Saturday, March 26, 2005

Disappointed

With an open mind I read the first chapter of renowned author Jonathan Lethem's book of essays, The Disappointment Artist.

The essay, "Defending The Searchers," is about Lethem's love affair with the old John Ford movie. (I enjoy westerns, and so was prepared to like the essay.)

Two Points:
1.) The essay is about Lethem himself, not the movie. The movie is an excuse for Lethem to write about himself.
2.) The essay is a failure. Lethem doesn't convince the reader that The Searchers is a great movie; in fact, he undercuts it throughout. He asserts its greatness, based on little more than that it interested him. Not moved, troubled, or excited him-- interested him. Even during his first crucial viewing of it, at Bennington, he's only halfway absorbed in its narrative. The other ever-present analytical (emphasis on the "anal") half of his brain is objectively studying it. Not the best way to approach art!

Of prime importance is Lethem himself; that this god of the intellect has noticed the old film. THAT makes the movie noteworthy. It impressed itself on his consciousness, so he spends the entire essay explaining this process. He thinks it might possibly be a very good movie-- he's arrived at this conclusion, "aha!" as if contemplating a chess move-- but has difficulty forming a hard opinion of it through his many viewings, always worrying about the reception his friends have of it-- as if they MUST like it also; that they don't is earth shattering. (Quite a picture of the mind of a demi-puppet!)

Lethem's essay builds no momentum, has no theme (other than the author's preciousness), arrives at no point.

LETHEM'S MIND
-- is dominated by feelings. The feelings aren't about the movie, but himself. He never puts his mind fully INTO the artwork. His sensitivity is confined to his chair. The "I" is everpresent in his thoughts. It's unremoveable. One would like to blast it out of the essay for a few minutes so we can focus on the movie. Given the nature of his kind of writer, this is impossible.

THE MOVIE
Lethem's fumbling, embarrassing essay has one achievement-- a reminder of the flaws of classic movies.

The films themselves can't be blamed for this. When seen in their own day, they were undoubtedly great. But after seeing countless hyper-speed "Matrix" and "Mission Impossible" films, to us most of the output of legends like John Ford and Alfred Hitchcock look contrived and glacially paced. This isn't because today's movies are better. Most are far worse. But the fact of them destroys all that came before.

Movies have always been illusions-- tricks played upon the spectator. The original impact of North by Northwest depended upon shock effects; a car swerving down a road; a helicopter charging the camera. A crafty director combined the contrivances for maximum impact, but the illusions no longer work. All that remains is the narrative and dialogue, which isn't bad-- but slight compared to a novel's.

Film's advantage over literature was technology. What happens when the technology becomes obsolete?

Citizen Kane or Dr. Strangelove seen today on a large screen become laughable. With Kane we notice all the obvious Orson Welles camera tricks and ridiculous special effects. (Watch for the toy nightclub.) Strangelove comes across as not-that-daring satire wrapped around sophomoric jokes and low budget 60's-TV production values.

The old movies which do impress when seen on a big screen are those, like The Robe, whose type of tricks (Technicolor and Cinemascope) haven't been improved, and which are so over-the-top dramatically they rise, when seen on a big screen, to the modern moviegoer's minimum thrill level. Or, like David Lean movies, those which combine superlative narrative with an emphasis on film as an artistic canvas. Lean didn't try to overwhelm with flashy edits and sudden thrills. His movies emphasize the opposite-- film's unbroken flow; art as a river.

We'll never appreciate the thrills of The Searchers-- the shock 50's audiences felt when the shadow of Scar looms over the child Debbie near the beginning; the everpresent sense of approaching violence. Too much cinema blood and decapitated movie corpses have already passed through our minds for that!

(I search through the DVD collection in the spaceship as I hurtle faster toward my destination. No westerns are available.)

19 comments:

Anonymous said...

King:

This essay would be more interesting and plausible if you presented examples from the text. Without them we're supposed to simply "take your word for it" and not make up our own minds. This is all about your response to Lethem's essay, so you are in fact doing exactly what you criticize him over.

If you want to see a "tribute" that is narcissistic navel-gazing at its absolute lowest, check out Jonathan Ames' "tribute" to George Plimpton:

http://www.jonathanames.com/plimpton.html


Anonymoose on the Loose

Anonymous said...

Okay, I feel the need to add a general Lethem comment here. We all know that Lethem is a literary It-Boy now. For a long time, I was okay with this because he was different, to me. I read Gun, With Occassional Music in high school and I liked it. Then I read Motherless Brooklyn and it's just really funny, really straightforward fiction. Good times.
I read As She Crawls Across the Table and found it irritating, but hoped it was some sort of step in his creative process or some crap. I don't know.
But his latest book, Fortress of Solitude is just such a step backwards. Or step left, really. It's pure autobiography, A, which annoys me. B, it's so blatantly an attempt at being "literary" that I couldn't stand it. He affects so much stylistic BS in this book that we happily got to pass on in his previous books that I was just really disappointed. It's like he's insecure about being so genre in the past. It just makes me sad. Here's a writer who has everything and no reason to turn into an irritating Updike type,
and it looks like he's doing just that.

Anonymous said...

Going to disagree on the Hitchcock part. I think the dialogue and characters do stand out. The character of Midge, for example, in
Vertigo is fascinating and her scenes with James Stewart have a lot more oomph than the ones with Kim Novak. Also, while I agree that Strangelove is sophmoric, more akin to the smirkfest stance of Mcsweeney's, I disagree about Citizen Kane(although I think Welles is a bit too pumped up among the ranks of the professor class).

Jimbo said...

From what I’ve seen and read it seems to me that alot of what you see in big budget films today comes from experimental films of the sixties and seventies. Some of the people making these films got jobs as profesors and their students went on to make rock videos for MTV. Feature films started incorporating the same elements. Shows a pattern : avant garde, academia, pseudo avantgarde pop, mainstream commercial . At each level it’s less original but more money is made from it.

King Wenclas said...

Re Quotes. If my ten-minute blog posts are going to be held to the same standard as overworked literary essays published in well-promoted books, then I want the accompanying bucks. Forward me Lethem's advance for his collection of literary narcissism and next time I'm at a bookstore I'll copy down some quotes.

Anonymous said...

Or, conversely, if you're going to go after a work publicly, maybe you should invest a bit more time in your reading and thinkin' than standing in a bookstore, reading a few pages, and then spending "ten minutes" telling us why you don't like it. Excuses, King! Isn't that what you diss the d.p.'s for?

Bam-Bam

King Wenclas said...

Re Vertigo. I saw the restored version in a movie theater in the late 90's. I agree it's Hitchcock's masterpiece-- greatest title sequence in film ever. (Haunting music.)
There's no mystery or magic about Midge. She's so middle-class, too much the conventional product of contemporary machine civilization; well-educated and homogenized, all surface. Kim Novak by contrast carries primal qualities-- in both incarnations. There's an animalistic edge to both her roles, which shows there's more in common-- residues of the medieval-- between aristocrats and the lower class, than with those in the middle who've been completely socialized.
Midge is the modern woman who relates to the male best when he's tame or helpless. An ur-feminist.
The earthy shopgirl Judy is extremely sympathetic because of the way she's forced to become an unreal ice queen to reach the insane man she loves. (The class gap between the two in the second half of the movie is palpable-- the awkwardness, the difficulties at communication, because the woman he wants her to be doesn't exist!)
Novak embodies both her parts to perfection.

King Wenclas said...

Oh, I think I make my point about Lethem's essay well enough. Believe me, quoting from it would only bore you. As it is, in my ten minutes I manage a better analysis of movies that he does in his very extended mirror reflection of himself.
(Sorry that I'm not a member of the leisure class. I grab my material for this blog when I can!)
Anyway, what's your stake in the guy. Are you his agent? His designated protector? Do you help him cross the street also? I'd like to see one of these bozos someday speak for himself.

Anonymous said...

Who am I? I'm a brother who reads your blog, of course, and appreciates your spirited discourse, dislikes many of the writers you attack, but who also feels the need (perhaps perverse) to keep you honest. This is a little jape I wrote last week during the blow-up but never posted:

Now I’ve done a survey too! But first, the difference between moot and mute is neither moot nor mute, and it’s not a mistake that spell check would catch because, contrary to Jeff’s casual dismissal, it’s not a misspelling. They’re two different words, and mean two different things. You can’t think clearly or communicate with anyone, let alone ‘the masses’ (who are these masses? Where do they live? Why won’t you give their names?) if you substitute incorrect words for the ones you mean. You’re right, Noah, everyone got your gist, but that’s just because everyone assumed that you didn’t mean what you said, that you didn’t know the difference, and they substituted the right word for the wrong one. If you’re comfortable with that level of condescension, I guess that’s your choice, but it disempowers you.

FUN FACT: In Shakespeare’s time there was even a proto-ULAer! His name was Robert Greene, and he said, "There is an upstart crow, beautified with our feathers, that with his Tygers heart wrapt in a Players hide supposes he is as well able to bombast out a blank verse as the best of you; and, being an absolute Johannes Factotum, is in his own conceit the only Shake-scene in a country." Wow. He called him a Johannes Factotum! Oh, snap! Just replace Shake-scene with the name of a doubtlessly hard-working successful writer, disrupt a harmless reading, and maybe the NY Post will print it!

Finally, Noah correctly points out that there have been some intellectuals who were thugs, but incorrectly assumes that I would disagree simply because I said that all anti-intellectuals were thugs. This is just a simple logic problem. If I were to say that all carrots were vegetables, it would not logically follow that there aren’t some vegetables that are not carrots. Or if I were to say that all people who react to having their ass handed to them in an argument by indulging in implausible fantasies of sexual violence are limp-dick half-wits (something Skinner, Freud and even Sartre would agree on) it wouldn’t mean that I believed that ONLY people who react to having their asses handed to them in an argument by indulging in implausible fantasies of sexual violence were limp-dick half-wits. Get it?

The salient point here is that argument can’t proceed in the absence of clear thought and articulate expression. It degenerates into cliché, distortion, and confused ramblings. If that’s what you guys want, if that’s your ‘future of literature’, that’s fine, but don’t pretend it’s anything else and don’t pretend that it’s going to do anything good for the lower classes. Stupidity breeds stupidity and the widespread stupefaction of our culture only serves the status quo. Do you really think you can change anything by simply being more ignorant than the people you imagine are oppressing you? This anti-intellectual cronyism is the reason that no one in the ULA has disassociated themselves from the threats in yesterday’s posts, and it’s exactly what the ULA accuses the demi-puppets of. Cicero’s childish nonsense is not an anomaly but rather the paradigm of what your beggars’ revolution is all about.

So, to the data: I showed nine people all of yesterday’s comments and asked them questions about the writers and the writing they encountered.

I’ve listed their professions below, along with an acknowledgement of who was a serious reader (people who read about three books a week, identified by a SR after their name), who was a casual reader (about three book a month, identified with a CR), who was a nonreader (identified by NR) who was illiterate (identified by an I), who was a writer (W), who had an MFA (MFA), who enjoyed Hamburger Helper (HH), who liked Stove Top stuffing (ST), and who preferred Rice-a-Roni (RR). The people are:

A contributer to a local alternative weekly (SR, W, ST)
A postal worker (CR, ST)
A special-ed teacher who was working on getting certified to teach ESL (NR, HH)
A guy who works in a record store (SR, MFA, ST)
A paralegal (CR, RR)
A woman who dusts off the books and writers at a local literary mag (SR, W, ST)
A homeless, unemployed person who lives outside my building (NR, ST)
A homeless, unemployed person who is staying at my friend’s apartment (SR, W, MFA, RR)
My grandpa (NR, ST)

The respondents were equally split between men and women. The questions were:

To whose writing do you most relate?

Bam-Bam: 3 Beau Blue: 2 Noah Cicero: 1 KW: 0 Marissa: 1 Ezekiel: 1 Jeff: 0 Anonymous: 1

Who seems most like a real person?

Bam-Bam: 2 Beau Blue: 1 Noah Cicero: 0 KW: 0 Marissa: 1 Ezekiel: 5 Jeff: 0 Anonymous: 0

If each of these writers published a book and you could only buy one, whose book would you buy?

Bam-Bam: 4 Beau Blue: 1 Noah Cicero: 0 KW: 2 Marissa: 1 Ezekiel: 0 Jeff: 0 Anonymous: 1


Which writer is best for the future of literature?

Bam-Bam: 3 Beau Blue: 2 Noah Cicero: 0 KW: 2 Marissa: 0 Ezekiel: 1 Jeff: 0 Anonymous: 0


Who would you trust to borrow your car?

Bam-Bam: 2 Beau Bleu: 2 Noah Cicero: 0 KW: 1 Marissa: 1 Ezekiel: 0 Jeff: 1 Anonymous: 2

If you were a dancer, who would you date?

Bam-Bam: 2 Beau Blue: 0 Noah Cicero: 0 KW: 0 Marissa: 4 Ezekiel: 2 Jeff: 0 Anonymous: 1


Who should get punched in the nuts? (You may pick more than one)

Bam-Bam: 2 Beau Blue: 0 Noah Cicero: 8 KW: 2 Marissa: 0 Ezekiel: 8 Jeff: 4 Anonymous: 3


Well, there you have it. Empirical data. I think this really clarifies everything.

Anyway, King. Cheers to you.

Bam-Bam
a/k/a
Rum Tug Tugger

Anonymous said...

I think that any critics of the ULA should try looking at through the prism of dialectic. Talk less about what it is and more about what it is becoming. If they were to define themselves as dedicated to making American letters more democratic for example then it’s character will be formed by this struggle. Who decides to become a member and who decides to be an opponent and for what reasons. Let’s look at the situation in which America finds itself at this moment. The neocons have pretty much found a way to present it : the forces of freedom against those of oppression, they already had this justification for the struggle against the Soviet block, no ? Me, I’d say it’s more of an expression of anti-democratic tendencies, some might say a power imbalance, too much power concentrated in the hands of too few who use it clumsily. Here as well the truth will come out in the fight : either those in charge are exceptionel enough to merit the authority they been given and they will win or not. I think in case they win those that work in publishing or academia will have to think about becoming neocon hacks or going into exile. Perhaps they will palm themselves off as a sort of opposition abroad. As far as I’ve seen where I’ve been living there are four groups working to advance the interests of the American right. Academia, media, religious and commercial. As far as I’m concerned the academic and the mediatic are the worst because they present themselves as not having a vested interest in the present power structure. Why shouldn’t I fight against the installation of the corrupt organisations of a failing regime in the country I’ve chosen to live and raise my family ?

Anonymous said...

Dear Noah,

Re: Responding to your comments.

Nah.

You guys crash people's readings, but you're mad when people drop in on a ULA blog?

Also, isn't it frustrating when you try to debate with someone who 1) doesn't listen, 2) refuses to answer your points, 3) makes any number of frustrating assumptions about you, yet which aren't true, 4) assumes you are less of a person than you are. Goddamn, that's frustrating. Believe you me, it is. So, ULA, but especially Noah, take a long look in the mirror. Maybe even reread the section of your last email where you talk about how Franzen and Beller et al have empty lives and never do anything for anyone. Noah, you know as little about that as I know about you. Young man, I'm trying to help you!

But you don't want my help. You probably want me to fuck off. I know you guys think you're the pranksters of lit, but you're not really selling that image very well when you get all pissy about crash-posting.

I'm scared off but good now.

Bam "Bam-Bam" Bam

Anonymous said...

Dear Noah,

Re: Responding to your comments.

Nah.

You guys crash people's readings, but you're mad when people drop in on a ULA blog?

Also, isn't it frustrating when you try to debate with someone who 1) doesn't listen, 2) refuses to answer your points, 3) makes any number of frustrating assumptions about you, yet which aren't true, 4) assumes you are less of a person than you are. Goddamn, that's frustrating. Believe you me, it is. So, ULA, but especially Noah, take a long look in the mirror. Maybe even reread the section of your last email where you talk about how Franzen and Beller et al have empty lives and never do anything for anyone. Noah, you know as little about that as I know about you. Young man, I'm trying to help you!

But you don't want my help. You probably want me to fuck off. I know you guys think you're the pranksters of lit, but you're not really selling that image very well when you get all pissy about crash-posting.

I'm scared off but good now.

Bam "Bam-Bam" Bam

King Wenclas said...

"Bam Bam," it's curious how you misinterpret the Robert Greene quote-- apparently you don't understand its context. Note the "player's hide" phrase. What this shows was members of the ESTABLISHED and LEARNED playwright community taking issue with a mere actor, who hadn't been to university, daring to be one of their number. (Many of the top playwrights and poets were of course outright aristocrats; it was still thought, in some circles, that "literature" belonged only to them.)
What you've in fact done, unwittingly, Bam Bam, is show that the snobbery which exists now in the lit-world existed also then-- that, if anything, Shakespeare would've been on OUR side, against the snobs. Robert Greene was a kind of demi-puppet of the day, sucking up to his era's Overdogs. I think it's noteworthy that the company put together by Shakespeare, Burbage, and their friends, was ULA-like in that the actors controlled things themselves, fairly much-- with permission from the Crown (State) of course. They wre a fairly democratic, cooperative group and controlled their own art, much like the ULA is doing.
Yes, Shakespeare was eager to "sell out," and in a way did, for money and a coat-of-arms, but never got the recognition he deserved as the greatest writer of his era, largely because of his humble background. Even after his death he was still being dismissed as a character who drank too much and could never stop talking. See Ben Jonson's remarks about this.
Putting on plays was still a somewhat disreputable business. The Globe couldn't operate within the London city limits-- was located in a raunchy part of town. The entire profession would be banned once the Puritans took power.
Context, Bam Bam! Shakespeare was about the lowest-class writer operating in his day, an outsider who from sheer rhetorical talent barged into the literary profession, so that many snobs today refuse to believe he actually wrote the plays (though all documentation shows that he did).
That he was not constipated about grammar and rules is further evidence that he was more like a ULAer than another kind of writer. In personality he was very much like us. You mention the readings the ULA has crashed. You don't seem to have a clue what Globe presentations were like-- with the audience part of the action; talking back to characters and pelting villians with peanuts, orange peels and such.
Do you really think "The Bard" was a meek Elissa Schappell sort? Or was he not like one of US-- loud, boisterous, and often raging drunk??
Someone heckle him-- the master of wordplay? He would've loved it!
Get a clue sometime.

King Wenclas said...

What can be said about Franzen and Beller is that they live in a kind of rarefied, plastic-bubble world-- are fairly clueless about how most people in America live. Does this harm their art? I think it does.
They get mucho promotion. All we're doing is offering an alternative, and making noise about it. Why does this bother folks?

Anonymous said...

'For example your use of the word "Salient." Why didn't you just write relevant or significant or important?'

Dude ... those alternatives are all bigger than "salient."

Anonymous said...

Noah,

Why won't you deal with the hard data I've provided? You insisted that your survey provided incontrovertible proof that readers at large would prefer ULA literature to that of comercially and critically successful writers, yet when I give you numbers that refute your contention, you simply ignore them. What kind of empiricist are you?

You claim that one person's suggestion that you be punched in the nuts justified your implausible threats of imagined sexual assault, yet my survey proved that a wide variety of people, people of different levels of education, from all walks of society, who enjoy a wide array of starchy side dishes and ground beef preparations all agree that you ought to be punched in the nuts. And you have no response. If you really were a committed empiricist, you would punch yourself in the nuts. And yet, as far as anyone knows, you haven't.

What's your reasoning? That you don't deserve it? That's simply an a priori rationalization. It isn't based on any evidence at all. In fact, all the evidence points in the opposite direction.

I will not consider your response to this, or any other post, legitimate unless you can answer this basic question. You also have to answer the following:
1. In what ways, exactly, has television added to the level of education generally, as you suggest?
2. Isn't it condescending for writers to limit their vocabularies in order to be understood by 'everyday people'? Are these people really as idiotic as you assume they are?
3. To the closest tenth of a percent, what portion of the people you slag do you think give a fuck?
4. What do a raven and a writing desk have in common?
5. What are the Cubbies' chances this year?
6. What's with these windshield wipers on headlights?
7. If a train leaves Albany for Pittsburg going 45 mph and another train leaves Albany 20 minutes later, also heading for Pittsburg but going 60 mph, where will the second train overtake the first?
8. What has happened to the Snowdens of yesteryear?

King Wenclas said...

Keep in mind, Noah, that "Bam Bam" is simply just another anonymous fake. I've encountered scores of them the last few years.
BB pretends to be objective, just keeping us honest, he says.
I wonder why he's not keeping authors like Jonathan Franzen honest! Has he asked Franzen what happened to the taxpayer money when J.F.'s pal Moody awarded him his NEA grant-- why he gave none of it back?
Has B.B. wondered why Franzen et.al. don't make themselves available, answering questions from all comers, as we do?
A double standard?
Objectivity?
This character has his own agenda, is maybe one of the folks we've contended with-- or one of their flunkies, most likely-- which is why the person, like all of his disreputable type, has to hide.

Anonymous said...

Goodness have you guys gotten earnest all of a sudden. You sound like a couple of small-town lawyers. "Keep in mind, Noah..." And I'm the one who's accused of treating him like a child?

Where's the rock 'n' roll, King? It's starting to feel like a poetry workshop around here.

Less talk, more rock,
Bam-Bam

King Wenclas said...

I'm simply pointing out that you have no substance-- and that truth is a concept without meaning to you.
(Funny, just a few posts ago you were complaining that we rocked too much for you-- daring to add noise to tepid lit events! We're always available to do it again if you want-- and likely will. Keep your eyes open!)