Category Archives: reviews

edmund white, “city boy”

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Edmund White
City Boy: My Life in New York During the 1960s and ’70s
(Bloomsbury, 2009)

The first question that arises with this book is why. Edmund White has already written a biography, of a sort (My Lives); more to the point, he’s also fictionalized the period in time in which this book is set in his autobiographical novels, A Boy’s Own Story, The Beautiful Room Is Empty, and The Farewell Symphony, the books for which he’s probably best known. Why then do this as non-fiction rather than fiction? One might suspect this book of being a cashing in on the present popularity of the memoir; but White has been studiously playing with the boundary between fiction and non-fiction since A Boy’s Own Story, where he began the project of fictionalizing his own life. Most recently, in Fanny and Hotel de Dream, he moved to a project of fictionalizing American literary history (the lives of Fanny Trollope and Stephen Crane, respectively); in the latter, he went so far as to fabricate apocrypha for Stephen Crane. This book, then, should not simply be taken as a clef for his romans à clef: it needs to be observed in context.

The trickiness afoot commences with the first, one-sentence paragraph in the book:

In the 1970s in New York everyone slept till noon.

A fine beginning; this is what those of us who weren’t in New York in the 1970s assume about life then. But this might be instructively compared to “Uncle Ed and My Life with Him,” an essay by White’s nephew Keith Fleming. Fleming lived with his uncle in the 1970s; this is engagingly fictionalized in The Farewell Symphony and described at length in City Boy, as well as in Fleming’s own memoir, The Boy with the Thorn in His Side. In the section excerpted on White’s website we find this description:

The first book he had suggested I read had been Lord Chesterfield’s Letters to His Son, and I instantly recognized my uncle in Chesterfield’s dictum that a gentleman never rises later than ten in the morning, no matter when he might have gone to bed, and that his day should be divided evenly between study and pleasure, which mutually refresh each other.

Lord Chesterfield certainly shows up in City Boy: on p. 27, White talks about how much he liked his writing, though White doesn’t mention what time Chesterfield thought a gentleman should rise. If one actually looks at Chesterfield, things become even more complicated:

But then, I can assure you, that I always found time for serious studies; and, when I could find it no other way, I took it out of my sleep, for I resolved always to rise early in the morning, however late I went to bed at night; and this resolution I have kept so sacred, that, unless when I have been confined to my bed by illness, I have not, for more than forty years, ever been in bed at nine o’clock in the morning but commonly up before eight.

How do we resolve the disjunction between Fleming’s account and White’s broad statement? Assuming that Fleming is accurately remembering his uncle’s habits, the “everyone” in White’s line must not include him, as we would have expected. If Fleming is misremembering Chesterfield but correctly remembering that this passage made him think of his uncle, White’s behavior is even more atypical of 1970s New York. Memory and truth are complicated; and this is a book that needs to be read carefully.

Looked at from the New York of 2010, the period from the 1960s to the 1980s in New York can’t help but seem a golden age for the arts, which we observe from mannerist decline. It’s not easy, for example, to think of a New York novel from the past decade that’s likely to hold its own in twenty years. But that past is a hard thing to nail down: talking to people who were in the New York art scene in the 1960s, one quickly realizes that any two accounts of the same events in that period are bound to be contradictory. White’s strategy, then, is to approach the same events several times, using different techniques. Reading his novelizations, the uninformed reader won’t always match names to characters correctly; the names remain ciphers, and what the reader is left with is the relationship between the characters. With names attached, as in City Boy, it becomes a record of the celebrity: this is what Richard Howard did, this is how Susan Sontag was, this is the sort of person that Harold Brodkey was. Both ways are valid ways to tell a story which is important; however, the fiction read before the memoir is going to have a different effect than the fiction after the memoir. Perhaps this is what White is getting at when he says, after a description of James Merrill:

Having actually known such a person doesn’t give one a special purchase on the reality. In fact familiarity can lead to slightly idiotic complacencies. The French critic Sainte-Beauve wrote that he couldn’t see why everyone made such a fuss over “Beyle” (Stendhal), since good ol’ Beyle would surely have been the first to laugh at his exaggerated posthumous reputation. Even so, everyone wants to hear the story just because it “really” happened, and yet in truth its reality – fragile at best and now largely mythologized into a new shape – is scarcely telling. (p. 86.)

The project of going back to the same history again and again makes sense with this in mind. City Boy is a blunt representation of reality; but it’s also a more measured one given that more time has passed since White’s last attempts to write about the period. This is maybe counterintuitive: The Beautiful Room Is Empty (1988) was written at a moment of crisis; while panic about AIDS in the U.S. was calming by the time that The Farewell Symphony appeared in 1997, its repercussions were still being strongly felt. If one were attempting simply to document what was being lost (a charge frequently leveled at autobiographical fiction), it would have made more sense to work in the memoir form then. But obfuscation allows for better representation.

A case might be made that one of the most interesting works of fiction in the past few years is White’s contemporary James McCourt’s Now Voyagers, a sequel to Mawrdew Czgowchwz, his novel of gay opera devotees in New York of the 1950s besotted with Irishness. Now Voyagers is an enormous, fantastically intricate book; it’s one of the most explicitly Joycean American novel that I can imagine (and McCourt has promised a sequel). But one senses, reading it, the heartbreaking feeling that this is a book that might never actually find a readership: it’s a document of a vanished age, in a vanishing language. I can sense how well it’s done, but my knowledge (of opera, of Irishness, of gay life in the 1950s) isn’t enough to really understand McCourt on his own terms; I can only admire his language. Now Voyagers is reminiscent of White’s first few novels, especially the elliptical allusions of the first, Forgetting Elena, which seems underrated despite Nabokov’s approval. White seems to have moved in the opposite direction, providing easier ways in to the past. I’m not sure, though, that this is an outright rejection of his earlier experimentation: rather, he’s continuing to play with style across what we think of as fiction and non-fiction.

lucy ives, “anamnesis”

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Lucy Ives
Anamnesis
(Slope Editions, 2009)

The premise of this book is laid out in its epigraph, by Vito Acconci: “Sometimes I draw the line on what I have dun.” Deleting the struck-through text, one is left with “o.”: a reminder that the poet can call forth through absence as well as through presence. Anamnesis is a book-length poem about not only writing by also unwriting: not erasure, but crossing out, leaving a record of thought. The book is divided into nine sections by pages that feature only a centered “+”, an interesting device: “+” can be the addition sign, but it might also be a crossed-out vertical line: a negated “I” as appears in the quoted Acconci?

Despite the promise of the epigraph, this is not a book that relies overtly on typographic trickery, though it is deeply engaged in the process of writing, a process that is reenacted in the text. This sounds like the overt premise for a fair amount of electronic writing: from William Gibson’s Agrippa on, it’s been a field fixated on the idea of the ephemerality of digital text. But the premise of good conceptual art is good ideas, not necessarily formal trickery, and it’s the ideas that Ives is interested in. (At the end of the day, “Agrippa” remains a rather bad poem written by William Gibson; while the concept is fine, the text seems incidental.) The way Anamnesis works is evident from its first stanza:

Suppose we write the sentence, “Paul had a very great mind”
Later we can return, strike through the word “mind” and write “brain”
Later we might add, before the word “had,” the words, “the owner of the restaurant”
We might add, “whose sign is the shape of a sleeping deer”
We could strike this sentence out entire
We could write, “Debt has become the watch word”
We’ll write, “Recommended for you”
But we can cross this out
Write, “My family has three members”
Strike through “has,” write “is”
Strike through “members,” write, “both my mother and father, in the apartment right now”
Strike through “right now,” write, ” in the mornings, noon, and in the evenings”
Strike “both” through
Write, “Lucy was saying that”
Strike the whole sentence

Taking the “we” at face value, we could attempt to follow these instructions, to create a sequence that starts like this:

Paul had a very great mind
Paul had a very great mindbrain
Paul the owner of the restaurant had a very great mindbrain
Paul the owner of the restaurant had a very great mindbrain whose sign is the shape of a sleeping deer

but already we have problems: which word does whose modify? The restaurant could have a sign in the shape of a sleeping deer; but it’s the personal noun Paul, rather than the restaurant that can be modified by whose. The whose clause can’t be inserted after Paul because the owner of the restaurant gets lost; it can’t be inserted after restaurant or brain because it would appear to modify those words, which would be ungrammatical. A solution would have to go beyond words themselves: but one notes that this is a book that purposefully doesn’t including periods, in an attempt to construct meanings out of words as words, unaided by that particular form of punctuation.

The commands to write and cross out are repeated through the book. The voice in this stanza is interesting: as something of an introduction, this stanza uses “we” in different tenses: “We write”; “We could write”; “We’ll write”. We seems to include both the speaker and the reader, inviting the reader into the text; but the shifting tenses make the relation of the reader to the speaker unclear. These might be mental exercises, à la Wittgenstein (“Suppose we write”); or they might be future plans (“We’ll write”). By the next stanza, “we” has turned to “you”: “You can write”. Unadorned imperative forms with an implied you become the rule: “Write”; “Cross out”. The reader must make his own space in the text, deciding whether these commands apply to him. There are limits to the reader’s power: following the instructions will only go so far. This is a “writerly text,” as Roland Barthes would have said.

I’m not trying to suggest that the reader is excluded from the book: I don’t think that’s the case at all. Rather, the reader is invited to be a part of the process as something is created by writing and effacing. Another electronic project comes to mind: Brad Paley’s CODeDOC, a program which reflexively visualizes itself while being run. The difference between this and Agrippa might be instructive: there’s an economy of means in CODeDOC, in that the code is the poem, rather than being something separate from (and more interesting than) the poem. Ives’s book contains its own mechanism: everything is done with words. 

I feel like I might be unjust to the book by drawing these comparisons to electronic writing; other comparisons could as easily, and perhaps more fruitfully, be drawn. To J. L. Austin, of course, to Barthes and Blanchot, through both of them back to Mallarmé. Marjorie Welish’s recent work – I’m thinking of Word Group and Isle of the Signatories  might be another useful point of reference: Welish, with her strong visual sense, is similarly interested in the word on the page and how meanings change without being a concrete poet. And beyond the focus on the process of writing and re-writing, there’s also the problem of how we use writing: as this book moves on, it becomes slowly less imperative and more a consideration of life: of how one does things, thinks about them, records them. This is an important book: I’ll come back to it.

geoff dyer, “yoga for people who can’t be bothered to do it”

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Geoff Dyer
Yoga for People Who Can’t Be Bothered to Do It
(Vintage, 2003)

There are plenty of reasons that I should not like this book by Geoff Dyer: the name of this book, for one; the horrifying blurb on the back suggesting that it was a combination of “Hunter S. Thompson, Roland Barthes, Paul Theroux and Sylvia Plath”; the promise of reading anything about Burning Man. The horrible grunge-y display type used inside for chapter openers, presumably reused from the poorly designed hardcover edition. The copyright page promises that an excerpt from Auden’s “September 1, 1939” is used in a book published in 2003. The prospect of British people writing about the United States. And worst of all, the marketing designation “Travel/Memoir” on the same back cover: a stint in the travel writing business still keeps me filled with horror at the thought of most travel writing and the people associated with it, and it doesn’t need to be said that no one needs another memoir.

And yet I make an exception for Geoff Dyer: somehow, I allow him to get away with things that I find deeply objectionable in most other writers. Part of this is context: I picked this book up at the bookstore in Fort Greene after a disheartening show at BAM, in need of something to pick me up for the subway home. Dyer’s writing works for me in that way as few others can reliably. (Also in this category, off the top of my head: Gertrude Stein, Ashbery’s Three Poems, some of Donald Barthelme, The Man without Qualities. Others exist, I’m sure, but it’s a vanishingly small group.) A lot of this has to do with style: Dyer’s a good enough writer that he can entertainingly talk about nothing will giving off the impression of effortlessness. Closer scrutiny, however, reveals that it’s an effortlessness that’s taken a great deal of work: everything functions. In this book, as in Out of Sheer Rage, Geoff Dyer has the flâneur down to perfection: he pretends to be doing nothing, but there’s a great deal of thought involved in that doing nothing. It helps as well that there’s a sense that Dyer’s using writers to think through the world: Auden and Rilke come up repeatedly in this book (“September 1, 1939,” for what it’s worth, does not come up with respect to 9/11) as do Brodsky and Henry James; epigraphs from the Goncourts and Nietzsche lead off the book. The way he’s using these writers is interesting: not so much name-dropping or academic reference so much as finding people whose thought can be usefully applied to his life. There’s the feeling you’re in the hands of someone who can be trusted, a trust that comes because of these shared points of recognition.

This is a book that’s ostensibly a collection of travel essays: eleven essays about particular places. The copyright page suggests that it’s a compilation, as much of the material has previously been published. It is, to a certain extent; but when read closely, one notes threads connecting the various pieces in the book. A pair of Tevas is bought in the first essay, on New Orleans; these Tevas thread their way through the later essays, just as Rilke and Auden do and a concern with the idea of a “Zone,” found first in Apollinaire and later in Tarkovsky. It’s difficult, however, to ascribe a chronology to these pieces: there are a handful of dates which suggest that these essays take place across the 1990s, but it’s difficult to order them. Girlfriends come and go; there are occasional references to things that came before. One has the sense of a writer who’s constantly traveling: but one can’t sense an overriding narrative in the traveling, the frequent problem with travel writing. (Kenneth Gangemi’s The Volcanoes from Puebla, one of the handful of travel books I like, also escapes the temptation of a narrative arc by the formal device of presenting its short essays in alphabetically.) An introduction to the last essay in the book suggests that it was written in 2000 and describing events of the year before, a decade after the first 1991; however, one is hard-pressed to find a clear sense of growth. Rather, one finds a document of a period in time: how Dyer lived in the 1990s, and how, in a sense, travel worked in that decade. While intended as a document of places, it’s become a document of a time. Travel doesn’t function in quite the same way any more.

Dyer wanders the world: he presents himself as an aimless wanderer, but this is something of a ruse: in the decade he covers, he published at least six books. These books aren’t really mentioned here: the reader familiar with Out of Sheer Rage will be able to place his Roman adventures within that context, and one suspects that his essay on New Orleans has something to do with his book on jazz. Dyer presents himself to the people he meets as a writer: but because he doesn’t mention his books in the text, he seems willing to come across as being without portfolio. Dyer’s presentation of himself contains a weird mix of humility and artifice: he presents his flaws and his frequent disinterest – there’s a certain sense in which this book is an apologia for an extended youth  – but there’s the sense that he’s holding something back. We know what he likes and doesn’t like, but the reader is left with a certain sense of distance after finishing the book: there’s a certain lack of autobiography. We’re not over-familiar. I like this.

The essays themselves vary. The pieces on Detroit, Miami, and New Orleans are better than one might expect, as they don’t overreach. Dyer isn’t trying to draw grand conclusions about American civilization from a city; rather, he records specific interactions and impressions. His descriptions of south-east Asian travels make him out to be one of those terrible tourists that one meets on the road, uninterested in anything around them but the next party: but again, one suspects this isn’t quite the case. The final essay, on Burning Man, shows its age: written at the height of San Francisco Internet boom hubris, there’s talk of Hakim Bey, who seems to have mostly been forgotten now, for better or for worse. Descriptions of drug experiences are almost invariably uninteresting. Here, though, he integrates it into larger experience: telescoping out from his local context to past experiences of travel, to Freud’s discussion of the ruins of Rome as metaphor for the mind in Civilization and Its Discontents, to Francesca Woodman’s photography, to Stalker. It works, though it shouldn’t.

chris diken, “some people” / stan mir, “flight patterns”

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Chris Diken, Some People
Stan Mir, Flight Patterns
(JR Vansant, 2009)

The number of people, I assume, who would buy books sight unseen from a press calling itself “JR Vansant” simply because it’s called that must be rather small; but I am in that number. Scott Bryan Wilson started publishing chapbooks under that name at the end of last year; my copies arrived last month. Production is straight-forward: silver type on heavy paper covers stapled around laser-printed interiors. The interior printing isn’t quite as nice as one might hope, and because of the long measure in Flight Patterns, the type is a bit small, but these are minor quibbles: this are very nice little books, better than I’d hoped for.

*     *     *     *     *

Chris Diken’s Some People is a short story, 18 pages long, and its plot is quickly related: a young man and woman visits an art museum, and the man uses the restroom. One is immediately caught by the style: the Gertrude Stein rhythm in the repetition of the fourth sentence:

They had hit a stride and each room in the museum seemed to reflect this overall greatening, each led them into a new age of new orientation of new medium of new dimension of new lender of new time of new overwhelming sense of standing before something ununderstandable yet still personally affecting.

Calling out Stein is something of a red herring. The dialogue in the story uses the Joycean dash; the voice is that of Gaddis, but more the Gaddis of The Recognitions than J R. There’s a little intrusion of Thomas Bernhard’s style if not his attitude: the long paragraphs, explanation piled on explanation; and maybe some David Foster Wallace. Another sentence, when the protagonist has found his way into the restroom, which he first wonders might be another exhibit:

As he went he though that while one arm had worked the flusher he’d used the other to undo himself with his free hand, thinking of himself in this situation as explicitly not free, that no one was free, that everyone was enchained by their urges, thinking of his free hand unjiggering his bebuttoned arrangement and of a three-dimensional model of the phrase free hand rotating like the precursor to human utterance in his mind, thinking how he used to be a mildly accomplished freehand sketcher before he gave it up for another pastime that too had passed, thinking that if only he didn’t find self-voiding the most horrendously outrageously horrible most distasteful and disgusting enterprise in the gamut of human activities that he could possibly take this opportunity to revisit his talent and how if he wasn’t in such a hurry to get it out and over with he could in a sense draw with his own acridity, employ self in lieu of stylus, practice here and then taken the honed skill to some more prominent canvas.

I like this sentence. It’s the italics that make me think of Wallace, but maybe the twisting baroque sentences of William Gass would be the best comparison. So much current fiction, especially fiction by young writers, tends to fall back on short, overly dramatic sentences: I feel like I don’t see long, wandering sentences like this enough: this is a sentence that’s trying to do something, and succeeding.

The protagonist of this story wanders into the bathroom wondering whether he’s left the art or whether he’s entering another exhibit; while at the urinal, a voice starts talking to him, engaging him in a conversation more philosophical than that of the typical bathroom voyeur. The possessor of the voice isn’t seen (and it’s unclear in the end whether he exists or not); the protagonist remains unsure whether he’s in the midst of some kind of performance. There’s an American suspicion of the visual arts: the fear that the crafty artist, probably European, might just be trying to trick us: it’s certainly at play in most of the descriptions of modern art in The Recognitions, for example. That’s certainly at play here. But there’s also a willingness to play along, to enter into a shared illusion, and I think that works here. It’s a good story: I’d like to see more from Chris Diken. 

*     *     *     *     *

Stan Mir’s Flight Patterns couldn’t be more different: a long poem (32 pages of small type) identified on the website as the first part of an even longer poem, another section of which is scheduled to be printed in the future by JR Vansant. The subtitle identifies it as a “Poem Beginning with a Line from Lax,” the line (“Birds dart over us, pulling shadows through us“) presumably from Robert Lax, though I have to admit not knowing his work and I’m not sure about the attribution. This is a meandering, meditative piece: carried out to full length, it feels very much like it could have been a Jargon Society book. An excerpt of an earlier version appeared online in the oddly presented GutCult: this is approximately the first sixth of what’s in the book, with some differences: italics have been added, and a phrase deleted (“a bird ripped apart” in the third line of the first stanza of the second section). 

The first section of this begins with a succession of thoughts, separated by colons, starting with birds and necessarily spreading onwards: the bird is a tremendously rich image, signifying an infinite number of different things. In the second section, the speaker’s voice appears: “I don’t / know where I belong nor where the pattern is”. From flocks of birds in the sky, the speaker takes his subject apart: “if change did occur // it did so long ago from the 3-fingered avian hand / flight’s feathers met modern birds’ basic form”. And then back to specifics: a warbler calling. Finally, a statement of purpose: “More things take flight / than we can count. I began with birds / to realize it’s more than birds.” 

The style loosens up after this introduction and becomes more conversational. Sections of prose and quotations are placed in the text; there’s a loose narrative, a trip to a farm in Vermont. The speaker is writing Flight Patterns (perhaps in this metafictional nod, we see what unifies JR Vansant); his companion plays Chopin and he reads Robert Duncan. A stanza lists the proper names of birds, all evocative. The speaker’s mother and father are introduced; the history of the land comes in, an enduring concern of the poem. In an extended prose section, the scene changes to Arizona: and there’s more digging into the familial past. Current events intrude: the death of Saddam Hussein, when “an Airbus’ engines / ingested Geese over the Hudson.” We move back and forth: to Philadelphia, back to Vermont, into the recounted past, to Arizona. A bit of what seems to be Mormon history intrudes, as does the mystic Johannes Kelpius who settled in Germantown, Philadelphia. Birds glue everything together:

When my father handed me many things he handed me
my mother. At various times she has been a Mimic
Thrush or a Thrasher. Hardly ever has she been
a Laughing Thrush or a Babbler.

Since 1960 my father has hung like late autumn
Starlings in Rome, omnipresent & not quite
despised. Each November the Starlings come
in from the countryside & fly about
sometimes in the shape of lungs
sometimes in the shape of a fist.

It is impossible to get them to do
otherwise – this is their pattern.

The image of starlings in Rome strikes me as exactly perfect: that’s how I remember them there. This is a rambling work, and it’s hard to come to a judgment of it knowing that there’s more to come; but this section is self-contained, coming, finally, to a conclusion:

Poetry is not
the third eye
It is an eye

Word & voice
Voice may
not remain

The word a
recast image
in ruin

The bird’s
image darts
through us

The cicada
a shadow
pulling through

I like this; I suspect I’ll be coming back to this, and I’m interested in Mir’s other forthcoming books. 

the baffler #9: an injury to all

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The Baffler #9: An Injury to All
ed. Thomas Frank 

Still working my way through old Bafflers: this one’s from 1997. I might be reaching my saturation point: this one took me a while to get through, in no small part because of what the editorial note describes as this issue’s “particularly unhappy tone”. This issue is unusually focused; most articles are on the sorry state of the labor movement in this country in the mid-1990s. Chris Lehmann looks at labor in the academy; Peter Rachleff looks at strikes against Hormel in Minnesota; David Moberg looks at attempts at organizing hotel workers in Los Angeles; Bob Fitch inspects the current state of the AFL/CIO. There’s some history as well: Frances Reed looks back at textile worker strikes in Lawrence, Massachusetts; Hunter Kennedy looks at the forgotten history of cotton strikes in Mississippi; an illustrated piece by Jessica Abel looks at the legacy of labor unrest in Decatur, Illinois, and Jim McNeill talks about his time as a labor editor in Racine, Wisconsin. It’s hard to read now: if anything, things are worse, and one senses that a lot of concerned people have simply thrown up their hands.

But: it’s good for you. And: there’s a lot here that’s useful. Tom Frank’s lead-off essay, a survey of labor writing through the ages is still relevant:

As a rule, advertising, the highest form of information-age cultural production, intentionally avoids discussing where products come from. In a time in which, we are told, style and image transcend all – both for corporate marketers and ourselves as consumers – essays like Edmund Wilson’s long description of the brutal facts of automobile production in “Detroit Motors” come across as nothing short of revelation. For a writer in the 1990s to produce such a piece – insisting on the inherently local, inherently material facts of work in an age when the only journalistic game in town is to wax blissful about the cyber-universe is eclipsing the analog world – would be almost willfully contrary. (p. 11.)

Change the date and it still works. Tom Vanderbilt’s “The Gaudy and the Damned” seems to have discovered a source for Mad Men, reading Chicken Soup for the Soul at Work (still in print, in turns out):

One story, titled “Santa comes to Joan,” caught my eye: “Every office has a Joan, or should have. She’s the one everyone looks to when the workload gets too heavy. She’s the one with the good story and the ready laugh. For our Christmas party, she’s the one who transforms our sterile corporate conference room, Christmas after Christmas, with tiny white lights, real teacups, teapots and plates she had brought from home.” (p. 15.)

And reading Josh Mason’s “Three Scenes from the Bull Market” now, one is surprised to discover that Jim Cramer of Mad Money and the real estate bubble got his start at the New Republic, where he suggested that laid-off workers could be quieted with stock options. Still hilarious, and available online at the SEC, is Wired‘s first, failed IPO, excerpted by Doug Henwood; they had operated at increasing loses for their first four years, but they were hopeful about making a lot of money off of suck.com in the future. Another prospectus, from Vans, touts how they’ll be more profitable as they’ve moved all their shoe manufacturing to South Korea.

As its title suggests, Jim Frederick’s “Intern Camp: The Intern Economy and the Culture Trust” looks at the culture of interning, then in a relative infancy. Obviously interning for for-profit corporations is a terrible thing, and there have been any number of pieces written about that. But Frederick’s piece is notable in that it examines the legal basis for internships:

There is, however, another exemption in the FLSA [the Fair Labor Standards Act, passed in 1988 (!)]. Vaguely worded, it concerns “trainees,” or the oddly redundant “student learners.” It allows for-profit institutions to pay short-term employees less than the minimum wage if they are there in an educational capacity. The Department of Labor requires that six criteria be met before it considers someone not an “employee” but a “trainee” exempt from the FLSA: The training is similar to that one would get in school; the training is for the benefit of the trainees, not the employer; the trainees do not displace regular workers; the employer derives no immediate advantage from the activities of the trainees, and may even incur some loss; the trainees understand that they are not entitled to a job at the conclusion of the training; and the trainees understand that they are not entitled to wages for the time spent in training. (p. 53.)

Frederick points out that some industries (banks, law firms, tech companies, engineering companies, and federal agencies) generally follow this; it’s abused by the glamor industries, fashion, architecture, and publishing, which use internships as a source of free labor. There’s a distinct class-based element to intern labor: it’s only relatively affluent young people who can move to New York and work for free in the hopes of getting a job down the road. (David Foster Wallace, more attuned to class differences than one might expect, would get this exactly right in “The Suffering Channel” where he describes a hierarchy of extremely well-dressed interns and the discomfort of his protagonist, working class reporter’s discomfort, with them.) One wonders how much the publishing industry has been hollowed out by two decades of reliance on interns: somebody should be looking at this.

At the end of the book, Robert Nedelkoff’s “Remainder Table” takes a look at the two books of the novelist Alan Kapelner, still neglected. I don’t know Kapelner’s work; LibraryThing reports that All the Naked Heroes was in the libraries of Carl Sandburg and Marilyn Monroe and Lonely Boy Blues was owned by Hemingway. I’d love a compilation of Nedelkoff’s “Remainder Table” columns; the books in them that I’ve tracked down have been worth the time.

And finally, Damon Krukowski had taken on the job of poetry editor with this issue: the selection here focused on poems about labor. Two poems, by Lizinka Campbell Turner (“Distinguo,” poorly scanned but in its original context here) and Edwin Rolfe (“Asbestos”), were rescued from The Liberator (1918) and The Daily Worker (1928); there’s also Kenneth Fearing’s “X Minus X” from 1934 plus Muriel Rukeyser’s “Metaphor to Action” from 1935. It’s an interesting selection, not least because it works well with the rest of the issue: one forgets that there was a sustained tradition of poems about labor, and that labor magazines published poetry. Somebody must have made a good anthology of this by now; I’m impressed that all four can now be found online.

frederic tuten, “tintin in the new world”

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Frederic Tuten
Tintin in the New World: A Romance
(Inprint Editions, 2005; original, 1993)

This is not a book that is well-served by the Internet. The Amazon reviews are almost unanimously damning; a LibraryThing one suggests that this is “Maybe the worst book ever written.” This is not the worst book ever written. It is a well-connected book: on the back cover, there are blurbs from Jonathan Coe, Susan Sontag, Larry McMurtry, and Leslie Marmon Silko. The copyright page explains that the Roy Lichtenstein cover was “created expressly for this novel”; another Lichtenstein drawing of the same subject serves as a frontispiece. The book is dedicated to “my friend George Remi (Hergé) and Roy Lichtenstein”. The novelist’s friendship with Hergé (real or metaphorical, I don’t know) is almost certainly what causes the online reviewer’s bad reactions: this is a book that takes Hergé’s characters and puts them into another context, along with a lot of characters from Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain. This is a fine conceit for a novel in the pop art tradition; however, it’s a formula that’s going to leave Internet browsers who assume this is a Tintin spinoff deeply unhappy. I picked my copy up at 192 Books: its presence there made it clear that it’s a certain type of book – more so because this copy was signed, implying that Frederic Tuten is the sort of author who reads at 192 Books. I picked it up because I knew that Tuten was associated with Donald Barthelme andFiction back at that journal’s beginnings, rather than because Tintin was in it (though Tintin, of course, doesn’t hurt); he’d been on my list of people to get around to reading for a while. But that sort of paratextual context tends to get lost on the Internet. This is, among other things, a book about Tintin, and that seems to be how the Internet insists on reading it.

But this book. Tintin, at Marlinspike with Captain Haddock and Snowy, is at loose ends; he wants something to involve him. A letter from Brussels, one presumes from Hergé, summons Tintin to Peru where an adventure should happen. No adventure happens. Instead, Tintin promptly meets the secondary characters from The Magic Mountain: Peeperkorn, Settembrini, Naphta (whose name has become “Naptha,” perhaps so that it’s not pronounced “NAFTA,” or perhaps to suggest naupathia), and Clavdia Chauchat. Tintin becomes Hans Castorp; Captain Haddock mostly fades away, a drunk resigned to his fate. Snowy is philosophical and doesn’t assume that anyone will understand him since he lost the power of language early in the Tintin series. Tintin finds love with Clavdia; eventually, he does in Peeperkorn. The complementary Settembrini & Naptha end up as lovers. Tintin finally leaves the mountain to become a savior to the natives.

Mixing and matching characters from earlier books has become commonplace in the past decade, whether in fan fiction on the Internet or in the bookstores with Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters. It’s hard to remember how radical this would have seemed even in 1993; this book follows hard in the tradition of Barthelme, both in his love of the readymade and in his strategy of setting up a ridiculous situation and then scrutinizing how it might play itself out. When this works well – as in, for example, Snow White – the fictional and the mundane cross paths: Snow White and the seven dwarves’ dilemmas are our dilemmas. One doesn’t, perhaps, learn very much about the original narrative – except how strange it actually is – but the present is illuminated.

That’s what’s happening here, mostly. Tintin’s life doesn’t make a great deal of sense when scrutinized closely: ostensibly he is a reporter, but he never appears to do any actual reporting. Tintin is perpetually youthful; he lives in Marlinspike with Captain Haddock, a violent drunk. Tintin’s life isn’t quite as endlessly recurring as, for example, The Simpsons, as his adventures do have a direction, but it doesn’t seem that Tintin ever really learns anything. He has adventures, over and over again, with beginnings, middles, and ends. He’s a character, and he lives through stories. The way a plot works isn’t the way life works: what Tuten does in this book is to take the character of Tintin and drop him into a world that’s marginally more realistic. Tintin finds love with Clavdia, and begins, instantly, to age: towards the end of the novel he has “man-sized hands” and possibly a beard. There’s an echo here of Shakespeare’s Prince Hal narrative, with Haddock taking on the character of Falstaff, wanting to rage on forever, though I don’t think this is a case of Hal being right and Falstaff being wrong: Snowy, Tintin’s conscience, goes home to Marlinspike with Captain Haddock.

The broader question here is why we read what we read. Plenty of the same people who read Tintin read The Magic Mountain; but they read them for vastly different reasons. This is why, I think, a distinction can be drawn between something like this and Sense and Sensiblity with Sea Monsters: that book exists as a novelty, a reification of the idea “wouldn’t this book be more entertaining if there were sea monsters in this book”. Austen’s premises are immaterial: her book is raw material for comedy. There’s a comic element to Tuten’s novel, but it’s not a hilarious book; rather, it’s a serious attempt to see what happens when the two books are put together. Tintin is the reader’s dream of eternal youth; The Magic Mountain is a negation of the possibility of that dream in the real world. There’s validity in both, but they don’t sit comfortably together as each looks ridiculous in the light of the other. Tintin’s existence seems weirdly retarded; the Magic Mountain seems overwhelmingly somber. In a scene towards the end of the book, Peeperkorn, having taken up painting, shows Tintin how he has imposed Clavdia’s figure on the entire history of Western art, from Leonardo to Ruscha: he constructs his own narratives. Tintin never quite manages this; adrift in the end, wanders off into another another narrative entirely, becoming, perhaps the one that the Incas describe as the messiah to come.

Did I like this book? I didn’t love it in the way that I love the Barthelme pieces that do the same things: I can’t find the hilarity or the depth of feeling that I do in those works. This is a book that’s happy to be unsure of genre and for that reason it’s hard to judge – perhaps this is why the reviews on Amazon and LibraryThing are so savage. But it’s an engaging book: it’s been kicking around my head for a while, and I’m not sure that I’m done with it yet.

éric rohmer, “six moral tales”

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Éric Rohmer
Six Moral Tales
(trans. Sabine d’Estrée)
(Viking Press, 2009)

Amazon had the Criterion Six Moral Tales box set for cheap after Éric Rohmer died; I took them up on it, and I’ve been working my way through them. The box set includes six DVDs; in addition to a booklet of critical essays, Rohmer’s book of short stories made from the films is also included. It’s a substantial book (262 pages); off the top of my head, I can’t think of other editions of films that have privileged a text counterpart so much. Criterion’s edition of Last Year at Marienbad, for example, doesn’t include the out-of-print Grove edition of the book, illustrated with the film stills. Nor are there that many films that are so directly connected to literary fiction authored by the director: Antonioni’s That Bowling Alley on the Tiber comes to mind, but there’s a difference between the short stories in that and the films. There’s Marguerite Duras, of course, and Georges Perec, but the films they directed aren’t especially well-known; the exception might be Duras’s India Song.

I’ve been reading the stories after watching all the films, so it’s taken me a while to make my way through this. Reviews of the Six Moral Tales often say that they’re based on a novel; the back cover of this edition says that “years before Eric Rohmer turned to filmmaking, he wrote his famed Six Moral Tales in book form,” which echoes Rohmer’s statement in his preface that the stories “are not adapted from my films.” These assertions are misleading; Rohmer’s is disingenuous. This isn’t a novel; rather, it’s six short stories where the same basic plot (boy has girl; boy meets other girl; boy considers straying) is reenacted, almost in the manner of Queneau’s Exercises in Style. The French copyright date on this is 1974, two years after the last of the films; in addition, it seems clear that these stories were (at the very least) reworked after the making of the films, something more noticeable because the stories and the films are extremely similar. 

At the start of the film of La Collectionneause, for example, is a scene where a painter, played by Daniel Pommereulle, talks to an art critic, played by Alain Jouffroy. Jouffroy disappears from the film after this scene; the painter, who is the third-most important character in the film, is identified by others as “Daniel”. The viewer may not know that Jouffroy is best known as an art critic, and that Pommereulle is generally known as an artist. This situation is further confused by the same scene’s treatment in the text:

Daniel – Daniel Pommereulle, to give his full name – is one of those contemporary painters who durin the sixties tossed their paintbrushes into the garbage and turned their creative energies to the manufacture of “objects.” The art critic Alain Jouffroy called them “Objectors,” and in the art magazine Quadrum published an article under this title devoted to their work. The year is 1966, and Jouffroy is paying a visit to Daniel’s studio. (p. 129.)

The article mentioned actually exists – “Les Objecteurs: La ‘Distance infinie’ de Duchamp,” Quadrum, no. 19, 1965, pp. 6–9. La Collectionneuse was released in 1967; possibly the scene was shot in 1966. One wonders, however, whether the conversation between Jouffroy and Pommereulle that follows is theirs or Rohmer’s. The acting credits in the film begin “avec la collaboration pour l’interprétation et les dialogues de”; what’s said in the film is very close to the text, but inexact. Although it’s isolated, almost certainly their scene in the film isn’t documentary: there’s too much relevance to what happens later. The first paragraph of the story, titled “Haydee,” physically describes the main character of the story; the name of this character, the “collectionneuse” of the title, is that of the actress Haydee Politoff, and the description physically matches the actress.

Or again: in “Claire’s Knee,” Jerome explains to Madame W. and Laura that “he and Aurora first met, six years before, when he was the cultural attaché in Bucharest” (p. 173). Why Bucharest? Presumably because Aurora Cornu, who plays a writer in the film, is a Romanian writer. There’s a further overlay here: Aurora (the character) is a writer and claims that she wants to write use Jerome as a character in her book. It’s not by chance that Aurora and Jerome look at a painting of Don Quixote: as Vargas Llosa noted, in the first book, Quixote makes the mistake of trying to read the world through the lens of a book, while in the second, the world, having read the book about Quixote, keeps expecting him to act like a character in it. Rohmer’s introduction again: “My heroes, somewhat like Don Quixote, think of themselves as characters in a novel, but perhaps there isn’t any novel.”

All of these stories tell the story of a male lead who passes through a point of crisis; all of the narrators attempt to justify their generally reprehensible behavior to themselves with flimsy reasoning, the morality of which is belied by the damage they end up doing to others. The most interesting use of this is in the fifth story, “Claire’s Knee,” where Jerome justifies his desire to be unfaithful by explaining to his novelist friend Aurora (who may be a past lover) that he’s acting in the interest of providing her with a story. There’s a distinct echo here of Choderlos de Laclos: and while Aurora, who is at least partially a stand-in for the director, finds his storytelling useful, she’s aware that his stated reasons aren’t his real ones. As in Les Liaisons dangereuses, the relationship between these two characters is more interesting than what they’re plotting; Jerome, however, isn’t aware enough to notice Aurora’s interest in him, or to notice that she, who he has taken as single, has her own distant fiance. The libertine echoes return in “Love in the Afternoon”: early on, the narrator describes his escape by reading in the subway:

On the train, I much prefer reading books to newspapers, not only because newspapers are cumbersome but also because I can’t immerse myself in the papers. Books lead me further afield, and at present I’m very much taken with books on exploration. Today’s book is entitled Voyage autour du Monde by Bougainville. (pp. 217–8.)

Bougainville’s description of Tahiti as paradise, source of the idea of the “noble savage” almost certainly isn’t what the narrator is reading: more likely he’s reading Diderot’s response, Supplément au voyage de Bougainville which sees in the sexual freedom of the Tahitians a model for the libertine reinvention of Western society. (In the film, it’s clear that the narrator’s edition includes Diderot’s supplement.) This also presages Chloe’s later argument against marriage, which the narrator finds tempting, but rejects, that polygamy isn’t degrading to women if women also practice it. For the narrator, it’s an escape from his present bourgeois reality; but it’s not one that he will follow up on.

These stories can’t be separated from the films, and were presumably meant to be read in conjunction with them, although this would have been very difficult for most readers in the 1970s when the films wouldn’t have been immediately accessible as they are now. The films were made from 1962 to 1972; they blossom from black and white shorts about students to full-color feature films about first affianced and finally married couples. While the characters don’t recur – save for a dream sequence in Love in the Afternoon, not reflected in the story – there’s an implicit story of growth, of a director growing more confident with himself. This growing maturity isn’t reflected as much in the stories: while the stories are more complex, Rohmer isn’t interested as much in the different ways that narrative voice can function in fiction. Most of these stories are told in the first person, echoed strongly by the voiceovers of the first films. “La Collectionneuse” starts in the third person from several perspectives (the film’s “prologues”) before it switches to the first. Only “Claire’s Knee” differs, being told in a the third person; this is generally from the perspective of Jerome, but at the end it suddenly switches over to Aurora with a scene that could only be seen by her: “The boy’s left arm is around Claire’s shoulder, and his right hand is caressing her knee.” (p. 213) This isn’t quite reflected in the film: there, the actors sit on a bench with their backs to the camera. The boy may be caressing her knee with his left hand (which would have mattered more to Jerome than to Aurora), but the viewer can’t see this; had the viewer not read the text, they almost certainly would not have presumed this. These are stories that are better told as films, where the camera’s perspective can be unhinged from the task of straightforward narration.

the baffler #7: the city in the age of information

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The Baffler #7: The City in the Age of Information
ed. Thomas Frank 

I’m still working my way through back issues of the Baffler. This one was laid out in June 1995; after quotations from Randolph Bourne and Edmund Wilson, the copyright page proudly announces that they don’t have an email address (or telephone). Tom Frank’s “Twentieth Century Lite” lays out the theme for the issue: the rhetoric of the right, led by Newt Gingrich, had it that the rise of the information age obviated the need for cities. Everything was about to change. Some things haven’t changed: David Brooks was spouting idiocies back then as well, but for the City Journal rather than the New York Times. A George Gilder quote stands out: “The telecosm can destroy cities because then you can get all the diversity, all the serendipity, all the exuberant variety that you can find in a city in your own living room.” I don’t think that anyone’s still trotting out this idea in a positive sense, at least not publicly, but it’s hard to ignore the effects of the internet, often adverse on the city: there’s no reason for neighborhood book stores if you can get anything cheaper through Amazon.

It’s hard to tell what the idea was with fiction; no fiction editor is listed, although there are poetry and art editors. Short pieces by Janice Eidus and David Berman seem consistent with Baffler style, even if neither is particularly noteworthy; the Berman would work better if it had been declared prose poetry. A brief piece by Irvine Welsh – an excerpt from The Acid House about a trip to Disneyland – feels out of place: reading Scots dialect in this context, one can’t help but think of James Whitcomb Riley. One forgets, though, how much Welsh’s literary reputation declined in this country. Another piece, by Tibor Fischer, doesn’t do much for me; taken together, the two suggest an interest in British models for describing society in fiction, but that isn’t quite matched by the quality of the prose. The poetry – edited by Damon Krukowski – is noticeably better. 

Naomi Klein, pre-No Logo:

But what does it mean when the still existing malt shop (or cafe or pub or laundro-mat) becomes cyberspace? What does it mean when you leave your house, go to public, urban spaces and spend the entire time ignoring the people around you in favor of finding out more about some angster in Texas named Bryon who has posted his entire diary on the internet in all of its excruciating detail, including a picture of his ex-girl friend Sandi’s cat and the heartwarming description of his relationship with his best friend Kriss: “We do a lot of things together, usually related to computer hardware (buying, selling, fixing).”

This isn’t a particularly good piece – bemoaning the wave of hype that then surrounded cybercafes – but here she gets to something useful, anticipating most of the next decade. 

The bulk of the issue is spent examining the current state of the city. The last piece in the book, “A Machine for Forgetting” sees Tom Frank examining Kansas City, getting started on the job of figuring out what the matter with Kansas was. Kim Phillips takes on Chicago, briefly; Robert Fiore looks at Los Angeles selling off its infrastructure. Steve Healy and Dan Bischoff cover Athens and Atlanta, respectively, and a Maura Mahoney review Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil accuses John Berendt of cultural tourism in Savannah. Paul Lukas’s “Forty-Two Pickup” surveys Times Square while Disneyfication was underway but not yet assured of success: it’s a familiar story by now, but the portrait of a New York that still seemed to be wavering between identities. It can be hard to remember now how much the middle of the country’s perception of New York has changed. Lukas’s predictions of the future, like most predictions of the future, are entirely wrong, but it’s good to be reminded that there was a point when an alternative could be imagined.

Most interesting to me was Diamonds Mulcahey’s “Screw Capital of the World,” a survey of the history of Rockford, Illinois, the crumbling city where I was born. There was not a great emphasis on the history of Rockford when I grew up; common consensus was that it was too boring to have a history. The opening of a piece by Calvin Trillin in the New Yorker from 1976 which Mulcahey points out gives a good idea of the civic tenor:

In Rockford, there is always a lot of talk about negativism. Rockford people discuss negativism the way college students in the fifties discuss apathy – as an endemic, mildly regrettable, permanent condition. Apathy is also discussed in Rockford, usually in conversations about negativism.

Trillin’s article covers Rockford at a moment when extracurriculars had been dropped in the public schools because the voting public wouldn’t vote for increased property taxes; my high school was similarly threatened just before I arrived there, but sports were deemed too important. Trillin also points out that forced busing in the schools was an enormous issue even then; this was still dragging through the courts long after I’d left and Mulcahey’s article was written. 

Mulcahey’s piece starts with a history of the Palmer raids of 1920, when 180 suspected Communists working in the tool-making and furniture factories were arrested. I’d never heard of this; Wikipedia, which manages to covers Cheap Trick repeatedly, also seems to have missed how the Rockford Daily Republic had declared Rockford to be “a veritable breeding palace for those who plot the overthrow of the United States by force.” Clarence Darrow successfully defended a Swede against charges of sedition. It’s not surprising that this would have fallen out of the historical narrative, but it does help explain how Rockford fell apart as a city. In 1945, Rockford was the “Screw Capital of the World”; but by the time I was growing up, that nickname had been forgotten, and we learned that it was the “Forest City,” on account of the elm trees that lined the streets before Dutch elm disease. (The visitor’s bureau seems unhappy about “Screw Capital of the World”.) In 1945, Life portrayed Rockford as an illustration of “the phenomenon of social mobility.” But Rockford was anomalous early on for being a right-leaning blue-collar city, which comes across strongly in the Trillin piece from 1976, when he finds that everyone is unwilling to pay for education. Industry left; by 1993, Money magazine rated Rockford the worst place to live of the 300 largest American cities. 

This is a fantastic piece, anticipating a great deal that’s happened in the politics of the middle of the country since; it’s unfortunate that this piece seems to have no representation at all online. I suspect this wasn’t collected because of the similarity with Frank’s Kansas City. Fitting, really, for a second city to a second city.

henry green, “nothing”

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Henry Green
Nothing
(Penguin, 1950)

I went to a reading the other night; the opening readers (and performers, it was that sort of event) were terrible, so I left at an intermission to have dinner with the people I’d come to the reading to see. After dinner, I got on the uptown train to go home; I was reading this book, an omnibus edition of Nothing, Doting, and Blindness. The woman across from me was looking at me strangely, and I may have been looking at her strangely because she looked like one of the people who had been reading that I’d been introduced to in passing; she reached in her bag and pulled out the Dalkey Archive edition of Nothing, and we had a conversation about how fantastic Henry Green is and what a shame it is that nobody seems to read him. She got off at the next stop after we re-introduced ourselves; this saved me the embarrassment of having to explain that I hadn’t actually seen her read, though she was the only one in the line-up that I’d been half interested in hearing. I have been reading books in the trains of New York for a long time, but this is the first time this sort of thing has happened to me, as far as I can remember. Maybe I’m reading the wrong books.

Henry Green is fantastic, of course, even if one isn’t making conversation on trains. I tore through Living, Loving, and Party Going last November while in Mexico, read Blindness, in this volume, on the flight home from Christmas, and Pack My Bag somewhere in between; all the rest save Caught, which is out of print and expensive, are on the shelves waiting to be read. Nothing has taken a little while to get back to: I was reading too fast, I thought, and I needed to slow down. Henry Green seems a bit imposing, I think: like Ronald Firbank, this novel is almost entirely dialogue, and if you’re not reading carefully, a great deal can get lost. Once you’re in, though, it’s hard not to be swept along.

The title is from Shakespeare, of course; Much Ado about Nothing with its pairs of starcrossed lovers is an obvious model for the book. Philip and Mary want to get married; their widowed parents, Jane and John, respectively, were once lovers and are still friends. Dick and Liz are Jane and John’s current lovers, though they’re of little consequence, as are, for what that’s worth Philip and Mary. When it’s followed in this volume by Doting, the title suggests the word’s Elizabethan pronunciation, “noting”; as in the play, there’s a great deal of crossed communication. Here Philip discusses wanting to call off his marriage with his mother:

‘All right my dear,’ she said, ‘But you seem very touchy about this. She’s a nice girl I agree yet I also know she’s not nearly good enough for you. What are we to do about it, that is the question?’
     ‘To be or not to be Mamma.’
     ‘Philip don’t dramatize yourself for heaven’s sake. This is no time for Richard II. You just can’t go into marriage in such a frame of mind. Let me simply think!’

(p. 108.) Philip’s response, though he probably doesn’t realize it, is loaded; though the question isn’t “to be or not to be Mamma” but whether his actual father isn’t John, the father of his fiancée, as has been hinted by others. The threat of incest hovers over the book: two-thirds of the way through the book Mary asks her father point-blank if Philip and she are really half-brother and sister, which he strenuously denies. The perceptive reader, however, will have noted that if John is Philip’s father, it’s still entirely possible that John might not be the half-sister of Mary if she is as illegitimate as he is.

As in Much Ado about Nothing, this is a comedy, though there’s a darkness behind it. The subject matter is nothing if not slight; the joy of the book is how perfectly it’s accomplished. The book is almost entirely structured in scenes of dialogue between two characters: they are substituted in and out. The primary exception is the novel’s central scene, a party that Jane has thrown ostensibly for Philip’s twenty-first birthday but actually for herself. Philip and Mary attempt to upstage the action by declaring their engagement, but are deeply disappointed when nobody seems to care as much as they had hoped. This interchange between the two of them is at the center of the novel:

     ‘I say,’ he said, ‘you do feel better now, you must?’
     ‘I think so, yes,’
     ‘Can’t find out yes or no.’
     ‘But no one can. First something inside says everything is fine,’ she wailed, ‘and the next moment it tells you that something which overshadows everything else is very bad just like an avalanche!’
     ‘I’m so sorry,’ he said. ‘I truly am.’
They danced again and again until, as the long night went on they had got into a state of unthinking happiness perhaps.

(p. 88.) The way the punctuation is deployed for emotional balance here bears note: in particular, that dangling “perhaps” which doesn’t get a comma and pulls down everything that’s come before it. Mary and Philip aren’t the center of the novel, of course; this is a book about their parents, and Philip comes off as a mooncalf. This is a book about middle age: Mary and Philip are too young to realize what’s going on around them. The reader’s affections lie with John and Jane. In the end, the adults have re-paired, but it’s unclear what will happen to Mary and Philip; they’ll be fine, one suspects.

Edmund White says in his recent memoir that Nothing is the book he’s read the most times. It’s a book that would lend itself to re-reading; the cyclical motion of characters from one scene to the next suggests it. And one wants to inhabit the world of the book, even though if you don’t particularly care about the social manners of the upper class in post-WWII Britain; it’s like Proust, in that regard. But this is also a book that’s tremendously funny: for me it trumps Waugh.

the baffler #4: your lifestyle sucks!

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The Baffler #4: Your Lifestyle Sucks!
ed. Thomas Frank 

Another Baffler: this one the oldest I’ve ever seen, from 1992. It’s a very young piece of work, self-consciously so: the contributor’s notes at the beginning identifies the ages of everyone involved. (“David Berman (26) and company have a 7” record out on Drag City. Band: Silver Jews. Sound: difficult but rewarding.”) After the contributor’s notes, there’s a piece that “was read at a real-life provocation staged by The Baffer on October 21, 1992 at the Hot House, a Chicago “performance space” and favorite art-lifestyle hangout”. That’s followed by the lead editorial, Tom Frank’s “Art As Lifestyle,” set in bold Helvetica for blunter impact, one supposes. Then there’s “Bafflers Behind Bars” which narrates how the editors where mistakenly arrested for provocation and spent “12 to 18 hours” in jail: at this distance, it’s hard to know if this is a joke or if the editors are legitimately proud of the credibility that comes from going to jail for one’s art. Scattered between these are a couple of poems, a full-page photograph of a sheep, and an “ask a post-structuralist” advice column that isn’t very funny. This issue, then, is something of a mess, though it’s enjoyable. Potshots at postmodernism hearken to a time when critical theory was something that people could be afraid of (and a time when ads from Critical Inquiry could subsidize your publication). One notes obsessions with Thierry Muggler and Prague (both seemingly from afar). Lexicographers should take note of a memo from Quaker Oats, in which they propose using the term “granola” to mean the sandal-wearing set. There’s the pre-mature appearance of the “New Urban Hipster” in a fictional piece by Keith White, also set in Prague.

There’s a lot of fiction in here; there’s also a lot of poetry, and a smattering of art. It might be worth tracking down what happened to most of these writers, as most of them are utterly unknown to me: presumably they were people floating around U. Chicago in the early 90s. But there’s a predominance of non-fiction here: it seems by design, a project to present an alternative to the mainstream. Mat Lebowitz’s “Uncoupling” is a chronicle of yuppy New York of the time in the style of Brett Easton Ellis: perhaps this is what Walter Benn Michaels was calling for in his demand for capitalist realism in the style of The Wire, though I can’t help but find an echo of the criss-crossed generations of Henry Green’s Nothing in it. It is worth looking at how the creative work functions here: a good deal of it (though not all) is pointedly socially engaged, to the general detriment of the poetry. The end of D. M. Mulcahy’s “Libidinal Tourist,” looking at how Prague was being marketed as a bohemian paradise, turns into a manifesto:

There are two worlds, that of those who live life and that of those who purchase lifestyle. Therefore we at The Baffler consider worthwhile only that art which understands these relations. To those artists we despise, we will not say, “Your painting is bad; your music is boring; your writing is trite.” We will say instead, “Your lifestyle sucks.”

The critical side of this is taken up by a pair of pieces about Donna Tartt’s The Secret History, a novel “eclipsed by the event of its publication”. (See, for example, a piece from the New York Times business section.) Maura Mahoney’s “The Packaging of a Literary Persona” is unabashedly snarky; but it’s hard to say that Tartt didn’t deserve it though, when Vanity Fair was evidently gushing about how she had T. S. Eliot reading “The Waste Land” on her answering machine. Mahoney does nail the appeal of the novel: “Young, professional, liberal-arts alumni, nostalgic for the life of the mind while experiencing the harsh truths of the life of the paycheck have been targeted to consume the Tarttian version of their most cherished myth – if it’s elitist, it must be art.” Mahoney’s piece is complemented by a shorter one by Richard F. Kolbusz, Jr., examining the novel’s dust jackets – by Chip Kidd, before he was a household name. 

What I like most about this issue is how unabashedly amateur it is: from the typography, which systematically marches through all the native Mac fonts from 1992, to the fiction and poetry clearly written by their friends. (Particularly “Honey,” a soppy love poem written by “A.P.,” identified only by initials: maybe this is an inside joke?) The origin of the odd layout of later Bafflers, where shorter articles snaked down the margins of longer articles for spread after spread, can be seen here; here, though, the inside and outside articles tend to be on the same subject, revealing it to be typographic experimentation: somebody clearly had seen a copy of Derrida’s Glas. There’s a scan of a draft of “The Libidinal Tourist” signed by Mike Ditka; there’s a fashion shoot featuring the editors. The final section, “Twenty-Nothing” turns into a Gen-X manifesto, written at a moment when the mass media was busy codifying grunge. There’s an entertaining prediction of the future: 

More disturbing is the thought of these products being sold in the form of nostalgia years from now. We can doubtless look forward to television shows like “Slammin’,” chronicling the adventures of a group of alienated Washington D.C. teenagers who use peculiar dance rituals to express their misunderstandings with the parents. “This Old Garage,” will peek in on the coming of age of a homosexual vegetarian brother and his feminist sister as they clash and come together on the fringes of the Seattle rock world. More important than the shows will be the products sold along with them. As teens today sport the tie-dyed shirts of the sixties and the bell-bottoms of the seventies, so will our children model Doc Martens, special hair-griming formulas, and knee-exposing jeans in the year 2005.

“Twenty-Nothing” is more impassioned than reasoned; it doesn’t stand up very well, like most manifestos, or, for that matter, most writing by the young and excited: 

Our youthful vision of the world was influenced more by Minor Threat (‘who’s that?‘ you wonder) than by the Partridge Family.

In retrospect, one might say that two roads diverge here, like when hardcore punk spawned emo and straight-edge. The Gen X self-consciousness points the way to Dave Eggers’s Might, where politics was rejected in favor of cultural whimsy – The Real World even comes in for generational scrutiny here. (Shiny Adidas Tracksuits and the Death of Camp, read five years ago, didn’t hold up very well at all.) Deeper political engagement leads to the later Baffler, the one that’s remembered, as well as Thomas Frank’s career. There’s not as much recourse to arguments from American history here as there would be later: while the history of American populism is tentatively brought out towards the end, it’s not as fully deployed as it later would be, perhaps for fear of seeming overly academic.