Book Log - Late June - September 3, 2007

Born In Flames - Howard Hampton - Mixed feelings about Hampton's distinctive volume. On the one hand, there's few writers going gonzo in film criticism (and far too many writers whose prose is merely functional, or worse - I love you J.Ro, but you'll never be a novelist), but Hampton isn't making a case for why this is a bad thing. Much of his schtick is roughly akin to the '90s band trend of combining two famous proper nouns into one pun-like name (Brian Jonestown Massacre, Dandy Warhols et al.) — e.g., Hampton drops both "naked luncheon" and "naked lunchbox," which isn't even trying that hard. Much of what he says, like too much theory and gonzo writing, is hard to dig out from the baroque prose, and the effort isn't worth it. Two moments in particular stand out as exceptions — "American Maniacs" plausibly offers up Natural Born Killers as the inverse image of Forrest Gump before going on to suggest that the logical conclusion of Gump's worldview would be "Private First Class Gump as a member of Lieutenant Calley's platoon at My Lai, carrying out orders even as he puts them in folk-wisdom perspective ('Stupid is as stupid does,' he says amid the slaughter)." "Do The Clam," meanwhile, is a hilariously horrified evaluation of Elvis' cinematic legacy, contemplating its "bland, zombiefied insistence that will not be denied." (There's also a well-done appreciation of Chris Marker and probably some other stuff I'm forgetting.) But a lot of Born In Flames seems directed from an adolescent critical perspective, one which insists on fiery destruction and constant visceral stimulation as the only means to legitimate art. I like plenty of my art hermetic and cerebral, thanks, and much of Hampton's writing contains little more than the sentiment, linguistically dressed up, that X is awesome because it's awesome. The line between "Film Comment" and Ain't It Cool News has never been thinner.
(June 10 - 20, approx.)

Invisible Man - Ralph Ellison - 50+ years after its publication, I still felt nervous about reading Invisible Man in public, as if someone would yell at me "What, you think you can substitute learned experience for the real thing? You know nothing." Probably more a testament to my own paranoia than anything, but Invisible Man's interest for me remained ultimately social, not literary. I think I've made it clear here enough times that my preferred brand of writing is clean and unfussy, and Ellison's jazz-tinged prose (something I never would've picked up on without outside guidance; it's in the way our unnamed protagonist riffs obsessively on every dire hypothetical, I suppose) is a bit too elaborate for me. But every time dialogue entered, I was hooked, and eventually I pushed compulsively through to the end. Some passages stand out as universally true (on New York: "Here they all seemed impersonal; and yet when most impersonal they startled me by being polite, by begging my pardon after brushing against me in a crowd. Still I felt that even when they were polite they hardly saw me, that they would have begged the pardon of Jack the Bear, never glancing his way if the bear happened to be walking along minding his business." Some things never change.) Yet much of what fascinates me is the ongoing heightened racial self-awareness, in ways that I'm even wary of writing about online. Suffice it to say that this is a great dramatization of the tension between what's "owed" to one's background and how you actually feel about said background...although I still don't care very much for how it's written.
(late June-early July)

The Life Of Samuel Johnson - James Boswell - I like to tackle one ridiculously ambitious reading project per year; Boswell is the new Infinite Jest. A few contextual factors: much of my curiosity about Johnson had nothing to do with my forced Brit Lit II tramp through the deadly Rasselas and was much more related to with Nancy McPhee's invaluable compendium The Book of Insults, in which Johnson is predictably omnipresent. Reading Boswell, then, was in large part a way of finding the original landscape in which Johnson spoke, and learning that he was earnest and pompous at least as often as he was scathingly off-the-cuff awesome. Another thing to note is that my copy is a pricey-looking but quite cheap Everyman's Library edition, meaning no annotative explanations of every last damn reference; for someone weaned, like most undergrads these days, on the exhaustive Norton Critical Editions of every last damn text, it's liberating. Those things add a lot of knowledge, but they can be stifling; you feel like you're reading a textbook more than a work of self-contained art. Here, the Greek passages are untranslated.

So. As noted by many others, the first 300 pages or so are a bit of a slog — not having met Johnson yet, Boswell relies on dull family histories, sketchy reports, and lots and lots of Johnson's early poetic exercises; it's bizarre to be reading on the subway and suddenly have to register meter. The most interesting bits sketch out what we would clearly diagnose now as clinical depression, with Johnson striving "to overcome it by forcible exertions. He frequently walked to Birmingham and back again, and tried many other expedients, but all in vain. His expression concerning it to me was 'I did not then know how to manage it.'" (Compare/contrast with me blankly staring at the internet for hours on end.) Part of this management came in the form of voracious, frightening amounts of reading: "I remember very well, when I was at Oxford, an old gentleman said to me, 'Young man, ply your book diligently now, and acquire a stock of knowledge; for when years come upon you, you will find that poring upon books will be but an irksome task.' " (If it weren't for the subway, I might only read 1/3 as much as I do; the older I get, the harder it is to pull myself away from people and into books, and I suspect this is true for a lot of people who once read extensively. I do better than most, but if I ever move closer to Manhattan, that's doomed.)

Over the course of their acquaintance, Johnson emerges as a uniquely odd, contemporary seeming figure, much closer to us than the lionized dean of old-school English he's been transformed into. His awkward appearance — a huge but ungainly physique, a habit of muttering to himself — would make him distinctive in any age, and his "progressive" stances make for fascinating insights into 18th-century norms, especially when contrasted with Boswell, who argumentatively inserts his own views into every page. In one especially bizarre sequence, Johnson's opposition to all slavery is noted ("Here's to the next insurrection of the negroes in the West Indies," he toasts at one point), and then followed by Boswell's vigorous defense of that institution: "his unfavourable notion of it was owing to prejudice, and imperfect or false information. ... To abolish a status, which in all ages GOD has sanctioned, and man has continued, would not only be robbery to an innumerable class of our fellow-subjects; but it would be extreme cruelty to the African Savages, a portion of whom it saves from massacre, or intolerable bondage in their own country, and introduces into a much happier state of life; especially now when their passage to the West Indies and their treatment there is humanely regulated." Wow.

I've never been particularly fond of the kind of reading that seeks to condemn the past for all its insensitivities and wrongs; there's much about Johnson's life and views that seems repugnant in present-day mores. And? What's disagreeable about the past is just as instructive as what's great. I learned a lot about things that strike me as stupid — arguments over the Querelle des Femmes, the constant insistence on the worst, most stilted of poetry as "noble" in its sentiments. But I learned things that struck me as still relevant, like Johnson's tough-minded stance on cant: "You may talk as other people do: you may say to a man, 'Sir, I am your most humble servant.' You are not his most humble servant. You may say, 'These are bad times; it is a melancholy thing to be reserved at such times.' You don't mind the times. You tell a man, 'I am sorry you had such bad weather the last day of your journey, and were so much wet.' You don't care six-pence whether he is wet or dry. You may talk in this manner; it is a mode of talking Society, but don't think foolishly." True. As a biographer, Boswell isn't what we think of: we're expected to always keep in the back of our mind his awkward appearance, but in possibly the most striking moment, Boswell's straight transcription of conversations becomes curiously moving. Asking Johnson whether or not he should take a vow "against any deviation from moral duty," Johnson recoils: "(much agitated) 'What! a vow—O, no, Sir, a vow is a horrible thing, it is a snare for sin. The man who cannot go to heaven without a vow—may go— Here, standing erect, in the middle of his library ... his pause was truly a curious compound of the solemn and the ludicrous; he half-whistled in his usual way, when pleasant, and he paused, as if checked by religious awe." What a great portrait of a moment of trembling and doubt mixed with an uncertain authority; there's a movie somewhere in here, or at lest an Oscar nomination. The fear of death hangs over Johnson's whole life, and the last 200 pages are a moving march to the end; against my own expectations, I found myself sucked in. A remarkable book in many ways, serving as much as an anthology of an age as anything.
(July 7 - September 2)

IV - Chuck Klosterman - My, how things have changed since June 2005, when I indignantly contemplated Klosterman's last book. No longer the exclusive domain of cult adoration, Klosterman has achieved genuine mainstream success (by which I mean I've seen the paperback of this book at every last damn airline book-shop/Hudson News for the last month-and-a-half) and a sizable group of haters in the process, with Gawker leading the charge in unexpectedly virulent terms. I'm not sure why the man is such a polarizing figure for those who bother to hate him, other than the obvious charge that his peculiar success may just about have lowered the bar for public discourse on this country about anything cultural. When Klosterman was a minor figure, his insistence that mass culture was somehow undervalued seemed kind of charming, not least because he then delved deeper than previously thought possible into, say, the iconographic significance of Lita Ford. With Klosterman now preaching to the real masses — as opposed to the impressed if unconvinced minority — it's hard to figure out why he seems so threatened by anyone who won't share his enthusiasm for mass culture at its most popular, regardless of quality. "3/4 of his stuff is whining about how he wants to listen to Winger but gangs of hipsters are making him listen to Sonic Youth," wrote an unusually perceptive Onion AV Club commentator (seriously, how many retards are there on those boards). And I find it hilarious that Klosterman believes that anyone who disdains anyone else's taste is part of a gang of "insecure, uncreative elitists who need to use somebody else's art to validate their own limited worldview" — before launching into an impassioned defense of Road House — but simultaneously claims that Americans who watch the Olympics and reflexively root for America are stupid because "you don't really consider the motivations that drive your emotions, and that you probably care more about geography and the color of a uniform than you do about any given sport." In other words, reflexively liking whatever's popular is OK, because you're part of a mass of millions defining their lives against the same cultural backdrop, but daring to watch a sports event without an intense understanding of what's going on is simply unacceptable. Perhaps this is why Klosterman is now writing for ESPN.

All that said, I know I'm being a little deliberately obtuse. That aforementioned defense of Road House precedes with the notice that "It never matters what you like; what matters is why you like it." Except that Klosterman doesn't really believe that either, insofar as he seems to get actively angry at the slightest suggestion that  (regardless of the idea that culture can't be wrong, it just is) wishing for alternatives is OK. The problem — I've said it before, I'll say it again, unless he offers me an internship or something — is that Klosterman is a smart dude who thinks about dumb stuff and can't understand why most of the other smart kids are inexplicably obsessed with, I dunno, Spoon or Heidegger or Edward Yang or anything else that doesn't affect millions of people simultaneously. He feels oppressed by a palpable minority, which is what happens when you move from the Midwest to Manhattan, one of the few places where the elitists win; it's not the real world though, and I'm shocked Klosterman has somehow forgotten this. In his view, culture that only affects a minority is not only irrelevant, it's somehow "oppressing" mainstream culture — as in his complaint that the death of a Ramone got more press coverage than the death of a member of Ratt. "We are all supposed to concede [that ... the Ramones were 'important' and ... Ratt were not]," Klosterman seethes, concluding that good taste is used "to create gaps in the intellectual class structure" ([un?]conscious shades of Bordieu) and Dee Dee got more coverage because he had "the right friends." What Klosterman's forgetting in this instance is that new generations of kids get turned on to the Ramones all the time (if, ahem, not me — I don't have much of a rooting interest in this post-mortem fight) and not so much with Ratt — in the long run, they're more significant to people who weren't there to experience it the first time. Which either means young kids are getting brainwashed by hipster parents, or Ratt kind of suck.

As always, I'm at least marginally disappointed because Klosterman is spawning imitators without anyone who's really getting it right. When he's on, he's still absorbing and infinitely readable, if only sporadically thought-provoking: at least half of the profiles in here are inspired (on the weirdness of Val Kilmer, the unexpectedly self-contradictory Jeff Tweedy, etc.), most of the stoned rambling that gets labeled "Chuck Klosterman's America" in "Esquire" is at least mildly amusing, and the previously unpublished, autobiographical novella at the end is rancidly revealing about the titanic levels of depression, self-loathing and condescension vaguely spotted in Klosterman's other work. I read this during interstitial moments on vacation — in the backs of cars while others were driving, sitting on porches and waiting for others, sitting through thunder-storms — and it never failed to suck me in. There's no doubt Klosterman's done a remarkable job of translating his personal voice to the page, and that voice is an interesting one. I'm just not sure if it's good for us, and I'm increasingly unnerved by Klosterman's seemingly unconscious insistence on the importance of cultural homogeneity. Coincidentally, I was reading Bruce Weber's rude anti-eulogy for Fellini, published a few days after his death in The New York Times, and was particularly unnerved by the bit that ran "It's almost impossible, given that art takes time to get your mind around, not to be middlebrow — or worse — right now." There's nothing obscene about this statement — the older I get, the more actively I try to avoid talking about movies/music/books with people who don't care about them, because there's so many things to talk about if you're a generally intelligent person with coincidentally shitty taste — but the aggression in it is the part I don't get, in Weber and in Klosterman. Aggressive mediocrity rules the culture; why must it additionally insist that everyone else is wrong?
(August 18 - 21)

Bright Lights, Big City - Jay McInerney - At 182 widely-spaced pages, McInerney's much-derided tome barely cracks the novella boundary; it's breathless, trashy subway reading, perfect for 2 or 3 late-night commutes. If you can ignore the fact that McInerney, along with Bret Easton Ellis, has become a sniggering synonym for everything loathsome about the '80s — coke-addled rich kids seemingly unaware of how lucky or spoiled they were basking in self-pity and brand names — this holds up shockingly well (this despite a second-person narration that implicitly invites "you" to relate). McInerney's sharp, self-lacerating wit is what makes it work: "You are a republic of voices tonight. Unfortunately, that republic is Italy." What's not to like? As insightful for its now-dated look into the (unnamed) "New Yorker" fact-checking department as anything, Bright Lights is as funny, bright and enjoyable as it is shallow and solipsistic. A guilty pleasure, but of the most well-crafted kind. Check it out, seriously.
(September 2-3)