Cinema Loses Two Giants in Two Days

Posted 31 July, 2007 in Film, Obituaries | No comments

Yesterday, it was Ingmar Bergman, who died at his home in Sweden at 89 years of age. Today, I read the news that Michelangelo Antonioni has died at age 94.

Liam Lacey’s tribute to Bergman in today’s Globe and Mail quotes Bart Testa, the University of Toronto film professor, who wrote in 2005, “Paradoxically, he was always the film artist most apart from movies, and yet a magnetic pole of modern cinema’s ambitions to seriousness. As a consequence, his idiosyncrasy and simultaneous centrality mean that Bergman disturbs, even warps, the trajectory of cinema since The Seventh Seal and Wild Strawberries.”

Jack Nicholson, star of The Passenger, presented Antonioni with an honorary Academy Award in 1995. Nicholson said of the director, “In the empty, silent spaces of the world, he has found metaphors that illuminate the silent places [of] our hearts, and found in them, too, a strange and terrible beauty: austere, elegant, enigmatic, haunting.”

Cinema has lost two of its masters.

Is It Time to Re-evaluate Don McKay’s Poetry?

Posted 31 July, 2007 in Poetry | No comments

Zach Wells thinks so.

I’ve long suspected that McKay’s inflated reputation has a lot to do with his personal charm. I run into the odd person who says some version of “I’m not crazy about his poetry, but he’s such a nice guy.” These folks, able to tease the poetry and the person who wrote it apart, seem to be in the minority. Perhaps on some level McKay’s fans are moved to overestimate his importance because it makes them more special, too: not only is Don McKay one of the best poets writing in English today, but he edited my manuscript. Where would apostles be, without a messiah?

Things Fall Apart; the Centre Cannot Hold

Posted 30 July, 2007 in Literary Criticism, Book Reviewing | No comments

In this corner, wearing the blue trunks and gradually greying, Sven Birkerts, writing in the Boston Globe on behalf of traditional print reviewers:

The implicit immediacy and ephemerality of “post” and “update,” the deeply embedded assumption of referentiality (linkage being part of the point of blogging), not to mention a new of-the-moment ethos among so many of the bloggers (especially the younger ones) favors a less formal, less linear, and essentially unedited mode of argument. While more traditional print-based standards are still in place on sites like Slate and the online offerings of numerous print magazines, many of the blogs venture a more idiosyncratic, off-the-cuff style, a kind of “I’ve been thinking . . .” approach. At some level it’s the difference between amateur and professional. What we gain in independence and freshness we lose in authority and accountability.

And in the other corner, wearing the red trunks, and delicately plucking occasional grey hairs from his beard, Ed Champion, writing online in defence of the litblogosphere:

What’s not to suggest that the litbloggers — who might just present a more comforting anarchy than a “self-constituted group of those who have made it their purpose to do so” — can’t “matter” in the way that Birkerts describes? If the norms of print culture have refused to shift over the past twenty-five years, as Pat Holt has suggested, maybe it’s high time for these norms to be shaken up. Maybe the centrifugal proliferation that Birkerts bemoans is the very impetus that will “define, or prompt, or inspire, or at least intuit” in that way that Cynthia Ozick pined for. (And if Birkerts can twist Ozick’s argument to suit his purposes, then I suppose I’m entitled to do the same.)

Is it just me, or is this whole debate becoming almost unbearably tedious? The arguments on both sides — a lack of editorial oversight and authority on the one hand; an elitist, hierarchical, and monolithic vision of culture on the other — are so predictable that it’s hardly necessary even to read these pieces anymore to divine their contents.

Equally predictable is the call-and-response pattern: a print journalist, observing the shrinking space devoted to books and book reviews in traditional print media, will write a piece bemoaning the loss of editorial standards and authoritative commentary in the online miasma of book chat; and litbloggers, feeling slighted, will respond by charging said print journalist with elitism and obsolescence. (It took less than twenty-four hours for one blogger to trot out the “elitist” accusation against Birkerts, while failing to mention that Birkerts applies the term to himself in his Globe piece, which kind of denudes the sting, if you ask me.)

While it would be foolish and hypocritical of me to denounce the evident virtues of the blogosphere out of hand, I must confess a sympathy for Birkerts’ advocacy of some kind of editorial standards in book reviewing (or any other kind of criticism, for that matter). And I’m not so sure that the “anarchy” Ed points to in the litblogosphere is all that “comforting”: a medium that accords equal weight to thoughtful, knowledgeable, well-written criticism and semiliterate doggerel seems deficient in at least one respect.

Having said that, I do wonder why print journalists and litbloggers constantly have to react to each other like opposite poles of a magnet. Would it not be more advantageous to dispense with the knee-jerk adversarial reactions on both sides and try to find some common ground, some way of living, and working, together? The garden of literature is surely vibrant enough to allow for numerous gardeners tilling and planting and fertilizing it. In this respect, Ed’s comment about online book critics crossing over to print reviews is well taken, and is a reminder that at our core, we’re really not all that different.

I would write more on this subject, but I’ve got a deadline. As it happens, I’ve been contracted to write a print review for a Canadian newspaper. Funny that.

Is It a Boy, a Girl, or an Assmonkey?

Posted 27 July, 2007 in Assmonkeys | No comments

Okay, one more quickie, because I couldn’t resist. This comes from Nikki Stafford, who is commenting on a column by the National Post’s Jonathan Kay. Seems Mr. Kay raised some hackles by writing about the war between “daters” and “breeders,” specifically the ire of the former group at having an intimate dinner spoiled by the offspring of the latter. Responses were many and varied, but Kay quotes this one, from an e-mail he received:

Mr. Kay, I hope we never have the misfortune to have your family ruin a nice restaurant near us, because I could hardly resist the compulsion to empty ice water into the faces of both you and your broodsow of a partner. Attention, Mr. Look-My-Sperm-Works, your job as a parent does not end at ejaculation: Would you please show the rest of us the Get Out of Courtesy card that they gave you when your wife [birthed] your first replicant? Polite parents do not assault diners with their loud brood of assmonkeys.

And another voice of moderation is heard from. How much of a frisson should I feel when I realize that I more or less agree with the spirit of what this correspondent is saying?

Friday, Deadline-driven Jottings

Posted 27 July, 2007 in Jottings | No comments

• A peculiarly literary podcast from the CBC’s Jian Ghomeshi. Ghomeshi interviews Don McKellar, who is currently shooting an adaptation of José Saramago’s novel Blindness; McKellar’s script is being directed by Fernando Meirelles, with Julianne Moore, McKellar, and Gael Garcia Bernal among the cast members. I haven’t been this excited about a single film in years. (My favourite Ghomeshi quote from the McKellar interview: “The end of civilization should include me.” If we cast our minds back to his days with Moxy Fruvous, it could be argued that it already has.) The podcast also features interviews with Veronica Tennant, currently serving as something called a “movement director” for the stage adaptation of Margaret Atwood’s The Penelopiad in London, and “cuddly” ninja blogger George Murray, talking about one of TSR’s favourite sites, Bookninja.
• Speaking of Bookninja, the site currently features a new story called “Impossible to Die in Your Dreams” by Journey Prize winner Heather Birrell.
• Nerd alert: Zach Snyder (300) is directing an adaptation of Alan Moore’s groundbreaking comic book graphic novel Watchmen, which will star Matthew Goode, Billy Crudup, and Jackie Earl Haley.
• Tim O’Brien, interviewed at Artful Dodge: “The purpose of writing is to enhance mystery, not solve it.”
• Anthony Lane, reviewing Danny Boyle’s Sunshine in The New Yorker: “Their task is to explode a stellar bomb, ‘with a mass equivalent to Manhattan island,’ on the surface of the sun. The effect will be, we are told, ‘to create a star within a star,’ a plan that has not succeeded since the union of Vincente Minnelli and Judy Garland.”

Jottings

Posted 26 July, 2007 in Jottings | 2 comments

• Russell Smith’s column in today’s Globe and Mail is about “the commodification of the erotic,” and the idea that Western society has become saturated in sexual imagery and language (which Smith sees as preferable to the kind of repression that prevailed in the ’50s). What I find most amusing about this is that the column is located directly beneath an article about Martin Gero’s debut feature, which will open the Canada First! series at this year’s Toronto International Film Festival. The title of the film? Young People Fucking.
• “I don’t think bloggers read”: Andrew Keen, author of The Cult of the Amateur: How Today’s Internet Is Killing Our Culture, profiled at the Guardian.
• They paved paradise, and put up a coffee shop.
• “Just kick the fucking thing.” (via Ed.)
• James Wolcott tears Mark Steyn a new one. (via Whitlock.)
• Craig Davidson’s record as an amateur boxer is now 0-2. He deconstructs his bout with rival novelist Jonathan Ames (who is forty-three years old, by the way), here.
• Moonlight Ambulette on libraries.

Well Said, Part Deux

Posted 25 July, 2007 in Uncategorized | No comments

Gary Kamiya on the need for editors in the Internet age: “If learning how to be edited is a form of growing up, much of the blogosphere still seems to be in adolescence, loudly affirming its identity and raging against authority. But teenagers eventually realize that authority is not as tyrannical and unhip as they once thought. It’s edited prose, with its points sharpened by another, that will ultimately stand the test of time. There is a place for mayfly commentary, which buzzes about and dies in a day. But we don’t want to get to the point where the mayflies and mosquitoes are so thick that we can’t breathe or think.”

Well Said

Posted 25 July, 2007 in Uncategorized | No comments

Did you hear about the stunt that David Lassman, who runs the Jane Austen Festival in Bath, pulled recently? Lassman submitted thinly veiled chapters from Auten’s books, under a pseudonym, to eighteen publishers in the U.K., all of whom rejected them. This was occasion for Lassman to crow about how dense the publishers were not to have recognized the masterpieces in question.

This is not the first time someone has tried this (I seem to remember eye weekly here in Toronto doing something similar some years back, using Hemingway and Joyce instead of Austen, and appending the names of Toronto Maple Leafs hockey players as authors), and it never fails to set my teeth on edge.

I’ve worked in the editorial department at a Canadian publishing house, and I can say with some certainty that if Ulysses or The Mill on the Floss came across my desk, I’d likely have rejected them and not lost any sleep over it. Andrew Franklin, publisher of Profile Books in the U.K. eloquently points out why in an article in the Independent:

Publishers turn down masterpieces every day and miss the opportunity to publish great bestsellers. Last year I missed Freakonomics. And there are other great books that I am too embarrassed to name. But if I spent my life fretting about the ones that got away I would never attend to the fish in the net. And we can console ourselves with another thought: if we didn’t see the potential when it was submitted to us we couldn’t have published it successfully either. The sort of person who lies awake worrying about the books that they are not publishing is not cut out for the job and should confine themselves to running a cosy literary society.

Moreover, Franklin goes on to attest that while Austen’s work may have endured, it’s not really the kind of thing that early 21st century publishers are going to be looking for when they read manuscripts.

Regardless, unsuspecting publishers, acting in goodwill, are not going to presume that any given manuscript that comes across their desk — and they get dozens every week — will contain material that has been plagiarized from a canonical work. (When an author signs a contract with a publisher, (s)he warrants, among other things, that the work to be published is original.)

Failing to recognize Austen’s words out of context is not an indication that a publisher is an unread dunderhead who has no business being in the job, and suggesting otherwise evinces a kind of smug superciliousness that doesn’t do any kind of service to the enterprise of publishing — or of literature, for that matter.

Jottings

Posted 24 July, 2007 in Jottings | No comments

• Yeah, what Daniel Green said. My favourite bit in this piece comes when Green quotes Charles Taylor castigating Harold Bloom for thinking that a book that has sold 35 million copies could possibly be bad. To hear Taylor explain it, if 35 million people have laid down their hard earned cash, that number is sufficient in itself to induce a bad book to spontaneously morph into a good one.
• As part of their ongoing campaign to save the book reviews, the National Book Critics Circle blog has posted an essay by Lindsay Waters, and editor at the Harvard University Press, on the importance of criticism to literature.
• Alison Bechdel on e-mail: “E-mailing has become almost an autonomic bodily function for me - it’s just going on all the time in the background. Yes, it’s all very distracting. But from what, really? What else would I be doing?” Oh, for the love of …
• Harry Potter 7, the Digested Read. Warning: spoilers inside. Spoilers, I said, SPOILERS … Don’t look … Don’t … Augh, my eyes!
• Remember last fall’s launch for Craig Davidson’s novel The Fighter? You know, the one where Davidson got in the ring with poet Michael Knox and had his ass handed to him? Well, apparently unbroken, Davidson is doing it again for the U.S. launch, this time battling Jonathan Ames. The fight goes tonight in Brooklyn, for anyone who happens to be in town and wants to see two novelists beating the snot out of each other.

Hindering Horses and Shooting the Wounded

Posted 23 July, 2007 in Book Reviewing, Book Reviews | No comments

Faint Praise: The Plight of Book Reviewing in America, by Gail Pool. University of Missouri Press, $21.62 tpb, 174 pp., ISBN: 978-0-8262-1728-8.

Pity the lowly book reviewer. Poorly paid, located at the bottom of the journalistic pecking order, where they toil in what Guy Davenport referred to as “the slum of American letters,” and routinely reviled by readers and writers alike, those who review books professionally (I hesitate to say “for a living,” since only a scant few can earn a living off of it, and they are mostly salaried employees of a newspaper or periodical) often feel that their efforts are both arduous and thankless in roughly equal measure.

“Book reviews first appeared in America at the end of the eighteenth century,” writes Gail Pool in the Introduction to her new book, and “[t]hey have been frustrating people ever since.” Chekhov called book critics “horse-flies which hinder the horses in their ploughing of the soil,” and Murray Kempton opined, “A critic is someone who enters the battlefield after the war is over and shoots the wounded.” Coleridge said that book reviewers “are usually people who would have been poets, historians, biographers, etc., if they could: they have tried their talents at one or at the other, and have failed.”

These disparaging remarks, coming as they do from working writers, all of whom can be assumed at one time or another to have been on the receiving end of a reviewer’s censure, are understandable, but they don’t serve as much balm to a reviewer’s fragile ego, and in any case they seem to miss the point. In particular, the charge that book reviewers are themselves failed writers has always struck me as odd, since book reviewers use precisely the same tools as novelists and poets to achieve their effects. They are only “failed” writers if their reviews lack coherence, or persuasion, or logic; otherwise reviewers have as much claim to being writers, sans l’adjectif, as does anyone else whose primary occupation involves the manipulation of language for the purposes of edification or entertainment.

The common perception of book reviewers as the bottom feeders of the literary world is largely predicated upon a misapprehension as to what exactly this amorphous group of people does. Many begin with the notion espoused by Amanda Craig that to review fiction “[a]ll you have to do is read a couple of hundred pages of someone wanking their imagination, and write five hundred moderately clever words about it.” This is dismissive to the point of being insulting, but Craig makes a mistake when she implies that “reading a couple of hundred pages of someone wanking their imagination” — if we might, for a moment, accept this description as an accurate summation of what a fiction reviewer does — then writing five hundred words about it, “moderately clever” or otherwise, is easy work.

Close reading of the kind a solid book review requires is itself not a task undertaken lightly; it is important for a proficient book reviewer to possess the ability to discern how a work achieves its effects and to judge whether the constituent parts of a book add up to a coherent whole. This requires a certain breadth of knowledge, a refined taste, and a sensitivity to nuances of language, none of which can be developed overnight.

Moreover, it is fallacious to suggest that a reviewer who is assigned a 200-page novel will stop at reading those 200 pages. As Pool rightly points out, “if a review is to be accurate, more is generally required than simply reading the book.” If the novel is the third book in a trilogy, for instance, it will be necessary for the reviewer to go back and read (or reread) the first two volumes in order to form any kind of valid perspective on the book in question. Further, if the reviewer is assigned, say, a biography of Richard Nixon, unless that reviewer happens to be a Nixon scholar, it will be necessary to do some background reading and research in order to provide a context within which the book under consideration can be fairly judged. In Pool’s words, “A reviewer can’t become an instant expert, but he can bring an intelligent, informed perspective to a book if he has read, say, all the author’s previous work, several other biographies of the figure whose latest biography he’s reviewing, various travel accounts of whatever country is the subject of his review.”

In his essay, “Confessions of a Book Columnist,” collected in Ripostes: Reflections on Canadian Literature, Philip Marchand sets out two prerequisites for a good book reviewer: she must be well read, and she must be, in the words of T.S. Eliot, “very intelligent.” If this seems somewhat vague, Pool goes further:

Ideally, reviewers should be well educated, widely read, culturally aware, endowed with good memory and, needless to say, good taste. They must be able to read critically, think lucidly, and argue logically. They must write clearly enough to be accessible, sharply enough to be entertaining, and tightly enough to turn seven hundred words into an article. They need sufficient independence of mind to form their own opinions, sufficient confidence to stand by them, and sufficient courage to see them in print.

I have argued repeatedly on this site that book reviewing is not a dilletante’s game; Pool here explains why. The qualifications that she lists as appearing on the “ideal” reviewer’s résumé I would argue are essential for anyone who wishes to practise the trade.

One reason why many book reviews — even (perhaps especially) those that are published in our major news organs — are so lacking in quality, Pool argues, is that editors too often assign books to the wrong people, and the reviews suffer accordingly. A name-brand novelist may bring a publication cachet if assigned to review a major new work of fiction, but that novelist may be utterly incapable of the kind of critical thinking necessary to do justice to a review. Nor, Pool suggests, do academics or specialists in a given field “necessarily make good reviewers”:

It’s one thing to find a William Dean Howells, who was a writer, critic, and editor. Nowadays, most of the people who are ideally qualified in terms of subject expertise and breadth of reading, in fiction as well as nonfiction, are likely to be academics, accustomed to academic writing and discourse — and as someone who has edited such writers, I know well the problems they present. In their own spheres they’ll have no need to make their points accessible to a general audience and will have had little practice in translating what they have to say into readable, let alone lively, prose.

At the other end of the spectrum are the enthusiastic amateurs who proliferate online, where the democracy of the Internet allows everyone a voice, but removes the editorial filter and does not demand that commentators attain a basic level of competence before they begin reviewing. Pool finds legitimate fault with a medium that asserts that all voices are equal and all opinions should carry equal weight, a medium that assigns equal value to the thoughtful, knowledgeable criticism of Sven Birkerts on the one hand, and the semiliterate ramblings of Harriet Klausner, Amazon.com’s top reviewer, with 6,500 reviews and counting to her credit, on the other.

The background for Pool’s analysis is a culture that actively discourages critical thinking, one that would rather have enthusiastic cheerleaders (like Oprah) than incisive critics. Although one of the persistent complaints about book critics is that they are too nasty, Pool finds that the opposite is in fact true: often, critics aren’t nasty enough. It is interesting that both Pool and Marchand make the same comment: both stand by every negative word they ever wrote, but both confess to some retrospective reservations about reviews in which they feel they treated their subjects too kindly. Pool attributes this to “weakness,” and points out that “it takes courage and confidence for a reviewer to go his own way and tell readers that the latest ‘masterpiece’ isn’t very good. Amid the waves of praise, he risks not only what all critics risk, being wrong, but being wrong alone.”

In today’s anticritical culture, it is a rare thing indeed to find a reviewer with the courage to stand out from the crowd and declare that the latest “instant classic” is actually a dud, that the emperor has no clothes. Pool’s book is a clarion call for a return to a vigorous kind of criticism, based on sound, logical thinking and the precise use of language. Her prescriptions for an ailing trade are based upon underlying premises that appear obvious, but that bear repeating:

That not only is reviewing important, but reviewers and editors need to take its importance more seriously than they do, steeling themselves against public opinion, literary snobbery, and their own self-doubt and remembering that cultural attitudes are subject to change. … That not only can reviewing, however insufficient its resources, require standards, competence, and accountability, but by demanding them — and only by demanding them — actually acquire them.