Author: driftlessareareview

Besides writing book reviews for his own blog, Karl writes reviews and essays for several other venues. He lives in the Midwest and has a full-time job. Posts might be irregular, but a commitment to quality is the first priority. The blog has a variety of subject matter, ranging from guilty pleasures to out-of-print hidden gems.
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Critic’s Notebook: Unpopular Causes, Part III

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Reappropriation: Camp, Kitsch, and Sincerity “When something is just bad (rather than Camp), it’s often because it is too mediocre in its ambition.  The artist hasn’t attempted to do anything outlandish.” – “Notes on Camp” [1965], Susan Sontag “Need more clarification? To his fans Liberace was the epitome of cultured taste, but of course we know he was kitsch. However, unlike the not-quite-weird-enough musical stylings of ABBA, say, or the Village People, Liberace-style kitsch is so weird, so outré, that hipsters find it impossible to appropriate as cheese. Liberace didn’t make his work inappropriable on purpose; others, however, have. The … Continue reading Critic’s Notebook: Unpopular Causes, Part III

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Critic’s Notebook: Unpopular Causes, Part II

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Unpopularity as Popularity: or How to be a hipster. “Every aspect of hipster culture amounts to little more than an elaborate pissing contest.  …  Hipsters ignore rules because they think it will make them look like they don’t care. There is no end result, just a continuous cycle of mediocre indie rock and scruffy looking dudes. By basing their actions on avoiding the mainstream, they are in fact guided by the mainstream.” – “Cracked Topics: Hipster”, Cracked.com You’re not cool enough.  The bands you like aren’t unpopular enough. Hipsters, the annoying quasi-subculture, has its own uses and abuses of unpopularity. … Continue reading Critic’s Notebook: Unpopular Causes, Part II

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Critic’s Notebook: Unpopular Causes, Part I

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“In place of a hermeneutrics we need an erotics of art.” – “Against Interpretation” [1964], Susan Sontag Challenges and Non-Responses The job of the critic is, by turns, tastemaker, evangelist, and champion.  The best critics harness the powers of intellection and enthusiasm to inform his or her readership on a work’s merits.  If a work receives more merits than demerits, than, in a roughly mathematical fashion, the creator obtains a “good review.”  This reviewer finds works with “mixed reviews” or polarizing reactions (see Jonathan Littell’s The Kindly Ones) most attractive, since “mixed reviews” are not sure things.  A tiny element … Continue reading Critic’s Notebook: Unpopular Causes, Part I

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The Sticks by Andy Deane @ Joe Bob Briggs

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I review books for the Joe Bob Briggs website. For those unfamiliar with Joe Bob Briggs, he did reviews of drive-in fare on Monstervision (a staple of the TNT network in the Nineties).  Briggs is also an author and actor.  He played a small, hilarious, and pivotal role in Martin Scorsese’s Casino: The Sticks by Andy Deane In a literary marketplace still riding the wave of vampire fiction started by the Twilight series, it’s nice to see a book that focuses more on werewolves and is actually scary. If you’re horror cravings demand adult language, cleavage, firearms, blood, carnage, and … Continue reading The Sticks by Andy Deane @ Joe Bob Briggs

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Essays on Capital, First Series: Essay Number Zero

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By way of an introduction … “It is simply misleading and vulgar to say of Marx, as Edmund Wilson in To the Finland Station and many others have done, that he was really a latter-day prophet[.]” – “Piety without content,” Susan Sontag [1961] “Marx’s thought marks a watershed.  Its roots reach back to Joachim of Fiore and further, to the inspired utterances of the Old Testament prophets.” – Reasons for Our Rhymes: An Inquiry into the Philosophy of History, R. A. Herrera [2001] “Better dead than Red.” – Anti-communist saying [c. 1950s] Karl Marx is a controversial, misunderstood, and often … Continue reading Essays on Capital, First Series: Essay Number Zero

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Dollhouse Riffs: Special Edition: Victor’s Chin and Sierra’s Cheekbones: Dollhouse and the Reinvention of Beauty on TV

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Author’s Note: I wrote this for the Smart Pop Books essay contest featuring Joss Whedon’s beloved-but-canceled TV series Dollhouse.  Since they did not choose my essay, I am posting it here on my blog. Introduction “A mask is but a sum of lines; a face, on the contrary, is above all their thematic harmony.” – “Garbo’s Face,” Mythologies by Roland Barthes Dollhouse is revolutionary television in its depiction of beauty.  The beauty presented on the program encompasses the social, economic, and visual.  We get the exotic beauty of Sierra and Victor, Bennett Halverson’s nerdy beauty, the damaged Dr. Saunders, Alpha’s … Continue reading Dollhouse Riffs: Special Edition: Victor’s Chin and Sierra’s Cheekbones: Dollhouse and the Reinvention of Beauty on TV

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Miss Lonelyhearts & The Day of the Locust, by Nathanael West

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The short tragic life of Nathanael West produced four novels.  Dying penniless and alone, West bequeathed a literary legacy that has reverberated in the works of Alexander Theroux and Thomas Pynchon.  The two works collected here, “Miss Lonelyhearts,” a long short story, and The Day of the Locust, a novella; offer the reader a sampling of West’s scathing apocalyptic satire.  In little over 180 pages, the reader encounters ferocious black humor, hard-boiled surrealism, and apocalyptic visions.  Nathanael West belongs to the family of innovative literary Modernists like T.S. Eliot, Samuel Beckett, and William Faulkner. “Miss Lonelyhearts” is a story about … Continue reading Miss Lonelyhearts & The Day of the Locust, by Nathanael West

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On Love (1822) by Stendahl

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Poised between artifice and authentic emotionalism, Stendahl’s On Love explores the topic of love, combining the rational and the romantic.  The stylistic balance fits the personality of Stendahl, the nom de plume of Henri-Marie Beyle.  The short work combines analytical passages and excerpts from the dairy of Salviati, another guise Stendahl uses to investigate the concept of love. The accretion of different personae, pseudonyms of pseudonyms, creates a fascinating literary product.  The book’s genesis can be traced back to a rebuff Stendahl received from Matilde Dembowski, “the aristocratic young wife of a Polish officer” Sophie Lewis says in the Introduction … Continue reading On Love (1822) by Stendahl

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Jesus of Nazareth by Paul Verhoeven

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At first glance, the idea that Paul Verhoeven, director of Basic Instinct, Robocop, and Starship Troopers, wrote a book on Jesus strikes one as the set-up to a particularly tasteless joke.  Fortunately, Verhoeven offers the reader his perspective on the Historical Jesus in his book, Jesus of Nazareth. Trained in mathematics and a prolific filmmaker, Verhoeven has been a member of the Jesus Seminar since he moved to Los Angeles in 1985.  He occupies a unique intellectual position within the Jesus Seminar due to his status as non-academic, non-theologian, and non-believer.  (But belief is not a prerequisite to historical investigation … Continue reading Jesus of Nazareth by Paul Verhoeven

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Gilead by Marilynne Robinson

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Marilynne Robinson is not a prolific author, but like fellow slow writers Thomas Pynchon and Alexander Theroux, each of her novels is a finely hewn literary masterpiece.  Gilead reveals literature at its finest.  Taking the form of letters written to his young son, Reverend John Ames, an old man approaching the twilight of his years, writes about God, history, fathers and sons, and life.  According to the summary on the dust jacket, the year is 1956.  Past and present commingle as Ames remembers his early life, including his father the pacifist and his grandfather, the fiery visionary abolitionist.  Father and … Continue reading Gilead by Marilynne Robinson

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