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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 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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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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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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Capital: Volume 1: A Critique of Political Economy (1867), by Karl Marx

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Two years after the American Civil War ended and nearly two decades after revolutions ravaged the European continent, Karl Marx, a secular Jew living in exile in Great Britain, published the first volume of Capital: A Critique of Political Economy.  Two more volumes would follow.  The plan involved an outline for six volumes, a monumental undertaking even to someone as prolific as Marx was.  Friedrich Engels would go on to edit and compile the second and third volumes in addition to editing future editions of Volume 1. Volume 1 of Capital can be seen bookending Marx’s fecund writing career.  He … Continue reading Capital: Volume 1: A Critique of Political Economy (1867), by Karl Marx

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Mechanicum (The Horus Heresy, Book 9) by Graham McNeill

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The Horus Heresy series continues in Graham McNeill’s epic Mechanicum.  Graham McNeill is one of the Black Library’s “dream team” writers.  The other members of the trio include the hyper-prolific Dan Abnett and Ben Counter.  The trio wrote the first three novels of the Horus Heresy series. The first three novels functioned like a self-contained trilogy, chronicling the Warmaster Horus and his descent into heresy and madness.  James Swallow’s Flight of the Eisenstein (Book 4) was a taut thriller with crisp writing and wonderfully orchestrated space battles.  Since then, the Horus Heresy has had its ups (Legion by Dan Abnett) … Continue reading Mechanicum (The Horus Heresy, Book 9) by Graham McNeill

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Tiny Book Reviews

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The Line of Beauty (2004), by Alan Hollinghurst Alan Hollinghurst reveals his mastery of English prose with The Line of Beauty, the 2004 Man Booker Prize-winning novel set in the decadent days of Thatcher’s Britain.  In the novel, Nick Guest, a Henry James scholar, spends time as a houseguest of the Feddens.  Gerald Fedden is the newly-elected Tory MP and lives with his wife and children in a glorious mansion in Notting Hill.  Nick’s long-burning infatuation for Gerald’s son Toby gets extinguished and then transfigured in the two loves he meets.  The first love is with Leo, a West Indian, … Continue reading Tiny Book Reviews

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