Art & Criticism

On bookshelves

"Literature", Art & Criticism
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It’s that perennial middle class literary question: should your bookshelves accurately reflect what you read, or should it have the books read by the kind of person you would like to, as Ezra suggests:

Bookshelves are not for displaying books you’ve read — those books go in your office, or near your bed, or on your Facebook profile. Rather, the books on your shelves are there to convey the type of person you would like to be. I am the type of person who would read long biographies of Lyndon Johnson, despite not being the type of person who has read any long biographies of Lyndon Johnson. I am the type of person who is very interested in a history of the Reformation, but am not, as it happens, the type of person with the time to read 900 pages on the subject.

I can sort of understand this, in that there are always books you want to have read but are less keen on to be actually reading, but buying books with no real intention of ever reading them? That’s wankerish, only one step removed from something like George Bush’s reading list, where you know the person and see the books they supposedly read and think “naaah”. These tricks never work, because when people pull them they always get the same sort of Generically Erudite Library , with the Joyces and the Nabakovs and the 900 page Charo biographies and all that, but without the real sort of esoteric interests a proper bibliophile develops.

Cory Doctorow

Art & Criticism, science fiction
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I’m not sure I actually like Cory Doctorow, either as a blogger or an esseff writer. Boing Boing used to be on my blogroll until it got too up itself for me, and I’ve tried his fiction but haven’t managed to finish any of it. Part of what annoys me about him is his relentless self promotion, part his equally relentless, somewhat naive techno exuberance. The combination just sets my teeth on edge.

A good example was linked to by Making Light the other day, a short called “Other People’s Money“, which was written for Forbes. The excerpt below showcases what I dislike about Doctorow’s writing:

“You’d have thought I’d learned my lesson by then, but no, sir. I am the original glutton for punishment. After Bubble 2.0, I took my best coders, our CFO, and a dozen of our users and did a little health-care startup, brokering carbon-neutral medical travel plans to Fortune 500s. Today that sounds like old hat, but back then, it was sexy. No one seriously believed that we could get out from under the HMOs, but between Virgin’s cheap bulk-ticket sales and the stellar medical deals in Venezuela, Argentina and Cuba, it was the only cost-effective way. And once the IWWWW signed up 80 percent of the U.S. workforce through World of Starcraft guilds, no employer could afford to skimp on health insurance.
The word would go out during that night’s raids and by the morning, you’d have picket lines in front of every branch office.

The whole story is like that, one long infodump laced with buzzwords and jargon to show what Doctorow thinks could be our future. It’s near future and of a type that I should like, like much of Doctorow’s work, as it’s simular to what people like Neal Stephenson and Bruce Sterling have also written. There’s one great difference though, in that their stories were grounded in a political and sociological awareness that I find lacking with Doctorow.

Art and politics

Art & Criticism
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Wag the Dog movie poster

I don’t know if any of y’all read Roy Edroso at all, but Roy specialises in making fun of the kind of rightwing meathead who only appreciate any kind of art if it’s propaganda for their cause. There’s a whole army of lowrent rightwing cultural commentators making a living by telling fellow wingnuts how conservative a movie is or not, who only value art for how well it adheres to their own political positions, and Roy is very good at showing up the absurdity of this. Roy’s basic position seems to be that when politics are put above art, art suffers, so only fools want art to be nothing more than propaganda. And he’s right of course,there’s nothing quite as awful as art that is mindlessly political (Ian McEwan’s Saturday springs to mind).

But at the same time, art, good or bad, always has a political dimension. Even art that says it’s apolitical has one, if only in the refusal to engage openly with politics. How an artist, a novelist sees the world informs their art and politics is always a part of it. And it’s the subconscious politics that are the most interesting, when it’s not put in there for purpose, but because that’s the way the author thinks the world works.

An example, Wag the Dog, that 1997 film about a president who two weeks before the elections get involved in a sexual scandal, for which his advisors fake a war to get him out of. It’s surface politics are trite and predictable: you can’t trust politicians, they will do anything to keep their job, you can’t trust the media because they fake everything blah blah blah. But behind that surface lie much more interesting politics. This is a movie that wants to present itself as cynical and knowning, but seen with a decade of hindsight, it just looks incredibly naive and, well, dumb.

Dumb because the cynicism at the heart of it is fake, a Hollywood idea of how politics work. A war with Albania is faked to distract attention from the president being accused of sexual assault. How is this done? By getting a movie producer to fake this war, who gets in a lot of other people to do this with them and it’s all swallowed by the great unwashed. In the end the producer, once he wants the credit for his success of course has to die to keep it all a secret, but the president gets re-elected and nobody is any the wiser… Nobody innocent dies, the phony war is so phony that nothing happens outside a television studio and it’s all smug bullcrap. We’ve seen what really happens when wars get faked and the endresult is a lot less neat than this movie suggests. We’ve seen that presidents do not hesitate to kill thousands of innocents for the sake of their own career, without the need of Hollywood advisors to help them on their way.

That’s right, Wag the Dog actually sugercoats the real truth, its cynicism is fake. And I think it is because it’s actual target is not the corruption in Washington, but corruption in tinseltown. It’s all about a bunch of Hollywood liberals playing around with things without once considering their impact on the real world. It is in fact a very conservative criticism of Hollywood, despite the fact that supposed liberals like David Mamet have worked on the movie.

And that’s what I mean with the subconscious politics of a piece of art.

Jeffty is five

Art & Criticism, science fiction
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(I wrote this last year and had always intended to come back to it, but I never did, until Nicholas reviewed Harlan Ellison’s Deathbird Stories and reminded me of this again.)

It was Kip’s post on Harlan Ellison and his trademarked name that reminded me of Ellison’s celebrated short story “Jeffty is Five”, which I had also just reread it again, so it was fresh in memory anyway.

I must’ve read “Jeffty is Five” about a dozen times by now; it’s a well anthologised story, winner of both the Nebula and the Hugo award. The first time I read it, some twenty years ago or so, I quite liked it, but over time I’ve become more and more uncomfortable with it.

As the Wikipedia summary puts it, “Jeffty is Five” “tells the story of a boy who never grows past the age of five physically or mentally. The narrator, Jeffty’s friend from the age of five well into adulthood, discovers that Jeffty’s radio plays serial programs no longer produced on radio stations that no longer exist. They are contemporary, all-new shows, however; not re-runs. He can buy comics such as The Shadow and Doc Savage that are, again, all-new although they are no longer being produced. The narrator is privy to this world because of Jeffty’s trust, while the rest of the world (the world that grew as Jeffty did not) is not.”

In the story, trust and nostalgia are inseperatable. The narrator gains access to Jeffty’s golden childhood world because he has Jeffty’s trust and looses it in the climax of the story by inadvertently betraying this trust. At the start of the story the narrator is out in the cold, untrusting world of seventies America, at the end he’s there again, but made even worse by knowing what he has lost.

As a story, it is a powerful dose of nostalgia, a paean to Ellison’s own lost childhood and the wonders it held, even for people who never experienced this time themselves. There’s always been a stubborn streak of nostalgia in science fiction, an awareness of history to which this story appealed; as its long list of awards shows. It also fits well with the general trend for nostalgia of the late seventies —happy Days, anyone?

Now in general, nostalgia is a reactionary emotion, not just a hankering for an idealised past and a denial of the present, but also a denial of possible future improvement. In small doses this is harmless, but when it controls a discourse, it can be a prelude to authoritarianism. Which is why I’m skeptical of nostalgia these days, especially as seductive as it is presented here. Ellison is quite convincing in his genuine love for nineteenforties pop culture, but unfortunately, this love is stuck in the middle of a quite amoral tale. Let me explain what I mean by that.

First, there’s the treatment of Jeffty’s parents, who are depicted without any sympathy for their plight, as dour, soulles, crushed people with no notion what their son can do, or appreciation of him. Both physically and mentally they’re repulsive. They have to be repulsive and unsympathetic for the story to work, to make the real world that much more dismal, but also because if the narrator felt any real sympathy for them, his joy in sharing Jeffty’s world with him could not be so innocent.

Then there’s Jeffty himself, whose condition is treated as not just positive, but as a wonder, something to envy. Again, this needs to be done to make the story work, but if you think about it, would you want him to stay five forever, or would you want him to grow up?

Finally, there’s the narrator’s treatment of Jeffty, which is nothing short of exploitative. In the heart of the story, when he recounts his time with Jeffty, “the happiest time of my life”, it’s all about him listening to new installments of his old favourite radio shows, seeing his favourite movie stars making new movies of his favourite novels, reading his favourite comics and pulps; you get the picture. It’s all about his pleasure in material things, justified through the lens of sickly nostalgia. (His hatred for contemporary America is also rooted in material matters: rock music, cheap candy bars, junkfood.)

This is why, though I loved this story when I first read it years ago, I’ve found it less and less charming everytime I’ve reread it. It’s well written, but it’s wrong.

Sharp on Philip K. Dick

Art & Criticism, science fiction
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Ellis Sharp describes the appeal of Philip K. Dick:

In the case of Philip K. Dick, I don’t find the prose that bad. Yes, sometimes it’s very tired and lazy. Other times it’s dazzling. And when it comes to writing fiction, style and gleaming prose isn’t everything. Think about (for example) Henry James and Robert Louis Stevenson. Henry James might well seem to be the better writer, with a massively accomplished oeuvre. But I would argue that ultimately he never wrote anything as important as what Stevenson achieved in The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, which manages simultaneously to be a hugely accomplished piece of writing and a brilliant exploration of the contradictory nature of human identity and a very insightful account of Victorian society and its hypocrisies. And Stevenson arrived there by way of genre writing. Interesting.

Dick reminds me of Stevenson in some ways. He’s more than just a great storyteller. He’s very good on paranoia, alienation and the self under stress. I first discovered Dick’s work as a young teenager, when I read his early work Eye in the Sky. At one point the characters discover their genitals have vanished, replaced by nothing more than smooth skin. I found that very disturbing. Rather more disturbing than, say, Gregor Samsa waking up and discovering that he’s turned into a giant insect.

But Dick is also very good on ideology and social control. The world he describes in his fiction continues to resonate today. Official reality is a vast simulacrum, is it not? Wars for freedom and democracy. Celebrity gossip. Grinning royals and loyal, flag-waving subjects. Important writers and journalists.

What I require from any piece of fiction is: does the writer’s vision engage me? If so, is it true to itself as art? And is it true to the world? In the case of Philip K Dick the answer is yes, yes, yes.

It’s easy to dismiss Dick as either a talented science fiction writer, interesting but ultimately limited by his subject matter or as a kind of half-crazed creator of hallucinary nightmares, interesting for their novelty but irrelevant to anything else, but that would be missing the true strength of his writing. Dick’s ultimate concern is the nature of reality, whether there can be such a thing as a fundamental realiy underlying our lives or whether it’s all a construct, no matter how natural it may look. Being a
science fiction writer Dick went slightly farther in this than just making the usual banal observations of the artificiality of American life, by reveling in unreality and constructed realities, yet almost always with their roots in that banal artificiality of white American suburban life.

His early short fiction, collected a few years ago in five large volumes, is illuminating in this regard, in the sheer number of stories that take place in suburban surroundings where everyday features of life have taken on a nightmarish aspect. They show how his fantasies were always grounded in the concerns of the “real world”, the paranoia, insecurity, powerlessnness and claustrophobia of day to day life, no matter how absurd or grotesk they seem at first sight.

(Speaking of science fiction, I do wonder what Ellis made of last Saturday’s Dr Who episode, featuring a certain Elizabethan playwright he’s blogged about occasionally…)