Tag Archives: capitalism

An Interview with Ivan Goldman

Posted on April 23, 2012 | 2 Comments

What inspired you to write Isaac: a modern fable?

The story of Isaac and Abraham is a compelling story that I must have dwelled upon a thousand times, and I doubt I’m alone in this. Of course there’s a multitude of interpretations. It’s a big topic. I didn’t tackle it until I developed sufficient naiveté to think I could do it justice. This took many years.

I once heard a rabbi say the story means God was teaching us not to sacrifice human beings. Clearly this is bullshit. There were a lot easier ways to teach this lesson, and if that was the message, it could have been much clearer, as are the Ten Commandments. Thou shalt not covet they neighbor’s wife. No wriggle room there.

Finally it occurred to me that if a superior power could send an angel and a ram up there to give the story a happy ending then that power could also have granted Isaac eternal youth. Then I knew I had a story. But I quickly realized Isaac would have to be mortal. Otherwise it’s a Superman story. Bullets, swords, falls from high places, etc. can kill my Isaac, and he knows it. But he won’t grow old or be afflicted by disease. Also, Isaac, though he stepped out of a bible story, has no more knowledge about where we came from, where we’re going, or what is our purpose here than anyone else. He’s just as baffled.

Did you base Lenny’s immortality on any existing Jewish folklore?

I’m a very poor source of existing Jewish folklore, but as far as I know, his immortality is based on nothing like that.

Have you had any experience in the “academic underclass” like Ruth?

I’ve had experience both as a privileged tenured brat and as a member of the stepped-upon “adjunct” lecturer proletariat. I gave up tenure to go off and work as an editorial writer in Seattle for a while. There are, of course, excellent, hard-working professors. Unfortunately, I ran into too many tenured creeps who were so immune from the consequences of their actions that they were basically spoiled children with facial hair. I once sat on a committee that had to adjudicate a grievance filed by a professor who was furious that his department chair tried to schedule him for more than two days a week. Honest. For this, he earned full-time salary.

I wanted to give Ruth, the novel’s co-protagonist, the opportunity to rise from lecturer hell, off the tenure track, to the top. Consequently, she gets a job at a think tank. Most of the professors I worked with would consider a think tank the very top because there are no students there.

Boxing is a motif in your work.  What attracts you to the sport?

It’s a difficult sport that demands courage, grace, strength, agility, quickness, and conditioning. Other athletes tend to admire boxers. Fighters tend to be angry people who overcome their anger through the intense training and fights inside the ropes. That makes them strong, gentle people, for the most part — the epitome of gentlemen and gentlewomen. They’re likable. Also, I was bad at ball sports because I have no depth perception.

Can you tell us about any new upcoming projects?

I’m working on another novel. But I once tried to sell a joke to the Tonight Show, got a gentle rebuff, and later saw Carson do the joke. Consequently, I am a paranoid lunatic and don’t discuss my ideas until the work is sold.

Who are your favorite authors?

Dostoyevsky, Chekhov, and Heller come to mind. I also loved Updike’s “Rabbit” series and some of Philip Roth, mostly stuff he did later. He got better with age. I find that encouraging.

How does a writer survive in this economy?

The economics of it won’t work for most of us. You can’t even sell your soul to TV that easily now that they’ve replaced sitcoms and soaps with scripted ‘reality’ and gruesome ‘contest’ entertainment that pays writers miserably. Life is an unfair lottery. I try not to let it bother me. I wouldn’t trade my life with an investment banker whose mission is to own a more ridiculously expensive watch than the other investment bankers. I was in basic training with guys who were sent to Vietnam while I got orders for California. Some of those who shipped out never got a chance to come home and be shit upon. I was privileged to be shit upon with the rest of us.

→ 2 Comments

Posted in books, Interviews, TV

Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

The Art of Reviewing: Roland Barthes

Posted on April 14, 2012 | 1 Comment

The Art of Reviewing explores reviewing as an art form and as a valuable element to understanding society and profiles specific reviewers of merit.

“Criticism does not always demonstrate its customary incisiveness: it often ignores the most worthless ephemera.” – Karl Kraus

“I would go to the stake for a sensation and be a skeptic to the last.” – Oscar Wilde

Roland Barthes (1915 – 1980) was a theorist, literary critic, and semiotician, but most importantly, he expanded the field of reviewing.  In addition, he reinvented the ways in which things could be reviewed.  He looked at old works in new ways.  This installment of the Art of Reviewing will explore how Barthes reinvented and reinvigorated the concept of reviewing.  (This article is not meant to function as purely biographical or theoretical, but more as a means to show nascent reviewers the potential of Barthes’s ideas and continually evolving philosophy.)

One of the great things about Barthes was his ability to deconstruct his own philosophical perspective.  He began his career from the vantage point of orthodox Marxism, amplified with some semiotic theory taken from linguistics.  In the end, his philosophy became more personal, intimate, and autobiographical.  One of his last works was Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes.  He was too inventive and too passionate to remain affixed to any particular philosophical or ideological box.  As reviewers get older, their ideas change.  The slow evolution from the ideological Marxist to contemplative individual makes for a useful case study in the importance of changing one’s mind.

Barthes represents an important bridge between the complicated Marxist mysticism of pop culture critic Walter Benjamin and Michel Foucault’s large-scale deconstructionist archaeologies of institutions.  Barthes’s writings are a Rosetta Stone of pop culture studies and how cultures manufacture ideology with its ephemera.

Mythologies (1957)

Written in 1957, Mythologies has tautly written dissections of French pop cultural artifacts and is an indispensible educational tool for aspiring pop culture observers.  The first half has a collection of newspaper articles, most no longer than two pages, examining a specific item.  The selection is incredibly diverse and disregards arbitrary barriers like High and Low Culture.  It examines everything from TV wrestling matches (of the WCW variety), cuisine, science fiction, and museum exhibits.  A veritable Whitman’s Sampler of cultural detritus, a monument to the mundane and commonplace.  The second half of the book is an expanded explanation of semiotics (connotation, denotation, signifier, signified, etc.), along with its linguistic roots, and the accusation that the bourgeoisie is a “joint-stock company.”

Barthes takes the position of an orthodox Marxist to dissect and examine the cultural products of the postwar French bourgeoisie.  His status as an ideological outsider gives him a much-needed critical perspective.  The semiotic background gives him the intellectual apparatus to read the artifact.  More specifically, to read against the grain of the status quo.  In academic parlance, the “queer the text,” since Barthes was gay, like Foucault (and those contemporary Fifties bulwarks of American conservatism, Whittaker Chambers and Roy Cohn).

The book is a must read for cultural critics and curators of museums and historical societies.  Less for the Marxist readings per se, but for the book’s illustration of how to read material culture.  Material culture is a means of passing along our culture’s mores, codes, and traditions.  While these things are important, anyone tasked with writing exhibit labels should understand how these things are socially constructs manufactured by humans.  As such, each embodies a specific ideology and point of view.  Whether that is good or bad depends on the individual’s interpretation.  But one needs to understand that this manufactured ideology is present within the object.  In the book, Barthes gives the example of the black child soldier in a French military uniform saluting on the cover of the weekly magazine Paris Match.  On the surface, it is a poster that glorifies the patrie and the republican “us.”  Dig a little deeper and one realizes that the poster operates as a legitimizing force for colonialism and imperialism.  Mythologies was published shortly after France’s disastrous Indochina War (1946 – 1954) and amidst the brutalities of the Algerian Revolution (1954 – 1962).  This explains the vituperative passion Barthes had as a Marxist and utilizing the tools of linguistics as an intellectual means of exposing the oppressive agendas buried beneath seemingly innocent pop cultural artifacts.

On a more mundane level, the miniature shopping carts kids push around the grocery conditions them to become consumers.  Whether this is a horrifying example of mental abuse against a developing child or business as usual depends on the individual’s specific interpretation.  But to say that this social conditioning is not taking place seems like a particularly weak example of willful ignorance.  The recent rebooting of the GI Joe franchise and America’s Middle Eastern foreign policy seem like something far more ominous than tiny shopping carts.  “Go Joe!”

Sade Fourier Loyola (1976)

Sade Fourier Loyola explores the works of three major innovators of language: the French philosopher, pornographer and atheist Donatien Alphonse François, Marquis de Sade (2 June 1740 – 2 December 1814); the French utopian socialist François Marie Charles Fourier (7 April 1772 – 10 October 1837); and Basque Spanish theologian and founder of the Society of Jesus (the Jesuits) Ignacio López de Loyola (Saint Ignatius of Loyola) (1491 – July 31, 1556).  Barthes goes on to illustrate how each writer in this superficially blasphemous trio transformed language.  How the three writers reflect off each other displays Barthes’s unique take on the subject, transcending the standard academic category of “comparative literature.”

Everybody has heard of DAF Sade, yet very few have read his works.  In the opening sections of Sade Fourier Loyola, Barthes reflects on the contradictory accusations leveled against Sade: His works are boring and his works are shocking.  How can one be both?  Mythologies dissected pop cultural artifacts while Sade Fourier Loyola examined well-known works in a different way.  The comparative literary criticism Barthes achieves is reminiscent of the ad slogan, “Think different.”

He examines Sade’s work, seeing it in mathematical terms, with each carnal atrocity building upon each other until they reach a séance, a kind of Enlightenment clockwork made of frenzied bodies.  Sade’s writing exemplifies what Barthes terms “a contamination of discourses,” with extended speeches championing reason and rationality suddenly broken by curse-laced shouts and blasphemies involving orgies, murder, and torture.  One of many things bedeviling critics is the inability to place Sade within a neat framework of periodicity.  Sade is simultaneously a Gothic writer, embracing the darker strains of Romanticism, an Enlightenment philosopher, and a literary satirist.  Furthermore, his work continually champions crime over law and power over morality.  Those who are more powerful are thus because of Nature.

The theme of subservience is picked up in his analysis of Loyola, whose Spiritual Exercises bears resemblances to Sade’s 120 Days of Sodom.  Each work appears like a glorified outline.  While both writers come from completely different backgrounds, Barthes brings our attention to the meticulousness and concentration involved in writing these books.  Loyola even has a section where the success or failure of the spiritual retreat’s practitioner can be measured on a graph.  Loyola and Sade also have their practitioners in severe isolation and endure physical hardships.

Fourier, the utopian socialist, uses language that combines aspects of both Sade and Loyola.  His utopia is spiritual in nature, but man’s perfection is attained by the release of bodily passions that have been repressed by civilization.  Barthes also explores the playfulness of Fourier’s brand of utopia, especially regarding his notorious phrase about turning the sea into lemonade.  The treatment of Fourier as a literary figure to be celebrated shows how Barthes has evolved from an orthodox Marxist to a non-ideological literary critic.  Marxists shy away from Fourier because of his wild eccentricities and the non-scientific basis for his utopian vision.  Barthes embraces him as he does Sade and Loyola.

The Pleasure of the Text (1975)

Barthes approaches reviewing and criticism as joyful acts, hence the title of the small book, the Pleasure of the Text.  Inspired by Severo Sarduy’s Cobra, a novel about a Cuban drag queen who transforms into a Tibetal bardo during an orgy with leatherclad biker studs, Barthes wrote down mini-essays in alphabetic order.  The essays focused on how a text can bring pleasure to the reader.  He elucidates the much-misunderstood concept of the Death of the Author.  The concept, maligned by the likes of Harold Bloom and Camille Paglia, does not involve turning a literary work into an amalgamation of social forces, thus negating the author.  The explanation is much more prosaic.

The Death of the Author is thus: After the Author has finished his or her work; he has no control over it.  The Author’s interpretative power is negated.  This is because the Reader is not consuming the Author’s Interpretation, but simply a Text.  (Barthes’s book can be seen as a precursor to the current discipline of Reader Reception Theory.)

The book also focuses on the concept of pleasure as it relates to the practice of reading.  He asserts that literature does not require a moral component to be pleasurable to the reader.  As an American subject to High School English classes, there was the tendency to examine works with a Major Moral Lesson, whether it was Grapes of Wrath or Heart of Darkness.  Literary consumption became analogous to an annual teeth cleaning: painful, tedious, and instructive.  But knowing the Moral Lesson made one feel good, or at least pass the quiz.  What became a rarity was how to enjoy the texts as objects of pleasure.  (Unfortunately, Americans have a schizophrenic relationship with pleasure and morality.)

When reading a text, this usually is administered to the skull.

Readers should be able to enjoy the language of the narrative without having to endure horse pills of morality.  An appreciation can be made on how the author formulates the language in the same way art can be appreciated once one becomes aware of specific brushstrokes and manipulation of pigments.  Appreciating books just on their moral level is stunningly pedestrian.

Roland Barthes was revolutionary both in what he reviewed and how he reviewed.  He began as an orthodox Marxist but evolved a personal philosophy that embraced many things.  Ecumenical and joyful, his approach to the review showed a writer both erudite and expansive.

FURTHER READING

Susan Sontag raised awareness of Barthes’s value to a well-rounded intellect.  The closing line of her seminal essay, “Against Interpretation” (1964) reads, “In place of a hermeneutrics we need an erotics of art.”  Barthes provides this much-needed erotics of art.

Sontag wrote two major essays on Barthes:

  • “Remembering Barthes” (1980) in Under the Sign of Saturn (1980).
  • “Writing Itself: On Roland Barthes” (1982) in Where the Stress Falls (2001).

WORKS BY ROLAND BARTHES

At present, many of Barthes’s lesser-known works remain hard to come by.  Except for Mythologies, his critical work remains unknown to lay audiences.  This is unfortunate, especially since the Internet has provided the perfect medium for discussions about pop culture.  The publisher Hill & Wang have volumes of Barthes more notable volumes in print.  So long as one isn’t averse to scouring used bookstores and Internet shopping sources, one can also find his lesser known works in English translation.  Despite his untimely death, Barthes remained prolific.

His instrumental work in the interpretation of pop cultural artifacts and Susan Sontag’s relentless championing should be reason enough to bring his works back into print.

→ 1 Comment

Posted in book reviews, books, The Art of Reviewing

Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Mondays with the Supremes: Part I: Inside the Secret World of the Supreme Court

Posted on March 19, 2012 | Leave a comment

From the Onion.

A limited-run series where I review three books about the Supreme Court of the United States, exploring its historical and ideological conflicts, and the transformations it wrought upon law and society.

The Brethren: Inside the Supreme Court, by Bob Woodward and Scott Armstrong (1979)

The Nine: Inside the Secret World of the Supreme Court, by Jeffrey Toobin (2007)

Scorpions: The Battles and Triumphs of FDR’s Great Supreme Court Justices, by Noah Feldman (2010)

I.     INSIDE THE SECRET WORLD OF THE SUPREME COURT

The Supreme Court of the United States is one of several institutions in our country that radiates majesty, secrecy, and opacity.  Like the Central Intelligence Agency and National Security Agency, it is shrouded in secrecy, periodically issuing decisions with great import to the daily lives of American citizens.  It also possess similarities to the Federal Reserve with a group of unelected individuals commanding great power.  Furthermore, Supreme Court Justices, like Federal Reserve Governors, have a tendency to speak in opaque terminology.  Discovering the importance of a Supreme Court decision sometimes involves digging through mountains of legalese and knowledge of the case’s labyrinthine history up the ladder of the US Justice system.

Supreme Court Justices possess a federal position unlike any other.  While Federal Reserve Chairmen must be re-appointed, once one is on the Supreme Court, one is given a lifetime appointment.  It makes it a hotly contested position, coupled with the small number of seats on the Supreme Court (only nine, despite the best efforts of FDR).  Appointed by the President and confirmed by the Senate, the average voter has little direct influence in the process.  In the past, the voter had even less, since US Senators were not elected via direct election.  (The 17th Amendment, passed in 1913, worked to change the deliberative, glacial, and otherwise necrotic institution.)

These three books under review, The Brethren, by Bob Woodward and Scott Armstrong, The Nine, by Jeffrey Toobin, and Scorpions, by Noah Feldman, work to remove the secretive veil that covers the Supreme Court.  Each book attempts to reveal to readers a “secret history.”  (Similar secret histories have included James Bamford’s series of investigative works on the National Security Agency and William Greider’s exploration of the inner workings of the Federal Reserve.  One can also add the vast, albeit dubious, literature associated with secret societies, and the equally vast literature associated with detailing the histories of the world’s numerous intelligence agencies.)

The books refract off each other in fascinating ways.  One can read punctuated biographies of specific justices.  In The Brethren, President Nixon appoints William Rehnquist to the Supreme Court from his previous position in the Justice Department.  The Nine follows his ascent to Chief Justice following his appointment by President Reagan.  Scorpions explores how Rehnquist, working as a clerk for Justice Robert Jackson, wrote a memorandum affirming Plessy v Ferguson’s segregationist policies.  The memorandum would come back to haunt Rehnquist during both confirmation hearings.  Justices Hugo Black and William O. Douglas were both appointed by FDR (as recounted in Scorpions) shuffle off the mortal coin in The Brethren in its detailing of the Court during the Nixon and Ford years.

The Brethren by Bob Woodward and Scott Armstrong was the first expose of the inner workings of the Supreme Court.  The book covers the Supreme Court terms from 1968 to 1975.  Justice Potter Stewart’s dissatisfaction with Chief Justice Warren Burger’s shenanigans prompted the authors to interview justices, clerks, and other personnel working with the highest court.  On the surface, one would assume the book is a tawdry exposé, but in actuality, Woodward and Armstrong wrote a limited-scope institutional investigation, exploring the personalities, protocol, and positioning that made the Supreme Court a uniquely American civic organization.  One reads about the factions, horse-trading, and decision writing.  The intellectual and ideological components that go into the construction of the finalized Supreme Court decision make for fascinating reading.  Instead of wrangling the necessary votes in Congress, one has to contend with only nine votes, or, at minimum, five votes in order to create a judicial majority and possibly overturn legislation.

The Brethren’s major accomplishment involved making the reader see the Supreme Court as simply another American civic institution.  The Court is an institution with its rivalries and it reaches decisions every bit as partisan and shady as those made in Congress or the Oval Office.  Woodward and Armstrong helped de-mythologize an institution deadly serious about preserving its autonomy, prestige, and authority, even if that involves wrapping itself in quasi-religious pomp and circumstance.

If one deigns to call him or herself an “informed voter,” it helps to know what our alleged representatives are doing, especially at the highest echelons of power, and how the power structure operates.  Responsible citizenship involves more than parroting back empty slogans befitting a bumper sticker and preening about with an “I Voted” sticker like you just won the Congressional Medal of Honor.  The fact that voters cannot elect Supreme Court justices should prompt more people to read books relating the zenith of the Judicial Branch.

→ Leave a comment

Posted in book reviews, books, Mondays with the Supremes

Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

CCLaP Fridays: On Being Human: An Introduction

Posted on February 18, 2012 | Leave a comment

My introductory essay to my themed essay series, “On Being Human” has been posted at CCLaP.

→ Leave a comment

Posted in books, CCLAP Fridays, film, nature, The Horus Heresy, The Internet, TV, Warhammer 40K

Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

An Interview with Marc Schuster

Posted on January 16, 2012 | 4 Comments

What inspired you to write The Singular Exploits of Wonder Mom and Super Girl?

I was working on a paper in graduate school when I started reading a pair of books called The Steel Drug and Cocaine Changes. As the titles suggest, they were about cocaine, and they included case studies of people who had used and abused cocaine. Some of them were very compelling, but due to the nature of the books, the stories were also very fragmentary. With The Singular Exploits of Wonder Mom and Party Girl I wanted to flesh out some of the details in a fictionalized forum, to try to come up with a more fully imagined version of the scraps I had read and started to piece together.

Tell us about your blog, Small Press Reviews, and the appeal of reviewing the works of small presses.

I started Small Press Reviews in November of 2007 after sitting in on a discussion of small presses at a local writers’ conference. One of the speakers was an author named Curtis Smith. I bought his book The Species Crown and loved it. Between his talk and the book, I was sold on small presses. Part of the appeal is that I feel like small press readers and writers share a strong sense of community. I had lunch with a small press author named Christian TeBordo a few weeks ago, and though we’d never really met before—aside from running into each other once or twice when we both taught at Temple University—we found that we shared a common language, so to speak, as we dropped names of small presses we really admire like Featherproof and Atticus Books, as well as small press books we both enjoyed like The Universe in Miniature in Miniature by Patrick Somerville. Being part of the small press scene is a little bit like belonging to an exclusive club, but one that’s—ironically, I guess—open to anyone who’s interested in joining. All you need to do is read a few books and join the conversation.

What’s the premise of Don DeLillo, Jean Baudrillard, and the Consumer Conundrum? What is the “Consumer Conundrum” and how is it reflected in the works of DeLillo, an American novelist, and Baudrillard, a French social theorist?

The book basically looks at the problem of consumerism in the western world. Early in his career, Jean Baudrillard wrote a book called The System of Objects in which he argued that humans have surrounded themselves with commodities which no longer serve any real purpose other than to signal status. This observation in itself is nothing new, but Baudrillard’s argument was that by surrounding ourselves with objects, we’ve taken on the status of objects ourselves—that our sense of self-worth is bound up in the constellations of objects we arrange around ourselves as signs of value. This is a bit of an oversimplification of his argument, but the conundrum I talk about in the book is that of figuring out how to overcome the inertia of commodification, how to stop being objects and, instead, become subjects, become human again. Baudrillard offered a lot of commentary on this predicament over the course of his career and eventually decided that it really couldn’t be done. Don DeLillo, on the other hand offers a more hopeful view of our species’ potential to regain its humanity—through art, though language, through doubting the logic of accumulation that surrounds us. It’s been a long time since I wrote that book. I’m a little fuzzy on the details.

Is there a link between capitalism’s need for gain (profits, acquisition, expansion, accumulation) and an addict’s need for increased dosages just “to maintain”?  (“Wonder Mom” seemed to touch on this indirectly, albeit from the perspective of a Drug Morality Tale.  Audrey’s inevitable crash late in the novel and the global economic cataclysm aren’t too dissimilar.  Or am I reading too much into it?)

No, you’re not reading too much into at all! In fact, a part of me always hoped that readers would draw a similar parallel. Look at the publishing industry, for example. John B. Thompson wrote a book a couple of years ago called Merchants of Culture, and in it he talks about the publishing industry’s need to make 10% more money in any given year than they did in the previous year. That’s why you always see a glut of crappy, gimmicky books just before the holiday season. The publishers are gambling that people who don’t generally read might buy these books as gifts, that they’ll be good for a laugh or will look good on a shelf in someone’s house somewhere. Yet another reason, I suppose, to favor small presses over big conglomerates. The same thing, as you note, happens to Audrey as she continues to fall deeper and deeper into her addiction. She’s hollowing out her soul as she strives for that extra 10% that will help her keep her head above water, at least until she needs her next hit. I always had consumerism in mind when I was working on that book.

Between your novels, your blog, and your teaching, what’s your work schedule like?  Do you ever feel like one area is being neglected while you tend to another?

Hah! Yes! All the time! I teach five courses with an average enrollment of about twenty students each. On any given weekend, I’m grading between forty and sixty papers. I love teaching, but that much grading really takes a toll. Needless to say, I don’t get much time for writing during the school year, but I do try to squeeze it in here and there. On one hand, I wish I had more time to write, but I also wouldn’t want to give up teaching. Not just because of the steady paycheck and benefits, but because I really feel like I come alive in front of a classroom—sharing ideas with students, helping them learn to express their ideas and participate in the wider dialogue not just of academia but of culture at large. Even so, I frequently wish I had more time to write. And blogging? I liken it to punk rock. When I’m working on a novel or an essay or a short story, I’m obsessing over craft and getting the content and form of the piece just right, like Brian Wilson taking months to record “Good Vibrations.” But with blogging, it’s more like the Ramones recording their first album in a day. Get it done, and get it out there. Share it with the world, warts and all.

What projects are you working on these days?

My second novel comes out in May. It’s called The Grievers. I should be getting galley copies this week, so I’ll be proofreading and making notes for any minor changes I want to make before it goes to print. Otherwise, I’m mainly gathering scraps in a notebook and hoping they eventually coalesce into something somewhere down the line.

Who are your favorite authors (novelists and/or academics)?

I like anyone who bridges the gap between “ivory tower” academic discourse and a more down to earth yet intelligent public discourse. There’s a lot in the news lately about the hollowing out of the middle class. I think there’s also been a gutting of the ability to have an intelligent conversation in the United States. At one end, there are academics who speak and write in impenetrable and, frankly, boring prose, and at the other end there’s the bombast and vitriol of the shouting heads on TV and radio, not to mention the histrionics of anyone involved in reality TV. It’s tough for regular people like you and me to have a thoughtful, intelligent, public conversation about the arts or culture or even politics anymore, but it is possible. Authors like Jonathan Lethem and Steve Almond do it in their nonfiction, and a lot of bloggers are doing it, too. Anyone who raises the bar on public discourse is okay in my book.

But if you’re looking for names, I love pretty much everything by Kurt Vonnegut. I was also on a George Saunders kick for a while, hot on the heels of a Chuck Palahniuk kick, a Neil Gaiman kick, and my perennial Philip K. Dick kick. Over the summer, I read Chistopher Moore’s Fool and told all of my friends to read it. More recently, I’ve been reading a lot of short stories. Robin Black’s If I Loved You, I Would Tell You This is amazing, and I really enjoyed Steve Almond’s God Bless America. I also liked Don DeLillo’s The Angel Esmerelda. If I’m not teaching or writing, I’m reading.

→ 4 Comments

Posted in books, Interviews, Permanent Press

Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

What I’m Reading 2012 and Other Business

Posted on January 4, 2012 | Leave a comment

What I’m Reading 2012

Overview: I’m currently reading five books.  Each poses certain challenges (in some cases, self-imposed challenges) to me as a reader, reviewer, critic, historian, and aesthete.  While New Year’s Resolutions get broken seconds after they’re uttered, these challenges will form an informal backbone to my reading schedule.  As it stands, I want to increase the frequency of my blog posts from bimonthly to weekly.  (The same goes for my other blog, Coffee is for Closers.)  The positive responses from readers has really inspired me to do more.

As you’ll see with these challenges, I want to “raise the bar” with the Driftless Area Review’s content.

The Book: The Brethren: Inside the Supreme Court, by Bob Woodward and Scott Armstrong

The Challenge: Woodward and Armstrong’s book chronicles the Burger Supreme Court from 1969 to 1975.  The Supreme Court decided on many significant cases, including the Pentagon Papers, Roe v Wade, and others.  Reading The Brethren has inspired me to write a multibook, deep-reading-style review, focusing on the Supreme Court.  For this review, I will also read The Nine: Inside the Secret World of the Supreme Court, by Jeffrey Toobin, and Scorpions: The Battles and Triumphs of FDR’s Great Supreme Court Justices, by Noah Feldman.

As a historian, the review will pose a great challenge.  The nice thing about the three titles is how each reflects off each other.  The Brethren follows the decisions of Hugo Black and William O. Douglas, two long-lasting Justices and FDR appointments.  Black died in 1971, paving the way for President Nixon to nominate and appoint William Rehnquist.  The Nine examines the Court during the Dubya Years, including the consequences of Rehnquist’s death, Rehnquist having then been elevated from Justice to Chief Justice.  The three books reveal the slow movement from a liberal to a conservative agenda.  The differing genres will be interesting to evaluate, since Brethren and Nine are works of investigative journalism and Scorpions is popular history.  It should prove to be an interesting project.

The Book: Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, Volume 2, by Karl Marx

The Challenge: Currently back-burnered for more compelling books.  Unfortunately, some sequels are worse than the originals.  Unlike Marx’s first volume, Volume 2 is a slow, tedious, bone-dry work, more akin to an economics textbook.  In addition, Friedrich Engels edited the present volume following Marx’s death.  The work exists as an amalgamation of several of Marx’s notebooks.  While the work presents relevant material on the operations of political economy, it is almost too dull to read.  The challenge will involve trying to read it without falling asleep.

A further challenge involves me writing more essays in my series Essays on Capital.  I want to continue this series, since the first volume presented a rich seam to mine.

The Book: Shadows Walking, by Douglas R. Skopp

The Challenge: Douglas Skopp’s self-published novel is a revelation, a well-written exploration of two doctor’s lives in Nazi Germany.  I will review the novel on its own, but it will become part of a larger project.  This project involves reading three massive, controversial novels about the Third Reich.  Two specifically focus on the Eastern Front: Europe Central, by William Vollmann, and The Kindly Ones, by Jonathan Littell.  The third novel – The Tunnel, by William Gass – is technically a “university novel,” but the subject matter associated with the protagonist feeds into the works of Vollmann, Littell, and Skopp.

The final challenge will be psychological, since these four novels survey the darkest aspects of modern history.

The Book: Citizens: A Chronicle of the French Revolution, by Simon Schama

The Challenge: This is the second history by Simon Schama that I’ve read.  I previously read Rembrandt’s Eyes, his magisterial double biography of Peter Paul Rubens and Rembrandt von Rijk.  As with Rembrandt’s Eyes, Citizens is an epic account, mixing biography, pop culture history, visual culture, politics, foreign policy, and tax law into a compelling page-turner.

French history is a particular enthusiasm of mine.  The challenge will be tempering this enthusiasm with the disinterested eye of a historian and bringing to bear my previous knowledge in French literature, historiography, and pop culture.

Blog Feature Revival

This year will see the revival of blog features on long hiatus.  The first will be the return of The Art of Reviewing.  French theorist Roland Barthes and prolific Gnostic Bardolator Harold Bloom are the first two on the docket.

The limited series 5000 Pages of Kissinger will conclude with my review of Years of Renewal, Kissinger’s final volume of his memoirs.  I have the skeleton of a review in place that I wrote several months ago.  The Arab Spring of 2011 and the nascent Occupy movement have made it a challenge to contextualize Kissinger’s work without seeming immediately outdated.  Both Arab Spring and Occupy have overturned the Nixon-Kissinger paradigm of supporting US-friendly free market dictatorships and absolutist monarchies in the Middle East.  These movements, along with the Tea Party movement and Ron Paul’s Small Government Neo-Isolationism, present opportunities for the government that acts in our name (if you’re a US reader of this blog) to reassess its global strategy, foreign policy interests, and free market cheerleading.

For decades, the Nixon-Kissinger paradigm had operated as a given within the global foreign policy architecture.  That given is no longer true and no longer equipped to deal with the Middle Eastern calls for freedom and the end of economic inequality.  As of this writing, the Arab Spring has become the symbol for freedom and liberation from oppression.  The end-result of these protests and coups is still unwritten.

“The Best 80s Sci Fi and Fantasy Films” will continue with an installment on Raiders of the Lost Ark.

Other Business

While I would like to this blog a major part of my life, creative projects and personal obligations inevitably get in the way.  These include a random assortment of personal and professional business.

I am getting married in early October and planning a wedding is a time-consuming endeavor.

On the reviewing front, I have a small pile of books from the Permanent Press I want to get around to reading.  I also have a couple novels from Archipelago Books I want to read and review.

My job is second shift and a temporary assignment.  Like many, many others who have been displaced, abandoned, or simply eliminated from the free market economy, I have a very real and very pressing goal of achieving full-time employment.  (The kind of employment associated with health benefits and paid time off.)  Working second shift has made it more challenging to post reviews, but with any challenge, it can be overcome.  On that note, if any blog readers like what they see and want to hire me as a writer, I’m all ears.  My contact information is in the Submitting Materials section.

Finally, I am working on the last round of revisions for a science fiction thriller.  I am planning to resubmit it to a small publisher who showed interest in the work.  In my query letter, I described my story as “The Sopranos meet Dune.”  I’m making this creative project a priority, since I am nearly finished with the revisions.  Overall, I have been pleased, since the revisions have strengthened the novel.

→ Leave a comment

Posted in 5000 Pages of Kissinger, 80s SFF, book reviews, books, books I'm reading, Critic's Notebook, Essays on Capital, film, Permanent Press, The Art of Reviewing, TV

Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

The Singular Exploits of Wonder Mom & Party Girl, by Marc Schuster

Posted on November 14, 2011 | Leave a comment

Audrey Corcoran is unhappy, affected by the vague nameless malaise that creeps into those with thwarted ambitions and unrealized desires.  Audrey works at Eating Out, a “shopper magazine” one usually sees in grocery stores and restaurants.  In this case, the “magazine” – really a glorified press release and advertising delivery device – caters to the businesses on the Golden Mile, a strip of middlebrow chains and franchises.  The Singular Exploits of Wonder Mom & Party Girl chronicles Audrey’s alienation and annoyance at the petty power games and trivialities in her comfortable middle class existence.

Living with her two children, the studious Catherine and the wild Lily, she survives as a divorcee in a Philadelphia suburb.  Her work life is one of false bonhomie and hollow comparisons to “a family”, made by Vic, her sleazy adulterous boss.  The office environment has all the earmarks of a workplace sitcom: the sexy faded Eastern European named Svetlana, the Indian guy named Raj, and the haggard mom named Melinda.  During one of these “family get togethers” at a local restaurant, Svetlana and Melinda goad Audrey into trying cocaine.  Audrey refuses.  This triggers an internal war inside her.  She wants to have fun, but she also has to be the perfect mom for her two children.

Eventually Audrey gives in to her temptations and tries it.  Her gateway is Owen Little, jazz aficionado and owner of Nick’s American Grill.  The occasional thrill becomes more habitual until it becomes an all-encompassing burden, an insatiable beast that has to be fed the stuff or else it will trigger a crash.

Written in the first person, Schuster captures the comical and tragic inherent in the American middle class lifestyle.  Amidst the constant justifications and rationalizations Audrey gives herself to take cocaine just one more time, he balances humor with personal failure.  As a divorcee, it is easy for Audrey to feel like a failure and not the proper role model for her children.  Thus she joins the local school board and then gets appointed on the anti-drug task force.  She meets a comically over-the-top anti-drug motivational speaker/superhero/exercise equipment salesman.  In that meeting, she buys an expensive piece of exercise equipment, recruits said superhero, and realizes she needs to sniff another line of coke along with figure out how to pay for the equipment.  Thus Audrey crosses the line from drug consumer to drug distributor, aided by Melinda.

Schuster gives Audrey an uncanny degree of psychological realism.  Not only is her drug consumption and paranoia handled well, but the coke paranoia exacerbates her middle class attitudes.  The middle class exists less as a concrete socioeconomic cohort than an ingrained perspective akin to the French term bourgeois.  (While many are economically bourgeois, they’d never deign call themselves that term, despite the bourgeois ideology being omnipresent in society.)  One key facet of the middle class attitude is resentment.  In the case of Audrey, it shows up in how she reacts to people outside her tax bracket.  She detests her husband’s new fiancée Chloe, driving her gigantic Escalade and her wealthy parents.  As a drug pusher, she threatens to call the police on a couple of “scummy looking” addicts.  In a fateful encounter on the Silver Mile (a rundown, decrepit section of the suburb yet to be properly gentrified), Audrey and Melinda get some coke in a very sketchy neighborhood.  Alas, poor people are frightening.

One of the beauties of Wonder Mom is Schuster’s non-judgmental attitude towards Audrey.  It is too easy to turn addiction stories into cod-Temperance morality tales.  Audrey is hardly “the weaker sex,” especially since she has to work as a single parent and juggle her work and school duties.  Audrey doesn’t necessarily triumph, but she perseveres.  Cocaine was one way she dealt with her busy life.  America’s schizophrenic attitude towards pleasure and its misguided failed War on Drugs only compounded Audrey’s bad decision.

(Marlise Tkaczuk’s “Wonder Mom” cover is delightful.  It shows Audrey in a makeshift costume holding a spatula, her red hair offset by the vibrant greens and yellows.  A quirky comic book-style cover betrays the comical and tragic tale inside.)

→ Leave a comment

Posted in book reviews, books, film, Permanent Press, TV

Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

80sSFF: Apocalypse Now (1979) and Apocalypse Now Redux (2001)

Posted on November 6, 2011 | Leave a comment

The first part in a series dedicated to examining the science fiction and fantasy films from 1979 to 1989.  The series will investigate whether these films possess certain ineffable qualities missing from today’s films of the same genres.

Kurtz: I expected someone like you. What did you expect? Are you an assassin?
Willard: I’m a soldier.
Kurtz: You’re neither. You’re an errand boy, sent by grocery clerks, to collect a bill.

Why are we beginning a series devoted to the science fiction and fantasy films of the 1980s with Apocalypse Now?  Francis Ford Coppola’s epic Vietnam War film holds the key to unlocking what made Eighties science fiction and fantasy films so great.  It’s an unlikely beginning, especially since John Carpenter’s classic horror film Halloween, was released the previous year.

Apocalypse Now, while still a War Movie, has several characteristics that make it closer akin to the Fantasy genre.  There is a Knight on a Quest in search of a Mythical Object guarded by a Monster.  In the film, the Knight is Captain Willard (Martin Sheen), accompanied by the crew of a small patrol boat.  They travel up the Nung River in search of Colonel Walter P. Kurtz, at once the Object and the Monster.  In addition, Apocalypse Now is a visionary film.  To be a visionary, one has to look at the same thing but in an entirely different way.  While the War Movie has a long and storied history, Coppola created a unique cinematic experience, cobbled together from a script by the conservative scriptwriter John Milius and narration written by war journalist Michael Herr.  What resulted was a depiction of the Vietnam War as a hallucinatory carnivalesque nightmare.  The effects of the Vietnam War on the domestic side would not be covered with this extended unflinching hallucinatory nightmare until Terry Gilliam’s Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (1998).

At the time of its release, the closest antecedent to Apocalypse Now was Jean-Luc Godard’s Weekend (1967), itself an extended indictment of the ravages and excesses of industrial capitalism.  In terms of science fiction and fantasy film, Apocalypse Now’s title is telling.  Unlike, say, Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome or The Dark Crystal, which are both post-apocalyptic films, the apocalypse is now.  The soldiers in the film seem morally adrift and numbed to the world, only attuned to finding sex or the next drug fix.  Chef reads a newspaper article about the Charles Manson murders, the murders mirroring the actual atrocities of My Lai.  Surrounded by madmen, murderers, and mayhem, the world seems at an end.  The apocalyptic setting and the horrific montages make the film much more than a faithful transcription of a Southeast Asian conflict.

The End is the Beginning is the End

Apocalypse Now came at the end of Francis Ford Coppola’s unrivalled critical and commercial success.  The film also represents the terminus of the American New Wave, Coppola belonging to a membership that included Martin Scorsese, Steven Spielberg, and George Lucas.  Coppola’s success began in 1972 with The Godfather and continued with The Godfather: Part II (1974) and the Conversation (1974).  Marlon Brando gives a landmark performance as Colonel Walter P. Kurtz, his presence a potent admixture of military and intellectual genius, Nietzschean amorality, smoldering sexuality, and tribal godhood.

The release of the film came during a revolution in the world of cinema.  Gone were the days of the freewheeling director and hands-off producers.  Apocalypse Now came two years after Star Wars (1977, George Lucas), a film that redefined the Hollywood blockbuster, and the Empire Strikes Back (1980, Irvin Kershner).  While not a cinematic flop, the film’s cost overruns and numerous other issues would make produces much more reluctant to give a visionary like Coppola massive budgets and little creative oversight.  The Eighties would see the rise of empty spectacle, family-friendly pap, and marketing juggernauts.  Apocalypse Now is a self-contained epic, not a node in a massively orchestrated marketing and merchandising operation.

Apocalypse Now vs. Apocalypse Now Redux: a Defense for Both

In criticism, especially film criticism, an overarching trend exists where “the director’s cut” has more credence than a film released by the studio system.  The phenomenon exists because of the Auteur Theory championed in academic circles and the larger trend of the search for Authenticity™.  When discussing Apocalypse Now, fans, critics, and audience members become divisive regarding which version is better.  Many see the original Apocalypse Now as the better film and Redux as a travesty.  (Thankfully, Coppola’s film was about the Vietnam War and not a Jedi insurgency, thus giving the world a Director’s Cut without CGI dewbacks and Greedo shooting first.)

My opinion splits the difference.  I enjoy both, but both versions are radically different films.  Even at nearly three hours, the original Apocalypse Now possesses an insistent pacing and momentum.  It is the more economical, pared-down film.

I enjoy Redux because it delves deeper into this nightmarish world.  Characters are expanded, entire set pieces are added, and Captain Willard comes across as a different person.

The issue of pacing becomes more pronounced with Redux.  Even the original is lacking in traditional battle scenes.  After Lieutenant Colonel Kilgore’s (Robert Duvall) aerial assault on the Vietnamese village, the only military “action” are isolated skirmishes and the Do Long Bridge stalemate (less a battle than a siege).

The majority of the film is Captain Willard reading the Kurtz’s dossier.  The normal narrative trajectory of a war film is the reverse: skirmishes leading up to a climactic battle.  The film operates under a series of anti-climaxes.  In the end, Willard finally reaches the Kurtz Compound to realize the Colonel is not there.  When he does return, there are several conversations and finally Willard taking down Kurtz at the very end of the film.

Redux includes two extended scenes which were cut from the original: the crew meeting the Bunnies and the French Plantation Scene.  In the latter, Willard tells Roxanne Sarrault (Aurore Clément) that he doesn’t intend to return to the United States following his mission.  It’s a major difference and the film narrative becomes altered, since this throws into question why he should continue his mission?

The longueurs and anti-climaxes heighten the viewer’s sensitivities.  The waiting, the meditation, and the visuals combine to create a cinematic experience both hypnotic and excessive.  The artificiality of Carmine Coppola’s score plays off against the claustrophobic and ruthless nature of the Cambodian rainforests.  The score becomes integrated into a whole by the editing, cinematography, and sound design.

The film is a non-traditional candidate for a science fiction or fantasy film, but it excels in its fantastic visuals and the meticulous worldbuilding.  Standing at the crossroads of the American New Wave and Eighties Action Spectacle, Apocalypse Now prepares the way for films set after apocalypses (Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome, the Dark Crystal), those indicting the inhumanity of bureaucracy (Brazil), and the organized madness of modern existence (They Live, Buckaroo Banzai, Bladerunner).

→ Leave a comment

Posted in 80s SFF, film, nature

Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

New name, same blog

Posted on October 20, 2011 | Leave a comment

What’s all this then?  As they say in boardrooms across this fair land of ours, it’s “time to take things to the next level.”  The Driftless Area Review now has a more memorable web address:

http://driftlessareareview.com/

It’s easy to remember, you have less to type, and should help with Google searches.  If you’re a publisher or author, my contact information remain the same.  Make sure to update your bookmarks.

 

 

→ Leave a comment

Posted in film, miscellaneous, The Internet

Tagged , , , , , ,

Hav by Jan Morris

Posted on October 2, 2011 | 1 Comment

Hav by the Welsh travel writer Jan Morris is a very Borgesian work, bringing to mind the Argentinean writer’s love for mirrors and labyrinths.  There is even a character named Dr. Borge and Hav’s major cultural motif is the labyrinth.  Morris achieves distinction in creating a place that goes beyond being a second-rate pastiche of Borges themes.  Unfortunately, the field of science fiction is riddled with examples of good ideas soured when executed.  Poor execution usually involves sloppy writing where the author received payment by the word.

New York Review Books has released a stellar volume with Jan Morris’s Hav.  The book compiles her two works of science fiction, Last Letters from Hav (1985) and Hav of the Myrmidons (2006).  The volume also includes an introduction by science fiction writer Ursula K. Le Guin and an epilogue by the author.  In the introduction Le Guin notes how readers began booking trips to Hav, not knowing it was fiction.  After reading Morris’s Destinations: Essays from Rolling Stone, one can understand the reader’s oversight of Hav’s non-existence.  Her travel essays for Rolling Stone, written in the 1970s, envelop the reader with a keenly constructed sense of place, quirky characters, and a narrative drive, though not necessarily plot-based.  This non-fiction writing is reflected in her fiction, creating a plausible locale.  Hav, a tiny Mediterranean peninsula off of Anatolia, possesses a culture frozen in amber, isolated from the world at large, but also an amalgamation of Eastern and Western cultures reflective of the wars, conquests, and commerce that passed through the area.

Last Letters sees Hav as a sleepy community with an outdated bureaucracy, an ambiguous British colonial political presence, and a multicultural kaleidoscope.  On the Escarpment reside the primitive Kretevs.  Arabs, Greeks, and Chinese reside in their own ethnic enclaves.  Hav has the westernmost settlement of Chinese, owing to the proximity of the Silk Road.  The Venetian and Russian empires made their marks in art and architecture.  A muezzin cries along with Missakian’s trumpet call, a remnant of the Crusader’s retreat.  The back cover summary describes Hav as having “chaotic and contradictory splendor.”

One should note that this is not alternate history.  Hav’s fate follows the ebb and tide of history, albeit from the perspective of a geographic asterisk.  A humorous passage in Last Letters involves the local intellectual circle hating Ferdinand Braudel because he never mentioned Hav in his monumental survey The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II.  Le Guin states in the introduction,

Probably Morris, certainly her publisher, will not thank me for saying Hav is in fact science fiction, of a perfectly recognizable type and superb quality.  The “sciences” or areas of expertise involved are social – ethnology, sociology, political science, and above all, history.

Morris’s writing is what makes Hav such a treasure to read.  Described as a “romantic traditionalist Welsh author,” she approaches travel at a different speed and pitch than Anthony Bourdain.  Morris’s character of Jan Morris is indistinguishable from her presence in her non-fiction travel essays.  She seems like a nice middle-aged lady who, despite all evidence to the contrary, sees the best in people and has the bad habit of asking awkward questions to stage-managed power brokers.  Not conservative in the vulgar faux populist mutation common to the United States, but one whose conservatism cherishes the artifacts and lessons of the past and seeks to preserve them for future generations.

Morris’s “traditionalist” leaning comes to the fore in the sequel, Hav of the Myrmidons.  Morris returns to Hav twenty years later to find a series of unsettling changes.  Following the Intervention, Hav is now a theocracy run by the Cathars, a Christian heresy long thought extinct.  The Holy Myrmidonic Republic of Hav exists both as a Catharist theocracy and as an emerging capitalist power.  A new airport, highway, and resort hotel – the Lanzaretto! tower – have been carved out of the rubble.  One thinks of Dubai and China’s emergent industrial hubs, whereas Old Hav bespoke of Danzig or Trieste, political “free cities” with their own syncretic cultures.

A chilling episode occurs when Jan is invited to a meeting at the ominously named Office of Ideology.  She meets Hav’s political deputies.  “They reminded me of the ideologues of apartheid who, long before, had greeted me with similar earnest solemnity at Stellenbosch in South Africa.”  Nothing is more stultifying and possibly unintentionally comical than the long-winded prattling of a totalitarian state’s cog, all ideological purity and true believer crazy eyes.  In Destinations (1980), she summarized the ideology of apartheid as “the intricate political device – part mysticism, part economics, part confidence trick – by which the white race maintains its supremacy over the blacks.”  With its omnipresent icon of Achilles’s helmet, Hav expresses that same combination.  The Greek community on San Spiridon, an outlying island, has become reborn, albeit with a troubling fanaticism.

This new iteration of Hav reflects the Post-911 world in its admixture of aggressive free market capitalism and political authoritarianism.  One need only look at China (and the countless Chinese products we all buy without a second thought) or the political autarkies of Silvio Berlusconi and Vladimir Putin.  The United States has catered to the whims of dictators, so long as the bananas were cheap and the despot made the appropriate anti-communist slogans.  Morris reverses Marx’s quote by showing the old Hav as a farce and New Hav as tragedy.  Hav is on the make, aspiring to rekindle its Venetian or Arabic drive to link itself again to a global marketplace.  Morris wonders at the human and cultural costs of those aspirations.  Is the material gain accrued from integrating with globalization really worth it, especially if all one caters to are incurious tourists blathering on about a place’s safety and comfort?  Travel without risk, at least the risk of random discovery, is a pointless endeavor.  Reading Hav is not.

 

→ 1 Comment

Posted in book reviews, books

Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,