Context & Continuity

God Bless Brazenhead Books.

There's No Place Like Here: Brazenhead Books from Etsy on Vimeo.

Regarding Belinsky...

As I've written before here, Belinsky is my favorite character from Stoppard's The Coast of Utopia.  I just came across a posting on a previously unknown, to me, blog called BookSlut all about Isaiah Berlin and his chronicle of Russian intellectuals. 

The post calls out Berlin's opinion of Bakunin (negative) and Belinsky (positive).  Here's the quote from Berlin that the post extracts:

The original prototype of these sincere, sometimes childish, at other times angry, champions of persecuted humanity, the saints and martyrs in the cause of the humiliated and defeated -- the actual, historical embodiment of this most Russian type of moral and intellectual heroism -- is Vissarion Belinsky.

And this is from the post's author:

Belinsky is the thread that unites the disparate patterns within the tapestry of early socialism: German idealism, Russian lucidity, French decadence. Everyone, in Russian Thinkers and The Coast of Utopia alike, is perpetually debating Belinsky’s ghost. This is convenient all around, for Belinsky said many contradictory things, as prolific and impoverished writers must. This combination of humble origins and elite approval ensured his place in Russian history, and his views about the "social" criticism of literature, were the battleground for the next century of Russian thought. Belinsky’s premature death in early 1848 installed him as an icon for the next generation of "violent" thinkers like Chernyshevsky and Pisarev, officially the fathers of Bolshevism.

Overall, I'm very impressed by the post and think it does a great job of illuminating the historical figures Stoppard uses for The Coast of Utopia. 

Happy reading!

Consensus-Driven Book Recommendations: Proust Makes the List.

From the Guardian...

Do Top 100 Books polls and charts agree on a set of classics?  I scraped the results of over [sic] 15 notable book polls, readers surveys and top 100's. Both popular and high-brow. They included all Pulitzer Prize winners, Desert Island Discs choices from recent years, Oprah's Bookclub list, and, of course, The Guardian's Top 100 Books of All Time. A  simple frequency analysis on the gathered titles gives us a neat 'consensus cloud' visualisation of the most mentioned books titles across the polls. Do you agree with the consensus?  [more]

Well, this is rather a mixed bag.  Let's see... The Hitchkiker's Guide to the Galaxy comes in over War and Peace and Do Androids Dram ofelectric Sheep.  His Dark Materials is about on par with Remembrance of Things Past.  To Kill a Mockingbird leads Harry Potter and Harry Potter leads Scoop, The Amazing adventures of Kavalier and Clay, Atlas Shrugged, The Wind and the Willows, Twilight and Persuasion.  --Wow.  Where does one even start with this?  On the one hand, I'm amazed, in positive and negative ways that some of these titles are on the list at all.  On the other hand, I see the residue of popular culture, High School / College reading lists and, my favorite category, "more honored in the breach than in the observance." 

The Intersection of Our Interests: Gleick & Stoppard.

A million years ago, I helped a celebrated science writer and a semi-professional bridge player, Uday Ivatury, launch the first NYC ISP focused on consumers:  The Pipeline.  It was a wonderful experience. 

The celebrated science writer was James Gleick and he's as justly celebrated today as he was then when had "only" publish the first two of his books, Chaos and Genius.  Now, he has had his sixth book published, The Information, and the reviews are excellent.  It is also going to be shelved alongside some of the books I've recently written about that address similar issues:  the perils and promise of the information age. 

A recent review caught my eye as it ended up being caught in the same news scan as Mr. Stoppard's clips.  Here's the relevant bit: 

And yet, Gleick remains relatively sanguine on the ability of systems, or networks, to sort themselves. (He writes at length about Wikipedia as a self-policing community, despite the skepticism it provokes among journalists and academics.) Or to remain unsorted, since ultimately there is so much information that "[o]ne can fairly say that even God has forgotten." Toward the end of the book, he recalls the great library of Alexandria, which, beginning in the third century BC, "maintained the greatest collection of knowledge on earth, then and for centuries to come." Among its hundreds of thousands of scrolls, Gleick tells us, were "the dramas of Sophocles, Aeschylus, and Euripides; the mathematics of Euclid, Archimedes, and Eratosthenes; poetry, medical texts, star charts, mystical writings. … And then it burned."

The point, of course, is that everything is perishable, that the universe itself is erasable — except that it's not. "All the lost plays of the Athenians!" he declares, citing a line from Tom Stoppard's play "Arcadia." "How can we sleep for grief?" The answer is simple: "By counting our stock."

This, Gleick concludes, is the great rule of the universe, and of the library, both actual and figurative, as well. "The library will endure," he writes; "it is the universe. … We walk the corridors, searching the shelves and rearranging them, looking for lines of meaning amid leagues of cacophony and incoherence" — just as we have always done.  [more]

I wonder if Mr. Gleick has had a chance to see the Broadway revival of Arcadia?  It's bound to be one of his favorites. 

The Man Filling George Plimpton's Shoes...

 ... and, according to this article, is doing a very good job on all fronts:

His desk has an old-fashioned Rolodex, a vintage Lucky Strike case and a neat bowl of paper clips. A small, cream-colored saucer doubled as an ashtray for his Marlboro Reds. A martini glass, mostly drained of Tanqueray, rested near a typed manuscript.

Wearing a slim gray suit and humming with nervous energy, Mr. Stein was ready to embark on a few hours of ambitious party-hopping: a book party in TriBeCa for his friend, the cross-dressing literary sensation Jon-Jon Goulian; a Harper’s magazine event attended by the writer Zadie Smith and a late-night dinner with friends at the French bistro Raoul’s in SoHo.

Bacchanalian nights are practically inscribed in the job description. Last spring, Mr. Stein was anointed the new editor of The Paris Review, only the third to hold the title in the magazine’s 58-year history, and the second to follow George Plimpton, himself a legendary New York social figure.  [more]

By the way, just in case you didn't know, The Paris Review has published it's archives of author interviews and this was, originally, what drew me to the magazine, as, I would guess, so many others.  Haven't read one lately?  Go to the archive, type in the name of your favorite author and then find out h0w they did what they did.  Now. 

Regarding Julie Taymor's Vision of The Tempest...

I'm moved to write this after spending a few minutes this morning reading the New York Times eviscerate Ms. Taymor's Broadway production of Spiderman.  For at least two months now, I've held the belief her excellent version of The Tempest would somehow fall in the shadow cast by the controversy of her current work on Broadway.  --After viewing the movie myself, I'm not sure it is collateral damage in the war between Ms. Taymor and the media or, perhaps, it simply hasn't earned the media's attention on its own merits. But, regarding its merits, we need to notice somethings before the lights dim and the first reel threads through the machine.

Ms. Taymor has earned our attention and respect.  Her collected work in film is original and striking.  Where do we being?  Frida?  Titus?  Across the Universe?  Pick three.  Pick two.  Pick ust one and you hold a reason for you to pay attention to what ever Ms. Taymor decides to do next.  Just within the realm of Shakespeare, her vision of Titus is unforgettable and purchases my constant interest. 

The Tempest isn't a perfect film but I won't dwell on it's shortcomings.  I mention this just to signal I'm not a relentless fanboy and, perhaps, persuade you I have a balanced point-of-view.  On the other hand, Ms. Taymor's production of The Tempest has forever changed how I understand and respond to the work.  Just one small change in interpretation changes my reckoning:  Casting Helen Mirren as Prospera.  Honestly, I will never be able to experience The Tempest ever again without thinking how much better it works with Prospera instead of Prospero.  Prospera's relationship with Caliban, Miranda, Gonzalo and Ariel ... every relationship makes so much more sense and feels more genuine.  I left the theater thinking to myself that this was, without a doubt, what Shakespeare had intended but unable to stage due to his time and the public's taste. 

It is a shame and a pity The Tempest didn't enjoy a wider release because the public has missed the opportunity to experience the film as Ms. Taymor intended.  On the other hand, I'm absolutely certain The Tempest will survive a very long time as the best way into the play for thousands of English Lit students. 

Overall, I'm not treking to Broadway to see Spiderman as I don't understand the comic book genre, but am quite interested in anything Ms. Taymor touches next. 

Now, if we could just persuade Ms. Taymor to tackle Julius Caesar. 

Wilfrid Sheed, Of Blessed Memory

Today comes word Wilfrid Sheed has passed and when I saw the obituary in today's NY Times, I had to pause because I met Mr. Sheed twenty-eight years ago and then, he impressed me as someone quite infirm.  --Of course I was greatly mistaken. 

I was a Very Young Person, toiling in the Manhattan caverns of book publishing and Mr. Sheed had found at temporary home at my employer, E.P. Dutton.  He had written one of his memoirs, this one about Clare Boothe Luce and how the Great Lady sheltered and nurtured Mr. Sheed.  It's one of those books that reads as if we are listening to someone reminice while we're both comfortably enscounced in the Algonquin's Oak Room on a winter afternoon with just enough sherry. 

The fact that Mr. Sheed was a polio survivor probably influenced how I regarded him, but there was more than that.  Mr. Sheed was a connection to another time and sensibility.  He was a graduate of Lincoln College, Oxford Univeristy and had much, much more in common with Evelyn Waugh and Chesterton than the most popular writer of his own era, John Irving (and that's another story I'll need to type up one day). 

God bless you, Mr. Sheed. 

Joyce Carol Oates: Fanning the Flame to Combustion with Her Wings.

The photo to the left explains the popularity of the Hipstamatic application for the iPhone.  But other than that, it's a photo of Joyce Carol Oates and her beloved husband Raymond Smith from outside their home in Windsor, Ontario in 1970, about nine years after they were married. 

The photograph is from Ms. Oates personal collection and was posted to The New Yorker's website to accompany the publication of Ms. Oates memoir of her husband's death -- and I highly recommend you read the article from the December 13, 2010 issue.

Ms. Oates has a special place in my heart for three reasons. 

1.  Most importantly, she is an amazing writer who has has proven she can write anything, froma Gothic Romance to a study on the sweet science of boxing.  Her writing is lovely and stories always capture my imagination.

2. & 3.  She's ... odd, prolific, and oddly prolific.  I was blessed with the opportunity to cross paths her a couple of times.   My first job in NYC was at E.P.Dutton, one of her publishers.  One publisher was not enough to keep up with her.  While I worked at Dutton, she published two sizable novels, Bellfleur and Angels of Light.  Inbetween, there were the short stories, criticism, novellas and her work on husband Smith's journal,  Actually there was so much work to published, she put two different pen names to work in addition to her own.  Oh, and the poetry.  Oh, and there was her own literary journal, The Ontario Review.  --Oh, and there was the full-time gig at Princeton.  Because she was so busy, and because her audience isn't really susceptible to media hype, Ms. Oates didn't do many interviews, but she did a radio interview while I was there that was organized by one of my bosses, Jean Rawitt.  Ms. Rawitt returned to the office following the interview and the legendary Lois Shapiro, the director of pulicity at Dutton (and latter The Free Press), asked Ms. Rawitt how it went.  Apparently, according to Jean, the interviewer asked Ms. Oates how it was she was able to produce such a prodigious volume of work.  Ms. Oates replied that it wasn't hard at all, she just typed up what the voices in her head had to say.  --And that was the end of the interviews for a while. 

And I admire someone who, in the course of their profession, transcends this grey, slumbering realm and enters into another world that is obviously more alive and vibrant and, of course, imaginative and vivid.  And this is how I usually select my favorite artists.  Can an ordinary human, scuffling around here in the shadows, create art on the order of Moby Dick? The Ring of the Nibelung? Bach's Cello Sonatas?  Leaves of Grass? The second side of Abby Road?  Obviously, I don't think so.  At the very least, these works result from -- at least -- a dialog between the artist and a higher power and, more likely, a visit to this other realm where, like this Prometheus, she steals some fire and, on return to here, some spark survives.  And the artist tends after the ember until she's able to fan it into flame. 

Ms. Oates is a wild and uncontrollable force whose gusts ignites all those tiny sparks she tends to with such loving care.  I've always worried about her because, she's so small, so thin-boned, those gust would snap her or that such flames would consume her.  But, just like the thin-boned bird, her wings carry her above us all.  Amen.

WSJ, 10.9.10: A Fierce Enthusiasm

The Wall Street Journal is doing a great job commemorating Mahler's 150th anniversary.  Most recently the newspaper reviewed what appears to be a marvelous study of why Mahler is important and popular, Why Mahler?: How One Man and Ten Symphonies Changed Our World.  One thing I learned was that Leonard Bernstein was the first to record all of Mahler's symphonies.  Of course, Bernstein recorded the symphonies twice. 

The difference is that Mr. Lebrecht knows not only Mahler's music but a great deal about the composer himself, having published a fine, annotated compilation of reminiscences and documents, "Mahler Remembered" (1987). In "Why Mahler?" readers will find a compelling biographical sketch of Mahler's life, from his seminal student years in Vienna through his burgeoning career as a conductor and, finally, his ever more consuming ambitions as a composer. Mr. Lebrecht stresses Mahler's psychological struggles—he was notably given to fits of despair and arrogant impatience—and his Jewishness, an identity that brought him ambivalent memories, notoriety and opposition, especially during his years as director of the Vienna Opera (1897–1907), when racialist political anti-Semitism was ubiquitous.

Mr. Lebrecht's "search for Mahler" includes a perceptive but devastating portrait of Mahler's widow, the notorious Alma, known for her many husbands (including the architect Walter Gropius and the writer Franz Werfel) and many infidelities. It includes as well an account of the author's conversations with the composer's surviving daughter, the sculptor Anna. Along the way we meet performers and friends of Mr. Lebrecht's, including Gilbert Kaplan, an avid Mahler enthusiast, amateur conductor and the founder of Institutional Investor magazine. Mr. Kaplan has put extensive resources into Mahler advocacy, helping to underwrite the publishing of books on the composer and facsimiles of his scores.  [more]

 

NYTimes, 10/10/10: In Defense of Naïve Reading

I'm a reader.  Sometimes, I write somethings, but mostly, I'm a reader.  On good days, I'm a professional reader, so, I'm very interested in smart articles about reading and I found one today that I'm passing along to you. 

Professor Robert Pippin, University of Chicago, wrote a very fine article, In Defense of Naïve Reading.  Basically, the article compares and contrasts two very different types of reading experiences, that of the casual reader and the experience of the person who's reading very deeply, say, an English major such as myself.  Here are two particularly cogent paragraphs from the article: 

Finally, complicating the situation is the fact that literature study in a university education requires some method of evaluation of whether the student has done well or poorly. Students’ papers must be graded and no faculty member wants to face the inevitable “that’s just your opinion” unarmed, as it were. Learning how to use a research methodology, providing evidence that one has understood and can apply such a method, is understandably an appealing pedagogy.

</snip>

Literature and the arts have a dimension unique in the academy, not shared by the objects studied, or “researched” by our scientific brethren. They invite or invoke, at a kind of “first level,” an aesthetic experience that is by its nature resistant to restatement in more formalized, theoretical or generalizing language. This response can certainly be enriched by knowledge of context and history, but the objects express a first-person or subjective view of human concerns that is falsified if wholly transposed to a more “sideways on” or third person view. Indeed that is in a way the whole point of having the “arts.”  [more]

Of course, the casual reader and the deep reader aren't two different people as much as just two different states of reading a single person may move through depending on the time, material and other circumstances.  While I might "read" the television show, Firefly, differently than my thirteen-year-old daughter, I think we can both enjoy the material with equal measure.

 

 

 

 

 

Call me Ishmael. Writing in Translation.

Michael Cunningham, author of The Hours, wrote an absolutely wonderful article on the Op-Ed page of this past Sunday's New York Times.  It's all about the business of translation, of text and of the idea for a book into the book itself. 

Although the words “Call me Ishmael” have force and confidence, force and confidence alone aren’t enough. “Idiot, read this” has force and confidence too, but is less likely to produce the desired effect. What else do Melville’s words possess that “Idiot, read this” lack?

They have music. Here’s where the job of translation gets more difficult. Language in fiction is made up of equal parts meaning and music. The sentences should have rhythm and cadence, they should engage and delight the inner ear. Ideally, a sentence read aloud, in a foreign language, should still sound like something, even if the listener has no idea what it is he or she is being told.

and this...

A translator is also translating a work in progress, one that has a beginning, middle and end but is not exactly finished, even though it’s being published. A novel, any novel, if it’s any good, is not only a slightly disappointing translation of the novelist’s grandest intentions, it is also the most finished draft he could come up with before he collapsed from exhaustion. It’s all I can do not to go from bookstore to bookstore with a pen, grabbing my books from the shelves, crossing out certain lines I’ve come to regret and inserting better ones. For many of us, there is not what you could call a “definitive text.”

and...

And still. We, as a species, are always looking for cathedrals made of fire, and part of the thrill of reading a great book is the promise of another yet to come, a book that may move us even more deeply, raise us even higher. One of the consolations of writing books is the seemingly unquenchable conviction that the next book will be better, will be bigger and bolder and more comprehensive and truer to the lives we live. We exist in a condition of hope, we love the beauty and truth that come to us, and we do our best to tamp down our doubts and disappointments.  [/more...]

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Malcolm Gladwell's Living Hell.

Honestly, it must be a living hell to be Malcolm Gladwell.  Coiffing the extravagant hair every morning.  Constantly interrupted by the hoi polloi expressing their un-dieing gratitude.  Besieged by book authors.  Gladwell gives readers of The Wall Street Journal a glimpse into one aspect of his wretched life:  Trying to write in coffee houses around the world. 

What of Paris? There are, famously, Les Deux Magots and Café de Flore on the Left Bank. Very early on, while my café philosophy was still a work in progress, I will admit to have written there—amidst the sea of Vassar girls with their Gitane cigarettes and their Thomas Mann. Then I came to my senses and moved on to the much more congenial Chez Prune, just off the Canal Saint Martin in the 10th Arrondisement—only to find a sea of Vassar girls with their Gitane cigarettes and their Thomas Mann. How many Vassar girls are there, anyway? My advice: write in your hotel room.  [link to story]Publish

Yes.  Back to your rooms, ladies.  Those of you from Smith and Barnard can remain.  By the way, where did you get those Gitanes?  They haven't been available in Paris since 2005.  Gladwell's list of cafes includes entries from New York, Zurich, London, the aforementioned Paris and Toronto. 

Terry Teachout Mourns the Popularization of High Culture.

Terry Teachout continues to get my attention and then do the darndest things with it.  In this week's Saturday edition of the Wall Street Journal, he seems to mourn the passing of high culture stepping into popular culture. 

In reviewing the recent New York premiere of "Me, Myself & I," Edward Albee's latest play, I remarked that "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?" is "the only one of Mr. Albee's 30 plays to have made an enduring impression on the general public—indeed, it's possible that 'Virginia Woolf' could be the last American play of any kind to have made such an impression." A number of readers wrote to me about that observation, and their reactions can be boiled down into a one-word reply: Really? So I gave it some additional thought, and the more I thought about it, the more certain I became that I'd inadvertently put my finger on something that is of relevance not just to Mr. Albee's career, but to the increasingly shaky standing of high culture in postmodern America.

<snip>

On the other hand, I'm sure that it can't be good for high culture when none of its practitioners are known outside a tight little circle of connoisseurs. How many Americans discovered live theater a half-century ago because they happened to read about Edward Albee in Life or see him on "The Tonight Show"? And how many of their grandchildren will fail to make such life-changing discoveries because those opportunities have dried up?  [link to article]

On many points, I think Mr. Teachout is right.  (And for those who are following me following Mr. Teachout, this is the exception, not the rule.  Five hundred channels of home improvement and Real Housewives of Wherever has relocated what passes for high culture into a ghetto where Charlie Rose is mayor and presides over a population of just a few.  Honestly, I can remember when A&E was a high-minded concept.  Obviously that was before Dogg and Cris Angel made their debut.  And Bravo too.  And it isn't just television, of course.  Magazine and newspapers and radio keep a very tight focus of celebrities who are celebrities because they are celebrities rather than serve as a contrivance for the delivering the latest titillation jolting our dopamine receptors.  --Yes, it's a pity.  Yes we will endure. 

(Prize to the first one who knows who I'm riffing on in the previous line.)

Because It's an Obession...

There is a rumor that Billy Crudup will appear in a revival of Arcadia that might open in New York early next year.  Crudup appeared in the original Lincoln Center production in 1993 playing Septimus and completely stole my heart as Belinsky in Coast of Utopia. 

Now you know.  We can make a weekend of it and see both Arcadia and the Julie Taymor production of Tempest.  It would be grand I'm sure.  Who's in? 

Where in the World is Walter Benjamin?

Sometimes when I read a book review, it leaves me baffled.  I can't figure out if I don't like the review or I don't like the book.  And this was exactly the case yesterday when i read a lengthy review of What Ever Happened to Modernism? (Gabriel Josipovici) in the Wall Street Journal.  

One of the upsides of this whole economic recession thing is that it's given me the opportunity to fill in some of the blanks of my so-called education.  Modernism is one of these areas I've only recently checked off my list.  (Watch out, Symbolism, you're next!)  I've developed an appreciation and respect.  So, when I spied the review in the Wall Street Journal yesterday, I thought it would be a great way to test myself. 

Then there was the matter of the author.  Josipovici is the author of the excellent Goldberg Variations, a "modern" novel that springs from Josipovici's textual interpretation of Bach's famous composition.  Anyhoo...

So I can't tell if it was Josipovici or the reviewer, Eric Ormsby, but someone neglected to mention Walter Benjamin, the fellow who coined the term Modernism.  This was hard fought intellectual ground for me, so i want to defend it. 

What is clear from the review is that Josipovici take a broad view of Modernism and dives into Cervantes and Rabelais.  The way Mr. Ormsby explains Mr. Josipovici's argument, this can make sense, but I wouldn't want to defend it myself.  My puny understanding of the material, however, shouldn't dissuade you from at least reading the review.  Myself? I'll be reading more source material before I climb up to (or is that descend unto) the criticism. 

Banned Books: What You Need to Know.

View Book Bans and Challenges, 2007-2010 in a larger map.  The map is drawn from cases documented by ALA and the Kids' Right to Read Project.

September 25 through October 2, 2010 is Banned Book Week.  I'm going to resist posting a list of books that have been banned for various, sundry and ridiculous reasons because it's too easy and much overdone.  Hey, some of the books I wouldn't have in my library or buy for my two kids, but that's no reason for censorship. 

Instead, I submit for your approval a lovely map charting which books were banned where.  I was disappointed to see geographical clusters on both the Left and Right Coasts, but then I realized, book banning isn't a function of metropolitan life or rural life.  Instead, we see that, where there are people, there are people willing to ban books. --C'est dommage.  C'est tres dommage. 

 

Big Day for Jane Austin Fan Club.

It's probably a fatal admission of English major geek-a-tude, but my pulse quickened when I discovered Oxford's Bodleian Library and King's College London have collaborated to post some of Jane Austin's original manuscripts.  For me, it is tantamount to resting my fingertips on the keys of Hunter S. Thompson's IBM Selectric typewriter, if he hadn't blasted it with a twelve-gauge. 

No, really.

It's a fascinating collection and well produced.  If one wants to see a writer hard at work, then no better example can be found than taking a look at the opening of chapter ten of Persuasion.  Ms. Austin scarsely left a single word on that page untouched. 

Included in the collection is an especially delicious item:  the outlines for Mansfield Park and Emma. 

So, in these small years of the twenty-first century, I'm rather inured by the hustle and bustle of the internets but, every now and then, I can just about make out some measure of merit there.  Today is one of those days. 

The Plot Escapes Me: Adventures in Reading.

Thought you might enjoy this essay from last Sunday's NYTBR.  So much of the essay resonates with my own experience. 

One answer is that we read for the aesthetic and literary pleasure we experience while reading. The pleasure — or intended pleasure — of novels is obvious, but it is no less true that we read nonfiction for the immediate satisfaction it provides. The acquisition of knowledge, while you are acquiring it, can be intensely engrossing and stimulating, and a well-constructed argument is a beautiful thing. But that kind of pleasure is transient. When we read a serious book, we want to learn something, we want it to change us, and it hardly seems possible for that to happen if its fugitive content passes through us like light through glass. ...

Still, reading is different from life, and writing is different from those other art forms. Indeed, reading’s great distinction may be that it is not an experience to be experienced only as an experience (otherwise, poets wouldn’t have to sweat so hard to make their poems a performance rather than discourse). A book, even a novel, contains information, in the strictest sense, and the most obvious purpose of reading a book is to acquire that information for oneself. And unlike a catch-and-release fisherman, when I acquire that information, I want to keep it.  [more]

...

 

What a Coincidence! David Edelstein and A.O. Scott Find the Same Thing "Oxymoronic"

Oxymoronic.  How often do you hear that word in an eight-hour period?  Let me explain why that's the pertinent question this morning.

First I'll tell you what you already know: I have aggressive media consumption habits.  I tear through media like Henry VIII at a banquet.  My family believes it's an awesome and frightening habit. 

Second, at that banquet, i always make room for The New York Times and lots of airtime from National Public Radio and from NPR, I usually catch the program Fresh Air.

So, yesterday, while tearing through the Times, I came across A.O. Scott's review of the new George Clooney movie, The American and read this paragraph:

In addition to the priest, he befriends Clara, a prostitute — played by an actress with the splendidly oxymoronic name Violante Placido — who is so stirred by his bedroom prowess that she stops charging him and asks him out for dinner instead. (Some guys get all the breaks.) Meanwhile his business dealings with his client carry a sexual undercurrent that the American may or may not notice.  [entire review]

i noticed the use of the word "oxymoronic" because it was well played and not a word I read in the media on a regular basis.  --Until yesterday.

David Edelstein reviews movies for the NPR program Fresh Air and it wasn't a surprise to hear him queue up a review of The American because the movie was just released and that's how the media works.  What was a surprise was when he spoke this paragraph:

As in "Up in the Air," Jack does make a new friend, Clara, a prostitute played by the oxymoronically named Violante Placido. I wondered why she was so familiar, with her soft, open face and voluptuous body. It turns out she's the daughter of Simonetta Stefanelli, unforgettable as Michael Corleone's doomed Sicilian bride in "The Godfather."  [entire review]

I don't think the reviewers "borrowed" from each other.  Both David Edelstein and, especially, A.O. Scott are "made men" who don't have to struggle towards the top anymore.  Rather, i think that, just like when the lights are out, the room is "dark," if a character has the name Violante Placido, the name is oxymoronic.  Both reviewers noticed it and both called it out and neither could find a better word to describe it than oxymoronic. 

Interesting.

WSJ: Joyce and Carter and Maybe Even Pollack Are Too Smart.

Above, we see a picture of James Joyce and the person responsible for James Joyce being the literary legend we know today, Ms. Sylvia Beach of the bookstore / publisher, Shakespeare & Company in Paris, published Mr. Joyce and for that the world owes her an everlasting debt of gratitude.  But that isn't the point I want to make.

What brings me back to the blog is an article by Mr. Terry Teachout appearing in the June 26, 2010 issue of The Wall Street Journal.  Mr. Teachout, who I've bloged about before here, came across an academic paper that sparked an idea for Mr. Teachout's column about how Modern music, literature and other arts might be too complicated for us to understand.  Observe:

Are certain kinds of modern art too complex for anybody to understand? Fred Lerdahl thinks so, at least as far as his chosen art form is concerned. In 1988 Mr. Lerdahl, who teaches musical composition at Columbia University, published a paper called "Cognitive Constraints on Compositional Systems," in which he argued that the hypercomplex music of atonal composers like Messrs. Boulez and Carter betrays "a huge gap between compositional system and cognized result." He distinguishes between pieces of modern music that are "complex" but intelligible and others that are excessively "complicated"—containing too many "non-redundant events per unit [of] time" for the brain to process. "Much contemporary music," he says, "pursues complicatedness as compensation for a lack of complexity."

"You have turned your back on common men, on their elementary needs and their restricted time and intelligence," H.G. Wells complained to Joyce after reading "Finnegans Wake." That didn't faze him. "The demand that I make of my reader," Joyce said, "is that he should devote his whole life to reading my works." To which the obvious retort is: Life's too short.

I've been thinking, a lot, about Modernism lately and I'm starting to put these ideas down on paper.  But for the time being, I want to write here that maybe it's still too soon to judge the lasting merits of Finnegans Wake or Eliot Carter.  Perhaps.  But part and parcel of that notion is that it's probably far too soon to summarily dismiss them.

Oh, and here's a link to the paper Mr. Teachout cites, Cognitive Constraints on Compositional Systems.

NYRB: David Foster Wallace on Television and Writing.

As for me, I've read The Broom of the System, and either I'm not smart enough to understand it or ... whatever.  Bethatasitmay, I love the idea of David Foster Wallace, the enormously gifted and tragic writer who love writing and reading.  So I was catching up on the July 15, 2010 of The New York Review of Books and was enjoying Wyatt Mason's review of David Lipsky's book, Although Of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself.  In the review, I cam across this: 

You teach the reader that he’s way smarter than he thought he was. I think one of the insidious lessons about TV is the meta-lesson that you’re dumb. This is all you can do. This is easy, and you’re the sort of person who really just wants to sit in a chair and have it easy. When in fact there are parts of us…that are a lot more ambitious than that. And what we need, I think—and I’m not saying I’m the person to do it…is serious engaged art, that can teach again that we’re smart.

and then this...

The old tricks have been exploded, and I think the language needs to find new ways to pull the reader…. A lot of it has to do with voice, and a feeling of intimacy between the writer and the reader…. Given the atomization and loneliness of contemporary life—that’s our opening.

Now I need to consider taking a run at Infinite Jest.  

Sir Tom Leading t/ Charge Against Increase in Library Fees.

I'm a member of one of the oldest private libraries in United States, The Mechanics' Institute Library and Chess Club in San Francisco. Besides being a very nice library and an outstanding chess club, it's a terrific place to work and meet with people when I'm in San Francisco. 

I just discovered that Sir Tom Stoppard is president of The London Library, founded in 1841 and home to Charles Dickens, George Eliot, Tennyson, Rudyard Kipling, T. S. Eliot, Rebecca West and Isaiah Berlin.  

I can't find out how much the London Library charges for membership but, according to the story in the Telegraph, the rise in membership is set at thirteen percent.  

Now, I'm obsessed about getting back to London and spending a day at the library.  And if you aren't of the same mind, then I suggest you watch the video I've embedded below.  

The London Library from Jeremy Riggall on Vimeo.

Jumpers: A Life Changing Experience.

In 1977 I sat down in a small theater on the campus of the University of Missouri - Columbia, watched the play Jumpers and was changed for life.

This was just five years after the play opened at the Old Vic with Diana Rigg in the leading role and a mere three years after the play opened on Broadway at the Billy Rose Theater. 

Somewhere in the dark, middle of the U.S., I sat in the theater and was transfixed.  This was, by far, the smartest thing I ever experienced.  It was a perfect melange of the smartest things from history.  For example:

It was precisely this notion of infinite series which in the sixth century BC led the Greek philosopher Zeno to conclude that since an arrow shot towards a target first had to cover half the distance, and then half the remainder, and then half the remainder after that, and so on ad infinitum, the result was, as I will now demonstrate, that though an arrow is always approaching its target, it never quite gets there, and Saint Sebastian died of fright. 

It’s not the voting that’s democracy, it’s the counting.

How the hell do I know what I find incredible? Credibility is an expanding field... Sheer disbelief hardly registers on the face before the head is nodding with all the wisdom of instant hindsight.

Language is a finite instrument crudely applied to an infinity of ideas, and one consequence of the failure to take account of this is that modern philosophy has made itself ridiculous by analysing such statements as, "This is a good bacon sandwich," or, "Bedser had a good wicket."

To the Barricade: Stoppard Takes to the Street.

The Charter 97 website brings us news that that Sir Tom and cohorts have taken to the streets to protest against censorship in Belarus.  Observe:

Britain’s theatre community comes out against oppression and censorship in the “last dictatorship of Europe”.

Sir Tom Stoppard and actor/director Sam West Has led a protest of high-profile theatre practitioners outside the Belarussian Embassy at 6 Kensington Court, London, W8 5DL on Thursday 1st July at 11.30am.

They presented an open letter to President Alyaksander Lukashenko of Belarus calling for greater democratic freedom and for an end to censorship of the Internet. Other signatories include Mark Ravenhill, Howard Brenton, Alan Rickman, Laura Wade, Caryl Churchill, Henry Goodman, Henry Porter, Simon McBurney, Simon Stephens and Lyndsey Turner.

“We urge you to allow the people of Belarus the right to express and share their opinions freely, whether this is on the internet or not. We urge you to use your powers to prevent any further repression of citizens who hold alternative, and oppositional, beliefs to you. We urge that the practice of physical abuse and intimidation against any citizen, including those who dare to hold alternative and oppositional points of view, be stopped. Finally, we urge you to protect the right to freedom of assembly in accordance with Article 21 of the International Covenant of Civil and Political Rights to which Belarus is a state party,” – the letter says.  [more]

Sir Tom has worked very hard on human rights issues and this is but another example of his great work. 

The Last of the Bright Young Things, Teresa Jungman.

I came to Evenlyn Waugh late, the year after I left school.  What's worse is that I read the serious stuff first, Brideshead Revisited and then the Sword of Honour trilogy.  It was only during another trip to England and Scotland that I picked up some lovely paperback editions of Decline and Fall, Vile Bodies and Scoop Suffice it to say that I I scarcely had a chance to catch my breath from laughing so hard.  

So I was surprised and saddened when I read the obituaries of Ms. Teresa Jungman.  Ms. Jungman, better known as "Baby," has been mentioned as the model for Lady Julia Flyte but is probably more closely related to some of the lovely and energetic well-born ladies from Waugh's earlier works.  Wagh was so taken with Ms. Jungman he proposed to her, repeatedly.  It ws probably for the best the Ms. Jungman turned him down as she would have had an enervating effect on Mr. Waugh.  --I can't quite see Mr. Waugh enjoying those long, quite days that were necessary for his prolific production. 

Another age finally draws to a close.  I didn't know Ms. Jungman was still alive.  And now I find myself mourning her passing. 

Here are a sample of the obituaries:

The Sunday TimesThe Telegraph

The Telegraph

Tony Judt on "Words."

Because you've been paying attention, you've been keeping up with Tony Judt's installments of his autobiography.  But in case you haven't seen the latest issue of The New York Review of Books, then you need to know what Mr. Judt has to write about words.  Consider this:

Forty years on from the 1960s, there are not many instructors left with the self-confidence (or the training) to pounce on infelicitous expression and explain clearly just why it inhibits intelligent reflection. The revolution of my generation played an important role in this unraveling: the priority accorded the autonomous individual in every sphere of life should not be underestimated—"doing your own thing" took protean form.

Today "natural" expression—in language as in art—is preferred to artifice. We unreflectively suppose that truth no less than beauty is conveyed more effectively thereby. Alexander Pope knew better.1 For many centuries in the Western tradition, how well you expressed a position corresponded closely to the credibility of your argument. Rhetorical styles might vary from the spartan to the baroque, but style itself was never a matter of indifference. And "style" was not just a well-turned sentence: poor expression belied poor thought. Confused words suggested confused ideas at best, dissimulation at worst. [more]

Overall, Mr. Judt has written an excellent series and, specifically, this essay is highly recommended. 

A Shot at "To Kill a Mockingbird"

I'm not sure what one receives in return for attacking a beloved work of American fiction, but then I'm not Allen Barra, author of a recent article in The Wall Street Journal, who has some rather unpleasant things to express about To Kill a Mockingbird.  For example:

In all great novels there is some quality of moral ambiguity, some potentially controversial element that keeps the book from being easily grasped or explained. One hundred years from now, critics will still be arguing about the real nature of the relationship between Tom and Huck, or why Gatsby gazed at that green light at the end of the dock across the harbor. There is no ambiguity in "To Kill a Mockingbird"; at the end of the book, we know exactly what we knew at the beginning: that Atticus Finch is a good man, that Tom Robinson was an innocent victim of racism, and that lynching is bad. As Thomas Mallon wrote in a 2006 story in The New Yorker, the book acts as "an ungainsayable endorser of the obvious."

It's time to stop pretending that "To Kill a Mockingbird" is some kind of timeless classic that ranks with the great works of American literature. Its bloodless liberal humanism is sadly dated, as pristinely preserved in its pages as the dinosaur DNA in "Jurassic Park."

Harper Lee's contemporary and fellow Southerner Flannery O'Connor (and a far worthier subject for high-school reading lists) once made a killing observation about "To Kill a Mockingbird": "It's interesting that all the folks that are buying it don't know they are reading a children's book."

Fifty years later, we can concede both that Harper Lee's novel inspired a generation of adolescents and that Flannery O'Connor was right.  [more]

Well that's certainly harsh.  I'm not ready to wage an argument with Mr. Barra, but I do wish he wasn't so harsh about a book that most of America has read.

Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose

Somehow I don't think Mr. Jobs would approve.

It has come to light that the iPad comic book version of James Joyce's Ulysses has been redacted by Apple.  In all fairness, dear reader, we are not talking about the version that was banned in Boston some seventy-five years ago.  It's just a comic book and the whole story reeks of irony doesn't it? 

The work in question is Ulysses Seen which is amply explained and promoted here.  Let's hope that by the time Stephane Heuet's comic of Proust is available, it won't run into similar difficulties.  

Cognitive Surplus, Clay Shirky: What to read next

About a million years ago, when the internet was navigated with command line and one had to know what to do when confronted with "$" on the VT200 emulator, I joined a merry band of folks on a NYC community call Panix, still to this day, a high-quality, high-value vista on the internet superhighway.  Right away, I knew I was lost and needed help.  The Panix community was populated with Very Busy and Very Talented people, some of whom were happy to lend a hand to us hopeless newbies and clays was particuarly patient and helpful.  I came to learn that clays was the nom du net for Mr. Shirky who would become famous far beyond the Panix neighborhood. 

clays grew up and did a lot of good consulting work for, among others, Nokia, the BBC, Newscorp, Microsoft, BP, Global Business Network, the Library of Congress, the U.S. Navy, the Libyan government, and Lego.  Because he's a pretty good writer too, he's been published in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Times, Harvard Business Review and Wired.  He has a great perch at the Interactive Telecommunications Program at New York University where Stacey Horn of EchoNYC     (another pioneer) has taught. 

Anyway, clays has already written a great book, Here Comes Everybody,  but his new book, Cognitive Surplus, looks to be even better.  Here's an extract from the flap copy:

Since we Americans were suburbanized and educated by the postwar boom, we've had a surfeit of intellect, energy, and time-what Shirky calls a cognitive surplus. But this abundance had little impact on the common good because television consumed the lion's share of it-and we consume TV passively, in isolation from one another. Now, for the first time, people are embracing new media that allow us to pool our efforts at vanishingly low cost. The results of this aggregated effort range from mind expanding-reference tools like Wikipedia-to lifesaving-such as Ushahidi.com, which has allowed Kenyans to sidestep government censorship and report on acts of violence in real time.

Shirky argues persuasively that this cognitive surplus-rather than being some strange new departure from normal behavior-actually returns our society to forms of collaboration that were natural to us up through the early twentieth century. He also charts the vast effects that our cognitive surplus-aided by new technologies-will have on twenty-first-century society, and how we can best exploit those effects. Shirky envisions an era of lower creative quality on average but greater innovation, an increase in transparency in all areas of society, and a dramatic rise in productivity that will transform our civilization.

The potential impact of cognitive surplus is enormous. As Shirky points out, Wikipedia was built out of roughly 1 percent of the man-hours that Americans spend watching TV every year. Wikipedia and other current products of cognitive surplus are only the iceberg's tip. Shirky shows how society and our daily lives will be improved dramatically as we learn to exploit our goodwill and free time like never before.

Okay, I'm hooked.  Can't wait.       

NYTimes, 4.19.10: Ex-Pat Paris as It Sizzled for One Literary Lioness

From today's NYTimes, a wonderful review of a new book, The Letters of Sylvia Beach.  Ms. Beach is the probably one of the most important figure in what we've come to call Modern Literature and, perhaps most famously, published James Joyce's Ulysses.  This was her "crowd"

Joyce, Stein, Pound Hemingway Fitzgerald and H.D. and many others. 

Beach was an unlikely champion of literary modernism. The daughter of a Presbyterian minister, she was the second of three daughters and grew up in Bridgeton and Princeton, N.J. She didn’t attend college but saw the world, working during World War I as a volunteer agricultural laborer in France and then as a Red Cross volunteer in Serbia. She was plucky. One letter home from Belgrade describes a springlike day ruined by the “bomby” air.

She was a bibliophile from an early age and debated opening a bookstore in New York or London. But in Paris she met and fell in love with a bookstore owner, Adrienne Monnier, who would become, Ms. Walsh writes in her introduction, “her lifelong personal and professional partner.” (This book’s dust jacket speaks of these women’s complicated “affair,” an odd phrase for a decades-long relationship. That phrase also goes farther than Beach does; she was reserved about her sexuality, and these letters are quite chaste.)

[more]