July 23, 2010 This Week’s Reading Staff Picks: Harvey Pekar, Henry Luce, Lost Critics By The Paris Review What we’ve been reading this week. I was keen to catch a glimpse of what is being called the “last comic” of Harvey Pekar, which is a collaboration with Tara Seibel, a Cleveland cartoonist and graphic designer. Seibel’s story of her final moment with Pekar is comforting in its ordinariness: she dropped him off at the public library, where he had parked his car. —Thessaly La Force Jackson Lears’ marvelous review of Alan Brinkley’s less-marvelous dual biography of Henry Luce and Time, Inc. The book has been a strange mirror for reviewers: when The New Yorker handled the book, it did so as a shadow portrait of Eustace Tilley; when The New York Times did, it became a book about the challenges facing newspapermen in the digital era. But Lears sees something bigger than himself reflected in the story of Luce and his mid-century behemoth. “Few men have more fully embodied the tense alliance between the Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism,” he writes. “He preached a civil religion for an emerging affluent society.” —David Wallace-Wells It’s douche bag, not douchebag, according to a former New York Magazine copy editor. But my favorite testimony from the trenches is still this Q&A with The New Yorker‘s Mary Norris. Some tidbits: she will always regret making Oliver Sacks spell sulfur the American way (instead of sulpher); there’s a staff writer who consistently spells annihilate with one “n”; and even the best are confused by the difference between “lie” and “lay.” —T. L. Also, the ever-serious Jeffrey Rosen on the punishing frivolity of life on the Internet; theologian David B. Hart on theologician Marilynne Robinson; and a charming Esquire feature on gamesmanship and The Price Is Right. —D. W. W. For my sins I’ve been reading Seymour Krim’s 1970 collection Shake it for the World. Krim was what used to be called an “underground” critic. He wrote for the Voice and the New American Review; I read him to remember how dead that world is now. Half this collection is a sustained rant against James Jones and Norman Mailer (“… now this hip young literary snatch was carrying on about Barbary Shore in a way that would have offended Mailer himself. I lost my trick of the evening because of the stone I turned to after this Mailer-infected preacherette thrust him at me like the sacrament . . . ” etc., etc., etc.) Nowadays I suppose he’d be a blogger, like the rest of us. Every once in a while, though, Krim gets off a zinger. For instance when the New Yorker theater critic John McCarten calls Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf “a vulgar mishmash.” Writes Krim: “What Irishman is kidding what Jew?” One misses that kind of thing, a little. —Lorin Stein
July 23, 2010 Ask The Paris Review Stuck in Bed, Appropriate Irony By Lorin Stein I read a Richard Yates novel. And I’m fucking depressed. Like wow, what a downer. Give me something to cheer me up. —Jeff Swift Like, you can’t get out of bed? Get someone to bring you the Jeeves novels of P.G. Wodehouse. They are extra-strength heartening. Emergency use only. For a mild case of the blues, may I suggest either of Sam Lipsyte’s last two novels, Home Land or The Ask? Some reviewers call them depressing, but they’re not. They master depression. And they take place on Yatesian territory—the suburbs of failure. Yet they are full of Olympian laughter. Some people swear by Laurie Colwin. Try Happy All the Time. Or Consenting Adults, by Peter de Vries. If nothing else works . . . I’m not sure how to recommend this, but are you familiar with I Am a Bunny? I have come this close to stealing that book from two separate babies, during two different dark nights of the soul. If you ask me, the consolations offered by I Am a Bunny are wasted on the extremely young. Read More
July 22, 2010 On Television Where Are the Darias? By Marisa Meltzer Daria, the MTV nineties-era animated sitcom, was not the first show to tell the high-school experience from the point of view of the outcast. It just happened to be the most emboldening. In Daria Morgendorffer, adolescent girls (and fans of any gender or age) could use an outsider unafraid to be herself. Today, that archetype hardly seems to exist. Daria dwells near the bottom of the caste system—somewhere between the geeks and art kids—at her suburban school. With her round glasses, sarcastic monotone, and chunky black boots, she is equally disaffected and defensive—an outsider who’s smarter than most everyone in her town. In the pilot episode, she quips, “I don’t have low self-esteem, I have low esteem for everyone else.” Of her peers, she explains: “I’m not miserable, I’m just not like them.” Her lack of pep makes her an outcast not only at school, but at home, where she’s the black sheep to Quinn, her younger, more attractive, and socially ambitious sister. But Daria is no loser; she stands up for herself, doesn’t care about the social hierarchy, and has no trouble speaking her mind or talking back. She has a sidekick and confidant—Jane Lane—and while Jane’s brother Trent is something of a crush for Daria, boys are far from the main topic of their conversations. Daria’s character originally appeared as a foil to the characters on Beavis and Butthead. In the extra features of the DVD, Glenn Eichler, the executive producer (who’s now at The Colbert Report), said that “MTV was looking for a show that would appeal to its female viewership.” After all, this was the bikini and booty-shaking Spring Break era of MTV, and as another writer mentions, the network wanted a show that would make girls appear smart. The creators of Daria cast around, looking at other teen characters on television—Darlene Conner from Roseanne, Angela Chase from My So-Called Life—and noticed something: teen girls were portrayed as fully realized people, and not mini-adults. So where did all the Darias go? Eight years after the show went off the air, the super-smart, dry, withering, righteously angry girls are largely absent from pop culture. For every sassy adolescent as played by Juno’s Ellen Page, our current teen cultural landscape is clogged with heroines whose principal interests, as on Gossip Girl, are status and men. It’s a transition that happened gradually from the late nineties to the present: There was the dry-humored Buffy the Vampire Slayer, the earnest clique on Dawson’s Creek, Mean Girls, the teen magazines that brazenly suggested $400 APC wedges for fifteen year-olds, the endless YA series that read like junior versions of Danielle Steel novels. Read More
July 21, 2010 Arts & Culture Reading Raritan By Robyn Creswell Richard Poirier taught English at Rutgers for some forty years (he died last summer), and he often argued that teaching students how to read, as distinct from teaching them how to be good citizens, or political activists, is the only thing literature professors are really good for, or qualified to do. In an essay he wrote in 1970, he suggested that “literary study can…be made relevant to life not as a mere supplier of images or visions, but as an activity; it can create capacities through exercise with the language of literature that can then be applied to the language of politics and power, the language of daily life.” To place literary study at the crossroads of politics, the everyday, and high art has become standard practice. It is what we call cultural criticism, and everyone does it. But Poirier was one of the first, and also one of the best. I was reminded just how good he was while reading the latest issue of Raritan, the quarterly he founded in 1981 and edited for two decades (it is now edited by the historian Jackson Lears). The current issue includes essays by regular contributors like Leo Bersani and David Bromwich, as well as poems by Richard Howard and Frederick Seidel. It also includes a remarkable folio of six “Editor’s Notes,” republished here for the first time, which Poirier wrote during the early eighties. One of the “Notes” is a prospectus describing the new magazine; another is a rebuke to Susan Sontag (for glibly equating communism and fascism); a third, from the summer of ‘82, is about watching the nightly news during the Israeli bombardment of Beirut; the last pays homage to George Balanchine. Poirier didn’t think of himself as a public intellectual. He thought of himself as a reader, and supposed that expertise in reading that gave him the credentials for commenting on everything else. He held that a serious interest in academic theory—deconstructionism, Marxism, discourse analysis—should go with an equally serious interest in popular culture and contemporary life. Raritan always resisted the pull toward specialization. It became a general interest quarterly where you could find Edward Said interviewing Daniel Barenboim, Anne Hollander writing on fashion, or poems by Gerard Malanga. No one was allowed to use footnotes. Read More
July 21, 2010 On Film Down the Rabbit Hole By Caleb Crain What’s Christopher Nolan’s new movie Inception about? As a piece of science fiction, Inception sets forth its own laws governing the nature of dreams, and dreams in the movie conform to the movie’s laws, not those uncovered by Sigmund Freud in The Interpretation of Dreams. (Spoilers ahead, of course.) There are touches where Nolan’s dreams correspond in nature to those described by Freud and experienced by all people nightly. When, for example, the dream-chemist Yusuf (Dileep Rao) has one glass of champagne too many just before going under, the dream extractors who enter his dream find themselves rained upon, thanks to the pressure on the sleeping Yusuf’s bladder. (A dream “with a urinary stimulus may lead [the dreamer] to a foaming stream,” Freud comments, in what might be considered a parallel passage.) Similarly, when the van containing the dreaming Arthur (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) swerves, gravity in Arthur’s dream of a hotel shifts sideways. As “the guardians of sleep,” Freud writes, dreams often try to explain away sensations that manage to impinge on the dreamer’s consciousness. In a number of important ways, however, Nolan’s dreams are unlike actual dreams. A real dream, of course, can’t be shared while it is being experienced, though that may be chalked up to the movie’s poetic license. More important, in a real dream, problem-solving is impossible; there are usually jump-cuts far more Godardian than anything attempted by Nolan; spacetime is much more fungible, if not irrelevant; and crucially, there is a wish, or rather, a congeries of wishes, governing the structure of the dream. In Nolan’s movie, the arch dream-thief Cobb (Leonardo DiCaprio) warns Ariadne (Ellen Page), a young dream architect that he has recruited, never to construct her dreams from personal memories, lest she lose track of the distinction between dreams and reality. In Freud’s understanding, though, dreams are made of nothing but personal memories, and a dreamer always knows that he is dreaming, even though that awareness may not always be a part of the dream. (That sounds more mystifying than it is. Another way to explain it: it’s only because what’s going on in the mind is a dream that the managerial part of consciousness allows something so disorganized to happen at all.) Cobb further warns Ariadne that beneath all the layers of constructed dreams lies what he calls limbo—the raw unconscious—where a person could become lost and spend an eternity. Freud, too, thought of the unconscious as existing at the deepest layer of a person’s mind, and he, too, thought it had an eternal character (“In the unconscious nothing can be brought to an end, nothing is past or forgotten”), but Freud believed that every dreamer dropped into exactly such a limbo nightly. The intricacy of Nolan’s action sequences depends on his notion that dreams within dreams exist on separate physical levels and are structurally fragile ways to go deeper into a person’s mind. Freud, however, considered a dream within a dream to be no more than semantic shorthand. He thought a dream within a dream worked more or less the way a double negative does: To include something in a “dream within a dream” is . . . equivalent to wishing that the thing described as a dream had never happened. In other words, if a particular event is inserted into a dream as a dream by the dream-work itself, this implies the most decided confirmation of the reality of the event—the strongest affirmation of it. Read More
July 20, 2010 Books Five Essential Books for The Critic By Thessaly La Force Over on the National Book Critics Circle blog, Lorin Stein has shared five books that he believes belong in any reviewer’s library. Here, Lorin explains the charisma of Susan Sontag: If you are (or want to be) a critic, then sometimes I think it’s good to ask what criticism is for. The first book that made me do that was Susan Sontag’s Against Interpretation. “We need an erotics, not a hermeneutics, of art.” I was sitting after school in a Swensen’s ice cream parlor when I read that. I had to go home and look up the word hermeneutics. But the reviews gave one the gist. This was criticism as seduction. Sontag could make a semi-literate fifteen-year-old want to read Michel Leiris or Samuel Beckett or see a Godard film. She made it all seem both glamorous and accessible—which are things I still feel art should be. And here, how Vivian Gornick shaped his own writing: My favorite contemporary book of criticism is Vivian Gornick’s collection The End of the Novel of Love. To me that book and Studies make a diptych—both are basically concerned with what Gornick calls “love as metaphor.” I read The End of the Novel of Love in my twenties—twice, in the space of a day. Since then I have never written an essay that wasn’t, deeply and superficially, indebted to Gornick. For years I tried to model my sentences on hers. My sense of criticism—that it must tell a story, that the story must be true, that the story must unlock a secret in the critic’s own inner life—I owe entirely to her example. Whenever a reader points out the similarity of my approach (and my prose) to hers, it is the praise that pleases me most.