“Literature”

Good riddance 2007, boo sucks to 2008

"Literature", Meta
Published on

The news that Ellis Sharp has given up blogging was the perfect end to 2007, another year in which the world in general seemed to get shittier, even if my personal circumstances have remained alright. What remains of 2007 to me is an overwhelming feeling of ennui, where literally each day brought a fresh outrage, but where unlike in 2006, when there was Israel’s war on Lebanon, there was no all overwhelming issue to which people mobilised. Not even global warming. There was more a feeling of despairing acceptance that the world was going to shit and you individually could do little about it, especially in the last months of the year. Blogging had been an escape valve, but has now conclusively been proven not to be able to change the world. No wonder Ellis, one of the best and intelligent bloggers I read this year has stopped. When you’ve said everything you can say, what’s the point in hanging on much longer?

Erm…

Well, for me personally there’s still the reason why I started Wis[s]e Words in the first place, because otherwise I’d still be screaming at the telly. I don’t need to win fame or influence people with this little thing, just as long as I can get rid of my thoughts here.

Meanwhile 2008 is four days old and has already managed to piss me off by offing George MacDonald Fraser, faithful chronicler of the adventures of Sir Harry Flashman, adventurer-gentlemen, cad and rogerer of other men’s women. I worried that this would happen back in September, when I reviewed what has now turned out to be his last Flashman novel. I had discovered him back in 1991 when John Ostrander namechecked Flashman in the last issue of Suicide Squad as the spiritual ancestor of Captain Boomerang. (If this means nothing to you, do check out back issues of this series; perhaps the most cynical (but excellent) mainstream superhero comic ever published.) Ten minutes into reading the first Flashman novel I could find (Flashman and the Mountain of Light iirc) I was hooked. George MacDonald Fraser was somewhat of a reactionary, but he was brutally honest in chronicling Flashie’s adventures in empire building. Such a pity that the still blank spots in Flashie’s past will now never be filled in.

So what can we expect from 2008? More of the same, I think. Yes, there are the presidential elections in the US to look forward to, but how much these will matter is something that can only be determined later. Like 2004 the outcome might break your heart if you still belief in the Democrats to save America from itself.

“I think Martin has suffered terribly at the hands of the Guardian”

"Literature", Islamophobia
Published on

Martin being Martin Amis, the quote being from his writer pal Ian McEwan, refering to Mart’s growing reputation as a racist and/or Islamophobe, because of remarks like these:

caricature of Martin Amis

“What can we do to raise the price of them doing this? There’s a definite urge – don’t you have it? – to say, ‘The Muslim community will have to suffer until it gets its house in order.’ What sort of suff­­er­­­ing? Not letting them travel. Deportation – further down the road. Curtailing of freedoms. Strip-searching people who look like they’re from the Middle East or from Pakistan… Discriminatory stuff, until it hurts the whole community and they start getting tough with their children. They hate us for letting our children have sex and take drugs – well, they’ve got to stop their children killing people. It’s a huge dereliction on their part. I suppose they justify it on the grounds that they have suffered from state terrorism in the past, but I don’t think that’s wholly irrational. It’s their own past they’re pissed off about; their great decline. It’s also masculinity, isn’t it?”

McEwan, who is slightly but not much less nuts than Amis on this subject seems to blame the Guardian for publishing articles like the age of horrorism rather than Amis for opening his gob in the first place, which seems a bit unfair. The man himself meanwhile has hit back at his critics with a spectacularly incoherent piece in, you guessed it, the despised Guardian itself:

I want to talk about the discourse, and about the kind of public conversation we should be hoping to have. But before I do that, I will pay my Islamic readers – and I know I have a few – the elementary courtesy of saying that I DO NOT “ADVOCATE” ANY DISCRIMINATORY TREATMENT OF MUSLIMS. AND I NEVER HAVE. And no one with the slightest respect for truth can claim otherwise.

Has he read his earlier remarks quoted above, or does he think that if he denies them hard enough they will go away? Because, you know, that blaming of an entire population for the acts of a few seems awfully close to racism to me, especially considering the context. Ever since the September 11 attacks Amis has left no opportunity unused to discuss his disgust at the ideology behind it and over time he has done so in increasingly general terms, culminating in that awful “Age of horrorism” article which came very close indeed in blaming all of Islam for the misdeeds of September 11.

So is Amis a racist? Not in the sense that he’ll be sticking burning crescents on the council estates of Birmingham perhaps, but at the very least he’s an arrogant, self-absorbed ignorant blowhard who mistakes his regurgitation of whichever book he last read for insight. Very telling indeed in this context is the second paragraph of his “I’m no racist, honest” piece, which begins with “When I was five or six years old, my father took me to meet a black man.” That’s the level of self-absorption we’re dealing with here.

Norman Mailer

"Literature"
Published on

I can’t really say anything about Norman Mailer or his death because I never read anything by him, nor was ever tempted to do until now. To post something now just because the man died recently seems a bit too bandwagonesque, so I won’t say anything about it. The only thing what I do want to comment on is that if both Roy Edroso and Ellis Sharp recommend the same novel, it must have something going for it. Here’s first Ellis, then Roy on cite>Why Are We in Vietnam?.

It’s too early to assess Mailer’s career either in itself or in relation to his contemporaries (it will take thirty or forty years for the noise to die down and the vested interests to fade). That said, it’s middle period Mailer that interests me the most. Did he ever achieve his ambition of writing a novel which fused those electrifying influences set out above? Yes, I believe he did. It may be significant that he did so in a book which is not only his shortest novel (143 pages in my Panther edition) but also perhaps his least typical: Why Are We in Vietnam? It is a narrative which repeatedly contemplates its own making, through a voice which fractures and takes on a dizzying variety of registers. The cover blurb heartily proclaims it Rabelaisian (preparing the reader for Mailer’s interest in assholes, dicks and bodily matters) but at times it reminds me of Joyce; at others of later James Ellroy.

[….]

Critics generally prefer Mailer’s more disciplined books like The Executioner’s Song and Harlot’s Ghost, in which Mailer’s madness is a thrumming engine set safely deep inside the work, sending energy steadily up into the well-ordered prose, with sudden power surges occasionally electrifying the surface. In passages like this one, we see what Mailer was like when nothing was stopping him. It’s the first Mailer book that grabbed me, and I still like it. There’s glory in it as well as absurdity; it’s compelling and not quite convincing; it is colloquial without being conversational. It is inventive to a fault.

I just might look out in the local library for that one.

Death of criticism: film at eleven

"Literature"
Published on

It must be a month with a vowel in its name, as once again the Guardian‘s blog Comment is Free has an article lamenting the death of professional criticism, this time written by one Ronan McDonald, who isn’t important enough to have his own Wikipedia entry. His article follows the usual pattern of these things: first an assertion of the importance of literary criticism, then the contrasting of a vanished golden age of criticism when critics were Taken Serious as arbiters of good taste, with the present democratisation and vulgarisation of opinion through blogs and Amazon ratings, all the while confusing criticism with reviewing, followed by a call to arms to the great unwashed to once again let professional critics determine what we should like or not like. The following excerpt is typical in its confusion:

The bloggers and reading groups often claim that they would rather get recommendations from someone they know, someone with similar tastes. One problem with this is that the public are relying on a reviewing system that confirms and assuages their prejudices rather than challenges them. An able and experienced critic, with sufficient authority, could once persuade readers to give unfamiliar work a second chance, to see things they did not see at first glance. In that respect, critics can be the harbingers of the new.

Can we rely on the bloggers to bring vital if alienating art to a wide audience? The conviction that educated taste is an elitist ruse, that one opinion is as good as another, and that we should take our lead for our cultural life solely from people like us might seem like an instance of “people power”. Yet the death of the critic is to be mourned. If we only listen to those who already share our proclivities and interests, the supposed critical democracy will lead to a dangerous attenuation of taste and conservatism of judgment. Without critics of authority, the size and variety of contemporary criticism may ultimately serve the cause of cultural banality and uniformity.

See? It positively reeks of sour grapes and fear. Literary criticism rarely sold papers anyway, and with informed opinion on almost every book imaginable just a google away, who would want to buy a Guardian say to read up about the latest predictable novel by a well established middle aged author, reviewed by a friend of said author hoping for a nice blurb from him for their own next book? Professional critics these days rarely if ever champion controversial art other than that branded controversial by the artist because it’ll sell better… Modern art and literature has gotten in a rut, is created and written for a small circle of London literati, smug and self satisfied and professional criticism echoes this.

Meanwhile for every professional critic eking out a living regurgitating received wisdoms, there are thousands of people online just as qualified if not more so to give their opinion about art, even when we would want to adhere to McDonald’s absurd standards, and who do it for free, for the sheer love of literature, of art. And they aren’t bound by London conventions…

Amis and 9/11

"Literature", Numpties
Published on

I remember back in early 2002 or so reading a Guardian(?) interview with Martin Amis, in which he posed dramatically as The Novelist Who Had Lost His Faith in Novels Due to the Horrors of 9/11 and even then I thought he was a wanker. Since then he has only confirmed my opinion of him, as he has gone on his own peculiar little crusade against the Muslim menace, revealing himself as yet another bedwetter.

Now Ellis Sharp was so kind as to draw our attention to a Guardian Books article by Pankaj Mishra, which looks at how Martin Amis and other writers of his generation like Ian McEwan or Don DeLillo, have made of the September 11 attacks and its repercussions. These are writers who have said that they have been shocked awake by 9/11 into an uncertain world where what they used to believe in no longer seems relevant and who have written novels exploring this new post-9/11 world. Mishra doesn’t think they have succeeded in doing so, in honestly appreciating the effects of the September 11 attacks; comparing them unfavourably to what happened in European fiction after World War One. An interesting article. Not so much interesting, as appalling, are the quotes used at the start of the article, for their sheer pomposity and cluelessness:

Reflecting on the attacks on the twin towers in 2001, Don DeLillo seemed to speak for many Americans when he admitted that “We like to think that America invented the future. We are comfortable with the future, intimate with it. But there are disturbances now, in large and small ways, a chain of reconsiderations.” On September 11, terrorists from the Middle East who destroyed American immunity to large-scale violence and chaos also forced many American and British novelists to reconsider the value of their work and its relation to the history of the present. “Most novelists I know,” Jay McInerney wrote in these pages, “went through a period of intense self-examination and self-loathing after the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center.” Ian McEwan claimed in a later interview to have found it “wearisome to confront invented characters”. “I wanted to be told about the world. I wanted to be informed. I felt that we had gone through great changes and now was the time to just go back to school, as it were, and start to learn.” “The so-called work in progress,” Martin Amis confessed, “had been reduced, overnight, to a blue streak of pitiable babble. But then, too, a feeling of gangrenous futility had infected the whole corpus.”

Amis went on to claim that “after a couple of hours at their desks, on September 12 2001, all the writers on earth were reluctantly considering a change of occupation.” This is, of course, an exaggeration. Many writers had intuited that religious and political extremism, which had ravaged large parts of the world, would eventually be unleashed upon the west’s rich, more protected societies.

It’s the rampant narcissism on display here that appalls me. Amis and McEwans generation of writers rose to prominence in the eighties and nineties, when there were quite a few outrages far worse than the September 11 attacks. Yet it was because the latter happened on their doorsteps so to speak that they were finally forced to pay attention, so it galls to see Amis and McEwan hold themselves up as arbiters of moral worthiness now.