I thought at one point that I wanted to be a critic. It was (get ready for big laffs) right after I took ENG 601 - "Introduction to Literary Criticism." Now, five or six years later, I think I'm coming to realize that it's not for me.
Renata Adler, who was a book critic, author, and revolutionary badass in the 70's, was quoted in an interview in Vice magazine talking about one of the ugly problems of writing today -- she said, "I've actually met some great young writers... [but] They've never read anything. I remember saying at
the beginning of the year, when I taught at Boston University, 'Is there
anything you all have read?'"
And the answer is no, of course, because comprehensive literacy is hard and getting harder. A century ago, somebody made up a list of books that purported to be the greatest hits of all the literature needed in the Western World. You could read that list, manage to comprehend it, and any liberal arts education would be a waste of money after that. The list was published as a collection and people bought it, apparently not ironically, so I assume this was a proposition that could be presented in front of people who would not laugh you out of the room then. I can't imagine taking it seriously today. Adler, for instance, wouldn't have made the list, and then where would you be?
(Adler, by the way, wrote one of the most crushing book reviews I've ever read, about one of her co-workers at The New Yorker. The great quote from it, "and it is, to my surprise and without... exaggeration,
not simply, jarringly, piece by piece, line by line, and without
interruption, worthless," makes you so glad you've never written anything that she has read.)
No, I'd never heard of her before tonight, either. And I don't consider myself culturally illiterate. But how do you cover everything? How do you cover everything from last week?
There's more quality, valuable literature being produced today, and in the past 100 years, than at any time in the history of the world, almost certainly because there are more people with thorough liberal arts educations than at any time in the history of the world. And I should emphasize that I don't necessarily mean formal or strict liberal art educations -- if you read every romance novel you could get your hands on for two or three years, you'd have read more books by more professional authors than the entire population of the planet Earth read in some years in history. And if you wrote based solely on that, maybe with a few how-to guides on the internet or motivational TED talks, you could just as easily turn out a novel that would have been a best-seller in 1930. If you were lucky, you could turn out Fifty Shades of Gray. (E.L. James studied history in college, didn't start writing till her mid-30's, and has sold 100 million copies of her books in the past four years. Those books aren't for me, but it's just silly to say they aren't important literature today.)
Criticism seems like a fun job; you're basically reviewing stuff you're reading, and you were going to be reading anyway. But criticism is about drawing connections, defining a literary dialogue, identifying connections in this work to themes in that work, allusions to this other thing, and shout-outs to the classics.
And I'm coming to realize that I'm never reading all the classics. I've had at least one copy of the Bible for 35 years now; I still have the one they gave me the first time I got baptized (more than a quarter century ago). Never read the thing. I mean, I've read parts, but never the whole thing. Same for Les Miserables, or Don Quijote de la Mancha, or Ivanhoe, or Ana Karenina. How can I write a review on something and say, "Wow, that scene in the middle where the guy kept referring to derpy windmills was pretty lame," and not realize I missed a reference to Don Quijote? I would have people cancelling their subscriptions. I would have people calling the paper and ordering a subscription, just so they could immediately cancel it.
So I think I'm going to do what I have been doing, occasionally writing a review for something I really like on Amazon, and staying fairly incognito. And I'm going to write, and I might even publish, and maybe some poor hapless fool will review me some day.
Brave heart. Better him than me...
Saturday, April 18, 2015
Friday, April 17, 2015
Poetry night
I took a month off. It happens sometimes; life's like that. I wasn't being very literary; I was being caught up in the world of prosaic pragmatics. Life without art isn't as enjoyable as life with, but sometimes you make bad decisions. You re-commit, re-dedicate, and you jump back on the horse, treadmill, wagon or blogspot, whatever it is you've fallen from, and you try again. I'm trying again.
I went tonight to a poetry reading, which was a first for me. Andrea Gibson and Amber Tamblyn were playing at a synagogue-qua-arts center in DC, Sixth and I -- and if I was a better blogger, most of the nouns in this sentence would be links to things, but I'm not and you can probably find the google button without me. They were both spectacularly fantastic, and I ordered both of their books on Amazon as soon as I got home.
I can't overstate how awesome they were, both of them. Amber Tamblyn, who apparently started off life as an actress and built some level of success before crossing into poetry, knows what it's like to be a sexy woman in a world that commoditizes them; she knows what it's like to have lifelong dreams swept aside because a trend or a fad or your eyebrows are suddenly passé. She dreams of the dead actresses she grew up wanting to be, and she eulogizes them with the terrifying empathy of one who had boarded Charon's ferry to follow them. I hope I learn to talk to my daughters the way her father talks to her; I hope I am as comforting, faithful, and inspiring a husband as her husband is to her. She delivered panegyrics that made me fall in love with people I'd never meet, which I think is sometimes harder than crushing the bastards who need crushing.
Andrea Gibson crushed some bastards that needed crushing. She's a feminist queer poet who writes, chants, and sometimes sings the grieving of her people, and I am not ashamed to tell you she made me cry tonight. She talked of coming out to her family, being sent to psychiatrists, fighting suicide, and going to a Catholic school to be taught natural history by a nun who didn't believe in dinosaurs, "and what I learned about extinction is when your family stops calling." If you don't know what that feels like, there's no way to express it better than that.
But she also talked about the role of art in the community, which is a topic that I've been thinking about a lot lately, and I guess she has, too. She discussed the death of Matthew Shepherd in 1998, a victim of anti-gay violence, how she'd cried when she heard he'd died, how she remembered exactly where and when she heard the news. She talked about James Byrd, Jr., who had died a few months earlier in 1998, a victim of anti-black violence, and about how she didn't remember when she'd heard that -- and what that meant to her.
She thought about it particularly in the wake of several killings lately, killings of black men by white cops, killings that reflected an abject and systemic racial bias that seemed irreversibly entrenched -- even in her own audiences. She talked about how she'd posted about the recent killings on her Facebook and her own fans, her own people who were at least nominally against oppressive regimes, at least when they were oppressive to white gays, her own fans were responding with racist hatred. And when she thought back to James Byrd, Jr., she realized that she hadn't been part of the solution.
As an artist, she felt her job was to comfort the disturbed, and to disturb the comfortable. She looked back at her shows, at her books, at her performances over the past 16 years, and realized she hadn't comforted many of the disturbed, many people who needed it, and she was going to make it her mission to do better from now on. Nobody's going to see a show with her anymore, she said, without her saying her piece on this before they make it out the door.
I don't know if that's the right way to go. Speaking reasonably and logically, fixing all the world's problems is a lot to do -- Jonas Salk focused on solving polio; he didn't beat himself up for not figuring out the common cold, too. It's very reasonable, in a world with so much injustice, to pick one part of the shitstorm and focus on that. I do not envy my feminist queer poet friends; they have a lot of uphill battles to fight, and I could never blame them if racism never cost them sleep at nights.
But reason and logic don't have a lot to do with making a concerted life effort to change the world with poetry, and they are not the sorts of things that Gibson and her ilk are likely to let stand in their way. They tilt at windmills; there's no telling them that they should be selective about the windmills.
I don't tilt at anything; I mostly sit back, surrounded by white, masculine, heteronormative privilege and swim around in Scrooge McDuck-style piles of money. But I admire them; I admire their talent, their grace, their indefatigable courage, their relentless charges.
I hope they skewer a bunch of the motherfuckers.
I went tonight to a poetry reading, which was a first for me. Andrea Gibson and Amber Tamblyn were playing at a synagogue-qua-arts center in DC, Sixth and I -- and if I was a better blogger, most of the nouns in this sentence would be links to things, but I'm not and you can probably find the google button without me. They were both spectacularly fantastic, and I ordered both of their books on Amazon as soon as I got home.
I can't overstate how awesome they were, both of them. Amber Tamblyn, who apparently started off life as an actress and built some level of success before crossing into poetry, knows what it's like to be a sexy woman in a world that commoditizes them; she knows what it's like to have lifelong dreams swept aside because a trend or a fad or your eyebrows are suddenly passé. She dreams of the dead actresses she grew up wanting to be, and she eulogizes them with the terrifying empathy of one who had boarded Charon's ferry to follow them. I hope I learn to talk to my daughters the way her father talks to her; I hope I am as comforting, faithful, and inspiring a husband as her husband is to her. She delivered panegyrics that made me fall in love with people I'd never meet, which I think is sometimes harder than crushing the bastards who need crushing.
Andrea Gibson crushed some bastards that needed crushing. She's a feminist queer poet who writes, chants, and sometimes sings the grieving of her people, and I am not ashamed to tell you she made me cry tonight. She talked of coming out to her family, being sent to psychiatrists, fighting suicide, and going to a Catholic school to be taught natural history by a nun who didn't believe in dinosaurs, "and what I learned about extinction is when your family stops calling." If you don't know what that feels like, there's no way to express it better than that.
But she also talked about the role of art in the community, which is a topic that I've been thinking about a lot lately, and I guess she has, too. She discussed the death of Matthew Shepherd in 1998, a victim of anti-gay violence, how she'd cried when she heard he'd died, how she remembered exactly where and when she heard the news. She talked about James Byrd, Jr., who had died a few months earlier in 1998, a victim of anti-black violence, and about how she didn't remember when she'd heard that -- and what that meant to her.
She thought about it particularly in the wake of several killings lately, killings of black men by white cops, killings that reflected an abject and systemic racial bias that seemed irreversibly entrenched -- even in her own audiences. She talked about how she'd posted about the recent killings on her Facebook and her own fans, her own people who were at least nominally against oppressive regimes, at least when they were oppressive to white gays, her own fans were responding with racist hatred. And when she thought back to James Byrd, Jr., she realized that she hadn't been part of the solution.
As an artist, she felt her job was to comfort the disturbed, and to disturb the comfortable. She looked back at her shows, at her books, at her performances over the past 16 years, and realized she hadn't comforted many of the disturbed, many people who needed it, and she was going to make it her mission to do better from now on. Nobody's going to see a show with her anymore, she said, without her saying her piece on this before they make it out the door.
I don't know if that's the right way to go. Speaking reasonably and logically, fixing all the world's problems is a lot to do -- Jonas Salk focused on solving polio; he didn't beat himself up for not figuring out the common cold, too. It's very reasonable, in a world with so much injustice, to pick one part of the shitstorm and focus on that. I do not envy my feminist queer poet friends; they have a lot of uphill battles to fight, and I could never blame them if racism never cost them sleep at nights.
But reason and logic don't have a lot to do with making a concerted life effort to change the world with poetry, and they are not the sorts of things that Gibson and her ilk are likely to let stand in their way. They tilt at windmills; there's no telling them that they should be selective about the windmills.
I don't tilt at anything; I mostly sit back, surrounded by white, masculine, heteronormative privilege and swim around in Scrooge McDuck-style piles of money. But I admire them; I admire their talent, their grace, their indefatigable courage, their relentless charges.
I hope they skewer a bunch of the motherfuckers.
Subscribe to:
Comments (Atom)