I like the Far Side better, too (with an Update)

Noah Berlatsky says the kind of thing I might say:

I think, for me, some of the problems [with the high art vs. low art distinction that] they're talking about can be resolved by thinking of high-art as simply a different kind of genre — that is, Joyce isn't necessarily any more individual or writerly than Stan Lee; he's just writing in a different tradition with different genre conventions and for a different (smaller) audience. The Lee/Joyce division is actually an interesting one, because both were very original, and so could be said to have been creating a new audience, stitched together from portions of older traditions. And my appreciation for both is probably about the same; I admire and enjoy many things about their writing, but neither are really my favorites, for reasons which have a lot to do with their investment in the tiresome tropes of male self-pity.

Well, okay - I'd never say the bit about male self-pity, but otherwise I find the idea of "high art" or "lit-fic" or "gallery art" as distinct genres in their own right to be pretty useful. My problem with a lot of, say, "lit-fic" fans is that they sometimes commit a synecdoche and treat "lit-fic" as if it were "the only real literature" or "the only literature that matters". (In the comic book world, super hero fans have been - historically - guilty of the same offense).

Update: The conversation in the comments section to Noah's post is interesting to me because the back-and-forth he has with Eric mirrors the arguments Michael Blowhard seems to have whenever he writes about "lit-fic" as "just another bozo on the genre bus". (Okay, so Michael Blowhard never actually uses that phrase, but I like it.)

I might be completely mistaken (and feel free to correct me if you think I am), but I don't think this kind of thing happens as much with film buffs. You tend not to see film buffs wading into a conversation with the assumption that of course Jean Renoir is more worthy/interesting/full-of-ideas/etc. than John Ford. You're more likely to come across guys like Michael Sicinski, who engages enthusiastically and insightfully with both art cinema and popular cinema (check out his top ten lists: look at 1980's, where Airplane tops the list but Hollis Frampton is close behind).

My guess is that lit-fic fans sense that the genre is somewhat endangered (or, at the least, that it 's prominence is on the wane), so that they're more likely to attack arguments like Noah's or Michael B.'s.

No posts: just links

I've got nothing to post here tonight, so here are some links:

Sean was disappointed with Grindhouse (I'll leave a comment there when he gets them working).

There's also more Tarantino chat between me and Steve in the comments section of my Grindhouse post.

Michael Blowhard has another excellent post up about lit-fic: must reading for anyone interested in arts & culture stuff.

Michael also linked to this very neat interview with Donald Westlake and John Banville.

Hopefully, I'll be back tomorrow with something a little more substantial of my own.

Book Chat: The Brooklyn Follies

The Brooklyn Follies

Paul Auster writes my favorite contemporary American lit-fic, probably because, unlike say Don DeLillo, he never skimps on the story, which he seems to care about for its own sake and not just as a framework for his ideas. The Brooklyn Follies is filled with incident, invention, and interesting characters, not to mention a couple of mysteries and some genuine (if momentary) thrills. It reminded me a lot of John Irving's early novels (especially The Hotel New Hampshire), but it's shorter and lot less heavy handed.

It is an English Major kind of novel though: there are references to Poe, Thoureau, Melville, Whitman, DeLillo; an important early scene revolves around a discussion of one of the character's senior thesis; the book's idea of paradise is being able to have the time to read all the books you'd want to read, and, oh, yeah, spend time with all the people you care about, too.

Like most of Auster's novels, there are stories within stories and a strong sense of approaching literature as a game to be played or a puzzle to be solved, but it's that addition of "all the people you care about" into the mix that distinguishes The Brooklyn Follies from Auster's last two novels. Those books - The Book of Illusion and Oracle Night - were more focused on the po-mo lit-fic gamesmanship and not so much on the larger world. This is a warmer book, almost a "feel good" book.

It doesn't end as well as it starts, not because Auster refuses to provide a satisfying ending a la DeLillo or takes a stab at ambiguity that feels a little bit too much like a cop out a la the recent Philip Roth novels, but because he tries to wrap everything up a little too neatly. I like that the book wears its politics on its sleeve (although at this date and considering Auster's audience, it isn't exactly an act of courage), but sometimes Auster's relatively schematic left-liberal worldview undermines his abilities as a novelist. Or rather, he's always been weakest (IMO) when it comes to creating characters, and so when filling out his casts he often resorts to stereotypes that will be recognizable to anyone who's kept up with American indie movies during the last 10 years. There's a Jamaican drag queen who's essentially a saint and a Southern Evangelic Christian who's the book's major monster. Structurally, the evil Christians show up at end, and Auster's somewhat condescending take on them wasn't enough to sour me on the book as a whole, but I wasn't as an enthusiastic fan of the book as I had been with fifty pages to go. (Also, IMO, the final paragraph was maybe a little redundant: I saw it coming from so far off that I felt a little let down that he made such a predictable move).

This lack of generosity and sympathy got me thinking about one of the few major American 19th Century Literary types who doesn't get mentioned in the book: my personal favorite, William Dean Howells. One of the things I like about a novel like A Hazard of New Fortunes is that Howells has affection for all of his characters, even if he treats their beliefs and ideologies with a bemused irony. The Brooklyn Follies could use a bit more of that, although, all-in-all, a pretty compelling, entertaining book.

A Hazard of New Fortunes

At one time, William Dean Howells was considered one of the big guns of 19th C American Lit - up there with Melville, Hawthorne, Twain, etc. But (based on my research, i.e. reading the afterword to A Hazard of New Fortunes) his reputation seems to have taken a serious hit sometime after the rise of modernism and the kind of novels he wrote aren't that fashionable in lit-fic circles. I don't think too many people nowadays are familiar with his work, which is too bad, IMHO.

Anyway, here are some things I liked about the book, along with some half-assed speculations/generalizations about why Howells's star has faded:

1. The "Journalistic" Aspect - Probably the most striking/coolest thing about the book from the perspective of a resident of 21st C New York City is the picture it paints of late 19th C New York City life. For instance, there's a relatively large section in the early part of the book that is all about the problems of finding a suitable NYC apartment - it was very neat to compare what has changed (which neighborhoods were considered good) with what hasn't (finding an apartment is a pain in the ass). There's also lots of great stuff about how the relatively new Elevated Train changed the way people lived their lives (not to mention another chunk of the book that deals with early transit worker strikes).

One of my big beefs with modernist & post-modernist novelists is that, for the most part, they've given up on this journalistic/documentarian aspect of the novel. "A Hazard of New Fortunes" tries to convey a sense of what day-to-day life was like, in a very matter-of-fact, laid-back manner.

I think the journalistic aspect has faded for two major reasons: One, modernist and post-modernist novels seem to be much more focused on issues of Identity. Take Philip Roth's "Zuckerman Unbound" (chosen because this is one of my favorite novels, so I feel that I am allowed to pick on it a little): lots of stuff about what it means to be Jewish (of a contempo, secular bent) and what it means to be a writer who has taken his Jewishness as a subject but virtually nothing on what it is like to live in NYC during the 1960s. Not that Roth is under any obligation to provide any "documentary details", but when every novel becomes, essentially, What It Means to Be Me, lit-fic (as a whole) becomes dangerously close to being swallowed up by solipsistic quicksand. Two, I wonder if narrative film & TV have somewhat displaced the novel in this regard. That's a bigger, sociological question that I am completely unprepared to answer, though.

2. The Characters - Of course I enjoy reading about characters that I can "identify with", but I also really like it when I'm reading an older novel and come across characters I can identify from my life. For instance, one of the main characters in the book is an artist living the NYC bohemian lifestyle while being supported by his father (a laborer from Upstate): I can easily imagine a lot of the parent-supported bohemians that I know making the same kind of rationalizations that Howells's artist character does.

3. No Big Deal - Compared to the other 19th C American Lit I've read, Howells's books are pretty low key: they aren't epics or huge tragedies or searing indictments of anything. They're much more modest and operate on a very down-to-earth level. "A Hazard of New Fortunes" doesn't go after a Big Theme and, if it can be honestly said to be "About" anything (in the sense that students write papers about
how a novel is "about" something) it's about what life was like in NYC at the end of the 19th C and, somewhat more specifically, about how the economic realities of 19th C America shaped NYC society. But it goes about its business in a fairly unfocused manner. Howells isn't interested in the Great Capitalized Themes: Love, Death, Honor, Revolution, Evil, Progress, etc. Or rather, he's not interested in capitalizing any of these themes - they're all there, floating around, but none ever threatens to take over the book.

I think, to a certain extent, we overvalue Big, Searing, Great Novels and undervalue novels that might be just as good, but keep a much lower profile. Not that there's anything wrong with Big, Searing, Great Novels, but variety being the spice of life and all that. (By "we" here, I might mean "Americans", as it seems the Brits, for
example, have done a pretty good job of honoring lower-key, "domestic" authors, like Trollope, for instance).

The 25 Comics I Like Best

#19 Eightball

by Dan Clowes

When I'm in the mood to play "Devil's Advocate", I like to use Eightball as Exhibit A in the case against the Comics Are Art movement.

Don't get me wrong: I think Ghost World and David Boring and Ice Haven, which all first appeared in the pages of Eightball, are as serious, thoughtful, and analysis-worthy as any of the critically acclaimed lit-fic novels that have been published since Eightball began in 1989.

But Eightball isn't just the place where Dan Clowes published these important "comic strip novels": it's also the place where Clowes published his not-quite-so-important gag strips, like "A Message to the People of the Future" and "I Hate You Deeply". If Dan Clowes had simply been interested in making "art comics", I'm not sure that we would have been treated to his thoughts about sports or Christians. And it's these strips that earned Clowes a place in the satirical tradition of Harvey Kurtzman and Robert Crumb. By not trying to make every issue of Eightball a work of art, he was free to be as disreputable as he wanted.

I'd also argue that Clowes's "serious" lit-fic-like comic strip novels owe part of their sensibility and effectiveness to having come out of this satirical/underground gag tradition. The earlier, "funnier" Eightball provided a necessary foundation for the later, more "serious" Eightball.

Some autobiography:

I first discovered Eightball when I was 13. My family had just moved to Montreal after living (for most of my life) in a very small border town in upstate New York. I had always gotten most of my comics through the mail. The closest comic book store was an hour away, and it was always a special occasion whenever I got a chance to go to it. (I also used to look forward to our summer vacations at the New Jersey shore, because I knew I could talk my parents into stopping at a comic store on the way home from the beach). The most "sophisticated" comics that I read--or was even really aware of--were Grant Morrison's Animal Man and Doom Patrol and Neil Gaiman's Sandman. I had tried out some black & white independent comics, but hadn't been very impressed.

When I got to Montreal, things changed. All of a sudden I lived in walking distance of a major, urban downtown area. It wasn't long before I discovered Nebula, a sci-fi bookstore that had a low quantity, high quality comic book section. They didn't stock any comics by Marvel or DC, but they must have had just about everything from Fantagraphics and Kitchen Sink.

I really had no idea what most of these comics were, but something about Eightball grabbed me. Thinking back on it, I'm not sure what exactly made me go for Eightball before, say, Cerebus--which was probably more in line with the type of genre stuff I was used to--or Hate--which actually turned out to be more in line with my sense of humour. My guess would be that Dan Clowes's confident, polished retro cartooning looked a lot more stylish--slicker even--than anything else on the Nebula racks.

I've read a lot about the mind-opening experience kids had when they first read the Harvey Kurtzman issues of Mad: all I can say is that, at 13, Eightball was my Mad. It was one of the first examples of "transgressive" art that I ever came into contact with: I found it offensive, entertaining, funny, thought-provoking, and, often, confusing.

Nowadays, though I've grown away from Eightball's somewhat alienated sensibility, I still look forward to each new issue, primarily because Clowes is such an inventive, constantly advancing cartoonist. (Ice Haven is one of the most technically brilliant and innovative comics I've ever read.) He's also able to populate his books with varied and interesting characters, which is, unfortunately, becoming a lost art in the art comics scene.

Ealier entries in this series:

#25 on RAW. I started this out with the intention of doing one entry a week... Oh well... This one is short and sweet. I'd only add that RAW has really spoiled me when it comes to art comics anthologies.

#24 on Hate!, which features one of my earliest attempts to write about the backlash phenomenon. Also, I seem to have been reading too much Donald Phelps at the time.

#23 on Dick Tracy. Still too much Phelps and too much Manny Farber, but this one reads pretty nicely, if I do say so myself.

#22 on Ditko and Lee's Dr. Strange stories. This is the first entry where my own "voice" really comes through. I also bring up a lot of issues that I continue to deal with on the blog.

#21 on Calvin & Hobbes. This piece might be the most interesting for casual comics fans, since most people are pretty familiar with this strip.

#20 on The Dark Knight Returns. Sums up a lot of my feelings on "revisionist" super-hero books.