two umbrellas

I’ve got another review up at WFTC. It’s Mary Gaitskill’s Don’t Cry. Here’s a bit:

I’ve only ever read two of Mary Gaitskill’s story collections: Bad Behavior, her first (published in 1988), and Don’t Cry, her latest. Both are highly charged works of fiction — strong, full of sexuality, intensity, and intelligence. After reading both of these collections, I have come to the conclusion that if I ever had the chance to meet Mary Gaitskill I would be quite intimidated. Her writing is tough and confident, somehow masculine and feminine at the same time, which doesn’t make it feminist — it makes it authentic.

My review of Miles from Nowhere by Nami Mun at When Falls the Coliseum is up. Here’s a bit:

There are so many things that could be potentially cliche about Nami Mun’s Miles from Nowhere: the title, the cover, the characters, the plot — just about everything. The main character, Joon, runs away from home when she is twelve. Her father has left the family, which drives her mother to insanity. After leaving her mother, Joon goes down the inevitable path of drugs and prostitution as she copes on the streets of New York City. But there is something keeping this novel from falling into the trap: Nami Mun’s writing.

My ‘New Lit’ column will appear the first Wednesday of each month. Check it out…

As more bailouts are being distributed and the stimulus package is reluctantly being passed, I worry about the economy of course, but I also worry about the American Way-of-Life. For far too long we have isolated ourselves with our ability to purchase, which has made us very comfortable. There is a false sense of security in that ability. We become patriotic about our purchasing power and that consumerism will save our economy, or rather our Way-of-Life.

But our current Way-of-Life is unsustainable because, in many accounts, it is useless. It has become more important to our economy and our culture to consume – even if we are consuming what we can’t afford or is completely unnecessary. Jim Kunstler writes about the “Poverty of Imagination” when confronting not only our economy but also our Way-of-Life.

The argument about “change” during the election was sufficiently vague that no one was really challenged to articulate a future that wasn’t, materially, more-of-the-same. I suppose the Obama team may have thought they would only administer it differently than the Bush team — but basically life in the USA would continue being about all those trips to the mall, and the cubicle jobs to support that, and the family safaris to visit Grandma in Lansing, and the vacations at Sea World, and Skipper’s $20,000 college loan, and Dad’s yearly junket to Las Vegas, and refinancing the house, and rolling over this loan and that loan… and that has all led to a very dead end in a dark place.

If this nation wants to survive without an intense political convulsion, there’s a lot we can do, but none of it is being voiced in any corner of Washington at this time. We have to get off of petro-agriculture and grow our food locally, at a smaller scale, with more people working on it and fewer machines. This is an enormous project, which implies change in everything from property allocation to farming methods to new social relations. But if we don’t focus on it right away, a lot of Americans will end up starving, and rather soon. We have to rebuild the railroad system in the US, and electrify it, and make it every bit as good as the system we once had that was the envy of the world. If we don’t get started on this right away, we’re screwed. We will have tremendous trouble moving people and goods around this continent-sized nation. We have to reactivate our small towns and cities because the metroplexes are going to fail at their current scale of operation. We have to prepare for manufacturing at a much smaller (and local) scale than the scale represented by General Motors.

The political theater of the moment in Washington is not focused on any of this, but on the illusion that we can find new ways of keeping the old ways going. Many observers have noted lately how passive the American public is in the face of their dreadful accelerating losses. It’s a tragic mistake to tell them that they can have it all back again. We’ll see a striking illustration of “phase change” as the public mood goes from cow-like incomprehension to grizzly bear-like rage. Not only will they discover the impossibility of getting back to where they were, but they will see the panicked actions of Washington drive what remains of our capital resources down a rat hole.

Since President Obama was elected I have been waiting for him to resound a JFKesque call to the American people that we need to make sacrifices. We know that times are going to be tough and that many people are going to lose their jobs and not be able to pay their bills and because of that things will change. However, we can’t continue to assure the American people that everything will go back to the way it was, that our Way-of-Life will be restored. What has made the US a great country is our ability and freedom to change and adapt to the world and our nation’s needs. Unfortunately, that can also lead to too much freedom where we ignore the needs of the country as a whole and focus on the wants of the individual. Our national pride has changed from having the best to having the most. We are finding out the hard way that without a strong vision of what our country/government/citizens can do, we are left with nothing but bad debt.

I’m still plugging away at the Faulkner Project. The Little Parasol is somewhat enjoying it. She loved As I Lay Dying but is not enjoying Sanctuary as much. Maybe it’s the way that I’m reading it; maybe she already has formed her taste in books…Kundera put her to sleep; but, I’ll admit, the essays can be dense and there were often times when I struggled to keep my eyes open myself.

I still enjoyed As I Lay Dying immensely. I am always surprised to find that I still have trouble reading this book. I often find Vardamen very hard to follow – more so than Benjy. However, I have confirmed my good judgement in not reading while I was pregnant. From Addie’s chapter:

He had a word, too. Love, he called it. But I had been used to words for a long time. I knew that that word was like the others: just a shape to fill the lack; that when the right time came, you wouldn’t need a word for that anymore than for pride or fear. Cash did not need to say it to me nor I to him, and I would say, Let Anse use it, if he wants to. So that was Anse or love; love or Anse: it didn’t matter.

…My aloneness had been violated and then made whole again by the violation: time, Anse, love, what you will, outside the circle.

Then I realized that I had Darl. At first I would not believe it. Then I believed I would kill Anse. It was as though he had tricked me, hidden within a word like within a paper screen and struck me back through it. But then I realised that I had been tricked by words older than Anse or love, and that the same word had tricked Anse too, and that my revenge would be that he would never know I was taking revenge…

I gave Ande Dewey Dell to negative Jewel. Then I gave him Vardaman to replace the child I had robbed him of. And now he has three children that are his and not mine. And then I could get ready to die.

I think if I had read that chapter while I was still pregnant I would have cried for days or gone into labor. (Maybe it would have been a good idea since the little Parasol was late.)

Milan Kundera’s The Art of the Novel has been sitting on my bookshelf for too long. I’m not quite sure why I read The Curtain first. I am always intrigued to read about a writer’s philosophy on writing and Kundera never disappoints. I am surprised how frank he seems to be when writing about his own writing. I feel as though I could read this book over and over again and never fully get out of it all it has to offer. While I often find his writing and writing style to be too technical for my own writing, I find that it in is this contrast that I can learn so much. I have also learned that I should really revisit Kafka.

The American Scholar has an essay titled “Wonder Bread” against some Brooklyn writers. I can’t help but agree that there is some arrested development in seemingly talented writers.

Here are a few excerpts:

…certain writers produce Brooklyn Books of Wonder. Take mawkish self-indulgence, add a heavy dollop of creamy nostalgia, season with magic realism, stir in a complacency of faith, and you’ve got wondrousness.

…

According to Jeffrey Sharlet, a journalist/provocateur who helped inspire this essay, and Andi Mudd, a spectacularly unwondrous college student who assisted in researching it, The Lovely Bones and its ilk “deserve a public shaming.” That’s because BBoWs are escape novels, albeit garnished with intellectual flourishes. They’re kitsch, which Milan Kundera defined as “the translation of the stupidity of received ideas into the language of beauty and feeling [that] moves us to tears of compassion for ourselves, for the banality of what we think and feel.”

…

The nakedness of Kunkel’s desire to change the world and of Eggers’s angst has an appeal, but it’s simultaneously simple and disingenuous. Both are Salingers of our time. That’s because they embody critic Lionel Trilling’s famous dichotomy; they mistake sincerity for authenticity.

…

Not that everything that touches the splendid borough is piffle. Besides BBoWs, Brooklyn has given birth to books ranging from Hubert Selby’s morbid noir Last Exit to Brooklyn to Neil Gordon’s garrotte-tight thriller The Gunrunner’s Daughter. Jonathan Lethem provides a case in point because his imagination is deeply anchored in Brooklyn and he writes of adolescence, especially orphaned adolescence in Motherless Brooklyn, and his narratives are peppered with references to popular culture. However, all of this makes for a mimetic re-creation of genuine experience that he knew as a child on Dean Street rather than as a childish adult on Dean Street. Moreover, Lethem doesn’t pull punches. On the second page of The Fortress of Solitude, a kitten is accidentally killed while the protagonist’s mother smokes cigarettes. Unless it’s Mr. Harvey in The Lovely Bones, no one smokes in BBoWs. They’d as soon smoke as fail to recycle. Also, a daring flight at the end crashes. Perhaps Lethem is striving for wonder, but he’s too smart to let it carry him away. He has, however, been carried away by his imitators. The BBoW authors have adopted Lethem as a surrogate father, and he ought to disinherit them.

…

Coddled and cosseted, they’re the first generation of novelists who grew up reading the young-adult pap that they’ve now regurgitated with a deconstructive gloss learned in college. Of course, such aspirations require equivalently high subject matter. Hence the BBoWs’s mock encounter with enormity. Still, they have no teeth. They’re sheep in wolves’ clothing who manage to write about bad things and make you feel good.

(via Arts & Letters Daily)

On a train ride to and from the suburbs today to visit a friend, I read Susan Sontag’s “Notes on ‘Camp’”:

2. To emphasize style is to slight content, or to introduce an attitude which is neutral with respect to content. It goes without saying that the Camp sensibility is disengaged, depoliticized — or at least apolitical.

38. Camp is the consistently aesthetic experience of the world. It incarnates a victory of “style” over “content,” “aesthetics” over “morality,” of irony over tragedy.

…The connoisseur of Camp has found more ingenious pleasures. Not in Latin poetry and rare wines and velvet jackets, but in the coarsest, commonest pleasures, in the arts of the masses. Mere use does not defile the objects of his pleasure, since he learns to possess them in a rare way. Camp — Dandyism in the age of mass culture — makes no distinction between the unique object and the mass-produced object. Camp taste transcends the nausea of the replica.

48. The old-style dandy hated vulgarity. The new-style dandy, the lover of Camp, appreciates vulgarity. Where the dandy would be continually offended or bored, the connoisseur of Camp is continually amused, delighted. The dandy held a perfumed handkerchief to his nostrils and was liable to swoon; the connoisseur of Camp sniffs the stink and prides himself on his strong nerves.

These notes listed (there are 58 in all), to me, represent statements that have not dated as easily as some of Sontag’s other points. I fear that there is a growing sensibility for points 2 and 38: an apolitical lack of content. However, I am struggling to decide what is the present day equivalent to camp.

Sarah Kerr reviews Joan Didion’s collection We Tell Ourselves Stories in Order to Live: Collected Non-Fiction. Here are a few excerpts:

“Style is character”: at several points in her career, Didion has offered this sentence as one of her core beliefs. But what does it mean? Not that you are what you look like, or that what you look like is what counts. Style is the writer’s site of decision-making-literally, the site of actions whose integrity can be measured. It is the place where the self meets the world. And so Didion felt a need to do what for her was, by her own admission, extremely difficult: go out and meet the world.

…

Because Didion’s later reporting on politics, often for this magazine, took a turn generally more critical of a reawakened American conservatism – and critical, also, of paralyzed Democratic accommodation – it’s sometimes been said that at some point in the decades after these first two books she was radicalized, or at least nudged toward something more like traditional liberalism. To argue this is to ignore how much the writing life has always been her central concern, and how much politics has always been a secondary, if all too gift-giving, subject. All along her aimed-for target has been behavior that is in error, above all behavior that resists – and therefore demands from the observing writer – irony.

But it’s true that something does seem to shift in her work. Early on, it seems to me, she is still in training as the capturer of moods and moments. Her ambition is to render thoroughly and truthfully her point of view, even if that point of view occasionally contains what she admits to be aspects of emotional projection. “However dutifully we record what we see around us,” she had warned in “On Keeping a Notebook,” “the common denominator of all we see is always, transparently, shamelessly, the implacable ‘I.’” Another line from that gorgeous but youthful essay, in response to the challenging of her memory by relatives: “Very likely they are right, for not only have I always had trouble distinguishing between what happened and what merely might have happened, but I remain unconvinced that the distinction, for my purposes, matters.”