Category Archives: reviews

the baffler #8: the cultural miracle

Posted on by

The Baffler #8: The Cultural Miracle
ed. Thomas Frank

I don’t think that I ever actually had a copy of this issue of The Baffler, #8 from early 1996, though pieces are familiar from their appearance in Commodify Your Dissent (my copy of which is, as far as I know, still in a warehouse about a rug factory in north Somerville). The arrival of Baffler 18 seemed like a good excuse to pick up old issues that I was missing – most show up on Amazon used for not much – & this was the first to arrive in the mail. At sixteen years old, this is an old issue, almost a pre-Internet Baffler: there are a couple of web addresses in the ads for Sub Pop and Dusty Groove, but those are the only acknowledgments that the web existed. The (first) Internet Boom hadn’t happened; Monica Lewinsky hadn’t happened yet, and Newt Gingrich was ascendent. There’s an ad for The For Carnation on the inside back cover; most of the full-page ads seem to be connected to Sub Pop in some way or another. Both poems (“Cantos for James Michener”) and drawings by David Berman feature prominently. Okay Soda is mentioned not in nostalgia but as a present horror; the marketing of Red Dog beer, which I’d completely forgotten about, appears more than once.

That said: it’s strange how contemporary so much of this feels. Maybe that’s this moment speaking, when the Supreme Court has decided that as legal people, corporations deserve to have free speech, real health care reform has been taken off the table again, and when the Democrats can’t even hang on to Teddy Kennedy’s seat. I don’t think we’ve been in a holding pattern for the past fourteen years; but reading this, you get the sense that we might have arrived back in the same place. Frank’s opening piece, “Gold Diggers of 1996,” which posits that the present has returned to the turbulent 1930s, ready to explode, could be followed, in true Busby Berkeley style, by a “Gold Diggers of 2010”. Some pieces may have been ahead of their time: the Mike Neuwirth short story that closes the issue, about a bartender in East Hampton, seems vastly more appropriate to 2006 than 1996. A piece by Negativland explains how record companies exploited consumer ignorance to artificially raise the price of CDs after decades of attempts to sell different formats; it ends:

So what’s next? How can they get you to buy another copy of your favorite Pearl Jam release when you already have it on CD? Don’t worry, they’ll come up with an answer for you soon.

(p. 31.) That particular story has finished itself; but, as ever, nonconformity is still used to market conformity. Robert Schuller’s Orange County Crystal Cathedral, visited by Tom Vanderbilt, had been superseded by megachurches; Pat Robertson remains. Owen Hatteras’s “Pelf and Powder Blue,” about the public taste for blockbuster shows (Monet & Caillebotte at that time) and America’s lasting taste for the Impressionists feels like a prelude to the popular success of Thomas Kinkade, which A. S. Hamrah took apart in the most recent issue of the magazine. Robert Nedelkoff’s fictional interview with a campaign manager feeling out a Senate run for Steven Seagal is McSweeney’s before the letter.

What’s most striking about this issue – especially when compared to McSweeney’s and what’s followed – is how angry it is. Most of what they were angry about is still worth being angry about. Right-wing “populism” is still a threat to civil society. But I think it’s been hard to sustain outrage in the face of so much that’s happened since: witness, for example. the general indifference to Scott Horton’s report in Harper’s demonstrating that our government has been torturing and killing prisoners and disguising this as suicides; or the military’s seeming need to command & control Haiti before bothering to aid the people. There’s a sense of burn-out on the left presently: the thrill of the Obama win aside, it’s hard to imagine serious change actually happening, and at best the Democrats stand as a bulwark against further right-wing indignities. Here there’s the idea that maybe if people understood these things, they’d wake up. Now one worries that people understand but can’t care.

The indie aspect still looks weird: now the focus on post-punk seems more parochial than anything else, an attempt to graft a politics onto an aesthetic. But in this issue, at least, that mostly comes through the ads, which suggest a certain sort of readership, a readership who were primarily interested in books and Chicago-style post-rock. There’s a lot of Hunter Kennedy (of Drag City/The Minus Times, which seems to still be going) in here; in the TOC, it’s art. Zines will be zines; the roots show through on the ads and art, some of which appear to have been made with scissors, tape, and a photocopier. A Gary Groth piece castigates Quentin Tarantino, then culturally ubiquitous; it’s paired with a piece by Ray Carnie, slamming middlebrow taste in film (then being adopted by emergent media studies programs) in favor of John Cassavetes, at that time impossible to find on video; both of these would be argued differently today when media has become less of an either/or choice. 

The most beguiling piece in the issue, for me, is Aaron Cohen’s reclamation of Artie Shaw for the left (online here), which follows an excerpt from Shaw’s Sideman, which was to be a “92-chapter autobiographical novel which, in Dostoevskian fashion, he intends to be the first part of a trilogy”. As far as I can tell, none of these ever appeared; nor did Good Enough Isn’t Good Enough, a multi-disc set of his own work that Shaw was compiling. But the voice of Shaw makes you wonder why you haven’t heard it before. The piece ends with this account of surviving McCarthyism:

I’m convinced that the thing that saved me, the one thing that kept me going, through it all, was sheer downright orneriness, the fact that I was just too damned mulish to lie down and oblige a pack of righteous idiots who believed they cornered the market on truth. Besides, I was curious to see what might happen next. Who knows? (I kept thinking) there may be a sudden outbreak of mass sanity. Hey, don’t laugh. It may happen yet. Listen, anything is possible.

the baffler, vol. 2, no. 1: margin call

Posted on by

The Baffler Vol. 2, No. 1: Margin Call
ed. Thomas Frank

A new issue of The Baffler (number 18) arrived yesterday & I’ve already made my way through it. There aren’t a lot of magazines that I reliably read through on arrival any more: I’ve fallen down on Dot Dot Dot, which was carrying me for a while, though I do generally make it through new issues of Fantastic Man. Everything else piles up. The past decade has been bad for magazines: wandering the magazine stores, it’s hard to find anything that looks necessary. I still miss Nest. Did I miss the Baffler? It never really folded per se, though it did seem like it faded out across the 2000s: the major lights had gone on to better things, and though four issues were released after Bush came into power, offering intelligent critique seemed beside the point in a world so impervious to reason. One can only say “I told you so” for so long.

The media world changed too: though the Baffler had done a superb job of covering the idiocies of the first Internet boom (Tom Frank’s One Market Under God is probably worth re-reading), it seems like they were taken aback with how radically the media landscape had changed. This new issue finds them taking stock: a quick piece by the editors leads off the issue by surveying the unexpected death of established media and the all-too-expected life of Wall Street. Chris Anderson & Wired come in for some old-time bashing. Focus stays on the Internet & the changing media world in the essay section, starting with Christine Smallwood (the problems of thinking about the Internet) and documentarian Astra Taylor (the problem of the artist in a world where everything can be pirated). Naomi Klein looks back at No Logo, examining the assumptions of 1999 (the same piece just appeared in The Guardian: presumably it’s an introduction to a tenth anniversary edition). Michael Lind finds oligarchs in America: at about this point it becomes clear we’re safely back in Baffler territory.

A. S. Hamrah’s piece on Thomas Kinkade and flipping houses is vintage Baffler: maybe my favorite piece in the issue. Yves Smith takes on the excesses of the finance industry. Walter Benn Michaels reprises a piece from Bookforum where he accuses the recent American novel of a lack of engagement with class issues; the piece has been reworked since its last appearance and is stronger for it, though I’m still not sure that championing American Psycho is the right way to do this. Moe Tkacik’s piece on the business writing of the recent bubble is good, though it pales against the memory of Tom Frank’s obvious love for the language of American business. Will Boisvert looks at Detroit; Ryan Ruby surveys the cultural devastation levied on New York by Mike Bloomberg; Jim McNeil looks at housing in DC. Will Schmenner’s piece on movies using the compilation soundtrack as a shortcut to emotion isn’t bad, but it could appear in any number of places; and the essay section is rounded out with the resurrection of an old conservative (Henry Fairlie) to serve as a voice for the progressive.

The magazine looks nicer than it did – though the “fi” ligature in the font they’re using draws an unseemly amount of attention to itself, as does the way they smallcap all abbreviations. There’s a blue bookmark, and the binding is good. The photos, in full color, are beautiful; a graphic section by Angie Walker isn’t particularly strong and feels like it belongs in Harper’s. The back of the book is lighter: a Dan Kelly piece starts with a list of authors drawn from a Facebook meme and explains how they’d do in a fight. Chris Lehmann takes apart revisionist histories of the New Deal; Mike Newirth reconsiders Nelson Algren; Matt Taibbi enjoys Rod Blagojevich’s book as much as anyone can, almost a return to his writing at the eXile. Two fiction pieces, by Paul Maliszewski and Lydia Millet provide a soft ending. There’s no Robert Nedelkoff, which is too bad, but he’ll turn up, I’m sure. It’s a solid issue: it feels revitalized after a long absence: maybe a good place to start volume 2.

*     *     *     *     *

In a way, it’s as hard for me to think critically about The Baffler as it is for many to think about Salinger, as it’s one of those things that I found at exactly the right time: the late 90s, the height of the first dot-com boom, at a college that was a charm school for the upper class, where day-trading was taking place over breakfast in the dining halls, everyone had a start-up based on some ridiculous idea which were, astonishingly, getting funded. The Baffler, then, was a necessary corrective: proof that somebody, somewhere was thinking sensibly, and that meant a lot. Coming across old issues on the shelves of used bookstores since then still provides a shock of recognition: it’s tied up with how I constructed myself at a certain point in time.

The magazine seemed to lose its footing after the Bush inauguration: in an era where blatant disregard of facts was the official order of the day, informed criticism felt besides the point. And of course, attention was elsewhere: Thomas Frank’s been doing solid work since then – in-house leftist on the Wall Street Journal‘s opinion page seems a good fit – as have most of the other people involved: Paul Maliszewski’s book on fakery last year, for example, deserved much more press than it received. Maybe the problem is the place of the literary journal right now: a piece by Ted Genoways, editor of the VQR in Mother Jones, suggests that while everyone’s busy submitting to literary magazines, nobody’s actually reading them. (The MFA industry is as readymade a Baffler story as can be imagined.) Attention’s moved: I don’t know that it’s moved elsewhere so much as it’s lost duration. Nobody needs to hear this again. But it’s nice to see the Baffler back.

(Worth noting: a handful of old issues – 11, 16, and 17 – can be downloaded in PDF format by clicking on the individual issues. These seem to be scans of the images)

stanley crawford, “mayordomo”

Posted on by

Stanley Crawford
Mayordomo: Chronicle of an Acequia in Northern New Mexico
(University of New Mexico Press, 1988)

I came to Stanley Crawford through his fiction – Log of the S. S. The Mrs. Unguentine got a reissue from Dalkey Archive a few years back with an afterward by Ben Marcus, and there was a bit of attention. It’s an easy book to read, though one that will require re-reading; from there, I quickly went through Some Instructions, Gascoyne, and Travel Notes; his most recent, Petroleum Man is on a stack of things to be read. Gascoyne and Travel Notes feel like juvenilia compared to his later books; stylistically, they feel like Pynchon and Robert Kelly’s Cities, a writer trying out forms. In Log and Some Instructions, the novelist has found his subject: the relations between people. Though formally very different, both are about marriage and the unknowability of others. Crawford doesn’t present this as an endpoint, but as a position from which to think about the ethics of our interactions with others.

From this, it’s a small jump to his non-fiction: A Garlic Testament is his account of growing garlic in New Mexico, which seems to be his primary occupation; it is about growing garlic, and can be judged as such, but it’s also about the problem of how we live our lives. There’s a similarity to the two books that Gianfranco Baruchello and Henry Martin put out (How to Imagine and Why Duchamp) about Baruchello’s attempts to use Duchamp’s thoughts to run a farm: like Crawford’s books, these are meditations on the place of work in our lives, a subject that’s more and more interesting to me. Mayordomo: Chronicle of an Acequia in Northern New Mexico precedes A Garlic Testament. It’s a book about his time as the mayordomo of an irrigation ditch used by himself and the neighboring farmers in New Mexico. The givens are simple: there’s a certain amount of water in the ditch, which everyone needs; water use must thus be rationed, especially during the dry season. The ditch is community property: it must be maintained, which may require a fair amount of labor, which must be apportioned. The mayordomo is paid to keep the ditch in order. Not knowing a great deal about water law, I’m not sure if ditch councils are still in existence: writing in 1988, Crawford speculates that water rights adjudication is likely to massively overhaul how water is administered in the area. Probably western droughts and the massive influx of population into the Southwest has also changed things. But the value in this book isn’t so much in its documentary quality (though I’m sure some readers might find it important for that) or how it functions as a memoir (though it does that). Rather, it’s a study of how people organize and relate to each other, their work, and the world they share. 

There’s a focus on the interactions of communities in this book: Crawford’s ditch shares water from a river with several other ditches, and in dry seasons negotiations with representatives of other ditches are necessary. These are associations of people rather than corporate bodies: those who share the water are small-time farmers, with a few acres of crops. It’s very much a version of the American dream, but one that’s not so blind to believe in self-sufficiency. The amount of water is limited; it needs to be shared. Ditch-sharing agreements, Crawford points out, extend well before New Mexico became a state; the acequia system of management came from Spain, a remnant of an earlier time:

There are few other civic institutions left in this country in which members have as much control over an important aspect of their lives; relatively autonomous, in theory democratic, the thousand acequias of New Mexico form a cultural web of almost microscopic strands and filaments that have held a culture and a landscape in place for hundreds of years.

(p. 176.) In its extended treatment of a subject that might not initially seem interesting, this is a book that forces the reader to slow down. Here, for example, Crawford talks about horses, which he’s just admitted that he doesn’t particularly care for:

There are a few old farmers still using horses up in the higher valleys where the internal combustion engine arrived a decade later than here. The horse has its advantages. Like you it tires with work, needs rest, food, water: your rhythms are similar. A tractor, a machine, invites you to work at a pace unnatural to the body, and while the machine does the work faster and better in some ways it is also designed with complex needs that seem like deep ulterior purposes to connect you to international fossil fuel and manufacturing conglomerates, banks, insurance companies; and its waste products, unlike a horse’s, are toxic and useless.

(p. 95.) When stated this way, Crawford’s point about rhythms of the horse and the machine seems obvious; and painfully applicable to our own lives. A rural Midwestern upbringing is more than enough to inoculate one against romanticizing agrarianism; but there’s something here that’s hard for me to ignore. Maybe it’s the cultural moment we’re in, where it’s hard to look forward to anything substantially improving; maybe it’s New York in a recessionary winter. Watching Paris Is Burning – filmed here while Crawford was minding his ditch in New Mexico – the other night suggested how much the city has changed in the past twenty years: there’s so much more wealth now, but people seem less alive, less attuned to each other. We spend more time in front of computers than we do in front of other people; I won’t argue that’s entirely bad, but one does wonder about how one ought to be living.

Technological mediation seems inescapable right now: correspondingly, maintaining a ditch seems much more interesting than it might have. Crawford, it should be pointed out, was not born to his ditch: born in California, he went to U. Chicago and the Sorbonne before spending time in Greece and moving to New Mexico; he’s acutely aware that he’s a latecomer to the land, but it’s his perspective as an outsider that finds the interest of the story. It’s strange, really, how little notice has been given to his work: no mention of him can be found in the Harper’s database, where one might think he’d fit. A longer piece by Verlyn Klinkenborg appeared in the New Yorker (21 September 1995, p. 125) on the occasion of the publication of A Garlic Testament. There have been a handful of appearances in the New York Times (most notably a generally disapproving review of Travel Notes by Stanley Elkin), but not since 1992. Maybe this lack of attention will change as the increasing importance of water as a social issue has been receiving a fair amount of careful attention recently: Joseph McElroy considers water and writing (his treatment of Crawford is probably the most thoughtful this book has received); and William Vollmann’s Imperial, a book that seems to have awakened reserves of resentment in the nation’s book reviewers, is deeply concerned with the ways in which water use affects communities, amidst the myriad other forces that shape the California-Mexico border. Both McElroy and Vollmann could be read profitably against Crawford.

eleanor antin, “historical takes”

Posted on by

eleanor antin, "historical takes"Eleanor Antin
Historical Takes
(Prestel, 2008)

I first ran into Eleanor Antin’s work in the Pompidou a few years ago; they were showing an edition of her 100 Boots, which immediately clicked with me: conceptual art that was immediately funny but not stupid, a tricky area to work. She’s someone who pops up in New York with some regularity: Carving was part of the “Wack! Art and the Feminist Revolution” show at PS1; her video of herself as The King was at MoMA. I found this book on winter sale in the gift shop at MoMA as well, where I was hoping to find postcards from the Bauhaus show; it’s a catalogue of a show at San Diego Museum of Art a few years back of her stagings (not quite restagings) of classical scenes in the foothills of Southern California. (I don’t know if Francesco Vezzoli’s Caligula is likely to hold up as well as Antin’s The Death of Petronius (2007) as a representation of the last decade’s excesses.) There’s a good interview with her by Max Kozloff and a pair of contextualizing essays by Betti-Sue Hertz and Amelia G. Jones.

But mostly this book is about the photographs. They’re not quite as immediate as 100 Boots, as one can’t look at these photographs without knowing there’s a subtext that needs to be unpacked. Antin’s playing with representations of women, obviously; scenes of Roman decadence set in what’s obviously southern California carry a weight now that might not have been foreseen when the book was published, presumably the middle of 2008 when the exhibition started. Antin’s also engaging with digital manipulation: the frontispiece, Constructing Helen (from Helen’s Odyssey), 2007, shows men sculpting a body several times their size, the body of a woman made to look like she’s made of marble. Not all are as blatant in their manipulation of photographs, but how the conventions of art is clearly a major subject: models posed as they would be in an Alma-Tadema or Poussin look astonishingly fake. Animals prove endearingly unwilling to be posed.

The strongest sequence (and the most remarked upon in the book’s text) is Helen’s Odyssey, a recasting of her story. The centerpiece is two versions of Judgment of Paris (after Rubens): Paris chooses between a bandoliered Athena with an automatic rifle, a vamping Aphrodite, and a 1950s housewife Hera, all posed before a painted backdrop that wouldn’t be out of place in an Italian restaurant. Helen, at the margins of the painting, looks directly at the viewer; going back to Rubens, we find that she’s not there at all.

The King of Solana Beach makes a welcome but short appearance at the end of the book, as do photographs from Angel of Mercy and part of Recollections of My Life with Diaghilev 1919–1929 by Eleanora Antinova, an alter ego. They’re fantastic short narratives; one wishes for a collected edition of Antin’s work. I can’t find fault with this book, though; it’s beautifully produced, and being too short isn’t the worst crime. I’d love to see the actual photographs.

everything passes & rereading

Posted on by

The first thing one notices about Gabriel Josipovici’s Everything Passes is how slight it appears: the economics of American publishing dictate that novels of less than two hundred pages are rarely found in bookstores. The spareness of Everything Passes goes beyond length: white space threatens to overpower the text from every side of every page. A book without many words is a book that can be read quickly: an average commute to work on the subway is long enough to read every word, sentence, paragraph in the book. The commute home lets you read it again. This is how I read Everything Passes for the first times: on my way to work, on my way back from work, over and over for a week or so. I came to the book in a moment of personal conflict; losing myself in the repetitions of the text was calming.

At the start of S/Z, Roland Barthes threatens that “those who fail to reread are obliged to read the same story everywhere” (p. 16). Well past the heyday of structuralism, this is a statement that still puts fear in the hearts of the would-be reader: very little reading is rereading, especially in the present era, when the volume of things that could be read seems to be approaching the infinite, despite continuing rumors of publishing’s imminent collapse. Of necessity more and more of my online reading is skimming. And even when a book is read entire in print, most don’t suggest – or aren’t worth – rereading. But Barthes can’t be brushed aside: the best reading is close reading, and close reading requires rereading. To read quickly is to admit that what you’re reading isn’t worth your time.

Everything Passes is a book that’s not shy in its demand for rereading. The book’s insistent repetition signals this from the first page, where four sentences are repeated; the word “again” figures prominently. A phrase encountered for the second time, a third or fourth time, resonates. Returning to the start of the book, the reader feels the first use of a phrase resonate, knowing what will happen. (One can’t help but think of how we listen to music: it’s rare to hear a piece of music only once.) It’s in this recognition of repetition and wondering at its meaning that the serious work of reading can be done.

On a basic level with Everything Passes, there’s the immediate problem of figuring out what’s going on: assigning names to the pronouns that represent the characters and sequencing scenes that reveal themselves as flashbacks. This isn’t hard to do, but it does require scrambling on the part of the reader; Everything Passes might be termed “difficult” because of this, but I think this is an important aspect of the book’s realism. Dialogue in the real world isn’t uttered in expository fashion; no omniscient narrator guides us when we make sense of the world.

On another level, the characters grapple with the problem of rereading. Felix points to the modernity of Rabelais, whom he identifies as the first writer of the age of print. Rabelais realized that a book was not a sermon or a play – something heard & observed once – but something else entirely and subject to its own rules: in other words, it’s something that could be reread. Prose fiction, unlike drama or the sermon, is outside of the passing of time inherent in the title: after three hours, the play is over and the audience goes home, but the book persists, waiting to be reopened.

We learn to read by reading the same things again and again. And with age, Sven Birkerts suggests in Reading Life, rereading gains personal resonance: a book first read ten years may physically be the same book, but more likely than not the reader is not the same reader. A book immediately reread is a different sort of experience: the structure of the book reveals itself more openly. Everything Passes shares a circular structure with Finnegans Wake: in both, the tense of the verb in the title suggests an ongoing present. Life must end, but a book goes on and on; caught between fiction and life, the place of the reader can only be to reread.

(This piece was written for Ready Steady Book’s Everything Passes symposium.)