{"id":4050,"date":"2010-08-26T10:25:29","date_gmt":"2010-08-26T14:25:29","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=4050"},"modified":"2013-01-09T15:55:11","modified_gmt":"2013-01-09T20:55:11","slug":"a-week-in-culture-eric-banks-part-ii","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2010\/08\/26\/a-week-in-culture-eric-banks-part-ii\/","title":{"rendered":"A Week in Culture: Eric Banks, Part 2"},"content":{"rendered":"

This is the second installment of Banks’ culture diary. Click here<\/a> to read part 1.<\/em><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

DAY FOUR<\/h3>\n

12:30 P.M.<\/strong> I put in a few bets in advance on the Saratoga card and head for the eye doctor to get new lenses for my glasses (which would have been a boon to have in place before the trip to Philadelphia and DC). I\u2019ll be lens-less for a half hour or so but I print out anyway a Guardian<\/em> article<\/a> by Tom McCarthy on \u201ctechnology and the novel\u201d that I want to read after finishing C<\/em>. The book had already dashed my fears that post-Remainder<\/em> McCarthy had turned art-world prankster at best, experimentalist court jester at worst. The profile\u2019s a funny and smart piece when I squint over it an hour later. C<\/em> begins at a turn-of-the-century school for the deaf with the burial of the protagonist\u2019s sister while the dead girl\u2019s father, a wireless communications buff, wants to rig the bier with a device so that she might signal if she\u2019s not really dead. McCarthy mentions an anecdote about Alexander Graham Bell\u2014his father also ran a school for the deaf, he also had a brother who died, and Alexander entered into a promise with his surviving sibling (who died early as well) that should either of them succomb, the other would create a device to receive transmissions from beyond the grave. He probably would have invented the telephone anyway, of course, and \u201cremained a skeptic and a rationalist throughout his life\u2014but only because his brothers never called: the desire was there.\u201d I\u2019m not sure I buy it, but C<\/em> makes me feel like I should.<\/p>\n

\"\"3:30 P.M.<\/strong> Get back home after picking up the new glasses, and I\u2019m glad I read the essay while I waited for them\u2014the replacement lenses make me feel like I\u2019m seeing the world through a goldfish bowl, and I get a terrible headache as a result. Plus, I lost my bets. In the mail is the new Jonathan Franzen<\/a> which I put off reading with my funky vision. It\u2019ll have to wait until next week, which means I\u2019ll have to make up a bunch of lies if anybody asks me what I think of it. I\u2019d rather bullshit my way through than face the guilt that I won\u2019t actually turn to it until I\u2019m on vacation.<\/p>\n

\"\"8:00 P.M.<\/strong> Head is still throbbing so I cancel plans to go see the Tilda Swinton flick I Am Love<\/em> (the only film it seems anybody\u2019s talking about these days) and turn on The Wild One<\/em> on TMC instead. I feel like I\u2019ve seen it a million times but this seems like the first time I\u2019ve noticed the actor who plays one of Lee Marvin\u2019s sidekicks\u2014who is that guy? A quick IMDB check turns up Timothy Carey\u2014his face is familiar because he plays the racist psychopath in Stanley Kubrick\u2019s The Killing<\/em> who shoots a horse, Red Lightning, during a stakes race, setting off the racetrack heist. Man, where have I been? I make a note to rent Carey\u2019s only directorial effort, The World\u2019s Greatest Sinner<\/em>, where he plays a crazed rock n\u2019 roller who turns into a Jimmy Swaggert\u2013style evangelist and is struck down by God Himself in the final scene.
\n<\/p>\n

DAY FIVE<\/h3>\n

\"\"8:00 A.M.<\/strong> I search Google books to pin down the exact quote from Stendhal\u2019s Rome, Florence et Naples<\/em> about his swooning at Santa Croce and find it. While doing so, I remember that I want to have a look at Michael Wood\u2019s book on Stendhal, written in 1969 or so. I\u2019d recently sent a stupid letter to the TLS<\/em> \u201ccorrecting\u201d a statement that Stendhal\u2019s Les Privil\u00e8ges<\/em> hadn\u2019t been translated prior to the book under review. I remembered a translation Richard Howard had done for Grand Street<\/em>, and wanting to pay tribute to Grand Street<\/em>\u2019s editor Ben Sonnenberg, who died in June. So I sent off my note, which the magazine published. And of course, it turns out that Wood had translated the text in an appendix to his book, which I idiotically had never read. Should I track down his e-mail, which I once had and have now lost, and send him a note, too? I guess if I take the book out of the Columbia library and read it on vacation when I\u2019ll also be reading the new Jonathan Franzen, it will suffice, from a distance.<\/p>\n

DAY SIX<\/h3>\n

\"\"<\/a>12:00 P.M.<\/strong> We go to MoMA to see \u201cMatisse: Radical Invention, 1913\u20131917<\/a>,\u201d the exhibition that I imagine must have been at the root of my art historian friend\u2019s complaints the other night. It\u2019s so crowded\u2014the lines are longer than you see at the movies\u2014that I almost bag it and head home. There\u2019s a lot of technophilia on display in the final room, analyses of how Matisse worked and reworked and reworked again the composition of the “Art Institute\u2019s Bathers by a River,” but it was less than I expected, which extends to the show as a whole. It is disappointingly less than the sum of its parts. I\u2019m primed to witness the starts and stops as Matisse grapples first with C\u00e9zanne and then with cubism to arrive at his luxurious twenties style, but my impatience\u2014with the crowds, with the wall labels, I guess with MoMA itself\u2014somehow makes the entire experience fizzle.<\/p>\n

\"\"5:15 P.M.<\/strong> I get back from the Columbia library after picking up Adrift on the Nile<\/em> and Wood\u2019s Stendhal (as well as Schoenberg\u2019s collection of essays, Style and Idea<\/em>, which complements the Mann readings, right?). I see on the Times<\/em> home page that Frank Kermode has died. I immediately go to the LRB<\/em> website archives and look at the titles of his lovely essays, so many of which I\u2019d read before over the years and which were a kind of model of everything I\u2019d modestly once hoped Bookforum<\/em>, when I took over the editorship of the magazine almost a decade ago, could aspire to publish. It\u2019s not hard to feel that with Kermode\u2019s passing it\u2019s the sad end of the line for a certain vision of literary culture\u2014a banal thought, I know, but one that I find impossible to avoid thinking.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/a>8:30 P.M.<\/strong> I put off I Am Love<\/em> again in favor of watching Our Man in Havana<\/em>, which I saw was airing when I was searching the TMC website to see whether The World\u2019s Greatest Sinner<\/em> might be broadcast. I\u2019d never seen the movie before and am flabbergasted by the top-to-bottom weirdness of the casting\u2014Burl Ives as the German doctor Hasselbacher? Maureen O\u2019Hara as Warthold\u2019s secretary Beatrice? Noel Coward as Hawthorne? The strangest touch is Ernie Kovacs as the sadistic Cuban cop Segura. They shot it in Cuba just after Castro took power, so the criminal excesses of Batista\u2019s Havana are even more magnified than in Greene\u2019s novel. But they\u2019re undercut by the film\u2019s inability to take itself very seriously\u2014it\u2019s more comic than Greene meant by grouping the book with one of his \u201centertainments.\u201d When Segura\u2019s famous lines about torture come up\u2014\u201csurely you realize there are people who expect to be tortured and others who would be outraged by the idea. One never tortures except by a kind of mutual agreement\u201d\u2014you can\u2019t imagine how the producers of the film thought the creator of the Nairobi Trio and Percy Dovetonsils would be just the man to utter them.<\/p>\n

DAY SEVEN<\/h3>\n

9:00 A.M.<\/strong> I write a note to my friend apologizing for missing the screening of Chit Chat on the Nile<\/em> and she writes back saying it\u2019s actually next Tuesday, so I\u2019ll miss it as I\u2019ll be on vacation. I offer to loan her my copy of Adrift on the Nile<\/em>, which she\u2019s never actually read; as it turns out, I didn\u2019t need to borrow it from the library\u2014last night I found a copy on my shelves that I\u2019d completely forgotten I owned when I was looking for the paperback Our Man in Havana<\/em> after watching the film. She accepts.<\/p>\n

10:00 P.M.<\/strong> After getting back from supper I decide, what the hell, might as well begin the Franzen.<\/p>\n

Eric Banks is a freelance critic and writer based in New York. He’s formerly the editor of <\/em>Bookforum and senior editor of<\/em> Artforum.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

This is the second installment of Banks’ culture diary. Click here to read part 1. DAY FOUR 12:30 P.M. I put in a few bets in advance on the Saratoga card and head for the eye doctor to get new lenses for my glasses (which would have been a boon to have in place before […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":48,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[23],"tags":[709,703,111,706,110,710,704,707,705,711,708,530],"class_list":["post-4050","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-the-culture-diaries","tag-chitchat-on-the-nile","tag-eric-banks","tag-freedom","tag-graham-greene","tag-jonathan-franzen","tag-marie-henri-beyle","tag-matisse","tag-michael-wood","tag-moma","tag-stendhal","tag-timothy-carey","tag-translation"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nA Week in Culture: Eric Banks, Part 2 by Eric Banks<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"August 26, 2010 \u2013 This is the second installment of Banks' culture diary. 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Click here to read part 1. DAY FOUR 12:30 P.M. 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\"\"9:00 P.M.<\/strong> I get home late after meeting a friend I haven\u2019t seen in years who\u2019s done his PhD in French lit and now faces the bleak reality of the nonexistent tenure-track jobs in French lit. He\u2019s weighing the pros and cons of moving to Aberdeen, which seems his best (or virtually only) shot. Unfortunately, he did his work on Diderot, so I can\u2019t pick his brain much about Stendhal. (I don\u2019t even know whether he knows Michael Wood, so I don\u2019t bother to ask whether I can get his e-mail address from him.) I feel lousy because I\u2019d hoped to go see a film a friend is screening that evening in Brooklyn, Chitchat on the Nile<\/a><\/em>, an Egyptian rarity from the \u201860s based on Mahfouz\u2019s Adrift on the Nile<\/em>, his novel about disaffected drugged-up government workers. But I blew it, staying too late at the bar. I make another mental note to take out Mahfouz\u2019s book from the library and read it also on vacation so I can at least seem knowledgeable about the film that I missed when I run into her again.<\/p>\n