Long Pauses

Category: Words

  • Reading

    Perhaps the best lesson of books is not to venerate them — or at least never to hold them in higher esteem than our own faculties, our own experience, our own peers, our own dialogues.

    So declares Cristina Nehring in “Books Make You a Boring Person.” I’m afraid that, in doing so, she has dramatically overestimated the quality of my faculties, my experience, my peers (no offense), and my dialogues. Daniel Green at The Reading Experience has already posted a wonderful response, in which he points out the obvious: that Nehring apparently makes no distinction between books and good books:

    Reading good books, however, books conveying knowledge or providing an engaged experience that cannot be duplicated in other ways, is an invaluable activity–even if reverse snobs writing for the New York Times think it’s boring.

    Green also does us the service of contextualizing the snippets of Emerson’s “The American Scholar” that Nehring misreads in order to prop up her straw man.

  • The Plot Against America

    Ron Rosenbaum has gotten his hands on a galley copy of Philip Roth’s new novel, due for release in October. He doesn’t tell us much that we didn’t already know — that it’s an alternative-future novel in which the pro-fascist, anti-Semitic Charles Lindbergh follows his victory over FDR in 1940 by signing non-agression pacts with Germany and Japan. What I didn’t know is that it is told from the perspective of the Roth family of Newark, NJ, including nine-year-old Philip, and that the Roths and other urban Jews are encouraged by the Lindbergh administration to relocate to rural areas, where their “American Absorption” might be completed.

    What a conceit! I’m excited to learn that Roth is melding his recent interests in mid-century American history with the more experimental projects of the late-80s and early-90s — Operation Shylock, in particular. I can’t think of another American novelist who could pull it off right now. Given Rosenbaum’s enthusiasm for the novel — he read its 390 pages in one night — I’m getting downright giddy.

    Rather than discuss the particular details of The Plot Against America, Rosenbaum chases several tangents, the most interesting of which involves Steven Spielberg and Mel Gibson. Several years ago, Spielberg optioned the rights to A. Scott Berg’s biography of Lindbergh, but after making Schindler’s List and learning of Lindbergh’s support of fascism and his anti-Semitism, Spielberg slowed development of his film project. Rosenbaum suggests that the director drop it entirely and adapt Roth’s new novel instead. Doing so would allow Spielberg to treat the subject with a little due rage, while also responding to Mel Gibson’s latest blockbuster. (As Frank Rich notes, Spielberg has been unusually quiet about The Passion). I especially like this bit:

    making movies with the solemn burden of “creating tolerance” is not always the best way of evoking an artist’s best work. A dip into Mr. Roth’s rage might be just the thing for Mr. Spielberg, fire him up again. While there are other directors who could make this a great film, Mr. Spielberg’s feel for the Amazing Stories pastiche mystique of the period, his intuitive feel for communicating the emotion beneath the surface of pop-culture obsessions, make one hope he could bring some of the sizzle to Mr. Roth’s steak that would make it a powerful film, an event. No rides, no toys, but an event.

  • Medium Rare

    Jack Neely, everyone’s favorite chronicler of life in Knoxville, has a nice piece in this week’s issue of the Metro Pulse about his recent efforts to sell some old books. It’s a great glimpse into the lives of book lovers and the dealers who support their habits, with nary a mention of Borders or Barnes and Nobles in sight.

    Neely’s always a fun read. I especially like his description of The Book Eddy:

    An intriguingly odd place where the books share space with strange curios: ancient maps, yellowed old globes, a gas mask, a ceramic peanut with an eyeless Jimmy Carter smile, a stage-prop diving helmet, jack-o-lantern gourds, a raven, a stuffed duck under glass, the remains of a spiny pufferfish that seems to have expired in full puff. A card warns, “Caution: extremely sharp fish.”

    Penelope, the black cat, is the disdainful hostess. My 13-year-old daughter remarked that the Book Eddy seems like a perfect setting for a murder. On hundreds of shelves are books from many eras about many subjects. Railroading, enzymology, lesbianism, Napoleonic warfare, electro-chemical engineering. They have a total of about 150,000 books in this store alone. Browsing is dangerous. Even if you quit your job, you don’t have enough time in your life to read half of the books at the Book Eddy. Looking at each book at the Book Eddy for one minute each, during their business hours, will take you a full year. And by then they’ll have thousands more.

  • Streetcar

    The Times and the Post have published their reviews of the Kennedy Center’s revival of A Streetcar Named Desire, starring Patricia Clarkson as Blanche. They are in agreement about Clarkson (“a clear-eyed look at one of theater’s haziest heroines”) and about the production as a whole (“vivid if uneven”). This line from Ben Brantley at the Times caught my attention:

    But the production’s cooler gaze also has the overpowering disadvantage of making the play itself appear cruder and clumsier than it usually does. A “Streetcar” without poetry becomes just another domestic melodrama, accessorized with frilly symbols, about what happens when irritating in-laws come to visit.

    Williams “without poetry.” That can’t be good.

  • Dreamer

    I’m almost finished Dreamer, Charles Johnson’s novel about Martin Luther King, Jr.’s struggles in Chicago in 1966, and it’s amazing — the finest novel I’ve read in months. (Dreamer wants to become part of my stalled dissertation; I have, as yet, managed to fight that urge.) Early in the novel King meets Chaym Smith, his doppelganger, and seeing his own face on the body of a homeless drug addict shakes his faith in the very foundation of his Movement: Equality.

    Nature was unjust. Who could deny that? But in the realm of the spirit invoked by the Founders, in God, there was no defensible social distinctions, for all creatures great and small, black and white, were isomers of the divine Person. It was a shamelessly Platonic argument, he knew that, yet of its veracity he’d been so sure.

    At least until now. . . .

    In no other way than the somatic were [King and Smith] equal. In fact, they were like negatives of each other. He laughed, humorlessly. The idea of justice in his life and Chaym’s was a joke. Not only was the distribution of wealth in society grossly uneven, he thought, but so was God-given talent. Beauty. Imagination. Luck. And the blessing of loving parents. They were the products of the arbitrariness of fortune. You could not say they were deserved.

    Smith acts throughout the novel as a foil to the Movement’s idealist platitudes. When Amy, a young volunteer, tells of her grandmother’s and great-grandfather’s back-breaking efforts to forge a strong black community and strong family values, the novel’s narrator, another volunteer, compares her story to “being gently led into the past, a distant better time when black people were the moral fiber of the nation” (88). Smith will have none of it: “That story she told, . . . it’s a fucking lie. Front to back, it was kitsch. All narratives are lies, man, an illusion” (92). It’s a nice device: interrupting a story to expose it as myth.

  • Bartok’s Fifth String Quarter

    Bartok’s Fifth String Quarter

    Several years ago, in a seminar on modern and postmodern lit, I wrote a fun paper on Ezra Pound’s music criticism. In particular, I was interested in Pound’s admiration for Bartok’s String Quartet #5, which he described as:

    a work in [Bartok’s] own idiom, consistently in his own idiom, built up into a complete and coherent structure. It is like no other known quartet. It definitely adds to the literature or whatever we are to call articulate repertory of work written for four stringed instruments. It projects from the preceding borders and frontiers of quartet composition, and is highly satisfactory in so doing.

    Any study of Pound and music is inherently fraught with problems. Though he was able to play the clavichord, Pound never received formal training in music theory and lacked experience as a performer. As a composer, Pound has only one major work to his name, Le Testament de Villon, an opera first performed in 1926. By his own admission, Pound was also quite tone deaf, a fact not lost on his friends. Upon hearing of Pound’s work on Le Testament, William Carlos Williams joked, “Pound writing an opera? Why, he doesn’t know one note from another.”

    In his published criticism, Pound often responds to the music viscerally — the way it makes him “feel” — rather than formally. Except for the occasional “pizzicati” or “counterpoint,” his reviews are often devoid of technical terminology. He seems conscious of his own weaknesses and protects himself by couching his attacks in comments like, “at least I felt” and “seemed to me.” That his opinions often mirrored those of his musical advisors of the moment — George Antheil and Tibor Serly, in particular — has also not gone unnoticed by his critics.

    As I’ve never cared too much for most of The Cantos, my paper turned into a formal analysis of Bartok’s quartet, which really is a remarkable piece. The second movement, the Adagio Molto, is beautifully dissonant— one of those remarkable collisions of modernist invention and melody. People who “don’t like” post-Romantic music have surely never heard the Fifth.

  • Vendler and Stevens

    “Somnambulisma” by Wallace Stevens

    On an old shore, the vulgar ocean rolls
    Noiselessly, noiselessly, resembling a thin bird,
    That thinks of settling, yet never settles, on a nest.

    The wings keep spreading and yet are never wings.
    The claws keep scratching on the shale, the shallow shale,
    The sounding shallow, until by water washed away.

    The generations of the bird are all
    By water washed away. They follow after.
    They follow, follow, follow, in water washed away.

    Without this bird that never settles, without
    Its generations that follow in their universe,
    The ocean, falling and falling on the hollow shore,

    Would be a geography of the dead: not of that land
    To which they may have gone, but of the place in which
    They lived, in which they lacked a pervasive being,

    In which no scholar, separately dwelling,
    Poured forth the fine fins, the gawky beaks, the personalia,
    Which, as a man feeling everything, were his.

    Poet/scholar Helen Vendler, the 2004 Jefferson Lecturer in the Humanities, last night gave her address, “The Ocean, the Bird, and the Scholar,” which is as inspiring a defense of the arts as you’re likely to read.

    The arts present the whole uncensored human person–in emotional, physical, and intellectual being, and in single and collective form–as no other branch of human accomplishment does. In the arts we see both the nature of human predicaments–in Job, in Lear, in Isabel Archer–and the evolution of representation over long spans of time (as the taste for the Gothic replaces the taste for the Romanesque, as the composition of opera replaces the composition of plainchant). The arts bring into play historical and philosophical questions without implying the prevalence of a single system or of universal solutions. Artworks embody the individuality that fades into insignificance in the massive canvas of history and is suppressed in philosophy by the desire for impersonal assertion.

    The arts are true to the way we are and were, to the way we actually live and have lived–as singular persons swept by drives and affections, not as collective entities or sociological paradigms. The case histories developed within the arts are in part idiosyncratic, but in part applicable by analogy to a class larger than the individual entities they depict. Hamlet is a very specific figure–a Danish prince who has been to school in Germany–but when Prufrock says, “I am not Prince Hamlet,” he is in a way testifying to the fact that Hamlet means something to every one who knows about the play.

    Wonderful stuff, and her inclusion of Stevens’ “Somnambulisma” is a brilliant touch.

  • In the Strangest of Places

    In his novels and other writings, [Walker] Percy grappled with the difficulty of separating the accidents of personality from the essence of personhood. Above all, he chronicled the struggles of flawed people trying to act decently and remain faithful in an imperfect and hurtful world. Percy illuminated the distinction between being a wanderer and being a wayfarer. For him, there had to be more to life than dividing one’s time between being a producer and being a consumer. Percy’s lost, loss-suffering, and alienated characters search for a more authentic existence than what is offered by postmodern capitalism: a lifetime of often meaningless work.

    Therefore, while I was pleasantly surprised, I was by no means shocked, recently, to learn that, toward the end of his life, when Walker Percy spoke enthusiastically about his “favorite American philosopher,” he was referring to Bruce Springsteen.

    — John Marks

    Back in the 1970s, there wasn’t much they couldn’t do: Pour on the volume and they didn’t distort. Leave ’em baking in the sun on a car’s back deck and they still played like champs. Best of all, hot sweaty hours full of sweet talk, glandular logic, and, finally, abject begging could pass, and, being a loop, they just kept on a-‘playin’. Babies were conceived, moon landings were ignored, and a presidential resignation meant little when you were funkin’ to the soothing tones of the mighty 8-track.

    — Robert Baird

    What a pleasant surprise to stumble into some nice bits of writing in, of all places, Stereophile magazine. The first comes from John Marks’s regular column, “The Fifth Element, ” in the May 2004 issue. (And I assume Herc is already mentally composing his comment on it.) The second is from “The Zen of Honky Tonk,” Robert Baird’s April 2004 profile of The Flatlanders. Neither piece is available online yet.

  • Little Children

    I did something last night that I hadn’t been able to do for nearly three months: I stretched out on the sofa and read for two hours. After listening to Terry Gross’s interview with Tom Perrotta, I picked up a copy of Little Children, his latest, which I realized last night is the first book I’ve read about people my age. And by “my age” I don’t mean 31-year-olds — there are plenty of those books out there — I mean a book about people born in the early-1970s, people who listened to Nirvana in college and who are now married (happily or not) and starting families.

    One of the back jacket blurbs describes Perrotta as an “American Nick Hornby,” which seems about right to me, though I’m not sure yet if that’s a compliment or not. The last novel I read was High Fidelity, which, like Little Children, is filled with recognizable characters and recognizable situations. Both books are about relationships and the difficulties of maintaining them in this age of cynicism and irony. And both books are utterly devoid of inspiring prose.

    That’s not to say that Hornby and Perrotta aren’t talented writers. They craft fine stories and have a knack for making the reader care for characters who aren’t particularly likeable. They’ve also discovered a language of pop culture references — a kind of Gen X shorthand that must make their novels excruciating reads to anyone over the age of, say, 55. I just wish that their writing were capable of surprising me as readily as it charms. A few cherry-picked examples from the first 150 pages of Little Children:

    After Todd, a stay-at-home Dad, kisses a stay-at-home Mom whom he meets at the park:

    He had a feeling similar to the one he’d had right before kissing Sarah, like his world had cracked up to reveal a thrilling new possibility. (52)

    After Todd realizes that his marriage is in jeopardy:

    They were heading for trouble, Todd understood that, driving toward a high cliff at very slow speed in a car with no brakes. (99)

    So many of Perrotta’s observations of suburban life are so spot-on — I especially like the way that his lead characters absolutely adore their children while still resenting somewhat the life-changes they’ve caused — but the narrative voice never quite transcends the banality of the lives it is documenting. Maybe that’s the point. I doubt it.

  • The First Long Pauses Giveaway

    Yesterday was a really good mail day. My parents sent us an anniversary present (today is our 8th), and my friend Nick sent some hard-to-find DVDs (including a copy of Dumont’s Twentynine Palms).

    But I was most excited to receive a stack of magazines. Two years ago, Doug Cummings invited me to join an email listserv, and I now consider the other participants there dear friends. We’ve spent that time discussing the basic stuff of life (family, work, politics, religion, and whatnot), but we’ve also been there to support the efforts of Karen Neudorf, a remarkable woman who has thrown herself, head first, into the business of ads-free magazine publishing. Yesterday I finally got my hands on the first issue of the new Beyond, and I can’t tell you how proud I am to be associated with it.

    Well, maybe I can tell you: The first ten people who write “I want to taste the goodness” in the comments section of this post get a free subscription.

    Seriously. I’m buying. Be sure to include your real email address when you comment because I’ll probably need to get some more information from you. Unfortunately, I think I’ll have to limit this offer to Americans and Canucks for now. Sorry.

    Congrats, Karen. Amazing, amazing stuff.

  • Close Reading

    Interesting passage from today’s Chonicle. From Susan Wise Bauer, visiting instructor of English at the College of William and Mary:

    Certainly the meaning of “doing a close reading” has changed over the past eight years or so. When I started teaching, “close reading” always meant verbal analysis: looking at metaphors, similes, sentence rhythms, and structures; pulling apart syntax, musing about the effect of a complex-compound sentence instead of a series of simple sentences. Now, teaching in an English department with ties to cultural and American studies, I find that “doing a close reading” in this sense is almost impossible. Students (and faculty members) doing close readings are much more likely to construct interpretations that deal with historical issues, popular-culture influences, relationships between writers and readers, and contemporary political currents.

    My sense is that we’re at the very beginning of this shift, because so many resources for students still talk about close readings as having to do with examining text. But in my experience, close reading, more and more, means examination of cultural references alone. Close readings (those dealing with words) now seem to fall under a much more specialized branch of study, having to do with rhetoric or some kind of linguistic analysis: a more scientific and less “humanities”-focused type of study.

    Bauer might actually be understating her point. She talks about this change occurring over the “past eight years or so,” which happens to correspond exactly to my years in graduate English programs. While graduate seminars continue to involve traditional close readings (more or less), the emphasis in undergraduate teaching is most definitely placed upon cultural analysis and something resembling reader response. How did you (the reader) respond to what you read? Why did you respond the way you did? How have you been conditioned (by, for lack of a better word, “culture”) to respond in that way? This teaching method makes for fun (relatively speaking) discussions, but I would question its effectiveness in producing better readers.

    Next, I hope Bauer writes about “scanning a poem.” Talk about a lost art. (And this is coming from an ABD in English who is woefully ill-equipped to scan poetry.)

  • History and Fiction

    From the Arts section of Tuesday’s NY Times:

    PHILIP ROTH’S NEW NOVEL — What might life have been like for the Jews of the United States had the aviation hero and rabid isolationist Charles A. Lindbergh, left, defeated Franklin D. Roosevelt for the presidency in 1940 That is the question raised and answered by the Pulitzer Prize-winner Philip Roth in the novel whose acquisition was announced yesterday by Houghton Mifflin. In “The Plot Against America,” to be published in October, Mr. Roth imagines life for his family in Newark and for a million other families around the country at a time when American Jews had reason to fear the worst. His Lindbergh blames Jews in a radio address for selfishly pushing America toward a pointless war with Nazi Germany and, upon taking office as the 33rd president, negotiates a cordial “understanding” with Hitler.

    And, as if that weren’t interesting enough, Roth has already responded to the Times’ write-up:

    To the Editor:

    In your March 2 Arts Briefing item announcing the acquisition by Houghton Mifflin of my novel “The Plot Against America,” you say my Lindbergh “blames Jews in a radio address for selfishly pushing America toward a pointless war with Nazi Germany.” In fact, the historical Charles Lindbergh did just that in his “Who Are the War Agitators?” radio speech to an enthusiastic America First rally at Des Moines on Sept. 11, 1941. “No person of honesty and vision,” Lindbergh said, “can look on [the Jews’] pro-war policy here today without seeing the dangers involved in such a policy both for us and for them. . . . A few farsighted Jewish people realize this and stand opposed to intervention. But the majority still do not. . . . We cannot blame them for looking out for what they believe to be their own interests, but we must also look out for ours. We cannot allow the natural passions and prejudices of other peoples to lead our country to destruction.”

  • And One More Thing

    For your reading pleasure: some snippets from Tony Kushner’s commentary on the Klezmatic’s recent CD, Possessed. Parts of the commentary, I noticed, have made their way into his and Alisa Solomon’s introduction to their new collection of essays, Wrestling with Zion, which I got for Christmas — given to me, no doubt, by some relative who couldn’t possibly imagine why I would be interested in a book of “Progressive Jewish-American Responses to the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict” — and which now sits on my towering “to read” pile. This part isn’t in their introduction.

    Hebrew- and Yiddish-illiterate, I barely know how to pray; riddled with ambivalence, child of Marx, Freud, Mahler, Benjamin, Kafka, Goldman, Luxemburg, Trotsky, An-ski, Schoenberg, mongrel product of Judaism’s and of Jewish exteriority, of its ghetto-hungry curiosity, of its assimilationist genius, I now approach Judaism as Jews once approached the splendid strangeness of the Goyishe Velt: I am shall we say deeply confused, but not complacent. And this I think of course is profoundly Jewish. So perhaps I can write your liner notes after all. Of music, son of a clarinetist and a bassoonist though I be, I know nothing. . . .

    High Holy Days this year found me doing research for my new play in a tiny town in Britain with no other Jews and no shul, so I cast my bread upon English waters, said the prayers I remembered, lit candles, made Shofar noises, cried for the Dead, begged for forgiveness and decided to read the Bible.

    And then he even mentions my favorite line from Perestroika, a line that, as he admits, always gets cut.

    Why does the God in whom I may or may not believe, or rather in whose existence I simultaneously believe and doubt, why does the Almighty spend the first five books of the Bible writing such morally problematic, bewildering stories? We’ve always had the answer to that one. Because the Torah is not clarification but the World itself; it is the World’s Goad towards perplexity, interpretation, towards Midrash and Talmud. “Az er darf ringen mit zayn Libn Nomen!” as a character in Perestroika says, in a scene that’s always cut because let’s face it, the play’s too long. “You must struggle with the Almighty!” “Azoy tut a Yid!” “It’s the Jewish way!”

    I watched all six hours of Angels in America on Saturday night, and I’ve decided that that’s how it should be seen.

  • The Meanings of Social Life: A Cultural Sociology

    By Jeffrey C. Alexander

    As noted in its sub-title, Alexander’s study argues for a “cultural sociology” — a discipline distinct from existing sociologies of culture. “To speak of the sociology of culture,” Alexander writes, “is to suggest that culture is something to be explained, by something else entirely separated from the domain of meaning itself” (12-13). Cultural sociology, on the other hand, demands that culture and social structures be “uncoupled,” allowing a kind of cultural autonomy. Only within such a “strong” program does it become possible to “discover in what ways culture intersects with other social forces, such as power and instrumental reason in the concrete social world” (14).

    Alexander contrasts his strong program with the “weak” ones that have come to dominate sociology over the last four decades. The best work of the Birmingham school, he argues, offers insightful criticism but ultimately invokes “abstracted influences and processes as adequate explanation for empirical social actions” (18). Pierre Bourdieu’s likewise reduces culture to a dependent of social structure — “It is a gearbox, not an engine” (18). Foucault’s deftly reconstructs historical data but “leaves no room for understanding how an autonomous cultural realm hinders or assists actors in judgment” (19). And, finally, contemporary work on the production of culture reduces it all to the workings of corporate sponsors and the elite, allowing little room for the examination of “internal cultural inputs and restraints” (20).

    As an example of a weak program, Alexander cites Wendy Griswold’s fine study of the transformed trickster figure in Restoration drama. Despite her admirable work, what Griswold lacks, he argues, is an acknowledgment of dramatic narrative itself — its inner workings of plot and character and the effect they inevitably have on the coding of meaning. This example points to Alexander’s final proposal: a strong program of cultural sociology that fuses Geertzian ideological criticism with contemporary pragmatism and literary studies:

    This impulse toward reading culture as a text is complemented, in such narrative work, by an interest in developing formal models that can be applied across different comparative and historical cases. In other words, narrative forms such as the morality play or melodrama, tragedy, and comedy can be understood as “types” that carry with them peculiar implications for social life. (25)

    Alexander first applies his program in a chapter-long reading of the Holocaust, explaining its postwar meaning in terms of two distinct narratives. In the first, the “progressive narrative,” the West viewed Nazi atrocities as the birthing stage of a new era, one in which an event like the Holocaust will “never happen again.” This narrative played directly into “modernization” (as Alexander calls it here and in earlier work) — an ideology that posited postwar America as a kind of Utopia. Alexander supports his progressive argument by examining the anti-anti-Semitism movements of the late-1940s and early-1950s and the establishment of Israel in 1948. “Postwar redemption depended on putting mass murder ‘behind us,’ moving on, and getting on with the construction of the new world,” he writes (41).

    With time, however, “The Holocaust,” as a concept, became divorced from its specific historical conditions and was universalized and metaphorized into a “sacred evil” unlike any act before or since. As it became universalized, the Holocaust took on the shape of a tragic narrative, thus allowing all of mankind to identify with the murders and to experience a form of catharsis in the process. Building from Aristotle and from literary critics such as Northrop Frye, Alexander illustrates how the Holocaust’s tragic narrative has been performed, both literally — in plays like The Diary of Anne Frank and in movies such as The Holocaust and Schindler’s List — and figuratively — in the formation of America’s interventionist policy in the Balkans and in the fights against A.I.D.S., environmental deregulation, nuclear build-up, and other potential human “holocausts.”

    Alexander follows his reading of the Holocaust with three short chapters, none of which I found particularly useful. Each takes on a sizable task — defining the relationship between cultural trauma and collective identity, arguing for a cultural sociology of evil, and mapping the discourse of American civil society — tasks much too large to be adequately addressed in the twenty or so pages he devotes to each. Alexander (and co-author Philip Smith) acknowledge this weakness in chapter five, in which they argue that America’s political discourse can be best understood as a debate between “democratic and counterdemocratic codes.” Before diving into short analyses of six significant political crises — from Congressional attacks on President Grant to the Iran-Contra Scandal — they write:

    Once again, we stress that we do not intend to explain any particular historical outcome; in order to accomplish this, extremely detailed case studies are necessary. We offer, rather, the groundwork for such studies by demonstrating the continuity, autonomy, and internal organization of a particular cultural structure across time. (126-27)

    After tracing that structure through a century-and-a-half of American political history, they conclude that it is, in fact, a “necessary cause in all political events that are subject to the scrutiny of American civil society” (154). But their statement is undercut by a series of qualifiers; they write that it “seems plausible to suggest” such a conclusion. Those qualifiers are telling, I think, for Alexander’s argument demands definitive evidence but doesn’t muster the energy to provide it.

    Chapter 6, “Watergate as Ritual,” goes some way in addressing this problem. In November 1972, just four months after the Watergate break-in, 84% of voters claimed that the scandal did not influence their decision on election night. Two years later, the event had taken on such symbolic significance that Nixon was forced to resign. “Watergate could not, as the French might say, tell itself. It had to be told by society; it was, to use Durkeim’s famous phrase, a social fact. It was the context of Watergate that had changed, not so much the raw empirical data themselves” (156). In his thoughtful analysis, Alexander explains how Watergate, as a symbol, came to transcend the world of petty politics and to touch upon fundamental moral concerns, thus polluting the executive office with the counterdemocratic code. This process was greatly influenced by the ritualizing experience of the televised hearings and by the release of Nixon’s taped conversations. “By his words and recorded actions,” Alexander writes, “he had polluted the very tenets that the entire Watergate process had revivified: the sacredness of truth and the image of America as an inclusive, tolerant community” (169).

    Chapter 7, “The Sacred and Profane Information Machine,” offers a quick overview of the computer as a maker of cultural meaning. The 13-page essay, first published in Smelser’s and Munch’s Theory of Culture (1993), feels out of date or, at best, like an introduction to a much longer and potentially interesting book. I’m not sure why it’s included here. The final chapter, “Modern, Anti, Post, and Neo: How Intellectuals Explain ‘Our Time,’” was the biggest disappointment, as it is a barely-modified version of the essay that opens Alexander’s Fin de Siecle Social Theory (1995). In my dissertation I plan to build from the model that Alexander proposes here by expanding it to incorporate the new post-9/11 reality, and I was hoping that this new book would do some of my work for me. Apparently, I’ll need to wait for the next one. He writes:

    Religiosity was not associated with totalitarianism. But is it fundamentalism per se or only Islamic versions that are employed to mark the correct alternative to civil society? Is terrorism such a broad negative that militant movements against antidemocratic, even murderous regimes will be polluted in turn? Will opposing “terrorism” and “fundamentalism” make the neomodern vulnerable to the conservatism and chauvinism of modernization theory in its earlier form? (Alexander, forthcoming)

    As is probably apparent already, I am of two minds about The Meanings of Social Life: A Cultural Sociology. The argument that Alexander and Philip Smith lay out in Chapter 1 is intriguing, and Alexander’s application of it in his readings of the Holocaust and Watergate are refreshingly useful. The rest, to be perfectly frank, feels a bit like filler.

  • But Is It Funny?

    Dale Peck at Slate offers the best critical reading of HBO’s Angels that I’ve found. He points out something that has bothered me a bit as well: the film just isn’t very funny. Which is a shame, because the play is really funny. Unlike so many of the TV critics who have offered their half-informed opinions over the last few weeks, Peck also understands the theatrical traditions from which the plays emerged and against which they so forcefully reacted. This is just good stuff:

    Ultimately, though, the real problem is that Angels is and remains a play, not a movie. It is deliberately, powerfully anachronistic in its approach to narrative, updating–one wants to say outing–the mid-century work of Williams and Albee. Though Nichols labors doggedly at filling in the spaces even the most lavish theatrical productions leave blank, his sets come across as cluttered, unnuanced, unnecessary; his frequent angel-eye perspectives seem thrown in just, you know, because. In particular, the addition of New York City vistas, the panoramas and facades left out of the play’s backdrops, seem shuffled in from a mismatched deck. That’s because Angels, even more than most plays, is steeped in conversation, soliloquy, the linguistic pursuit of ideas. Its characters interact with each other, not their environment, because (as the subtitle reminds us) the play is a fantasia: There is something internal and not quite real about it.

    I also like his conclusion:

    Whether you regard capitalism as the thing that will save the world or the thing that will destroy it, the marketplace has proven capable of assimilating gay male notions of masquerade, subterfuge, and subversion without itself being subverted by them. By which I mean that there was a George Bush as president when Kushner first wrote Angels, and there is a George Bush as president now. By which I mean that perhaps it isn’t the movie that doesn’t do the play justice, it’s the times. By which I mean, finally, that as soon as I finished watching Angels, the only thing I could think of doing was watching it again because I wanted it to have another chance.

  • A Question for a Friday Afternoon

    “Everything changes everything—nobody argues with that. My point is that whatever changes fiction may appear to inspire have usually to do with the goals of the reader and not of the writer.”
    — Philip Roth, Reading Myself and Others

    Last Friday night, at a friend’s graduation party, I found myself in a fascinating conversation with a slightly drunk political science professor who also happens to be a socialist. Somehow we got on the subject of Philip Roth, and the professor, a short-ish Jew born and raised in an Italian neighborhood of Brooklyn, told me: “Oh, Darren” — he was in that sentimental stage of inebriation — “I love the way the man writes. His novels are a joy to read. But…” His right thumb and fore-finger rested on his chin. “…his politics, I don’t like.”

    The professor and I had a lot to talk about.

    I’ve been working lately on a chapter for a new, book-length study of Roth’s career. My assignment is to survey his non-fiction, which has given me reason to read through five decades of his interviews, essays, and reviews. What I have found most striking is the consistency with which Roth has pointed to some mythic ability of the “imagination” to transcend the shifting demands of ideology. At his most extreme (some would say absurd), he has even made comments like the one above, arguing that the artist has no moral obligation other than creating an accurate representation of reality, in all its rich ambiguity and complexity.

    My knee-jerk reaction is to call him full-o’-shit (and a reactionary, at that) — and I can think of countless examples of particular works of art that have reshaped my own relationship with the world — but I wonder how much truth there is to his claim. Did those works affect me so profoundly because of my particular motivations at that particular moment, or because of the artist’s genius? Some combination of the two, I guess.

  • On My Bedside Table

    Timebends by Arthur Miller — the playwright’s autobiography, which I started reading in September and stopped reading two days later, somewhere around page 80.

    Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books by Azar Nafisi — I have every intention of getting back to this one. Someday. As I recall, the first 20 pages were great.

    True Notebooks by Mark Salzman — A gift from a friend, who assures me that Salzman is a sure-fire cure to the angst that plagues writers (or, more accurately, to the writing-induced angst that plagues me, specifically).

    Reason and Revolution: Hegel and the Rise of Social Theory by Herbert Marcuse — A little prepwork for my dissertation discussions of the New Left.

    The Meanings of Social Life: A Cultural Sociology by Jeffrey C. Alexander — Looking forward to reading this one over the holidays.

    American Mischief by Alan Lelchuk — Published in 1973, and now unforgivably out-of-print, it would sit on your shelf somewhere between Public Burning and Portnoy’s Complaint. I’m somewhere near page 80 of this one, too.

    Brief Interviews With Hideous Men by David Foster Wallace — I don’t even particularly like Wallace, but this is the type of book that I buy from the $4 shelf at the front of Barnes & Noble. As usual, I read the first two or three stories then set it aside.

    The last four issues of The New York Review of Books — Each of which has one or two articles whose titles have piqued my interest.

  • Minor Quibbles

    Well, crap. I’m thrilled so far with Angels. Mary-Louise Parker is stealing the show as Harper, and Justin Kirk is fantastic as Prior. The homage to Cocteau and the casting of the prior Priors were both brilliant. But why, in their trimming and reshaping, did Kushner and Nichols have to cut my two favorite lines from Millennium Approaches? When we first see Harper, she really should be saying:

    People who are lonely, people left alone, sit talking nonsense to the air, imagining…beautiful systems dying, old fixed orders spiraling apart…

    When you look at the ozone layer, from the outside, from a spaceship, it looks like a pale blue halo, a gentle, shimmering, aureole encircling the atmosphere encircling the earth. Thirty miles above our heads, a thin layer of three-atom oxygen molecules, product of photosynthesis, which explains the fussy vegetable preference for visible light, its rejection of darker rays and emanations. Danger from without. It’s a kind of gift, from God, the crowning touch to the creation of the world: guardian angels, hands linked, make a spherical net, a blue-green nesting orb, a shell of safety for life itself. But everywhere, things are collapsing, lies surfacing, systems of defense giving way…This is why, Joe, this is why I shouldn’t be left alone. [ellipses are Kushner’s]

    So much of the play is built from that imagery, established so early on. I imagine that Nichols thought it just too much for the opening moments of the film — too theatrical, too obvious, too wordy for a character we had just met. It’s Kushner at his best, though. “Systems of defense giving way” is, I think, the play’s richest metaphor.

    I was even more annoyed by the cutting of this brief exchange, which really should follow Belize’s description of the sky as “mauve.”

    Belize: All day long it’s felt like Thanksgiving. Soon, this…ruination will be blanketed white. You can smell it — can you smell it?
    Louis: Smell what?
    Belize: Softness, compliance, forgiveness, grace.

    Perestroika is about softness, compliance, forgiveness, and grace — grace, most of all. Can’t wait until next week.

  • For Shits and Giggles

    Meghan Keane has a review of Angels in America over at the National Review Online. I’m still waiting for a legitimate, conservative critique of the film — one that doesn’t expose the reviewer’s own ideological blindness. I expect conservatives to be offended by many of the lines spoken by Kushner’s characters; I expect conservative critics to acknowledge the distinction between the message of a particular character and the message of the work as a whole. But that is expecting too much of anyone who writes for a partisan magazine (whether the NRO or The Nation) in a climate like ours.

  • Speaking of Gobbledygook

    I have this habit of browsing through the “New Arrivals” shelves on my way out of the university library. I go straight to the PNs (film) and the PSs (American Lit) and grab whatever titles catch my eye. It’s a bad habit, actually, because these are the books that inevitably get filed away on some bookshelf at home, never to be opened.

    Today, after tracking down the last of those elusive Philip Roth essays, I gave into my craving and checked out Just Being Difficult? Academic Writing in the Public Arena, a new collection of essays edited by Jonathan Culler and Kevin Lamb. According to the jacket copy:

    The essays are less about proving the innocence of those accused of bad writing than about critically interrogating the terms and assumptions of the allegations. The contributors attempt to inform and deepen the debate by asking what values, history, politics, and stylistics are implicated, on both sides, in the controversy.

    The book seems to have been inspired, in part, by the journal Philosophy and Literature‘s year-end awards for “bad” academic writing and by the debate (and hard feelings) they have provoked. I found one brief review that summarizes the collection’s argument as such: “by calling attention to their own unconventional writing style, theorists emphasize theory’s calling to investigate language.” I certainly hope that they offer a more convincing justification than that. Should be a fun read.

  • More Angels

    Richard Goldstein offers the best one-paragraph synapsis of Angels in America that you’ll ever read. (He also talks to Kushner about Walter Benjamin, Bertolt Brecht, the problems of liberalism, and his new musical, Caroline, or Change.)

    In Angels, every character you expect to be good is capable of evil, and everyone who ought to be evil can love. Never have there been so many caring, sexy Mormons in a work by a card-carrying lefty. As for the Angel, she has eight vaginas and the means to use them—even on the dying faggot she transforms into a prophet through an orgasmic act. He ascends to heaven on a golden ladder, and just when you think you’re in a Christian potboiler about the rapture, it turns out that God has disappeared and the bureaucrats who run paradise want this prophet to end the human quest for change. But he rejects this temptation and demands “life . . . more life” instead: life as rebellion against celestial stasis; change as ecstatic, unmanageable pain. This is what the pioneer woman in Angels says when she pops out of a diorama at the Mormon Visitors Center: People change when God rips out their intestines, stuffs them back in a different way, and “it’s up to you to sew yourself up.” Benjamin tried to describe that ineffable process, and Kushner admits, “I’m indebted to Benjamin to the point of larceny.”

  • Radical Pragmatism

    In this new interview, Mother Jones calls Tony Kushner a “Radical Pragmatist,” a moniker I wouldn’t mind carrying myself. (It will take some effort on my part, though. I can’t imagine any aspect of my life or politics being described as “radical” right now. Baby steps.) He talks a bit about his and Robert Altman’s* failed attempt to film Angels a few years ago — nothing new if you’ve read their interview in either Tony Kushner in Conversation or Approaching the Millennium. The meat of the interview, though, is a discussion of the current political climate. I especially like this bit. Kushner is sounding more and more like John Rawls:

    There are a lot of politically active young people, but I feel that we’ve misled them. I have great admiration for the essayists and writers on the left, but the left decided at some point that government couldn’t get it what it wanted. As a result, it’s a movement of endless complaint and of a one-sided reading of American history, which misses the important point: Constitutional democracy has created astonishing and apparently irreversible social progress. All we’re interested in is talking about when government doesn’t work.

    On a related note, here’s a link to an editorial at GOPUSA.com that was inspired by Frank Rich’s piece from a week ago. It takes pot-shots at likely targets: Barbra Streisand and “the tinsel town left,” George Soros and Howard Dean (who is once again saddled with the now-mandatory modifier “McGovern-like”). Oh yeah, and you can also buy your copy of Treason there, so you know the site’s a bastion of fair and balanced journalistic integrity.

    * Fun Fact: When I spell-checked this post, Dreamweaver suggested I replace “Altman’s” with “Batman’s”

  • The Great Work Begins

    I can’t seem to muster enough energy to even care about the Reagan mini-series hubbub; carving out a nuanced position is completely beyond me. For largely economic reasons, CBS seems to have caved to partisan political pressure, which is lame and disheartening but neither illegal nor censorship. It’s not even particularly surprising. Come to think of it, I might actually be more offended by the idea of there being a Reagan biopic starring James Brolin than by the fact that I won’t get to see it. I mean, who would want to?

    I am intrigued, though, by the rising tide of commentary that links the mini-series with Angels in America. Frank Rich got the ball rolling with his piece in the Sunday Times. Then, yesterday, Andrew Sullivan posted a response at The New Republic. And now there’s word that Showtime will bump up its broadcast of the Reagan movie to November 30, exactly one week before HBO’s big premiere. In the Post article, Lisa de Moraes explains that Showtime President Robert Greenblatt “denied speculation that [his network] moved up the airdate to Nov. 30 because The Reagans, with all its juicy, audience-attracting controversy, was in grave danger of becoming roadkill when HBO debuted its adaptation of Tony Kushner’s Pulitzer Prize-winning play.” Greenblatt’s motivations are actually irrelevant to me; I’m more interested in the fact that the media has made that leap on its own, connecting the two films in a hotly politicized context.

    All three links are worth a read — I’m especially excited by Rich’s claim that “Angels is the most powerful screen adaptation of a major American play since Elia Kazan’s Streetcar Named Desire more than a half-century ago” — but I’m going to limit my comments to Sullivan’s piece, and, more specifically, to one aspect of it: his strangely ambivalent dismissal of Kushner’s play as “good Stalinist agitprop.” (I’m tempted also to take on his equally bizarre claim that “networks aren’t supposed to be” biased, but I’ll leave that argument to others better equipped and motivated to do so.)

    It is perhaps worth mentioning here at the start that Sullivan and Kushner have, as they say, “a history.” I haven’t followed it all too closely, but it’s been public at least since June ’94, when they appeared together, along with Donna Minkowitz and Bruce Bawer, on the Charlie Rose show to discuss the 25th anniversary of Stonewall. I haven’t seen the episode, but based on the transcript (available in Tony Kushner in Conversation) it appears that they spent a good portion of the evening throwing jabs at one another — Kushner accusing Sullivan of knocking down paper tigers, “one of them is the politics of the Left, as though there’s one politics of the Left”; Sullivan accusing Kushner of being “stuck in the McCarthy period….stuck in the late 1960s.” There was also Kushner’s commencement speech at Vassar, in which he took a none-too-subtle jab at “those newfangled neo-con gay people with their own website and no day job.” I don’t read Sullivan often enough to know if he responded in kind.

    But back to the piece in The New Republic. Sullivan writes:

    Exhibit A in the attempt to turn the human tragedy of AIDS into political agitprop was Tony Kushner’s Angels in America. As such, it appealed and still appeals to the hard left, which is partly why it won a Pulitzer and entirely why Frank Rich of The New York Times single-handedly championed it in the 1990s.

    That Angels is a fiercely political play goes without saying. And, yes, I imagine that its particular politics would be more appealing to those of a leftist bent. But to reduce the play to agitprop — a rhetorical ploy of the laziest variety — demands a grossly simplistic reading of a work that delights in ambiguity. Later, Sullivan seems to acknowledge as much in a back-handed compliment, calling Kushner’s play “a magical realist fantasy — where dreams become enacted, angels appear, and all sorts of metaphors are turned into dramatic imagery.” Even Roy Cohn, who Sullivan (accurately) describes as “an emblem of all the hard left despises,” is treated by Kushner with tremendous grace. Sure, the character Louis describes Cohn as “the pollstar of human evil,” but anyone who has seen or read the play with at least a modicum of maturity and human understanding will surely remember Roy’s death scene — a moment of suffering and humor and mourning and, perhaps most surprising of all, forgiveness. (I can’t wait to see Pacino and Streep together.)

    To be fair, Sullivan’s biggest beef here seems to be with Rich, who I would agree makes some questionable argumentative leaps. But Sullivan makes too many of his own. The historical record, he writes, “is complicated, hemmed in by political and scientific realities that neither Kushner nor Rich want to explore. Why? Because such nuance would get in the way of their anti-Republican hysteria.” He also compares Angels unfavorably to Randy Shilts’s As The Band Played On:

    Shilts’s sin — and the reason that he was vilified as viciously as Kushner was celebrated — is that he actually criticized some gay activists, as well as the Reagan administration, for resisting efforts to counteract the plague early enough. But in the polarized politics of AIDS, such complexities are generally unrewarded.

    Again, Sullivan’s reduction of Angels to simplistic, partisan politicking reveals his embarrassingly simplistic reading of the play and, I might add, some blatant partisanship (and personal anger?) of his own. Like Shilts’s book, Kushner’s play is actually quite critical of the American left, which is precisely why it’s a great play and not just one more Waiting for Lefty. The following paragraphs are the opening of a larger piece that might or might not end up in my dissertation.

    – – –

    Near the end of Millennium Approaches, the first part of Tony Kushner’s Angels in America, Louis Ironson asks, “Why has democracy succeeded in America?” then proceeds to answer his own question — sort of — rambling for several pages through a breathless and often hilarious (in a flummoxed, Woody Allen kind of way) litany of stereotypically liberal “fetishes” including, but not limited to: freedom, homophobia, human rights, race, anti-Semitism, and “the inescapable battle of politics” (1:89, 92). When his companion, an African-American ex-ex-drag queen named Belize, accuses Louis of spouting “racist bullshit,” Louis wilts, acknowledging that he probably is. “Oh I really hate that!” Belize sighs. “It’s no fun picking on you Louis; you’re so guilty, it’s like throwing darts at a glob of jello, there’s no satisfying hits, just quivering, the darts just blop in and vanish” (1:93).

    It’s a telling moment for Kushner, perhaps the most explicitly political of America’s top-tier playwrights. Set mostly in the mid-1980s, Angels in America is very much concerned with a particular moment in history when, as Louis’s debilitating ambivalence demonstrates, “being Left in this country” was more transgressive and exasperating than it had been since the consensus days of the Eisenhower administration. Reagan’s landslide victory over Mondale; the ideological partnering of the Republican party with the “Moral Majority”; the wholesale cutting of budgets to domestic social programs; the intensification of Cold War rhetoric and foreign policies of containment; and the ineffectiveness of key left-leaning organizations to stem this tide — all contributed to a crisis point in the history of the American Left. Kushner has said of the era:

    the play is set — and I think this is very important — at a time when there’s no such thing [as mass-movement politics] in the United States for generally progressive people. For someone like Belize, there isn’t anything: The Rainbow Coalition has started to waffle and fall apart. And there is nothing in the gay community — there’s the Gay Pride parade, and Gay Men’s Health Crisis getting humiliated at the City Council in Newark every year — 1984-1985 was a horrible, horrible time. It really seemed as if the maniacs had won for good. (Savran 27)

    Throughout Angels and much of his other early work, Kushner responds directly to this crisis with equal parts vitriol and, perhaps more surprisingly, a tempered optimism. In that same interview he asks a critical question of the Left, one that guides his plays and that should likewise guide the formation of any contemporary progressive politics, or so he implies. “So none of these people had anything they could hook into, which is the history of the Left,” Kushner says. “When the moment comes, when the break happens and history can be made, do we step in and make it or do we flub and fail?” (Savran 27).

    – – –

    Ultimately, Angels in America is unable to offer a single, simple answer to Kushner’s own question — or, at least, a single, simple, political answer. Hell, as the curtain closes, Louis and Belize are still arguing, now about Israel and Palestine. But there’s something in the play itself — in its humanism and poetry, its theology and ambiguity, its campy theatricality and epic reach — that does inspire a strange longing (in me, at least) for progress (whatever that means) and for something like collective action, though not of the variety that would likely send Sullivan’s knee-a-jerkin’. Prior’s closing lines are a benediction, with all of the stickiness that word implies:

    You are fabulous creatures, each and every one.
    And I bless you: More Life.
    The Great Work Begins.

    If Sullivan reads Angels in America as a Stalinist tract, then I pity his ideological blindness. He’s missing a hell of a play.

  • Roth, on Film

    We all know that Stanley Kauffman, that grand icon of American film-reviewing, has been with The New Republic since 1958. But did you know that he was preceded immediately by a young punk of a wannabe novelist named Philip Roth? In June 1957, Roth — then a 24-year-old instructor at the University of Chicago — began his nine-month stint with the magazine, where he reported on the latest Hollywood and television offerings. I read through all of his reviews this morning and stumbled upon a few nuggets.

    First, Roth the critic. Despite a general antipathy toward “ideology” that has characterized so much of his work over the years, Roth gets surprisingly political in his critique of Studio “message” films, particularly those that treat America’s race problems with, in his words, “Mother Goose simplicity.” His reviews of Island in the Sun and Something of Value — the former a Harry Belafonte vehicle, the latter a Sidney Poitier picture — chastise the filmmakers for surrendering to empty sentimentality and senseless moralizing. Referring to the climax of Something of Value, in which Poitier dies tragically, leaving his child to be carried off by Rock Hudson, Roth writes:

    The next generation, the picture seems to cry, for them it will be better! But I keep wanting to know about this generation. . . . [I]sn’t it possible to live with a man when he is not like your brother? What I want to know is when we’re going to be ready to make that picture.

    Roth’s finest moment as a film critic, though, comes in his assessment of A Bridge on the River Kwai. I say “finest,” perhaps, because his ambivalence toward Lean’s “masterpiece” mirrors my own:

    The Colonel, then, does not appear to have actually chosen to blow up his bridge, nor does he live to see it destroyed. And thus he is robbed of that final agony and awakening that might have made of him a tragic figure. He does, of course, have an awakening: “What have I done?” he finally asks. But what kind of question is that? What must I do now? — that is what the tragic hero asks, that is the painful question. He must do something. To have the hero fall across the dynamite switch because he is wounded permits the final destruction to arise not out of the agony of choice but out of mere physical circumstance. What had begun as a drama of character ends unsatisfactorily with some misty melodramatic statement about Chance and the Ironies of Life.

    Of course, in 1957 Roth was also busy writing fiction, including the stories that would be collected in Goodbye, Columbus and that would make of him a National Book Award winner at 26. That brash young talent is on display in a few of his reviews. In his coverage of the televised Miss America pageant, for instance, he wanders off into a remembrance of his boyhood barber, a “sixty-year-old Turkish Jew who had preached hedonism to me long before he’d begun to shave my sideburns; his admiration for his adopted country was limited for the most part to its long-legged women.” The old barber would be right at home in Roth’s early stories — a friend of “Epstein,” maybe, or Ozzie’s neighbor in “The Conversion of the Jews.”

    Special mention also goes to Roth’s review of 20th Century-Fox’s The Sun Also Rises, which he delivers in the style of Hemingway and in the form of a conversation between himself and a “street-walker” who he meets outside the theater. It ends:

    We left it at that.

    Finally she looked up. “I hear they are filming A Farewell to Arms,” she said.

    “I know.”

    “It will have Rock Hudson,” she looked up hopefully; it was a drunk’s kind of hope. “Maybe it will be better?”

    Someone came into the bar and from across the street I could hear silver clinking on the box office window.

    “Yes,” I said, “isn’t it pretty to think so.”

    As far as I know, Roth’s reviews have never been collected. I had to scour through a few rolls of microfilm to find them all. They’re well worth the effort, I’d say. Kauffman, by the way, posted his review of The Human Stain a few days ago and concludes:

    Thus The Human Stain, for all its page-by-page rewards, is a smaller book internally than most of Roth’s work. It is no compliment to the art of film to say that the book’s quasi-mechanical structure, plus that social issue, recommended it for adaptation, but I’d guess that this was what happened. These facts also explain why the film’s shortcomings are not all Meyer’s: most of them are in the novel.

  • Going Digital

    Mike, do you feel that these days you can actually do bolder things on television than you can in film?

    Nichols: I do, yes. It has to do with HBO, it’s as simple as that. We love HBO and we love the freedom that there is on HBO, and the power. And what is that power? It’s economic. You know, we’re run by market forces—the fact that an outfit can make a billion dollars a year just sitting there collecting its subscriptions. It’s an economic basis that affords us this freedom.

    HBO’s economic freedom is just one of the many topics of discussion over at Newsweek, where Mike Nichols, Tony Kushner, and their cast are talking up Angels in America. In preparation for the big premiere, I called my cable provider last week to find out how much it would cost to add just HBO to my basic service package. “You’re new monthly bill will be $61.50,” the surprisingly helpful saleswoman told me. “Or,” she paused, tying her carrot to the stick, “for just a few dollars more, we can upgrade you to digital cable and throw in the full compliment of HBO/Showtime channels, plus an additional tier of your choice.”

    So, of course, I now have digital cable.

  • A Good Hard Rain

    I first read Sam Shepard’s Buried Child five years ago in a graduate readings course in American drama. Last night I was finally able to experience it in performance, which, as is always the case with great drama, is a quite different thing. Actually, I’m hesitant to use the words “great drama” in regard to this particular production, which too often suffered from poor casting — Shelly gave her monologue with that earnest far-off stare usually reserved for Barbra Streisand impersonators and Tilden was too…well…cute. The latter role demands equal parts brokenness, menace, and charisma, but he managed only country bumpkin, which drained his scenes — including that famous finale — of their magic and tension.

    Remember that episode of The X-Files when Mulder and Scully fought the family of hillbilly inbreeds? The episode that should have been creepy and disgusting but was mostly over-the-top camp? The CBT’s production of Buried Child had the same faults. Only twice during the two-and-a-half hour play did the room crack with energy: First during Bradley’s “rape” of Shelly, which is one of Shepard’s finest moments, and again during Bradley’s fight with Vince, which was staged in slow-motion under a strobe light. The remainder of the evening was notably unremarkable.

  • Saints and Artists

    Paul Ford posted a great piece on the death of Elliott Smith that is all the more timely given the impending release of that Sylvia Plath film. If I ever teach Plath — not likely, but she’s all over the 20th century American lit anthologies — I might teach Ford’s essay alongside her. Talking about that mysterious relationship between the artist and her audience is tough; it’s even tougher when that connection is forged, at least in part, by some recognition of shared misery. I don’t deny the power of Plath’s or Smith’s poetry, but I worry when they (or others like them) are transformed into romantic heroes because of suicide. Ford goes a long way in confronting the dynamics of this experience:

    No story can reconnect the artist to what the artist created. But we believe one can and write biographies accordingly. Thus, the title of the Elliott Smith biography will be “Figure 8,” or “Miss Misery’s Groom,” and it will detail drug abuse, terrible acts, violences, punctuated by in-studio redemption. Everything about Smith, including anecdotes from his friends, indicated that he lived hard and left a trail of pain and shit along with his songs. So his life will become a tale full of cautions and insight about the tragedy of genius, and become the beatification of a rock saint. . . .

    For the audience, is it that our heroes are monstrish with their skin peeled away, their flaws shown, and their work is thus tainted, our pleasure diminished? Or maybe worse, that they are great in spite of their normalcy, in spite of their mundane, selfish, uglinesses, and when we witness their weakness we, also weak, are put on the hook ourselves, and must acknowledge that these flawed, wife-beating drunks, these lunatic head-in-the-oven suicides, these otherwise useless men and women, were capable of greatness, of dipping their hands into history and altering the flow, while we mill about our cubicles and curse our boredom?

    Grieving does nothing for the dead. We grieve for ourselves, for what we can no longer have. Elliott Smith got exactly what he wanted, and we can give and take nothing else from the man. Because it provided a sense of approval and connection, Smith’s old concerts can now be remembered as sacred events. But what a failure of the imagination: all moments are equally rare, whether someone is playing a guitar or not, whether Smith is alive or dead. Those on the message boards who are grateful they saw him perform live are fully vested in the lie that somehow the story, the man, and the experience of the music are all bound together, that the aggregate pleasure of thousands can be summed up into one living soul, one ex-addict with a beating heart, and now his entirely solitary act—seppuku without the second—can be seen as some kind of communion, a concluding act to his oeuvre of bitter depression. A pair of round cracked eyeglasses on an album cover, and a ticket stub from 1998. A bit of cloth dipped in his blood, a fragment of the true cross. It’s all about
    taking
    the easy way out
    for you,
    I suppose.

  • A Writing Exercise

    I spent my lunch hour over in the library, where I went snooping for some old Arthur Miller essays. Most have been collected in fine editions, of course, but I like to put my hands on the originals — to grab those bound periodicals from the stacks and flip through their fragile pages, discovering the context within which the words that inspired my work were first published. It’s the wannabe historian in me, I guess.

    Unfortunately, Miller’s essays are just old enough that, except for a piece in the July 3, 1954 issue of The Nation — a fascinating McCarthy-era adaptation of Swift’s “A Modest Proposal” — I was forced to leave the stacks and venture down into the microfilm room. Contrary to popular opinion, I actually like the microfilm room (though I’ll be the first to admit that it absolutely pales in comparison to the real thing). I like browsing through the rows of tiny carboard boxes, threading the microfilm through the reader, whizzing my way through pages and pages of history at the touch of a button. It makes me feel, well, scholarly.

    I spent my lunch hour whizzing mostly through Life, Harper’s, Esquire, and the like. 1958 was an interesting year for Miller. He was married to Marilyn Monroe then, making him America’s most recognizable “serious” artist. In the year-end, double-issue of Life that year, an issue devoted to “Entertainment” that featured a multi-page pictorial of Miss M, Miller contributed a few hundred words: “My Wife Marilyn.” It’s accompanied by a charming portrait of the two together — the Jewish intellectual and his bombshell shiksa wife. The photo is so impossibly metaphoric, so iconic even, that I can’t look at it and see two real human beings. The image, refracted through my mind’s eye, is too blurred by celebrity and tragic history.

    I’m most intrigued, though, by the April 1956 issue of The Atlantic Monthly, in which Miller published his seminal essay on “The Family in Modern Drama.” For a cultural studies guy like myself, the issue is a gold mine. Miller’s essay is sandwiched between a two-page spread from General Electric — “Progress is Our Most Important Product” — and Averell Harriman’s analysis of “The Soviet Challenge and American Policy.” It’s like a snapshot of my dissertation project. Miller’s liberal critique of American profiteering is impossible to imagine removed from its Cold War context.

    I think I’ve found the introduction to my first chapter.

  • Film and Stage

    In a recent interview with Cate Blanchett, Stuart Husband mentions that the actress has dropped out of an up-coming film adaptation of Patrick Marber’s play, Closer. I would be more disappointed — she’d be great in the role — but for the fact that I didn’t even realize that the film was in the works. It’s going to sport a fine cast, otherwise. Should be interesting. On a slight tangent, I looked up Marber at the IMDb and discovered that another of his plays, Asylum, is also being filmed, starring Ian McKellen.

    Closer will be directed by Mike Nichols, who apparently is going to finish out his career by filming great plays. Two months and counting until I fire up my one-month subscription to HBO in order to watch Nichols’s rendition of Angels in America. Quotes like this have certainly piqued my interest:

    In writing his first screenplay, Kushner shortened his work by roughly 90 minutes and made changes likely to be incorporated when the play is published again.

    “I don’t think that we changed very much in the first part,” Kushner said. ” `Perestroika,’ I knew when I was writing it, was going to be one of those plays that you can rewrite for the rest of your life.” Nichols helped him fix a scene that had never worked onstage. “I don’t think I want to say which one it was, because I don’t want everybody to sort of pay special attention to it,” Kushner said. But Nichols told him the scene violated the play’s inner logic.

    “Tony and Mike found a rapport so quickly,” executive producer Cary Brokaw added. “Mike wanted consciously to be true to the play, and found the more we examined the script, as a true adaptation of the play, that it was incredibly cinematic. It didn’t need fixing. It just worked.”

    This snippet from Meryl Streep ain’t bad either:

    “We’re all lucky to have been in this,” she said. “I’m so glad you’re living and writing and working,” she said to Kushner. “I don’t expect to get anything remotely as ambitious as this piece of work in my life again, so I’m grateful to you.”

    Damn. I’m giddy.

  • Better Him Than Me

    Tim Adams from the Guardian Observer, spent last week reading the ten novels that top England’s Best Seller list. A glutton for punishment, apparently.

    To try to maintain my bearings as I ploughed on I kept little running totals of what seemed like useful statistics in a notebook. The final tallies looked like this. Number of pages: 3,891; murders: 54 (of which, throats cut: 17); orgasms: 24 (of which, simultaneous: 8); books using the word ‘raghead’ to denote an Arab: 3; good-looking villains: 1; central women characters who did not talk about needing a man: 0; pistol whippings: 5; gasps over unexpected proportions of lover’s manhood: 3; uses of the phrase ‘all hell broke loose’: 2; uses of the phrase ‘you do the math’: 4; times I went to sleep halfway through a paragraph describing the night sky: 2; times I smiled at an authorial joke: 4; times I laughed out loud (when supposed to): 0. (One of the things we seem to want from our bestselling books is a straight face. One of the things they demand from us, almost without exception, is to be taken seriously.)

    Reminds me of acquaintances who slavishly see every blockbuster on opening weekend, then whine about the shoddy quality of “movies these days.” It’s a question of taste, really, which Adams gladly acknowledges and demonstrates. A fun read.