The First Long Pauses Giveaway

Tuesday, March 30, 2004  | 

Yesterday was a really good mail day. My parents sent us an anniversary present (today is our 8th), and my friend Nick sent some hard-to-find DVDs (including a copy of Dumont's Twentynine Palms).

But I was most excited to receive a stack of magazines. Two years ago, Doug Cummings invited me to join an email listserv, and I now consider the other participants there dear friends. We've spent that time discussing the basic stuff of life (family, work, politics, religion, and whatnot), but we've also been there to support the efforts of Karen Neudorf, a remarkable woman who has thrown herself, head first, into the business of ads-free magazine publishing. Yesterday I finally got my hands on the first issue of the new Beyond, and I can't tell you how proud I am to be associated with it.

Well, maybe I can tell you:

The first ten people who write "I want to taste the goodness" in the comments section of this post get a free subscription.

Seriously. I'm buying. Be sure to include your real email address when you comment because I'll probably need to get some more information from you. Unfortunately, I think I'll have to limit this offer to Americans and Canucks for now. Sorry.

Congrats, Karen. Amazing, amazing stuff.

All Work and No Play

Sunday, March 28, 2004  | 

The style of the picture is reflected by the stills you have already received. The film is based on William Makepeace Thackeray's novel which, though it has irony and wit, could not be well described as zany.

— Stanley Kubrick, in a 1975 Telex to Warner Brothers executive Mark Kauffman

Jon Ronson has been given permission to dig through the boxes that fill Kubrick's Hertfordshire home — the lucky bastard — and he's written about some of his findings.

Oh, and finally the mystery is solved:

"It's Futura Extra Bold," explains Tony [Frewin]. "It was Stanley's favourite typeface. It's sans serif. He liked Helvetica and Univers, too. Clean and elegant."

Song of the Moment

Friday, March 26, 2004  | 

At one point in my life — 1989 or thereabouts — I would have argued until blue in the face that Yes was the greatest rock band of all time. Not "Owner of a Lonely Heart" Yes; I'm talking about "20-minute Hammond organ solo, Jon Anderson falsetto-singing, Roger Dean album cover" Yes. It was one of my dorkier obsessions. Like, I still know most of the words to "Close to the Edge." Thanks to iTunes and my dilligent digitizing of my CD collection, I heard "South Side of the Sky" the other day for the first time in probably ten years. My wife's comments sum it up for me: "This is Yes? Huh. It doesn't suck." Actually, it's a damn cool song. It's certainly aged better than much of the early-70s prog rock.

As an aside: when I was 19 I played piano in a big band. One night, during a break, I started playing part of "South Side of the Sky" and within a minute the rest of the rhythm section joined in. It was really sloppy, but we made it from the end of the piano solo (the 3 minute mark) through most of the "la la la la la la la la" part.

For Book Lovers

Friday, March 26, 2004  | 

So can you see now why I'm so excited about this new home?

Biskind Blows

Thursday, March 25, 2004  | 

Via GreenCine Daily [via Movie City News] comes this link to Biskind Blows. At the moment, it's relatively light on content, but the owner's intention is obvious enough: expose the questionable reportage of Peter Biskind, Hollywood historian cum gossip columnist. I haven't read Down and Dirty Pictures, and have no real desire to, but, based on others' reports, I feel safe in assuming that my main beef with Easy Riders, Raging Bulls applies to his newer work as well.

BiskindBlows.com links to a fun Movie Answer Man column in which Roger Ebert offers his account of a "notorious" exchange between himself and Todd Haynes. Ebert includes a letter from Christine Vachon, the independent producer responsible for making Biskind aware of the exchange:

At those Independent Spirit Awards (a million years ago it seems like) we had been told that you were not a fan of the film. Todd did introduce himself to you. I remember you appeared a bit flustered. I did not say that you said 'who the hell is Todd Haynes.' And I certainly do not remember saying 'you pulled your hand away.' I told the story -- innocently, I thought -- in the context of how far Todd and I had come with our little film. We'd heard you didn't like it, so it was an uncomfortable encounter -- but absolutely not in the mean-spirited context Biskind put it in.

I have not talked to Peter Biskind since the publication of the book. He has not returned my calls. There were several things he quoted me as saying that I felt were taken out of context, like calling my longtime partner Ted Hope a 'thuggish frat boy' -- yikes!

My biggest disappointment in the book (besides the tedium of one Bad Harvey story after another) was that there was absolutely no sense of the pleasure of seeing the films themselves. I remember seeing some movies at Sundance (like "The Hours and the Times") and being stunned and excited. Seems that the book should have had you rooting for Miramax at least half of the time.

Closing Time

Wednesday, March 24, 2004  | 

This afternoon, after eleven years of apartment- and condo-living, my wife and I will be closing on our first house house. Four walls. A yard. A basement. The whole bit. It's a little over twenty years old and in need of some work, so pardon the mess. In the immortal words of Tony Montana, "Say hello to my little friend."

Faith and Film

Monday, March 22, 2004  | 

After reading about it for the past few months, I found a copy of The Hidden God: Film and Faith on the new releases shelf of the university library during my lunch break today. Given the sensational coverage of film and faith in recent weeks, this collection of short essays is a breath of fresh air. The list of contributors is as interesting as the films they discuss. A random sampling:

• James Quandt on Au Hasard Balthazar and The Devil Probably
• Stuart Klawans on Andrei Rublev
• Terence Davies on The Robe and Demetrius and the Gladiators
• Philip Lopate on The Green Ray
• Stan Brakhage on Artificial Intelligence: A.I.

In total, there are fifty essays, each accompanied by beautiful black and white stills. The Museum of Modern Art did a fine job with this one. And MoMA's film festival must have been pretty damn amazing, too.

Only two minor disappointments: first, although it gets a brief mention in Nathaniel Dorsky's "Devotional Cinema," I wish Dreyer's Ordet had been treated with an essay of its own. And second, David Sterrit and Mikita Brottman, who contributed a piece on L'Humanite, didn't cite my Dumont essay. Not that they had any reason to. I'd just like to see my name in such a cool book.

Roth and Library of America

Monday, March 22, 2004  | 

From the Associated Press, March 19:

NEW YORK (AP) _ Philip Roth will collaborate with the Library of America on an eight-volume anthology of his works, including such classic novels as "Portnoy's Complaint" and "The Counterlife." It marks just the third time the Library of America has published the books of a living writer, and the first time the writer has participated in the project.

Founded in 1979, the New York-based Library of America is a nonprofit publisher created to "preserve our nation's literary heritage." Featured authors include Walt Whitman, Herman Melville and Mark Twain. Besides Roth, Eudora Welty and Saul Bellow are the only other writers published in their lifetime by the Library of America.

"It's thrilling to wind up in such company. Nothing could please me more," Roth said Friday in a statement.

The first two Roth volumes will come out in 2005, and the series will conclude eight years later, to coincide with the author's 80th birthday. One of the world's most admired writers, Roth has won numerous awards, including the Pulitzer Prize for "American Pastoral" and the National Book Award for "Goodbye, Columbus."

If You Build It

Friday, March 19, 2004  | 

The Metro Pulse features a short article this week about the need for a new and much larger library in downtown Knoxville. The unfolding of this project should prove interesting, as it will essentially ask city and county taxpayers how much they "value" the library. The elected decision-makers are already eyeing the $60 million facility recently completed in Nashville, which is a good thing, as far as I'm concerned.

Liberalism and Literature

Friday, March 19, 2004  | 

A comment left here on Wednesday by Daniel Green led me to his blog, which in turn led me to his wonderful article, "Liberalism and Literature." A critique of the "academic left" and of ideological criticism, in general, Green's piece is refreshingly articulate, well-informed, and even-handed. It echoes what I see as a growing dissatisfaction with contemporary, theory-centric literary studies — both within academia and outside of it — a dissatisfaction (political, professional, and aesthetic) that I hope to address in my dissertation (assuming, of course, that I ever get around to finishing the damn thing).

I'm most sympathetic to Green's argument when he points to the vast divide that separates traditional liberal ideals and the messy details of practical politics from the radical and Utopian ideologies that dominate certain sectors of literary criticism.

This reductive approach, whereby all subjects are political, either inherently so or made to be so, is detrimental to real politics, which can be safely disregarded in favor of the more tidy rhetorical kind.

Green supports his case with a spot-on analysis of America's current political condition, which, as he points out, is itself a chorus of competing fictions. The "radical worldview" he likens to escapist genre fiction:

an opportunity to leave behind the muddle of ordinary life in exchange for the narrative clarity and enhanced drama stories make available.

Modern conservatism — steeped in its legends of "gun-toting colonials," "bread-earning" husbands, and "a group of white founding fathers whose supreme wisdom literally cannot be challenged" — is founded, first and foremost, Green argues convincingly, on a belief in free market capitalism, itself a dominant force of liberal progress.

It is impossible any longer to think of the "conservative" — at least in the United States — as one who simply resists impulsive change; instead, the postwar American conservative comes fully possessed of a complete collection of well-made fictions, chief among them the unequivocal faith in the "free market" (taken over, to be sure, from 19th century liberals), a fiction so powerful in its influence that conservatives have almost managed to conflate it with democracy itself.

So what does any of this have to do with "Liberalism and Literature"? Green's immediate concern here is reminding us that great literature — with its delight in ambiguity, the "universal uncertainty of human life and the agelessly unresolved conflicts stirred up by human aspirations" — is itself a primer for liberal ideals, including, in Tony Kushner's words, the inevitability of "painful progress." "I would again maintain," Green writes:

that my primary interest in literature — my belief in its capacity to sharpen the mind's apprehension of the shaping patterns at work both in the imaginative creations of poets and novelists and in the imaginary creations many of us attempt to make of the social, political, and cultural arrangements we must unfortunately settle for in lieu of the more vivid if less tangible worlds evoked by the poets — has made me more alert to the many different forms the aestheticizing of mundane reality can take.

That's a tricky leap he has made there, but one with which I am growing increasingly sympathetic. His critics on the left would likely denounce Green's argument as fundamentally conservative, claiming that by reducing the value of Art to its "universal" nature, he is ignoring the particular economic and "real" political forces that have shaped the making of the Art and our reception of it, and that he is therefore, by default, supporting those very forces. (I've made the same claim against Philip Roth's recent fiction, actually.) But that critique is too easy, and, as a personal aside, it contradicts my own experience of literature. The years I've spent studying literature and film have had one great effect on me: They turned what was once a black and white world into a vast mosaic. And that process does, in fact, make a tremendous impact on "real" politics.

One more note on this article:

Much has been made — especially in recent years and in conservative regions like the American South — of the dominance of leftist or liberal thought in academia. Green offers, I think, the most obvious explanation for that dominance. I've thought the same thing for years, but never took the time to write it down:

Considering a whole constellation of facts about contemporary America — among them its now unchallenged position as supreme economic, cultural, and military power, its exaltation of business and commerce as indicators of status and accomplishment, its thoroughgoing utilitarian approach to education and manifest impatience with the cultivation of intellect and sensibility for their own sakes — it is not at all surprising that those who choose what was once called the "life of the mind" at its universities would feel estranged from the official values that seem to animate the political and commercial life of American society. Whether such people would identify themselves as "liberals," "radicals," "progressives," or just as independent thinkers, surely it is at the least unlikely that as a whole they would incline much toward the established conservative view of the way things ought to be.

Good stuff.

Song of the Moment

Wednesday, March 17, 2004  | 

This is the second time my Song of the Moment has been a Radiohead cover by jazz pianist Brad Mehldau. The first was "Exit Music (For a Film)," available on Volumes 3 and 4 of The Art of the Trio. Mehldau's take on "Everything in Its Right Place," from his new release Anything Goes, is even better. After a solo bass intro, Mehldau enters with a fairly straight-ahead reading. Thom Yorke could be playing piano through the first eight or ten measures. Then, leading into the first chorus, there's a whisper of dissonance. And then the drummer settles into a synchopated swing. And then Mehldau launches into a ridiculous polytonal solo. Amazing stuff.

Caught on Video

Wednesday, March 17, 2004  | 

From the fine folks at MoveOn: Donald Rumsfeld caught on video. I actually feel a bit embarrassed for him. Not much, of course. A bit.

Close Reading

Wednesday, March 17, 2004  | 

Interesting passage from today's Chonicle. From Susan Wise Bauer, visiting instructor of English at the College of William and Mary:

Certainly the meaning of "doing a close reading" has changed over the past eight years or so. When I started teaching, "close reading" always meant verbal analysis: looking at metaphors, similes, sentence rhythms, and structures; pulling apart syntax, musing about the effect of a complex-compound sentence instead of a series of simple sentences. Now, teaching in an English department with ties to cultural and American studies, I find that "doing a close reading" in this sense is almost impossible. Students (and faculty members) doing close readings are much more likely to construct interpretations that deal with historical issues, popular-culture influences, relationships between writers and readers, and contemporary political currents.

My sense is that we're at the very beginning of this shift, because so many resources for students still talk about close readings as having to do with examining text. But in my experience, close reading, more and more, means examination of cultural references alone. Close readings (those dealing with words) now seem to fall under a much more specialized branch of study, having to do with rhetoric or some kind of linguistic analysis: a more scientific and less "humanities"-focused type of study.

Bauer might actually be understating her point. She talks about this change occurring over the "past eight years or so," which happens to correspond exactly to my years in graduate English programs. While graduate seminars continue to involve traditional close readings (more or less), the emphasis in undergraduate teaching is most definitely placed upon cultural analysis and something resembling reader response. How did you (the reader) respond to what you read? Why did you respond the way you did? How have you been conditioned (by, for lack of a better word, "culture") to respond in that way? This teaching method makes for fun (relatively speaking) discussions, but I would question its effectiveness in producing better readers.

Next, I hope Bauer writes about "scanning a poem." Talk about a lost art. (And this is coming from an ABD in English who is woefully ill-equipped to scan poetry.)

Miscellaneous Debris

Monday, March 15, 2004  | 

Blogging raises all sorts of interesting theoretical questions about the lines that separate private and public space. Since the death of my wife's parents a few weeks ago, those questions have become more pronounced in my mind and those lines more blurred. I'm still looking for answers — still trying to decide if/why I should devote so much energy to writing in the first person. Still thinking . . .

• Hou Hsiao-Hsien Boxset — I don't buy DVDs at quite the pace I used to, but this one seemed a no-brainer. For just under $80, you get Hou's four early films, all of which had been effectively unavailable to American audiences. The films are packaged beautifully and, though I haven't had a chance to watch them yet, the transfers are reported to be top-notch. Sinomovie reportedly produced only 3000 editions of this set, so get 'em while they're hot. HKFlix appears to have a few more in stock.
• Charm and Hammer — While in Scottsdale last week, we visited Bret Rowe's studio, and I fell in love with this painting. Derivative of Warhol? Probably, but it's clever enough, and I have a soft spot for pop art.
• Pedablogue — Michael Arnzen's technology- and teaching-focused blog at Seton Hill University. I love that SHU has its own Movable Type-powered blog server. I wish we could offer the same here at UT.
• Posteritati — An online dealer that has 32 vintage Tarkovsky posters to choose from. I'm in heaven; my checking account is not.

Greetings from . . .

Thursday, March 11, 2004  | 

. . . sunny downtown Phoenix, where it's fast-approaching 90 degrees for the third day in a row. A nice change of pace from Knoxville's grey skies and cold rain.

A hearty congratulations to my two best friends from UT's English department, who have done the unthinkable: both have landed tenure-track positions at their dream institutions. Unbelievable. I'm eating my own liver, I'm so jealous.

History and Fiction

Saturday, March 06, 2004  | 

From the Arts section of Tuesday's NY Times:

PHILIP ROTH'S NEW NOVEL -- What might life have been like for the Jews of the United States had the aviation hero and rabid isolationist Charles A. Lindbergh, left, defeated Franklin D. Roosevelt for the presidency in 1940 That is the question raised and answered by the Pulitzer Prize-winner Philip Roth in the novel whose acquisition was announced yesterday by Houghton Mifflin. In "The Plot Against America," to be published in October, Mr. Roth imagines life for his family in Newark and for a million other families around the country at a time when American Jews had reason to fear the worst. His Lindbergh blames Jews in a radio address for selfishly pushing America toward a pointless war with Nazi Germany and, upon taking office as the 33rd president, negotiates a cordial "understanding" with Hitler.

And, as if that weren't interesting enough, Roth has already responded to the Times' write-up:

To the Editor:

In your March 2 Arts Briefing item announcing the acquisition by Houghton Mifflin of my novel "The Plot Against America," you say my Lindbergh "blames Jews in a radio address for selfishly pushing America toward a pointless war with Nazi Germany." In fact, the historical Charles Lindbergh did just that in his "Who Are the War Agitators?" radio speech to an enthusiastic America First rally at Des Moines on Sept. 11, 1941. "No person of honesty and vision," Lindbergh said, "can look on [the Jews'] pro-war policy here today without seeing the dangers involved in such a policy both for us and for them. . . . A few farsighted Jewish people realize this and stand opposed to intervention. But the majority still do not. . . . We cannot blame them for looking out for what they believe to be their own interests, but we must also look out for ours. We cannot allow the natural passions and prejudices of other peoples to lead our country to destruction."