The Believer Deluxe Retro ClassyPak includes: the 2004 Visual Issue (Mike Mills, Guy Maddin, Raymond Pettibon, a DVD); the 2006 Music Issue (Calexico, the National, Paul Collins, Rick Moody, a CD); and the 2006 Visual Issue (Matthew Barney, Shelley Jackson, a removable stack of paintings by Kehinde Wiley affixed to the cover). All this for - - - - |
Before you read this, perhaps you would like to read Section One and Section Two. - - - - DE: I urged Fred to reconsider. Besides it being morally and intellectually bankrupt and utterly venal, it was a very poor use of his time — if he was tired of Gehry's good press, why not instead find an architect who he loves and celebrate him? That's not to say that if one has genuine objections to Gehry's style, one shouldn't be free to express them in a respectful way. But to have decided on a conclusion without even having an opinion... so disturbing. But very common. Went to the Nader rally at the Garden last night, and it was exciting, because the place sold out — about 16,000 seats at $20 a pop. For a political rally. I mention it here because Michael Moore was there, and I was encouraged to see him get a standing ovation upon entry and exit. He was also, I have to say, by far the best speaker all night. He was truly skilled, with a way of booming his voice in a very Huey Long way, though tempered with humor — anyway, the whole presentation works amazingly well. My guess is that if he were running with Nader, they'd have more like 8% of the polls at this point, largely because Moore would have a better idea of how to attract the media attention the Green Party can't seem to muster in any significant, non-condescending way. But I should go back a few steps, because I never addressed your entry before last, when you had just seen a movie you absolutely hated. (Why do I think it was Dancer in the Dark? Not that I've seen it, but it seems to provoke that reaction in so many people.) But of course you're free to dislike the movie. I think the distinction I'd make is this: We're free to dislike movies, TV shows, art, books. But the thing we need to look at is the impulse to publically and passionately rip these things up. I know that on a personal level, one's need to be the person to stand on a high hill and tell everyone else that something is garbage is just not, let's be honest, a healthy one. I might feel good about warning the populace about, say, unsafe cars, or marauding hordes, or killer wasps, or a hurricane named Sandy, but to get up there, demand everyone's attention, then just whip out your pee-pee and urinate on a painting of a kitten... it's a strange impulse. I look back on my own years of doing just that — I wrote a few nasty art reviews while living in San Francisco — and I'm not proud of those times. There are just so many other uses of one's energy. Allow me two anecdotes to just pound home this idea: You and I have a mutual friend whose book, a great, funny, nonfiction kind of thing — essays — came out about a year or so ago. It was well-reviewed generally, but there was one review, in a major newspaper, written by a man who usually writes about style trends. In his review, he began, in the first paragraph, by stating that he hated the entire genre from which the author's book sprung. Then he expressed his disdain for first-person sorts of essays, which made up the entirety of the book in question. Then he proceeded to slash the book and its author bloody. It was the most shockingly malicious review I've read in many years. And the question is: What made this person think he needed to get up on the high hill and declare the book unworthy? Why jump out of the style section to tell the world he doesn't like something? Something others clearly do? The author already had tens of thousands of fans, so why would the reviewer, who again first stated his distaste for the author's oeurvre, feel himself a fair commentator, in a national and (we wish to be) unbiased forum? It was much like me declaring that I hate military subject matters, and male characters, and suspense, and books that are adapted into movies starring Harrison Ford, and then reviewing Tom Clancy's latest. What would compel me to do this? It's not a healthy impulse. It's the province of a troubled person. A person that needs to work some things out before he reviews again. Of course, he has a right to his opinion. For instance, I don't read books about kittens wearing baggy clothing, but I know that many people do, so what kind of sociopath am I if I step up to the microphone and say that this thing that so many people like doesn't appeal, personally, to me? Last anecdote: the above example, and its origins and diagnoses, might also be applied to the case of Tom Wolfe and the gauntlet he ran after A Man in Full was published. We all know by now how a number of writers of his generation, among them Misters Norman Mailer and John Updike, reviewed Wolfe's book, and with a generally unfavorable result. They faulted the book for being readable. They faulted it for having a large initial print-run. They said that because it was expected to be popular it could not be good. And on and on. I don't want to pick into the actual reviews too much, but I do wonder what would possibly inspire two writers of the stature of Updike and Mailer, who both have done enough that they can rest comfortably that their work has, it could easily be posited, affected history and will certainly last many lifetimes hence — what would compel men such as this, in their winter years, to bother taking their weapons off the wall (I'm picturing some kind of mace) to swing them at a contemporary's new book? It reflects poorly on the mace-swinger, no? And it also reflects poorly, I think, on the periodicals that print such things. I'm going to mix some more metaphors: So the writers are scratching an itch they should not scratch, and the periodicals are kind of gleefully giving a home to what is really an act of perversion — for some reason I'm picturing some unnatural sex act committed in a basement unconsensually while people watch — not because the periodical thinks it's fair but because they know they can sell tickets to the show. Honestly, there could be nothing more depressing than seeing that for the paperback edition of Mailer's The Time of Our Time, he added, proudly, his Wolfe review. Mailer's entire brilliant career was capped off by a meandering drubbing of Wolfe's novel — for the Man in Full review was indeed the book's last item, the end of a life of writing. This kind of thing, of course, is what Neal Pollack's been duly parodying. But so I'm desperately hoping that this sort of shit is long behind us. The days when writers, of all people, are calling each other names, and letting their very weird professional jealousy boil their blood, I sincerely hope will never visit us again. Where does that kind of thing come from? Do we fear that if people are reading one person's books they won't read ours? That there is a finite amount of readers, and that we have to fight like vermin for their attentions? It's an ugly business and it sullies everyone. What feeling does an Updike or Mailer get after typing the last bitter word? I would imagine it's like kicking a cat. You work yourself up, you kick the cat, you laugh, then you say, if you are not too far gone already, What the fuck am I doing? I wake up and want to kick a cat? I remember asking Tobias Wolff this question, when Zev Borow and I interviewed him, briefly and completely incompetently, many years ago, for an item in Might magazine. We wanted to know all the usual stupid things: What did he think of this certain new young writer (we wanted him to be envious), what did he think of that certain bestseller (we wanted him to dismiss it), that kind of thing. We were making the youthful mistake that gossip substitute for intellectual vigor. But Wolff just sat there, in his dignified sort of way — he always seems to be smoking a pipe, though I've never seen him do so — and said that, to his mind, all boats rise together. And as common as the expression is, I'm not sure I had ever heard it. But it's rattled in my head ever since. What it means of course is that if everyone supports each other, then there will be not fewer readers, and fewer opportunities, and fewer books published, and less to live for, but much more likely the opposite. If one person's book is popular, or another wins an award, then it helps us all — at the very least, it certainly can't hurt. The impulse behind tearing into a colleague says Don't look at that fraud, look at me! But wouldn't it be just as easy to say, Hey, after you're done looking at him, look at me, too! Imagine going backstage at a piano recital and seeing the kids scratching each other's eyes out over who gets to go first. It's just ludicrous. These are books, after all. There should be no fighting in the world of books. We're lucky that there are books. We're lucky we can write any damn book we want. We're lucky there are so many people who will still pay money for these things, read these things, keep them on shelves and pack them in boxes when moving across the country. It's all pretty incredible, so anyone lucky enough to be involved in it, in whatever way, should take deep breaths and enjoy it. That said, the good news is that we haven't, lately, seen any of this kind of thing outside of Wolfe and his unfortunate experiences. I do think we're at a point where most people realize that there is enough to go around. People have asked about competition between the newer literary magazines, like McSwys, Tin House, Fence, Open City. And I have to laugh. It's an oxymoron — competition between literary magazines? I mean, the idea of a literary magazine is so silly that to take it seriously enough to think we're competing for something (what?)-- The editor of Tin House actually had the idea, when we were both starting out, to stage a fake rivalry — over claims to some new writer maybe. It would have been funny, but and the media culture in New York — and here I'm talking about a few periodicals — would have lapped it up. And that was the point, of course, to give the bottom-feeders who only know gossip and conflict the easy meaningless shit they want. But so I think we all do very different things, we all do our best, and I would be personally dismayed if any of us ever folded. I like us all existing together. It's nice. And saying nice things about someone else or something else does not diminish he who says that nice thing. It costs nothing. It's free. There are no literary magazines, or books, I don't support, outside of maybe Newt Gingrich's fiction. I think I've probably blurbed about 12 books this year and if there are 12 more I like I'll just go ahead and say so. People agonize over blurbing as if it diminishes their own work to be seen on too many others' covers. But that's crazy. Any second guessing of the simple supportive impulse is fishy. What could possibly be the point in standing between a book and a reader? JL: So, then we're struck by the incompatibility of an indulged, unexamined sneering attitude being freed to respond to these tender utterances of ours (or someone else's). We've withheld cynicism and we want it withheld in return. And there's nothing that seems sadder, more thin and inadequate as a posture in the world than a brandishing of this critical sneer as if it's something to be proud of. A major accomplishment on a par with the act of opening oneself! To claim it as a hip credential that you've calcified your defenses against the possibility that Rod Stewart singing "The First Cut is the Deepest" can make you cry. Not only doesn't anything riskily corny or vulnerable or just too damn popular stand a chance of touching you, you've articulated a language for quickly and efficiently making others feel bad about their responsiveness to it. What an accomplishment. What a human triumph. Only connect, says E.M. Forster. We're seeking connection, you and I. And we recognize the pettiness of connection-snuffing because we've had to work so hard to battle it back in ourselves. And we're freaked out to see others not even wrestling with those impulses, but exalting them, turning them into credentials. Just a theory.
|
Red dot denotes content that is new today.
Black dot denotes newish content.