Tuesday, December 31, 2019

When Facebook Becomes Blogging

So Pooja Ghosh asked me to do 7 days of posting my favorite books by their covers. It's too much work over too long a period on a page that already clutters people's feeds all the time, but I will list them:
1. Collected Short Stories of Isaac Bashevis Singer
2. Eugene Onegin by Aleksandr Pushkin
3. Collected Plays of Anton Chekhov
4. A Tale of Love and Darkness by Amos Oz
5. Midaq Alley by Naguib Mahfouz
6. Life and Fate by Vasily Grossman
7. The Brothers Ashkenazi by Israel Joshua Singer
A Second Seven:
1. King Lear
2. The Book of Ecclesiastes
3. The Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan Kundera
4. Portnoy's Complaint by Philip Roth
5. The Adventures of Augie March by Saul Bellow
6. The Book of Genesis
7. Romeo and Juliet 
A Non-Fiction Seven
1. The Vital Center: The Politics of Freedom by Arthur Schlesinger
2. Essays by Michel de Montaigne
3. The True Believer by Eric Hoffer
4. Power and the Idealists by Paul Berman
5. Four Essays on Liberty by Isaiah Berlin
6. A Cultural History of the Modern Age by Egon Friedell
7. Jerusalem by Amos Elon
A Further Nine to Even Out the Numbers
1. Chess Story by Stefan Zweig
2. Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen
3. I Served the King of England by Bohumil Hrabal
4. Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman
5. Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce
6. Saturday by Ian McEwan
1. The Prince by Nicolo Machiavelli
2. Cultural Amnesia by Clive James
3. The Big Con by Jonathan Chait
As I do this, I realize, holy shit, I've finished so many less books than I think I have...

Friday, December 27, 2019

ET: Almanac

"There was once, so the story runs, an executioner named Wang Fun, who lived in the reign of the second emperor of the Ming Dynasty. He was famous for his skill and speed in beheading his victims, but all his life he had harbored a secret aspiration, never yet realized: to behead a person so rapidly that the victim's head would remain poised on his neck. He practiced and practiced, and finally, in his seventy-sixth year, he realized his ambition. It was on a busy day of executions, and he dispatched each man with graceful speed, head rolling in the dust. Then came the twelfth man; he began to mount the scaffold, and Wang Fun, with a whisk of his sword, beheaded his victim so quickly that he continued to walk up the steps. When he reached the top, he spoke angrily to the executioner. "Why do you prolong my agony?" he asked. "You were mercifully quick with the others!" It was Wang Lun's great moment; he had crowned his life's work. A serene isle spread over his face; he turned to his victim, and said, "Just kindly nod, please."

Arthur Koestler - The Invisible Writing

Thursday, December 26, 2019

ET: Almanac

“Just as every political party considers itself a `centre-party’ threatened by revolutionaries on the left and reactionaries on the right, so every young writer tends to think his talent is compounded from the choicest ingredients. One hopes – and on what little ground! – that one incorporate the lucid sanity of a Bertrand Russell, without any of his liberal smugness; the bitter incisiveness of Bernard Shaw, without his sterility; the rich humanity of H.G. Wells, without his splashing-over; the analytical profundity of Proust, without his mawkish snobbism; the elemental sweep of D.H. Lawrence, without his gawky bitterness; the miraculous naturalness of Chekhov, without that sorry echo of the consumptive’s cough; the supreme poetic moments of Goethe unimbedded in the suet-pudding of his common day; the intimations without the imbecility of William Wordsworth; the lyrical imagery of Shakespeare, without his rhetoric; the pathological insight of Dostoevski, without his extravagant suspiciousness; the life-imparting breath of Tolstoy, without his foolishness; Turgenev’s purity in reproducing nature, without his sentimentalism; the lyrical power of Pushkin, without his paganism; the elegiac quality of Lermontov, without his `Byronism’; the humour and epic language of Gogol, without his provincialism; the spirit of Voltaire, without his tininess; the human understanding of Dr. Johnson, without his overbearingness; the dash of Byron, without his vanity; the faithful portraiture of Flaubert, without his tortuous fastidiousness. The list could be prolonged.”

- William Gerhardie

Sunday, December 22, 2019

When Facebook Becomes Blogging

“When I lie waking all alone,
Recounting what I have ill done,
My thoughts on me then tyrannize,
Fear and sorrow me surprise,
Whether I tarry still or go,
Methinks the time moves very slow,
All my griefs to this are jolly,
Naught so sad as melancholy.
'Tis my sole plague to be alone,
I am a beast, a monster grown,
I will no light nor company,
I find it now my misery.
The scene is turn'd, my joys are gone,
Fear, discontent, and sorrows come.
All my griefs to this are folly,
Naught so fierce as melancholy."
- Robert Burton 
Christmas is a difficult time for a lot of people. I have about as little to do with Christmas as any American, growing up in a neighborhood where there are not even so much as Christmas lights on more than one in fifty houses. But the lack of light and the cold can get to any of us, so can the fun and happiness that is everybody else gets to experience this time of year but 'me', the loneliness of no spouse or children to spend it with, worries that the time to rewrite one's life-story begins to run out, and worst of all, the ruminative speculations about all the ways one screws up along the way to one's failures to acquire a better life and what it may demonstrate about the quality of person one is, and how one's defects and mistakes and errors may have done harm to others, which then leads to speculations on future ways one can harm others. I've seen a number of posts about people feeling depressed right now. For anyone who doesn't find this one of the easiest times of year, this is one of the hardest times of year. But there are two other quotes though from Robert Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy that seem helpful to me: 'Melancholy can only be cured by melancholy,' and 'a quiet mind cures all.' The illness is far stronger than one's mental capacities, the more prodigiously fearsome, the more reason becomes raw material for the melancholia to shape as it wills. Insanity is formed just as by excess rationality as by irrationality. An excess of rational thought is a prison with no windows, and even the deepest thoughts can only skim the surface of our existence - containing so little evidence for what is ultimately true and false. And therefore, as the Bard says, 'there is nothing good or bad but thinking makes it so,': depression, or melancholia, or the black dog, or whatever else, can be quieted by a lower temperature of mind. First by finding ways not to think, then by distraction, then by the distraction growing into different goals, one finds ways to offset the melancholy. It comes and it comes, but it goes. 
...This is more for me than anyone else.

Thursday, December 19, 2019

In Praise of Big Books - Parts 2 and 3 (Final)


All those literary cliches I mentioned in the last podcast are a way of saying that I just read Purity by Jonathan Franzen, and I had a great time. I'd been avoiding Franzen novels for years, he was just too much of the zeitgeist in the 2000's, too trendy, too cool, too liked by people and critics whose opinions I didn't care for. And now that I'm reading Freedom, his big book from 2010, I'm beginning to see that my doubts about him at the time were not misplaced. I doubt I knew what the term 'lit-bro' meant before the latest David Foster Wallace volleys, but there was something about all the writers of that most recent generation that rubbed me the wrong way: Wallace, Franzen, Eggers, Michael Chabon, even Zadie Smith, .... The whole spirit of their writing seemed earnest to me where they should be ironic and ironic where they should be earnest. They all struck me as too cool, too self-conscious, for any depth to be anything but a pose. Maybe it's my own shallowness for judging them by their looks, but none of them look like they've thought deeply a day in their lives, even David Foster Wallace looked as though he never suffered. They're all from Hollywood central casting of what a novelist should look like. And then I read an interview with Franzen who said that he never really knew anything about literature until he was twenty-one, and it was all I could do not to scream 'fuuuuuuck you!'

James Wood, probably the pre-eminent literary critic of the early 21st century English speaking world, and to my still slightly limited knowledge, the best, had his own description of it that was, to use our own era's critique of the previous era, strangely gendered in the other direction, a trend in novel writing which he called 'hysterical realism, in which he terms the novelists of Generation-X more a kind of 'Frankfurt School entertainer', more concerned with showing how the world works with digressions on arcane topics than in the more traditional novelistic pursuits of elucidating subtleties of character, being, and situation. This strikes me as both true and a misnomer. Like any art form, there are endless permutations in which an art form can evolve, and it's absolutely true that some of these novels I've read read like 'novels-by-google' who are more interested in information than in making the audience feel anything at all.

But there is also a pendulum that grounds all forms of study in the models and patterns of the past, and this new novel, arriving in America at the turn of the 21st century and in Europe and Latin America in the mid-20th, is much much closer to the novel of the 17th and 18th centuries - those picaresque, digressionary, simultaneously humorous and pedantic, novels like Tristram Shandy, Tom Jones, Jacques the Fatalist,  and Moll Flanders, all of which reach still farther back into the novel's very origins with works like Simplicius Simplicissimus, Gargantua and Pantagruel, and even Don Quixote and the Autobiography of Benvenuto Cellini. This is a very different, older idea of what a novel is, whose animating purpose is to tell a rollicking story of adventure. And to tell the adventure, you have to do a lot of leg work to set the scene. You have to convey all the information that gives the reader context for the situations in which the characters find themselves - this is not easy to do, and it has to be done at length and the situations have to be entertaining enough to be enjoyable reading, and the easiest way to make them entertaining is to make them weird and absurd, so if these situations seem weird enough, they probably obscure the characters within the situation.

This is a very different kind of novel than the more traditional, 19th century type, and to this day, the 19th century novel of character and inner thought was so universally beloved because it is embedded in the universal human experience of consciousness. Anna Karenina, Crime and Punishment, these novels were and remain so beloved because the way the characters think mirrors the way we think, even if the situations are not ones we generally find ourselves in. Aristotle would call that process 'mimetic', it's as though we experience what they experience and we think to ourselves that this might be the way we'd react in the same situation.

On the other hand, that sort of sympathetic empathy for people different than us is not much in vogue today, and there's nothing today more beloved of more readers than sci-fi and fantasy. It's difficult to imagine two genres more grounded in the external setting of the world it builds rather than the mind that perceives. So even if the audience for David Foster Wallace and Dom DeLillo is a very specific demographic, the audiences for Isaac Asimov and J.R.R. Tolkein seem near-universal, and who knows? I may have my doubts that the genre fiction of living memory will be of any more interest to later readers than Agatha Christie and Arthur Conan Doyle are to today's, but among today's readers, there's no question that all kinds genre fiction is more beloved and culturally relevant than anything by Zadie Smith and Jonathan Franzen.

But Franzen was always a little apart from the rest of them. He was more interested in taking this sort of 'explaining how the world is' approach to writing and regrounding it in the substance of character and feeling, and that sounds at least a little more interesting than cold bites of information that cause a novel to be written nearly as much by google as by the writer. There's always been a place in the most traditional novels to find all those social movements of the world represented by character, and that place is allegory. I'm not going to list all the great novelistic allegories, it's practically an honor roll. The brief list I'll make is to show how many different concepts a novel can represent.

I suppose it begins with Balzac (and I'll try to say that name this time without giggling), who made 'The Human Comedy', I can't say that I've ever found any one book of his truly scintillating, but the point of his 'Comedie Humaine' is to portray as many different types of people as possible in the extremely dynamic and diverse society that was early 19th century Paris. Later, the novelistic allegorist for all time, Thomas Mann, created Buddenbrooks, a 19th century novel published in 1901, through which, by portraying a 19th century German family, he took the reader through all the different traits of character said to belong to each generation of 19th century German life, and prophetically showed the dissolution of that way of life, which perhaps could only lead to the nihilistic fanaticism of the next two generations. In the 1920s, Mann wrote the other book I'm now reading, The Magic Mountain, which is the ultimate novel of ideas, in which every character in asylum high up in the mountains seems to represent a completely different philosophy of life in that very intellectually fecund era that makes each character neurotic in a completely different way. And before Mann there was Dostoevsky and The Brothers Karamazov, and every brother represented a different trait of human instinct. The father, Fyodor Karamazov, seemed to be an untrained animal who gave into all kinds of instincts in the most pathetic ways, and was eventually murdered and clearly murdered by one of his sons. The oldest, Dmitri, clearly represents the heart, with all its overwhelming passions, its desire to do good, and the division between the two creates overwhelming suffering for him, and he is blamed for his father's murder. The middle child, Ivan, clearly represents the head, with all of its cold calculations for abstract thought and its innate predisposition to nihilism, whereas Dmitri is predisposed to suffering, Ivan is predisposed to outright insanity, and eventually goes crazy and confesses to his father's murder, though he clearly didn't do it, we'll get to what happened in a moment. And then there's Alyosha, the youngest, beloved by all, who clearly represents the soul, and has a calling into the priesthood and a monastery. But Father Zossima, the elder of his monastery, sees how screwed up his family is, and tells Alyosha that he must spend his life tending to his family and to communities at large, and through the good faith of Alyosha in his fellow man and his holy mother Church, many characters find that they can start the hard work of redemption. And then there is the illegitimate son, Smerdyakov, who is the negative human experience, the part of humans which they never want to acknowledge, the base low cunning, the easy gullibility, the pleasure in others' suffering, the base animal instinct and passion for low pursuits, and the desire to revisit suffering inflicted upon oneself onto others. I suppose it goes without saying that he's the brother whom we're meant to be at least 99% sure killed his father. He claimed he did it because of Ivan's dictum that in a world without God, everything is permitted. When Ivan hears this, he becomes so guilt stricken that he goes crazy and believes himself to be the murderer.

The point of all this is a novel of character can also be a novel of ideas if the characters mean more than just themselves, and this is where Purity excelled. We'll get to that in the next podcast. See you then!

-----

 We're all older now, and there's a whole new generation of literary fiction writers to be annoyed by.  The very fact that Franzen is so out of step now from a literary country he previously did so much to define makes me feel like taking what he has to say a little more seriously. Love turns so easily into hate, and to be honest, the hate engendered by both Franzen and David Foster Wallace makes me think twice about them. It certainly doesn't make me more interested in reading David Foster Wallace when one finds out his long history of wretched behavior to the women closest to him, but it's slightly amusing that thousands of readers, not just the quote-unquote mansplainers who were always recommending him to women, who used to eat up his every word and were devastated by his suicide; seem as though they're vowing en masse to never re-read his work. At very least, when readers have that complicated a relationship with a author, that means that his works are probably interesting. Even so, Infinite Jest is not my idea of a great way to spend a month... On the other hand, Wallace's journalism is far more interesting, and interesting in a way that a lot of later journalism is not because it challenges the preconceived notions of its audience. In one piece asks audience members to put aside their loathing of right-wing radio to consider the spectacular level of talent involved in making it. In another he asks them to empathize with run-of-the-mill Middle Americans at an Illinois State Fair, all of whom would probably vote Trump a quarter century later. There was his piece on John McCain, which examined the phenomenon of how McCain got many 2000 liberals excited about highly conservative notions like national greatness and honor and sacrifice. And then of course, there's the lobster.... (pause) I've tried Infinite Jest at least twice, not very hard, one day I'll make a more serious effort, but it never called to me. Perhaps Wallace's natural home, like the natural home of many novelists in this extremely un-novelistic age, is journalism. Wallace's long-form feature writing is magnificent - conversational, urgent, with incisive points that always compel the attention span.

But except perhaps for Consider the Lobster, which I won't even describe, just read it, all of these pieces are so antithetical to the spirit of 2020 that it should come as no surprise that the very same audiences who thrilled to Wallace at twenty now turn against him at forty. Perhaps in some way, Wallace knew what was coming for him, and having devoted so much time to resisting his inner voice telling him what a monster he was, he could not abide hearing that voice in externalized form, telling him what he thought he knew about himself all along. Though that's probably reading far too much into a suicide that will never truly be understood except to say that Wallace battled severe depression for decades. But depression does lift eventually, and whether in a year or fifty, the pendulum eventually swings back. Whether or not that includes me, Wallace will find new and appreciative audiences, he already has, and his most appreciative appraisers in the late 2010s seems to be a number of Christian publications.

But with Franzen, there's none of the high drama of Wallace's biography, indeed, perhaps partially out of personal experience of watching Wallace's demons, Franzen seems to do what he can to avoid exactly that kind of drama. When Oprah gave Franzen her endorsement, effectively making his career forever, Franzen did everything he could to turn it down. People thought he was monstrously ungrateful and scornful of an appreciative public, but think of all those American celebrity novelists - the stress of being a celebrity to more than twenty-thousand core readers can kill creativity - think of Salinger, Ellison, Fitzgerald, Margaret Mitchell, Capote and Harper Lee, David Foster Wallace... you go to public readings where you're treated as a rock star by literally thousands and then you have to go home and spend years at a time by yourself, trying to recapture the flame you'd been able to conjure in colossally different life-circumstances. The pressure of writing big books may have killed Wallace, or maybe it was knowledge of the media firestorm which would eventually burn much of his colossal esteem, but in the face of whatever similar pressure, Franzen churned out three meganovels in fifteen years and seems to have a fourth on the way - which will apparently be his final novel. I doubt a big novel is ever without its troubles, but compared to his famous friend to whose name Franzen is always connected, it seems almost as though big novels with big questions are as easy for him to expectorate as a loogie.

Freedom, on the other hand, does not seem nearly as great a book to me. At that time Freedom was released, only nine years ago, everyone spoke about how Franzen reground American novels in old notions of character and plot, but what strikes me in 2019 is how much information overload there is. There is a never-ending series of plot points whose complexity is serpentine, and whose point very well may be to elucidate the mind-numbing complexity behind which many businessmen hide their malfeasance, but as I found out when writing my own novel, portrayals of those complexities do not  make for great storytelling unless you can find a way to evoke their opacity without succumbing to the same. This is the oft-stated complaint about the novels of that generation: Wallace, Franzen, Zadie Smith, and going further back to Thomas Pynchon and Dom DeLillo.

About five years ago, Franzen drew all kinds of fire for saying that twitter is the ultimate irresponsible medium that reduces everyone's capacity for thought to the size of a soundbite - let's leave aside that of course America's pre-eminent writer of long novels in our generation was going to believe that, but four years later, a demagogic would-be dictator won a Presidential election with vast aid from a twitter feed, three years after that, there's little sign that this twittering era will end well for anyone but a handful of billionaires, each of whom might have rebellious daughters who disown them anyway.

And then, of course, there's the issue of misogyny in Franzen's writing. In some ways, Franzen was in a tough bind. He was called out for having privileges which women writers lack, and he immediately acknowledged its truth. What else could one do with a notion that's so obviously true. When Freedom came out, it was practically a month-long release party in the New York Times. But Franzen then noted that the accusations were coming from romance novelist, Jennifer Weiner, and Jodi Piccoult, both of whom can complain about their lack of critical approbation to their tens of millions of dollars in sales. To me, the problem is sort of framed by everyone backwardly. Why the pretense to the belief that writers relegated to genre ghettos don't suffer in the quality of their output and their freedom to go in any creative direction they like? Jodi Picoult is a relatively serious middlebrow writer, but Jennifer Weiner a romance writer - there's a pretty obvious beginning, middle, and end to that kind of book, and only so many variations. And meanwhile, very good genre fiction writers like JK Rowling and Barbara Taylor Bradford already make exponents more money than Franzen ever will, so in that sense, this liberal male who at least means well finds it a little difficult to feel too much sympathy. On the other hand, the problem is clearly that a woman who wants to write serious fiction will necessarily find her opportunities systemically limited, and therefore will often be relegated to making a much more probable success for herself within a genre ghetto. And this is a problem. If women or minorities were writing the same quantity of great literary fiction as white men, there wouldn't be nearly as much of a problem, because that means that they are getting the same amount of opportunities and the system is ultimately not weighted against them. But the system is weighted against them. And because of the frustrations inherent in systemic bias, many of the most talented women and writers of color simply give up their literary dreams, or are still forced more often to dilute their work for commercial considerations, or, if they even get to the pages of a book review, get  more critical pans that make them have to compromise on their vision for later work. I realize that there is a minefield of controversy one has to wade through with these points, but the point is to create a diverse world where the opportunities of the present and future are properly weighted to equal distribution resources for talent in all directions.

So is Franzen a misogynist? Well, I'll try to tread carefully here. There doesn't seem to be Wallace's long history of outright hostility, but there's definitely something both in Franzen's media pronouncements and in his fiction that makes him sound marginally less interested in women. In Purity there's no mistaking bristling contempt for the most radical feminism represented by the character Annabel Laird. Perhaps his weakness is my weakness too, and the character of Annabel's idealism is clearly born not of any lived experience, but of a toxic combination of mental instability and too much privilege that feeds on one another. She is clearly meant in many ways to be an allegorical representation of American radicalism born more of privilege than necessity, and I mostly had to nod in agreement with it, such belligerents do exist rather plentifully in some circles, among men as well as women. But there were a number of other women in the book who were portrayed much more sympathetically, the character of Laila is presented as a much more liberal feminist who lives in equal cooperative partnership with her partner who is also her coworker and is in many ways the star of their relationship to whom he cedes the limelight. One might fault Franzen as a male novelist telling women the proper way to be feminist, and yet, is a writer really supposed to silence themself? Fiction is only worthwhile if it has the sting of truth, just as non-fiction is only worthwhile if it has the vividness of fiction. Stories are a way of rendering the world in a multi-dimensional, more parablistic, deeper truth than mere facts. Every character has his or her or their own perspective,  and his or her or their own point of view, and through the writer's perspective, if he or she or they write work of quality, the composite of perspectives, the multi-dimensionality of reading characters live truth through lived experience, will provide a kind of new truth about life with which the reader can come away.

And yet at the same time, there is something about the rendering of Annabel Laird that doesn't sit right, and seems genuinely cruel, both to the delusions of the mentally ill, and also to the fact that a few of Annabel's points about the condition of women are not entirely wrong in ways that I'm not entirely sure her creator understands.

All writers, all people, have terrible weaknesses, but with enough insight, insight sometimes born of struggle, perhaps weaknesses can be re-contextualized into strengths. All sorts of great narrative artists from Philip Roth to Martin Scorsese to Strindberg to Dostoevsky have made their fear, confusion, and anger toward women into subjects that make abundantly explicit that the fault lies with the male protagonist and his creator, not the female characters or women more generally. Such limitations do mean there's some essentially lacking mix of compassion and imagination in the nature of creators like them, and it comes through in their work. The very best of the best are creatively androgynous, but you don't need to be able to imagine all the way into every kind of person to be a great artist, you just need to freight your imaginings, however misunderstanding or cruel, with meaning. Within the cruelty there must be compassion, just as within the compassion exhibited by the  very best of the best: a Shakespeare, or a Mozart, or a Rembrandt, or a Tolstoy, there is cruelty.

And this ambiguity between cruelty and compassion is where Purity excels. Like Dostoevsky, Franzen's ability to render the dysfunctional messiness of human motivations would seem unearthly, except that conflicts of human motivation are the very essence of the human story. For the characters in this book, love means hate and hate means love, the purer their motivations, the darker the reality they will into being. The more they long for simplicity, the more tangled grow their complications. The more will to power they exhibit to enact their better world visions, the more the world resists their ministering. It is a masterful rendering of human complication. It serves as an allegory for the very complicated mess that is the contemporary American-led world, and also serves as a kind of middlebrow tale in itself, existing somewhere between a pot boiler and soap opera. The best of the best is not just highbrow, it's every-brow and all at once. No, this isn't Tolstoy or Chekhov, it's not even Twain or Roth, and the attempts at humor in Purity are not great, but even with those quid-pro-quos, it's damn close to canonical fiction. It is very difficult to imagine an intersecting web of people and stories that better mirror the very particular conflicts of our time.

And Franzen is yet again embroiled in controversy for an article in the New Yorker about climate change, and how it may be counterproductive to give false hope for a future in which climate change doesn't subsume the planet if we act quickly enough. Obviously it's a little hypocritical for this doom and gloom podcaster who seemingly so delights in stripping what he believes to be illusions away to criticize someone else for taking away hopes, but Franzen did seem like a counterproductive catastrophizer. My first thought when I saw the article was 'shut up Jonathan,' and it's hardly the first time I've seen Franzen's name in the headlines and thought that. The same scientific experts who prognosticate about climate change's likelihood are the ones telling Franzen that he's grossly exaggerated the likelihood. But then again, scientists are notorious for their positivism, their belief that the world operates according to logical principles and that all logical things of this world can be scientifically verified. Nobody is better at understanding the unreason of people than a novelist, and perhaps it takes a novelist to make the imaginative leap that shows that even the most urgent human problems will fall prey to human irrationalities long after the chance for sparing every human life has ceased.

Like most of you dear listeners, Franzen hails from a very light society, but I think he's clearly a novelist of darkness from a generation who has begun to see the American light darken, in the tradition of Dostoevsky, Melville, Conrad, Mann, Faulkner, McCarthy, a novelist of excess who sees the potential in humans to destroy themselves. Perhaps it's not just more comforting to prefer the other line of writers, the light-bringers who see human's constructive potential, perhaps it's also more necessary if we're going to make better worlds. But there must be an enormous place of honor for this dark vision, the cautionary purge through fiction that shows the worlds we do not want to come to pass.

Wednesday, December 18, 2019

In Praise of Big Books - Final Draft

Welles Before the Law (up to the door shut)

That was Orson Welles reading the opposite of a big book. A six-hundred some word parable, the exact count depending on the translation, but I have to imagine it a perfect story in any translation; Kafka's Before the Law, and if you haven't read or heard it before today, you'll find yourself pondering its meanings for the rest of your life.

There's a reason that so many athletic events are over in a minute or two. If, for say, olympic athletes had to operate at peak performance past a few minutes, they would fail to perform their optimum at best, injure themselves permanently at worst. In the same way, there is no way to expect any kind of aesthetic perfection from long-form narrative. The best short stories are perfect, they are self-contained worlds which create multitudes of meaning that never stop yielding possibilities no matter how often you ponder them. Over the last ten years I've thought of so many different possibilities for what the end of Chekhov's The Black Monk might mean that it would be an entire podcast to list them. Hemingway's Hills Like White Elephants is little but a conversation that can mean an exponential multiplicity of different situations. The chill of Hawthorne's Young Goodman Brown can make you speculate your whole life long about America's origins, and wonder how many Puritans, or how many Christians through the millennia, went through the motions of faith while truly believing in nothing, or even only the Devil, and how that lack of faith may have corrupted the Christian faith itself. And it would be pointless to discuss all the potential meanings in Kafka's Before the Law or Borges's Borges and I, because both are not even a single page long and have enough potential meanings to ponder for a lifetime and never get past their first door. But meaning does not necessarily connote intellectual meaning, it can also connote emotional meaning. My personal favorite writer, Isaac Bashevis Singer, is very nearly forgotten master of the short story writing in a very nearly forgotten language (Yiddish), and his short stories don't have the subtleties of Borges or Kafka. They are almost folk tales, like Hans Christian Anderson or Edgar Allen Poe in their different ways, or Giovanni Verga and Flannery O'Connor, and they evoke not speculation but sense-impression, so grounded are they all in various pre-literate oral traditions that they evoke the entire worldview of a place and time, not only the superstitions and fears of distant people, but their hopes and values, and to me and so many others, that's almost more worthwhile than the more intellectual type of story, the meaning of these stories is not contemplative but empathic, and lets you identify with the extraordinary within other humans who have nothing in common with you as though they live inside your own skin.

On the other hand, even the best big books have to make aesthetic contortions of logic and structure and character development, with a hundred pages at a time of boredom and hollow manipulation to be endured until the narrative picks up again. Dostoevsky called Tolstoy's 864 page Anna Karenina a flawless work of art, and it's definitely more flawless than Dostoevsky's four final loose baggy monsters, but Part III of Anna Karenina, with all its prattling on about Levin's land dealings, would strain even the most business-savvy farmer. In terms of perfect novels, One might say The Great Gatsby is perfect, or Pride and Prejudice, or Cormac McCarthy's The Road, or Dostoevsky's earlier and very lean Notes from the Underground, or Stefan Zweig's Chess Story, or Bohumil Hrabal's Too Loud a Solitude, the latter three are short enough that they might fall into the novella category rather than novel, and personally, I think the novella is particularly great because it neither creating its splendors by elision as the short stories almost inevitably have to - the unsaid being as important as the said, nor does it let its author yield to the temptation of taking us through every narrative permutation of which they can think, no matter how dubious the connection to the rest of the book.

And then of course, there's Shakespeare, writer of writers, who takes us through so many permutations and contortions of logic and structure and character paradox that it's almost impossible to say that Shakespeare plays have any form at all, and yet they hurtle along to a literary momentum that breaks the speed of thought. Perhaps Shakespeare was writing the equivalent of the loose baggy monster in an era when few writers knew how to construct a story that was more than a hundred pages long - even the 850 page Don Quixote is more an anthology of short stories about two characters than a connected narrative, but because Shakespeare's plays are so short in comparison to later greats like Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Dickens, Melville, they scorch on both the stage and the page. The plays absorb us in as other writer can, and spit us out a different person.

And then, even over Shakespeare, there's the 'BIGGEST' book of them all, the Holy Bible, a work probably collated, redacted, edited, and marinated over a period of 2000 years. A lot of atheists of our  time think the Bible is just regressive mesmerism for groupthink, I think it's still the greatest book ever written, containing everything from the largest cosmic questions to the smallest domestic squabbles, the best intentions to the most appallingly violent ones, the highest poetry to the lowest comedy - and yes, there is comedy in the Bible all over the place and some of it even translates to our time, so more's the shame for them. The Bible is an anthology that has themes for every situation, and as the universal relatability of its themes pops up again and again in relation to the problems of every generation, one can only conclude that even if the Bible gets all kinds of specifics wrong, it is the eternal book. And because its themes and characters are so universally relatable to everyday life, encounters with the Bible completely change our thinking about life. For good or ill,  there has never been a more powerful work of art, and perhaps there can never be.

And why might that be? I submit that's because the Bible is the big book par excellence. I would imagine that the limit for a book to have no excess verbiage is probably around 375 pages, but the big books, the big novels, the best of them anyway, are the nearest thing to lived experience that we get without living life. Clive James, as we said a few podcasts ago, defined fiction as 'life without the dull bits', ...well.., in big books the dull bits are definitely there, ditto any symphony over an hour and any opera over two-and-a-half, ditto any double album or long-form TV show. But here's to them. Part of living life is living through the disappointing passages, which make the exciting parts all the sweeter. Even the best long novels will have one dull page for every nine that excite, and we will be grateful for lives with so little dullness than rather so much. And as we take them in, necessarily little by little, our impressions of these works cannot possibly be instant. We don't just watch the story evolve, we evolve alongside the story, often having to leave and return to it in the middle, bringing all sorts of unrelated new experiences to the book, pondering these stories and characters and themes for days. The books read us, as George Steiner might say, we don't just read them, we absorb them, they become part of us, changing our thinking as any of our memories would.

I'm cringing as I write all the English class appreciation cliches, all this is a prelude to the next podcast in which we discuss Purity by Jonathan Franzen. Talk to you soon dear listener!

Purity: In Praise of Big Books - Parts 1 and 2 (rough)

There's a reason that all sorts of major athletic competitions are over in a minute or two. If most olympic athletes had to operate at peak performance past two minutes, they would fail at best to perform at their optimum, injure themselves permanently at worst. In the same way, there is no way to expect any kind of aesthetic perfection from long-form narrative. The best short stories are perfect, they are self-contained worlds which create multitudes of meaning that never stop yielding possibilities no matter how often you ponder them. Over the last ten years I've thought of so many different possibilities for what the end of Chekhov's The Black Monk might mean that it would be an entire podcast to list them all. Hemingway's Hills Like White Elephants is little but a conversation that can mean an exponential multiplicity of different situations. The chill of Hawthorne's Young Goodman Brown can make you speculate your whole life long about America's origins, and wonder how many puritans, how many Christians through the millennia, went through the motions of faith while truly believing in nothing, or even only the Devil, and how that lack of faith may have corrupted the Christian faith itself. And it would be pointless to get started on all the potential meanings in Kafka's Before the Law or Borges's The Other, because both are not even a single page long, would take you literally three minutes to read, and have enough potential meanings to ponder for a lifetime and never get past their first door. But meaning does not necessarily connote intellectual meaning, it can also connote emotional meaning. My personal favorite writer, Isaac Bashevis Singer, is suddenly an almost forgotten master of the short story, and his short stories do not have the subtleties of Borges or Kafka. They are virtually folk tales, like Hans Christian Anderson or Edgar Allen Poe in their different ways, or Giovanni Verga and Flannery O'Connor, and they evoke not speculation but sense-impression, so grounded are they all in various pre-literate oral traditions that they evoke the entire worldview of a place and time, not only the superstitions and fears of distant people, but their hopes and values, and to me, that's almost more worthwhile than the more intellectual type, save Chekhov, who empathized with other humans as though they lived inside his own skin.

On the other hand, even the best big books have to make aesthetic contortions of logic and structure and observation, with a hundred pages at a time of boredom to be endured until the narrative picks up again. Dostoevsky called Tolstoy's 864 page Anna Karenina a flawless work of art, and it's definitely more flawless than Dostoevsky's four final loose baggy monsters, but Book III of Anna Karenina, with all its prattling on about Levin's land dealings, would strain even the most business-savvy farmer. In terms of perfect novels, One might say The Great Gatsby is perfect, or Pride and Prejudice, or Cormac McCarthy's The Road, or Dostoevsky's earlier and very lean Notes from the Underground, or Stefan Zweig's Chess Story, or Bohumil Hrabal's Too Loud a Solitude, the latter three are short enough that they might fall into the novella category rather than novel, and personally, I think the novella is a particularly great because it can feature a straight-forward narrative without creating its aesthetic splendors by elision as the short stories have to almost inevitably - the unsaid being as important as the said, nor does it allow its author a yield to temptation of taking us through every narrative permutation of which they can think, no matter how dubious the connection to the rest of the book.

And then of course, there's Shakespeare, writer of writers, who takes us through so many permutations and contortions of logic and structure and character paradox that it's almost impossible to say that Shakespeare has any form at all. Perhaps he was writing the equivalent of the loose baggy monster in an era when few writers knew how to construct a story that was more than a hundred pages long - even Don Quixote is more a collection of short stories than a connected narrative, but because they're so short in comparison to later greats like Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Dickens, Melville, they scorch on both the stage and the page. The plays absorb us in as other writer can, and spit us out a different person.

And then, even over Shakespeare, there's the 'BIGGEST' book of them all, the Holy Bible, a work probably collated, redacted, edited, and marinated over a period of 2000 years. A lot of people in our think the Bible is just regressive mesmerism for groupthink, I think it's still the greatest book ever written, containing everything from the largest cosmic questions to the smallest domestic squabbles, the best intentions to the most appallingly violent ones, the highest poetry to the lowest comedy,  - and yes, there is comedy in the Bible all over the place. The Bible is an anthology that has themes for every situation, and as the universal relatability of its themes pops up again and again in relation to the problems of every generation, one can only conclude that even if the Bible gets all kinds of specifics wrong, it is an eternal book. And because its themes and characters are so universally relatable to everyday life, encounters with the Bible completely change our thinking about life. For good or ill, there has never been a more powerful work of literature.

And why might that be? I would imagine that the limit for a book to have no excess verbiage is probably around 375 pages, but the big novel, the best of them anyway, is the nearest thing to lived experience that we get without living life. Clive James, as we said a few podcasts ago, defined fiction as 'life without the dull bits', ...well.., in big books the dull bits are definitely there, ditto in the big symphonies and operas, the long-form TV shows and double albums. But here's to them. Part of living life is living through the disappointing passages, which make the exciting parts all the sweeter. Even the best long novels will have 1 dull page for every 9 exciting ones, and you will be grateful for so little dullness than rather so much. And as we take them in, necessarily little by little, our impressions of these works cannot possibly be instant. We don't just watch the story evolve, we evolve alongside the story, often having to leave and return to it in the middle, bringing all sorts of unrelated new experiences to the book, pondering these stories and characters and themes for days.

All these cliches are a way of saying that I just read Purity by Jonathan Franzen, and I had a great time. I'd been avoiding Franzen's novels for years, he was just too much of the zeitgeist in the 2000's, too trendy, too cool, too liked by people and critics whose opinions I didn't care for. I doubt I knew what the term 'lit-bro' meant before the latest David Foster Wallace volleys, but there was something about all the writers of that most recent generation that rubbed me the wrong way: Wallace, Franzen, Eggers, Chabon.... The whole spirit of their writing seemed earnest to me where they should be ironic and ironic where they should be earnest. They all struck me as too cool, too self-conscious, for any depth to be anything but a pose.

But we're all older now, and there's a whole new generation of fiction writers to be annoyed by.  The very fact that Franzen is so out of step now from a literary country he previously did so much to define makes me feel like taking what he has to say a little more seriously. Love turns so easily into hate, and to be honest, the hate engendered by both Franzen and David Foster Wallace makes me think twice about them. It certainly doesn't make me more interested in reading David Foster Wallace when one finds out his long history of wretched behavior to women in his life both permanently and peripherally, but it's slightly amusing that thousands of readers, not just the mansplainers who never shut up about the book, who used to eat up his every word and were devastated by his suicide, seem as though they're vowing to never re-read his work. At very least, when readers have that complicated a relationship with a book, that means that the book is probably interesting.

With Franzen, there's none of the high drama of Wallace's biography, indeed Franzen seems to do what he can to avoid that kind of drama. When Oprah gave Franzen her endorsement, effectively making his career forever, Franzen did everything he could to turn it down. People thought he was monstrously ungrateful and scornful of an appreciative public, but think of all those American celebrity novelists - the stress of being a celebrity to more than twenty-thousand core readers can kill creativity - think of Salinger, Ellison, Fitzgerald, Margaret Mitchell, Capote and Harper Lee, you go to public readings where you're treated as a rock star by literally thousands and then you have to go home and spend years at a time by yourself, trying to recapture the flame you'd been able to conjure in colossally different life-circumstances. The pressure of writing big books may have killed Wallace,  or maybe it was knowledge of the media firestorm which would eventually burn his reputation, but in the face of whatever pressure, Franzen churned out three meganovels in fifteen years and seems to have a fourth on the way - though apparently his final one. I doubt a big novel is ever without its troubles, but compared to his famous friend to whose name Franzen is always connected, it seems almost as though big novels with big questions are as easy for him to expectorate as a fart. He drew all kinds of fire for saying that twitter is the ultimate irresponsible medium that reduces everyone's capacity for thought to the size of a soundbite - let's leave aside that of course America's pre-eminent writer of long novels in our generation was going to believe that, but four years later, a demagogic would-be dictator won a Presidential election with vast aid from a twitter feed, three years after that, there's little sign that this twittering era will end well for anyone but a handful of billionaires, each of whom might have rebellious daughters who disown them anyway.

And then, of course, there's the issue of misogyny in Franzen's writing. Is Franzen a misogynist? Well, we'll try to tread carefully here. There doesn't seem to be Wallace's long history of outright hostility, but there's definitely something both in Franzen's media pronouncements and in his fiction that makes him sound marginally less interested in women. You can pick up a kind of contempt in Purity for certain kinds of women, and all kinds of contempt for the much more radical forms of feminism represented by the character Annabel Laird. Perhaps his weakness is my weakness too, and when Annabel's idealism is clearly born not of any lived experience, but of a toxic combination of mental instability and too much privilege that feeds on one another. She is clearly in some ways meant to be an allegorical representation for many forms of American radicalism born more of privilege than necessity, and I mostly had to shake my head in agreement with him, and there were a number of other women in the book who were portrayed much more sympathetically. Yet at the same time, there was something about the rendering of the character that didn't sit right, and seemed genuinely cruel both to the delusions of the mentally ill and also to the fact that a few of Annabel's points about the condition of women were not entirely wrong in ways that I'm not entirely sure her creator understands.

We all have terrible weaknesses, but with enough insight, insight sometimes born of struggle, perhaps weaknesses can be re-contextualized into strengths. All sorts of great narrative artists from Philip Roth to Martin Scorsese to Strindberg to Dostoevsky have made their fear, confusion, and anger toward women into subjects that make abundantly explicit that the fault is that of the protagonist and his creator, not the female characters or women more generally. It does mean that mean there's some essentially lacking mix of compassion and imagination in the nature of creators like them, and it comes through in their work. The very best of the best are creatively androgynous, but you don't need to be able to imagine all the way into every kind of person to be a great artist, you just need to freight your imaginings, however misunderstanding or cruel, with meaning. Within the cruelty there must be compassion, just as within the compassion exhibited by the best of the best: a Shakespeare, or a Mozart, or a Rembrandt, or a Tolstoy, there is cruelty.

And meaning is where Purity excels. Like Dostoevsky and Strindberg, Franzen's ability to render the dysfunctional messiness of human motivations would seem unearthly, except that conflicts of human motivation are the very essence of the human story. For the characters in this book, love means hate and hate means love, the purer their motivations, the darker the reality they will into being. The more they long for simplicity, the more tangled grow their complications. The more will to power they exhibit to enact their better world, the more the world resists. It is a masterful rendering of human complication. It serves as an allegory for the very complicated mess that is the contemporary American-led world, and also serves as a kind of middlebrow tale in itself, existing somewhere between a pot boiler and soap opera. The best of the best is not just highbrow, it's every-brow and all at once. This isn't Chekhov or Tolstoy, it's not even Twain or Roth, and the attempts at humor in Purity are not great, but even with those quid-pro-quos, it's damn close. It is very difficult to imagine an intersecting web of people and stories that better mirror the very particular conflicts of our time.

And Franzen is yet again embroiled in controversy for an article in the New Yorker about climate change, and how it may be counterproductive to give false hope for a future in which climate change doesn't subsume the planet if we act quickly enough. Obviously it's a little hypocritical for this doom and gloom podcaster who seemingly so delights in stripping what he believes to be illusions away to criticize someone else for taking away hopes, but Franzen did seem like a counterproductive catastrophizer. My first thought when I saw the article was 'shut up Jonathan,' and it's hardly the first time I've seen Franzen's name in the headlines and thought that. The same scientific experts who prognosticate about climate change's likelihood are the ones telling Franzen that he's grossly exaggerated the likelihood. But then again, scientists are notorious for their positivism, their belief that the world operates according to logical principles and that with enough time and argument, the world will yield to reason. Nobody is better at understanding the unreason of people than a novelist, and perhaps it takes a novelist to make the imaginative leap that shows that even the most urgent human problems will fall prey to human irrationalities long after the chance for sparing everyone's life has ceased.

Like most of you dear listeners, Franzen hails from a very light society, but he is clearly a novelist of darkness, in the tradition of Dostoevsky, Melville,  Conrad, Mann, Faulkner, McCarthy, a novelist of excess who sees the potential in humans to destroy themselves. Perhaps it's not just more comforting to prefer the other line of writers, the light-bringers who see human's constructive potential, perhaps it's also more necessary if we're going to make better worlds. But there must be an enormous place of honor for this dark vision, the cautionary purge through fiction that shows the worlds we do not want to come to pass.

Tuesday, December 17, 2019

In Praise of the Big Book - Most of it

There's a reason that all sorts of major athletic competitions are over in a minute or two. If most olympic athletes had to operate at peak performance past two minutes, they would fail at best to perform at their optimum, injure themselves permanently at worst. In the same way, there is no way to expect any kind of aesthetic perfection from long-form narrative. The best short stories are perfect, they are self-contained worlds which create multitudes of meaning that never stop yielding possibilities no matter how often you ponder them. Over the last ten years I've thought of so many different possibilities for what the end of Chekhov's The Black Monk might mean that it would be an entire podcast to list them all. Hemingway's Hills Like White Elephants is little but a conversation that can mean an exponential multiplicity of different situations. The chill of Hawthorne's Young Goodman Brown can make you speculate your whole life long about America's origins, and wonder how many puritans, how many Christians through the millennia, went through the motions of faith while truly believing in nothing, or even only the Devil, and how that lack of faith may have corrupted the Christian faith itself. And it would be pointless to get started on all the potential meanings in Kafka's Before the Law or Borges's The Other, because both are not even a single page long, would take you literally three minutes to read, and have enough potential meanings to ponder for a lifetime and never get past their first door. But meaning does not necessarily connote intellectual meaning, it can also connote emotional meaning. My personal favorite writer, Isaac Bashevis Singer, is suddenly an almost forgotten master of the short story, and his short stories do not have the subtleties of Borges or Kafka. They are virtually folk tales, like Hans Christian Anderson or Edgar Allen Poe in their different ways, or Giovanni Verga and Flannery O'Connor, and they evoke not speculation but sense-impression, so grounded are they all in various pre-literate oral traditions that they evoke the entire worldview of a place and time, not only the superstitions and fears of distant people, but their hopes and values, and to me, that's almost more worthwhile than the more intellectual type, save Chekhov, who empathized with other humans as though they lived inside his own skin.

On the other hand, even the best big books have to make aesthetic contortions of logic and structure and observation, with a hundred pages at a time of boredom to be endured until the narrative picks up again. Dostoevsky called Tolstoy's 864 page Anna Karenina a flawless work of art, and it's definitely more flawless than Dostoevsky's four final loose baggy monsters, but Book III of Anna Karenina, with all its prattling on about Levin's land dealings, would strain even the most business-savvy farmer. In terms of perfect novels, One might say The Great Gatsby is perfect, or Pride and Prejudice, or Cormac McCarthy's The Road, or Dostoevsky's earlier and very lean Notes from the Underground, or Stefan Zweig's Chess Story, or Bohumil Hrabal's Too Loud a Solitude, the latter three are short enough that they might fall into the novella category rather than novel, and personally, I think the novella is a particularly great because it can feature a straight-forward narrative without creating its aesthetic splendors by elision as the short stories have to almost inevitably - the unsaid being as important as the said, nor does it allow its author a yield to temptation of taking us through every narrative permutation of which they can think, no matter how dubious the connection to the rest of the book.

And then of course, there's Shakespeare, writer of writers, who takes us through so many permutations and contortions of logic and structure and character paradox that it's almost impossible to say that Shakespeare has any form at all. Perhaps he was writing the equivalent of the loose baggy monster in an era when few writers knew how to construct a story that was more than a hundred pages long - even Don Quixote is more a collection of short stories than a connected narrative, but because they're so short in comparison to later greats like Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Dickens, Melville, they scorch on both the stage and the page. The plays absorb us in as other writer can, and spit us out a different person.

And then, even over Shakespeare, there's the 'BIGGEST' book of them all, the Holy Bible, a work probably collated, redacted, edited, and marinated over a period of 2000 years. A lot of people in our modern age hate the Bible, I think it's still the greatest book ever written, containing everything from the largest cosmic questions to the smallest domestic squabbles, the best intentions to the most appallingly violent ones, the highest poetry to the lowest comedy,  - and yes, there is comedy in the Bible all over the place. The Bible is an anthology that has themes for every situation, and as the universal relatability of its themes pops up again and again in relation to the problems of every generation, one can only conclude that even if the Bible gets all kinds of specifics wrong, it is an eternal book. And because its themes and characters are so universally relatable to everyday life, encounters with the Bible completely change our thinking about life. For good or ill, there has never been a more powerful work of literature.

And why might that be? I would imagine that the limit for a book to have no excess verbiage is probably around 375 pages, but the big novel, the best of them anyway, is the nearest thing to lived experience that we get without living life. Clive James, as we said a few podcasts ago, defined fiction as 'life without the dull bits', ...well.., in big books the dull bits are definitely there, ditto in the big symphonies and operas, the long-form TV shows and double albums. But here's to them. Part of living life is living through the disappointing passages, which make the exciting parts all the sweeter. Even the best long novels will have 1 dull page for every 9 exciting ones, and you will be grateful for so little dullness than rather so much. And as we take them in, necessarily little by little, our impressions of these works cannot possibly be instant. We don't just watch the story evolve, we evolve alongside the story, often having to leave and return to it in the middle, bringing all sorts of unrelated new experiences to the book, pondering these stories and characters and themes for days.

Friday, December 13, 2019

Three Dead Critics: Harold Bloom Part 2

Because the Harold Blooms of the world did not concede that the best of popular culture was entirely worthy of the 'A-word' (meaning art of course), we're now long since living in a world where the 'A-words' are 'anything at all you like,' and because literary critics were so slow in realizing that Welles and Bergman were creators who deserve an equal, maybe even superior, place alongside Whitman and Strindberg, let alone David Chase or Matthew Weiner, we can't be surprised that more contemplative, 'higher', art that challenges people to find deep meaning in life has no more value to most people than culture products that are clearly meant to do little more than entertain their audience. Even the quote/unquote 'postmodern' world of 'art is anything goes' is now dying, and perhaps we're now moving into a world where the 'A-word' is 'Anything that promotes my values.' And by not conceding that a gifted writer of differing identity can bring a valuable perspective purely by virtue of their lived uniqueness, he lent legitimacy to all his enemies who claimed that the perspective of the traditional geniuses is all the same by virtue of their white male privilege.

Now please understand, this is not to mean that there's no value in commercial entertainment or even that commercial entertainment can't be art, it most certainly can and one can find all kinds of artfulness in the lowest of lowbrow places. But the nature of commercialism is that the vitamins get watered down by all manner of business concerns. On TV, when you're producing 20 to 26 episodes a season, there is absolutely no way for all of them to be of consistent quality. In Star Trek you have to deal with the conundrum of Picard, the most principled leader on television, unwittingly coming destroying the earth for the Borg, and in the same show you have to watch Dr. Crusher have an affair with a lamp. One could make the same distinctions for divergence in quality for All in the Family, Mary Tyler Moore, NYPD Blue, and The West Wing.

Realistically speaking, that will happen all the time in art as in any facet of life, and one has to accept as a necessary component of living that most potential in this life is untapped, and even those who generally fulfill their potential do not fulfill all of it. Just as an example from recent Western life, I saw a twitter feed just today where a hundred people complained how insane it is to think that there was nothing good on TV before The Sopranos, as though Prestige TV sprang fully formed like Athena from the head of David Chase. Obviously, that's not true in the slightest, for fifty years, there were lots of great shows before we got to The Sopranos. but the revelation of The Sopranos was due to the difference in how it was produced: due to HBO's limited number of episodes per season, and therefore its ability to allocate more of its budget to every episode, its business model based on catering precisely to people who craved more imaginative production rather than finding a common denominator between every demographic,  because of all that and more, there was so much less crap amid the gold, and HBO was merely waiting for great writers like David Chase and David Milch to come along and wring every bit of artistic potential from this new model. But even in the cases of Chase and Milch, the vast reservoir of their potential laid untapped. Chase was a journeyman TV writer and failed moviemaker who struck gold in his mid-50s, and by the end of The Sopranos' run was so burnt out that he never made another show. Before Deadwood David Milch had NYPD Blue, the pressure from which gave him a heart attack, and after two other failed New York police dramas he came to HBO to do Deadwood, it was immediately hailed by critics as one of the greatest shows ever made, but after three years and little audience, HBO did not renew the show with the promise of two movies, it took thirteen years for one movie to materialize, by which time David Milch was suffering from dementia. Whether or not Harold Bloom sees TV as an equivalently prestigious art form to the novel, which itself was not considered much of an art until Henry James fought for its prestige, the creators suffer from all the same setbacks as any other kind of artist.

So at least in that sense, Harold Bloom was the guardian who fell asleep at the gate. By his ilk refusing to regard anything which smacked of popular culture as worthy of serious consideration, who can be surprised that so many current millions regard anything that smacks of high culture as unworthy of serious consideration? The 'arts' as they've been practiced for three-thousand years are now a cultural backwater which have little to do with contemporary life as most people live it, and this is less than 200 years after Beethoven and Tolstoy and Goya and Keats and the resurrection of Shakespeare and Michelangelo and Bach, the era when people realized that the contemplation of art and its transcendent metaphysics did more to free them from the mental dictatorship of religions than any political action, and now, not even two-hundred years later, we are in danger of placing ourselves into new mental prisons, based on the idea that various forms of science will protect us - be they not well-thought-out social sciences like intersectionality which believes that the underprivileged of the world remain so because of a silent conspiracy of systemic forces that with enough effort can be cast off like a shirt, or Randian objectivism, which believes that potential of the individual is all that matters and that therefore the potential of the potentially great will be the best service to the earth - and if their service to the earth isn't good, that's OK too. Or be those beliefs based on hard science and the trans-humanist belief that greater scientific and statistical-data analysis will eventually liberate us from the limitations of being human. All these various hard and soft scientisms fall apart as nearly every belief system in history has that the human condition is a prison from which there is escape. It is a most definite part of the human condition to search for an escape route, but the only escape from being human is temporary and illusory, and that escape is the arts. The details of how the arts can provide that must obviously be a podcast for another day and another theme.

But now we live in the 21st century. And just after the 19th century, the era when culture's widespread triumph facilitated a near-universal adaptation of enlightenment principles and the widespread emergence from the long mental choke-hold of monotheistic dogma, came the century when culture lit a match to the very world that built it to its greatest height. On one side, the side of fascists and imperialists, came the idea that those nations who had not yet developed their culture to a similarly visible extent are inferior by their very nature, and therefore should either be exploited as slaves or eliminated as pollutive threats; on the other side, the side of communists, and yes, the vast majority of socialists too, came the idea that culture is the greatest tool humanity has yet invented to facilitate humanity's belief in its own material liberation and equality and freedom from exploitation, and therefore culture must be used, and invariably used, as a weapon of propaganda, and those millions who might be powerful use it in any manner other than propagandistically are threats who must be eliminated. So let there be no doubt, there are many great dangers to the belief that culture can save us, just as there are to any other system of belief, and when it came to culture's more destructive properties, critics like Harold Bloom might as well have stuck their heads into a sewer. Its all well and good to say that such beliefs are a misuse and perversion of culture, but all things of this world will be misused all the time, and there is no choice but to be vigilantly mindful of our values' misuses and take as many precautions as we can against them.

And in the place of what we've mistakenly termed 'high culture', we now have a new culture, a popular culture, filled with electronic art forms still so new that they've barely grown past infancy - and at the first sign that the voice of the people may demand something other than what intellectuals proscribe for them, the most gifted academics, or at least the most privileged ones, fled from popular mediums almost entirely, and without the input of people who understand the long history of art's uses and misuses, billions now subsist on mass entertainment without realizing that their greater say in world affairs requires them to contemplate what entertains them more deeply, like, just to take two obvious examples, why they exult in the most desensitizing depictions of violence, or why they love the very real humiliations of reality television ... I certainly don't believe in censoring people's entertainment, but I do have to imagine both to a certain extent desensitize people to suffering, and that if a critical mass are introduced to works that interrogate why they love those kinds of degradation, our cultural empathy might just increase. As hard as it is to believe, in a democracy whose maintenance depends on the intelligence of the general public, contemplation of our reasons for enjoying violence and humiliation is what might make the difference between a democratic society that thinks conscientiously enough to stay together, and a society that so misunderstands itself that it breaks down.

Wednesday, December 11, 2019

Three Dead Critics - Harold Bloom Parts 1 and 2 - Rough Draft

Part 1:

I almost forgot, Dear Listener, we still need to return to our three critics: Harold Bloom, John Simon, and Clive James. Let's begin with the easiest of these three to tackle, easy because he was such an intellectual caricature, his persona to the world was so over the top that he was almost a popular culture figure of fun. With his physical shape it's amazing that Harold Bloom made it past sixty, and for thirty years his physical appearance morphed into the embodiment of a desiccated, senile aesthetic.

In so many ways, Bloom was his own worst argument. Fifteen years ago he was metoo'd by Naomi Wolf (of all people...). Given the lack of other women who came forward, I suppose it's possible that this was a one-off lapse in judgement, and given Naomi Wolf's long history of intellectual sloppiness and outright mental insanity, she might have misinterpreted Harold Bloom's intentions toward her as well, though I frankly doubt it. After he died I half expected that the every major magazine (such as they still exist) would fill their entire back halves with a dozen other me-too stories about America's most powerful English teacher, and his most fawning students would pretend to be shocked at the extent of it. The truth is that Bloom long had a reputation for hitting on his students, but nevertheless it's still possible albeit unlikely that Naomi Wolf misinterpreted him, and that all his other dalliances were both entirely consensual and without quid-pro-quo understandings of the power he would wield to their benefit. But even if Bloom was a Saint, unlikely as that is, he was nevertheless a pope from which his church seceded - a living embodiment of apolitical aesthetic worship - that immersion in the greatness of literature was its own reward. His church had hardly any new saints, and inclusion in the church's canon practically ended with Samuel Becket, a modernist update of the old saints. He would praise a couple later writers: Jose Saramago, Philip Roth, Thomas Pynchon, and, of course, Tony Kushner, who was an ex-student of Bloom's and counted Bloom an influence on his work. Profiles in major publications were often by former students who clearly earned his favor, bordered closely on the hagiographic, but as with all biographies of preacher-saints, they were vague on the essential question: what did he actually teach?

In his long dotage, Bloom was not really a teacher or a thinker, he was a religious cleric, a preacher of literature's church in a revival tent, and by the time I came of age as a reader, the extent of his literary output was just book after book of literary cheerleading. When he was a young man, Bloom clearly had ideas. Everybody who's dipped a couple toes into literary theory knows The Anxiety of Influence, - his thesis that great poets wrestle with their greatest predecessors in a kind of Freudian struggle to declare independence and individuality from father-figures. The idea both has some merit and is also a little ridiculous. Everybody has predecessors, and great writers have to read in order to know how to write. So if you take it as a metaphor, I suppose it can yield all kinds of insight that helps you perceive how artists might have transformed the material of previous writers, but if you read it literally, it's also ridiculous; inspiration comes from literally any facet of life, and we still have no idea how the brain conjures inspiration. His last truly original idea was surmising that the J-writer, writer of the largest and most consequential swath of the Old Testament, was none other than David's wife, Batsheva or Bathsheba. Why Batsheva? Nobody could really figure out his reasoning...

And yet as Bloom never tired of admitting in one of his many self-contradictions, literary theory is itself ridiculous. No one in their right mind would read the theory behind a work you love when you can experience the work again. In that sense, Bloom was absolutely right. The point of the arts is not to be a tool to better understand politics or religion or ideology or sociology or systemic injustice or mythical archetypes... the point of art is to create something meaningful where nothing used to be. Once all the interpretations of theorists both Christian and Marxist expire which Shakespeare and Mozart and Rembrandt inspire, the primary works still remain, with new interpretations for the concerns of new generations. Great work remains great, but our relation to it is always evolving. Artistic meaning can be reside within all those fields of study, but attempts to pigeonhole art's purpose within the realm of those other fields make art a servant of propaganda - and this is a practice indulged in as often by right-wing intellectuals as it is by left-wing, all of whom Bloom loathed and they loathed him back seventy-seven fold.

My contempt for Bloom was somewhat loving in spite of itself, and what I particularly admired was that he had all the right enemies. To be perfectly honest, I own more than a half-dozen of his books, and I still occasionally dip into them, mostly for suggestions for other books to read, because it's not like I could make heads or tails of much of his writing. I'm not nearly as smart as I think I am, but for a reader who could read thousands of books in his memory, Bloom was a shockingly bad writer - his critical judgments were simultaneously imperious and incoherent, his tone both egotistical and self-pitying, and his prose only compelling when he hurled invective. I agreed with many of the insults, but it's a sad person indeed who likes another only for hating everybody you hate.

Bloom mounted every defense for keeping the gates of high art up a critic could possibly mount, and by defending it so strenuously, he did as much as anyone to collapse the gate he claimed to defend. The question among intelligentsia used to be if it's a good use of one's time for a person who loves Dickens to read Bradbury and Tolkein, we now live in a world where the intelligentsia asks if its a good use of one's time to read Dickens if you love X-Men.

-------

Part 2:

By not conceding that the best of popular culture was entirely worthy of the 'A-word' (meaning art of course), we're now long since living in a world where the 'A-words' are 'anything at all you like.' Even the quote/unquote 'postmodern' world of 'art is anything goes' is now dying, and perhaps we're now moving into a world where the 'A-word' is 'Anything that promotes my values.' And by not conceding that a writer of differing identity can bring a valuable perspective by virtue of their uniqueness, he lent legitimacy to all his enemies who claimed that the perspective of the traditional geniuses is all the same by virtue of their white male privilege.

I had an indulgent contempt for Bloom, he was the guardian who fell asleep at the wheel. By his ilk refusing to regard anything which smacked of popular culture as worthy of serious consideration, who can be surprised that so many current millions regard anything that smacks of high culture as unworthy of serious consideration? The 'arts' as they've been practiced for three-thousand years are now a cultural backwater which have little to do with contemporary life as most people live it, and this is less than 200 years after Beethoven and Tolstoy and Goya and Keats and the resurrection of Shakespeare and Michelangelo and Bach, the era when people realized that the contemplation of art and its transcendent metaphysics did more to free them from the mental dictatorship of religions than any political action, and now, not even two-hundred years later, we are in danger of placing ourselves into new mental prisons, based on the idea that various forms of science will protect us - be those beliefs in science based on hard science and the belief that greater scientific and statistical-data knowledge will eventually liberate us from the condition of being human, or be they not well-thought-out social sciences like intersectionality which believe that the underprivileged of the world remain so because of a silent conspiracy of systemic forces that with enough effort can be cast off like a shirt, these beliefs fall apart as nearly every belief system in history has that the human condition is a prison from which there is escape. It is a most definite part of the human condition to search for an escape route, but the only escape from being human is temporary and illusory, and that escape is the arts. The details of how the arts can provide that must obviously be a podcast for another day and another theme.

But now we live in the 21st century. And just after the 19th century, the era when culture's widespread triumph facilitated a near-universal adaptation of enlightenment principles and the widespread emergence from the long mental choke-hold of monotheistic dogma, came the century when culture lit a match to the very world that built it to its greatest height. On one side, the side of fascists and imperialists, came the idea that those nations who had not yet developed their culture to a similarly visible extent are inferior by their very nature, and therefore should either be exploited as slaves or eliminated as pollutive threats; on the other side, the side of communists, and yes, the vast majority of socialists too, came the idea that culture is the greatest tool humanity has yet invented to facilitate humanity's belief in its own material liberation and equality and freedom from exploitation, and therefore culture must be used, and invariably used, as a weapon of propaganda, and those millions who might be powerful use it in any manner other than propagandistically are threats who must be eliminated. So let there be no doubt, there are many great dangers to the belief that culture can save us, just as there are to any other system of belief, and when it came to culture's more destructive properties, critics like Harold Bloom might as well have stuck their heads into a sewer. Its all well and good to say that such beliefs are a misuse and perversion of culture, but all things of this world will be misused all the time, and there is no choice but to be vigilantly mindful of our values' misuses and take as many precautions as we can against them.

And in the place of what we've mistakenly termed 'high culture', we now have a new culture, a popular culture, filled with electronic art forms still so new that they've barely grown past infancy - and at the first sign that the voice of the people may demand something other than what intellectuals proscribe for them, the most gifted academics, or at least the most privileged ones, fled from popular mediums almost entirely, and without the input of people who understand the long history of art's uses and misuses, billions now subsist on mass entertainment without realizing that their greater say in world affairs requires them to contemplate what entertains them more deeply, like, just to take two obvious examples, why they exult in the most desensitizing depictions of violence, or why they love the very real humiliations of reality television ... I certainly don't believe in censoring people's entertainment, but I do have to imagine both to a certain extent desensitize people to suffering, and that if a critical mass are introduced to works that interrogate why they love those kinds of degradation, our cultural empathy might just increase. As hard as it is to believe, in a democracy whose maintenance depends on the intelligence of the general public, contemplation of our reasons for enjoying violence and humiliation is what might make the difference between a democratic society that thinks conscientiously enough to stay together, and a society that so misunderstands itself that it breaks down.

------

It's ultimately fine that the literature most people now consume is TV, the music is electronic, the poetry is song lyrics, the theater is movies, the art is graphic novels and animation and cinematography. The best work among all of those new arts have long since proven their worthiness. But why is there so little place in common discourse for all five of those arts as they have always been practiced? Is the reason partially that people are simply lazy and uncurious? Of course. But that can't be the whole reason. Part of the story is how ignorant and insensitive the gatekeepers were to new developments. If you live too much in the past, the present evolves without your input.

And now that we live in a world where the study of art's long history as its own reward is barely acknowledged, we begin to live again in an era when art is a servant to other forces. We've been here many times before, and no matter how good and pure the intentions of the first generation ideologues, lots of people will eventually attach themselves whose intentionality is bad indeed. It's a shame, history is suddenly littered with the remains of artistic works that would alert people to these dangers.

Wednesday, December 4, 2019

What Does A Great Conductor Do? - Final Draft

(Play from where the link goes until hard cut at 19:33)

It's one of the hardest passages for a conductor. Near the end of the first movement of Bruckner's seventh symphony, a movement I've often imagined to be a depiction of heaven - the divine light, the play of angels on clouds, the ascension of the newly deceased to their reception into eternity.

It's almost impossible to hear properly on a recording, but getting this right in concert is the difference between noise and an array of musical colors that few other pieces could ever release. As the soul ascends toward the gates of St. Peter, the music of the strings and high winds ascends in tones higher, and higher, and higher, in the kind of longing and ecstasy that is Bruckner's alone among musicians. And in order to get a sense of just how high we have soared, the double basses and timpani intones a pedal point E in their lowest octave - as if to show how distant earth is from heaven.

But in most performances, you can't hear that low-E. Double bass is a very quiet instrument, and if a timpani roll gets too loud, it sounds like distortion. And yet in the performance I heard on Saturday night, the low-E was as pellucid as a triangle, yet the basses were not even playing. It must have been played by the tuba, though I couldn't see the tuba player from my seat. The conductor, Marek Janowski, must have rescored it, and it must be a ferociously difficult note for a tuba to play for so long, but orchestral musicians have much better technique today than they did in Bruckner's day. For anyone who knows basic orchestration, this solution should be obvious, and yet I'm not aware anybody had ever thought of it.

Nearly three years ago, I heard the legendary Daniel Barenboim conduct a performance of this symphony that was magnificent, but this particular moment dissolved in gibberish. Barenboim is a master of phrasing and voice leading and context, but no one ever hailed him as a master of technique. Yet Marek Janowski is such a master craftsman that he thought of a solution better than any thought up by Bruckner and perhaps any other conductor. This is the kind of thing a true maestro knows how to do.

Every concertgoer has asked this question for two hundred years: what does a conductor do? The answer is not so easy, because the job description of a conductor is so nebulous that a conductor can pretty much make up his job as he goes along. Think of it as a baseball manager or football coach, the low-key way that Joe Torre managed a team was almost the opposite of the high-octane intensity of Tony La-Russa. Both managers clearly were extremely successful, but their success depended on the responsiveness of the players they faced. Some workers are more motivated by bosses who let them figure things out for themselves, other workers require a boss who corrects their every move. Everybody is different, and success depends upon the organization's culture, and the director's ability to read the kind of boss their players require for the best results.

I was not a normal kid. During the two or three years of my childhood when I didn't long to be an orchestra conductor, I dreamed of being a baseball manager. As I got older, the more similarities there seemed between these two childhood obsessions. For better or worse, the performing arts have about the same success rate as baseball. Just as with batting averages, even the elite among musicians and actors will only get a hit 3 out of 10 times, and will only hit a home run one in fifteen times. In a lifetime, we all fail many more times than we succeed.

The recreative artists who give the appearance of universal success, like Carlos Kleiber or Daniel Day-Lewis, can only do so in artificial circumstances. They're so selective about their projects that there's no true sample size in their work.

Conducting is not a profession as rife with frauds as some allege, but there are many who are more mediocre than their reputations. A conductor great at every performance is a myth. Most good conductors, like any performer, have a couple dozen substantial works at most which they know well enough to excel, and everything else is a crapshoot.

And like in every profession, the best of all are almost never superstars. To be a superstar, you have to at least be good, but performers become superstars because they choose music that draws more attention to them than to the music. Yet music expresses so much more than sensory overload. I've heard Valery Gergiev give a Tchaikovsky 5 that could light up a whole city, and in the same concert he conducted Tchaikovsky's Romeo and Juliet Overture whose playing came so unglued I thought he'd stop the piece and start over. I've heard Yannick Nezet-Seguin give a Petrushka for the ages, but in subtler music like Bluebeard's Castle by Bartok, he exhibited no understanding of what makes the music compelling. I've heard Gustavo Dudamel do a Rite of Spring to wake up a continent and another Rite of Spring to put a city to sleep. The same was once true about Georg Solti and Herbert von Karajan. The really great ones, who are always studying more music as a matter of course and can find the music in the music of any time or place, rarely become household names in any country except for the week they guested at your local orchestra if you've got a particularly robust public for classical music in your town. They're too curious about great music to keep playing the flashy pieces that make you remember them more than the music they conducted, if you've grown to love orchestral music, chances are it's because there was a conductor made it sing and dance without even drawing attention tot he fact that he was doing it.

Occasionally you get a musical genius up there like Leonard Bernstein and Daniel Barenboim who can find the music in anything, but the nature of genius is that their brains work differently, and they can't always transmit their extraordinary understanding. On any given night, Lenny and Danny could be as risible as they were magnificent the night before. Is a conductor like Barenboim more valuable than a conductor like Marek Janowski, whose revelations are very subtle, but who never fails spectacularly?

Any kind of musician who gives a performance worthy of the music they're playing on more than one in three nights is the most exclusive of exclusive clubs, and in the history of the entire of the conducting profession, there are maybe twenty-five names. Some of those are names that if you followed the classical world from a distance you might have heard: Claudio Abbado, Mariss Jansons, Bruno Walter, Thomas Beecham, and (cough, ahem) James Levine, and some are only known and remembered by the concert faithful like Charles Munch, Charles Mackerras, Rafael Kubelik, Ernest Ansermet, Eduard van Beinum, Ferenc Fricsay, Gennadi Rozhdestvensky, Herbert Blomstedt, William Steinberg, Otmar Suitner, Igor Markevitch, Michael Gielen, Christoph von Dohnanyi, Paul Paray, Erich Kleiber... and perhaps the living names of five younger conductors who are less than ninety years old yet... And even those twenty-five names are not necessarily even the greatest, they are the great contact hitters - the ones who inspire great performances most often, but not necessarily the greatest performances. By my judgement, there is no higher 'batting-average' than Pierre Monteux, the Golden Age French conductor who could literally make great music from anything, but can I say with a clear conscience that he is a greater conductor than Wilhelm Furtwangler, the greatest home-run hitter in the profession's history who climbed and scaled to higher heights than any other maestro ever did? Of course not, there must be room on a list like this not only for Furtwangler, but other power hitters who strike out all the time too like Leonard Bernstein, Valery Gergiev, Dmitri Mitropoulos, Willem Mengelberg, Victor de Sabata, Simon Rattle, Nikolai Golovanov, Kirill Kondrashin, Neeme Jarvi, Leopold Stokowski, Yevgeny Svetlanov, Serge Koussevitzky, Klaus Tennstedt, Albert Coates, Yuri Temirkanov, John Barbirolli, Eugen Jochum, because when the Furtwanglers and Bernsteins were great, no one has ever been greater, even if they was too seldom at their greatest. And then, what do you do about a conductor like Carlos Kleiber, who in some ways cheated - he clearly got a hit at least one in two times he ever came to bat, but he conducted roughly 200 night in the last thirty years of his life, not even seven times a year, only conducted less than two dozen works, and almost always with the world's four or five greatest orchestras - it's like a hitter who spends all year preparing for the World Series, knowing that the best team will demand him, and that he can win the championship while only swooping in when it was time to claim the glory. So in short, what does a great conductor do? I

(go to the end of the movement and have this music play us out)

I have done a terrible job of answering the question. I answered it so much better in what was supposed to be today's podcast which was a tribute to the late Mariss Jansons, one of the very elite maestros of all time, it was friggin' great and then I accidentally deleted it more than half of it this morning without any chance of recovery, just before I tried to record it. So for the moment, what does a great conductor do? After more than thirty years of being fascinated by conductors and great classical performances, I still have no idea.