat?  That’s not Jack!!  Wait — is that woman married??”

Hey — we all have different skill sets and interests…

Patti Smith vs. Terry Castle

Ivan Kreilkamp6 Comments

I recently read two really good memoirs, Terry Castle’s The Professor and Patti Smith’s Just Kids.  They would seem to have little in common.  On the one hand, the eminent professor of 18th-century British literature and lesbian writing at Stanford; on the other, the “godmother of punk” reflecting on her salad days in the late 60s and 70s.  (That’s her with Robert Mapplethorpe on West 23rd street in the early 70s.) But in fact they do share a few qualities– both are portraits of the artist as a young bookworm; both came from lower middle class families (Smith’s a bit scrappier/ more working-class than Castle’s) and latched on to literature/art as a vocation.  Both books are about passionate love attachments: Smith’s with Mapplethorpe, who was her lover/comrade for the crucial early years in NYC; Castle’s with her unnamed professor at grad school, the affair with whom scarred her for years.

Just Kids feels as if it may have been partly inspired by Dylan’s Chronicles Part 1.  It’s not as great as that, but then Chronicles was a somewhat astonishing book; Smith’s is more conventional, but is really lovely in a lot of ways, and it’s a lot of fun to follow her through her time with Mapplethorpe in the Chelsea Hotel, hanging out with Harry Smith, trying to break into the inner circle at Max’s Kansas City, living for art and poetry, making collages out of stuff they find on the street, dead broke, so broke they’d go to a museum with enough money for one admission, and then one of them would look at the art and come out to tell the other one about it.  Smith was a working-class South Jersey kid with no cultural or other capital, enraptured by Arthur Rimbaud and Diego Rivera.  That song “Piss Factory” is completely real — at age 16 she worked in a factory inspecting handlebars for tricycles.  She felt her only practical option was to become a schoolteacher, but she dropped out of junior college, moved to the city and met Mapplethorpe.  Everyone assumed she was on drugs but she didn’t even drink, lived almost completely for art.  I went back and listened to probably my favorite song of hers, “Free Money;” her account here of her years scraping by with barely enough to eat made it resonate in new ways for me (I’m sure it’s about him):

Every night before I go to sleep
Find a ticket, win a lottery,
Scoop the pearls up from the sea
Cash them in and buy you all the things you need.

Every night before I rest my head
See those dollar bills go swirling ’round my bed.
I know they’re stolen, but I don’t feel bad.
I take that money, buy you things you never had.

Kind of like Dylan’s Chronicles, this comes to an end just about when she’s about to really make it.  Just Kids obviously has the more world-historical story to tell, but to tell the truth, I probably liked The Professor better; I’m a sucker for academic novels and the long memoir part of it resembles that genre, but really raw, witty & hilarious, and also very moving sometimes.  She’s a fabulous stylist and truly funny.  (If you want a fuller review here’s a rave from TNR.)  I’d always remembered her essay about Susan Sontag in the LRB; this is in the book too, and in this context it seems like the lighter, less consequential twin of the more traumatic memoir about the grad school affair, both about Castle looking for intellectual and erotic attention & validation from a glamorous older lesbian woman.

I guess all memoirs are tales of survival, to some degree, saying to the world, “well, I made it this far.” A favorite line from The Professor: “Here indeed was a mystery worth plumbing: I was fat; I was mean; but I was alive.”

Konrad Lorenz, Selma Lagerlof, & Nazi chickens

Ivan Kreilkamp4 Comments

I recently read through (meaning skimming parts of it) an interesting book, Patterns of Behavior: Konrad Lorenz, Nico Tinbergen, and the Founding of Ethology (Chicago), by Richard Burkhardt, Jr., about how the study of animal behavior emerged from its former place as a sub-category of natural history to become a full-fledged science in the twentieth century.

With apologies for going straight to the most sensationalist aspects of the book, Lorenz’s accommodation to the Nazi regime, and the Nazis’ promotion of his work, was a bit shocking for me to discover (as someone with vague pleasant memories of reading King Solomon’s Ring in high school).  Lorenz was (for a time) a Nazi, notwithstanding his supporters’ attempts to cover this up or whitewash it after the war.  In a major 1938 speech in Bayreuth, he

proposed that the degeneration of instinctive behavior patterns in domesticated ducks and geese corresponded to the cultural and genetic degeneration of civilized man…. The danger to the race, he warned, lay in the undesirable types that proliferated under the conditions of civilization.  Summoning up an image with which the Nazis were obsessed, the naturalist who only a few days before had applied for the membership in the Nazi party likened degenerate members of society to cancerous cells in an organism: ‘Nothing is more important for the health of an entire people than the elimination of invirent types, which, with the most dangerous and extreme virulence, threaten the penetrate the body of a people like the cells of a malignant tumor.’

Lorenz’s arguments found favor with an important Nazi psychologist, Erich Jaensch, who drew on Lorenz’ basic claims in order to compare “the pecking styles and other characteristics of northern vs. southern races of chickens.”

[Jaensch] concluded that the differences between northern and southern races of chickens paralleled the differences between northern European and southern European races of humans.  Northern chickens pecked steadily and accurately while southern chickens pecked rapidly but impulsively and inaccurately.  This mirrored, he claimed, the calm, measured, and tenacious behavior of northern, Germanic types as compared with the restless, lively, and flexible behaviors of Mediterranean types.

Wow.

Ethology did begin to improve in the post-National Socialism 1950s.

One non-Nazi-related detail that also caught my attention was that Lorenz credited his childhood love for animals, in part, to

Selma Lagerlof’s classic children’s book The Wonderful Adventures of Nils, which was read to him when he was about six.   Nils is the story of a boy who is magically changed into the size of an elf and flies off on the back of a barnyard gander with a flock of wild geese.  By Lorenz’s account, the story led him to want to become a wild goose himself or, failing that, at least to have one…. In Lagerlof’s classic, wild geese are identified as clearly superior to their barnyard cousins.  Thus, beginning with the bedtime stories of his childhood, Lorenz was taught that wild animals are stronger and more admirable than their domestic relatives are.  This idea would feature significantly in his thinking for the rest of his life.

Because my daughters must learn of the superiority of the hearty wild Swedish goose to its emasculated domesticated cousin For some reason I felt compelled to get hold of a copy of Nils, which we read to the girls.  It’s a pretty great book, although at a certain point it kind of devolves into a Swedish travelogue in which Nils learns about each region of the country as he flies around on the back of his goose friend.  It’s an anti-cruelty book, among other things; Nils gets turned into an elf because of his mistreatment of farm animals, and he has to go through his adventures to learn a new comradeship with his feathered and furred friends.

Big Star Revisited

Ivan Kreilkamp13 Comments

Big Star was one of the handful of bands who most shaped my musical tastes at the crucial age of 14-18 or so.  Radio City and Sister Lovers/ Big Star Third are icons of my personal aesthetics (I never loved #1 Record as much), but ironically I haven’t had either of them on MP3, other than some tracks included on an Alex Chilton cd collection.  So Keep Your Eye on the Sky, the Big Star box set, which is full of demos, alternate tracks and some early live recordings, was a really cool birthday gift (thanks Jake).  Getting it also inspired me to pick up the Continuum 33 1/3 book on Radio City.

Carrie Brownstein has a nice little blog post in that Best Music Writing of 2009 book about the diminishment of “mystery and the mysterious” in pop music today.  Big Star is a perfect example of this.  As everyone comments, being a fan of the band in the 1970s usually involved stumbling upon one of their albums — maybe Radio City, with its William Eggleston photo of a bare light bulb on the cover — in a dollar bin or something, being blown away by how amazing the music was, and having no idea who these people were.  Peter Buck of R.E.M. is quoted in the box set liner notes:

No one I knew had ever seen them play.  I think I’d read that one of the guys had been in the Box Tops — which made no sense either.  Information was scarce.  So these records they’d put out, they were simply artifacts.  It was like seeing the heads of Easter Island or the Great Pyramids or something.  You didn’t know what they were or how they’d gotten there.

By the time I got into Big Star in 1984 or so they were a lot better known, but even so, you couldn’t Google them, there was so Wikipedia page, so you ended up relying a lot on the little Robert Christgau capsule reviews or the Rolling Stone Record Guide entry and the like.  Going through the box set and this book now offers a surplus of information and photographs that once and for all eliminates that numinous haze, born of a paucity of information, that used to surround the band — but at this point, that’s perfectly OK with me, as they deserve all-time-great historical status, with all the archival trappings.

Bruce Eaton’s 33 1/3 book is quite good.  It’s austere in its formalist focus on “the music itself” — Eaton starts out explaining that because of all the gossip, rumor and falsehoods surrounding the Big Star and Alex Chilton stories, he’s going to focus pretty exclusively on the actual process by which the band formed and made Radio City.  This involves a fair amount of to me, somewhat boring technical chitchat about production choices, recording and mixing, etc., but on the other hand, I did feel I got a better understanding of what was musically/technically special about the band and the importance of the producer John Fry.  I also suspect there may have been a strategic element here, as Eaton makes clear that Chilton has expressed zero interest, in recent years, in talking with any journalists, and it sounds as if Chilton agreed to participate on the condition that the interviews would be almost exclusively about the music and recording.

A few tidbits/insights I gleaned from the book:

  • Chilton grew up with a sometimes jazz musician father and was heavily immersed in Memphis/Stax R&B (Wilson Pickett, the Staple Singers, etc).  The Anglophiliac, British Invasion sound of Big Star was almost entirely a product of Chris Bell’s obsessions, and Chilton seems always to have viewed the band as a vehicle for this particular, very “white” approach to music which he saw as only a small part of what he himself was about.  Actually it’s kind of hilarious in Eaton’s book how much Chilton repudiates Big Star and Radio City, their masterpiece, in particular; he says he thinks “Back of a Car” (which he did not write) is the album’s “only good song” and that he thinks his lyrics on the album as a whole are terrible.  (Although this struck me as heresy, if you actually look up the lyrics to “O My Soul” or something you realize that they are pretty flimsy; it’s a great example of how little lyrics matter except in their musical context.)
  • Big Star opened for Badfinger in Boston in March 1974, one of their few performances ever outside Memphis; their instruments were stolen and they had to play with gear borrowed from Billy Squier (! — yes, of later “The Stroke” fame!) of local band Sidewinder.
  • Notwithstanding the point about Chilton’s partial disaffection from the “whiteness” of Big Star’s approach, Chilton himself says that he copped certain musical structures and ideas on Radio City from Bach and other Baroque music… which actually kind of makes sense.
  • During and after Big Star, Chilton was in a semi-/unofficial pickup studio band called the Dolby Fuckers.  Surprised no one’s ever borrowed that name.
  • Of course everyone knows that Big Star was a “critics’ band.”  But the book makes clear that Radio City never would’ve been recorded (after Chris Bell’s departure from the band) if it hadn’t been for the somewhat bizarre event called the Rock Writers Convention in Memphis in May 1973.  All surviving members of the band attest that the good response they got to their performance at the convention convinced them that they actually could have an audience.  Considering that the very idea of a rock critic was a fairly recent invention at the time, Big Star may have been in some respects the first band who recorded specifically for rock critics and with their tastes in mind.  (I was also surprised to learn that Chilton knew Richard Meltzer and other rock writers from his sojourn in NYC in 1970.)
  • Eaton makes some good points about the difference between Big Star and other “power pop” bands of the era sometimes associated with them (like the Raspberries or Badfinger).  While the latter were classicists trying to work entirely within pre-established musical structures, Big Star (after #1 Record especially) was always about taking and reproducing those kinds of pop structures but messing with them, disintegrating them, removing the ground beneath them.  This then builds to an extreme on Big Star Third which is still unparalleled as a woozy, druggy, depressive, achingly gorgeous collection of songs.

One more thought: I was fascinated to hear the Flying Burrito Brothers cover (“Hot Burrito #2”) in the live set on the box set.  Chilton seems to have more than a few things in common with Gram Parsons as a musically omnivorous, addictive, louche son of privilege (well, relative privilege in Chilton’s case) with an ambivalent relationship to pop music in what was becoming the New South.

I saw Alex Chilton in 1985 at the Rat in Boston.  I was 16 and had the most ridiculous fake I.D.  I was desperate to get in and was thrilled that I did.  If I recall correctly he played stuff from Feudalist Tarts and various R&B covers and then a few Big Star songs like “September Gurls” which made me very happy.  I think I ended up walking all the way back home to Cambridge from Kenmore Square at 2 a.m. or whatever.

The box set contains an amazing collection of photos.  My favorite is one of Chilton at age 20 in the Chelsea Hotel in NYC with long hair, tie-dyed tank top (!) and scruffy facial hair holding a copy of the Byrds’ Untitled.

This photo above is from the back of Radio City: Jody Stephens, Andy Hummel and Chilton — in the original T.G.I. Friday’s in Memphis!

Pleasure reading (late 2009/holidays)

Ivan Kreilkamp4 Comments

Got around to reading Philip Roth’s 2004 counterfactual The Plot Against America which I found compelling and kind of scary.  It’s a re-imagining of American history in which Republican candidate Charles Lindbergh defeats F.D.R in 1940 on an anti-war, anti-semitic, covertly pro-German (or at least pro-accommodationist) platform.  What makes it really get under your skin is that Roth seems to be drawing heavily on his own Newark childhood, so it reads not as science fiction or fantasy but as a creepily plausible rethinking of both U.S. and his own family history if the country had taken a drastically different turn in the late 1930s.  So, for example, the depiction of his brother who embraces the new Lindbergh regime seems charged with real and intense family memories and conflicts.  The novel also feels obviously of its 2004 Bush administration moment in its detailed thinking through of how a truly fascist U.S. might play out.

Recently read both The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo and the sequel The Girl Who Played with Fire by Stieg Larsson, a Swedish journalist who, to what must have been the deep frustration of the international publishing world, had actually died at age 50 in 2004 prior to the publication of any of his novels.  The third of the trilogy is due out in the States soon.  These are interesting blockbusters.  They’re pulpy and have some of the limitations of most blockbuster fiction: the characters can be cartoonish, the plots implausible, sensationalist and heavily dependent on techno-thriller conventions of various sorts.  (For example, a whole lot of both novels involves descriptions of computer hacking.)  But, they’re total page-turners, really hard to put down and a lot of fun (I gave Sarah the second one at Xmas and over the last few days we were reading it simultaneously, with me picking it up when she put it down; we each had our own bookmark).  I guess I felt the second one was inferior and in the end closer to that techno-thriller cliche than the first, which is more thoughtful and interestingly broody about Swedish politics, patriarchy, and misogyny.  Has there ever been an international blockbuster series of novels whose major theme is male violence against women?  The Swedish title of the first one is Men Who Hate Women and the hero, Lisbeth Salander, is a female avenger against male sadists and abusers.  Salander is in some ways too Hollywood-ready, kind of Laura Croft-like in some ways, but she’s also a great heroine in her weird combination of Sherlock Holmes (she’s Asbergers-y, a genius/savant with a photographic memory), Jason Bourne or the Fugitive, and Batman or something.  The novels also reminded me a bit of a recent favorite of mine, the Danish thriller The Exception by Christian Jungersen of a couple years ago; they share a left-wing, anti-racist Scandinavian perspective on problems of contemporary globalism such as sex trafficking, war crimes, and the like.

One more thing: one of my favorite things about the novels and about Salander is that she’s a kind of superhero version of Pippi Longstocking: uses “V. Kulla” as a fake name on her doorbell at one point for example (cp. Pippi’s Villa Villakulla).

Read two Patricia Highsmith novels while in Cambridge for the holidays, inspired by reviews of the new Highsmith biography which make her sound like a very weird and fascinating character (did you know she worked as a writer for superhero comic books, for example?).  One of her most famous, Strangers on a Train, and a more obscure one, The Blunderer.  Similar plots and characters: “men who hate women,” actually, or men who want to get rid of their wives. Strangers on a Train is a brilliant “double” novel and a novel of homosexual panic — it would’ve fit perfectly into Eve Sedgwick’s Between Men.

Best Music Writing 2009, this year guest edited by Greil Marcus.  I threw this into an Amazon order as a stocking stuffer for myself.  Someone gave me the 2007 volume, which I loved, and I haven’t missed one since (ok, that only makes 3).  I’m a longtime fan (and erstwhile practitioner) of rock/pop music criticism, which can feel like a dying mainstream art.  But these collections inspire confidence that there’s loads of brilliant, imaginative and funny writing out there about pop music, albeit sometimes in hard to find places.  The books tend to collect a really diverse mixture of artist profiles from Rolling Stone or The New Yorker with pieces from little magazines and quasi-unpublished bits from blogs and whatnot.  A few favorites from this one:

  • Vanessa Grigoriadis “The Tragedy of Britney Spears” — a long investigative piece from Rolling Stone, itself a voyeuristic peek at this train-wreck of a career but also a thoughtful analysis of Spears’ downwardly spiraling dependency on celebrity/paparazzi culture (she is now romantically involved with a paparazzi she met on one of her daily chases).  Reads a bit like a Bruce Wagner novel.
  • John Jeremiah Sullivan, “Unknown Bards: the blues becomes transparent to itself.”  Reflections on John Fahey and other collectors and aficionados of early 20th-century blues recordings.  Really smart and interesting on the paradoxes and ironies attendant on old white men obsessing over old records made by Southern black men.  Also an argument for blues as great, transcendent art.
  • James Parker, “Unauthorized!  Axl Rose, Albert Goldman, and the renegade art of rock biography.”  Hilarious overview of the disreputable genre of the “unauthorized” rock biography, including analysis of several biographies of “persistent, near-magical malignancy.”
  • A nice short piece by Jonathan Lethem about the nature/meaning of rock vocals in “post-Elvis, post-Sam Cooke, post-Ray Charles popular music” in which he makes a case that “the singer in rock, soul and pop has to be doing something ineffable that pulls against any given context.”  I actually found this argument surprisingly original and persuasive.
  • An investigative piece by Josh Eells about “the eyeliner wars,” e.g. the harrassment and persecution of “emos” (androgynous fans of Dashboard Confessional and My Chemical Romance) in contemporary Mexico.  Reminded me of a good piece from the anthology of a year or two ago about the surprisingly enormous cult of Morrissey in Mexico.
  • Paul Ford’s “Six-word reviews of 763 SXSW Mp3s.”  Just what it sounds like: 763 reviews of 6 words or less (tweets, in effect) of bands performing at the South by Southwest conference, a reducto ad absurdum of the Blender-style capsule review genre.  In the introduction Greil Marcus aptly describes this feat of reviewing and of dismissal as “heroic, or demonic” and as a performance that implicitly dismisses “music and criticism at the same time.”  Maybe you’d have to have put some time in a music reviewer to fully appreciate this one.

Ballet, rainbows, magic, fairies, and jewelry

Ivan Kreilkamp4 Comments

Sometimes it feels like we’re continually being hit up for money via the girls’ kindergarten.  What I don’t like about it is the sense that the school or the PTA are using the kids for fund-raising — invoking the nag factor to get us to pony up.  If they wrote directly asking if we could pay a certain amount per month to pay for extras the school can’t otherwise afford, we’d have no problem with that.  But the reading marathon, the contests, the Scholastic book orders (of which I presume the school gets a cut) get tiring.  Especially at this age when my daughters, at least, really do not understand money at all.  Or odds or probabilities.  We had several complete meltdowns around the Reading Marathon because they were convinced that they were going to get to ride in a limo (the final top prize for one student in the school).

So anyway, we weren’t prepared for the Scholastic Books order.  The girls came home with pieces of paper on which their librarian (I think) had written the titles and prices for three books each in which C&I had expressed interest.  These would cost a total of almost $50 and they somehow presumed it was a done deal that we’d be buying all of them.  Screaming, crying meltdown over this.  Finally we compromised and got one book each and one more to share.

I also am not too impressed with the books’ general level of literary quality.  I don’t think it’s a promising sign about a book’s merits when it comes with a cheap dollar-store style necklace included (that’s why they wanted the book, of course).  Actually to be fair, when I actually went to the sale with them set up in the library, they did seem to have good books mixed in with the necklace/book hybrids my daughters unfortunately gravitated towards.  Showing a 6-year old girl a book with jewelry included is not really playing fair.  Normally we’re pretty good at telling them that they can’t buy something, but somehow all the peer/school pressure involved here made it very difficult to manage.  Maybe part of what was galling about this was that Grandma Suzy had just shown up with a few bags of wonderful/classic children’s lit from the 1950s-70s, next to which these looked especially tawdry.

This is the book/necklace title.  Ballet, rainbows, magic, fairies, and jewelry, a potent brew:

9780545106153_xlg

Torture Porn Lit

Ivan Kreilkamp2 Comments

Heartsick-Chelsea-Cain-unabridged-compact-discs-Audio-Renaissance

Just read Heartsick by Chelsea Cain which I picked up looking for something else because, I think, Amazon named it the top thriller of 2007.

I didn’t altogether enjoy it — it seemed derivative (of Silence of the Lambs, although it does have the wit tacitly to acknowledge the debt when the psycho killer mockingly refers to the journalist as Clarice) and very, very gross.  It is gripping and well done in some ways — I wanted to read to the end to find out what would happen — but I was struck by the sheer bloody sadism of it.

It reminded me of a silly argument my brother and I had a while ago about the ethics and politics of so-called “torture porn” film, namely the Eli Roth Hostel movies.  It was silly because I think at that point neither of us had seen the movies… so if anything, I’d have to say he won the argument b/c it’s difficult to take a moral stance of condemnation about something you haven’t seen.   Although part of my point was, I refused to give in to the logic that because this on-the-face-of-it objectionable cultural object has become notorious, “you must see it yourself” to decide.  On the other hand, it’s hard to argue the position from ignorance.

Anyway, what I didn’t like about Heartsick is the back story involving the protagonist detective’s ten-day-long ordeal being slowly and lovingly tortured by the psycho serial killer he’d been investigating.  It actually works pretty well as back story to explain his particular trauma and what’s at stake for him in current case… but annoyingly, the novel is interwoven with day by day chronological accounts of that week and a half.  It’s really hard to take — painstaking description of what it’s like to drink drain cleaner, anyone? — and just seemed sadistic/self-indulgent in a mode of “can you top this” grossness.

I was mulling over the cultural meanings of ‘torture porn’ and thought of several possible explanations/causes for why this has trend emerged so clearly in the last decade or so.

  • Most obviously: sheer oneupsmanship in a modernist logic of greater and greater, purportedly more and more “daring,” transgressions.  This was basically the point I was making to Jake: within Modernist art of the early and mid 20th century, various forms of transgression, obscenity, and more and more realistic depiction of sex and violence became closely linked with artistic expression and a cultural vanguard.  One could think of this as the “First Amendment theory” of modernist transgression, in that to be “censored” or deplored becomes an almost necessary sign of artistic expression and integrity.  The thing is, though, that this dynamic has become tired and predictable when every gangsta rapper and thriller novelist or director participates in the same game.  Sorry, Eminem and Marilyn Manson, you are not James Joyce or Picasso bravely defying the philistines with your cds and DVDs sold at Walmart to every wanna-be radical tweener in America.  (Or for that matter Tarantino: I think he’s at his worst when he falls into this mode; most of the more interesting aspects of his movies have little to do with pushing the transgression envelope.)   And in this case, Chelsea Cain’s novel being that much grosser and more explicit than The Silence of the Lambs does not make it more daring.  Given that you can find stuff on the internet with a few keystrokes that would’ve made Henry Miller or James Joyce blush, that whole logic, which relies on certain dynamics of scarcity and concealment, is basically moot.  These days really radical, daring art is more likely to avoid this whole game of transgression entirely.
  • post-9/11 culture, Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo.  Needless to say a lot of the obsession with torture in pop culture comes directly out of this political/cultural dynamic: e.g. the t.v. series 24.  I’d assume that Saw and Hostel are part of this too, albeit less directly.
  • One other thought, a slightly less obvious one: in this novel anyway, there seemed to be a fascination with the idea of the body as art-work, and the serial killer as a kind of conceptual artist, carving and sculpting her victims’ bodies into new shapes.  A break in the original case came when the detective Archie noticed, looking at photos of all the crime victims, that the shape of a heart had been carved into all the torsos (hard to make out amid all the gore).  The journalist protagonist dyes her hair pink which I think is meant to link to this theme.   Like Jack the Ripper, these murderers are artist/author figures who leave their “signature” to be read by the police.  So here too we could link the trend to plastic surgery and various kinds of body-based conceptual art that views the human bodily as “plastic,” malleable and part of culture not nature.

Anything else going on here?  There’s always the possibility of whole-scale moral degeneration, I forgot that one…

Pleasure reading

Ivan Kreilkamp5 Comments

A loyal Moonraking reader (thanks Judith) asked why it had been so long since I updated.  Oddly, I checked my stats and visits have been high lately despite no new updates.  Is it all random Google visits?  Who is out there?  To be honest, I think I crave more interactivity and lately have been more likely to take my random observations to Facebook.  But, I will see if I can get my blogging mojo back.

I’ll briefly mention some of the pleasure reading I’ve been doing lately.

My big recommendation is Lorrie Moore’s The Gate at the Stairs (I must say I dislike that title which seems very generic to me).  I’m a longtime fan of her short stories.  In preparation for reading the new one, while I waited to get my library copy, I read one of her two previous novels, Who Will Run the Frog Hospital?, which is excellent although not as memorable as the new one.  The Gate at the Stairs actually could easily be accused of being contrived in all kinds of way in terms of plot but the “voice” of the narrating protagonist is so funny and moving that I didn’t care so much.  Sentence by sentence it’s consistently sharp, resourceful & hilarious.  Very self-aware about language, fascinated by puns and wordplay and nuances of speech and idiolects.  A novel about race and adoption, about childcare in relation to class and power, a girl’s coming of age novel.  Also it all takes place in a Midwestern college town (Madison) so that was another plus.

In 1996 or 1997 I called up “the Connection” (Boston NPR talk show) and asked a question on-air to Lorrie Moore.  I had only read a few of her stories from Self-Help and asked some question about her uses of semi-experimental fictional form that kind of missed the point of her work, I think, and seemed mildly to annoy her.  Since that experience I’ve always thought of her as a bit imperious and intimidating, but I heard an interview with her last month that made her sound charming and almost kind of girlish.

Chess Story by Stefan Zweig.  New York Review of Books reissue of this novella, the last work Zweig wrote before his 1942 suicide.  Made me want to play chess again… just in case I’m put in solitary confinement by the Nazis.  I’ve never read Zweig and this made me want to read more.

Olive Kitteridge by Elizabeth Strout won the Pulitzer last year, has been recommended highly by various family members I respect, and is about characters in Maine, but I didn’t like it quite as much as I hoped I would.  It’s definitely good and involving fiction, well-observed, it draws you in; the character of Olive K. herself is kind of great — she’s a really difficult and in some ways unpleasant lady — but somehow I found it all just a little… predictable, or trying too hard to do what “good fiction” is supposed to do.  And/or, I liked some of the stories much more than others (it’s a kind of Winesburg Ohio-esque story cycle, with the Kitteridges coming in and out of the stories).  Also I have to say that I think that aspects of this novel may be pitched especially to an over-60 or so readership (hey, we have Y.A. fiction, why not Older Adult fiction?)

Wobble to Death — this is Peter Lovesey’s 1970 Victorian mystery, the debut of Sergeant Cribb.  The plot revolves around a competitive race-walking event in London in 1879 at which contestants keep dropping off.  I spent the whole time I read this thinking, “am I really reading a mystery about Victorian competitive race-walking?”

Arnaldur Indriðason’s Arctic Chill.  I am in the middle of this moody Icelandic mystery, by the author of Jar City which I read a year or two ago.  Very Henning Mankell-esque, a bit derivative maybe (the detective’s relationship with his daughter seemed a little too close), but/and totally gripping and enjoyable.  A bit more stripped down and focused, more of a straight procedural maybe, not as ambitious in terms of depicting a whole society.  Very similar dynamics involving immigrants in the closed Nordic society — here a young Thai boy is found murdered and the detective is probing into the life he and his immigrant mother and brother have lived, the racism they’ve faced, and so on.

Asterios Polyp

Ivan KreilkampLeave a comment

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Strongly recommend this new graphic novel, David Mazzucchelli’s Asterios Polyp.  It’s being hailed as a landmark of the genre, and I agree — it strikes me as among the best graphic novels I’ve read, along with the likes of Maus, Charles Burns’ Black Hole, Ghost World, Persepolis, Jimmy Corrigan, and I’m not sure what else (I’ve never gotten too into the neo-superhero stuff like Watchmen).

Mazzucchelli got a BFA at RISD and became a successful comics artist at Marvel Comics in the 1980s, then started doing non-superhero stuff, like the graphic novel version of Paul Auster’s City of Glass.  He’s apparently being working on Asterios Polyp for a decade.  Here’s the NY Times review, which dubs the book “a big, proud, ambitious chunk of a graphic novel, with modernism on its mind and a perfectly geometrical chip on its shoulder” and “a dazzling, expertly constructed entertainment.”

It’s a novel of academia, in part; Asterios Polyp is a famous “paper architect” and professor at Cornell who’s become famous for designs that are never actually built.  The story is told in circular, recursive cycles with a bit of a film noir type set-up: we begin with the collapse of Asterios’ elite life and his fall into impoverished obscurity, and then re-trace the steps that led him there.  These include his marriage to a shy, talented sculptor who feels overwhelmed by him (until her own success begins to threaten him), his obsessive-compulsive behaviors and deeply ingrained intellectual snobbism.  As with any really successful graphic novel, the art is thoroughly embedded in the story and vice versa; in this case the art is quite spectacular and even show-offy — it definitely repays close scrutiny and multiple readings, with different characters, plots, and time frames all given their own distinct styles.  (It probably reminds me most of Chris Ware’s work in the brilliantly fussy/minute attention to graphic design and the interest in retro and recherche 40s-50s style; kind of amazing that Mazzucchelli worked for years on Daredevil, although in fact I’m sure doing comics for Marvel was ideal training for this).