I haven't had much time lately, keeping me away from here and forcing me to leave some posts on the back-burner, unfinished. I did, however, want to duck in and say a wee bit about Kurt Vonnegut, who died the other day. I've always liked Vonnegut, read several of his novels, though I was never a huge fan. Outside of Slaughterhouse-Five and Cat's Cradle (my two favorites), and maybe Galapagos, much of his work seemed sort of random to me. It was never entirely clear to me what the point of some of the books was--often things didn't seem to hang together much. That said, even the seemingly more random works were often full of a lot of great, funny writing. And it occurs to me now that perhaps they weren't meant to "hang together" and that I may have been trying to force them into novel-sized holes.
I have a friend who is a huge Vonnegut fan. In fact, it was mostly her copies of books I read, when we were roommates nearly a decade ago. (Unfortunately, she didn't have Mother Night, a book I've seen several mentions of in the last couple of days, so I've not read it. I did see the mostly panned movie starring Nick Nolte. I liked it.) Before that, I used to sit around with her and her other friends, listening to them talk about writers, in a way I'd never experienced, and they all loved Kurt Vonnegut. His humor and basic humanity is enormously appealing to a lot of readers. For me, I think it might be time to re-visit Slaughterhouse-Five and Cat's Cradle, and seek out Mother Night and God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater.
Another friend used to enjoy telling the story of a high school friend of his who wrote Vonnegut a letter, asking him for advice on being a writer. Vonnegut wrote back to the effect of "Screw you! No one ever gave me any advice!" His friend thought this was fantastic and got the letter framed.
In recent years, with Bush and the terror war against Iraq, Vonnegut had of course re-emerged somewhat as a sort of Mark Twain-style anti-imperialist quipster. And he remained enormously entertaining as such. But I felt a certain unease watching his appearances or reading his columns and interviews in these recent years. He would make appropriately biting remarks about politics and bitterly cynical comments about human nature, all well and good, and often very funny. But then he'd talk about wishing he were dead, that everyone he'd loved was dead, that he wished he'd died in his house-fire, and he seemed to really mean it. He seemed to be bitterly pissed that he was still alive having to put up with the likes of people. I wasn't offended or anything, but I felt for the man. He might not have wanted my sympathy, and of course he thought it was great joke to speak of atheists in heaven, but I hope he's in a better place now, whatever that might mean. Rest Well.
iPod rundown - 04/05/07
1. Matmos - "For the Trees (Return)": This pretty, sort of country-ish song is from The Civil War. In the first episode of Woebot.tv, in which Woebot talked about his favorite albums from 2006, he praised Matmos' fantastic The Rose Has Teeth in the Mouth of the Beast as their best album (I agree), but then referred to The Civil War as embarrassing. Hey! Anyway, I like the album. It's not nearly as good as the later one, but it has a lot of great music on it, I think.
2. Throwing Muses - "Epiphany": In 2003, Throwing Muses unexpectedly released a new album after having had to break up several years earlier for financial reasons (no one bought their consistently excellent records, no one went to see them play; I went by myself to see them at the 9:30 Club in DC in 1996, just before the end, in support of the great Limbo cd, and the place was only 1/3 filled; they were amazing...). This "reunion" album is self-titled (they claim their first full-length album, from 1986, was actually "untitled"), and it's hard-charging, raw stuff, of which "Epiphany" is a representative example.
3. Cat Power - "Salty Dog": This nice version of the traditional folk song appears on The Covers Record.
4. The Ex - "Fistful of Feed": More excellent rock music from the Dutch anarchists; awesome. Dizzy Spells is the album, and was actually my introduction to this essential band (recorded by Steve Albini; it sounds great).
5. Fridge - "Ark": I was briefly really into Kieran Hebden's solo project, Four Tet, and his band Fridge (AllMusic describes them as a post-rock trio, which sounds about right). I played Fridge's Happiness cd incessantly for months. And yet now it's been several years since I've listened to it at all. This track is the opening song from the earlier Eph. I still like it quite a bit. It always feels to me like it's on the way somewhere, but never quite gets there.
6. Beanie Sigel (feat. Bub B) - "Purple Rain": This was the most-talked about song on Sigel's The B. Coming, one of the most praised rap albums of the last couple of years. I like the album, though I admit that I've had a hard time seeing why this song in particular excites everybody. A little too much of the izzle-speak, frankly.
7. Fleetwood Mac - "Little Lies": Another Fleetwood Mac song for one of these things? Well, at least it's again from a different album. Funny, in 1987, as I've mentioned more than once before, I was still listening almost exclusively to classic rock. So, when news came that Fleetwood Mac had a new album coming out, it was a big deal to me. A little embarrassing. In the event, Tango in the Night is only half good. There are some interesting Lindsey Buckingham songs (like "Big Love" and "Caroline"), weird and really kind of bad Steve Nicks tragedies ("Seven Wonders"?), and the typically boring fare from Christine McVie. "Little Lies" is a McVie song, and it became a pretty big hit. I have some affection for it, but it's rather cheesy. I've gotten rid of the cd.
8. Hendrix - "Stone Free": From Are You Experienced?, obviously. Maybe I just missed it, even with all my classic rock listening, but I don't really notice Hendrix's influence on any other rock. Unless it's so pervasive I just can't hear it.
9. The Black Heart Procession - "A Heart Like Mine": This comes from my favorite Black Heart Procession album, Three, also the first one I ever got. I like them; they remind me of Tom Waits in some respects, of Souled American in others. First encountered them opening for Modest Mouse.
10. The Rapture - "Sister Saviour": Another song from the second DFA label compilation, a dub mix of one of the better songs from The Rapture's Echoes. I like it.
11. Palace Music - "Tonight's Decision (And Hereafter)": Is Will Oldham our most death-haunted songwriter? This song appears on Viva Lost Blues. Some choice lyrics: "the rest suffer death in its own black blur"; "where are the days I used to be friendly?"
12. The Game-"Don't Worry": Pleasant, boring rap from The Documentary. This may be axed from the iPod.
13. Kid606 - "Longer": From Wire magazine Tigerbeat label-comp. I'm not really into Kid606's brand of electronic mash-up, though this track is not too annoying, and at 38 seconds doesn't wear out its welcome.
14. Polmo Polpo - "Like Hearts Swelling": Title track from a simply gorgeous record. I have Polmo Polpo categorized as "electronic", but this 9+ minute track doesn't sound like much electronic music; it sounds more like music from a strange, distorted string quartet, with some other instrumentation I had a hard time picking out of the mix (it does sound as if the performance has been processed with electronics to a certain extent, so like Matmos' music in that respect, I suppose). A peek at the liner notes tells me that this track was, in fact, built around a live, improvised performance of double bass, accordian (the instrument I couldn't identify, I'm sure), electronics (by Sandro Perri, who basically is Polmo Polpo), and viola. Plaintive. Mournful.
15. Richard & Linda Thompson - "Streets of Paradise": I've talked about them before. This is a lovely Richard-sung song from Pour Down Like Silver, an album I looked for and coveted for years before it finally was reissued on cd a couple years back; it's now pretty easy to find.
2. Throwing Muses - "Epiphany": In 2003, Throwing Muses unexpectedly released a new album after having had to break up several years earlier for financial reasons (no one bought their consistently excellent records, no one went to see them play; I went by myself to see them at the 9:30 Club in DC in 1996, just before the end, in support of the great Limbo cd, and the place was only 1/3 filled; they were amazing...). This "reunion" album is self-titled (they claim their first full-length album, from 1986, was actually "untitled"), and it's hard-charging, raw stuff, of which "Epiphany" is a representative example.
3. Cat Power - "Salty Dog": This nice version of the traditional folk song appears on The Covers Record.
4. The Ex - "Fistful of Feed": More excellent rock music from the Dutch anarchists; awesome. Dizzy Spells is the album, and was actually my introduction to this essential band (recorded by Steve Albini; it sounds great).
5. Fridge - "Ark": I was briefly really into Kieran Hebden's solo project, Four Tet, and his band Fridge (AllMusic describes them as a post-rock trio, which sounds about right). I played Fridge's Happiness cd incessantly for months. And yet now it's been several years since I've listened to it at all. This track is the opening song from the earlier Eph. I still like it quite a bit. It always feels to me like it's on the way somewhere, but never quite gets there.
6. Beanie Sigel (feat. Bub B) - "Purple Rain": This was the most-talked about song on Sigel's The B. Coming, one of the most praised rap albums of the last couple of years. I like the album, though I admit that I've had a hard time seeing why this song in particular excites everybody. A little too much of the izzle-speak, frankly.
7. Fleetwood Mac - "Little Lies": Another Fleetwood Mac song for one of these things? Well, at least it's again from a different album. Funny, in 1987, as I've mentioned more than once before, I was still listening almost exclusively to classic rock. So, when news came that Fleetwood Mac had a new album coming out, it was a big deal to me. A little embarrassing. In the event, Tango in the Night is only half good. There are some interesting Lindsey Buckingham songs (like "Big Love" and "Caroline"), weird and really kind of bad Steve Nicks tragedies ("Seven Wonders"?), and the typically boring fare from Christine McVie. "Little Lies" is a McVie song, and it became a pretty big hit. I have some affection for it, but it's rather cheesy. I've gotten rid of the cd.
8. Hendrix - "Stone Free": From Are You Experienced?, obviously. Maybe I just missed it, even with all my classic rock listening, but I don't really notice Hendrix's influence on any other rock. Unless it's so pervasive I just can't hear it.
9. The Black Heart Procession - "A Heart Like Mine": This comes from my favorite Black Heart Procession album, Three, also the first one I ever got. I like them; they remind me of Tom Waits in some respects, of Souled American in others. First encountered them opening for Modest Mouse.
10. The Rapture - "Sister Saviour": Another song from the second DFA label compilation, a dub mix of one of the better songs from The Rapture's Echoes. I like it.
11. Palace Music - "Tonight's Decision (And Hereafter)": Is Will Oldham our most death-haunted songwriter? This song appears on Viva Lost Blues. Some choice lyrics: "the rest suffer death in its own black blur"; "where are the days I used to be friendly?"
12. The Game-"Don't Worry": Pleasant, boring rap from The Documentary. This may be axed from the iPod.
13. Kid606 - "Longer": From Wire magazine Tigerbeat label-comp. I'm not really into Kid606's brand of electronic mash-up, though this track is not too annoying, and at 38 seconds doesn't wear out its welcome.
14. Polmo Polpo - "Like Hearts Swelling": Title track from a simply gorgeous record. I have Polmo Polpo categorized as "electronic", but this 9+ minute track doesn't sound like much electronic music; it sounds more like music from a strange, distorted string quartet, with some other instrumentation I had a hard time picking out of the mix (it does sound as if the performance has been processed with electronics to a certain extent, so like Matmos' music in that respect, I suppose). A peek at the liner notes tells me that this track was, in fact, built around a live, improvised performance of double bass, accordian (the instrument I couldn't identify, I'm sure), electronics (by Sandro Perri, who basically is Polmo Polpo), and viola. Plaintive. Mournful.
15. Richard & Linda Thompson - "Streets of Paradise": I've talked about them before. This is a lovely Richard-sung song from Pour Down Like Silver, an album I looked for and coveted for years before it finally was reissued on cd a couple years back; it's now pretty easy to find.
Sam Harris v. Andrew Sullivan
Mark at Ready Steady Blog points to a lengthy debate between Sam Harris and Andrew Sullivan at Beliefnet. Since I find both Harris and Sullivan generally unimpressive, and debate about the existence of God extremely tiresome, I wasn't planning on plowing through the thing any time soon. However, I got involved in a mini-exchange in the comments to Mark's post (based on the opening email in the debate from Harris, I said that Harris' definition of "reason" is problematic; another Richard said that Harris had not actually defined reason, but had attempted to define faith; I argued that his definition of faith implied a definition of reason; he said it didn't, and that Harris' use of reason was more expansive than I was giving him credit for), prompting me to read it now. On balance, I was not blown away; some observations follow.
Harris says a lot that I more or less agree with when it comes to questions of empirically verifiable knowledge about the world, and the likely factual truth of any particular religious belief. And Sullivan does, indeed, as Harris charges, basically ignore this stuff. This shouldn't be surprising, at least in part because Sullivan routinely has problems with evidence in his political writing. However, Harris comes off as remarkably tone-deaf, and Sullivan at times surprisingly compelling--but only when he's talking about his experience of his faith, not the "beliefs" themselves. Harris is wrapped up in factual truth-claims of religion, Sullivan is more interested in his religious experience.
I used to make all kinds of arguments like those that Harris makes, until I realized that they didn't matter; I recognize his tone-deafness as resembling my own. Other-Richard was disturbed that Sullivan, he says, "essentially said that his beliefs existed independently of any form of evidence or argument". But he doesn't quite say this (or, if he does, it's more because he's an inept debater). He really says this of his faith. I think atheists all too often refuse to see a distinction.
But, as might be expected, my main problem with the exchange is this: politics. Harris claims that the survival of the species may well depend on our ability to eradicate religion. Religion, therefore, must end (good luck with that). He says, in his opening salvo:
Sullivan spends a huge portion of one of his replies in the exchange talking about "contingency"--how our lives are necessarily contingent: on time, place, culture, parents, history; how there can be no "contingency-free" existence. His bringing this up is interesting (even if he's constructed a straw man, since Harris never really said there could or ought to be a contingency-free existence, as he later points out). It's interesting because, in effect, in their refusal to admit that culture, politics, and economics might be determining factors even for those who seem to be in the grip of these religious fundamentalisms, they refuse to notice that the experience and practice of religious fundamentalists might also be contingent. And they absolutely refuse to recognize some of what that experience and practice might be contingent on: for example, the giant elephant in the room of Western Imperialism, in general, and American foreign policy, in particular. They refuse to notice explicit, longstanding policies of liberal economic dominance and their military enforcement. They refuse to notice intentional American patronage (that is, calling it a "mistake" is wildly disingenuous) of the most extreme elements in various other countries, and how this patronage might have affected the options available to the people in those countries. When the fundamentalists are the only ones who can ensure clean drinking water, where might your loyalties lie?
If I had a copy of Sam Harris' book, The End of Faith, in front of me, I'd quote those passages that I read previously which demonstrated to me the massive political blindspot at the center of his "humanistic" quest to rid the world of religion, and which effectively ensured that I'd be unlikely to read the book in full or bother with him much in the future. But that'll have to wait for a trip to the library and another post. (Hint: it has to do with extremism he identifies in certain political radicals, an extremism he naturally equates with religious fundamentalism. Second hint: Noam Chomsky, you'll be shocked to learn, is one of these radicals.)
Harris says a lot that I more or less agree with when it comes to questions of empirically verifiable knowledge about the world, and the likely factual truth of any particular religious belief. And Sullivan does, indeed, as Harris charges, basically ignore this stuff. This shouldn't be surprising, at least in part because Sullivan routinely has problems with evidence in his political writing. However, Harris comes off as remarkably tone-deaf, and Sullivan at times surprisingly compelling--but only when he's talking about his experience of his faith, not the "beliefs" themselves. Harris is wrapped up in factual truth-claims of religion, Sullivan is more interested in his religious experience.
I used to make all kinds of arguments like those that Harris makes, until I realized that they didn't matter; I recognize his tone-deafness as resembling my own. Other-Richard was disturbed that Sullivan, he says, "essentially said that his beliefs existed independently of any form of evidence or argument". But he doesn't quite say this (or, if he does, it's more because he's an inept debater). He really says this of his faith. I think atheists all too often refuse to see a distinction.
But, as might be expected, my main problem with the exchange is this: politics. Harris claims that the survival of the species may well depend on our ability to eradicate religion. Religion, therefore, must end (good luck with that). He says, in his opening salvo:
We are both especially concerned about Islam at this moment--because so many Muslims appear to be 'fundamentalists' and because some of the fundamentals of Islam pose special liabilities in a world overflowing with destructive technology.And in his first reply, Sullivan says:
We agree that Islamic fundamentalism is by far the gravest threat in this respect (because of its confort [sic] with violence); and that the core feature of what occurred on 9/11 was not cultural, political, or economic - but religious. We agree that a large part of the murder and mayhem in today's Iraq is also rooted in religious difference, specifically the ancient rift between Sunni and Shia. We also agree, I think, that the degeneration of American Christianity into the crudest forms of Biblical inerrantism, emotional hysteria and cultural paranoia is a lamentable development.The fact that they, and too many others, agree on this is part of why this conversation, as ever, basically goes nowhere. The fact that they believe that the problems besetting the world (from 9/11 to Iraq to American domestic problems, etc.) are basically religious and not "cultural, political, or economic" means that those problems will not go away. They are effacing politics, because discussing politics in any useful sense would mean challenging some basic premises of their own privileged existence.
Sullivan spends a huge portion of one of his replies in the exchange talking about "contingency"--how our lives are necessarily contingent: on time, place, culture, parents, history; how there can be no "contingency-free" existence. His bringing this up is interesting (even if he's constructed a straw man, since Harris never really said there could or ought to be a contingency-free existence, as he later points out). It's interesting because, in effect, in their refusal to admit that culture, politics, and economics might be determining factors even for those who seem to be in the grip of these religious fundamentalisms, they refuse to notice that the experience and practice of religious fundamentalists might also be contingent. And they absolutely refuse to recognize some of what that experience and practice might be contingent on: for example, the giant elephant in the room of Western Imperialism, in general, and American foreign policy, in particular. They refuse to notice explicit, longstanding policies of liberal economic dominance and their military enforcement. They refuse to notice intentional American patronage (that is, calling it a "mistake" is wildly disingenuous) of the most extreme elements in various other countries, and how this patronage might have affected the options available to the people in those countries. When the fundamentalists are the only ones who can ensure clean drinking water, where might your loyalties lie?
If I had a copy of Sam Harris' book, The End of Faith, in front of me, I'd quote those passages that I read previously which demonstrated to me the massive political blindspot at the center of his "humanistic" quest to rid the world of religion, and which effectively ensured that I'd be unlikely to read the book in full or bother with him much in the future. But that'll have to wait for a trip to the library and another post. (Hint: it has to do with extremism he identifies in certain political radicals, an extremism he naturally equates with religious fundamentalism. Second hint: Noam Chomsky, you'll be shocked to learn, is one of these radicals.)
Clumsiness in the Face of a Brilliant Narrative Mind
In my last post I wondered about the quantity of bad writing readers are willing to wade through in the name of story. In light of this, and the question of genre writing (and genre "ghettoes"), I was intrigued by this review by J F Quackenbush of Philip K. Dick's Confessions of a Crap Artist, at Wet Asphalt. The following passage in particular:
On a related note, Steve Mitchelmore posted today about beginning to read a thriller:
Dick's prose, and hence the true problem he presents to critical appraisal, is often slapdash, sloppy, and amateurish. This clumsiness in the face of the brilliant inventive narrative mind behind it has a way of detaching the reader, and with Confessions the themes of alienation and misunderstanding that so permeate his work function on that detachment in such a way as to leave the reader alienated himself, and yet completely engrossed. Here Dick's flaws as a stylist actually serve to heighten the reader's experience, and the obvious comparison is to much more well-regarded technicians like Thomas Pynchon or William Gaddis whose prose often reflects stylistically and structurally the themes and moods of the story. From this, it is apparent that Dick is postmodern in a very unselfconscious way. Dick's postmodernism is a product of neurosis and style, and does not rely on the skillful artifice of a Pynchon or a Barth to convey the images and feelings of a postmodern world adrift in it's own hypochondria. Dick himself is a product of that world, the author himself didn't seem to understand why it was that he wasn't accepted as a more mainstream author, and had an ironic and good-humored detachment from the insanity of many of his own beliefs. Philip K. Dick is often held forth as an example of the best that Science Fiction has to offer, and in a way that's true, but at the same time it reveals some of the failings of the Sci Fi ghetto. Confessions of a Crap Artist, relying for success so heavily not just on the readers understanding of Philip K. Dick the individual, but also on the accidental brilliance of Dick's mediocre prose, is (almost) accidentally brilliant. To offer Philip K. Dick as one of the great writers of the 20th Century, as many have done, is therefore not unproblematic. Like Frank Herbert, Dick has an almost cult-like following who seem to be almost completely unaware of the many technical flaws and rough edges to the works of the respective men. Of course, Dick isn't nearly as inept as Herbert, and in that way it's an unfair comparison, at the same time the comparison is revealing as one of the reasons that Science Fiction authors have remained so long in their ghetto, and that is the overly sympathetic reading that Sci Fi authors often receive from their fan base. This is, I think, a critical distinction between the work of Literary authors and authors working in the various genre ghettoes.There's a lot to unpack here, and I'm not going to try to do it in this post, not least because I've never read anything by Dick. But I think Quackenbush touches on points that make various online literary debates so difficult. Too often readers seem to be talking past each other. People read for different reasons, with different ends in mind, so when we all show up online, with our overlapping reading communities, confusion seems inevitable.
On a related note, Steve Mitchelmore posted today about beginning to read a thriller:
I had no expectations at all and it began well. The main character was introduced in crisp prose with a wonderful pulse. I learned of his mundanely pleasant life, his mysterious girlfriend and the suggestion of a dark cloud waiting to float over and block out the sunlight. No trouble. I've read many infinitely worse “literary” novels. Yet it was here that I put the book down. Now that a world had opened up, I wanted more. I wanted the whole book to be like this; a book of beginnings, sunlight ahead, and I knew that was not going to happen. That dark cloud scuttled over soon enough.Fantastic. I don't mean anything like "yay, Steve! screw that genre crap!" Rather, Steve knows what kind of writing he needs, and he is able to articulate it, in his inimitable fashion. But I suspect that this post is incoherent to a lot of readers. And I don't mean that to sound condescending. I mean that, hell, I very likely would not have stopped reading a book that got off to the kind of start Steve describes, even if I think I do know what he means by "book of beginnings" (in some respects, I think Paul Auster is like this). But I'm not quite as confident about what kind of writing I need. I could say I have different needs at different times, and to some extent that's true. But it's becoming less and less true the more I read. I'm less and less interested in being up to date, or in reading a little of everything, and more interested in fulfilling some ill-defined literary desire I have. A desire I'm trying to define. I lack the discipline, in an odd way. I still feel compelled to finish a book, if it's at least passingly entertaining, even if it doesn't really address a deeper need, and even as I increasingly resent being pulled along by plot.
Follow up on Cormac McCarthy
Commenting on my last post, Brandon says that, in fact, like "a thriller" The Road "had a certain 'pulp' quality which makes it fun", contrary to Levi Asher's dismissal. Makes it sound sort of like a "genre" novel, doesn't it? Which is funny, since I wrote not too long ago that "It's pointless to say that [McCarthy] 'wrote a genre novel'." Well, I still think it's pointless, but largely because it doesn't mean anything. The claim is devoid of content, positing McCarthy as a so-called "literary" writer who has written some undefined thing called "genre". This tells me nothing.
Some might argue that he's always written genre, in the sense of that fiction marketed as "literary fiction", but which doesn't question or ultimately stray from the dominant form of the novel. One of these people might be Ellis Sharp, who writes that McCarthy's writing doesn't "engage" him: "Although the prose looks more technically up to date than [Kiran] Desai’s I’m not entirely convinced that they are quite as far apart as all that." Ellis notes this McCarthy sentence from the same extract presented by Asher: "And on the far shore a creature that raised its dripping mouth from the rimstone pool and stared into the light with eyes dead white and sightless as the eggs of spiders." When I first read this sentence I tripped over the "sightless as the eggs of spiders", and I would have hard time arguing against Ellis' assessment that this is bad writing. (I like this comment from Ellis: "McCarthy’s eye is on the reader – not the creature.") And yet, as mentioned in the last post, I liked the "glaucoma" simile from earlier in the passage, as well as the insistent rhythm of the prose. Those carry more weight with me than the later poor sentence, at least in keeping me interested in reading the book.
Also in his comment, Brandon observes that McCarthy "constantly bounces between really good and laughably poor" and that, for him, "[t]his is part of his appeal". How much work do readers do forgiving bad writing in search of story? A lot, I think. I'm usually not interested in doing it. I'm happy to expend even considerable effort when I read, but I'm not interested in forcing my way through bad or clunky prose because there just might be some "story" lurking behind there somewhere. I'll say more on this point later. I've already said that McCarthy is not a key writer for me; indeed, the books of his I have read did not compel me to seek out the rest of his fiction. We'll see what happens when I read The Road.
Some might argue that he's always written genre, in the sense of that fiction marketed as "literary fiction", but which doesn't question or ultimately stray from the dominant form of the novel. One of these people might be Ellis Sharp, who writes that McCarthy's writing doesn't "engage" him: "Although the prose looks more technically up to date than [Kiran] Desai’s I’m not entirely convinced that they are quite as far apart as all that." Ellis notes this McCarthy sentence from the same extract presented by Asher: "And on the far shore a creature that raised its dripping mouth from the rimstone pool and stared into the light with eyes dead white and sightless as the eggs of spiders." When I first read this sentence I tripped over the "sightless as the eggs of spiders", and I would have hard time arguing against Ellis' assessment that this is bad writing. (I like this comment from Ellis: "McCarthy’s eye is on the reader – not the creature.") And yet, as mentioned in the last post, I liked the "glaucoma" simile from earlier in the passage, as well as the insistent rhythm of the prose. Those carry more weight with me than the later poor sentence, at least in keeping me interested in reading the book.
Also in his comment, Brandon observes that McCarthy "constantly bounces between really good and laughably poor" and that, for him, "[t]his is part of his appeal". How much work do readers do forgiving bad writing in search of story? A lot, I think. I'm usually not interested in doing it. I'm happy to expend even considerable effort when I read, but I'm not interested in forcing my way through bad or clunky prose because there just might be some "story" lurking behind there somewhere. I'll say more on this point later. I've already said that McCarthy is not a key writer for me; indeed, the books of his I have read did not compel me to seek out the rest of his fiction. We'll see what happens when I read The Road.
Thoroughly Humorless
I acquired Cormac McCarthy's novel The Road yesterday, as part of a birthday gift certificate-enabled book-buying bonanza. I've previously read only Blood Meridian and All The Pretty Horses (in a bold critical move, I prefer the former to the latter, by quite a lot), and in general I don't consider McCarthy at all central to my reading interests. I expected to borrow The Road from my father eventually (he's a McCarthy fan), but I keep hearing more and more about it and, I admit, my interest has been piqued by all the hubbub (not that it matters, but I swear I decided I would get it just before I heard that Oprah selected it for her book club thing, though I find that she selected it rather entertaining).
All of which is just a lead up to my noting Levi Asher's post today in which he reiterates his hatred of Cormac McCarthy (link via The Mumpsimus). He is certainly entitled to his taste, and as far as I can tell his taste does not resemble mine (for starters, I have never had much interest in Kerouac or Bukowski), which is fine. His critical assessment is honest: he's not trying to suggest that other people are stupid for liking McCarthy; he just doesn't get it. I thought his post was interesting, though, less for what he says about McCarthy, than for what those things say about his interests as a reader and how those are quite different than mine. He quotes for us two opening passages, the first is from The Inheritance of Loss, by Kiran Desai, the second is from The Road. He does this to show what is good about Desai's opening, bad about McCarthy's (go to Asher's site to read them; they're too long for me to usefully reproduce here). I was amused to find that, after reading both passages, I felt little inclination to want to continue reading Desai's book, and I do still want to read The Road.
Then Asher tells us what he doesn't like about the McCarthy passage. He says:
But that stuff's all down to basic taste, more or less, or can be argued to be, but in the middle of that passage of Asher's I quoted above, he says The Road is going to be "a book of punishing, guilt-ridden unpleasantness, a book that must be aim[i]ng to be 'good for us', because it's sure not aiming to be fun". It's not clear to me why he should think that the book "must be aiming to be good for us" like "medicine". Rather, it's not clear why he opposes such books with books that are "aiming to be fun", as if these are the only options we have. And, fun? What does fun have to do with it? Using the word "fun" implies, to me, a desire for broad entertainment. I might praise a pop song as fun or a movie comedy (or thriller, or whatever), but I read very little literature that could be helpfully described as "fun" (which is not remotely the same as "pleasure"), but it's beyond me why anyone would go into a book by Cormac McCarthy expecting to find something that could be called "fun". And of course, he knows he won't, since he's already expressed his distaste before, so in that sense his attempt to read The Road was not entirely honest (I don't mean that to sound snotty), since he doesn't seem able or willing to put aside his expectations of what a novel should be like in order to discover what might actually be worthwhile in McCarthy. But then nothing says he has to; you can't read or appreciate everything.
I hope to read The Road relatively soon and report here at least a little of my experience of it.
All of which is just a lead up to my noting Levi Asher's post today in which he reiterates his hatred of Cormac McCarthy (link via The Mumpsimus). He is certainly entitled to his taste, and as far as I can tell his taste does not resemble mine (for starters, I have never had much interest in Kerouac or Bukowski), which is fine. His critical assessment is honest: he's not trying to suggest that other people are stupid for liking McCarthy; he just doesn't get it. I thought his post was interesting, though, less for what he says about McCarthy, than for what those things say about his interests as a reader and how those are quite different than mine. He quotes for us two opening passages, the first is from The Inheritance of Loss, by Kiran Desai, the second is from The Road. He does this to show what is good about Desai's opening, bad about McCarthy's (go to Asher's site to read them; they're too long for me to usefully reproduce here). I was amused to find that, after reading both passages, I felt little inclination to want to continue reading Desai's book, and I do still want to read The Road.
Then Asher tells us what he doesn't like about the McCarthy passage. He says:
The first thing the reader detects is that this will be a thoroughly humorless book, a book of punishing, guilt-ridden unpleasantness, a book that must be aimng to be "good for us", because it's sure not aiming to be fun. That's the moral outlook Cormac McCarthy always offers -- a stern "church lady" tone warning of stark choices between evil and redemption.I think this is a strange comment to make. No one ever accuses Cormac McCarthy of being anything like a broadly comic writer, that's for sure, but an epithet like "thoroughly humorless" still seems weird. I've not read enough to be able to argue that there's some great comic vein in McCarthy's work that he's just too dense to get, but I seem to recall references in some reviews to dark humor in McCarthy in general, and The Road in particular. For example, in a review picked more or less at random, here is Benjamin Whitmer at The Modern Word:
As bleak as the novel is, it’s also funnier than one might expect. Granted, it generally takes a grisly sense of humor to properly appreciate McCarthy, but that’s what makes his humor so effective. The funniest bits of The Road are found in the viciously sharp dialogue, particularly in scenes where the man and the boy encounter other stragglers on the road.Ok, so maybe there's some darkly funny stuff Asher just couldn't manage to get to, especially since he finds the prose itself so galling. I can see having trouble with McCarthy's style. In the past, it's taken me a few pages (ok, 40) before I feel like I've adjusted to it. But the quoted passage definitely sets a mood and a tone, and the prose has an insistent rhythm, which is aided by the hated "ungrammatical half-sentences" (which are "the prose signature of junior high school students everywhere"--a cheap shot, sure, but this is hatred he's expressing, so cheap shots are to be expected). And I like the simile in the third sentence, in which the days are said to be increasingly gray, "Like the onset of some cold glaucoma dimming away the world." I want to read more.
But that stuff's all down to basic taste, more or less, or can be argued to be, but in the middle of that passage of Asher's I quoted above, he says The Road is going to be "a book of punishing, guilt-ridden unpleasantness, a book that must be aim[i]ng to be 'good for us', because it's sure not aiming to be fun". It's not clear to me why he should think that the book "must be aiming to be good for us" like "medicine". Rather, it's not clear why he opposes such books with books that are "aiming to be fun", as if these are the only options we have. And, fun? What does fun have to do with it? Using the word "fun" implies, to me, a desire for broad entertainment. I might praise a pop song as fun or a movie comedy (or thriller, or whatever), but I read very little literature that could be helpfully described as "fun" (which is not remotely the same as "pleasure"), but it's beyond me why anyone would go into a book by Cormac McCarthy expecting to find something that could be called "fun". And of course, he knows he won't, since he's already expressed his distaste before, so in that sense his attempt to read The Road was not entirely honest (I don't mean that to sound snotty), since he doesn't seem able or willing to put aside his expectations of what a novel should be like in order to discover what might actually be worthwhile in McCarthy. But then nothing says he has to; you can't read or appreciate everything.
I hope to read The Road relatively soon and report here at least a little of my experience of it.
New Music
Three months into the year, and I've bought just eight new cds, only three of which are 2007 releases: Panda Bear's Person Pitch; LCD Soundsystem's Sound of Silver; and Deerhoof's Friend Opportunity. It's completely unheard of for me to not have already bought new albums by certain old favorites, such as Modest Mouse or, especially, Kristin Hersh, not to mention a whole slew of other interesting looking releases, but time and money are an issue, so they'll have to wait.
Person Pitch is gorgeous. I especially like the 12+ minutes of "Bros"; this is the kind of song I could easily listen to all day long. Since 2004's Sung Tongs, reviewers have repeatedly (and lazily, it seems) cited the Beach Boys as a point of reference for Panda Bear's group, Animal Collective. The comparison is more conceptual, I think, than anything else . People are more reminded of the Beach Boys than really claiming that Animal Collective actually sound like them (I could be wrong; I don't hear it, in any event). But with Person Pitch, the sound of Panda Bear's voice comes through very much like one of the Beach Boys (if I cared about the Beach Boys, and could thus differentiate their voices, I could tell you which one). (See Simon Reynolds on Person Pitch in the Observer: "Like Animal Collective, Lennox [i.e., Panda Bear] pulls off the trick of being simultaneously poppy and abstract, winsome and deranging.")
Sound of Silver is pretty good. People seem to be talking most about "Someone Great", but after a handful of listens my favorite track is easily "All My Friends". On a number of the other tracks, James Murphy's vocals are a distraction from the otherwise enjoyable music. Once again I feel that all too often Murphy sounds like he's suffering from a major head cold when he sings (see "North American Scum"). Check out Tom Breihan's entertaining feature about LCD Soundsystem and interview with James Murphy in The Village Voice. Interestingly, Tom seems to think (and appears to reflect a general consensus, not that I've followed up on it) that the slower songs (like "Someone Great") are more central to this record than the last one, which surprises Murphy. It surprises me, too, since the two albums don't sound all that different from each other (though I like the new one more, I think), but also, as with previous LCD Soundsystem music, all of my favorite songs are the faster songs ("All My Friends", of course, but also the opener "Get Innocuous!" and "Us V Them"). They're the songs on which the vocals are the least distracting, for one thing, but also, as with Panda Bear's "Bros" (or Animal Collective's "Banshee Beat"), the kinds of songs that have a kind of repetitive beauty that I can just get lost in.
Deerhoof's Friend Opportunity has, so far, alas, failed to click with me. It has some great moments, but despite its brevity, it seems diffuse. I have been unable to zero in on any particular track.
I expect to buy Bill Callahan's first non-Smog album, when it comes out later this month. And I think I'll post something about the other new cds I've acquired this year. They're all 2006 releases, and I think a reassessment of my favorites from last year may be in order. . .
Person Pitch is gorgeous. I especially like the 12+ minutes of "Bros"; this is the kind of song I could easily listen to all day long. Since 2004's Sung Tongs, reviewers have repeatedly (and lazily, it seems) cited the Beach Boys as a point of reference for Panda Bear's group, Animal Collective. The comparison is more conceptual, I think, than anything else . People are more reminded of the Beach Boys than really claiming that Animal Collective actually sound like them (I could be wrong; I don't hear it, in any event). But with Person Pitch, the sound of Panda Bear's voice comes through very much like one of the Beach Boys (if I cared about the Beach Boys, and could thus differentiate their voices, I could tell you which one). (See Simon Reynolds on Person Pitch in the Observer: "Like Animal Collective, Lennox [i.e., Panda Bear] pulls off the trick of being simultaneously poppy and abstract, winsome and deranging.")
Sound of Silver is pretty good. People seem to be talking most about "Someone Great", but after a handful of listens my favorite track is easily "All My Friends". On a number of the other tracks, James Murphy's vocals are a distraction from the otherwise enjoyable music. Once again I feel that all too often Murphy sounds like he's suffering from a major head cold when he sings (see "North American Scum"). Check out Tom Breihan's entertaining feature about LCD Soundsystem and interview with James Murphy in The Village Voice. Interestingly, Tom seems to think (and appears to reflect a general consensus, not that I've followed up on it) that the slower songs (like "Someone Great") are more central to this record than the last one, which surprises Murphy. It surprises me, too, since the two albums don't sound all that different from each other (though I like the new one more, I think), but also, as with previous LCD Soundsystem music, all of my favorite songs are the faster songs ("All My Friends", of course, but also the opener "Get Innocuous!" and "Us V Them"). They're the songs on which the vocals are the least distracting, for one thing, but also, as with Panda Bear's "Bros" (or Animal Collective's "Banshee Beat"), the kinds of songs that have a kind of repetitive beauty that I can just get lost in.
Deerhoof's Friend Opportunity has, so far, alas, failed to click with me. It has some great moments, but despite its brevity, it seems diffuse. I have been unable to zero in on any particular track.
I expect to buy Bill Callahan's first non-Smog album, when it comes out later this month. And I think I'll post something about the other new cds I've acquired this year. They're all 2006 releases, and I think a reassessment of my favorites from last year may be in order. . .
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