Bianca Steele

More on Women Novelists and “Likability”

Commenting on the Messud kerfuffle, Rohan Maitzen points to this article by Meredith Maran.  Maran writes about women she knows, or has heard of, who’ve been asked to revise their novels to make characters more “likable.”  She’s specifically talking about “literary” novels.  This generally means the more sophisticated reaches of the “mainstream,” books that are reviewed in the ordinary books pages of papers like the New York Times, instead of being banished to the one paragraph per book “crime” or “mystery” section (unless they’re best sellers or by seriously big-name authors like Stephen King, in which case they’re promoted to the front page and get extra space).  Some genre writers, notably China Miéville, an English writer of literary-tending science fiction, have argued against the “mainstream” definition itself, on the grounds that “mainstream” is just another kind of genre, like thrillers or “chick lit.”  Be that as it may, in the US, at least, it seems to be the case both that “mainstream” is treated as the default (or “unmarked”) variety of fiction, and also that the dividing line between literary and mainstream is not clear and bright.

Look at two “women’s” books that my mother lent me more than a year ago (neither of which I’ve yet been able to read more than a dozen pages of).  The Help is billed as literary fiction, and clearly has literary aspirations, but I’d call it basically “mainstream.”  The way it plays with point of view and with dialect is unusual for a genre novel, but somehow it seems to be aiming squarely at the middle—if not at “what will sell,” then at least at what by far the majority of people wouldn’t object to—and it seems odd to call that “literary.”  Lisa Scottoline’s non-legal thriller, Look Again, strikes me as a kind of Sue Grafton novel with the focus on an ordinary person, rather than a professional detective; and on her personal journey, rather than on catching whodunit.  It’s very well written, hitting all the creative-writing class marks, making none of the mistakes that are sometimes allowed to true crime or science fiction authors, but it’s clearly a mainstream, almost a genre novel, not highbrow or literary.

Mark McGurl’s The Program Years talks about the rise of the creative writing program in the United States, and the resulting professionalization of the American novelist.  Most working writers in the US today have MFA degrees, and make their living teaching college students to write.  But this means, also, it seems, that all writers—mainstream, as well as literary—are coming out of the same programs, for the most part (the most prestigious programs excepted).  Is it not until after the first novel is accepted and published that it becomes clear whether a writer will be “literary” or “mainstream”?

This seems to be a problem especially for men, because the market for “mainstream” men’s novels isn’t really there to the same extent as the market for women’s novels is.  There are Brooklyn-literary novels, maybe (say, Keith Gessen’s All the Sad Young Literary Men), but it seems difficult to make a career of that.  There are novelists who mark themselves out as “literary” by their style, like Paul Auster or David Foster Wallace.  There are writers who at first might have seemed to mark themselves out for a kind of mainstream men’s market, by apparently masculine subject matter, like Neal Stephenson (who, after his first novel, moved on to science fiction), or Richard Powers (also science fiction), or Bret Easton Ellis (ultra-violence), or Tom Perrotta (who actually does comfortably straddle the line between mainstream and literary, I think).  There’s Jay McInerney, but he seems to be an exception.  Similar writers seem inexorably to be drawn back from the initial celebrity of their youth into a more literary obscurity, like Tobias Wolff, possibly making a pit stop in a different kind of career, as Ethan Canin did.  On the other hand, a Gish Jen, Allegra Goodman, or Mary Gordon can continue publishing novels that earn out their advances by straddling the line between “popular” and “sophisticated”; and a Jennifer Weiner or Kathryn Stockett can publish blockbusters (which also might happen to get decent reviews in places like the Times) by appealing to the extremely large market for classy women’s novels.

But it’s a problem for women, too, that the line between mainstream and literary is so ill-defined.  Women novelists, like those Maran cites, presumably face pressure to become more mainstream, in order to find a market.  If a few changes, here and there, can double or triple the number of readers a book might find, why would a publisher not want to make them?  There are very few young female writers I can think of who seem likely to have their manuscripts read as aspiring to literariness (which, in any case, can be a matter of prestige more than sales).  Someone like Vendela Vida or Heidi Julavits can rely on her association with an established literary circle (in their case, around Dave Eggers and The Believer).  There are probably some women who can gain a reputation within their grad school programs for being literary.  Other than that—especially if they have no interest in science fiction type themes or in postmodern stylistic tricks (or in the kind of intellectuality displayed by, say, A.S. Byatt, who wrote her first novel as an imagined encounter between D.H. Lawrence and F.R. Leavis, and who in any event is British)—I don’t know what space there is for a first “literary” novel by a woman, unless it really tries hard to also appeal to a more “mainstream” market.

Silly Novels Interviews by Lady Novelists, by George Eliot Katie Roiphe

Claire Messud’s latest novel, The Woman Upstairs sounds interesting, certainly more so than her previous one, The Emperor’s Children (oh no, another novel about young people obsessed with David Foster Wallace!).  The title makes me think of Hilary Mantel’s early novel, Eight Months on Ghazzah Street, which is one of my favorites, an Orwellian gaslight mystery set behind the walls of purdah, but it could also fit well into my next “Boston-area novels” series, if there ever is one.  But on the Internet, there’s been much brouhaha over the interview Messud did with Publisher’s Weekly, part of which, presumably edited down from something a bit longer, they published online.  As the interview presented, the interviewer, a woman, asks Messud, “What are we to make of Nora Eldridge, [the protagonist]?  Because she is angry, really angry.”  Messud answers at length, talking about the kind of novel she intended to write.  The follow-up question is, “I wouldn’t want to be friends with Nora, would you?”  To this, Messud replies, in essence, that the question is a mistaken one.

Writing a brief piece in Salon, David Daley characterizes Messud’s response as a statement that the interviewer’s question was sexist.  Let’s leave aside the definition of “sexist.”  Obviously what is meant is that the question wouldn’t have been asked of a male novelist, and that it’s wrong to have different standards for women and for men.  Messud alludes to this question herself, earlier in the interview: she explicitly says that she had decided she wanted to see a book about a woman who has characteristics she only sees in novels (which she thinks are very good, and in fact loves) that are written by men about men.  In other words, she recognizes that there’s a kind of novel that’s generally written only by men.  She also explains that she doesn’t believe that fact equates to a prescription that has to apply to her.

At this point in the interview (as it was published), the interviewer suggested that she thinks characters in fiction ought to be likable, and that Messud’s character isn’t.  Messud responded by objecting to the question.  She listed, again, some of the same novels she’d mentioned earlier: those she’d already identified as the kind only men, and not women, are thought to be able to write.  There are two ways of taking this.  First, she could be saying, “Surely you think Sabbath’s Theater is great?  Then why do you criticize me?  It must be because I'm a woman.”  Or, she could be saying, “You must think Sabbath's Theater is bad, too, and it isn't.”  I think it’s more likely she intended to say the second of those, which is a common enough sentiment.  But it was actually Messud who’d brought up the question of gender in the first place, and it’s not that surprising if people took her to be saying the first.

But then Katie Roiphe chimed in, linking to Daley’s piece.  Where Daley had mildly noted that Messud implicitly criticized the reviewer’s question for being sexist (Daley mentions Laura Miller’s review of the novel in his own publication, though he doesn’t link to it[1]), Katie Roiphe attacks Messud for implicitly criticizing the reviewer’s question for being sexist.  It’s worth noting that Roiphe doesn’t only attack Messud for the accusation of sexism, Roiphe actually goes on to attack Messud for being insubordinate towards the interviewer.

([1] For that matter, it’s odd that Slate has a column called “Double X,” which is written by Roiphe, and a blog called “XX Factor,” which is written by a slate of four women.)

And as is usual for Roiphe, she gives a whole pseudo-Freudian explication of why Messud might do that and why it’s wrong.  What she says about Claire Messud is, in short, this: that she displays a “tendency to blame the world for a blanket, raging sexism that only partly exists,” that she unfairly “devour[s] her interviewer with her superior, more sophisticated literary approach,” that she throws a tantrum at the injustice of being subjected by a journalist to “indignities, like being asked if you would be friends with your character.”  This is vaguely less insufferable, actually, than Roiphe’s columns so often are.  Here, at least, she’s attributing to Messud attitudes that other writers have laid claim to, in similar situations.  She simply describes those attitudes in a one-sided way that makes them and Messud all look like whiny adolescents—that misunderstands the situation entirely (as if the idea that novelists might know more about literature than book-journalists do, for instance, was entirely novel)—and sets Roiphe up, if only for the amount of time it takes the reader to finish her column, as a voice of reason, almost as a saint.  No one will ever blame Katie Roiphe for seeing sexism where it doesn’t exist, especially if she accuses every other woman of that failing first (though you’d think she’d already secured herself on that point by now).  The most infuriating among Roiphe’s columns, at least for me, are those where she attacks women she simply doesn’t like, for some reason she doesn’t bother to articulate, but has something to do with some domestic task they do and she doesn’t herself think is necessary.  Then, she tars them with the “probably a man-hating feminist” brush, not to mention the (I am not making this up) “probably watches TV with her husband instead of having sex with him, which is a thing I’d never do” brush.  This one is just barely normal enough that many readers, following the link from other mentions of the column, won’t know why Roiphe’s name arouses such outrage.

The really bizarre thing in this case is that Roiphe goes on to give Messud publishing advice.  I suppose what’s going through her mind is, “She’s a writer (a little like me), I have a newspaper column, maybe she would like to someday have a newspaper column, so I’ll tell her what she would need to change if she’d like someday to be me.”  And the advice that Roiphe gives Messud, who’s just published her fifth novel (and is two years older than Roiphe is), is based on Roiphe’s experience with her first book of nonfiction, which she published when she was twenty-five.  Roiphe made such and such mistakes, she says, she learned some lessons in such and such a way, and made such and such changes, and she’s sure Messud can profit from making exactly the same changes.  What it comes across as, however—at best—is tribalistic defense of a journalist (the Publishers’ Weekly interviewer) against a perceived attack from an outsider.

Scott Esposito and D.G. Myers have literary responses to the fracas.  Myers’ is colored by the fact that he habitually defends exactly the kind of novel Messud would seem to be defending in the interview, as here, in a discussion of Roth’s The Human Stain, which happens to be just about at the point in Roth’s career where I started questioning my ability to go along with what he seemed to be up to. -via  For that matter, so does Mr. Claire Messud, James “hysterical realism” Wood.

A Blast from the Past, To Cure Grumpiness

I’ve been in a bad mood for a little over a week.  I think it’s because I’ve still got a copy of Backlash in the house.  Every so often I feel compelled to give it another chance.  I pick it up and flip through it.  Oh, the Republican Party decided it wasn’t so much in favor of abortion rights, equal rights and equal pay for women, or NOW, after all.  I can see how that would be disappointing, especially since it made future legislation more difficult.  But is that evidence that US culture is now “backlash culture,” really?  Or: Oh, in the late 1980s there were very few woman attorneys.  But is that evidence that the number of woman attorneys was actually not increasing, or that by 2000 or 2010 we could still expect to see almost no more women working as attorneys than we saw in 1970?  Or: Oh, here are a small handful of self-help books, summarized at length, that tell women how to attract men who want to marry them; and the writers think being a feminist or speaking your mind won’t do it.  But are they so very different from the self-help books of any other decade?  Are they even typical of the 1980s?  Are they evidence that the feminist-inclined young woman of the 1980s is internally conflicted, demonstrating by her actions and beliefs that she’s under pressure to be less independent and more childlike than she feels is right?  And what’s this “feminist psychotherapy” that the author keeps mentioning but doesn't specify?  And: Why does she mention Moonlighting to talk about media coverage of on-set politics between the director and the stars, but doesn’t discuss the show itself, when (though it was awfully entertaining) it would be a better example of backlash culture than any she’s included?  And how could anyone draw political conclusions from the data point, “male fashion designers aren’t very sympathetic to feminist ideas about fashion”?

Now that I’ve gotten that out of my system . . .  I’ll just mention that the second time I picked the book up, someone had said I should read it again, suggesting that there would be some payoff if I read it as evidence for a Marxian or quasi-Hegelian narrative.  And I’ll just say that I tried all the permutations, but none of them worked for me.

I’ve also been grumpy about the bombings at the Marathon.  I live a couple of miles from the marathon route, a couple more miles from the starting line, and like a lot of writers from Hopkinton, where the race starts, it feels irrationally like it hit especially close to home.  Friday seemed quiet, though there couldn’t have been that much of a drop-off in commuter traffic, and apparently traffic on the main roads was still pretty heavy.  Ungraciously, it occurred to me that if Boston and Newton weren’t opened up, people would have to come here to Framingham if they wanted a semblance of night life, and it would be even harder to drive anywhere or get a restaurant table.  And as with the Newtown shootings, and the rape case from India right after it, I haven’t been able to put on NPR the way I like do at lunchtime.

So here are two clips of dances by Mark Morris.  The first, “Dad’s Charts,” is of a solo performance by the choreographer from 1980.  The second, from the Met production of John Adams’ opera Nixon in China, is “The Red Detachment of Women.”  Both are pretty cool.

Faludi’s Backlash contra Carol Gilligan and Difference Feminism

In the comments section of Crooked Timber, in which I mentioned Susan Faludi’s Backlash (first published in 1991), Corey Robin (whose book I really liked) accuses me of talking about a book I’ve only skimmed.  That isn’t true, but I’m not going to argue with him on his blog about the way he teaches the book (though I think it might be useful to raise the question why a partisan contribution to a political debate that’s still going on should be treated as canonical history).

So I borrowed the book from the library for the third time and sat down with it.  Why?  Do I feel guilty for opining on a book I haven’t formed a proper opinion on yet?  No.  Am I going to finish it this time?  Probably not.  But I’m still too annoyed to put it down.  On the one hand, there’s no way in heaven or hell I’m going to be able to read this book without whining in writing about how annoying it is.  On the other hand, if it’s so easy to criticize that I have to ask myself why in the world it was published, why would I want to bother reading it at all?  But having a blog means that whining in my private notes can be transformed into something that seems almost but not quite like useful activity.  Even if nobody actually reads it.

So: one thing, at least, even if the rest of it stays in my scratch files:

(Okay, I feel bad now, because I saw that today is Susan Faludi’s birthday.  Happy Birthday!  But I’m supposed to write a thousand words and then sit on them for twenty-four hours?)

In the couple of hours I spent with the book yesterday, I was intrigued by Faludi’s treatment of Carol Gilligan and her book In a Different Voice [1].  There’s more about this discussion a little farther down, but I wanted to note a paragraph from a review of Backlash, by Jean Bethke Elshtain, in the conservative Catholic magazine, First Things:

“When I was an undergraduate in the 1960s out in the Western provinces (Colorado, it was), my instructors (Democrats to a man, no women in what was called the History and Government Department at Colorado State University in those benighted times) not only encouraged me to make the most of myself, they taught me that conspiracy theory was the hobgoblin of little minds, like those of the local John Birchers. We studied one of their texts in a Government course, unpacking the way the author crossed every t and dotted every i with his overriding paranoid theory, if it may be called that, that the Communists and their dupes ran everything, appearances to the contrary notwithstanding. He had lots of facts too. It all made sense—if you shared the initial paranoid starting point. We mocked this stuff and marveled that anyone could believe it. The Birchers were pretty much defeated by this sort of humorous dismissal, as was a local group that launched a campaign against the Beatles as the instruments of Satan.”

In most of the public libraries where I’ve lived since I graduated from college, Elshtain’s books have been shelved under “feminism.”  She is a person whom Backlash does not mention.

The third section of Backlash lists a string of anti-feminist figures of the 1980s, ending with right-wing feminist Sylvia Ann Hewlett (Faludi calls her a “neofeminist”), Second Wave feminist pioneer Betty Friedan, and psychologist Carol Gilligan.  What are Friedan and Gilligan doing there?  Friedan wasn’t willing to give up the idea of traditional femininity that some of her younger colleagues in the movement wanted to reject.  Faludi accuses her of being unaware that her rhetoric is borrowed from the right; and of thinking, or at least writing, in such a muddled way that it’s impossible to tell what she really believes. 

As for Gilligan, on close inspection, the chapter is actually in praise of her.  Faludi begins the discussion by attacking difference feminism, after correctly noting that it was the preferred stance of feminist academics and theorists throughout the 1980s.  She goes on, also largely correctly, to introduce Gilligan as a participant in that same school.  She incorrectly claims that those who championed “difference” tended not to care about equality.  Then she moves on to the media discussion of Gilligan’s work.  At this point, the argument shifts to an attack on the media for taking Gilligan up as an example of their preferred narrative.  For several pages, Faludi discusses Carol Gilligan’s own statements, in which she attempted to show that the broad narrative painted by the media wasn’t an accurate representation of  her work, and a critique by another scholar, pointing out flaws in Gilligan’s research.  (This section could serve as a good illustration of some of the flaws introduced by Faludi’s writing style, which uses the journalistic, faux-objective, non-voice “voice,” in which the point of view and even apparent argument meanders from here to there and back again, following the train of thought of each major source, in turn.)  She concludes that Gilligan’s work is very important, and largely correct, but doesn’t actually make the claims most people (misled by the media) believe it does, and (as shown by Zella Luria’s scholarly critique) properly understood, only makes very modest claims in the first place.

So this chapter, like the rest of the book, is an attack on the mass media for promoting anti-feminism.  It’s not an attack on Carol Gilligan or her work.  It is an attack, also, on difference feminism.  But Gilligan, the only scholar Faludi actually discusses [2], is not (as Faludi argues) a difference feminist[3], and so her work is not part of difference feminism, and so she’s fine.  She’s a victim of the media[4].  It remains unclear why Gilligan was included in the list of horribles at all.  Why not describe a more typical member of the difference-feminist crowd?  Perhaps it’s only because Faludi wanted to write a book about the state of media coverage of feminism in the late 1980s, and Carol Gilligan had gotten a lot of press.

Is it also an attack on difference feminism?  It’s hard to say.  By the end of the chapter (save for a cryptic reference to the feminist scholarly journal, Signs), the reader has forgotten that “feminist scholarship conferences [were] awash in papers on women’s special virtues [emphasis added].”  We’re back to an attack on the media, and the media’s putative invention of an anti-feminist narrative, and an unnuanced defense of “feminism” with no apparent effort to investigate what people mean by the word.  In 1991, to be sure, it could seem unclear whether difference feminism would be a flash in the pan, or whether it would endure.  I’ve never been an enormous fan of it myself.  But it seems unseemly to attack it in the same breath as Hayes Tim and Beverly LaHaye[5].  (Here, as in other places in the book, I imagine I hear Camille Paglia off in the wings, waiting for her cue.)

Moreover, there’s that huge nugget of cultural criticism clogging up the lion’s share of the book.  A commenter at CT pointed out, helpfully, that criticizing popular culture is not, by any means, the only thing Faludi does in Backlash.  But actually doing the math shows that the popular culture section makes up a whopping one-third of a nearly 500-page book.  It comes as the second section of the book, and the first substantial section, following the kind of historical survey that you might find in an academic book, and that many readers will presumably skip.  And much of it consists of the kind of movie and television criticism that is very, very closely affiliated with difference-feminist ideas.  In other words, a difference feminist would agree with what Faludi says in this section.  A difference feminist, talking to another feminist and finding that she disagrees with Faludi’s criticism of the shows she discusses, would point to theories and writings from difference feminism in support of her own views.

I’m not saying that Faludi is arguing in bad faith in either one of those sections.  Here, she appears to be in agreement with what, say, a Second Wave feminist might say: both that difference feminism is wrong and actually anti-feminist, and that those movie and television critiques are actually correct.  Feminism in the 1980s and 1990s was fraught and tangled.  But, also, this puts Faludi in much the same position as Friedan.  Whom she attacked as on a par with Allan Bloom, George Gilder, and Phyllis Schlafly.  Why were these writers included in this book in this way?  And now the reader is back at the beginning again.

 

[1] I look forward to returning this to the library, so my four year old will stop trying to convince me that it’s a book about animals.  Because people don’t have different voices.

[2] She mentions three other books, including Suzanne Gordon’s Prisoners of Men’s Dreams, in introducing the topic, by way of demonstrating that bookstores and publishers were marketing a “difference” narrative.

[3] For what it’s worth, Google Search completion begs to differ.

[4] Says Faludi, who writes for the Wall Street Journal.

[5] Who appear in the index under the name Tim Lataye.

O Brave New World

Four times a year, Phi Beta Kappa puts out a newsletter, the Key Reporter, with capsule book reviews, an essay or two, maybe the text of a speech at a PBK event.  For the past few years, the Key Reporter has been getting smaller, as the cost of postage rises, presumably, and it's now only printed and mailed two times a year, with all the issues available in PDF format online.

As of this issue, though, the Key Reporter consists of a pamplet, about 5"x8".  Instead of articles, it prints blurbs promoting the articles, and those square barcodes so you can read the whole thing on your device.

Every Love Story Is a Ghost Story: A Life of David Foster Wallace

I’d been putting off buying Every Love Story Is a Ghost Story, D.T. Max’s biography of the recently late David Foster Wallace.  But also I was nearly obsessively returning to the Amazon page to reconsider it.  Eventually, needing something nonfiction to read, I gave in.  At one point, I’d seek out and read anything Wallace wrote, but eventually gave that up—the nonfiction first, a lot of which I haven’t read (in this, I’m the opposite of many of Wallace’s fans, especially among journalists, who really adore the nonfiction, and especially the pieces I tend to like least), and eventually the fiction, too—Oblivion doesn’t fall into the category of books I’m going to borrow from the library enough times that I really ought to buy them[1], though actually there are only three stories in the collection that I don’t already have in magazine form.  I’d gone through the same nearly obsessive process with The Pale King, which, similarly, I eventually broke down and read.

It’s not too surprising that the biography itself raises the question whether it really needed to be published, and whether anyone really needs to read it.  The book ends with what for many readers, most probably, will be the starting point from which they decided to pick it up: Wallace’s suicide and what led up to it; and what he had in mind for The Pale King, the unpublished and uncompleted manuscript that would be his final novel.  Most of this material appeared already in Max’s 2009 New Yorker piece. 

The penultimate and antepenultimate chapters, similarly, cover material that is already somewhat familiar to many readers: Wallace’s publications after his blockbuster (in literary terms), Infinite Jest, and the editing process and publicity tour for that novel.  Max actually has little to say about the many stories and magazine articles Wallace wrote after Infinite Jest.  The origin of the Harper’s pieces, which it’s known were much longer in manuscript—and as later published in collection—than as printed in the magazine, if they ever appeared at all—is described; but the editing process is not.  The origin of Wallace’s Dostoevsky piece, a review of a biography by Joseph Frank, is dealt with in some detail, but not the fact that it never appeared in print in any magazine (nor the rumors that it was included in a galley version of Wallace’s first nonfiction collection, which appeared in 1997, and circulated in quasi-samizdat form among some insider fans, but was removed before that book went to press—in fact, no rumors at all of this kind make an appearance in this book[2]).  It’s with the publication of Infinite Jest that the “accepted” biography of David Foster Wallace begins.  As far as what comes after that goes, we know all this, or think we do, and there’s not much a biographer can add.  Max recounts a lot of correspondence between author and agent, or agent and editor, all of it pretty much the same as all the rest.

Wallace’s worldview was pretty much set by that point.  What’s more interesting, or was for me, at any rate (and maybe also for the biographer, who counts The Broom of the System, written while Wallace was still in college and published before he got his MFA, as his favorite book), is what comes before.  Max devotes lots of space to the genesis of Wallace’s early stories and nonfiction articles, and to the interactions with university programs and fellow writers they grew out of, as well as to (in passing) debunking certain myths.

Maybe we really didn’t need to know these things, and so didn’t really need a biography of David Foster Wallace.  His life isn’t really history; it took place very recently, so a book about him is inevitably going to fall into the category of journalism, even of publicity hype.  Looking at it feels a little prurient, like wanting to satisfy our curiosity about any individual person, who deserves their privacy.  We don’t have to satisfy our curiosity about where the novelists writing now are coming from, what they studied at school, who mentored them, or what obstacles they encountered, any more than about their political ideas or whether they consumed illegal substances.  But then again, we really don’t need novels, either.

As far as David Foster Wallace’s early life, influences, and development go, Every Love Story Is a Ghost Story is a good, basic biography that gives you all the facts (for the most part).  Wallace was born in New York State and moved to rural Illinois as a small child.  He grew up in a university town and attended public high schools where only some of the students were, like him, faculty kids.  He played competitive tennis.  He watched a lot of TV.  He read a lot.  He drank and smoked pot.  His father, a philosophy professor[3], taught him about philosophy.  He had a complicated relationship with his younger sister, his only sibling.  His mother, a teacher of college composition, really was very insistent on good grammar, and really did cough at the dinner table every time one of her children made a grammatical mistake.  He really did go to Amherst College, and considered going to Oberlin (viz. The Broom of the System, in which a girl rejects Amherst’s sister college for Oberlin after visiting her elder sister there).  He really was in recovery.  He was really hospitalized for depression.  He did take a dual summa in English literature and philosophy.  He did know Mary Karr and Elizabeth Wurtzel.  He went to Yaddo twice.  “E Unibus Pluram” was commissioned by Harper’s but not published by them.  He wrote a good number of book reviews early in his career.  Etc. 

There’s some attempt to place David Foster Wallace as a writer, but Max isn’t a literary critic, and there’s blessedly not too much of it.  There’s no attempt to diagnose him or to subject him to commentary.  Only once does the biographer allow himself to wonder whether a diagnosis of bipolar disorder, rather than depression—which would have necessitated, presumably, a drug different from the Nardil he was prescribed—had been called for, and the question whether Wallace was in therapy for most of his adult life, and if not, how he was getting his prescriptions refilled, is not considered.  The book is sympathetic to the twelve-step movement, in a vague kind of way, and respectful of Wallace’s and his friends’ privacy.

The genesis and development of each of the stories that went into Girl With Curious Hair is described to a significant level of detail.  So is the kind of work that was expected at Amherst and at the University of Arizona.  The classes Wallace took at both places are described, and the kind of work Wallace turned in for them.  His struggles with the curriculum, when it pulled against his intuitions, is described, as well.  Every one of his emotional collapses (as an earlier age would have termed them) is narrated, in its genesis, phemonenology, and eventual resolution.  All of this leads up to the completion of the magnum opus, Infinite Jest, and the apotheosis (whatever his feelings about it) of David Foster Wallace as a teaching writer, albeit an occasionally blocked one, with complex feelings about that blockedness.

Where the book is also useful is in debunking (assuming you think that kind of thing is necessary, or desirable) some of the rumors that swirled around Wallace’s persona—what he called “the statue”—while he was alive.

The “standard, accepted” biography of David Foster Wallace during the time of his greatest fame included the following “facts”: that he had never held a teaching job until after around the time Infinite Jest was published, that everything he wrote about AA was based on research and he was not himself in recovery, that he was a cradle Catholic; that the manuscript of The Broom of the System was accepted at Amherst as a thesis in the department of philosophy, as a text about Ludwig Wittgenstein.  Max’s biography shows all these “facts” to be, in fact, false, and it’s helpful for other areas, too, that simply were never very clear.  On the other hand, other questions, such as the pseudonyms mentioned above, aren’t addressed at all.

On the literary side, the following additional facts, I think, were generally largely accepted: that Wallace’s understanding of literary theory (Derrida, De Man, and so on) was one that had been inculcated in him in the standard undergraduate English literature sequence (and not in philosophy classes, which tend to take a different tack); that he had rejected philosophy for literature and that, if he hadn’t done so, he had certainly rejected technical formal logic and Anglo-American analysis in favor of a more literary and subjective philosophical style; that the beliefs held by the faculty of the University of Arizona writing program were his own (in fact he disagreed with them vehemently and was somewhat miserable there); that the best parts of his early published fiction were written by an author who despised Mark Leyner (in fact, he was a fan, and only turned against Leyner’s kind of writing a bit later).  Some might feel that knowing whether these “facts” were true or false is important for understanding what Wallace wrote.  To my mind, Max’s biography casts them in doubt (even for readers who didn’t already doubt them, as a consequence of having read the texts themselves).   To be fair, Wallace did change his mind (or at least nuance it) about, especially, the purpose of fiction and the best way of writing it; but it is not obvious that he made a complete about-face and came to fully embrace the writing preferred by the MFA program that he attended.  And to my mind, it’s an important fact that for Wallace, unlike many of his peers who came out of English-literature programs, De Man belonged to philosophy and not to literature.

It would be too much to say that this book is going to give ambivalent (or even mourning) readers closure about Wallace and the manner of his death.  It did help me come to grips with the earlier stories, again, after I’d become frustrated with his later ones and with the way he’d become given to speaking about them.  It helped me better appreciate The Broom of the System, which never was one of my favorites.  And it helped to explain why there were parts even of his best work—Infinite Jest and Brief Interviews With Hideous Men, in particular—that eventually came to rub me the wrong way, and why the parts I liked best were so often the parts that Wallace himself seemed to disown.

 

[1] Now that I have an e-book reader, though, the criterion has moved from “don’t really really have to have it, but am about to borrow for the third time,” to “would consider borrowing again just for reference, because it looks pretty interesting.”

[2] This is reasonable, actually.  The book is about the writer, not about his readers.  But all except the bare facts of the publication histories of many of the stories that would be collected in Oblivion is excluded here.  And even that’s an exaggeration, unless the fact that some of them appeared under pseudonyms is excluded from the category of “bare fact.”  For instance, “Mr. Squishy,” one of the best stories in the collection, first appeared as the work of “Elizabeth Klemm,” but the name “Klemm,” like the words “pen name” and “pseudonym,” appear nowhere in the book.

[3] If it were my book, I’d have mentioned the fact that one of James D. Wallace’s books (on open stacks in the Boston Public Library in Copley Square) is about the philosophical implications of fiction.  Maybe also the fact that another of his books is on virtue ethics. But it’s not.

Freude! Freude!: On not-reviewing the new Die Hard movie.

I may or may not get around to seeing the new Die Hard movie—I saw the last one, but I think I missed the third—but I thought it was interesting that two different movie critics decided to write about it without actually really reviewing it.  In Slate, Eric Lichtenfeld writes about the tag line, instead, and at the Tor blog, Ryan Britt publishes a predictive review he wrote before he actually saw the actual film, with notes interspersed showing what he’d gotten wrong.

I had already thought about reviewing the trailer.  (This is the version I saw in the movie theater.  There are others, but it looks like they all use the same music, in one form or another.)  Because it’s a really good trailer.  And it’s good in part for the reasons Lichtenfeld gives, for why the tag line is so memorable.  Or rather, if the tag line (you know, “Yippee-ki-yay, m-f-”—I think only the first part in fact appears in the trailer) weren’t so memorable, the trailer wouldn’t work as well as it does.  The tag line, as it appears in the trailer, is the moment of recognition, the moment when the viewer realizes that this is a trailer for a new Die Hard.  (Which is exciting, for reasons explored in the Lichtenfeld and Britt pieces, even though the viewer also knows it’s not likely a new Die Hard is necessary, or that it’s any good.)

What I liked was the way the music parallels that moment of recognition.  If your knowledge of classical music is at about the same level as mine, so that you’re familiar with a lot of great works but on intimate terms with at most a few of them, you knew from the opening bars of the trailer’s score that you knew this music from somewhere, but you couldn’t quite place it. It’s pretty good, though.  Then you see Bruce Willis, and you begin to wonder, but you’re still not sure.  Then he pumps a semi-automatic and says “Yippee-ki-yay,” and you’re certain.  And the score hits full bloom with the Ode to Joy, backgrounding the facades of majestic old European buildings, and you remember that Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony was the hallmark of the Die Hard movies, and you know exactly where you are. 

Why the Ninth was chosen for this movie is something that escapes you, as it happens.  This is the point at which you start to question the whole lingering Cold War theme of the new sequel, and your questioning casts a shadow back to your enjoyment of the earlier one, such as it was (you were never really a fan of helicopter chases).  Of course the question, “Is this really a hero for our time?”, was one that was proposed already by the previous sequel, in which McClane’s daughter begins to take over for him, and Justin Long’s nerdy guy teaches him about cyberwar.  And so why is McClane’s son not only CIA, but CIA in Russia?  Is the answer that we actually do still need McClane, unreconstructed?  One hopes not.

Anyway, about a week ago I heard a really good recording of the Ninth, the Berlin Symphony conducted by Claudio Abbado, with a big tympani sound, real stringy strings, and a big, Russian-sounding men’s chorus.  We’ve gotten used, I think, to the sound of Bernstein at the Brandenburg Gate, heavy on the joy, light on Romantic drama, the Sturm und the Drang.  I like the Abbado better than the recording of the Ninth I already have, Dohnanyi and the Cleveland Symphony. 

Morozov v. Johnson

In the past I’ve found it hard to follow the internal arguments about whether “faith in the Internet” has been somehow inflated.  Besides reviews in magazines, there was Tom Slee’s three-part discussion of Evgeny Morozov’s attempted takedown of enthusiasts, The Net Delusion.  More recently, Morozov wrote a scathing review of Steven Johnson’s book, Future Perfect: The Case for Progress in a Networked Age.  Johnson replied, and Morozov replied to the reply: Johnson “doesn’t understand my critique.”  I don’t think Morozov shows anything of the kind.  What he shows is that Johnson doesn’t accept the assumptions that Evgeny Morozov claims underlie Johnson’s own argument.  Johnson and others describe a more or less loose collection of progressive tendencies that can be enabled either by the Internet or by institutions that are like the Internet in certain relevant ways: he describes what those ways are.  But that isn’t enough for Evgeny Morozov.   He wants to push the idea that there’s a thing called “Internet-centrism,” a real thing, the nature and so on of which he thinks people ought to understand before they dare to talk about its effects publicly.  Yet he himself can’t or won’t explain what he means by it.  Equally, he can’t or won’t find any public, human representative of it who accepts the label for himself.  He uses the word “Internet-centric” like the name of a disease; you wouldn’t expect a sociopath to accept the label for himself, either. 

Some questions about why Morozov comes down so hard on Johnson:

Does Morozov really think Johnson should not have been allowed to write a popular, journalistic book about a contemporary social trend without having first written a Ph.D. dissertation on all the college professors who had imagined and written about the characteristics of not-yet existing social trends, in articles they expected only other college professors to read?  Presumably he would have had to incorporate the dissertation directly into each of his books, as well, or Morozov and other reviewers would have no way of telling whether he’d “done his homework” (in Morozov’s words), or not.

Does Morozov really think it’s unreasonable to write a book on the Internet as a tool, without examining other tools in the same book, and presumably allowing those other tools to come out ahead a proportional number of times?  Does he really think it’s irrational for Johnson to “start with his preferred solution—the ‘Internet’” (what’s with those scare quotes, by the way?), as if the Internet didn’t exist yet and Johnson were proposing it to readers as something they might want to ask their governments to produce?  Someone writes a book that says, “Here’s this great new tool, here are some progressive ways to use it,” and Morozov replies, “Why do you think progressive ways to use this tool will arise without any thought?  Why are you looking at this tool at all?  And ‘great new tool’ is a ridiculously utopian turn of phrase.”

It’s possible to wish someone’s books were a little deeper (why I’ve never gotten around to reading Johnson’s books, or other popular “progressive” books, like Chris Mooney’s, or Chris Hayes’s), and to wish there were a little more available at a level between the absolutely journalistic, book that’s really an article with a lot of filler, and the academic journal article available only to college professors on campuses with enough money in their budgets to spring for free access for everyone to the best academic publishers, without needing to jump to attack an author for not being what he’s not.  This is not going to get us better books.  It’s not going to instigate people like Steve Johnson to “step up his game,” in Evgeny Morozov’s opinion.  It’s going to do the opposite: intimidate writers and suggest they ought to lower their sights, lest they be accused, by the likes of Morozov, of pretending to know what they can’t.

P.S.: I didn’t look up his bio until after I had written the above: Evgeny Morozov is not, as I had assumed from his articles, a grumpy Soviet-trained engineer in his late fifties.  He was born in the same year that I graduated from high school, and graduated from Stanford.  Should that change what I think about what he says?  (Certainly, if his ideas about a thing that exists and is called “Internet-centrism” derive from what he learned from studying cutting-edge research in one of the best universities in the world, that’s very different from whether his ideas about it derive from a half-remembered compulsory study of historical materialism, combined with after-hours bull sessions with fellow engineers on Usenet.)

Thomas Friedman thinks corporations are people.

In today’s New York Times, Thomas Friedman’s op-ed calls for real collaboration in Washington, like there is in Silicon Valley.  He quotes “an expert on networks who has been involved in several successful startups,” who notes the need for “collaboration both within and between firms,” where “’collaboration’ is defined as something you do with another colleague or company.”  Then Friedman goes on to contrast this with Washington, where it’s known that “collaboration” means always and only working with the enemy.  Silicon Valley gets things done, and Washington (especially nowadays) doesn’t.  So Friedman calls for Washington types to learn from Silicon Valley . . .

. . . but he doesn’t mention people collaborating anywhere in the essay.  Instead he talks about corporations collaborating with one another.  It seems that the idea of individuals, employees, being important, is something he actually can’t begin to imagine.  The people he mentions are: a corporate vice president, the founder of an energy company, a co-founder of LinkedIn, and the current CEO of the same company.  CEO’s and heads of marketing, in the world of the New York Times Business Section (written largely for people who aren’t themselves in business, but want to feel culturally au courant about the economy, as well as the theatre), are the only individuals who matter.

I could go all critical-theoretical, and claim that Friedman is telling us a little bit about The Truth about how the economy works, who is really important in Society right now, and so on and so forth.  But why would you want me to?  Does Thomas Friedman know anything about this world that he hasn’t read in the New York Times, himself?  Why should you, or I, believe that what he says has a basis in anything except his own head?

Finally, two paragraphs before the end of his essay, he mentions developers, the people who do the collaborating.  He refers to a corporation’s “developer community,” people who aren’t formally affiliated with the corporation, and who (if they get paid at all) aren’t paid by the corporation.  They use the software developed inside the corporation—by employee developers—who do, Virginia, exist—in order to produce consumer tools, or the kinds of tools they themselves would like to use, and they’re motivated by enthusiasm for the platform software, and by the wish to create something cool.  But this is not the only model for a company.  It isn’t even the concept Friedman started out with, about five paragraphs back.  Again, I could ask what Friedman may be trying to tell us, by saying this thing that I think is wrong (or, he could argue, that I didn’t already know, that had never occurred to me before).  But why?  What is it that’s supposed to have earned a reader’s trust?

The fact that he doesn’t seem to know this, that it isn’t at all obvious that he knows anything at all about the subject he’s writing on, beyond what a handful of sources, cabdrivers, and people at cocktail parties have mumbled in his presence, has already put me off.  Just in this same paragraph, he seems not even to know that “the developer community” and “headhunters” are different groups of people.  I suppose that a New York Times op-ed writer may be assumed to know the difference.  But the fact remains he wrote a confusing paragraph that doesn’t sufficiently distinguish between them.  No composition teacher would permit this degree of confusion.  Again, why is he supposed to have earned the readers’ trust?

I can only suppose that he really does think corporations are people, and that he understood the quote at the beginning of his essay in precisely that sense.

Lincoln, a film by Steven Spielberg, from a screenplay by Tony Kushner

The movie follows Abraham Lincoln and the men he’s deputized as they attempt to pass a Constitutional amendment banning slavery.  (The Constitution as originally ratified didn’t explicitly permit slavery but didn’t prohibit it either, and implicitly made it legal, by admitting the states in which it was incorporated into law.)  Obviously it is worth watching.  Whether it’s fatally flawed by its treatment of race and its depiction of slavery as an issue that primarily concerns white men, I don’t know.  I tend to have low standards when it comes to how politically complete and accurate historical films should be.  You can read other people’s writing on this topic and make your own decision.

The film is directed, as everybody knows, by Steven Spielberg, from a script by Tony Kushner.  It’s supposed to follow Doris Kearns Goodwin’s Team of Rivals, about the political rivals who got together within Lincoln’s presidential administration, but apparently draws on only four pages in the middle of that book.  Several other historians are credited as consultants, as well, some of whose contributions (like those of James McPherson) seem fairly obvious.  The rivals who play such large roles in Goodwin’s book do all make appearances here, and in important positions, but they don’t necessarily get large amounts of screen time.  And one of the big revelations of her book was that Lincoln suffered from dejection and spent a lot of time reading his Bible, neither of which fact makes any appearance onscreen in Spielberg’s film at all.

Tony Kushner has worked with Spielberg before, on Munich, which he co-wrote with Eric Roth, but he’s best known for the two-part play, Angels in America: A Gay Fantasia on National Themes.  Angels in America uses techniques that in a novel might be called magical realism to explore AIDS and the history of Jewish and homosexual life in the United States.  On the one hand, Roy Cohn, a historical figure, former deputy to Richard Nixon and persecutor of the Rosenbergs, and a closeted gay man, is dying of AIDS.  On the other, Prior Walter, a true-blue WASP, is coming to grips with his recent diagnosis.  In between are Joe Pitt, a Mormon lawyer and disciple of Cohn; Louis Ironson, who leaves Prior because he’s unable to deal with illness, and then takes up with Joe; and Belize, Prior’s friend and Roy Cohn’s nurse.  The conceit of the angel is that God has, literally, absconded, leaving a gaggle of angels (in the tradition of Milton and Blake) unable to cope, unable to perform their usual bureaucratic functions.  The angel America brings a revelation to Prior, in his illness, telling him to stop trying to change the world.  He refuses it.

Theater is often inaccessible, and large-scale visual effects can be expensive to produce.  Except for the HBO version of his play (directed by Mike Nichols from a script by the playwright), Kushner’s brand of magic has been hard to find.  Lincoln, especially near the beginning, evokes some of the same magic Kushner brings to the theater.  This is interesting, because there is probably no movie director who is less theatrical—in the sense of being theater-like, play-like—than Steven Spielberg.  No one leaves a Spielberg movie saying, “That was okay, but it was really too much like a play.”  No one is leaving Lincoln saying this, either.  But it’s nice that the Kushner sense of visionariness, which is much more personal and cerebral than Spielberg’s sense of magic, made its way onto the screen, at least a little bit.

This is probably the first digital Civil War film.  The crudeness of everything was emphasized: the shaggy hats, the obviously homemade uniforms, the sense that everything the government and army were using had been jerrybuilt for the purpose a very short time ago.  High-ranking army officers tip their chairs back on two legs, in a way I learned from the books I read as a kid was considered a sign of uncouthness.  The President drinks from a tin cup.  You know that when you watch a movie directed by Steven Spielberg, you’re going to get a good story and a good visual experience, and Lincoln does not disappoint.

I didn’t think Daniel Day-Lewis looked like Lincoln, and this bothered me, probably more than it should have.  He was not nearly gaunt enough.  Spielberg plays this as if the infamous presidential super-accelerated aging process, always especially noted in regard to Abraham Lincoln, applied only to the last month of his presidency.  In fact, though, Lincoln was gaunt throughout his life.  Day-Lewis looks well-fed and self-satisfied.  He doesn’t look like Lincoln—he looks like Arthur Miller, or better, like Leonard Bernstein.  But really, who he looks like is Daniel Day-Lewis.  He looks like a movie star.  It can be annoying when a historical movie casts the main character with so much regard for personal likeness that acting ability is disregarded, but reworking a historical drama so that the central personage can fit some kind of charismatic ideal tends to be a bad sign.

Day-Lewis is surrounded by a bevy of stars and well-known performers who are more or less character actors, or what passes these days for character actors: Tommy Lee Jones (who is good but whose character is excessively marked by, alternately, his hick accent and diction and the viewer’s remembering that he graduated from Harvard), David Straithairn (in other words, Edward R. Murrow), Sally Field (Norma Rae), Jared Harris (the Brit accountant on Mad Men, playing Ulysses S. Grant).  They circle around the President, pursuing their own agendas, but always deferring to him.  At times, not always obvious times, the film recalls Walt Whitman’s idolization of Lincoln, in poems like “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloomed,” an elegy written in the wake of the President’s death.  They, in turn, are surrounded by a mass of little-known actors who look like ordinary people, real Americans, even nineteenth-century Americans—whose motives tend to be more petty, who aren’t very interested in big ideas or in political movements, and who have to be persuaded one way or another to link up their personal destinies to the cause of Abolition.

I can’t help but compare this vision of how political change is made with Kushner’s own account, in an essay published with Angels in America, of how little is ever accomplished by one person alone, how any accomplishment worth anything is always a group effort:

“The fiction that artistic labor happens in isolation, and that individual talents are the sole provenance of artistic accomplishment, is politically, ideologically charged and, in my case at least, repudiated by the facts. . . .  The smallest indivisible human unit is two people, not one; one is a fiction.”

I can only half-reconcile this essay with what I saw on the screen in Lincoln.

The movie was marred, for me, by Spielberg’s usual crude, mechanistic use of Christian imagery, which he makes use of as if it were something he had to have, to please the crowds, as much as music by John Williams or big sweeping panoramas.  When Thaddeus Stevens pretends he doesn’t believe all races were created equal, but only that there should be equality before the law (something that apparently did not really happen), solely in order to win votes, his opponent has to jump up and use the word “deny.”  The moment this happens, you just know it’s going to happen three times.  Otherwise, how could there be a parallel between Stephens and Peter's denying Christ after the latter’s arrest?  But this parallel does nothing.  There’s no reason for it: no reason why this particular character should be compared with Peter, and no reason why this particular point of the story of Lincoln should be linked to Peter’s threefold denial of his friend and his God.  It’s there to say something about The Universality of Myth, yada yada yada, this is a Christian country, where gospel stories are shared by all of whatsoever creed, so a story is made more resonant and “deeper” if it’s associated with Christian narratives.

I said that nobody is going to leave the theater after watching Steven Spielberg’s Lincoln, saying, “That was too much like a play,” but actually, there is one play it is very much like: the 1967 musical, 1776 (made in 1972 into a film—badly butchered, incidentally, in the broadcast television/VHS version), about the proposal and ratification of the Declaration of Independence.  Even more than Lincoln, 1776 focused on the wheeling and dealing needed to get a legislature to take action: in the case of 1776, to persuade the delegations of all thirteen colonies to the Continental Congress—at a time when New England, New York, and New Jersey were the ongoing sites of battle, but many still hoped for reconciliation—to agree to declare their independence from Great Britain.  There are a number of parallels.  The plots of both Lincoln and 1776 are in large part stories about persuading legislatures to vote a certain way.  The sharp-tongued Thaddeus Stevens is mocked by his Southern colleagues in the same way as the “obnoxious and disliked” John Adams.  The debate over the morality of slavery is portrayed as an essential element in the legislative process, in both cases, as (according to 1776) Jefferson edits his draft of the Declaration to remove language condemning the Atlantic slave trade, as the price of securing the agreement of the South, and as (in a musical number that can be viscerally upsetting if done right) Adams is reminded that Massachusetts is home to the ships’ captains who carry on that trade and bring back the profits that follow upon it. 

And the question whether this is really the last legislation needed, ever, on this and related questions, arises in both.  There’s a sense in which the characters naturally feel something like, “This is the one big fight.  All we have to do is get this piece of legislation passed, and we’ll already have achieved our goal.”  In the case of the Thirteenth Amendment, viewers certainly know that a long subsequent struggle was needed, and that the struggle still is incomplete.  Any sense, which a viewer might feel on leaving the theater, that the story is over and won, is clearly illusory.  In 1776, this is signaled more within the story, as the elation of having the Declaration in large part accepted is punctured, as delegates make specific objections to the text—not least to its mentions of slavery—and it is watered down.  In Lincoln, though it isn’t always in the foreground, when it is, it makes the story feel very ironic.

If Lincoln makes a specific political point, one that’s relevant to our own times, beyond "racism is bad," I’m not sure I could say what it is.  But it’s a pretty good movie, and it’s almost certainly going to be a staple of high school history classes for many years to come. 

I Have Never Liked "Les Miz"

In the New Yorker’s blog, movie critic David Denby has a piece on the new film version of the musical version of Victor Hugo’s bloated nineteenth-century French novel, Les Misérables.  Denby says he hasn’t seen the stage version, but from what he writes, all its flaws are carried over nearly in full to the cinematic one (and with a few more added, which I can’t speak to, since I haven’t seen it yet).  The show has been so ridiculously popular for nearly thirty years that it’s nice to see someone who feels about it the same way I do.

Denby writes:

It’s terrible; it’s dreadful. Overbearing, pretentious, madly repetitive. . . . I couldn’t help wondering what in the world had happened to the taste of my countrymen—the Americans (Americans!) who created and loved almost all the greatest musicals ever made.

And:

The music is juvenile stuff—tonic-dominant, without harmonic richness or surprise. Listen to any score by Richard Rodgers or Leonard Bernstein or Fritz Loewe if you want to hear genuine melodic invention. I was so upset by the banality of the music that I felt like hiring a hall and staging a nationalist rally. “My fellow-countrymen, we are the people of Jerome Kern and Irving Berlin! Cole Porter and George Gershwin, Frank Loesser and Burton Lane! We taught the world what popular melody was! What rhythmic inventiveness was! Let us unite to overthrow the banality of these French hacks!” (And the British hacks, too, for that matter.) Alas, the hall is filled with people weeping over “Les Mis.”

I couldn’t agree more.

Les Miz (as it’s called, for short) just isn’t a “musical.”  It’s a spectacular.  The show’s creators, Claude-Michel Schönberg and Alain Boublil, are from France—not a country that had given us a large number of Broadway shows.  (The same writers went on to create Miss Saigon.)  It was adapted for the London stage before being brought to New York.  At the time, Broadway was struggling, and the traditional style of musical play was having difficulty finding producers and audiences.  Into the vacuum spilled new large-scale productions from London, often by Cameron Mackintosh, and eventually corporatized productions, often by Disney.  The British shows, by Andrew Lloyd Webber, for example, were not in the American-music tradition.  Webber began by writing rock operas, from the standpoint of which the American songbook appeared musically old-fashioned, but which were themselves old-fashioned in form, more like operettas than like the American form that had grown from the operetta.  It helps a little, in appreciating Les Misérables, to recognize that it is definitely not a Broadway musical, but more in the operetta tradition.

I saw Les Miz onstage in the late 1980s.  I didn’t like it.  Like David Denby, I thought the only number that seemed a real musical number was “Master of the House,” performed by an innkeeper and his familiars.  It had a bouncy tune, it had dancing, it had characters who seemed to be having fun.  It was reminiscent of some of the songs in the 1960 English musical Oliver!  The rest of the show is ballads and musically formless spectacles, both of which are okay in small doses, but not enough to sustain a Broadway-style musical.  The plot alternates between the pathos of a young orphaned girl and the pathos of revolutionary students at the barricades of a revolt that’s never clearly defined.  In my memory, the students lose, very badly, and in my memory, they’re also joined by a small boy who is shot by the government forces.  I may have made him up, though, conflating the baggage carriers in Henry V with Fantine, the tiny waifish girl on the theatrical posters and the cover of my Signet paperback.  The rest of the plot, as everyone knows, is The Fugitive, more or less, with Jean Valjean as Harrison Ford, and Inspector Javert as Tommy Lee Jones.  And for my money, the South Park movie (Bigger, Longer, and Uncut), though unwatchable in parts, is worth the price of admission just for the parody of Les Misérables, in the song “La Resistance Lives On.”

However, for the past few years I’ve been listening to XM Radio’s Broadway channel in my car, and they fairly often play songs from Les Miz.  Obviously, these were recordings of the casts from the stage versions.  At first, I would change the station whenever these came on, but over time, the show’s biggest hits started to grow on me: rousing ensemble numbers like “Do You Hear the People Sing?” and “Red and Black,” fairly typical musical numbers like “At the End of the Day” and the comic “Lovely Ladies,” and even (to a lesser extent) the ballad, “A Little Fall of Rain.”

On the same channel I’d hear songs from Miss Saigon, and although these really aren’t as good, I began to hear the way melodic lines, vocal types, and plot elements echoed back and forth between these plays and, especially, Andrew Lloyd Webber’s.  So there’s a comparison to be made between “The Heat is on in Saigon,” where the virginal hero wanders through the fleshpots of the city, and “The Temple,” where Jesus reacts badly to the moneylenders and other merchants in the temple at Jerusalem.  Schönberg-Boublil gained by the comparison.  Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice’s attitude toward “superstars,” and the degree to which they distinguished between Jesus Christ and Evita Peron, was never very clear.  Miss Saigon made more sense than those plays, even if it was not as good as them, theatrically or musically.

But when I saw the full set of trailers for the film, I remembered how painful the show really was to watch.  Three minutes of a rousing ensemble number, or six, is one thing.  Moment after moment of emotional “peak” is another.  It’s not usual for a Broadway number to be especially intense, emotionally.  This may be why they seem silly to many people these days.  It may also be why the songs from Les Miz sounded better on the radio.  The repetition of motifs was overbearing, the orchestration was overbearing, and every moment seemed designed to evoke strong emotion (which I knew, from my memory of the show, would eventuate in pity for the very piteous ends suffered by almost all the main characters).  “Castle on a Cloud,” sung onstage by a small girl, can sound sweet and honest, and out of context, not very kitschy at all.  But the film version (featured on the trailer) is intensified until it sounds like something from a horror movie.

And “Master of the House,” for me, has aged poorly.  I saw the play on tour, at Boston’s Colonial Theater.  The acoustics at the Colonial were terrible every time I saw a play there.  Spoken or sung, you were lucky if you could hear five words in a row.  Amplification still seemed new at the time, and it didn’t seem to work well.  (This was one reason I was willing to assume the show was better than I’d thought after I saw it in person: the fact that it sounded terrible, muddy, and unmusical might not actually have been the composers’ fault at all.)  I had no idea what most of the lyrics even were, beyond the much clearer tags like “master of the house, ruler of the inn.”  Then I heard it on the radio, with the London cast.  The innkeeper was clearly the butt of the song, a grasping letch whom all the lodgers hated, and his wife was Patsy from AbFab.  The number turned out to belong to the cruder kind of BBC comedy.  I don’t look forward at all to seeing it done by Helena Bonham Carter and Sacha Baron Cohen, two Brits who I expect to perform it in a similar way.

Okay, Now I Know what 'Mansplaining' Means

This is hilarious (h/t New Apps blog):

At a major conference I attended as a PhD student, I presented a paper on a fraction of my research in hybrid digital and human networks. As the panel concluded, an angry man approached me and accused me of “using” “his” work without citing him. Between the shouting and gesturing, I came to understand that he believed the only possible source of one of my presentation examples was his (unpublished) research. As a novice scholar, I was too stunned by the aggression and implicit accusation to do more than stand there. Eventually he stormed off promising to follow up. A few days later, he emailed me a citation of a forthcoming journal article he had co-written. In his email he insisted I either cease discussing the broad topic or refer to his work *whenever* I did. He also demanded I *never* return to that particular conference to engage in similar discussions. 

I also liked the post titled “Home Economics Is Roughly the Same as Electrical Engineering.”  I’ve actually had the contrary experience.  Someone on a listserv once took the time to e-mail me off-list to explain that when he thinks of engineering, what he thinks of is in fact EE, and that to him software engineering is more on a par, probably, with “domestic engineering”—which I suppose is basically home ec (rather than “social engineering” done by the NSA, as opposed to CIA, or something).  And then again it could have been a woman letting me know what the dominant male culture thinks of what I do for a living.  Really, it could have been. 

On the other hand, some people are just jerks.  I’ve heard similar behavior to some of this—a college junior saying, “if you want to know everything there is about cryptography, come see me, because I did a research paper on it last year,” announcing this to a whole room of undergraduate and graduate students, and at least 80% men.  I’m sure that in private women get a lot more of it, and unattached from any kind of friendly rivalry where the same would be expected in return.  But a lot will be new to people who haven’t thought about it before. 

Also this one.  I have to say, if I ran across that on the Internet (rather than a close friend on Facebook whose judgment I trusted in other things), I’d assume the guy was either mentally disturbed or a character in a Harry Frankfurt essay (that link only works sometimes for me, try this if it doesn't).  At least on Facebook you could ignore the guy, instead of feeling you had to defend your honor and reputation by refusing to let him get the best of you.

Another Scandal: Excessively Nice Critics (UPDATED)

I learned a lot about writing about other people’s books from Daniel Mendelsohn, especially his early essays in the New York Review of Books.  Here, in a blog at the New Yorker, he takes on the recent “niceness” scandal in literary reviewing.  Mendelsohn provides a useful overview and gives all the relevant links, but he also kind of glibly runs through a series of views that he obviously doesn’t have sympathy with.

Mendelsohn asks what is the function of criticism.  Again, he doesn’t really engage sympathetically with the other, mostly younger critics he whose views he discusses, and with which he disagrees.  One doesn’t have to think of critics as “harmful parasites” (an idea he attributes to his colleague Richard Brody, at the New Yorker) to recognize that their writing has a secondary function, while the works they discuss have the primary one.  Sure, you could come up with a theory whereby critics play the leading role, with artists existing only to give critics something to do, but you would be pretty silly to do it.  I suppose you could think of critics as engaged in exactly the same practice as, say, novelists (composers and choreographers seem to me a harder sell), only doing it in a different way.  But where do you stop?  Are science fiction writers engaging in science?  Is Ben Mezrich (author of Bringing Down the House and The Accidental Billionaires) engaging in applied mathematics research, casino security, and business administration?  Why not say readers are engaging in the same pursuit as novelists and literary critics, every time they read a novel?   (That’s a nicely Talmudic idea, in fact: reading as prayer as work.) There’s a point, it seems to me, when you have to stop doing one thing and start doing the other one, when you have to realize that there’s a limitation that applies to one pursuit that doesn’t apply to the other.  If criticism is the same as art, then a critical essay can do everything a novel does.

Dale Peck is the poster child for the harsh review; Dave Eggers—as much as his wife, Vendela Vida, and their colleague at the aptly named The Believer magazine, Heidi Julavits—is the poster child for “niceness.”  (Mendelsohn describes the Eggers who said he’d never write a bad review as “youthful,” which is true, but misleading, as Eggers was at the time the most important publisher and editor in circles that decidedly were not important only to the young.)  Dale Peck rose to broad notoriety when he published a review of Rick Moody’s memoir/essay, The Black Veil, which he began with the indelible words, “Rick Moody is the worst writer of his generation.”  In my opinion, however over the top he was, Peck is more right about Moody than Eggers has ever been right about anything.  The Black Veil, which I read largely on the strength of Peck’s own review, was engaging and fascinating—but like so much of what Moody writes, reading it was (as Gloria Steinem said of seeing Marilyn Monroe on the big screen) like being suffocated with a Baked Alaska.

Dale Peck swore off writing negative reviews after the controversy following his piece.  I read Daniel Mendelsohn’s review of Peck’s collection, aptly titled Hatchet Jobs, when it first appeared (Mendelsohn links to it in the post linked above, though it’s paywalled), but I honestly don’t remember it.  I liked the old Dale Peck.  I like—though I often don’t agree with—Edmond Caldwell’s Contra James Wood blog.  I almost never agree with anything printed by a Dave Eggers publication, and almost never enjoy reading them.  That’s not an argument that Peck’s and Caldwell’s styles guarantee good criticism, but it is an argument to rethink any previous automatic agreement with what Eggers says.

Laura Miller, at Salon (linked by Mendelsohn), puts forward some more practical arguments.  Her editors, she says, have statistical proof that nobody wants to read anything that isn’t entirely positive.  But that’s not a moral argument of the kind Dave Eggers made.  It’s not an argument that should apply to someone discussing a novel on BoingBoing, and it’s not an argument that should apply to the amateur blogger discussing fiction for his own amusement, with no intention of becoming a professional literary critic someday.  It's not an argument that should apply to the dedicated literary blogs like The Millions.  It’s not an argument that people should be, as Jacob Silverman put it in the post Miller’s discussing, “nice.”  Then Miller herself says something that sounds not very nice at all: "for God’s sake, take it to the classroom, workshop or specialty publication.”  This is the kind of thing I wish Mendelsohn would have engaged with.

UPDATE: Fixed the spelling of Julavits's name; and here's another link.

Scandals

If you follow these kinds of things, you know that there have been a number of plagiarism scandals in journalism recently, particularly in the zone where journalism intersects with book publishing, punditry, and celebrity.  The most notorious of these might be the case of Jonah Lehrer, who was discovered to have been reusing passages from his books in writing for magazine publishers that he represented as new, and to have also both fabricated quotations and used someone else’s work without acknowledgement (ironically, he had just written a book arguing that there is little difference between creativity and borrowing from others).  The most recent of these have involved Fareed Zakaria, a foreign policy analyst and journalist who’s made a bigger name for himself discussing the issues surrounding the War on Terror, and Niall Ferguson, a British and now American historian who to a non-academic’s eyes seems to have moved very quickly from writing a popular book on history to pronouncing on US domestic policies (weighing in heavily on the side of the GOP).

Not surprisingly, the scandals have raised the question of “the blogosphere” or “the Internet” as the putative cause of everything that’s wrong with our public culture.  Henry Farrell, at Crooked Timber, instead questions the culture of paid speeches, but his links focus more conventionally on the state of journalism and its infiltration from below by amateurs without academic or journalistic credentials, and without editors keeping them in line.  (This is going to be much longer than I thought it would be when I started it, and I may have to cut it short to keep it from expanding so broadly that I’ll never be able to finish it.)

Even from the outside, it looks like this has been building for a long time.  It had been building even before Jonah Lehrer was forced to resign from the New Yorker and had his book pulled from the stores by his publisher.  There seems to be an increasing intolerance of what many people realize is, in most cases, considered unacceptable—but which, in some cases, the people in charge seem often to ignore.  Arguments like “this is how it’s always done” aren’t persuading, and the issue doesn't seem to be fading.  Instead, each successive case is worse than the one before, and more and more pressure is being brought to bear, earlier and earlier.

Dan Drezner points out that the dynamic is different from what it might otherwise be because there’s a reliance on bloggers like Evgeny Morozov (whom he mentions) and Ed Champion (whom he doesn’t).  Many (including Drezner, in a passage he quotes by another writer) have pointed out that some of the pressure is coming from reporters who are lower on the food chain, doing what reporters do and holding powerful people to account for what they say, but at the same time (in part because the lowest tier of reporters are often associated with online entities these days) there’s an appearance that the only ones complaining are the ones whose career—probably self-proclaimed and unremunerated—exists only in the digisphere.  Morozov and Champion are guys who fit into the online culture, and who do a lot of good work.  It’s true that they are, at times, very aggressive by academic or ordinary journalistic standards.  At the same time, though, their failure to meet those standards isn’t entirely obvious.  My sense as regards Champion’s Reluctant Habits blog, which I’ve read more than I’ve read Morozov, is that he’s perfectly able to do serious criticism and interviews without taking a bite out of someone.  When he goes on the attack, he seems to give as good as he gets, and he looks like he’s trying (in the same way as Morozov) to uphold certain standards that others aren’t in a position to defend so assiduously.  The guys at the top of the food chain are frequently just as aggressive as they are.  As Drezner points out, the whole “I blame the Internet” meme is practically mooted solely by Ferguson’s treatment of Paul Krugman—who as a New York Times columnist, Princeton University professor, and winner of the Nobel Prize is not exactly a liberal blogger ranting about the news in his pajamas, as Niall Ferguson knows perfectly well—yet even if criticism from the blogosphere is of lesser value, somehow, than criticism from anywhere else, it’s hard to see why aggressiveness ought to be the criterion by which they’re condemned.

Anyway, the cases of Zakaria and Ferguson seem very different.  Zakaria, it seems, although he earned a Ph.D., went straight into journalism and used his expertise to inform his work in producing reporting for the general public.  He never produced an academic book.  All his work with editors and readers came while he was working as a magazine writer.  Ferguson, on the other hand, worked for decades as a professor in academia, and developed habits and expertise related to academia, very specifically.  It was only afterward that he began writing books for a popular audience and working with non-academic editors and with general-interest magazines.  Even if the kinds of differences each ran up against, between how academic and journalistic research and writing regards the use and acknowledgement of sources, were the same, it would be surprising if the ways they each encountered those differences—and the errors they made as a result—were identical in each case.

Zakaria has always written on the same kind of thing, for the most part.  That’s not true of Ferguson.  Zakaria had a very specific take on current events (specifically, US relations with the Islamic world), which was clearly disputed by many educated people, but which was equally clearly informed by Zakaria’s knowledge of the scholarly literature.  Ferguson, on the other hand, has moved back and forth between a narrowly academic subject matter (the history of economics and banking, particularly with reference to the outbreak of war in 1914) and more popular works on everything that might be said about the twentieth century as a whole and what led up to it.  The War of the World, his book on World War II (which I haven’t finished, and which I only found out just now, from Wikipedia, was also a BBC television production) seems to be cut from two different kinds of cloth.  There are the sections that draw very broad conclusions about the world in general, and the course of history, and there are the in-depth accounts of very specific aspects of the war.  To me, the latter are more interesting, but as far as I know books like this one aren’t peer-reviewed, and as a student of history, I wouldn’t take them as gospel.  I would expect to find that the jury is still out on any issue raised by those sections that are even the slightest bit controversial.  I feel less comfortable (though this might be a very personal feeling) assuming what Ferguson says is a reliable statement of any kind of academic consensus than I do with Zakaria.

In comments at Crooked Timber, Ferguson was compared to Christopher Hitchens, which I think is rather telling.  It seems to me that Hitchens can’t really exist in a world in which Ferguson can write an article like the one in Newsweek (which, if you haven’t been following the story, and didn’t look it up already, seems indisputably to cross well over the line that divides “contentious description of disputed fact” from “blatant misrepresentation for which no excuse is given beyond the right of a partisan to break the rules of grammar in order to make the worse argument appear to be the better one”).  Hitchens’ aggressiveness is linked to his not being an academic.  It also depends on his assurance that people like Ferguson will tell the truth in an objective, academic and nonpartisan way, that he will not shade the truth to fit some agenda or other.  Hitchens did not do what Wikipedia would term “original research” (at least in the pieces I read by him, most of which I enjoyed and learned from); he analyzed and reported on what other people (researchers and critics) wrote, drawing on his general knowledge of the world and the places those other people occupied within it.  He doesn’t seem ever to have tried to do both.  He doesn’t seem to have believed both were possible.

Also: I don’t know if Drezner has gotten the target audience of Esquire quite right.  The 1%?  Really?

Where Is Lucius Fox’s Army of Off-the-Books Engineers and Metalworkers? Or: The Geography of Gotham.

I guess he builds them all with his own hands, just like Bruce Wayne built the first batsuit.

SPOILERS FOLLOW.  Seriously, do not read further if you don’t want to know.