I lost it at the movies

(for Amie)
I know many people who, while being fully literate and even liking to read, manage to read only a half a dozen books per year. Now, it is the quality of the reading that counts, of course. Yet, I think that there is more going on here than simply lack of time. I suspect that there is an almost physical discomfort with large blocks of reading.

Myself, I am as immersed in reading as a fish is in water; however, as a reviewer, I am sometimes confronted by a book – for instance, an eight hundred page novel from Syria I recently reviewed – that reminds me of the sheer physical process of reading. It turned out that novel was a ‘fast’ read. But that mental resistance, which appears to me as a physical resistance, comes up for me not so much in reading as in watching movies.

I used to think that my problem with movies (and my problem with tv) was simply with popular American movies. It was the problem of plausibility. Metz, in an essay on movies from 1967, wrote a rather profound bit about this:

We know that for Aristotle, the plausible (Vraisemblable) (to eikos) is defined as the totality of what is possible inhe eyes of public opinion, and is thus opposed to the totality of what is possible in the eyes of people who know (this last “possible” being supposed to make a unity with the truly possible, the real possible) The arts of representation… don’t represent all the possible, all the possibles, but only the plausible possibles. The post-aristotelian tradition – for instance, the notions of the plausible, of bienseance, of the agreed upon among the French writers of the classics of the 18th century – has taken this idea and enriched it with a second sort of plausibility, not so much different from the first and yet totally absent, it must be said, from Greek philosophical thought: what is plausible is what conforms to the laws of established genre.”

Of course, our critical stances to movies will correspond to, move among, these different parameters of plausibility. There are those who accept anything; there are those who watch for the illogical moment, the break in the chain of the real; there are those who, accepting the supremacy of genre over the real, treat the question of plausibility solely in terms laid down by genre (would superman be able to do this or that? A different question than, say, the notion of a superhero fighting crime in a society founded on crime, say the Apartheid reigning in the U.S. during the golden era of the superheros). I like watching thrillers with my brothers – on video, of course – because they are sharp-eyed for technical implausibilities in the story. How Hero Y knew about Villain X, or whether he’d have the time to escape danger in Location A and get to Location B in time to save the day – although usually this is on a finer level. And sometimes, I feel like the supposition that I will buy into the world of possibles presented by the movie strikes me as simply degrading from the outset – it is as if a fully adult person started talking to me as though I were five years old. The later speech act could convey anything – how to build an atom bomb, for instance – but would seem absolutely unserious and degrading.

However, my real problem with movies is on a deeper level. Like the well intentioned reader, I often confront it as a medium that seems to demand something tiring from me – an effort that makes me restless. This may sound like I am talking about intolerably slow movies, but it is jus the opposite – it is the sense of not being able to hold onto anything which I find much more frustrating. This isn’t just American pop movies – which solve the problem of plausibility the American way, by speeding up. It is, for instance, the Innocent, a Visconti film I rented and saw this week, that I couldn’t finish. Partly this was because the plot of D’Annunzio’s novel, from which the film is lifted, is, by now, much the chestnut. Partly it was the technical expertise of the film – the costumes and locations seemed very late 19th century, and thus were simply too opulent, too crowded, for me – and seemed to crowd Giancarlo Giannini, the reason I was watching the film, too. I have, perhaps, too often seen him play a marginal, the faux playboy, to accept him as a rich decadent. But all of this projects upon the film my problem, not the film’s: which is that I can’t find my point of anchorage, to use Barthes term – that control from which one can understand the denotative and connotative level. Film seems to tend more to what Barthes called the relay – the advancement from one point to another in a narrative, a sequence of images – with a sheer speed that confuses me.

Love song for Judith Warner

One thing the NYT gets: the op ed page should be opened up to a much wider variety of comment on a much wider variety of subject than is normal for a big paper. The Washington Post not only fields a mostly rancid old crew of farts, but a rancid old crew of farts who write in the most tiresomely predictable ways about the most tiresomely predictable subjects. Admittedly, it is fun that the internet version of WAPO has a comments section where you can hurl baseballs at the clowns, but basically, Hiatt is not only another rancid old fart, but a terrible editor, a coddler of just those writers the second audience – the country club audience – likes, but who have no appeal beyond that. True, the regular columnists at the NYT do the same thing – witness the NYT’s search for a “conservative’ to balance the liberals that ended up foisting Douthat upon us –but the marginal columnists, the occasional ones, the subsection on drinking, for instance – has been a brilliant use of op ed space. That they have Olivia Judson doing a science/environmental column is brilliant – and really, that is the space they should be filling in the regular columnist spot, conservationist, not conservative. Rebecca Solnit should be begged, offered big bucks, whatever to get her to write a twice weekly column for the paper.

But this is a love song for Judith Warner.

In my head, I have several pictures, Van Gogh once wrote his bro’. No shit! And in my head too! My pictures are of the impossibly limo liberal society of the late sixties, which I have read about not only in the satires of Tom Wolfe, but in the novels of Paula Fox, the stories of John Cheever, the essays/fictions of Norman Mailer – where they function as the appalled onlooker. Moneyed people, who all went to the Ivies and all came out to make more money while, at the same time, retaining a certain large interest in the culture at large. The kind of bourgeoisie that the artist was made to slug – until they disappeared into the black hole of the “business school’, and came out with zero sense of culture – not even a middle brow sense of culture – and an incredibly childish worldview shaped by Ayn Rand and business inspiration books. One has to be lucky in one’s enemies. These enemies, though, were simply pod people. The urge felt by liberals to compare everything bad to the Nazis is a way of covering up for the tissue of terror and mass murder that make up our own history, which contains villainy enough. But the advent of the Nazis in Germany, setting aside the other crimes, was the advent of a new type, something the artist had never seen before. The bourgeoisie was vulgar, selfish, vain, and wanted sentimental trash to wallow in and platitudes to feed the kids. But their was a certain community of interest that made fighting with them worth while. The Nazi generation, though, could care less. The cut through the sentimentality about culture by, indeed, ‘drawing their guns’ when they heard a whisper of it and killing it.

Similarly, the Rand generation wasn’t just politically sick, but proposed to bring about a word in which poetry would simply not exist, replaced by consumer reports.

Judith Warner gives me faith that the Randian tide is receding. In one of the bright spots in this zona, she simply wrote the graduates of the Ivy biz schools out of the party – she wrote a column that destroyed the notion that the “best and brightest” went to work at Wall Street. It was the most beautiful act of class snobbery I’ve ever seen committed in an American paper, a tremendous, beautiful, multi-tasking snub. I had been wavering about her before – but that column did it for me. I fell in love.

Every one of her columns seems to emanate from a haute bourgeois liberal sector that I long thought I had merely dreamed. These people, it turns out, do exist!

This makes me very very happy.

Notes on a drunk

I don’t have the stamina to be an alcoholic. You have to have a purity of heart in order to will one thing, as Kierkegaard said – no matter what that thing is. I have never had that purity of heart. I’m an adulterated man, and in some ways I fear that I am just the sort that God will spew out at the last judgment – half and half, lukewarm, on the one hand and on the other hand, the clauses coming out of my mouth from some infinite spool. Ratiocination is organic with me - I sweat it. To be mediocre is never, ever, to rise from the mix, just once – never to crystallize, even if as a kind of human shit. I am unadulterated only, perhaps, at the edge of sleep – mostly, I am a self riddled with the holes of non-existence, an inveterate duck-er.

But if I am questioned as to why I refused to become an alcoholic on that last day – and don’t think we can use our human standards to understand those rules, it is the hints, the exceptions, the times we weren’t “like” ourselves that we get a glimpse into our real chances in this universe – I will have to mention the stamina thing. Last Saturday, for instance, I go to a party at my friend and client’s house. R. R. has arranged for some students of hers to pick me up – I can’t bike up the fifteen miles to where she lives. The students are extremely sweet. I am introduced, at the party, to R.’s family – who are all also extremely sweet – as well as the whole Austin Lebanese community, or so it seems. And finally, fatally, R. introduces me to the largest bottle of tequila I have ever seen.

Me and the bottle seem to be getting along well. In fact, it seems to be giving me excellent advice as I chat up this woman named … well, with an unusual name. Who, it is true, seems to have come with this man, who rather fades into the background for me, although I have this feeling (as I write this) he was in the foreground for himself.

Eventually, though, the bottle got altogether too territorial, and laid claim to many of my most valuable proprioceptive functions. We went outside, and there, in a corner of the yard, in the rain, and the darkness, I threw up just the smallest amount. Almost practice. However, being a half and half, a moderate, I recognized this as a sign that perhaps I should go, and tracked down the students, who were themselves thinking that it was time to go. They had a babysitter.

Somehow, at this point, it was not noticed that I was stepping carefully from one maelstrom to another – which I attributed to the poor construction of houses in North Austin. Surely they should fix those maelstroms! But I was discrete, and didn’t say anything, and in fact in the car, I was going to be my joking self. This was the plan. As soon, that is, as I got the window open and practiced a little bit again. Unfortunately, it was some kind of child proof window - which is a thing that intoxication can't abide. I imagine a child could have opened it, really. I couldn't, though. Thus, I ended up practicing on myself – about which I was immensely relieved. Not on the seat of the car or anything, or at least much, or at least that I noticed.

And then it was six o’clock in the morning and I woke up feeling rather – excellent. That tequila had truly been good – no hangover, just a feeling of energy in my limbs. And the oddest thing of all was that I did not feel at all guilty towards the poor guys who had transported me. I called and apologized, of course, once again – but somehow I felt I deserved this.

In the second best novel about alcoholism, Moscow to the End of the Line (the first best is, of course, Under the Volcano), the narrator is a Moscovite who desires, just once, to see the Kremlin, which you would think he would have seen except that all kinds of obstacles – social, vehicular, and mostly bottle-uar – continually obtrude themselves on his quest. At one point he makes a very wrong turn before he gets to the Kursk subway station, which leads him to an interlude in which he wakes up in some unknown hallway. But what happened in the interlude? And he writes this: “No, I’m sorry because I just calculated that from Chekhov Street to this hallway I drank up six rubles—but where and what and in what sequence, to good or evil purpose? This nobody knows and now, nobody will ever know. Just as we don’t know to this day whether Tsar Boris killed the Tsarevich Dmitri or the other way around. What sort of hallway was it? I haven’t the slightest idea even now, and it ought to be that way. Everything should. Everything should take place slowly and incorrectly so that man doesn’t get a chance to start feeling proud, so that man is sad and perplexed.”

'Everything should take place slowly and incorrectly so that man doesn’t get a chance to start feeling proud, so that man is sad and perplexed' – this, and nothing else, is at the heart of alcoholism as a metaphysical disorder. Sobriety leads to pride, and pride leads to sobriety, and when the two form an impenetrable syndrome, watch out! --- that is when the system of the world loses its mind, that is when it 'works' so well that it drives us all, man, beast and angel, to ultimate destruction.

the zona sings a song of itself

The poetry of the sinking ship, the mysteriously vanished vessel, the strayed Antarctic expedition, is all in the last message. This is it. SOS. The food is running out. Today, we killed the last sled dog. The sender is putting his final moment into the words that will fail to save him. In the Zona, things are a bit different. This is never it. There is a form of negative infinity that is made in America – it is called the (un)death of the salesman. Two pieces of poetry from the Biz page of the NYT today:

Mr. Ginn says his remaining properties will eventually pay off. “My belief is that when the depression ends, there will be a pent-up demand for happiness,” he said in an interview at his offices at the Hammock Beach Resort near Daytona Beach. “Sometime between 2035 or 2040, Florida will double in size.”

“You need to buy when there’s blood in the streets,” he said with a shrug. “Even if it’s your own blood.”

Fourteen cages plus one

A little translation work today - another of my attempts to English the great Kurt Tucholsky! First part

Fourteen Cages plus one
By Kurt Tucholsky

We drive down to the old harbor, where, at the quay, many small boats are docked that can be rented for three francs. What was once the line drawn under the sum of someone’s life is now a pleasure cruise. The motor growls, the boat starts. There lies Marseille.
The houses stand there, narrowly build, around the basin of the old harbor; to your left, up above, you are greeted by the church of Our Beloved Lady who Watches, on the hill. A golden doll. The boat glides under a very high iron construction, to which pennants are attached. To the Fort, in an inlet of the sea. We stop at a small islet.
The islet is the Château d'If. It lies – in case you have your atlas at hand – before the city of Marseille, opposite the islands of Ratonneau and Le Frioul, which are connected through a levy. Is there anything on them? No, unfortunately not. The Chateau d'If is the island on which Edmond Dantès was imprisoned, the Count of Monte Christo.
The small island emerges, becomes visible. You can see a concrete gray, half fallen in wall, we attach ourselves. Above, a winding path through the lower walls, above. A crumbling barracks with the Bourbon lilies still stands there: the castle was built in the year 1592, a Bastille of the South. Francois I laid the foundation stone already in 1524, over a phial of oil and a metal box with grain and a glass of wine. It is a white, crumbling wall, the wall and the stones of the ground have almost assimilated one with the other. There is a small pedestrian bridge out of wood, the planks of which are loose, then the arch and the court of the prison.
The court is very small, surrounded with four walls that are not so high; from above one sees a square of the radiant blue sky. Below, the light is modulated, milky and bright coffeebrown. Below there is a well and on one of the walls a rack of postcards. And all about are the cachots, the cages.
Some lie on the ground level. And above, around the courtyard, along all four walls, there runs a small gallery with an iron ladder by means of which one can access the higher cages. Before every door there is a wooden plaque, on which stands painted, who had once been imprisoned there. As in a zoological garden, one misses the postcript: a gift of Council Friedheimer. I go in.
The guide has you admire the spacious room: “bien aërés et avec vue sur la mer.« Yes, it goes through the small gaps, and when one leans one’s head on the iron grating, one can see a piece of the sea, in which the free fishes live. The ground is walled off, black traces on the walls show where a fireplace once was. It must have gotten devilishly cold, back then… There they also sat.
It was mostly political prisoners who sat here, all people that the regime couldn’t, or didn’t’ want to kill, and whose freedom made it highly uncomfortable. At the time, it was very simple: you only needed a lettre de cachet in order to achieve an end that you now can only achieve through the sitting of a whole people’s court, with all the this and the that: the previous investigation, a hearing, onesided, as only hatred can be, a lynchmob ppress and the whole gigantic apparatus. Thus it was simpler. Many times, aristocratic families even let their sons be a little imprisoned, simply for …
There sat –
A rich Marseille businessman, because of a supposed conspiracy against Cardinal Richelieu; took a chance on a hungerstrike, which he maintained for eleven days; died on the twelfth. A Marseille sailor, who had struck down his superior; sat thirty one years. An Abbé Faria – he and the sailor had even sat here in the nineteenth century. – And how! There’s a hole, a windowless space, in which you wouldn’t put a dog, with a depression as an exit. In that, the convinct was shrived.
On the other side, Dantes sat, the one whose fate Dumas had used in his page turner. The prisoner had tunneled out a connection to Abbe Faria, which is still shown.
At that time there was still a cachot in the ground that is not accessible to the public. In the year 1871, there sat one hundred sixteen prisoners. Communards. One hundred sixteen – that is no number for us others…

Up to the small steps on the upper gallery. There sat: an abbe who had supposedly seduced a girl; a ministerial official who had conspired with England; a man who had sought to murder Napoleon; the famous man in the iron mask; Louis-Philippe Égalité; Mirabeau (there was no political prison in which he didn’t sit); a M. Mollard, who sat there for sixteen years because that is what his parents wanted. Later,iIn this place, a revolutionary tribunal held sessions. A great poisoner, who was burned in Aix in the year 1588; and a street robber and a man named Meynier and… and… and…

How not to write a review: Dwight Garner, file number one

I say this with all the rancor and envy I can muster: why the fuck is Dwight Garner being groomed to be the NYT's book reviewer?

I had some minimal dealings with Garner when I reviewed a few books for Salon. He was a nice enough person. But he never struck me as a literatus. It is with horror that I have watched his rise at the Times. I am well aware that working for national media requires a mind well leavened with mediocrity. The occasional genius, the suspicious hermeneut, the investigative reporter, or stylist will be forever the outsider in those precincts. But Garner's mind has no leavening at all - it is, at best, a flatliner's shadow.

Take this review. Now, reviewing is a much abused art, and it is in parlous state in these here times, but this... is shocking.

First, an intro paragraph that sounds more like a parody of the discussions of some hi concept movie in The Player than a review. Especially as Garner, after throwing out a number of names gets down to business by ... dismissing his own buildup.

"If you could create the perfect rock biographer, he or she would probably be equal parts Robert Caro, Greil Marcus and Nick Tosches. That is, part buzz-saw researcher, part warm-blooded public intellectual and part roguish street-corner hustler. The resulting book — a biography of Randy Newman? Neil Young? Aretha Frankin? — would be, to quote the soul musician Swamp Dogg, total destruction to your mind.

Let’s not hold it against Barney Hoskyns, a journeyman British music writer, that he is not all that — or even particularly close to all that."

Now, it isn't that the Garner's first paragraph shouldn't have been written - as any reviewer knows, you write a first draft first paragraph on the largest lines, so that you can radically change it or just dump it once the review starts showing some sign of life further down the page. Garner, though, simply kept the first draft first paragraph. And a NYT that seems increasingly disconnected from actually editing its book reviewers let him.

Of course, once started on the game of pointless name-dropping, Garner can't quit. Thus, his next maneuver is to attach Nick Hornby's name to poor Hoskyn's hull, like some cancerous barnacle. Garner even picks Hoskyns own name dropping passages to quote in his 1200 words:

Now 59, Mr. Waits has been so good for so long that he is easy to take for granted. He was only a few years out of high school, after all, when he wrote “Ol’ ’55,” a song the historian Simon Schama has called “the single most beautiful love song since Gershwin and Cole Porter shut their piano lids.” Mr. Hoskyns’s book is a chance for a multiangled reappraisal.

Mr. Waits is not an easy man for a biographer to approach. He would not speak to Mr. Hoskyns, and asked others not to. But as Mr. Hoskyns points out: “He is no rock-and-roll version of J. D. Salinger or Thomas Pynchon. He never hid out in the mountains like Dylan after his motorcycle accident, or like Bucky Wunderlick in Don DeLillo’s novel ‘Great Jones Street,’ ” adding, “Generally he’s been on hand to give good quote in support of the latest album.”

So, what do we have so far? A review of a book which is not by Robert Caro, Greil Marcus or Nick Tosches, or about Randy Newman, Neil Young or Aretha Franklin. It is about Tom Waits, who, it turns out, is not J.D. Salinger, Thomas Pynchon, Bob Dylan, or a fictional character in Delillo's Great Jones Street. Readers who wondered can now wipe their brows. Whew! Glad that is cleared up.

At least we know that Garner is not a reviewer like Cicero, Cyrano de Bergerac, or Pierre Bayle, if they were reviewers, which they weren't.

5 degrees

Faire une recherche, faire des recherches, mots voluptueux; tout pleins,tout gonflés des promesses ultérieures.

(Do research, do some researching, voluptuous words; full, swollen with ulterior promises)

This is from the mouth of Peguy’s Clio, who obviously understand the obscure, persistant, immersive pleasure of a project that consists of tracking down innumerable sources and putting together innumerable facts. Facts, like jigsaw puzzle pieces, are, after all, made to be put together – and like puzzle pieces, the shape of the edges reflects the factory decision as to where, precisely, they fit.

But in contradistinction to the jigsaw puzzle, the historian is always seeking some dreamy fact, some key fact, from which one can go outward, ever outward, to the world. For in history, the box contains too many facts – and, of course, cut the piece differently and you will find a different place for it. Although it will bear, on its surface, one hopes, that glimpse which, collected with all the other glimpses, will give you a picture, a piece of verisimilitude.

It is in the spirit of Clio (version Peguy) that I read, with delight, the Peter Hennesy’s review in the TLS of Brian Harrison’s Seeking a Role: the United Kingdom, 1951-1970. I couldn’t resist the first paragraph:

“Brian Harrison has a special gift which historians prize. He can turn the grains of history into fascinating and convincing patterns. How about this as an example of his grasp of the granular? From a journal to which I was hitherto a stranger, Heating and Ventilating Engineer, he has gleaned that in the UK, the “average living room was over 5° Fahrenheit warmer in 1970 than in 1950”. In terms of what one might call the softening of Britain, this is hugely significant. Those of us on the rim of middle and old age can vividly remember living in homes with but one warm room enlivened by a coal fire and, on winter nights, leaping into bed and hoping to fall asleep before the chill bit, and waking up to patterns of frozen condensation on the window panes in the morning. I have been a weaker man since the winter of 1966–7, when the underfloor heating of St John’s College’s new Cripps Building in Cambridge corrupted me for ever.”

Of course, in that special code of class that the British sneak into all statements, the way Chinese restaurants in the U.S. use MSG, we learn, from this, about Cambridge – it is the neverending echolation of class that will forever keep me from understanding Britain. I admit it. But that 5 degrees – oh, that lovely 5 degrees! Of course, to the inattentive reader, it might seem like only 5 degrees – but to those who love to track a fact, back through its distortions in the literature – and you will find that the simplest facts (to change my metaphor) are as distorted, in their transmission from one text to another, as the faces of the protagonists in the Fun House mirrors at the end of Lady from Shanghai – to some sure source, that 5 degrees is everything. The holy of holies. And whether at Cambridge or in some room in a housing project, that the reviewer recognizes the role played by 5 degrees in his life makes it all the sweeter.

If I were a historian, I cannot imagine a more positive review – at one point, Hennesy actually compares Harrison to Macaulay. For the sake of the 5 degrees alone, I am going to read this book – or maybe review it myself.

And so I’ll hie me hence – and leave this to end my song:

Ham.
To what base uses we may return, Horatio! Why may not
imagination trace the noble dust of Alexander till he find it
stopping a bung-hole?

Hor.
'Twere to consider too curiously to consider so.

Ham.
No, faith, not a jot; but to follow him thither with modesty
enough, and likelihood to lead it: as thus: Alexander died,
Alexander was buried, Alexander returneth into dust; the dust is
earth; of earth we make loam; and why of that loam whereto he
was converted might they not stop a beer-barrel?
Imperious Caesar, dead and turn'd to clay,
Might stop a hole to keep the wind away.
O, that that earth which kept the world in awe
Should patch a wall to expel the winter's flaw!