Reissues; Clarifications.

I first began contemplating this blog last summer; in fact, one day I even sat down and wrote a first post that, frankly, kicks the actual first post’s ass. But I wasn’t online at the time, so it all came to naught. Doing some research for the current post, I looked up that ghost of a post, and have decided to run it in full. The excuse for this post follows.

Thursday, August 18, 2005

“Welcome,” says Marianne Faithfull early on in her chatty live CD Twentieth Century Blues, “to the New Morning.” I’ve never been sure whether that was the name of the club she was playing, the name of her show, or a more general allusion to the somewhat decadent idealism of the Weimar Republic; the music she goes on to sing is mostly Weill/Brecht, with a little Warren/Dubin, Coward and Nilsson thrown in for good measure. It’s one of my favorite albums (though I rarely listen to it) because Faithfull’s voice, a pensioned prostitute’s croak with perfectly posh diction, is a modern exemplar of that very decadent idealism which Weill’s music and Brecht’s drama exude, and the way she finds thematic touchstones in Tin Pan Alley, West End Theatre, and 70’s freak-pop is inspirational. It’s, frankly, my ambition, or one of them: to tease out the synchronous strands in the vast tapestry of . . . of—hell, I don’t know what to call it; Twentieth-century popular art, maybe, with the caveat that some of it isn’t twentieth-century, some of it isn’t popular, and some of it isn’t art—and figure out what such synchronicity means, if anything.

That is a very poorly-constructed paragraph (I mean, really, two overly long and complicated sentences, one right after the other, that begin with “It’s”?), but I’m going to let it slide because this is a blog and no one expects blogs to be of great literary merit. And maybe it’ll teach me to write readable sentences.

This blog isn’t called the New Morning or anything like that. But when I tried to imagine my opening sentence, “Welcome . . . to the New Morning” kept obtruding itself in Ms. Faithfull’s breathless pant. So I wrote that instead.

So welcome to [Don’t Stay Up Too Late]. Especially welcome to those insomniacs who’ve stumbled on some much later posting, and liked what they read so much that they’ve worked their way all the way back to this one; bleary-eyed, slightly hungry, and determined with the obsessive determination of the truly exhausted, maybe even a little light-headed (when you revisit this blog a week later, will it still have that wholly original voice, that passion and humor which you found irresistible tonight?), but above all curious to see what the hell I can find to jabber on about for thirty more paragraphs, you are my ideal reader. Don’t worry, though, I like all the rest of you just fine too.

I intend for this blog to be (O, the vain schemes and plans of man!) a record of what I’m reading. Not just reading, though; I wish that there were a word besides the too-vague “experiencing” that would denote assimilation of all varieties of art: music, movies, radio, television, the plastic and performance arts to some degree, not to mention those aesthetic experiences which are not planned and cannot be recaptured. (Uh… what?) You know, like those moments that happen when you’re driving and you see the most beautiful sky. Nobody made that work of art (at least nobody who can receive royalties); it just happened.

That’s enough Introductory Logorrhea; on with the Lists.

(My mother informs me that it’s a sign of Asperger’s Syndrome—a mental condition related to autism—to make lists. I will probably someday have a room of filing cabinets with nothing but lists on them. Nick Hornby and Paul Collins, who know something about autism, are very list-oriented writers. At least I assume Hornby is; I’ve never read High Fidelity, but I saw the movie.)

What I bought today, and why:

This is (primero Dios) going to be a regular feature, maybe the primary feature of this blog, a list of items scavenged from the day’s or week’s shopping. Today’s haul is unusual not necessarily in its size, but in its bookishness. It was a relatively expensive day, too; Erasmus’ “When I have money, I buy books, and if I have any left over, I buy food and clothes” stopped being funny a while ago.

In order of size (surface area, really):

Superfly by Curtis Mayfield, LP
Elton John by Elton John, LP
The Pointer Sisters by the Pointer Sisters, LP
Sticky Fingers by the Rolling Stones, LP
Jack Kirby’s New Gods by Jack Kirby, graphic novel
Seven Soldiers: Klarion the Witch Boy #3 by Grant Morrison and Frazier Irving, comic book
The Defenders #2 of 5 by Keith Giffen, J. M. DeMatteis, and Kevin Maguire, comic book
An Experiment in Criticism, C. S. Lewis, book
The Rising Gorge by S. J. Perelman, book
The Screwtape Letters by C. S. Lewis, book
Grendel by John Gardner, book
Bookmark Now: Writing in Unreaderly Times, edited by Kevin Smokler, book
The Sunday Philosophy Club by Alexander McCall Smith, book
Now I Lay Me Down to Sleep by Ludwig Bemelmans, book
Behind the Beyond by Stephen Leacock, book
The Glorious Pool by Thorne Smith, book

Superfly because I’ve been wanting to buy it for ages, ever since I downloaded “Freddie’s Dead” because allmusic.com recommended it as an instance of Soul Music, but I could never bring myself to shell out the $14.99 the CD is new, the $9.99 it is used, or the $24.99 it is in some new deluxe-with-all-sorts-of-bonus-tracks edition. But $4.00 for the LP? And it’s a 1972 record, and I’ve been collecting 1972 LPs ever since I bought a record player six months ago? I believe the only thing that could have kept me from buying it would be actual physical violence.

Elton John I bought because I could produce no compelling reason not to. Earlier in the day I had thought, as one does, that Elton John’s early—say, through Captain Fantastic—records would make a fine series to have all on vinyl. I already have Honky Château and Tumbleweed Connection, so when I found an Elton John that wasn’t so used that his ugly mug was peering out of as much white as black, I broke down.

The Pointer Sisters I bought because I have their second album, That’s A Plenty, and I told myself I really should hear their first album before I hear their second one. (Delayed gratification, as a moral virtue, is much easier to practice after a purchase has been made than before, I find.)

Sticky Fingers I bought because I’d always heard about the working zipper but never actually seen it before. And Exile on Main St. is perhaps my favorite album ever, but I’ve never listened to Sticky Fingers. Such is the humiliating lot of the rock ’n’ roll autodidact.

New Gods I bought because I’ve been meaning to for quite some time, and I wanted to get something with a decent price point to justify using my debit card in the comic book store, because I was out of cash. I already have the Mr. Miracle trades, so from here it’s halfway to the Forever People and Jimmy Olsen trades, and I’ll have the complete Fourth World saga. And for the vast majority of the blog-reading public, I just spoke Greek. No, seriously—it’s really good. Not in the read-it-and-you’ll-see sense, but in the an-informed-
consensus-agrees-that-Pet-Sounds-is-a-greater-achievement-than-Sgt.-
Pepper’s-no-matter-how-many-glossy-magazine-lists-the-latter-tops sense. You have to be something of a comic geek to get it, just like you have to be something of a music geek to get post-surfin’ Beach Boys.

Seven Soldiers is a currently ongoing “limited series” written by Grant Morrison (the Charlie Kaufman of comics) and all tying into the DC Universe, the fictional universe where Superman and Batman exist but Spider-Man and Captain America don’t. This is fairly popular, as far as comic books go, especially with a certain breed of comic book fans who are smart enough to see through the rank shittiness of the average superhero comic but who aren’t willing to let go of genre tropes entirely. Morrison, a Scot, is something of a god in these particular circles; I know one very smart journalist who believes, with a straight face, that Grant Morrison’s comics—which are a cleverly-written amalgam of Philip K. Dick, Hunter S. Thompson, John Barthes, and Futurama—are the future of literature. Not of comics, or of science fiction, but of literature, art, and human experience. . . . I haven’t read any of the Seven Soldiers comics, though I’ve dutifully bought them (the series is about halfway to completion), telling myself and the clerk at the comic shop that I’ll read them all once they’re done. Privately, I have my doubts.

The Defenders is a Marvel comic featuring the Hulk and three characters who haven’t had movies made featuring them. (Not that I mean to be snarky, you understand; I’m just scared of sounding stupid, and “Dr. Strange, the Sub-Mariner, and the Silver Surfer” is pretty stupid-sounding no matter which way you slice it.) In the mid-eighties, Keith Giffen and J. M. DeMatteis (writers) and Kevin Maguire (artist) took a struggling DC title, Justice League of America, and turned it into something, if not particularly hip or innovative, at least non-insulting to an adult’s intelligence. They did this, largely, by playing for laughs. They weren’t allowed to use DC’s “big guns” (Superman, Wonder Woman, the Flash) due to editorial politics (I can actually recite chapter and verse of everything that was going on at the time, both in the real world and in the comics, but you’re not interested), so they brought in a bunch of second-string characters, played up the goofiness inherent in the idea of superheroes, and managed to eke out a fanbase and some semblance of editorial clout that lasted until the Next Big Thing came along and they were yesterday’s news, corporate comics being about tied with corporate pop music for general shittiness of behavior. One of their secret weapons was Kevin Maguire’s art, which maintained a sort of cartoony naturalism as a deadpan style which both accentuated the sheer goofiness of grown men and women in these costumes and heightened the humor. It doesn’t look so good today; Maguire’s fallen in with the latest trends and is going for an overmuscled look. And his line, which was a thing of almost Mucha-like grace in the late 80s, is obscured by the overpowering digital coloring no corporate comic can do without these days. Ah, well.

An Experiment in Criticism I bought because I’ve been haunting the Literary Criticism shelves at my local Borders lately, and I only just saw it. My adolescence was spent in large part reading C. S. Lewis, but for one reason and another I’ve never picked up his more scholarly books.

To deviate from my order a bit, I bought The Sunday Philosophy Club because it’s buy-two-get-one-free time at Borders, and it was the only reasonably cheap book I could find to go along with Screwtape Letters (I know it almost by heart, but I happened not to have a copy) and Grendel (just read On Moral Fiction, figured this was the next logical move). I know nothing about Smith (McCall Smith?), other than that his books have been unobtrusively breeding in the Mystery and New Books regions. Also, they appear to be some of the last extant instances of a nearly-vanished genre, light fiction. Not beach reading or chick lit or any other of a number of healthy and, if I may say, offensively robust marketing niches, but the genre that flourished in the late 1800s and early 1900s, of which P. G. Wodehouse is practically the only surviving record. (No, there are other modern practitioners. John Mortimer leaps to mind, as does . . . uh . . . well, I suppose that’s it really.) I’m looking forward to being slightly disappointed as Smith’s books turn out to be either not light enough or just plain banal. Or I’ll have a new favorite author. A win-win situation.

Bookmark Now (a book of “state of the artform” essays by youngish, newish writers) I bought because at lunch I started reading the Paul Collins essay (he is suddenly one of my favorite current writers; I tend to love essayists, memoirists, and journalists more than novelists, at least among the living), then read the foreword (bit too starry-eyed and “every day in every way, the Current Literary Scene is getting better and better,” I thought), then read Glen David Gold’s winning confession about Googling himself, then realized I’d better get back to work. I don’t really hold much hope about the other writers being as good—by which I mean entertaining—but apparently I’ve become a Collins collector. Someone had to be.

The Rising Gorge I bought because I figured it’s really about time I had some Perelman in the house. A Sub-Treasury of American Humor isn’t going to cut it anymore.

Now I Lay Me Down to Sleep I bought because I can’t remember any time I didn’t enjoy Bemelmans.

Behind the Beyond I bought because it is by Stephen Leacock. It’s also, physically, a very charming small hardbound book published by the Bodley Head in 1928 and I’m a sucker for old books that look nice, nevermind the contents.

The Glorious Pool I bought because I only had three Thorne Smith novels in the house and they were getting lonesome. It’s a cheap Sixties paperback edition, and has the wink-wink nudge-nudge tone on the front and back cover to prove it, but at least I can read it.

Phew. Writing of necessity about so many books—before I read them, no less—is a great way to encourage me to save my pennies.

What I was thinking about when I sat down to write this:

I doubt this will be a regular feature, but I booted up the computer in order to write something approximating the following paragraphs:

I’ve been reading Hatchet Jobs by Dale Peck. For some inexplicable reason, I can’t bring myself to actually buy the thing, but I’ve been reading chapters here and there in Borders. (There’s a chair not five feet from the Literary Criticism shelves, and no one ever sits there. Bliss.) Peck, for those not in the know, caused a ruckus gosh, three years ago now, when he opened a review of a book by Rick Moody with the paragraph “Rick Moody is the worst writer of his generation.”

I was reminded last night that I had read Rick Moody before reading that review. In the Best American Essays 2005 book, curated by Louis Menand, he has an essay about “cool.” Peck says that after he finished whatever book of Moody’s it was he was reviewing, he scrawled “Lies! Lies! All Lies!” on its cover; I had a nearly identical reaction to the essay, an intolerable piece of Kerouac-worship—I don’t think I despise any literary outcropping quite as much as I do the Beats—that had nothing of substance to say, even within the very narrow limits he set for himself.

Anyway, Peck’s book is a collection of similarly nasty reviews (and a couple of glowing ones), fronted and backed (and peppered) with rather sweeping This Is What Good Novel-Writing Should Be pronouncements. (As if it mattered, what I’ve read about his own novels doesn’t encourage me to seek them out.) I noted above that I recently read John Gardner’s On Moral Fiction; Peck’s contentions make him a sort of Brian Setzer to Gardner’s Elvis. (Of course, Gardner admired Joyce and Faulkner. But they share an antipathy for well, pretty much everything since, or at least everything that’s been revered by the literary establishment, such as it is.)

Peck ends his book with a call for “a new materialism.” Apart from being hopelessly vague, I don’t think it’s even accurate as to the need of the present moment. Not that I know what is, necessarily—but I am tired of hearing that a healthy respect for religion or spirituality is “dangerous” (apparently every cultural pundit in the country thinks they’re the first to make the connection between religious fundamentalism at home and abroad; none of them are the first to mistake fundamentalism for all of a religion). Sorry; this last bit came out as a reaction to a cursory reading of an essay in this month’s Atlantic, which—not very coincidentally—rejected Gardner’s moral vision of fiction as both trite and setting the bar too high. (Uh . . . what?)

Every writer wants to change the world, says Peck. Perhaps. One unspoken theme I’ve been coming across, in Peck’s book, in the Atlantic article (wish I could give you a name, but it was unfamiliar to me, and I’m offline at the moment), and in the online reactions to Peck—and, come to think of it, in Smokler’s introduction to his collection—is relevance. Fiction, in order to regain the position of prominence it once had, or just in order to be any good, or in order to be relevant (huh?) must be . . . you guessed it, relevant.

I disagree. Relevance is the bugaboo of literature in exactly the same way as authenticity is the bugaboo of popular music.

(Good God, this is getting long.)

Popular music doesn’t need to be authentic; in fact, it can’t be. No musician can live up to the ideal of authenticity implicit in its fans’ and critics’ (and fan-critics’) adulation. Rappers who talk about the streets while buying mansions, bluesmen (and, come to think of it, is there a more reductive, imperialist term? Nobody’s life can be defined by playing one genre of music) who left the Delta to get rich in the city, the Beatles letting Phil Spector produce Let It Be; all of these are a betrayal, in some sense, of what some people want the music to stand for. But because music, as music, can’t stand for anything, because it’s always available to interpretation, reinterpretation, appropriation, reappropriation, and on down the line, because recorded music is, in a fundamental way, separate from not only the intentions but the very existence of the people who make it, it follows that it’s also separate from the intentions—and, yes, the existence—of the people who listen to it. You can project a folkie radicalism onto early Dylan, but you’ll only be pissed off no end when he finally plugs in. You can project a punk puritanism on the early Clash, but “The Magnificent Seven” will always be there to break your heart with its disco beat.

And you can demand that literature be relevant to the time it’s being written in, but all you’ll ever get is journalism.

Heh. I began typing this at 11:00 PM. It’s 1:41 AM. Welcome to the new morning.


Sorry about that. I do go on, don’t I? Anyway, the thing I wanted to post about was that I finally tracked down the Atlantic article I froth at the mouth about above (and, the sharp-eyed, note, below). It’s called “Moral Fiction,” it’s by Mary Gordon, and it’s in the “Fiction Issue 2005” of The Atlantic Monthly. Now I have to get my hands on a copy of the article so I can quote exactly what my problem with it is. Hopefully my memory won’t have played the funhouse-distortion tricks it finds so amusing.

I’ll leave you now; I’ve got a couple of DVDs to watch, and a long day tomorrow, so . . . continue to find me of interest, and I’ll attempt to be of interest.