some songs

I just posted five songs that I’ve written. None of them are particularly new; one or two are actually lyrically dated, referring to the Bush Administration. If you own a record label, let’s talk!

Four notes for a new decade in book criticism

Critical Mass, the house blog of the National Book Critics Circle, has been running a series of guest posts on “The Next Decade in Book Culture.” I highly recommend reading a few.

Here are some notes I’ve jotted down towards an essay on that topic. Who knows if I’ll ever write it. Feedback and other thoughts are welcome:

1)An old truth that we’d somehow managed to ignore– that no one is capable of being an expert on the entire mass of literature, or even any subgenre of it– has, with the explosion of online text and pdf, become unavoidable. In a nice reversal, younger generations will increasingly view critics who claim expert status as idiots, precisely on account of those claims. No amount of wit and snark will obscure this. Own up to your own limited reading, and just tell us about the couple of laps you’ve taken in the “great gray sea” of culture.

2)The internet-age need for faster response time increasingly privileges knee-jerk criticism, quick reads, incomplete digestion. This of course runs counter to the role that books have served since the rise of the newspaper. Music and art criticism can run at blogspeed, perhaps, but not book criticism. Either we must strain to create profound styles in the shallows of same-day culture, or book criticism will have to move away from the organs of “news” and back to a self-consciously patient medium like the book or archive.

3) The books we write about are in similar straits. For instance, we’re just now getting a look at what the best New York writers were capable of doing with 9/11, eight years later. For reasons related to point #1, above, we should distrust any essays that presume a universal knowledge of a generation’s literature while only offering a few selected examples (see Roiphe, K.) This is especially true when the essayist is trying to hurry to judgement about the current generation.

4) Computers are good at reorganizing information. For instance, if I like an amateur book review on Goodreads, I can, with the click of a button, check whether that reviewer has rated any of the same books I’ve reviewed. The holy grail for companies like Amazon and Apple is a perfected “If you loved ___, you may like ___” recommendation tool. This data will provide a lot of great material for critics. But many readers, myself included, don’t always want to read the sorts of books we know we’d like. We’re attracted to certain books because they seem to have taken on a life of their own in the culture. Often, good criticism is the breath of that life.

Support authors, publishers: steal from Barnes & Noble

The Millions (blog) interviews a real-life book pirate. This has got to be frightening to a lot of people. I have conflicted feelings, because pirates are probably the good guys here, in terms of making books more accessible to people, and this one in particularly sounds like a very solid guy. But I might be biased, as most of my heroes have always been pirates. (i.e., e.g., etc.)

This would not be an issue if the pirates in question would just sack up and steal hard-copy books from big chain bookstores. Did you know that publishers actually have to buy back all the books that bookstores can’t sell? So when you steal a book from Barnes & Noble, that makes one less book that the publisher has to buy back. B&N has already paid for it, so the publisher and the author both get paid. You’re stealing entirely from the chain store behemoth that has shuttered so many independent bookstores.

(Just don’t steal out-of-print books or older titles that the store might choose not to reorder– buy those from an independent seller instead. The refined book pirate will seek out new releases and perennially popular titles.)

Aargh.

Aww, wook at the cute widdle wecwusive writer

If you can’t make out the blurry cell phone pic, it reads “Torston Krol’s extended biography:  Torston Krol is the author of Callisto, which Kirkus Reviews called “the best portrayal of an American Innocent since Forrest Gump. Nothing further is known about him. [leafy literary wingding.]“

They actually put this in the back of the paperback version of his novel, The Dolphin People. Congratulations, marketing genius, you just convinced me never to read this guy’s books. If you’d like to dissuade me, do so in the comments.

Jonathan Lethem is all out of bubblegum

And his next book is gonna be about They Live.

This whole interview is pretty good, especially if you liked Chronic City as much as I did.

The Western canon and me

So on Wednesday morning I was greeted with some awesome news: I’d won a short story award run by the University of Louisville. The administrator who called me told me the prize amount, which I’d forgotten, and the fact that I’d also be invited to give a reading at a literature conference in Louisville, which is sort of neat I guess. But without him having to tell me, I immediately remembered the reason why I’d entered this one out of hundreds of high-entry-fee, low-likelihood-of-winning short story contests. This one was judged by Harold Bloom.

Probably you know who Harold Bloom is. If not, here’s a taste. My favorite excerpt:

Oh, but hey, what about James Wood? I’m sort of kidding, of course.

Oh, don’t even mention him. He doesn’t exist. He just does not exist at all.

I thought his last book was fun to read because he gets so enthusiastic about things, but yeah, I don’t really understand the phenomenon of him on the whole.

My dear, phenomena are always being bubbled up. There are period pieces in criticism as there are period pieces in the novel and in poetry. The wind blows and they will go away.

His last book seemed to be a period piece at least in terms of its cover design. It looked like a textbook from the 30s or 40s. It was kind of cute.

A publisher wanted to send me the book and I said, “Please don’t.”

Of course he was a bit less snarky (though no less passionate) before he got old and sick and realized that he could say whatever the hell he wanted.

Anyway, for a day and a half I was walking around on a cloud, thinking that Bloom had personally chosen me for inclusion in the canon. Then last night I checked the UL website, just to make sure it hadn’t been a prank call, and got an unwelcome comedown:

Due to an unforeseen illness, Harold Bloom was unable to serve as final judge for this year’s Calvino contest.  As a result, the Calvino Committee has chosen the winner and runner up.

Oh, well. Good thing I only told my mom and my girlfriend… but something tells me that my mom told at least a few people. (Erin doesn’t share my adulation of Bloom, not exactly.)

I don’t know the people on the prize committee, and there’s actually a good chance that my tastes are more similar to theirs than to Bloom’s– after all, I’d rather curl up with a book by Calvino than 90% of the books on Bloom’s canon list. But clearly my ego has sustained injuries from this fall. I soothe my resentment with the healing oils of relativism– I’m a product of my Great Books college education, raised to aspire to inclusion in some hazily selected Skull and Bones society of literary history, doomed to seek the approval of old critics whom I’ve never met and don’t agree with, rather than that of my community or my own orthogonally delineated muse. But who am I kidding. It would have been nice.

My one solace: at least I didn’t have to figure out how to write a post about winning a contest AND being chosen by Harold Bloom. It would have been hard to find an angle so that I didn’t seem like I was bragging.

James Cameron hates your way of life (rant)

I’ve just read the first of what I expect will be a fascinating run of articles reporting on Avatar’s impact in the post-colonial world. In China, the dominant reading casts the Chinese state as the humans and the people dispossessed by Three Gorges-like eminent domain projects as the Na’avi. How will it be read in India? Pakistan? Africa? Bolivia?

Watching the movie last weekend, I was blown away on a number of levels. The cinematography, palette, “set” design, computer graphics, whatever– it was all very impressive. As for story and script, I might not like everything about it, but I don’t doubt that James Cameron succeeded by his own standards. (These just so happen to be about the same as the standards of the market, which will reward him well.)

*SPOILER BELOW*

My appreciation began to waver around the end of the second act, when it became clear that Sully would successfully go native, that Avatar would end up as just another us v. them cowboy/Indian movie with no postmodern revisions except for (thanks, technology!) the fortunate new option of identifying with– and actually becoming one of– the noble Indians. The movie that I‘d been hoping for (a sci-fi parable where the hero must negotiate between two selves, one engaged with and deeply respectful of the colonized culture, the other sick to death just from breathing their air) flamed out with the first wave of machine-gun fire. A complex situation was simplified so that we could get our war on in the third act. And the film lost sight of the real-world situation that each of us enters on a daily basis– the threefold attempt to respectfully engage with other cultures, hold true to some universal, perhaps human-rights-based ethical guidelines, and at the same time not lose sight of our own roots.

Maybe that’s too complicated for Hollywood. But the scary thing is, it’s also too complicated for politicians, and generals, and suicide bombers. In fact, I’d point to our (cross-cultural) failure to wrap our minds around that complexity as the root of the great tragedies and disappointments of the past decade or so. And recent events, from Copenhagen to the underwear bomb, suggest that this decade will be no better than the last.

Film, I think, is actually the sort of democratic medium that could help us as a planet overcome this sort of failure of the imagination. But film can also, of course, reinforce our mental blocks. The sad thing is, I think James Cameron was capable of going either way with this. He could have figured out an action-packed third act that didn’t do away with the protagonist’s inner conflict, for instance. And going the wrong way  probably only upped his profits a few percentage points.

In the end, Avatar is clash-of-civilizations porn of the most insidious kind. Too bad it’s completely beautiful. And too too bad they cut out the money shot.

Pretty solid response to Roiphe the tarmac-gazer

From the Rumpus, in response to the same essay I posted about a couple days ago:

What’s stranger to me is that she never thinks to ask the basic question: why? Why are these white boy writers she’s handpicked for their erotic timidity not flogging the joy knob the like the white boy writers of yore?

Actually, that’s not fair. She does have a theory. It has to do with their castrating collegiate girlfriends, who have them pussywhipped.

Right.

But wouldn’t a cultural critic writing a think piece for the NYTBR want to consider something a little less, uh, conjectural. Such as the role of sex itself in the culture at large? Might it be worth observing that, in the days of Updike and Roth, a certain brand of sexual candor still felt taboo, whereas today lesbian bondage and interracial blowjobs are pretty much a standard marketing tool for most Fortune 500 companies?

Roiphe – who has spent her career writing about sexual mores, as far as I can tell – seems unable, or unwilling, to entertain the notion that certain writers may be reacting to the broader pornofication of our discourse, the ubiquitous vulgarity, the way in which sex is immediately received as a public pitch, not a private activity.

This is interesting! (The rest of the article is scattered potshots.)

I guess the conventional wisdom I’ve personally received on this subject, whether from my peers or from older writers who lived through the Updike/Roth era, is that “good sex” scenes in which the male protagonist comports himself as a hero are somehow boring. Not to say that I fully agree. I’d argue that “bad sex” scenes, more than asexual or timid sex scenes, are the cliche of younger, Gen-X-ish fiction writers.

I don’t think there’s much chance Roiphe’s article will lead to a very productive discussion. Her method– choosing two or three scenes from novels and holding them up as representative of an entire generation– is flawed and too easily replicated by other poor debaters with different points of view. Maybe the best we’ll get out of it is a guide to a few (possibly) generationally-significant sex scenes from the last fifty years.

Five best movies of the decade

I just saw Up In the Air. It’s ridiculously overrated. To focus on positives, I’ve prepared this list.

I’m going for passion and totally subjective sentimentality here– for a film to make it, at some point in the decade I had think that maybe it was my favorite movie ever.

No explanations, but good reasons follow each title:

The Royal Tenenbaums

City of God

Donnie Darko

2046

Synecdoche, NY

Synecdoche, NY is my favorite film of the decade. If you require an explanation, here you go:

Kaufman has made the most perceptive film I can recall about how we live in the world.

An actual concluding sentence

From an actual essay in the New York Times Book Review. (By Katie Roiphe, comparing the sex scenes of Updike and Roth to those of younger novelists like Jonathan Franzen and D.F. Wallace.)

Why don’t we look at these older writers, who want to defeat death with sex, with the same fondness as we do the inventors of the first, failed airplanes, who stood on the tarmac with their unwieldy, impossible machines, and looked up at the sky?

Yup, it’s just that the baby boomers didn’t account for drag.