XUJUN EBERLEIN

on two accounts of the great Chinese famine.

Image: Murri via Ralph Magazine

Yang Jisheng
Tombstone
Cosmos Books, 2008. 950 pp.

Frank Dikötter
Mao’s Great Famine: The History of China’s Most Devastating Catastrophe, 1958-1962
Walker & Company, September 2010. 448 pp.

1.
In July 2011, Frank Dikötter’s Mao’s Great Famine won the BBC’s Samuel Johnson Prize, one of Europe’s best known and most lucrative awards for a work of nonfiction. One of the judges, Brenda Maddox, explained to the Guardian why the book impressed her so much: “Why didn’t I know about this? We feel we know who the villains of the 20th century are — Stalin and Hitler. But here, fully 50 years after the event, is something we did not know about.”

That reaction highlights both the main contribution and main limitation of Dikötter’s book. Though there have been many books and articles published on the same subject — in English, Chinese, and I’m sure other languages — apparently Dikötter’s is the one that brought awareness to at least one more Westerner ignorant of the catastrophe. On the other hand, Dikötter’s attempt to draw parallels between the Mao-era famine — that swept over the entirety of mainland China from 1959 to 1961 and killed tens of millions — and the Holocaust and the Soviet Gulag is, at best, an oversimplification that hinders understanding. To borrow what the discerning Asia scholar Ian Buruma once said on a different subject: “To distinguish between atrocities does not diminish the horror, but without clarity on these matters history recedes into myth and becomes a form of propaganda.”

The most authoritative study on the famine is Yang Jisheng’s Tombstone, which has a broader and deeper perspective. The Chinese language edition of the book was published in Hong Kong two years before Dikötter’s, and an English version is due out from Farrar, Straus and Giroux in fall 2012.

Educated at Tsinghua University, Yang Jisheng came from a peasant family in Hubei Province, where his father starved to death during the famine. Yang worked for 35 years as a respected reporter at the Party-run Xinhua news agency. After retiring in 1996, he began a ten-year journey of investigation into the famine that had burdened his heart for decades. Traveling all over the country, and helped by his many contacts in journalism and the government, he managed to access a wealth of material closed to the public, making copies of over 3,600 folders of information from provincial archives as well as those of the central government in Beijing. He often had to be stealthy about his research subject: instead of saying he was writing about the famine, he claimed, as he told Ian Johnson, that he wanted to understand “the history of China’s rural economic policies and grain policy.” He got away with it most of the time, even in Henan, a province tightly guarding its archives where, years later, Dikötter’s research efforts were stymied. The only time Yang failed to get access was in the remote backward province of Guizhou. There, when he handed a carefully researched list of document titles to the archivist, the woman was frightened, and said she’d need instructions from above. When the provincial officials subsequently told Yang they needed approval from Beijing, he had to give up.

To gain a human perspective on the great tragedy, Yang interviewed a wide array of witnesses, from ordinary survivors to officials of various ranks who had handled policy at the time. As a Xinhua veteran, Yang’s capacity to access to these officials is unmatched, as is his cultural perspective from within. The resulting two-volume book of 950 pages offers a systematic examination of the famine with distinctive precision, thoroughness, and insight. (Oddly, it is a book that Dikötter is somewhat dismissive of.)

Conducted about a decade later than Yang’s research, Dikötter’s study draws from the same combination of sources: official archives and witness interviews. His book, too, presents useful research on several — though not as many — aspects of the famine.

Together, these two books cover 26 of Mainland China’s then 29 provinces, municipalities, and autonomous regions. The studies clearly establish the facts on the horror and extensiveness of the famine. While a few wide-eyed young Chinese nationalists, and a bunch of older Maoists writing on the Chinese website Utopia, still refute that a massive famine occurred, they do so by ignoring the evidence.

The Chinese have a saying: “The past that is not forgotten becomes the teacher of the future.” If the famine was the deliberate act of an individual villain (Mao Zedong) as demonic as Hitler or Stalin, then, the villain long dead, the matter is settled. On the other hand, if it was the result of failings in the social and political systems that, at least in part, still persist, then there are important lessons for today’s leaders.

Read More →

Palms © C.P. Heiser

From James Murray’s The Evolution of English Lexicography, published in 1900: “The English Dictionary, like the English Constitution, is the creation of no one man, and of no one age; it is a growth that has slowly developed itself down the ages; its beginnings lie far back in times almost pre-historic. And these beginnings themselves, although the English Dictionary today is lineally developed from them, were neither Dictionaries, nor even English.” (From the epigraph to Simon Winchester’s The Meaning of Everything: The Story of the Oxford English Dictionary.)

Jeff Weiss on The Doors’ L.A. Woman: “From recording to writing, the approach is rough but relaxed. No set hours. No working at night. No more than three takes, recorded live on 8-track with minimal overdubs. Desks are shoved to the side. Quilts hang from the walls for higher fidelity. Working from the second floor, out of sight, Botnick hooks up a console speaker and tape recorder. For session work, he recruits Elvis Presley’s bassist, Jerry Scheff, and rhythm guitarist Marc Benno, who frees Krieger up for kaleidoscopic solos. A disciple of the King, Morrison is thrilled.”

Guy Patrick Cunningham on reading in pieces: “Fragmentary writing is (or at least feels) like the one avant-garde literary approach that best fits our particular moment. It’s not that it’s the only form of writing that matters of course, just that it captures the tension between ‘digital’ and ‘analog’ reading better than anything else out there. And that tension, in many ways, is the defining feature of the contemporary reading experience.”

Adam Gopnik on the The Caging of America: “What prisoners try to convey to the free is how the presence of time as something being done to you, instead of something you do things with, alters the mind at every moment. For American prisoners, huge numbers of whom are serving sentences much longer than those given for similar crimes anywhere else in the civilized world — Texas alone has sentenced more than four hundred teen-agers to life imprisonment — time becomes in every sense this thing you serve.”

Video from TripleCanopy: Zoe Beloff’s film and installation The Infernal Dream of Mutt and Jeff is on view at M HKA Museum (Antwerp, Belgium) from February 16 until June 3, 2012.

Mutt and Jeff on Strike from triple canopy on Vimeo.

LEE KONSTANTINOU

on Art Spiegelman’s ghosts.

Anja and Vladek for Art’s bar mitzvah album, 1961

Art Spiegelman
MetaMaus: A Look Inside a Modern Classic, Maus
Pantheon, October 2011. 300 pp.

In the 1991 second volume of his classic graphic novel Maus, published five years after the first, Art Spiegelman briefly — and dramatically — drops the conceit for which his book is so famous. For seven pages, instead of depicting himself as a humanoid mouse, he draws himself as a human being wearing a mouse mask. When we first meet this new version of Art, he is sitting at his drafting table, balanced atop a pile of dead, emaciated humanoid-mouse bodies, reflecting on the success of the first volume of Maus. In the panels that follow, journalists ask an exasperated Art what Maus means. Merchandisers approach him offering lucrative opportunities to turn his comic book about his father Vladek’s experience surviving a Nazi concentration camp into what Spiegelman has elsewhere called “Holokitsch”: grossly sentimental and commercial appropriations of survivor stories. In response to the trauma of success, Art shrinks down to a child-sized form. “I want … ABSOLUTION,” he whines. “No … No … I want … I want … my MOMMY!” Art visits his therapist, Pavel — another Holocaust survivor, whose own mouse mask bears an eerie resemblance to Vladek’s mouse face (talk about transference!) — and slowly returns to adult size. But not for long.

If the newly published MetaMaus — an engaging 25th anniversary commemoration of the first volume’s publication — is any indication, Spiegelman has yet to recover from the trauma of his creation’s success. And the ironic distance that once separated Spiegelman the artist from “Art” has, if anything, shrunk. The image of Art atop a stack of bodies was, as Spiegelman notes, less a reflection on the impact of the Holocaust on his everyday life than a response to the monumental triumph of Maus itself, its distance from its humble beginnings, serialized as a pamphlet insert in Spiegelman and his wife Françoise Mouly’s avant-garde comics anthology, RAW. “It’s just that after a while it started seeming like Groundhog Day,” Spiegelman laments in MetaMaus of the constant requests for interviews, lecture appearances, and other explanations of and elaborations on his work. “I suppose it led to the image of me perched on a pile of corpses with a lot of microphones aimed at me in the ‘Time Flies’ section of Maus.” “Time Flies,” which partly reverts to the formal experimentation that obsessed Spiegelman before he started working on Maus, is itself “a MetaMaus-like commentary on the whole project.”

The core of MetaMaus is a book-length interview of Spiegelman, ably conducted by University of Chicago English professor and distinguished comics scholar Hillary Chute. This interview is divided into three sections, each attempting to answer a single question: Why the Holocaust?, Why Mice?, and Why Comics? These are the questions that have haunted Spiegelman for almost three decades. As Spiegelman says in the pithy cartoon introduction to MetaMaus — which constitutes, as far as I can tell, the only new artwork in the book:

I thought I’d finally try to answer as fully as I could … That way, when asked in the future, maybe I could just say … NEVER AGAIN! And maybe I could even get my damned MASK off! I can’t breathe in this thing …

In the last panel of the intro, Spiegelman’s alter ego — a humanoid mouse this time, not a human wearing a mask — pulls off his face to reveal a skull beneath. We have good reason to doubt that this will be the end of Spiegelman’s anxious relationship to Maus, or to his own success.

Read More →

ART SPIEGELMAN,
author of MetaMaus,
interviewed by VAN DYKE PARKS

Click here for the third episode of the new Los Angeles Review of Books podcast series (soon to be available on iTunes — watch this space). We hope these podcasts will go beyond the standard promotional Q&A pleasantries and promote genuine intellectual and philosophical discussion. Today we present an interview with legendary comics artist Art Spiegelman, editor of RAW, author of Maus and the new MetaMaus, and LARB Contributing Editor Van Dyke Parks.

As a bonus, this podcast also features a conversation about MetaMaus between Lee Konstantinou (who reviews the book for us today) and LARB Managing Editor Evan Kindley.

Not enough for you? Click here for the first episode, a conversation between Tom Lutz, Misha Glouberman, and Sheila Heti, and here for the second, featuring Simon Reynolds and Andy Zax.

Future episodes will include conversations between Mariam Lam and Monique Truong, Maggie Nelson and Arne de Boever, Geoff Nicholson and David Shook, Tom Lutz and Jonathan Penner, Will Hermes and Lisa Jane Persky, and David Leonard and Oliver Wang.

Produced by Oliver Wang.

Image © Paul Bausch onfocus.com http://bit.ly/rESKHY

Trauma rearranges us. We know that. But so, sometimes, does reading. In this piece, Louise Steinman reflects on both, and pays tribute to a writer who had a deep impact on many of us, directly and indirectly.      — Tom Lutz

LOUISE STEINMAN
Crete Spring

During the seventies and eighties my longtime friend, a painter, lived in Greece, on the island of Crete. In 1981, when spring beckoned after a long, dark New York City winter, I scraped together the money to visit her there for the first time.

My friend lived with her Greek husband, a musician from Athens, in an old stone house painted robin’s egg blue in a village outside the port city of Chania, 25 miles from the western edge of the island. Though none of us had much money, we ate royally on produce from the garden augmented occasionally by fresh catch from local fishermen and always with excellent cheap local wine decanted into a liter bottle from a barrel at the grocer’s.

My friend’s house had no indoor plumbing, no hot water, no electricity. Mail was rare, phone service was conducted from a pay phone over open boxes of salted sardines at the corner store, and email had yet to be invented. Which for me was all for the good. I was relieved to be far away from home and the unrelenting demand to make “life decisions.” Spring on the island — scents of lavender and rosemary, the startling blue Sea of Crete — was ecstatic.

Another joy was that I’d brought just the right book with me. Before leaving New York, my forage through a book bin on upper Broadway yielded a paperback of James Hillman’s Re-Visioning Psychology, a book the author claimed was about “soul-making.” I’d never heard of Hillman, but there were Greek gods on the cover, which augured well.

Read More →

JONATHAN PENNER

David Cronenberg © Ian Welch, Welchtoons.com

David Cronenberg arrived on the world’s cinema screens with a viscous splash. His unmistakable Cartesian horror films Shivers, Rabid, The Brood, Scanners, Videodrome, and Existenz were extraordinary meditations on making the mental physical, and made Cronenberg one of the most admired auteurs of the late seventies and early eighties.

But since 1983’s The Dead Zone, most of Cronenberg’s films — like The Fly, Dead Ringers, M. Butterfly, Naked Lunch, Crash, Spider, A History of Violence, A Dangerous Method, and the upcoming Cosmopolis — have not been made from his original scripts, but have been adaptations from the works of others.

Curious about his hero’s transition from originator to adapter, Los Angeles Review of Books Film Editor Jonathan Penner recently sat down with David Cronenberg to discuss the artist’s life and work.

¤
It’s Dangerous to Be an Artist
As a young upstart filmmaker I felt that you were not a real filmmaker if you didn’t write your own stuff and it should be original. And that was beyond the French version of the auteur theory which was really meant to rehabilitate the artistic credibility of guys like Howard Hawks and John Ford. The French were saying a director could work within the studio system and still be an artist and that those guys were, even though they didn’t normally write their own stuff. And for years I said, no, no you have to write your own stuff. But then I got involved with Stephen King’s The Dead Zone, and it was more of a studio project, and there were five scripts that had been written, one of them by Stephen King himself, and frankly I didn’t think his script was the best of the five. In fact, I thought that if I did his script people would kill me for betraying his novel. I think what happened is that he just wanted to try something else. He wasn’t interested in just doing the novels, so he changed it quite a lot to the point where it was less like the novel than Jeffrey Boam’s script, which was actually more faithful. So I started to work with Jeffrey Boam, and I started to really enjoy the process of working with other people and on the script, and I thought, well this is interesting ‘cause what it means is, if you mix your blood with other people’s, then you will create something that you wouldn’t have done on your own, but is enough of you that it’s exciting and feels like you. It’s kind of like making children.

Read More →

JONATHAN ZIMMERMAN
on the mythology of film school.

Steve Boman
Film School: The True Story of a Midwestern Family Man Who Went to the World’s Most Famous Film School, Fell Flat on His Face, Had a Stroke, and Sold a Television Series to CBS
Benbella Books, November 2011. 352 pp.

“Life … at 24 frames per second.”

— Tagline for Film School Confidential

OPEN ON: a smoldering, post-apocalyptic hellscape. The once great city sits desolate, its iconic landmarks reduced to rubble. A mysterious red carpet unwinds into the distance, indicating — I don’t know, some sort of dystopian Emmy party? The king of this land wields his standard issue Arri-S camera like a magic scepter. His power is mighty, evidenced by the throng of ladies grasping desperately at his bulbous calves. In the mid-ground, a villain in a beret and Che Guevera T-shirt scowls, the intensity of his ire matched only by the girth and heft of our hero’s rippling muscles, who is shedding his USC shirt in a Bruce Banner-esque manner…

I am trying not to judge, but the alarming cover of Steve Boman’s Film School: The True Story of a Midwestern Family Man Who Went to the World’s Most Famous Film School, Fell Flat on His Face, Had a Stroke, and Sold a Television Series to CBS demands comment. The book does manage to live up to the promise of its cover, but not in the way the author intends. The scorched earth and smoke clouds reveal themselves to be as portentous as they are pretentious. Set against the backdrop of the University of Southern California’s famous School of Cinematic Arts, Boman’s memoir is a tale of tribulation and triumph. Portraying himself as the prototypical Midwestern everyman-in-big-city-made-good, Boman shows off the crowd-pleasing story techniques practiced and preached as gospel at USC. Dealing in broad strokes and archetypes, Film School follows him from stumbling student to respected director and, finally, successful television producer. His USC is one of emerald towers to be scaled, gold to be mined, and bad guys — Simon Cowell-like professors and anonymous latte-chugging intellectuals — to be overcome. It is, in essence, mythology.

Read More →

MORT PERSKY

on the art of the newspaper column.

Photograph by Ralph Schoenstein via Smithsonian.com

John Avlon, Jesse Angelo, and Errol Louis
Deadline Artists: America’s Greatest Newspaper Columnists
Overlook Press, September 2011. 432 pp.

A mere 60 years ago, at the front end of my love-hate affair with the published word, I went to work for my first “real” newspaper, an actual evening daily willing to pay a salary-like sum for my dubious services. The paper was the Herald in Augusta, Georgia. It subscribed to a feature service called NEA, which sold columns and other stories in a one-price package deal that the Herald and many other papers seemed to find irresistible. Unlike its à la carte rivals, whose wares were typesetter-ready, NEA delivered its viands neatly laid out on printed pages that made them look more attractive to editors.



That extra dash of typography meant somebody had to clip the stories chosen for print and paste them onto sheets of copy paper — a quaint necessity of the day — before writing a headline and sending the lot to the composing room, there to be set in type once again.



That somebody — often me — could be counted on to have scissors, rubber-cement pot, and a deskload of soft-leaded, blacker-than-Hitler’s-heart No. 2 copy pencils at the ready. Which is how I came to be thus accessorized for my first meeting with the work of James Earl Breslin Jr., whose writing accounted for roughly half of the most interesting stories in NEA’s sports section, the Green Sheet. I had no reason to wonder about the fellow’s age then, and besides, he was in New York and I was in Augusta. Had I known he was 23, but a couple of years older than I was while gluing down his columns for the linotype operators, I might well have considered dropping out of the game then and there.



Jimmy, you see, had already fast-tracked himself into a job that required more than mere reporting and promised greater rewards. He was very nearly a columnist already, all but freed from the tedious requirements of “objectivity.” In Deadline Artists: America’s Greatest Newspaper Columnists, a new and important anthology, the great Russell Baker describes it this way: The objectivity code “forbade a reporter to write of, say, Senator Blattis: ‘Lying as usual, Senator Blattis declared today …’” Baker concluded, “This obligation to assist in dignifying inferior men … made you feel as though you were nothing more than a megaphone for the convenience of frauds.”

And that is why, like the young Jimmy Breslin, Baker made it a priority to become a columnist as quickly as possible, succeeding so famously that his op-ed essays ran in The New York Times from 1962 to 1998. For Jimmy, NEA’s many papers supplied a nationwide wall on which his talent could grow like a trumpet vine. He’d gone from a 15-year-old copyboy at the Long Island Press to 25-year-old pro still honing his talents under NEA sports editor Harry Grayson, and preparing for … who knew what? What he became was the columnist’s columnist, perhaps the best ever, still writing at age 82 in a time when newspapers themselves are in their own twilight.

Read More →

by C.P. Heiser

Murray and the collection © C.P. Heiser

Turning to his record player and switching to a 78 stylus, Murray lets drop a scarce test pressing of a Valentino recording, circa 1923. “Pale hands I loved beside the Shalimar…” he croons, the voice on key and sure, if only a little brittle. Meanwhile, the door into the collection is open, and I see just a hint of it: a glimpse of the shelves stuffed with the engraved sound of countless other voices and instruments.

Music, as it relates to an object bearing recorded sound: this is what Murray Gershenz has been obsessed with for decades. Born in the Bronx in 1922, he served as a parachute mechanic during the Second World War before moving west and stumbling into a career as a cantor for various Los Angeles synagogues. All the while he collected records and tapes, and soon collecting took over. Big band, jazz and blues. Classical, folk, rock and roll. Murray collected all of it. In the ’60s he opened up a book and music shop at Santa Monica and Western. It wasn’t long before the books were jettisoned and the music took over.

Fifty years later, one of the largest private record collections open to the public sits on Exposition Boulevard between the 10 freeway and Baldwin Hills. Painted twice across the cinderblock exterior — once in large block letters and then in cursive, over the security-gated entrance — is the name Music Man Murray. If a building can be called a doppelganger, than this drab, isolated structure might be the corollary for the man who unlocks its doors and shuffles inside each day.

¤

We speak at Murray’s desk, in the anteroom of the two-story building. Behind me, I can feel the presence of the collection — one that numbers in the hundreds of thousands. Half a million. Maybe more. (The rest is in a warehouse somewhere else.) But let’s get something straight from the outset: this is no museum exhibit, and hardly an archive. It is a singular mass, a monster comprised of hundreds of thousands of recordings, many of them ancient 78 pressings or eight-track cassettes or acetate prints, which, I am beginning to sense, no longer matter so much without each other. Maybe this is why the Collector, who is fast approaching ninety, doesn’t want the thing to splinter apart, doesn’t want it to be sold off piecemeal. He wants a buyer for the monster.

“I want to get the hell out of here,” he mutters at his desk, surrounded by favored memorabilia. An insomniac, he’s spent many nights recording compilations of rare records he didn’t want to lose track of through sale: collecting, in other words, his own collection. These favorites are here, near his desk, always in sight. “Crazy,” I say, admiringly. Murray gives me a sweet look that might be his signature. He is straight out of central casting. Behind a ticklish-looking mustache and large glasses, his eyes are bright and thoughtful, with white tufts of hair decorating the sides of an otherwise bald pate. Glancing over my shoulder I wonder if it’s time to see the collection. Go on in he tells me. He’s feeling tired today.

Behind me, the Collector stands propped within the jamb (doubtless where he ought to be in case of an earthquake), backlit by the open door to the warehouse, the shelves of the collection looming over him: sagging under the stock, insurmountable, and almost pointless — who’s going to climb them? Stymied by the albums which are shoved in so tightly together it takes effort just to pull one out, I turn to look at Murray in the doorframe, and snap a picture. What’s happened to the Collector? What is happening?

“Things just stopped moving,” Murray says, not so much glum as done. Along the side of the staircase, a hulking conveyor belt, used for transporting boxes of inventory between the first and second floors, sits idle. It hasn’t moved in a long time either.

Murray’s got other stuff to do anyway. As it turns out, he’s an actor, does TV and film and radio. If you watch Modern Family or Parks & Recreation, for example, you might have seen Murray. A documentary film by Richard Parks, about Murray and his attempts to sell the collection, debuts this weekend (see the trailer for the film below). In all, Murray seems satisfied with his life. In fact, he seems fine with moving on, leaving the collection — his life’s work — behind. The question is whether somebody will buy it complete and allow Murray to leave, for lack of a better term, with a clear conscience. Otherwise, there will be another, more ambiguous question to face: when does a collection stop being what it is?

¤

Murray remembers the early days of his career, when he was visited by another music collector. The man wanted to sell his collection. Murray went to the man’s house and valued the collection of records — it was full of gems and rarities and worth a small fortune. At the time, starting out as he was, Murray was in no way prepared to make such an acquisition. Of course, he did anyway, taking out a loan and spending much of a day heaving boxes of the man’s records back to his shop. It was an epic score, and Murray still relishes the memory.

Two weeks later the man returned, asking if Murray would consider selling back the collection. The man must have been terribly distraught to embarrass himself this way, but Murray doesn’t remember very well. Why should he? There was no chance in hell he was giving it back. Murray does remember asking the man why he sold the collection in the first place. “Persian rugs,” the man answered. They were his new love, but not for long. The man bought a rug with the money Murray had given him, but missed his records. I imagine a distinguished-looking man in a smoking jacket. Lying on some fine, elaborate carpet, he stares mournfully at the useless record player beside him. Murray shakes his head. The Collector may have wise eyes and a kind face, but there is little sympathy now, only bemusement for the fellow who didn’t know himself well enough to understand that the collection represents the collector, and that to abandon it is to abandon oneself. If you’re ready to let go of what you once were, like Murray says he is today, that’s one thing. If you’re not, you’re like the poor fool who handed Murray his soul. Murray, it turns out, isn’t as sweet as he looks.

In “Unpacking My Library,” his essay on book collecting, Walter Benjamin claims that the best way to acquire a book is to write it oneself. The second best way, he says, is to steal it. The point? There is utter hubris in the collector’s impulse. However self-effacing or geekily awkward a collector might be, however apparently humble in manner or appearance, a true collector harbors inside of him the arrogance of a despot, the blind desire of Cortez. As Benjamin famously quoted the Latin: “Books have their fates.” And copies of books have their fates as well, he says, the most important fate being its “encounter with the collector, and his collection.” For the collector, “the true freedom of all books is somewhere on his shelves.”

Behind Music Man Murrays’s apparent sweetness, the competitive drive to acquire, to possess, still flickers in the story he tells of the errant collector. The collector is both conqueror and liberator. Of any given specific set of like objects, Murray tells me, “You have to have everything.” That is the mark of the true collector: you must possess a private Manifest Destiny, a fetish driven by rivalry, competition. The problem is that Music Man Murray’s rivals just aren’t coming anymore. There aren’t the same obsessive people out there working hard to track down, say, every last acetate copy of Heda Hopper’s radio program “Hollywood Magazine” (which, incidentally, Murray pulled for me from a pile near his desk). As Murray says, they just stopped coming. So the flicker in his eyes snaps on and off, like a pilot light not finding gas.

What puzzles me a little is why Murray doesn’t appear to be suffering from even the mildest case of existential angst. Near the end of Benjamin’s essay, the critic distinguishes between public and private libraries, noting that the phenomenon of collecting loses much of its meaning as it loses its personal owner. Why, then, is Murray okay with giving up his life’s project, the single thing that has defined him more than anything else, and just walking away? Perhaps it’s that he’s come to the conclusion that, without other collectors, he simply is no longer a collector himself. The place that is Music Man Murray and Murray the man are no longer inseparable. The place is the place. Murray is Murray. And if the hand-lettered sign on the building has lost hold of its referent, what, then, is the place worth?

¤

Without prompting, Murray tells me an interesting if apocryphal story. It is about a journalist who visits an asylum to investigate patient treatment. The reporter speaks to different people who present clear reasons for their being committed. During his work, the reporter comes across a man whom he believes to be a visitor like himself, given how absolutely normal — totally sane — his behavior seems. It is only after a long, pleasant chat that this man reveals, in passing, that he is a patient at the asylum. The reporter is flummoxed, and blurts out, “But you’re completely fine! Totally sane! One hundred percent uncertifiable. Why in God’s name are you here!?” The man demurs; the reporter insists. At which point the man’s eyes bulge and he explodes in a rage, attacking the reporter savagely, beating him and clawing at his face. “His problem,” says Murray. “He was convinced he was crazy.” That was his sticking point, Murray says: the guy didn’t want to be told he didn’t belong there.

¤

We’re back at Murray’s desk. I ask him what makes a collector collect, and Murray tells me it’s like malaria. “Once you get bitten, you can’t give it up.”

We smile, but I think we both know that’s not quite accurate. Collecting isn’t a contractible disease, randomly acquired. To be a true collector is an essential trait of personality, like being a “leader,” or a “clown.” It is a private pathology. There is no “somewhat of a collector.” You either are, and you always have been, or you aren’t. If it wasn’t records for Murray, it would have been bottle caps or baseball cards or vintage cars.

And perhaps this is how the story of the lunatic lines up with Murray, at least the Murray of today. Like the lunatic who isn’t a lunatic, Murray is a contradiction: a collector who isn’t a collector. For both men, it may be a question of place. The lunatic will scratch and claw to stay in the asylum no matter how often he’s told he doesn’t belong there. He will protect his rightful place in the asylum. Murray, on the other hand, is leaving the place that has defined him. And someday soon, he hopes, he will be a collector without a collection. Outside, the building with his name on its façade appears to be shrinking, just as music, too, has shrunk. These days, music lives inside a few scattered bits of data, the fetishized object becoming, at least for the masses, not so much the music as the little hand-held device upon which it plays.

I nod and Murray nods and the record scratches out the tune, “Pale hands I loved…” That’s “loved” — past tense — though I doubt this is the last time he plays it.

Left to right, filmmaker Richard Parks, Murray’s son Irv, and Murray © C.P. Heiser

Richard Parks’ documentary Music Man Murray premieres this weekend at the Santa Barbara International Film Festival. For more information about the film you can visit Parks’ site for the film, or click here for a schedule of screening times. It will also be screening at the East Bay Jewish Film Festival.

BORIS DRALYUK

on the grim hardness of a neglected noir master.

Photograph of Paul Cain from back inside flap of Fast One’s first edition (1933)
Photographer Unknown

Paul Cain
The Complete Slayers: Fast One and the Complete Short Stories of Paul Cain
Centipede Press, February 2012. 300 pp.

Coleman said: “Eight ball in the corner.”

There was soft click of ball against ball and then sharper click as the black ball dropped into the pocket Coleman had called.

— Paul Cain, “Murder Done in Blue” (1933)

Somebody always takes it about as far as it’ll go, and no one took the hard-boiled farther than Paul Cain. Cain’s entire contribution to the genre — a slim novel and 14 stories, some of which haven’t seen print since the 1930s — is now available as The Complete Slayers from Centipede Press.

Raymond Chandler tagged Cain’s only novel, Fast One (1933), as “some kind of high point in the ultra hard-boiled manner.” They use that as a blurb; to my mind, those qualifications — “some kind,” “ultra” — reek of anxiety. Stacked pound-for-pound against Cain’s lean and war-hardened antihero Gerry Kells, Chandler’s Philip Marlowe comes off like a flabby, eccentric chatterbox — more Sydney Greenstreet than Humphrey Bogart.

The novel’s title says it all: Fast One. Some have called it A Fast One or The Fast One, but that’s not it. There’s neither need nor time for articles. Someone or something, in the singular, is fast. Fast and singular. And the chase is on:

Kells walked north on Spring. At Fifth he turned west, walked two blocks, turned into a small cigar store. He nodded to the squat bald man behind the counter and went on through the ground-glass-paneled door into a large and bare back room.

There’s so much momentum in those first lines — so little besides movement — that the reader can hardly keep up, much less take a pause. A pause might raise some questions. Just how does Kells get through that ground-glass-paneled door? Does he open it? Bust right through it? Roll through it as if it didn’t exist? But, of course, the door doesn’t exist. Cain’s language is stripped so bare it’s hardly referential. That’s the central paradox of the hard-boiled style: For all its reputed hardness, the universe it conjures is eerily immaterial — verbal, not substantive. Hard-boiled protagonists throw punches indefatigably, get blackjacked unconscious at the end of one chapter only to emerge with a slight headache at the start of the next, and keep moving to the last.

Read More →

Some recommended happenings in the Los Angeles area this week, for your potential enjoyment.

Thursday, January 26^th: Héctor Tobar in conversation with journalist Jesse Katz at Central Library beginning at 7:00 pm.

Literary Death Match featuring LARB’s Matthew Specktor, Edan Lepucki, Ben Loory, and Natashia Deon plus a trio of all-star judges at Busby’s East beginning at 8:15 pm.

Carol Wolper discusses and signs Anne of Hollywood at Book Soup beginning at 7:00 pm.

Ben Marcus reads and signs his novel The Flame Alphabet at Skylight Books beginning at 7:30 pm.

Friday, January 27^th: Brian Kellow discusses and signs Pauline Kael: A Life in the Dark at Book Soup beginning at 7:00 pm.

Sunday, January 28th: Tongue and Groove presents: Heather Havrilesky, James Meetze, Susan Sherman, Leslie Schwartz, and Ron Darian at The Hotel Cafe beginning at 6:00 pm.

Tuesday, January 31^st: Pico Iyer in conversation with Los Angeles Times staff writer Tom Curwen at Central Library beginning at 7:00 pm.

Wednesday, February 1^st: An evening with David Milch discussing his writing career and new HBO series Luck at Track 16 beginning at 6:30 pm.

David Graeber discusses and signs his book Debt: The First 5,000 Years at Skylight Books beginning at 7:30 pm.

Thursday, February 2^nd: Tricia Tunstall in conversation with community affairs director of L.A. Philharmonic, Leni Boorstin at Central Library beginning at 7:00 pm.

SHARON MIZOTA

on Yayoi Kusama’s autobiography.

Stars Infinity (A.B.C), 2003 © Yayoi Kusama
Courtesy Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery

Yayoi Kusama
Infinity Net: The Autobiography of Yayoi Kusama
Translated by Ralph McCarty
University of Chicago Press, January 2012. 256 pp.

Discussions of Yayoi Kusama must inevitably reckon with the state of the artist’s mental health. The 82-year-old Japanese icon, who deftly inserted herself into the epicenter of Minimalism, Pop, and performance art in New York City in the 1960s and 1970s, continues to produce eye-popping, whimsical, surreal works. She also lives — by choice — in a mental institution.

An art-world provocateur turned living legend, Kusama is, despite her stature in the art world, also something of an “outsider artist.” Although she was schooled in art — unlike artists to whom the term is usually applied — she is seemingly driven more by personal neuroses and compulsions than artistic or intellectual trends. However, Kusama’s place in contemporary art is more complex than the simple story of an outsider finding her way into the fold. Her autobiography, written in 2002 and now appearing in English for the first time, seeks to secure her reputation among the international avant-garde. Yet it is also highly ambivalent, pointing to the limitations of traditional distinctions between insider and outsider.

Read More →

by Jeffrey Wasserstrom

Collage © Lisa Jane Persky

Once upon a time, specialists in Chinese studies, like me, felt we had a lot in common with scholars who focused on Russia. We each shared an interest in large countries that had command economies and Leninist systems of rule. We each struggled to make sense of comparably opaque and often misleading official pronouncements. And when it came to works of dystopian fiction, we both studied places that were widely considered “Orwellian” in nature. But then came a pair of events whose twentieth anniversaries have just been marked: the collapse of the Soviet Union and the founding of a new Russian Federation. In the wake of these major changes, the comparative landscape began to shift. Soon, the contrasts between China and Russia seemed to far outweigh their similarities. After all, 1992 began with a new government in Moscow striving to leave the Communist era behind, while an old one in Beijing expressed its determination to keep China under Communist Party control and territorially intact.

And yet 2012 begins with the Russian and Chinese constellations once again falling into alignment. China is still sometimes referred to as Orwellian, but neither it nor Russia is now seen as the closest real-life approximation of a “Big Brother State,” a title that now belongs to settings such as North Korea where harsher forms of authoritarianism are the rule. Some China specialists, myself included, have recently argued that consumerism, materialism and a culture of distraction have come to play such a pivotal role in keeping Hu Jintao and company in power that Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World may now supplant the previous fictional template through which we once viewed Chinese authoritarianism: Orwell’s 1984. My reading of commentaries and reportage on Putin’s Russia suggests that the same shift from Orwell to Huxley makes sense when we look toward this fledgling, and questionable, democracy.

The realignment of the trajectories of the two countries creates an eerie effect for me when I happen to read something on Russia with the goal of forgetting, for a brief moment, about China — the country I teach and write about for a living. My effort to escape is undermined by the feeling I sometimes get when immersed in a newspaper or magazine article about Russia — the feeling that the words coming off the page could just as well have been written about China.

This happened most recently when I picked up David Remnick’s fascinating “Letter from Moscow: The Civil Archipelago,” which appeared in the New Yorker’s final issue of 2011. Focusing largely on responses to Russia’s late 2011 elections, it offers a sweeping look at everything from the complex and challenging activities of human rights groups, to the still-underdeveloped nature of civil society in a post-totalitarian state, to the limits placed on the press in a country whose leaders are determined to contain the flow of information that undermines their authority. The big themes Remnick addresses often brought Chinese examples to my mind, but so, too, did some of its small details. For example, in trying to capture the frustration and outrage that many urban residents feel at the special perks enjoyed by members of the government, their kin and their cronies, Remnick turns to driving habits. Solving traffic congestion in Moscow is a simple matter for “officials and the well-connected,” who employ specially issued “flashing blue lights” that, when placed atop their luxury cars, allows them to zoom through traffic-snarled streets as ordinary drivers have to pull aside to let them pass. To be sure, China does not have the same blue light system. Nevertheless, the Chinese Internet is filled with angry posts describing incidents when officials and their family members acted — and got away with acting — as though the rules that apply to others simply do not apply to them.

I feel a particularly strong sense of “he could have just come back from China” as Remnick describes a recent spate of urban protests in Russia. For Remnick, this form of resistance demonstrates that the authoritarian country’s young professionals are becoming less “bovine,” “apathetic” and “anesthetized by stability” than they once were. This exact assessment of Russia’s middle class struck me as something I could have read on the “Letter from China” blog by Evan Osnos. (Osnos, incidentally, reports from Beijing for the magazine that Remnick edits.) It is not just that we have been seeing an uptick in middle class activism lately in the PRC as well as in Russia. It is that, as Osnos often points out, the Chinese authorities have been working overtime to convince upwardly mobile young professionals to continue to accept a flawed status quo, as long as it brings them creature comforts: a deal that the government struck with this demographic group in the wake of 1989, and one that is becoming less and less secure as time goes by.

One particular Osnos post on this theme, written in 2010 and called “The Age of Complacency?”, reviews the main points of a dystopian novel by Chan Koonchung, a former Hong Kong resident now based in Beijing, which was generating enormous buzz in China’s capital. Just released in English as The Fat Years, Chan’s novel (which owes a good deal to both Orwell and Huxley but only name-checks the latter) examines how “the most privileged and educated men and women” in a China just over the horizon (the story is set in 2013), “struggle to balance the benefits and perils of life under high-functioning authoritarianism.” The novel encourages us to wonder about the choices that lie before those who, as opposed to being left behind during their country’s rise, “have reaped the rewards” of economic development, but now increasingly wonder what they have sacrificed in terms of political liberties. Remnick identifies a similarly tricky situation in Russia, at a time when there is increasing unease with Putin’s government among not just dissidents and the poor, but some who have been doing quite well for themselves in recent years.

Osnos’ “Letter from China” is one of the blogs I rely on most heavily to help me track the changes in a country that I can only periodically visit. His April comments on the Arab Spring were particularly fascinating for a China specialist watching from afar. In posts entitled “China: The Big Chill” and “Why Ai Weiwei Matters,” he reported on government moves to intimidate or silence gadfly figures, including many less internationally famous than Ai who were detained around the same time and yet in some cases remain in prison. These moves to quell freedom of expression, Osnos argues, were launched in part because Beijing was jumping at shadows in the wake of Mubarak’s fall. Yes, the Arab Spring touched even China. And, as Remnick notes, the same was true for Russia. The swift transformations in the Middle East and North Africa of early 2011 ensured that the year would be a nervous one for authoritarian leaders of all ideological persuasions, and his depiction of the anxiety in Russian leadership circles was eerily similar in tone to those nervous shudders emanating from Beijing.

The tense state of affairs in Chechnya, a frontier zone with a largely Muslim population, doesn’t do anything to help fears of actual resistance spreading to the capital. Remnick’s “Letter from Moscow” highlights these regional “differences” within Russia. Despite the shift toward Brave New World governance in Moscow, the style of rule in Chechnya seems to be much more akin to the “boot-on-the-face” variety depicted in 1984. In Remnick’s words, the authorities are particularly “ruthless” and “draconian” in dealing with any hint of dissent there, and he describes the dangers journalists face in reporting on and from the region. Chechnya lingers as perhaps the biggest failure in “democratic” Russia, making it, again, not so different from China these days.

Again, Osnos’ coverage of China, in this case of regional strife in the borderland area of Xinjiang, aligns with Remick’s in interesting ways. Like Chechnya, which stands at the very edge of the Russian Federation, Xinjiang is located at the edge of the PRC. In a July 2009 post called “Looking Beyond Ethnicity,” Osnos refers to Beijing’s “decades of trying, unsuccessfully, to snuff out resistance” in Xinjiang. The Party’s mishandling of Uighur/Han tensions — and its overlooking of their economic aspects — has resulted in a region “embroiled in a pattern of uprising and crackdown” that contrasts sharply with the situation in most other parts of the country. In a follow-up (“Xinjiang: The Reckoning Begins”), Osnos describes a Han man armed with a stick who tears open a car door to threaten the pair of foreign reporters inside.

The similarities between Russia (where national elections, no matter how flawed, are held) and China (where the upcoming leadership transition is being worked out in obscure ways) should not be overstated. The Russian press is not controlled as tightly as the Chinese media. Putin is not just like Hu Jintao. Chechnya is not just like Xinjiang. And so on.

Still, even though any China-Russia analogy is bound to be imperfect, imperfect analogies can be useful. They can lead us to break out of entrenched, misleading modes of thinking and help us become attentive to connections and parallels we might otherwise miss. Putting today’s Russia and contemporary China in a shared category, rather than one in a post-Communist box and the other in a still-Communist one, can help us see things about each country more clearly. It also makes it less surprising to hear that leaders in Moscow and Beijing may once more be looking to the other capital for inspiration about how to handle specific problems, as Remnick illustrates in his one comment about China: a reference to members of Putin’s circle studying the sophisticated techniques the Chinese authorities have developed in their struggle to control the flow of dissenting opinions via the Internet.

The imperfect China-Russia analogy inspires a final fanciful thought, triggered in part by 2012 marking not just the 20th anniversary of the founding of a successor state to the old Soviet Union but also the 40th anniversary of a turning point in Chinese history: Nixon’s historic meeting with Mao. If a Rip Van Winkle figure prone to two-decade-long naps woke in late February 1972, after falling asleep in 1952, he would have been shocked to learn that a summit was underway in China between Mao (one of the world’s most famous Communist leaders) and Richard Nixon (a fervently anti-Communist American President). But as the preceding exercise has shown, if the same fellow dozed off again in 1992 and woke up now, he would also be in for an unsettling surprise: discovering it was no longer easy to tell, without paying close attention to details, whether a New Yorker “Letter from…” article or blog post was about a post-Communist Moscow or the still-Communist Beijing.

¤

Jeffrey Wasserstrom is Chair of the History Department at the University of California, Irvine, and the author, most recently, of China in the 21st Century: What Everyone Needs to Know (Oxford University Press, 2010). His reviews and commentaries have appeared in newspapers such as the Los Angeles Times and a wide range of magazines and journals of opinion, including New Left Review, the TLS, the Nation, the Huffington Post, Time and Newsweek. He is the Editor of the Journal of Asian Studies and co-founder of the UCI-based China Beat blog/electronic magazine. Read his first piece for LARB, “Hot Dystopic,” which appeared in May 2011.

Articles by Evan Osnos referenced by Professor Wasserstrom are available at Osnos’s blog. Specific links are as follows:

“The Age of Complacency?”

“China: The Big Chill”

“Looking Beyond Ethnicity”

FRANKLIN BRUNO on 19th century musicking

and SARA JAFFE on punk’s racial politics.

First Appearance of Jenny Lind in America, September 11, 1850

FRANKLIN BRUNO

Gilded Age Fan Club

Daniel Cavicchi
Listening and Longing: Music Lovers in the Age of Barnum
Wesleyan University Press, November 2011. 256 pp.

In 1869, Patrick Gilmore, the former Union army bandleader, who wrote the lyrics to “When Johnny Comes Marching Home,” organized the National Peace Jubilee and Grand Music Festival on the model of “monster concerts” introduced in Europe 15 years earlier. (Think of it as a kind of postbellum Bonaroo.) Around 30,000 Bostonians — over a tenth of the city’s population at the time — flocked to a makeshift coliseum for several days of concerts by a thousand-member orchestra and massive choral groups of up to 10 times that size. Three years later, the same city’s “World Peace Jubilee” doubled the number of singers and musicians, and more than trebled the audience. For the later event, Gilmore imported Johann Strauss, no less, to conduct his own global hits. “Now just conceive of my position face to face with a public of four hundred thousand Americans,” the Waltz King later wrote:

Suddenly, a cannon-shot rang out, a gentle hint for us twenty thousand to begin playing the Blue Danube. I gave the signal, my hundred assistant conductors followed me as quickly as they could, and then there broke out an unholy row such as I shall never forget.

The performance was more satisfying to Yankees like 15-year-old Helen Atkins, who reported in her diary that she “enjoyed it ever so much. Strauss played ‘the Blue Danube’ perfectly mag[nificient] – !!!!! All went off very finely.”

Read More →

Image: M. Goetzman

Literature and Sport from Ford to Foster Wallace by Jason Cowley: “I used to think that a choice had to be made between sport and literature; that you couldn’t be both a sportsman and a book man. They represented two separate and distinct cultures, the life of the mind and the life of action, and there was no connecting bridge between them… I was wrong, of course, but it took me many years and the emergence of the new memoir-writing about sport, inspired by Nick Hornby’s Fever Pitch and Pete Davies’s All Played Out in the early 1990s, to understand why.”


Pico Iyer: An advocation of the long and meandering sentence: “Nowadays the planet is moving too fast for even a Rushdie or DeLillo to keep up, and many of us in the privileged world have access to more information than we know what to do with. What we crave is something that will free us from the overcrowded moment and allow us to see it in a larger light. No writer can compete, for speed and urgency, with texts or CNN news flashes or RSS feeds, but any writer can try to give us the depth, the nuances — the ‘gaps,’ as Annie Dillard calls them — that don’t show up on many screens. Not everyone wants to be reduced to a sound bite or a bumper sticker… Enter (I hope) the long sentence…”

David Shields: An advocation of a newer, more immediate fiction: “Books, if they want to survive, need to figure out how to coexist with contemporary culture and catalyze the same energies for literary purposes. That cut-to-the-bone, cut-to-the-chase quality: this is how to write and read now.”


Ta-Nehisi Coates on Jennifer Grotz’s poem “Poppies”: “When I first read Jennifer Grotz’s ‘Poppies’ all I could tell you was that I liked its sound. I didn’t have any idea what the poem was about. I just liked letting the words fall off my tongue when I read it aloud. It was elemental, and I think almost every poem I love is like that for me. At a base level it just sounds good… But then I went back and I saw the philosophy at work.”

[excerpt] Michael Schulman on Polari, “once the jabberwocky for British gay men”: “The existence of a ‘gay language’ is not well known, even in the U.K. A poll of British gay men in 2000 revealed that half of respondents had never heard of it. If Polari is known outside of England, it is most likely because Morrissey once titled an album Bona Drag, which means ‘nice outfit.’ And there is a brief Polari scene — with subtitles — in the 1998 film Velvet Goldmine (‘A tart, my dears, a tart in gildy clobber!’). But you’d have to scour a lot of pubs to find anyone who still uses it in conversation. When the Cambridge list came out, Paul Baker, the leading Polari scholar, was surprised that it had been considered endangered, not extinct.”

GREGORY LEON MILLER and WALTON MUYUMBA

on the recent work of Percival Everett.

Illustration of Percival Everett © Joe Linton

GREGORY LEON MILLER

Identity Crisis

Percival Everett
Assumption
Graywolf Press, October 2011. 225 pp.

Percival Everett
Erasure
Graywolf Press, October 2011 (orig. 2001). 272 pp.

Over the course of more than 20 books, Percival Everett has produced as rich a body of fiction as just about any contemporary American writer, but mainstream literary recognition has proved elusive. As an African-American writer deeply interested in the American West, and one with an experimentalist bent, he’s certainly no marketer’s dream. His books range so freely — from satire to absurdism, from realism to metafiction — that it’s difficult to get a fix on him. Then again, the same might be said of Cervantes, Sterne, or Twain.

Identity is the bedrock of the rational. Aristotle’s theory of identity holds that each entity has a specific nature. An owl cannot be a monkey; an elevator cannot be a marimba. Destabilize identity and the ground beneath our feet crumbles: We risk falling into madness. It’s no accident that Everett’s two variations on Greek myth, For Her Dark Skin (1990) and Frenzy (1997), bring readers inside the minds of Medea and Dionysus, those avatars of the irrational. Indeed, so thoroughly do his books complicate identity and undermine logic — in terms of both content and form — that they elude critical categories.

Everett’s new book, Assumption, begins as a standard crime novel, though anyone familiar with the author will know it’s unlikely to stay that way. The protagonist, Ogden Walker, a deputy sheriff in remote Plata, New Mexico, likes his job well enough, even if he’s not especially good at it. He’s bothered by the imagined disapproval of his dead father, a black man who didn’t care for police and generally despised white people even though he married one. Ogden’s mother lives nearby and is the only person outside of work who Ogden sees regularly. The narrator remarks, “It was hard for a son to think that his father hated half of him,” underscoring the internal split, or doubling, that becomes clearer as the narrative unfolds. Ogden “deeply love[s]” the New Mexican landscape yet feels “like a failure remaining there,” sensing there was “a life he was not pursuing.” Like many of Everett’s protagonists, Ogden comes to us burdened by the past, by others’ expectations, by accumulated disappointment and stress, and by an ever-sharpening sense of mortality.

Read More →

Still from trailer for The Big Combo (1955) Allied Artists
John Alton, Cinematographer

Our monthly crime fiction column by CULLEN GALLAGHER.

This month, books by Jake Hinkson, John Rector, Reed Farrel Coleman, Alan Glynn, and Harry Whittington.

Jake Hinkson
Hell on Church Street
New Pulp Press, December 2011. 198 pp.

Is this noir enough for you? “The story of my life is I lived, I fucked up, and I’m going to die. I’ll probably go to hell.” Hell on Church Street is the debut novel from Jake Hinkson, who first made his mark as a scholar in the pages of Eddie Muller’s Noir City Sentinel and with short stories in ezines like Beat to a Pulp. Hinkson’s first book is like some unholy union of Sinclair Lewis’s Elmer Gantry, Jim Thompson’s The Killer Inside Me, and Charles Willeford’s The Black Mass of Brother Springer. Hell on Church Street tells the story of Geoffrey Webb, a rotund con artist with a clerical collar and a delusional superiority complex. After taking a job as a youth minister for the Higher Living Baptist Church in Little Rock, Webb begins a doomed affair with the preacher’s teenage daughter. Once the local sheriff gets wind of this, he attempts to blackmail Webb into stealing a valuable document from the preacher, which sets off a chain reaction of violence in the Baptist community.

Hell on Church Street is one of the rare novels that actually deserves the over-used comparison to Jim Thompson, not just because Webb follows in the footsteps of such crazed protagonists as Lou Ford (The Killer Inside Me) and Nick Corey (Pop. 1280), but because Hinkson takes a risk and deviates from Thompson’s iconic moulds. As Webb’s world spins further out of his control, he develops a self-awareness lacking in Ford and Corey: “And then it hit me. Maybe the problem was me. Maybe I wasn’t as hidden and smart as I thought I was. Maybe the problem had been me all along.” Despite his perverse sociopathy, Webb suffers a genuine fall from grace, and we sympathize with him in ways that we never can with Thompson’s protagonists.

Who do we hold responsible — or thank — for unleashing such a savagely psychotic, yet strangely compassionate novel as Hell on Church Street? That would be New Pulp Press, a small outfit under the editorial leadership of Jon Bassoff. Over the past three years, they have cultivated an arsenal of bold, experimental crime fiction titles — many of them from debut authors such as Hinkson — that carry on in the grand noir tradition without pandering to pastiche. Leonard Fritz’s In Nine Kinds of Pain is a love letter to the seediest aspects of Detroit, with literary echoes of Burroughs and Bulgakov; Heath Lowrance’s The Bastard Hand is a crack-addled ride through the backwoods of Mississippi; and if you ever wondered what a collaboration between Bukowski and Ian Fleming might have looked like, check out Jonathan Woods’ collection Bad Juju and Other Tales of Madness and Mayhem. And with Woods’ debut novel, A Death in Mexico, already on deck for 2012, New Pulp Press is a small publisher to watch.

Read More →

Image: Strata © Stanford Kay

SUSAN SALTER REYNOLDS on Trea Martyn’s Queen Elizabeth in the Garden,
Clyde Phillip Wachsberger’s Into the Garden with Charles,
and Christian McEwen’s World Enough & Time.

Trea Martyn
Queen Elizabeth in the Garden: A Story of Love, Rivalry, and Spectacular Gardens
Bluebridge, January 2012. 336 pp.

Imagine a time when, to win a woman’s love, the ardent suitor had to create a garden more beautiful, more sensual, more unusual than his competition. Seen through Trea Martyn’s fascinating lens, the fate of England in the 16th century rested on just such a competition, waged by Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester and William Cecil, Elizabeth’s Lord Treasurer. Cecil created his fabulous, strange gardens at his estate, Theobalds. Dudley spent the equivalent of millions of dollars on his gardens at Kenilworth Castle. Cecil was a constant, mild man; Dudley a bit of a hothead who longed to prove himself in battle. Endless songs and poems and puns about the competition were written for the Queen’s attention. Each spring, she would decamp from London with her court to visit friends and subjects — these trips were called the Queen’s progresses, and they very nearly bankrupted the hosts. The excess — the food, fireworks, fountains, plays, and myriad follies — were well documented, but Martyn brings these marvelous, strange parties and dinners to life. There is also a great deal of information here on the history of gardening (Italian gardens were all the rage during Elizabeth’s reign), the British infatuation with flowers, herbs, and plants from around the world, and the creation of herbal apothecaries (Elizabeth insisted on treating her ailments with herbal remedies). Great gardeners like Mountain Jennings, John Tradescant, Thomas Hill, John Gerard, and William Turner all make appearances in this capacious book. It is easier to root for Dudley, whose untimely death cut short his imaginative gardening — but Cecil was a worthy opponent, and Elizabeth played them both quite cruelly.

Read More →

JEFF CHANG on Catherine Opie’s Inauguration

and BRENDAN BOYLE on Michael Fried’s Four Honest Outlaws.

Catherine Opie, Untitled #1 (Inauguration 2009)

JEFF CHANG

The Future Belongs To Crowds

Catherine Opie
Inauguration
Gregory R. Miller & Co, September 2011. 124 pp.

In 2008, Newsweek art critic Peter Plagens asked if the photographer Catherine Opie had become too safe. Opie made her first big splash at the 1995 Whitney Biennial, where she offered “Self-Portrait/Pervert,” in which she appeared in a black leather mask and pants against a glowing rococo-patterned cloth, her arms pierced by 46 eighteen-gauge needles, the title “Pervert” carved into her skin over her breasts. “When a real live publisher, studio or museum delivers unto you readers or viewers you didn’t have before, your palms get a little sweaty,” he wrote. “You feel obligated to give them something a little more accessible, a little more mainstream than the eccentricities that got you noticed in the first place.” What LCD Soundsystem’s James Murphy had called “Losing My Edge,” Plagens was calling stage fright.

Opie’s new book, Inauguration — composed of photos shot on and around January 20, 2009, when Barack Obama became the nation’s first black president — likely will not change his mind. What could be more accessible, more mainstream than covering, as Deborah Willis puts it in her catalog essay, “a ‘day in the life’ of one of the most anticipated [events] in U.S. history”?

This book arrives at a time when the culture wars are flaring up again, questions of identity are resurging, and another struggle over the meaning of America awaits in the agonizing electoral season ahead. Disillusionment with Obama is widespread. His unsteady governing has tested the once hopeful. Obama’s own “eccentricities” seem to have been sanded away. If Plagens is to be believed, Obama and Opie could be mirrors of one another, the one in politics, the other in the arts.

But it’s not quite so simple. The Occupy protesters, whose encampments numbered over 900 at their peak this fall, now embody the desire for change. At Berkeley High — where the first urban slang dictionary was compiled, and whose students joined the militant Occupy Oakland, Occupy Cal, and Occupy Berkeley protestors this past winter — there is a new term of derision: “1%.” Working definition: “Someone whose actions or thoughts are socially unacceptable, usually involving deception and/or theft.” Usage: “I called shotgun but Isaac took the seat anyway. He’s so 1%.”

Not long ago, Obama appeared to be the figure who might bridge divides, end the culture wars, and usher in a “post-racial” era. Instead, the polarization has intensified. Despite his best efforts to appear self-effacing when he could have been proud, pliable when he could have been firm, he still became the image of fear, the specter of all the things that “we Americans” are not. Immigrants, college students and youths, and David Wojnarowicz once again became targets.

Opie’s Inauguration, like William Eggleston’s 1976 Election Eve series, depicts the President and the First Lady only by proxy, as flickering dots on mobile LED video screens. Instead she places her faith in the crowds. Lines gather patiently. People smile. They sell t-shirts and calendars. They mug and hang from the White House fence. They pose beside the building nameplate for the National Council of Negro Women. They greet the anti-war protestors and the people protesting Guantanamo with cameras, not jeers. The tone of Inauguration is one of calm anticipation.

We’re still waiting.

Read More →

PETER CAMPION on Carol Muske-Dukes

and ANGE MLINKO on Susan Stewart.

Satellite view of the Mississippi River shows riverbank land-use patterns.
Image courtesy of NASA

PETER CAMPION

Find Yourself A City To Live In

Carol Muske-Dukes
Twin Cities
Penguin, May 2011. 96 pp.

You wake up in a new city, but you don’t know which one it is. Before the rational part of your mind kicks in, while the traffic blurs past, your memory shuffles for possible answers. New York? Your cousin’s house in Jackson, Mississippi? Los Angeles? Or right at home, wherever that may be? The disorientation can be unnerving, but strangely pleasurable too. Certainly, there’s a tinge of glamour: if you don’t know what city you’re in, you must really be a big shot. But that doesn’t completely explain the pleasure; there’s something deeper, something more immediately grafted to sensation. You feel that you’re waking into the unknown, the possible. Your consciousness and your surroundings have become mutually permeable. Or else, the opposite feels true: the link between consciousness and its surroundings has broken, and now you must struggle to readjust. Either way, in those moments, the relation of the self to the world feels somehow more active, more engaged.

What makes Carol Muske-Dukes’ new collection of poems, Twin Cities, so impressive is her passionate attentiveness to this very state. She has a unique ability to reflect and embody how our personal experiences and the actual spaces through which we travel fuse and fissure. Muske-Dukes has long been a superb poet of travel — not in the strictly touristic sense (though she has written some fine poems about tourism) but in the more basic, expansive sense of movement through space. I remember finding her 1997 collection An Octave Above Thunder: New and Selected Poems in a college bookstore and turning to the opening poem, “Like This.” Here are the first twelve lines:

Maybe it’s not the city you thought
it was. Maybe its flaws, like cracks
in freeway pylons, got bigger, caught
your eye, like swastikas on concrete stacks.

Maybe lately the dull astrologies of End,
Millennium-edge rant about world death
make sense. Look. Messages the dead send
take time to arrive. When the parched breath

of the Owens River Valley guttered out,
real voices bled through the black & white.
The newspaper ad cried, We who are about
to die salute you. Unarmed, uncontrite.

Read More →

Some recommended happenings in the Los Angeles area this week, for your potential enjoyment.

Wednesday, January 18^th: Eric Weiner in conversation with Lisa Napoli discussing his new book at Track 16 at Bergamot Station beginning at 8:00 pm.

Ayad Akhtar and Amy Waldman: Two novelists on the lives of American Muslims before and after 9/11 at Central Library beginning at 7:00 pm.

The Under Appreciated & Egocentric Poetry Readings presents Kate Gale, Billy Burgos, Rebecca Gonzales, and Luivette Resto at Ellis Martin Gallery beginning at 7:00 pm.

Thursday, January 19^th: Kramers Ergot Number 8 book party release with Ben Jones, Johnny Ryan, Sammy Harkham, and Tim Hensley at FAMILY beginning at 7:00 pm.

Friday, January 20^th: Steven J. Ross discusses and signs Hollywood Left and Right: How Movie Stars Shaped American Politics at Book Soup beginning at 7:00 pm.

A Reading Party with Popcorn and Young Adult Authors (Carol Tanzman, Janet Tashijian, Crickett Rumley, and LARB YA Editor Cecil Castellucci) at The Last Bookstore beginning at 7:00 pm.

Lectures from Beyond present Will Alexander: “Poetry as Divine Roulette” at Beyond Baroque beginning at 7:00 pm.

Saturday, January 21^st: Hollywood Forever and PEN Center USA Present: A reading by Anne Carson at The Masonic Lodge beginning at 8:00 pm, introduced by LARB Poetry Editor Gabrielle Calvocoressi.

Monday, January 23^rd: Author Norman Lebrecht in conversation with Deborah Borda, president and CEO of Los Angeles Philharmonic Association at Central Library beginning at 7:00 pm.

Wednesday, January 25^th: Les Figues Press presents: Play It Forward at The Last Bookstore, starting at 7:30 pm. Readers will include Harold Abramowitz, Carribean Fragoza, Myriam Gurba, Jen Hofer, Jibade-Khalil Huffman, and the LARB’s very own Kate Wolf.

Thursday, January 26^th: Héctor Tobar in conversation with journalist Jesse Katz at Central Library beginning at 7:00 pm.

Literary Death Match featuring LARB Senior Fiction Editor Matthew Specktor, Edan Lepucki, Ben Loory, Natashia Deon, and a trio of all-star judges at Busby’s East beginning at 8:15 pm.

NATALIE STANDIFORD

on Colin and Maile Meloy.

Prue and Curtis in the I.W. from Wildwood Illustration © Carson Ellis

Colin Meloy
Wildwood
Illustrated by Carson Ellis
Balzer & Bray (HarperCollins), August 2011. 560 pp.

Maile Meloy
The Apothecary
Illustrated by Ian Schoenherr
G.P. Putnam’s Sons (Penguin), October 2011. 368 pp.

Talented families are the nature-versus-nurture debate come to life. How do two or more writers turn up in one family? Is there such a thing as literary genes, or a writerly upbringing? Maybe it’s just a coincidence; certainly there are more examples of writers whose siblings have other interests entirely. Literary families are the anomaly. And, like any rarity, they fascinate.

There aren’t a whole lot of examples of literary siblings where all shine equally bright: Emily and Charlotte Brontë (both better known today than their siblings, Anne and Branwell), Margaret Drabble and A.S. Byatt (famous feuders), Nancy and Jessica Mitford … One sibling is often more successful than the others, as in the case of Evelyn and Alec Waugh, or in the Minot family, where all seven children are artists of one sort or another but Susan is the star.

Until last year, Maile and Colin Meloy were stars in separate galaxies. Maile is the acclaimed author of the novels Liars and Saints and A Family Daughter, and the story collections Half in Love and Both Ways Is the Only Way I Want It. Colin is the lead singer of The Decemberists, an arty folk rock collective whose fantastical, narrative albums have captured a wide and impassioned audience. Last year, sister and brother both ventured into new skies, albeit the same one: Maile Meloy’s The Apothecary was published by G.P. Putnam’s Sons in October, while Colin Meloy’s Wildwood came out in August, courtesy of HarperCollins. Both are young adult novels.

Read More →

MICHAEL NORTH on two volumes of letters by modernist masters

and STEVEN G. KELLMAN on Hemingway’s Boat.

Ernest Hemingway in Kenya, 1953. LOOK Magazine Photograph
Public domain, part of collection given to The Library of Congress

MICHAEL NORTH

Postal Modernism

Sandra Spanier and Robert W. Trogdon, eds.
The Letters of Ernest Hemingway: Volume 1, 1907-1922
Cambridge University Press, September 2011. 516 pp.

George Craig et al, eds.
The Letters of Samuel Beckett: Volume 2, 1941-1956
Cambridge University Press, September 2011. 886 pp.

Cambridge University Press has been advertising these two volumes of letters together, and, sure enough, Amazon reports that readers who bought one also tended to buy the other. There are a number of obvious reasons for linking the two writers, since they were both famous modernists, each one master of his own idiosyncratically spare prose style, his own particular way of not saying things. Hemingway and Beckett both received the Nobel Prize, fifteen years apart, and when Hemingway won in 1954, it was in the same general atmosphere of international existentialism that made Beckett famous that year, the year in which Waiting for Godot was published by Grove Press. The book that is generally considered to have put Hemingway over the top, The Old Man and the Sea, seemed to many international readers the same sort of bare existential drama that Beckett was just then putting on stage.

Still, readers who actually do buy these two volumes of letters together and read them more or less at the same time are likely to suffer from significant disorientation, for the two authors, although famously associated with the same literary circles in Paris, seem to have inhabited different planets. Some of this is due to the fact that publication of the first volume of Hemingway’s letters has coincided with the second volume of Beckett’s. Hemingway’s are the letters of a boy, who remains just as juvenile at the end of the volume when he has unaccountably become pals with Gertrude Stein and Ezra Pound. Beckett’s letters come from the period in which he completes his most accomplished works, Godot and the trilogy of novels Molloy, Malone Dies, and The Unnamable. At this time he perfects the somber, despairingly negative, attitude toward fame and accomplishment he was to maintain for the rest of his life. Reading the two sets of letters together is therefore a bit like stopping an Andy Hardy movie to read a few pages of Civilization and Its Discontents.

Read More →

Image: C.P. Heiser

Kate Braverman on this place: “I know California isn’t a real destination. You can’t get there from New Jersey, not simply by following a line drawn on a map. The process of arrival is more subtle and complex. It involves acts of contrition. You must appease the gods. You must find novel forms of penance. You must tattoo your children and look at the wonder. It’s about conjuring and awakening and intuitions you wish you never had.” (From Wonders of the West, offline and out of print)

Dave Gardetta on the true costs of parking: “Our downtown contains more parking spaces per acre than any other city in the world and has been adding them at a rate of about 1,000 a year for a century. If you grew up here, the earliest and most essential phrase drilled into you by adults — ‘Remember, we’re in blue Mickey’ — was uttered in a parking lot bigger than Disneyland itself. Angelenos can immediately recognize outsiders, lost souls seen wandering through parking garages with no memory of where the Corolla sits.”

Tilda Swinton on Woolf’s Orlando: “Woolf wrote of the limitations of memoir – ‘they leave out the person to whom things happened’ – and so with Orlando she fuses memoir and biography, that discipline so revered in her father’s study and which she so eagerly wished to revolutionise in a night. We could say that Orlando is Woolf’s avatar dressed up in Sackville-West’s clothing.”

Caitlin Flanagan on what it feels like to be a girl (reading Joan Didion): “Didion’s genius is that she understands what it is to be a girl on the cusp of womanhood, in that fragile, fleeting, emotional time that she explored in a way no one else ever has. Didion is, depending on the reader’s point of view, either an extraordinarily introspective or an extraordinarily narcissistic writer. As such, she is very much like her readers themselves. ‘I’ve been reading you since I was an adolescent,’ a distinctly non-adolescent female voice said on a call-in show a decade ago, and Didion nodded, comprehending. All of us who love her the most have, in ways literal and otherwise, been reading her since adolescence.”

Chris Wallace on what it feels like to be him: “At least four times I’ve gone home from a day’s work without a word, never to return. I’ve left schools, left my position as starting quarterback for a college football team, and left this piece a half dozen times. My distinguishing feature is a pair of taillights.”

Lars Bang Larsen on art in the long nineties: “Art became animated by biennials, magazines and art fairs; by artists who strayed from the studio and integrated their mobility into their work; and by curators who shed the historical baggage of the museum’s archive. The general activity that surrounded art – its media, infrastructure and social activity – became as prominent and energetic as art itself.”

INGRID NORTON

writes us from the Motor City.

I was sitting in the Telway diner around the edge of midnight. The Telway is a story in itself: a chrome island built during the 1940s, floating on a blighted stretch of Michigan Avenue. Telway is staffed by the Appalachian whites who long ago moved to Detroit for work and, more recently, to the suburbs to live. It’s open 24 hours and nothing costs more than $2.25. I ordered a fish sandwich and had the place to myself, except for the short-order cook, the waitress, and the cashier. A pair of bulky night workers stood in the vestibule and asked for hamburgers, heads framed by the take-away window. Then an ambulance pulled off Michigan Avenue and parked on the sidewalk outside. A stocky, balding EMS worker with reddened skin and tired eyes came in.

“How much time you got?” he asked the powder-faced redheaded woman working the counter.

“How much time you need?”

“I just watched the cops beat the shit out of somebody,” the EMT said to all of us. “He was being stupid.”

He ordered a large coffee with double cream, and proceeded to tell us the convoluted story. He spoke with a flat affect and blank eyes. It was a robbery/assault at some house “by the train station.” He’d waited outside with the woman who had called 911. She kept telling him to go inside and help the man who’d been assaulted. “‘He’s spitting up, you gotta get in there.’ And I told her again,” he said, “‘I can’t go into a violent situation before the police get here, so we’ll have to wait for the police.’”

It took the police over half an hour to get there, and so they waited on the sidewalk while the woman grew steadily more agitated, railing about it being the EMT’s duty to save lives. She said, “I’m going in to get him! If he dies while we’re waiting and you aren’t helping him, I’m gonna sue the city.” The EMT replied, “Well, that’s a great idea, ma’am. Because in case you haven’t heard, the city’s broke. They don’t have the money to pay my pension. They’re taking away retirement benefits. I’m suing the city. So you can just get in line.”

“That’s Detroit,” said the lanky blue-eyed counterman, with a laugh. He had white hair and was probably of the first generation of Appalachian migrants to come to the city.

Read More →

When John Kaye sent this report it made me realize that two of my great literary touchstones — Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas and Tristram Shandy — have much more in common than I had ever noticed. They are both colossal failures of mission, spectacular performances of the art of being sidetracked, of being shanghaied by errant attention, or, perhaps, perfect examples of the way art is, at its best, a perversion, a turning away from more straightforward intentions. This piece was commissioned elsewhere to be a brief reminiscence of a weekend in New Orleans. We prefer this Shandean, heavyweight version.         — Tom Lutz

Image © Paul Bausch onfocus.com http://bit.ly/rESKHY

JOHN KAYE

A Mission of Considerable Importance

HUNTER AND INGA: 1978

The third (and last) time I went to New Orleans was in September of 1978. I was living in Marin County, and I took the red-eye out of San Francisco, flying on a first-class ticket paid for by Universal Pictures, the studio that was financing the movie I was contracted to write. The story was to be loosely based on an article written by Hunter Thompson that had been recently published in Rolling Stone magazine. Titled “The Banshee Screams for Buffalo Meat,” the 30,000-word piece detailed many of the (supposedly) true-life adventures Hunter had experienced with Oscar Zeta Acosta, the radical Chicano lawyer who he’d earlier canonized in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas.

Hunter and I were in New Orleans to attend the hugely anticipated rematch between Muhammad Ali and Leon Spinks, the former Olympic champion who, after only seven fights, had defeated Ali in February. The plan was to meet up at the Fairmont, a once-elegant hotel that was located in the center of the business district and within walking distance of the historic French Quarter. Although Hunter was not in his room when I arrived, he’d instructed the hotel management to watch for me and make sure I was treated with great respect.

“I was told by Mister Thompson to mark you down as a VIP, that you were on a mission of considerable importance,” said Inga, the head of guest services, as we rode the elevator up to my floor. “Since he was dressed quite eccentrically, in shorts and a Hawaiian shirt, I assumed he was pulling my leg. The bellman who fetched his bags said he was a famous writer. Are you a writer also?” I told her I wrote movies. “Are you famous?”

“No.”

“Do you have any cocaine?”

Read More →

Like many in the literary world, LARB’s fiction editor Matthew Specktor was intrigued by the appearance, on Twitter and elsewhere online, of people claiming to be critics Michiko Kakutani and James Wood, followed by others claiming they were the real Kakutani or Wood, angry at having their identities usurped by imposters. The freedom to present multiple selves online has been analyzed since the beginnings of web-based socializing, but these literary pretenders, Specktor suggests, raise slightly different questions. The parody avatars and self-impersonations of the age of social media are not simply part of our unfolding future; they are redolent with the essential stuff of our literary past, of literary production and consumption itself, and windows into the process by which fictional people take up lodging in our heads.       — Tom Lutz

Image © Paul Bausch onfocus.com

MATTHEW SPECKTOR

“I Versus I?”

“Defying a multitude of bizarre projections, or submitting to them, would seem to me at the heart of everyday living in America, with its ongoing demand to be something palpable and identifiable.”– Philip Roth

All of us have been given a certain amount of time to waste. Some we fritter in the old-fashioned ways: by breathing, staring at dull panoramas, playing computer solitaire, or watching CSI. Most of it, however, we now waste on social networking sites: Facebook, Twitter, or whatever green alternatives spring up to offer a sop to our need to be seen, what used to be called loneliness. On Twitter, or Facebook, we serve ourselves up in miscellaneous detail, presenting our epigrams and aphorisms and photographs, our urbane or intemperate responses to others. (Hopefully not too intemperate. We are all politicians now.) Consciously or otherwise, we stretch ourselves into flattering (even if, at times, deliberately ugly) postures: We spend time trying to curate, to use that buzzy term, ourselves. Or “selves.” It’s hard to say which iteration deserves to be considered ironically these days, the one that takes fabulous vacations and lets the world in on its Spotify playlist or the other, the sad sack of skin that slumps in an ergonomic chair. Either way, almost everyone has both. It’s a rare holdout by now who won’t traffic in @ symbols and hashtags, who doesn’t consider all but the most self-embargoed information (I suppose “@____, I have herpes” is still an uncommon move) fodder for broadcast. Fair enough. I won’t get into the ethics, or aesthetics, of undersharing, but I will say that those fusty souls, fetishists of privacy or 20th century manners, who don’t feel a need to display their dinner plates to the world often find themselves hijacked — by @Abe_Vigoda, for instance, or @Wendi_Deng. Even those who thrive on electronic display are sometimes hijacked too: In addition to @kimkardashian, there exists @_kimkardashian (with 35,000 followers, to the other’s 12,000,000), @kimdashteam, @kimkardahian, @kimkardash … It’s no wonder, then, that we are often confused by impostors, delighted by sock puppets, and relieved — most of us, anyway — that we remain singular. Er, duplicate. Triplicate, if you count LinkedIn.

Read More →

MAGGIE NELSON

on the posthumous work of Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick.

Atmospheric Changes, Artist’s Books © Eve Kosofsky Sedgewick (date unknown)

Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick
The Weather in Proust
Edited by Jonathan Goldberg
Duke University Press, January 2012. 215 pp.

When I first heard that Duke University Press would be putting out a collection of the final writings of Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick — one of the primary founders of the field known as queer theory, who died of breast cancer in 2009 — I first imagined a scrapbook-like volume of wild stray thoughts and posthumous revelations. Then, when I heard the collection was titled The Weather in Proust, and that it included all the unfinished writing Sedgwick had done in service of a critical study of Marcel Proust, I imagined it might be a swirling, dense, epic literary analysis, à la Walter Benjamin’s 1,088 page The Arcades Project, the likes of which the world had never seen.

The slimmish, 215-page collection, edited by Jonathan Goldberg, is neither of the above. It is decidedly not a hodgepodge of odds and ends that Sedgwick left behind, but rather nine solid, finished-feeling essays on topics that preoccupied Sedgwick throughout her prolific career. These topics — which include webs of relation in Proust, affect theory, non-Oedipal models of psychology (especially those offered by Melanie Klein, Sandor Ferenczi, Michael Balint, Silvan Tomkins, and Buddhism), non-dualistic thinking and antiseparatisms of all kinds, and itinerant, idiosyncratic, profound meditations on depression, illness, textiles, queerness, and mortality — will be familiar to anyone who has spent time with Sedgwick’s previous work, which includes the groundbreaking Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire (1985), Epistemology of the Closet (1990), Tendencies (1993), and Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity (2003).

But while a great deal here is familiar — indeed, many passages from the above books resurface, verbatim, throughout these pages — there is nothing rehashed about the project itself. To the contrary: For a writer whose prose (and thought) could often be astoundingly dense, circuitous, and lovingly (if sometimes frustratingly) devoted to articulating the farthest reaches of complexity, the overall effect of The Weather in Proust is one of great clarification and distillation. Indeed, for those unfamiliar with Sedgwick’s work, I would recommend starting with The Weather in Proust and moving backward from there, as the volume offers an enjoyably compressed, coherent, and retrospective portrait of Sedgwick’s principal preoccupations.

Read More →

by C.P. Heiser

Ry Cooder; photo by Vincent Valdez


In November, Rolling Stone released its “100 Greatest Guitarists of All Time” list, a ranking of the top-100 compiled through the polling of musicians and other experts recruited by the magazine. Ry Cooder appears high on this list, ranked number 31 all time (following slide guitarist Elmore James and just ahead of ZZ Top’s Billy Gibbons). On the only other occasion when the magazine sought to put the world’s greatest guitarists into single file (in 2003), Cooder broke the top ten, coming in eighth place. And it is Cooder, probably as much as any artist appearing in the ranking, who underscores the exasperating reductionism and arbitrary nature of such a list. As a composer, musician and producer he is remarkable precisely for his scope beyond the instrument he plays—for his focus on collaboration (on projects like the Buena Vista Social Club) and the inclusion of traditional influences in his own music. For all his individual greatness and legendary skill as a slide guitarist, Ry Cooder’s career has been anything but singular.



Los Angeles Stories, Cooder’s first book of short fiction, was released in October by City Lights. There is a feeling in the stories, as in much of his music, that something is being documented; that voices, and personal histories, are being preserved not for posterity, but against annihilation by some overriding and corrupted power.

A Los Angeles native, Cooder sets (and dates) his stories in booming 1940s and 50s LA. His best characters — especially the working musicians that often appear — exist in a world we might rightly identify as the hazy space between the numbers of “top one hundred” success. Skipping back and forth across the boundaries of different worlds, Cooder’s characters rub elbows and bend rules, all the while maintaining a delicate kind of invisibility. 

I spoke with Ry Cooder in November, not long after the release of Los Angeles Stories. He appears in conversation with journalist Lynell George at Vroman’s Bookstore tonight.

*

Your collection Los Angeles Stories opens with “All in a day’s work,” the story of a friendless man whose job it is to go door to door asking people to list themselves and their occupations or businesses in something called the City Directory, which was sponsored by local business. It called to mind All The Names, the novel by the Portuguese writer José Saramago, which features a clerk trapped in an arcane bureaucracy called the Central Registry, where the records for every birth, marriage and death in the unnamed city are kept. While Saramago’s clerk lives with the weight of the names themselves, your character, Frank, is out finding them, creating a catalogue from scratch. And unlike the unnamed city in Saramago’s novel, the historical Los Angeles of your story is very real, as was the Directory itself. How did you discover it?



I have a friend who’s a garage sale connoisseur — a tool man, a DIY guy, a proponent of “if you can’t unscrew it, you don’t own it.” He ran across the Directory somewhere, and brought it to me. It predates phone books by many years and first appeared before WWI, a time when nobody had phones in their own homes. Just imagining how they compiled this thing, it must have been a huge job. I still don’t really know how they managed it; I just made it up based on how I figured they would have to do it — a huge force assigned to specific territories, going door to door, adding entries and so on.



From that I figured you could invent a character who worked for the City Directory — a simple, do-nothing type of guy who happened to encounter things as he made the rounds on this job. There would be a story behind every door. He’d be the kind of person nobody would mind opening the door for. He’d live on Bunker Hill because you’d want him to contemplate the people who lived there, in those old apartments and big decaying houses.



“All in a day’s work” is set in 1940, in a Los Angeles of limitless growth and possibility, and you present us with this one little guy, literally going door-to-door, noting down the souls of the city in the interest of this growth. For him, the only reality is the one he walks through. He doesn’t even know what’s happening in Europe with “Adolf H,” as another character in the story puts it.





I have this huge map of Los Angeles, a digital scan of a hand drawn map and anytime I lingered on something in the Directory, I’d look it up in the map. With the map and the book I began to visualize the city as it was, and once I did that, it wasn’t hard to imagine people connected to the businesses listed. My character for this story would be assigned to beauty parlors and visit a place called Beauty by Rene — which is inspired by an actual listing in the Directory. 



There were all these entrepreneurial people too. Modern, pragmatic people who, during the Depression, began opening up their homes to serve meals. Lunch rooms as they were called. So you had a lot of apartment houses listed by name. Doing other research, I’d seen photographs of the Chili Counter in Aliso Flats, which was opened in front of someone’s house on a residential street. Sure enough, when I looked it up in the Directory, there it was.



There was just a lot of stuff going on at the time that would never fly now. Not that you could necessarily get away with anything, because it was an entirely different mentality; but there was just more space for all kinds of oddball things to happen and be done that in this day and age you just can’t do. What we have now is an endless tableau of corporate underwriting and advertising that undermines that individual impulse to do it yourself.



What came first (to you, at least): the City Directory, or Los Angeles Stories? Were you already writing the stories or did the Directory help you to write them?



The story in the book, and the Directory itself, came later on, after I’d written a majority of the other stories in the collection. Once I got the Directory, and started working on a story, I saw that it would be a good beginning. At that moment having written all the other stories I could see immediately: ‘Ah! I know where I’m going with this!’ If you’re attentive and alert, you’ll be prepared when somebody gives you something valuable to use. I learned that playing music.



Billy Tipton turns up in Los Angeles Stories, a jazz musician and bandleader who is probably most famous for turning out to be gender assigned female at birth. Even though he grew up female, he was able to keep his switch to male presentation more or less secret from the public-at-large until after his death. It’s kind of amazing how a whole community of musicians and groupies kept the secret for so long, enabling Tipton to pass seamlessly in the public eye. How did Tipton find his way into your book?



Secret knowledge comes with belonging to any kind of closed society. For touring musicians, it has a lot to do with being on the road so frequently, apart from families and regular social orders, living in this other world. Tipton is a perfect example of that. I wanted my fictional character — this fella’ Al Mafis who is half-Mexican and who can pass for white (as long as he doesn’t aim too high) — I wanted him to introduce us to that world where the rules can be bent, if you’re careful. In cities, but especially in LA, there was and is an immigrant mixture that blurs color lines. But musicians in particular could go where other people of color simply couldn’t. The members of swing bands, for example, could turn up at parties and homes that other minority people of the time would never be allowed in to. Of course, they might have to enter through different doors, but they were there, and accepted in a certain way.



So in my story, Tipton and my fictional character Al are doing this all over the place, except on totally different scales. And Al knows that if he’s smart and careful, he’s going to find something, and something is going to break for him, though necessarily to a lesser degree than it did for Tipton. The public at the time simply didn’t know what was going on. Like someone says in the story: The white kids who come to see one of these acts: they don’t even know what time it is. 



You might say Billy Tipton is just giving us a nice pivot, a good fulcrum, to move some things around. He’s passing, big time. Betty Newlands, the girl he seduces in the story and brings to LA, was the name of the mother of a friend of mine. I still have such a picture of the real Betty in my mind, after all these years, and so I put her in this story, running away with Billy after getting them into trouble. You have to draw from something personal.

Tipton’s a good example of your interest in complex hybrids: people who mix and are mixed and get mixed up in different ways.

You grew up in Santa Monica in the Fifties. Where do you think you got this initial curiosity for the great mix, which we see in your musical collaboration, but now also in your story collection?



Santa Monica was pretty white and it was incredibly segregated. You had a small Mexican and black population which was cornered in a small neighborhood. It was what you call a Sundown town — the kind of place where there could never be free movement for people of color; a pretty hard ass place to be a minority of any kind.

Raymond Chandler writes of Santa Monica pretty dimly — he called it Bay City – but he hated its fascism. Donald Douglas, based in Santa Monica, ran the show there like a fiefdom. Overall, quite a tight-ass little town. I didn’t like it at all when I was a little kid. It was boring, a terrible place. Flat and featureless.



What got you out?



I had a series of eye procedures done to correct my vision when I was a kid, and we had to go to Downtown to see the doctor. I loved looking out the window at the old buildings and apartments. The doctor would give me a pad and pencil and I’d just draw what I saw. ‘Take him up Bunker Hill,’ said the doctor to my mom. ‘Just go up Angels Flight. It’ll be great.’ But my mom was so scared to go into the streets that we never did. Because of that, I was able to see that Bunker Hill and Downtown were where it was at and I started going on my own at a pretty young age.



I loved Pershing Square, and the mix of people. The music that I was interested in — coming from the South — the Oakies and Arkies and all that — it was there. You could see there was a whole world once you got to Downtown. So growing up in Santa Monica, all I wanted to do was leave it. And it was easy. Public transportation was an ordinary thing to do in the Fifties. My mother hated to drive. When she had to do it she was totally overcome by anxiety, so when I was willing to take a bus and a trolley to see my eye doctor in Downtown, she said fine. 



Your stories, set in the Forties and the Fifties, feature regular people living in a pretty weird place – Los Angeles – at a time when its growth seemed unstoppable. The city is less a background then a recurring subject for your character sketches, which, as in the case of the tailor Ray Montalvo in “Who do you know that I don’t?”, are almost always concerned with themes of identity and status. 



Back then a tailor would be the kind of person who is peripheral, but important. Somehow, for some reason, a tailor is a very confidential person. He is supposed to keep very quiet. Just about the only more confidential person out there is the undertaker. And with that, there is status in the community – so-and-so knows this and so-and-so knows that. Tailors trade in made-to-order outfits, sure, but they trade in secrets too. 



My characters don’t have the privilege and carte blanche that rich people do in terms of how they live and preserve their wealth. At the same time this is a time before the dismantling of our trolleys and the construction of the freeway system that Mike Davis writes so well about — a freeway system that functions to cordon off and contain certain communities from spreading into others. So it was more of a wide-open place, more available to everyone.



Spokane, Washington: more than once in Los Angeles Stories, it comes up as a place to go, if you’re leaving LA.



Spokane is the opposite of Los Angeles. Pure white, an end of the road type of place. My dad worked for Grayson’s department stores and he travelled a lot to straighten out problems in their regional stores. He came back from Spokane one time and told me about this whole embezzlement scheme that he’d unearthed and how he confronted this clerk who panicked and blew the whistle on management. I incorporated that story. And then of course Billy Tipton ended up in Spokane, broke and miserable, living in a crappy apartment. Spokane is supposed to be very beautiful, but I guess I view it as the last bend in the road.



Was your dad much of a storyteller?



It was very hard to draw anything out of my dad. He wouldn’t give anything away. The things that told the story for me were the photographs. Not my dad’s, but my dad’s dad — my grandfather — who was a doctor and a photographer and generally an all-around guy who travelled a lot and was curious about a lot of things and took a lot of pictures. My dad kept those photos and I loved to look at them. Those photos got me thinking. And since it was hard to get my dad to ever say what was going on in the photos, I got to making up scenarios for them. Most of the story of [the album] I, Flathead is drawn from those pictures. But as a little kid I would make up stories based on my grandfather’s pictures, and I would mention them to other people. My parents would always scold me — you can’t just say things about yourself that aren’t true! But I just felt the need to interpret them somehow.

EVIE NAGY

on Miss Fury, the first female superhero.

Art by Tarpé Mills

Tarpé Mills
Tarpé Mills & Miss Fury: Sensational Sundays 1944–1949
IDW Publishing, July 2011. 240 pp.

DC Direct, the merchandizing arm of publisher DC Comics, produces a line of collectible busts called “Heroes of the DC Universe.” Apparently, the category of “Heroes” includes not only classic superheroes such as Batman, the Flash, and Green Arrow but also villains like the Joker, Darkseid, and Larfleeze the Orange Lantern. Flip a few dozen pages farther through the DC Direct catalog, though, and you come to a separate line of statues called “Women of the DC Universe”; this is where you’ll find busts of Wonder Woman, Catwoman, Supergirl, Vixen, and other female members of DC’s vast cast of superpowered beings. In other words, “heroes” are defined as men, including mass murderers, while women are what they are.

I’ve a hunch that whoever in the DC marketing department created these two discrete product lines was working on a notion that separating out the ladies was some kind of honorific, a pedestal to show off their unique skills and forms. But it’s a glittering example of the problematic position of female superheroes, who are usually created and written by men for a largely male audience, while also often serving as models of female power and independence. Even the fact that we routinely call them “female superheroes” more often than “superheroines” or just “superheroes,” reflects the issue; like girl bands and lady judges, the “female” in “female superheroes” is still a modifier to the real thing.

DC’s leading lady is, of course, Wonder Woman, a warrior princess born of an all-woman Amazon civilization created by the gods. She first appeared in December 1941; her real-life male creator, William Moulton Marston, invented the polygraph machine and was an enthusiastic scholar of the psychology of bondage. Combining his interests, he granted Wonder Woman a Lasso of Truth that forces honesty out of those it ensnares. Needless to say, there is no limit to the interpretations that comics fans and analysts have lent to this complicated origin of the superpowered female, which is both wildly progressive and disturbingly fetishistic. That this contradiction burdens female superheroes 70 years later isn’t as surprising as it should be.

But, contrary to common belief, Wonder Woman was not the first female superhero. She was preceded by more than half a year by Miss Fury, who starred in her own Sunday comic strip for 10 years beginning in April 1941. Miss Fury was created, written, and drawn by a woman, June Tarpé Mills, who published under the more sexually ambiguous Tarpé Mills. Had Miss Fury entered an enduring canon like DC’s, it’s possible that the template for female superheroes, as well as for superhero comic readership, would have depended more on the influence and perspective of actual women.

Read More →

LINDSAY RECKSON

on Jane Shaw’s Octavia, Daughter of God.

Collage of advertisement from 1939 The Telegraph, UK
and Wikimedia Commons image of Joanna Southcott

Jane Shaw
Octavia, Daughter of God: The Story of a Female Messiah and Her Followers
Yale University Press, October 2011. 398 pp.

In style it took the shape of any other garden party, that signal diversion of the interwar years. Tea and jellies, dancing and croquet, “lemon-ade” and clock golf:

Octavia gave a Garden Party to all at the Centre, in the Garden of The Haven, on the 18th — a most perfect day. Tea was served under the big weeping ash-tree named Yggdrasil. After the Meeting, twelve of the party danced country-dances, dressed as country people in smocks and panier dresses.

The only difference being that the dancers thought they were cavorting in the Garden of Eden, reestablished in the market town of Bedford, about 50 miles north of London. And they believed their host was the daughter of God.

Let’s back up a bit. More than a hundred years earlier, in the second decade of the 19th century, a domestic-servant-turned-prophet from Devon named Joanna Southcott declared herself the expectant mother of a new female messiah. As Southcott and her followers believed, this child (the half-sister of Jesus) would complete the unfinished project of redeeming mankind from original sin. Southcott died in 1814 without having given birth, but her writings and prophecies — some of which were sealed in a large wooden box, with instructions to be opened by 24 bishops of the Church of England in an unspecified time of “grave national danger” — became the sacred texts of a small but determined 20th-century community that tended garden, as it were, religiously.

Read More →

Some recommended happenings in the Los Angeles area this week, for your potential enjoyment.

Wednesday, January 11^th: Tea Obreht discusses and signs The Tiger’s Wife at Vroman’s Bookstore beginning at 7:00 pm.

Ellis Avery discusses and signs The Last Nude at Book Soup beginning at 7:00 pm.

Thursday, January 12^th: Slake after Dark presents LARB contributing editor Aimee Bender reading selections from her short stories and novels at Atwater Crossing beginning at 7:00 pm.

Lynell George in conversation with Ry Cooder in support of his book, Los Angeles Stories at Vroman’s Bookstore beginning at 7:00 pm.

Friday, January 13^th: Exchange- A Panel on L.A.’s Emerging Alternative Creative Economy at The Last Bookstore beginning at 8:00 pm.

Tuesday, January 17^th: [ALOUD] at Central Library presents Luis J. Rodriguez and Father Gregory Boyle discuss the struggles of post-gang life beginning at 7:00 pm.

Listen in as comic geniuses Dave Barry and Alan Zweibel discuss their new book, Lunatics at the Skirball Center beginning at 7:30 pm.

Wednesday, January 18^th: Eric Weiner in conversation with Lisa Napoli discussing his new book at Track 16 at Bergamot Station beginning at 8:00 pm.

Ayad Akhtar and Amy Waldman: Two novelists on the lives of American Muslims before and after 9/11 at Central Library beginning at 7:00 pm.

ALISON POWELL

on Sara Levine’s thing for Robert Louis Stevenson.

Collage with detail of map (perhaps by Robert Louis Stevenson) of Treasure Island

Sara Levine
Treasure Island!!!
Europa Editions, December 2011. 172 pp.

There are times in life when one’s hand moves, with the autonomous drive of a divining rod, toward a book that is the very thing needed at that precise moment. Needed for what? Needed, one learns within a page or two, to be The Source, the new idea, the clear, firm, blessedly wakening voice that can save you. This is the choice made by the unnamed female narrator of Treasure Island!!!, a novel that chases with a high-held lantern its unpunctuated namesake, Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island. The first novel by seasoned short-fiction writer Sara Levine, Treasure Island!!! offers a wild, funny, rambunctiously surprising look at what happens when the very thing needed to shake up a life does its job far too well.

When a trip to the library allows her searching grip to land on the spine of Treasure Island (“It’s classic. The gold letters say so.”), our girl is hopeless, hapless, and, at twenty-five, burrowing weakly into the sandy soil of postcollegiate living. Through TI, as the locals call the buccaneer-themed Las Vegas casino of the same name, the narrator discovers a way out of the doldrums and into a white-water adventure. Intrinsically, this isn’t a bad impulse, self-diagnosing and then medicating through fiction. Nonetheless, we are soon reminded to use even the mildest drugs with caution. So many of us know, or have been, more prosaic versions of the narrator. Her George Saunders-esque job — as a assistant at a “pet library” (rent a hamster for the weekend!) run by the brittle and surprisingly fashionable Nancy — is a composite cartoon of all such absurd first jobs for English majors. The boyfriend, Lars, is an equally anemic toiler in the fields of commerce. (To quote Gang of Four, “To have ambition was my ambition.”) Tech support. You know that guy. If this girl and that guy are in love, their love is not of the sweetest stripe. They trade the barbs of the disjointed. “Lars, would you know a great book if it hit you in the ass with its registration papers?” says the girl. “Piracy and the expansion of the nineteenth-century nation-state … I’ll talk for twenty minutes and then turn it over to you and Jimbo,” says the boy. While the narrator stews over Lars’s failure to connect over the book, he says, “Let’s order two flans.” Not exactly the kind of line a girl might hear from Stevenson’s more thrilling pirate captain, Flint.

With or without flan, the narrator pushes the template of Treasure Island down the throats of everyone in her life, her sister and parents, her boss, her best friend, and the small band of characters she meets along her quest for adventure. They ask the central question: Why Treasure Island? “Isn’t Treasure Island,” the other voices in the novel cry, “a boy’s book?” Not only is TI a boy’s book, it is the boy’s book. It is the ur-text for the boyish fantasy mind, much as Anne of Green Gables or Little House on the Prairie inflame the incipient imaginations of girls. TI is also the source material for the pirate iconography that has become so steadfast a part of our culture that a trip through the Pirates of the Caribbean ride at Disney World or, for purists, Disneyland, is on a par with visiting Mount Rushmore. Actually, it is more important than visiting Mount Rushmore. Come on, everybody sing! “Yo ho ho, it’s a pirate’s life for me!”

Read More →

Bee © Mike Goetzman

James M. Cain on Southern California: “If you are like myself before I came here, you have formed, from Sunkist ads, newsreels, movie magazines, railroad folders, and so on, a some¬what false picture of it, and you will have to get rid of this before you can understand what I am trying to say … Wash out, then, the “land of sunshine, fruit, and flowers”: all these are here, but not with the lush, verdant fragrance that you have probably imagined … Wash out the palm trees, half visible beyond the tap dancing platform … When you have got this far, you can begin quite starkly with a desert.”

Lapham’s Quarterly on idleness: “It is the soul’s first habitat, the original self ambushed—cross-sectioned—in its state of nature, before it has been stirred to make a plan, to direct itself toward something. We open our eyes in the morning and for an instant—more if we indulge ourselves—we are completely idle, ourselves. And then we launch toward purpose; and once we get under way, many of us have little truck with that first unmustered self, unless in occasional dreamy asides as we look away from our tasks, let the mind slip from its rails to indulge a reverie or a memory.”

Cory Doctorow on the enduring relationship between science fiction and the future: ”I believe that in nearly every instance where science fiction has successfully ‘‘predicted’’ a turn of events, it’s more true to say that it has inspired that turn of events. Gene Roddenberry’s set-dressers didn’t ‘‘predict’’ that Motorola’s engineers would make flip-phones that bore a more-than-passing resemblance to Star Trek’s communicators. Rather, Motorola’s engineers were trekkers. Flip-phones were ‘‘predicted’’ by Gene Roddenberry in only the most trivial sense – the same sense in which I ‘‘predict’’ that a pizza will arrive shortly after I order it.”

Michael Prodger on David Hockney: “He is, for all his popularity, a figure who divides opinion. He is widely admired as one of the finest draughtsmen of his generation and for his remarkable sense of colour. His fascination with technology meanwhile has been seen as both innovative and as a distraction from his real metier. The content of his pictures is lauded for its evocation of place — a California swimming pool or a cool 1970s interior — and criticised for a lack of depth. He has been dismissed as merely a lightweight if joyous flâneur like Raoul Dufy and hailed as encapsulating the spirit of the age.”

 

Jason Diamond on books and branding “authenticity”: “Books have always been a status symbol for some parts of society… But this impulse to collect these books is slightly more complicated: it isn’t just about posturing but about a certain longing. The rustic, the outdated, the handcrafted and antiquated—these things seem ubiquitous. Cucumbers pickled in mason jars line the shelves at Whole Foods, men are buying bespoke suits styled after bygone eras, and hip kids are throwing Depression-era hobo-themed weddings. We’re a generation enthralled by authenticity and craftsmanship. Walter Benjamin wrote that in an era when everything was reproduced, nothing had the aura of originality. Now, most men’s clothing is made en masse—and we find ourselves missing the hand stitched. Likewise, many of our libraries consist only of e-books—and our old paperbacks seem to posses a one-of-a kind personality.”

John Ruscer on the literary magazine Harlequin Creature: “The journal’s cover is crafted by letter press, and every page of every copy is hand-typed on a vintage typewriter. No photocopying or inkjets here. The Harlequin Creature crew produces each copy of their journals through “typing bees,” where Smith Coronas, Underwoods and Royals bang away and carefully placed keystrokes forge every letter.”
Harelquin Creature is currently taking submissions.

SIMON REYNOLDS,
author of Retromania: Pop Culture’s Addiction To Its Own Past,
interviewed by ANDY ZAX

This is the second episode of the new Los Angeles Review of Books podcast series (soon to be available on iTunes — watch this space). We hope these podcasts will go beyond the standard promotional Q&A pleasantries and promote genuine intellectual and philosophical discussion. Today we present a two-part conversation between music historian and critic Simon Reynolds, author of Retromania: Pop Culture’s Addiction To Its Own Past (reviewed here for us by Mike McGonigal), and Andy Zax.

For Part 1, click here. For Part 2, click here.

Andy Zax is a music producer, writer and former co-star of Comedy Central’s Beat The Geeks. In addition to the Grammy-nominated Woodstock: 40 Years On anthology, he has produced boxed sets and reissues for such artists as Talking Heads, Television, Chic, Rod Stewart, Judee Sill, John Cale, Nico, Lee Hazlewood, David Axelrod and Charles Wright. He can be found on Twitter at @andyzax.

Click here for the first episode, a conversation between Tom Lutz, Misha Glouberman, and Sheila Heti.

Future episodes will include conversations between Art Spiegelman and Van Dyke Parks, Mariam Lam and Monique Truong, Geoff Nicholson and David Shook, Tom Lutz and Jonathan Penner, and David Leonard and Oliver Wang.

Produced by Tom Lutz, Andy Zax, and Oliver Wang. Thanks to Camila Ryder and Michael Goetzman for their assistance.

MIKE MCGONIGAL

on Simon Reynolds and the perils and pleasures of retro culture.

Simon Reynolds © Lisa Jane Persky

Simon Reynolds
Retromania: Pop Culture’s Addiction to Its Own Past
Faber & Faber, July 2011. 496 pp.

In the series finale for the latest incarnation of Doctor Who, time stops entirely. Each historical era coexists, so you have Charles Dickens pimping his Christmas special on a cheesy talk show, London coppers riding round on Roman chariots, and flying dinosaurs spooking contemporary-looking children at a picnic spot. There are those who fear that pop music has already arrived at such a state: There is no future left, but the past is completely alive and surrounding us. In this cultural end-of-days, nothing is new and everything is permitted to be recycled. All we are left with are the oneiric, self-reflexive impulses of nu-rave, grunge revival, and karaoke singing competitions. Revivals of revivals of revivals, until music has all the appeal of pre-distressed, acid-washed jeans. Today, as Simon Reynolds succinctly states in his new book Retromania: Pop Culture’s Addiction to Its Own Past, “[e]ven bands no one gave a shit about are re-forming.”

Is this really where we’ve arrived, culturally? Have the Xeroxes for band flyers been copied so many times that we can’t even make out what they say anymore, let alone if they’re supposed to be “enjoyed ironically,” or not? “Isn’t there something profoundly wrong,” Reynolds asks,

about the fact that so much of the greatest music made during the last decade sounds like it could have been made twenty, thirty, even forty years earlier? … Where are the major new genres and sub-cultures of the twenty-first century?

(Seriously, where? We need to know so that we can start to schedule their revival a few months after they die.)

Whatever your own particular take on this classically postmodern conundrum, you’re liable to come away from Retromania with even more questions than you had going in. This is an engrossing, meandering and often brilliant attempt to parse the pop musical landscape of the last quarter-century. In doing so, it also looks at the gadgets that have influenced our ability to immerse ourselves in the music of the past, with detours into recent examples of retro-ism in art history, fashion (“whose recycling of old ideas … seemed to reach a frenzied state of rotation this last decade”), television, cinema (“the Hollywood mania for remaking blockbuster movies from a couple of decades earlier”), theme parks, pornography (“websites with scores of specialist categories such as ‘retro face-sitting’”), and architecture.

Read More →

AIMEE BENDER

Among the most important recent developments in literary Los Angeles is the launch of Slake, an old school/new school journal founded by Joe Donnelly and Laurie Ochoa [on the web at slake.la], dedicated to the idea that print is not dead and that people want to read serious writing of the fictional, nonfictional, and poetic varieties. Slake #4 is about to come out, and we decided to offer a little teaser for those of you who don’t yet know the magazine. This excerpt is from one of LARB’s favorite writers, contributing editor Aimee Bender. Bender will be appearing at 7 pm this Thursday night, January 12th, at Atwater Crossing (3245 Casitas Ave., Atwater Village, 90039) as part of the Slake After Dark reading series. Details at Slake.la.

      — Tom Lutz


(from “An Incident with a Stick,” in Slake: Los Angeles No. 4, “Dirt”)


I sat down in a plaid lounge chair. She sat next to me. She perched. She was looking at the party attendees and trying to remember who was who, matching faces to the database in her mind. There is nothing so effective at abating one’s own social anxiety than a more anxious person perched on the next lounge chair. It is a neat trick, nearly always successful. I had grown up with an agoraphobic mother, who asked me as a kid to be the one to go talk to the neighbors about their barking dog. I liked the neighbors, did it gladly. The neighbors opened the door in their bathrobes and listened with care, nodded with sympathy, and the world bent under my hands like soft metal. Something of Ellen’s party preoccupations reminded me of that, of the surge of pure self-importance I felt as my mother peeked out the front window like a cartoon, the soothing sound of the dog gnawing a bone in the back, me leaving the neighbor’s house with a cookie. I sipped my wine. I had lost some of my neighborliness over time. While with Ellen, I was not obligated to do anything else at the party, as I appeared to be enjoying myself. Across the pool, on the other side, a woman with yellow curls tossed back her head and laughed.

From where we sat, we could see into the house. Upstairs, huge, perfectly washed windows overlooked the patio and pool, and the inside lighting was opalescent and glowy, which interacted with the pale blueish lights under the water. Everything was very moon-themed in color scheme. I could see a standing lamp in the corner of the upstairs room — chrome, with a metallic ruffle around the bulb.

Read More →

Image © Paul Bausch onfocus.com

One of the most intriguing and valuable books I read in 2011 was Catherine Liu’s American Idyll: Academic Antielitism as Cultural Critique (University of Iowa Press). We have billionaire antielitists, tenured antielitists, rightwing nutjob antielitists, leftwing wacko antielitists, famous artist antielitists, multi-platinum antielitists, and Congressional antielitists, and Liu wants to know: Why is everybody on this bus? The book articulates some ideas that have been knocking around, inchoate, in my own head for a while. I asked the author to tell us why she wrote it. – Tom Lutz

CATHERINE LIU

I wrote this book because, all through college and graduate school, I found academia hypnotized by largely pointless but bitter struggles about “elitism.” At the beginning of the Culture Wars, Allan Bloom and William Buckley were clearly the elitists and they were clearly the bad guys; but then again, anyone who read and liked literature more than listening to Madonna was cast as an elitist too. In graduate school, and then as I started my first job at the University of Minnesota, everyone was drawing lines and taking sides, for or against canons, for or against Deleuze, for or against Habermas, for or against Derrida, all using the word “elitist” to cudgel their opponents. I found it all infuriating and enervating.

“Elitist” is used as an all-purpose insult by both the culturally reactionary and the culturally progressive: people who speak foreign languages are elitist (if they learned them in school); recently on NPR, a Wisconsin Republican called union members “elitist.” How did this term come to be so useful and meaningless at the same time? My generation of academics also throw the word “deconstruction” around all the time, and so I thought we should take up the “deconstruction” of knee-jerk antielitism.

(I also wrote this book because I wanted to understand the Midwest and the U.S. in general. I wanted to understand why my bicoastal existence and my parents’ immigrant self-obsessions had led to me to reach largely mistaken conclusions about the U.S.)

Read More →

Image: Strata © Stanford Kay

SUSAN SALTER REYNOLDS’s regular column, this week
on John Jeremiah Sullivan’s Pulphead, Jane Smiley’s life of Dickens,
and Edna O’Brien’s James Joyce.

John Jeremiah Sullivan
Pulphead: Essays
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, October, 2011. 369 pp.

Just when you think America is going down the tubes, you read John Sullivan’s essays (or David Foster Wallace’s, or Rebecca Solnit’s) and you think how strange and varied this country is, how huge and relentless and funny. It has been said that this way of observing American life began with de Tocqueville, but these writers play insider baseball. An outsider looking at America might be charmed with the quirkiness, the scale; or alarmed at the materialism, the cult of celebrity, the fast buck and the nouveau riche. But the insider has more to lose. When John Sullivan and his fledgling family move out of their home each month so that TV crews can use the old North Carolina house to film another segment of One Tree Hill, Sullivan learns the hard way that he has signed a deal with the devil. When his neighbor says, “We don’t have much, but it’s ours,” a complicated chord is struck: passive-aggressive neighbor in one’s personal business + financial fears + privacy and ownership + fascination with celebrity = moral dilemma.

And yet the beauty of these essays (aside from the graceful writing and subtle humor) lies in the fact that Sullivan is not trying to convince us of anything. He’s not trying to sell us anything or claim a moral high ground. He doesn’t actually know what the right thing might be to do in any of these essays. (However, when a night nurse leads him into the hospital room where his brother, who has just been electrocuted by a microphone, lies in vegetative state, and says, “It ain’t like big brother is gonna wake up tomorrow and be all better,” Sullivan knows that was the wrong thing to say. “Had I not seemed shocked enough?” he writes.)

These days, I’m beginning to think, essays are the way to go — the escapist literature that brings us right into the eye of the tornado, where we can safely hide from the frivolous stupidity of so much that passes for cultural discourse today. In that eye, sitting there looking out at Christian rock bands, for example, history collapses into the moment and is light as a feather: “It was late,” Sullivan writes of a Christian rock festival visited by Jews, “and the Jews had sown discord.”

Read More →

MATTHEW SPECKTOR

James Baldwin cc Allan Warren 1969

He missed the first class. In fact, he missed the first three. In his place came an emissary, a small, solemn fellow who cocked his head and closed his eyes and explained how Mr. Baldwin has been detained in Paris. I was nineteen, and had only a cursory understanding of who “Mr. Baldwin” really was. I’d read Giovanni’s Room, and passages of The Fire Next Time had been drilled into me by a zealous Marxist high school teacher, but really I was fascinated, and not a little appalled, by whatever it was that allowed someone to blow off his own students so comprehensively. “Mr. Baldwin” was late. In fact he would show up only five times during the semester’s allotted sixteen weeks, so what was I doing sitting in a classroom with someone I won’t name, but whose own credits amounted (at least as I measured them then) to a single novelization of a famous Blaxploitation movie? This wasn’t the person I’d come to study with, for whom I took a thirty minute bus ride every week from my own campus to Mt. Holyoke College’s. There were fifteen people in the class, three from each of the five schools in our consortium. We’d been chosen by lottery. And week upon week, we’d go and we’d wait and at last James Baldwin’s factotum would come in and apologize, sort of, for the great man’s absence.

I don’t really remember anything about his classes, this substitute’s, except that they involved a great deal of silence and contempt. His, presumably, for our soft, white entitlement, and mine, entirely premature, for his failure to be someone famous. My entitlement was my contempt, in other words, which made his fully justified. I recall the whole mode of those classes as being essentially oracular, and though whatever he said, this oracle, this substitute prophet, is lost to time, he seemed to spend the few hours every week closing his eyes and intoning something, various things, about the Art of Fiction. I do not remember turning in any writing, those first few weeks. I do not remember being asked for any. This class was, nominally, a workshop, but it became for a while a sort of dispiriting, faithless church. We were told things about how to write. We wrote them down, I think. These words were, by implication, Baldwin’s. But we never knew for sure.

Eventually, he came. At the beginning of the fourth week, I straggled down the waxy hallway and found — for whatever reason, I was early — James Baldwin, standing on the threshold of his own classroom as if he were confused about whether he should enter it. There was no one else there. And of course, I recognized him, slowed down so that I could light a cigarette, which at the very least would prevent me from doing or saying something stupid, would give me something to do besides ogle the famous writer. He came over and he took my hand and he cupped it between both of his own so that he could, likewise, use my match. He didn’t say anything. And he didn’t release my hand for a good fifteen seconds. The moment had a frieze-like quality, and was also a form of automatic seduction. I was charmed, by someone whose charm felt general. He took me in, by which I mean turned those bulbous eyes in my direction, and then introduced himself finally. It was an intimate moment without any intimacy in it. I’m not sure I’ve ever mattered less to another human being.

Read More →

SIANNE NGAI

describes her time studying with STANLEY CAVELL.

Apple © Jeffrey Hayes

I was a grad student in English at Harvard in the mid-90s, but physically there for just three years, anxious to move to Brooklyn for a relationship as soon as I became ABD. In that brief but intense period of time, I tried to take as many courses offered by Stanley Cavell as possible. In my last year, I asked him to be a member of my dissertation committee. Looking back I’m still flooded with gratitude (and astonishment) by the fact that he said yes.

At the time I couldn’t have said why I felt so attuned to Cavell’s writing. I just knew, after reading his essay on moods in Emerson and Nietzsche (“Aversive Thinking”) and then his books on Thoreau and remarriage comedy (The Senses of Walden, Pursuits of Happiness), that I wanted to read more, and to think and talk with him as much as possible about the things he thought were interesting. All the more so when I realized that, in person, Stanley Cavell was exactly like the voice his writing projected. That voice, no matter what it happened to be speaking about — Shakespeare and the avoidance of love, Jacques Derrida and J. L. Austin, the Hollywood women’s film of the 1930s and 40s — was unfailingly generous and infectiously interesting. It was a meta-philosophical voice, preoccupied less with the wrongness of skepticism (that is, with skepticism understood as intellectual error, thereby capable of intellectual correction) than with its status as a basic condition of human life and also as a kind of madness, a denial of our shared reality with other minds. Cavell’s voice was a kind of therapy against that madness. It was also an utterly and profoundly non-snobby voice: the voice of a philosopher concerned with philosophy’s aversion to the ordinary, and with the nondiscursive aspects of ordinary language — its affect and force, its ontology as action — that seemed to interest so few other philosophers of language at the time. It was, finally and significantly, the voice of someone deeply interested in how gender inflects both of these problems.

Read More →

MORTEN HØI JENSEN

on SIDDHARTHA DEB, a teacher of a different kind.

A is for Apple © Michael Naples

Edmund Wilson once described his Princeton teacher, Christian Gauss, as “a teacher of a different kind — the kind who starts trains of thought that he does not himself guide to conclusions but leaves in the hands of his students to be carried on by themselves.”

Siddhartha Deb, too, is a teacher of a different kind. He is young, for starters, and seems often to stand apart from the academic milieu; though he keeps a formal, professional distance to his students he is really more like an older sibling than one of the customary mid-life antiques one always half-expects. He is well-versed in the latest contemporary writing; he listens to MC Solaar and wears hoodies when not in the classroom; he writes lucid, intelligent criticism for hip New York journals like n+1 and Bookforum.

In other words, when it comes to Deb the generational gap that unavoidably exists between students and professors is pretty narrow. This gap shrinks even further once you factor in the genuine sympathy and interest Siddhartha always displays. My stock image of him in a classroom has him hunched over the desk with his arms in front of him, listening and nodding his head intently, muttering, “Right, right, right, right.” And yet he manages to command respect. While a student of his at Eugene Lang College of The New School I often felt the tectonic plates of my own opinions and tightly-held ideas loosen or shift.

Read More →

Some recommended happenings in the Los Angeles area this week, for your potential enjoyment.

Thursday, January 5^th: Jeff Garlin in Conversation with Henry Rollins to discuss Rollins’s new book Occupants at Largo beginning at 8:00 pm.

Kathryn Kay discusses and signs The Gilder at Vroman’s Bookstore beginning at 7:00 pm.

Saturday, January 7^th: Acker & Blacker’s The Thrilling Adventure Hour featuring WorkJuice Players Paul F. Tompkins, Paget Brewster, and many more at Largo beginning at 8:30 pm.

Sunday, January 8^th: The New Short Fiction Series presents a reading by Elizabeth E. King at The Federal Bar beginning at 7:00 pm.

Hammer Conversations presents: curator Kellie Jones and her her father- renowned poet, playwright, and activist Amiri Baraka discussing their new book at Hammer Museum beginning at 2:00 pm.

Wednesday, January 11^th: Téa Obreht discusses and signs The Tiger’s Wife at Vroman’s Bookstore beginning at 7:00 pm.

Ellis Avery discusses and signs The Last Nude at Book Soup beginning at 7:00 pm.

Thursday, January 12^th: Slake after Dark presents LARB Contributing Editor Aimee Bender reading selections from her short stories and novels at Atwater Crossing beginning at 7:00 pm.

Lynell George in conversation with Ry Cooder in support of his book, Los Angeles Stories at Vroman’s Bookstore beginning at 7:00 pm.

PICO IYER

on the ghost of Graham Greene.
Iyer’s The Man Within My Head is published today.

Graham Greene by Margaret Woods (2004)
Courtesy of The Graham Greene Birthplace Trust

I had just arrived in Saigon — this was September 2004 — and, 15 hours out of sync after the long flight from California, I was wide-awake, adrenaline-quickened and eager to see everything as I hit the late-night streets. I dropped off my case at the Hotel Majestic and then began walking down Tu Do, or Freedom Street (the Rue Catinat, as it had been in French times, and now officially Dong Khoi, or Simultaneous Uprising Street).

The city had not changed much in the 13 years since I’d last been here, except that the sense of illicit energy, of movement, of underground whispering was more intense. “Layla” drifted up from an underground bar, and men along the sidewalks murmured promises of various exotic pleasures. A young woman sped up on a motorbike, took off her helmet and, shaking free her long hair, said, “We go my room?” Cyclo-drivers peddled slowly past, sometimes with a single woman in their seats, sometimes stopping to ask if I needed a friend.

I went into an internet café — they were everywhere, and everything was open, even after midnight — needing to transcribe this for someone. “I might almost be walking through Graham Greene’s Quiet American,” I wrote to a childhood friend who had become a novelist in a somewhat Greenian vein. “It’s uncanny. The Englishman Fowler and his Vietnamese girlfriend Phuong might still be walking down the Rue Catinat.”

At that very moment a young woman came in, from the N.Y.-Saigon Bar next door, and took the stool next to mine. Business must be slow, I guessed, so she’d check her email for a while. She was long-legged, very young, and barely dressed. She logged onto her Hotmail account and I, shameless journalist, looked over to see what she was typing.

It was, of course, a love letter, from an admirer in Europe. “Dear Phuong,” it began, and then the changeless cadences of half-requited love came tumbling out.

Read More →

MARK SARVAS

with a reminiscence of his mentor, writing instructor, and friend,
STEVEN CORBIN.

Red Apple © Ann Elizabeth Schlegel

This week, we present reminiscences of great mentors and teachers, from a series originally published on our blog [click here], curated by C.P. Heiser.

¤
Steven Corbin was the first novelist I knew personally. (How exciting and rarefied that seemed to me at the time!) He died in 1995 at the age of 41 from AIDS-related complications.

He cut a formidable figure, a six-foot-two, muscular, dreadlocked black man who was openly gay. I would watch people circle him warily, unsure what to make of him, wondering whether to be afraid. Then his gentle nature would reveal itself and all but the irretrievably bigoted embraced him.

I met Steven in 1990. I’d enrolled in a beginning fiction class he was teaching at UCLA. Before the class began, I picked up a copy of his debut novel No Easy Place to Be, a tale of three sisters set against the Harlem Renaissance. I didn’t love the book but I liked stretches of it. Steven was always good with the family moments, which he’d drawn from life:

Velma took a long drag on the cigarette, standing in the corner with her arms folded, her feet crossed. She eyed Miriam, hoping Miriam was wrong about Negro literature being a trend that wouldn’t last long enough for her to establish a career. She picked specks of tobacco from her teeth. The kitchen was a battlefield of conflicting odors. Collard greens and fatback fought lye and peroxide. The clashing scents of black-eyed peas, rice and hair pomade curled on the edges of burnt human hair.

I reminded myself that the best teachers weren’t necessarily the best writers (nor vice versa) and Steven rewarded my gamble: he was an inspiring writing teacher from the first lesson. His passion for his students, for literature, for his writing poured out of him from the first moment he stepped up in class. Passion was his defining characteristic and we all stepped back as his enthusiasms spilled forth.

Read More →

JEFFREY KINDLEY

on dining out with Marianne Moore in the early sixties.

Apple © Jacqueline Gnott

From a series originally published on our blog [click here], curated by C.P. Heiser.

¤
I was watching a new friend make cocoa in her kitchen. She boiled water while the chocolate was melting on a separate burner, poured the water into two teacups and allowed them to sit while the milk began to simmer in another pan.

“Elizabeth is wonderful but she gets carried away,” she said. “She tries too hard to describe the wart on the chin for accuracy, don’t you think?”

She emptied the water from the warmed teacups, then poured the milk and melted chocolate into the cups with extreme care and stirred them together. The cocoa was the best I had ever tasted. It was 1964. My new friend was Marianne Moore, then 76. “Elizabeth” was Elizabeth Bishop. I was a college freshman.

Read More →

ARETHA SILLS

on the Late Great Townes Van Zandt.

Photograph by Julie Cline

What I remember most about the AP obituary that ran fifteen years ago tomorrow was its brevity — given that it was written for one of the most influential songwriters of our time — and a quote from Katie Belle, Townes Van Zandt’s five-year-old daughter who was with him: “Daddy’s having a fight with his heart.”

When he died at age 52 on New Year’s Day 1997, fans of the legendary Texas singer-songwriter were saddened but not surprised. He had, after all, named his 1972 album The Late Great Townes Van Zandt — possibly a joke about his perpetual obscurity, or possibly because he and everyone who knew him thought he would die young like Hank Williams (who also died on January 1st). As his friend Guy Clark said at the memorial, “I booked this gig thirty-something years ago.” Townes’s seemingly brief turn on this plane was characterized by staggeringly self-annihilating behavior — behavior that had in many ways defined that turn, and has often overshadowed the powerful and transcendent body of work he left behind.

If I had a nickel I’d find a game.

If I won a dollar I’d make it rain.

If it rained an ocean I’d drink it dry

And lay me down dissatisfied.



— from “Rex’s Blues”

Townes’s obituary offered just enough room to recap a few basic facts: that his songs were recorded by singers more famous than he would ever be, including Emmylou Harris, Merle Haggard, and Willie Nelson; that though he sang about prostitutes and bums and emulated Lightnin’ Hopkins, he was the scion of a prominent Texas oil family; and, the often-told tale, that Steve Earle once threatened to jump on Bob Dylan’s coffee table to proclaim just who was the better songwriter. The obituary politely left it to Van Zandt’s lyrics (from “A Song For”) to hint at his lifelong struggles with mental illness and addiction: “There’s nowhere left in this world where to go. My arms, my legs they’re a tremblin’. Thoughts both clouded and blue as the sky, not even worth the rememberin’.”

The day after New Year’s 1997, I was working at Streetlight Records in San Francisco. A co-worker gingerly handed me the newspaper, fearing I’d be crushed. He knew that I had interviewed Townes a few years back. One of the last things I’d heard Townes say was, “I wish you could help me, Aretha” — a line I withheld from publication, as well as a few other sections of our conversation, including a part about how many rehab facilities and mental institutions Townes had visited over the years. I’ve been mystified by my reticence to print these moments ever since. I have no excuse other than that I was in my early 20s and more of a fan than a journalist.

Read More →