Dealing with Addiction: Victorian Fiction

All right. A week or two ago, after plenty of challenging, edifying, or at last worthwhile literature, I felt a hankering for something else, a "little bit on the side" as our grandfathers called their favored brothel playmates, and so I dropped by one of our local Half Price Books (the sites of so many of my crimes) for another copy of Wilkie Collins's The Woman in White (discussed in an earlier post; see below). I did this despite the fact that I already had, god only knows where, three other copies of that book, but I figured I could get a copy of such a classic (read: overprinted) novel cheaply, thus obviating the need to go through box after box in my garage or storage unit.

This one was a Wordsworth Books edition, the cheapest of the cheap public domain publishers (and thanks!), and now part of their "Tales of Mystery & the Supernatural" series designed to catch browsing book-buyer's macabre eyes. That's not important; just thought I'd mention it.

However, this momentary (or so I thought) backsliding into the clutches of Victorian literature (sensation fiction, of all things!) was not, alas, to leave me unmarked. Before seven days had passed I'd reread both The Moonstone and Phineas Finn--Phineas Finn, the goddamned Irish Member himself!--and as if that weren't bad enough, I'd bought an Oxford Illustrated Classics edition (at least I got a good price for it) of The Mystery of Edwin Drood--fortunately for me, I did not read that particular opus imperfectum again, nor do I plan to until middle age.

I was only able to begin pulling myself out of this binge through a judicious and liberal application of Thomas Hardy (Far From the Madding Crown, The Woodlanders--now is clearly not the time to finally read Desperate Remedies) as shock treatment. After all, Wessex is a nice place to go if you've got to sober up.

So what is it about Victorian literature that attracts the weak among us? I think it probably has a lot to do with being able to take the whole thing as a big joke--"respectable" (and even not so respectable) fiction of the period comes off to modern eyes and ears as very near to satire of itself. To take one glaring problem with these people, they never have sex, nor seem to want to. All quote desire unquote is confined to some sort of abstracted transcendental sentimentality, usually as a device for tortured and tortuous thoughts and machinations on the part of an important to character (i.e., "I have loved him always, secretly in my heart of hearts: How thus could I betray him, guilty though he be of such enormity?" blah blah blah).

Maybe there's always some kind of gap between the fictional world produced by a culture and what was really going on in that culture, at least for the most part, but the Victorian Era in the UK and US (but esp. in the UK!) enlarged this discrepancy to alarming proportions. The fact is, we know people were fucking: fucking each others's brains out in privies, in the servants's quarters, the garret, the summerhouse, behind the folly in the park, against every smooth-barked tree, etc. We know this because a few people managed to confess to us, posterity, what they were not supposed to tell us and what they couldn't to any significant degree publicly tell each other during their lives, for example in "Walter's" My Secret Life--shockingly unfelicitous in expression, but as honest an account of a man's sex life as I've read or heard.

But sex is just the most glaring and obvious of the self-imposed blindnesses of those times. And who knows (though if it's anybody's job to tell us, it's artists's) what our blindnesses are today? Still, that's no excuse for these people, nor for the thusly compromised works of fiction that they produced. Rare is the mainstream Victorian novel that can be read as "great literature" today; mostly, they seem to be read for their social, historical, or formal significances. There are obvious exceptions: Hardy, certainly; Thackeray, maybe; Eliot, probably, by a hair.

This isn't to say that I don't think there was a lot of innovative work done by other Victorian novelists, nor that there was not a great deal of very good writing--passages from works by Dickens and Trollope et al. are among the most evocative writing in any language, ever; I'm confident of that--but all the same it's hard to read them without thinking something like, "Oh, I like that. I bet I'd really have liked this book when I was nine or ten." Always supposing one had to hand any requisite reference works, which fortunately children now do thanks to the Internet. By the way, I think people of about my age were the last people who didn't learn to read after understanding the important reference role of the WWW--at least, that's what I hope.

Richard Brautigan's "The Hawkline Monster: A Gothic Western"

A deliberate perversion; wicked, boyish, joyful.

(It's come to my notice that I've been giving a lot more of my time to British and specially English writers than they probably deserve. This is an attempt to partially correct this.)

Brautigan didn't have much time for what other people thought, nor for what they wrote or might expect him to write, as the other two books of his that I've read--The Abortion: An Historical Romance 1966 and Rommel Drives On Deep Into Egypt (a book of poems)--demonstrate. Here is the opening verse (I might better say "salvo") of that latter volume:

Rommel is dead.

His army has joined the quicksand legions

of history where battle is always

a metal echo saluting a rusty shadow.

His tanks are gone.

How's your ass?

Almost a little like something out of Robert Lowell, until the last line of course.

Actually, Brautigan didn't have much time, period, for caring what people thought or anything else in the grand scheme of things: alone, 49 years old in a big old house in Bolinas, CA, Brautigan blew his cranium open with a .44 Magnum revolver just like Dirty Harry's--(probably) 10 years to the day after Hawkline was published, but we can't be sure because although that was the last time anybody heard from him (a bad conversation with an ex-girlfriend a long way away) his body wasn't found until a month and a half later, by a private investigator. He was survived by both parents, both ex-wives, and a daughter.

Actually, I don't know very much about Brautigan; he seems like a literary character who also wrote stuff, a character of the mischievous and "deliberately enigmatic" sort. Then again, it has to be said in his defense that he seems to have made literature fun--at least for a while, and at least for him. One thing that  I think I can fairly say from having read these books and looked at their original covers (Hawkline a notable exception to this rule) is that Brautigan loved beautiful women, or at least pretty ones (tastes do vary, and each year seems to have it's own paradigm). I'd like to think that he also got along (to put it one way) with them: such a fact would, esp. given his gangly and generally unbecoming appearance, give some encouragement to those wondering if literature is a worthwhile pursuit and credence to those immortal words spoken by Sean Connery in Finding Forrester.

It strikes me that, so far, I haven't written anything at all about the book whose title appears above this post. That is, perhaps, unfortunate, but at the same time it's symptomatic of reading Brautigan. I can honestly say that I enjoyed this book: I enjoyed reading it, I enjoyed holding it, I enjoyed putting it down and finally placing it back on my shelf. I even laughed, once, which is unusual for me or maybe anybody to do when reading a book, alone. I can't say, however, that my life was substantially enriched by reading it, nor that I learned anything except what kind of stuff people were reading and writing in the late 60s and early 70s.

Part of the reason that I feel reluctant to go into detail about the novel (is it one?) is that there's some stuff in there that I'm just not comfortable with. The way women are depicted in this book is both incorrect and idiotic, but to a certain, much more flattering extent, so is that of the men. The women that Brautigan writes about, here and elsewhere, seem to have two things in common: they're all beautiful without knowing or caring, and they're all rutting and looking ready to copulate with the next male (regardless of personal endowments) that they come across. I don't think of myself as altogether one of the "new men" which used to be talked about, but all the same I just feel kind of uncomfortable about this stuff. Or am I just a prude?

That would surprise me: I think Brautigan is, in a very pleasant and likeable way, a depraved chauvinist. And one who very clearly demonstrates this fact. But if we held every writer accountable for that or similar crimes, where we would we be? Without Hemingway, Roth (Philip and Joseph), Bellow (probably), Nabokov (almost certainly), Stendhal, Waugh (maybe we'd be better off here, guilty pleasures aside?), Burroughs (for sure), Patricia Highsmith (the worst of them all) and the list could go on, and on, and on. I for one am not willing to put all these against the wall at the expense of not being able to read them because of "ideological" or "moral" concerns.

Hawkline--and perhaps Brautigan's ouevre in general--is purposefully picayune, even frivolous. Maybe Brautigan thought this was exactly the sort of book that people needed at the time; maybe he felt these things reflected the "spirit of the age"; maybe Brautigan was just some kind of solipsistic comedian, an existential jester who confused himself with a protagonist. From what I've read about his other books and the way he's regarded (and who he is regarded by) I have to tend towards the last explanation, but clearly the 60s and the resulting come-down are to blame as well, perhaps even for Brautigan's death a decade and a half after the Summer of '69.

Guilty Pleasure of the Over-Read: Wilkie Collins's "The Woman in White"

Although my first copy of this book was an orange-spined  Penguin English Library edition from the early 70s (bought for me by one of my grandmothers?) the cover illustration is the same as the Penguin Classics edition above--beautifully moody, a portal into a world constructed primarily in my mind...

I've just finished rereading The Woman in White for the third time. It's still good: still intense, still exciting--and still one of the best thrillers ever written after more than 150 years. Also, this is that rarest of things: a really entertaining, well-plotted novel with romance and mystery that English majors don't feel guilty about enjoying.

It's not too much to say that Woman is one of (if not the) prototypes for a large number of the popular novels of today. Though having celebrated its sesquicentennial, it nonetheless feels very modern and familiar in many respects. Not all of them for the best.

But Collins partially redeems his often fanciful plot choices and highly-polarized characters through the byzantine, even baroque structure of his narrative. He is also one of the first in literature to let a wide range of characters from a variety of social backgrounds speak and tell their own stories in their own voices.

This is, perhaps, Collins's great innovation. He certainly thought so. There is the perhaps unavoidable stench of "improvement" or "enhancement" of the voices--it kind of reminds me of how Bellow's characters are invariably described early on as "first-class noticers" (Wood)--but for the most part, and to a very great degree considering the quite low standards of the day in this and related genres, he pulls it off.

One of the best examples comes somewhere after the mid-point of the novel, when the former cook at Count Fosco's rented house in St. John's Wood relates what she knows to some sort of legal clerk. In this short section, Collins takes on the perspective and voice of an uneducated person, a person who could hardly have been less like himself, and does a fine job both with the point of view and the language. He even has the cook ask, though not in so many words, that her vocabulary and grammar be corrected in the taking down of her statement, thus providing a credible alibi for a more readable, less colloquial text than we might have expected otherwise.

There are many drawbacks to the novel, many aspects that irritate a modern reader and also much that is objectionable on artistic terms, but it should be borne in mind that this is one of the few works of literature of any value produced in its time and place, and furthermore that the book was intended as a popular entertainment--compared to today's equivalents (James Patterson, for example) Collins is a writer of great sympathy, vision and subtlety, not to mention the innovative nature of his work which we've already touched on.

Having sung it some praises, I'd now like to move on to some things that irritate me about The Woman in White--though bear in mind that some or all of these will have a lot to do with the socio-historical context that Collins was writing within.

For one thing, Laura, "Lady Laura", kind of pisses me off. This is primarily because the actions, many of them desperate and arduous, of the two most sympathetic characters in the story--our two protagonists, really--are motivated by their deep and repeatedly-repeatedly-repeatedly reiterated love (in all its transcendent mid-Victorian purity) for this girl who is, as far as I'm concerned, a complete dead zone of expression, intellect or significance except in her much-reported and, frankly, overemphasized beauty--oh, and her enormous fortune.

In a sense, this novel is primarily interested in her--and she is the point at which everything in the story turns--primarily because she is rich. And at a level that is both basic and base, Victorian fiction as a whole is about money and very little else. When this kind of thing is faced up to and treated quite openly, things are a lot more bearable--thank you, Trollope. But even the hallowed and feared category/deity of "respectability" is very often defined by or contrasted with the economic fortunes of and forces in the lives of individuals and families.

There is also a kind of "crisis of masculinity" going on in this book, and in a lot of sensation fiction (at least from the few books I've read)--see Mr. Fairlie, for example. Men inflict much pain, misery and depredation on women--women are constantly at the mercy of men who are placed in positions of power over them arbitrarily, without any consideration of the men's merits, often merely as the result of a vacuum in some section of the family tree--but it is always implied that what's needed is a benevolent tyrant in place of the wicked one presently seated on whatever throne.

So in the end it's only really a half-crisis; in the end nothing radical is said or settled. There are problems in this novel and others of its ilk, sure; these contradictions are sometimes presented, sure, and even railed against on occasion--but that's about the extent of it.

The fundamental evil (to call it what it is) of these power structures is hardly assailed at all. The one sort-of exception to this is what I perceive as a latent, 19th-century Liberal critique of the aristocracy, esp. the lower aristocracy, that I see Collins as carrying out without, as it were, putting himself out in the open and in the line of fire, much like a grouse trying not to be murdered by a member of the House of Lords and his pack of gillies. However, what Collins feels about questions that might be but aren't necessarily related, such as the validity of the monarchy in a country with more-or-less universal male suffrage, I just don't know.

There are lots of other things I could tell you about and get bothered about all over again, but in a way they don't actually detract from the pleasure of the story. As long as you can still identify with the characters, in spite of their views and beliefs (many of which I'm convinced Collins himself disapproved of and expected us to as well), at least enough to care about what happens to them, then we're in, we're sold to Collins, who will proceed to (as he was fond of saying) make us cry, make us laugh, and make us wait.

One more thing (god, I could write a whole book on The Woman in White, but I suspect there are too many of those already) before I sign off: I think there's a stronger connection between the serialized novels and perhaps the reading of most fiction in the 19th century to today's narrative TV shows, than there is between the way they read then and we read now. Just an idea....

[Further Reading: For anyone who is (like me) too interested in this stuff, I recommend John Sutherland's essay "The Missing Fortnight" in his first collection of entertaining and illuminating inquiries into the minor and insignificant minutiae of 19th-century English novels, Is Heathcliff a Murderer? (pg. 117 in the first Oxford World's Classics edition).]

"Forty Years of Murder" by Prof. Keith Simpson

An ugly little man, very much in love with his attainment of position and influence within his profession both at home and abroad, Simpson is also very much preoccupied with the perfection of knowledge and analysis in his chosen field of endeavor, forensic science.

This book, written after his retirement from full-time public service at Guy's Hospital and London University (now University College London) includes his recollections, often in great technical detail, of the crimes he was involved with during his years of activity as one of Great Britain's--and the world's--preëminent (I'm thinking about this convention, which I have sometimes permitted myself to adopt since my parents first got me a subscriptions to the New Yorker--but I'm still a little uncomfortable about it) pathologists.

I have some suspicions regarding the exact authorship of the book, that is to say as to whether or not the book was effectively ghosted from transcripts and memoranda of interviews by some unacknowledged but hopefully well-remunerated Grub-worm. If this were so, it would explain two things which I find it hard to reconcile with the character of Simpson as demonstrated in this book: 

First, the often overly-conversational style (which makes for good reading, don't get me wrong) suggests the spoken word of a well-schooled public person, though not the typical prose style would would expect to be affected by such an individual with that background; and secondly, there is so much bravura and often not-too-subtle self-congratulation that it seems as if someone has just let him go on a bit too much and then, either out of a sense of fidelity or pique at having to listen to such a person for hours and hours and hours, put it all in pretty much verbatim.

Then again, I could see the first being just a personality quirk born out of long years of what might be called "professional casualness" and a sense of his own greatness putting the man at ease about whatever he had to say, and the second could very likely be put down to either an editor's (lack of?) taste or temerity in the face of an insistent Professor Cedric Keith Simpson, OBE, FCRP, ABCDEFG....

Regardless, the book is a good one, and the stories it contains are intriguing, sometimes horrifying. Simpson was involved in many of the most famous and infamous cases of his day: "the Luton Sack Murder", "Acid Bath" Haigh, the Brothers Kray--he was even called all the way to the "West Indies" (British people are so cute sometimes!) to investigate some of the alleged crimes of the man known as "Michael X".

All these and many more are described--their lurid tabloid titles appended--along with a nice selection of photographs of crime scenes, evidence, tools of death, murderers alleged and convicted, and Simpson in the company of various august personages (including J. Edgard Hoover, fortunately out of drag) to indicate the esteem in which Simpson was held--and not just by himself.

Books I Got for Less than $10, or Why Are We Still Reading These Things?

From a View to a Death by Anthony Powell
Teleny, of The Reverse of the Medal by Oscar Wilde (?--et al.?)
The Anatomy Lesson by Philip Roth
The Consul's File by Paul Theroux
Justine by Lawrence Durrell
The Manuscript Found in Saragossa by Jan Potacki
The Moonstone by Wilkie Collins
Can You Forgive Her? by Anthony Trollope
Duo by Colette

Yesterday, I mentioned in passing an essay by George Orwell entitled "Are Books Too Dear?". Orwell was concerned that people, working class people primarily, were unwilling to spend money on books because they were perceived as a costly luxury. He disagreed, and went to some lengths to prove his point. Not that I imagine it did much good.

Just as back then and even more so today, there are libraries aplenty where you can find lots to read for the cost of--most of the time--nothing at all, except late fines. But I'd just like to point out that today, for about what even the least affluent make in an hour, I bought nine books (second hand, all of them, but none in bad condition).

Some people might say that it's easy if you have the kind of taste that can be satisfied by getting an early-70s Penguin classic for half of $3.50. There is some truth in this. But even the most recent mass market fiction, bought used, will be about $3.50 to $4.00, trade paperbacks around $7.00 to $8.00, and hardback fiction $10 to $15. And roughly speaking, the prices for those books bought new will be, respectively, less than $8.00, $15, and $25.

Let's think about these numbers in relationship to another form of relatively inexpensive entertainment, DVDs. A new DVD usually goes for somewhere between $20 and $30. Assuming the movie's running time is two hours, that's two hours of entertainment for about $25. Granted, there are often extras that some people enjoy watching, and somebody can always watch that movie again and again until it's too scratched or the technology becomes obsolete.  Even if you rent that new movie, it will cost about $5.00.

The average book (although this varies much more than is the case with movies) probably takes most people four to eight hours. I'm not going to try to point out any of the obvious extrapolations; anybody interested enough already sees the point.

All of this is, however, just a lot of hot air coming from a person who likes to read and views books not as some kind of unusual luxury but as a household good to be stocked. The fact is that most people just don't think about books this way. There used to be some validity, and there probably still is, to the truism that middle class people appreciated literature as much or more than most, partly because it was part of the culture that separated them from those below them and part of the process (in terms of education) that maintained them in their socio-economic position and might allow them to rise higher.

In a sense, books were necessary for a large portion of society, and reading and comprehending texts of some length was a skill and means of advancement and self-education. In our much more multimedia culture today, this is no longer as true, and this fact can be seen not just elsewhere but within books as they are published today--just pick up, if you don't like the rest of us already have one, a copy of one the For Dummies or Complete Idiot's Guide books.

I think that it's not too much to say that the changes alluded to above have made reading less relevant. That doesn't mean that reading is irrelevant, but it does mean that come of the emphasis put on it is probably anachronistic and even reactionary. The fact is that new horizons have opened up for new kinds of literacy, some of them more intuitive in their grammar (film, the Internet) than old-fashioned linear narratives of the type found in most books.

People who love reading have to wake up to two (relatively) new truths: reading isn't the act that it once was, because the forces that mould the history of civilization (whatever they are) have changed its context as much as the behavior viewed in isolation may appear the same; and this rather radical alteration has, in a sense, freed language and literature from many of it's former duties and responsibility.

I honestly don't know if Joyce could have written what he did before radio; I'm fairly sure there would be no Ballard without TV, no Burroughs without film. At least, if it weren't for these new visual media, I don't see why we would have been interested in even needed them as much.

Perhaps I go too far in that last paragraph, but I'm stepping onto that ledge because I know there are points to be made out there.

BOOKS EVERYBODY SHOULD READ: George Orwell's Essays

Kind of obvious, maybe. I mean, everybody who's graduated from a high school in the US is liable to have read not one but two books by this great writer. Ironically, they're both works of fiction, which frankly was not what Orwell was best at.

His other novels are all interesting, amusing, and sometimes more: in particular, the melancholic autobiographical Keep the Aspidistra Flying and the sweltering if somewhat undercooked Burmese Days are well worth there place in print all these years later, though they remain there largely due to the success of an allegorical fable and a piece of dystopian sci-fi, the import of each neglected and subsumed by the system that routinely teaches our children how to misread them.

However, it's Orwell's non-fiction that really made him an important force--not "merely" a writer--in the 20th century. Is there any more important writer of non-fiction? Let me know if you think so. Down and Out in Paris and London, Homage to Catalonia and The Road to Wigan Pier are three of the best and most significant works of literature in the last hundred years and more. If anybody disagrees, we can go a few rounds.

Though most of his books have been widely available, and never to my knowledge out of print in his own UK (which god knows has better reason that anybody else to hate him back) many of his essays and in particular his more ephemeral writings (book reviews, columns, etc.) remained in large part uncollected. (I'll just mention here that there's a really interesting group of notes, transcripts and the like available from his time at the BBC--at the goddamn BBC!--you can still pick up 2nd hand. I actually bought a copy in Oklahoma City once, so that should give you an idea.)

This collection, published a few years ago in the US and I have no idea when in the UK, remedies this situation for the most part--it even goes so far as to include an unfinished article/essay sniping at Evelyn Waugh and his puny, hollow Catholicism. Good stuff. No doubt the fact that he was unable to complete it on his deathbed will be found reassuring to clerical child-rapists, their supporters, those who encourage the spread of AIDS in the Third World (yes, Third World, not "Global South") through the discouragement of safe sex, and that gay-hating fop, formerly of the Wehrmacht (unfair of me, I know, but the rest isn't), now prancing in robes under the soubriquet Benedict XVI. But what should one expect from sequels?

Alas, I digress. Although Orwell's essays are hardly unknown, and some of them ("Shooting an Elephant", "A Hanging", and esp. "Politics and the English Language") are among the most influential models of the form, much of what he produced is neglected. And produce much he did, as one ought to expect from an acknowledged past-master of something relatively brief and financially viable: my edition, published by that the always wonderful and beautiful Everyman's Library, runs to 1370 pages--longer or nearly as long as many editions of the Bible. Fittingly.

In particular, I'd like to draw people's attention to "Confessions of a Book Reviewer", "Are Books Too Dear?", "Raffles and Miss Blandish", "You and the Atom Bomb", "Boys' Weeklies", and "Inside the Whale". Oh yes, and all the others. Fortunately for those who can't just take my word for it and pay the $40.00 or whatever the book costs now, all this and much, much more (as Laurie Taylor says) is available here (sadly, it is no longer a pirate Russian site mirroring the material out of the Western copywright orbit...).

Before I go, maybe I should say actually why everybody should read George Orwell's essays. To be honest, I feel like the case shouldn't have to be made to any sane, democratically-minded human being. There being an unfortunate dearth of such individuals, esp. in my neck of the woods, I'll just say this, briefly: Orwell brought a new kind of conscience and moral seriousness combined with genuinely great prose style to a journalistic situation that badly needed them, at a crucial moment in history.

But his work needs to be reread today because so many of his analyses shine light on our modern political situations and the danger of both the right and the left, and point out the shell game played between the "extremes" by parties of power, esp. in countries like his and mine.

Not much has changed, and not much has stayed the same. Orwell keeps us on our toes, ready for action, ready to challenge received notions, whether they be the intelligentsia's love affair with Soviet Russia in the 30s or the use of scare-words like "terrorism" as a means of compelling consent in democratic societies today.

P.S. I'd just like to say that on my desk sits a small collection of books used for reference, though I suppose I'm maintaining an anachronism by using, for example, printed atlases. Let the future judge me, as I'm sure it will judge us all. Anyway, included in this group are: a relatively recent edition of Webster's, the Oxford Dictionary of English Etymology, Cassell's Latin Dictionary, Eco's The Open Work, and a few others. One of these others, and the one I have read and carried with me the most in my life, is my Everyman's edition of Orwell's Essays. It's that good and that important, that I consider a book made up to a large extent of stuff published in long-defunct newspapers and magazines to be an essential reference for my life. Please. Do. Read it.

IN PRAISE OF: E. F. Bleier

Nobody who only reads good, solid, literary prose of a serious nature is likely to have any idea who this post is about. On the other hand, people who only read shitty contemporary sci-fi and fantasy novels (my brother Daniel, for example) are equally unlikely to recognize the name. Basically, nobody has any reason to know anything about E. F. Bleier, and if I spent my time more wisely, I probably wouldn't either.

However, I do. And I love him. Or did, until this past summer when he died without me or anybody else noticing, at the grand old age of 90. Good going, Everett.

I think that Bleier was an American, but I don't really care, and he might as well have been British: right now on the shelves in my bedroom I happen to have three books edited by him--Three Gothic Novels, Three Victorian Detective Novels, and The King in Yellow and Other Horror Stories by Robert W. Chambers, selected by Bleier. All of these volumes have authoritative introductions setting out the context and significance of the works they precede.

In addition to his editorial work, Bleier wrote something called Firegang: A Mythic Fantasy that I suspect was best left unpublished (it only came out in 2006 from a tiny SF press) but who knows? Maybe it's great. Doesn't matter, because even if proof came out tomorrow that he was secretly a Nazi war criminal, having commanded an Einsaztgrüpen in the General Government during the winter of 1941, killing Jewish and dark-haired Poles (including women and, naturally, children) just to keep warm by burning their bodies arranged into huge and architecturally magnificent bonfires, I honestly wouldn't be able to help but still be glad that he'd lived--and all because of stuff he didn't even write. Allow me to explain.

Here's how it works: lots of people write books. Some people read some of these books, sometimes a lot of people read a book soon after it comes out, making it "popular". But then as time goes on, fewer and fewer people read those books, distracted as they are by something sparkling/something new. Some people do keep reading them, because they happen to find them in a used bookstore, because somebody recommends them, because of this, because of that--but basically, less and less, fewer and fewer. Some books come back with a vengeance under the steam of what I believe are called "the arbiters of public taste" or "gatekeepers of the canon" or "Harold Bloom". But they don't read everything, and funnily enough sometimes the people who read the most have the least catholic (small "c"!) tastes.

But none of this to say that some of the books that got read when they first came out only some time thereafter to be all but forgotten, or even books that hardly got or didn't get read at all when first published (Moby Dick) aren't any good. Sometimes, depending on where you're standing in time and where you're looking back to, quite the opposite is true.

So sometimes there are books, books which are very good or at least very notable, either influential or heralding something new or as artifacts of their time or just (the best) because of their weird, uncategorizable nature, that get lost between the cracks in the floorboards of the library of the mainstream's literary consciousness, except that such a metaphor is both grotesque and unlikely, and so someone has to go and rescue them and say, "Look! Look at this! Can't you see?!"

Only, nobody has to do that. And if someone didn't, all we'd have today are a few printed copies left over that were never used to wipe some child's ass and Project Gutenberg files that no one ever reads, not only but partly because they are unreadable. The someone who did--well, one of the someones--was E. F. Bleier. If I haven't already said it, thank you.

Things I have to thank Bleier for: I read Byron's "Fragment of a Novel" (probably the first vampire fiction ever written) in one of his books, included to give some context to the painful but interesting Vampyre of Polidori; in the same volume, Vathek--I might never have read Vathek (!) if it weren't for him, and that is was crazy, wonderful book, a book one could say, if one was tempted to say things like this, isolated like an island (like the Isle of Redonda, perhaps?) from the rest of English literature; the first police detective protagonist (and first female detective, in the same person) in The Unknown Weapon by Andrew Forrester, Jr. ("Little is known of the author, beyond the titles of his three obscure books of crime and detection and the fact that he read Poe."); Wilkie Collins' My Lady's Money, not published anywhere else that I know of (a post or posts on my exhilarating, torrid re-reading of Woman in White coming soon); and so, so much more: Max Carrados, for example, and I also first read Algernon Blackwood's best stuff in a selection he edited, etc.

Why did Bleier never edit a book of M. R. James' ghost stories (some of my favorite--or, I'll just come out and say it: my favorite bedtime stories ever)? I'm just curious. Maybe he didn't like them, or he didn't like James personally, if they ever met, or maybe James' stuff wasn't going cheap enough or in the public domain so that Dover (who Bleier did his best work for, or at the work that I and most people who've heard of him known him from) couldn't get their hands on it. Regardless, I'd like to read something that Bleier had to say about James and that ghost story tradition--if any knows of anything, please let me know.

Well, that's enough and certainly not enough on this guy, who wrote so much about what other people wrote. I wonder how he actually managed to earn a living, but then again I suspect that mysterious process will forever remain obscure to me, particularly in regard to my own life.

Nick Hornby's "Housekeeping vs. The Dirt"

Great. Just great. Totally un-intellectual and never above itself, often below (he quotes thusly from Philip Larkin's letters: "I think this poem is really bloody cunting fucking good." "Your letter found me last night when I came in off the piss. I had spewed out of a train window and farted in the presence of ladies and generally misbehaved myself.""Katherine Mansfield is a cunt.") and just generally a lot of fun, as you can see.

Everybody should read his column in the Believer but then I guess that would mean that people were actually reading that magazine, which is just too inconceivable, as Hornby himself points out. I actually laughed a few times while reading this book, which I don't usually do even when I think a book is funny.

There's lots of stuff about how the UK isn't like the US, which is true but only noticeable to them and to us: to everyone else, we're basically the same game, and all of us are right. Also included: rants against fiction about literature, matters literary and the literati; constant sarcasm and irony; ready admissions that he just didn't finish a book because it was too boring or maybe over his head or that he never even started it.

All this and much, more more abide inside the Euro-flap covers of this delightful book, praised to the heavens or their secular equivalent by every left-wing progressive news source from here to there: the back has blurbs from Salon.com, the Boston Globe, NPR, the SF Chronicle, the Austin Chronicle, and of course, of course, the Guardian.

Nicholson Baker's "Vox" and the "problem" of erotic literature

The synopsis on the back of my copy reads:

Vox is a novel that remaps the territory of sex—sex solitary and telephonic, lyrical and profane, comfortable and dangerous. It is an erotic classic that places Nicholson Baker firmly in the first rank of major American writers.

And these are some of the plaudits the book received in hardcover:

“A brilliantly funny, perversely tender and technically breathtaking erotic novel.” —The New York Times

“A remarkable tour de force...Vox is hilarious...a delightful novel.” —Alexander Theroux, Washington Post Book World

“Imagine Chagall being commissioned to do the illustrations for The Joy of Sex.” —Michael Upchurch, San Francisco Chronicle

“This is Ravel's 'Bolero' played out on the page.... The conversation gets sexier and sexier and...well, I'm too wrung out to go on.” —Louise Bernikow, Cosmopolitan

I don't put much store by blurbs, but fair enough, I liked the book too. However: Chagall? No. Ravel? No (maybe Satie at his more ironic). And dear Louise, please tell me what it means to be “too wrung out to go on”? “Go ahead, whisper it in my little ear...”

The temptation is to start out a post about something like this with a disclaimer going something like this: “Well, I'm writing about this stuff 'cause you know you can be intellectual about this stuff, everybody knows that who's heard of the Marquis de Sade, so just back off, guys, it's not like I read this stuff a lot, or like I even enjoy it, duh...”

Well, I'm not going to patronize you (whoever “you” are). The fact is that while I don't read erotic fiction as much as I do, say, detective fiction, I've certainly read some books that belong to this much-neglected (or much-pretended-to-be-neglected) genre. I'd say that, as in most genres, about half of them were probably not worth reading all the way through except for the their forensic value. Probably six, seven, eight of them were interesting enough for me to remember in some detail, and two or three are works of high literary caliber.

I first became interested in these books about the middle of high school. I didn't have much money, really no money except what my parents gave me or I could scrounge from the change lying around the house. Also, my parents were careful not to permit us to have access to the Internet in any part of the house that wasn't public—or, I might be tempted to say, “explicit”.

Also, I couldn't have brought myself to buy a porn magazine if you'd convinced me I could exchange it immediately for the complete later works of Wittgenstein. Well, maybe, but just. (By the way, reading his war diaries reveals that he understood this kind of thing very well.) Furthermore, I kept seeing this section at Half Price Books, ensconced in as unobtrusive a place as they could find, quietly facing a wall of Fiction & Literature (whatever the hell that means) between Poetry and African-American Literature.

This location was obviously very convenient, permitting the embarrassed shopper to glance down the spines of the small but concentrated Erotica section, or even to pull out a title and flip through it (always being careful to keep the covers angled at least a little bit down towards the floor and one's, er, erogenous situation under control), while pretending to be either the Romantic, sensitive, Byronic type or the open-minded, culturally heterogenous, Liberal (in the American sense) type who's read For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide When the Rainbow Is Enuf and now thinks that it was so great that a big studio finally made a movie that was so socially relevant and...

Anyway, it was just too much temptation, literally and literarily. I managed to steal a number of volumes from there during the next couple of years, and at first I only appreciated them for their “coarser” elements. But the truth was, I wasn't blind—not even in, um, ecstasy—to the quality or lack of it in these books. For example, I once (more or less by accident) stole a volume of poems by Pierre Louÿs.

Now, that's not a book that was written just to help facilitate late-19^th century masturbation sessions. And today I know, thanks to all those wonderful books that help you learn how to sound smart when talking about literature, that his work represents a real achievement in the Parnassian school, being one of the very, very few read outside of France to this day, and a real forerunner of Mallarmé, whom I like but not as much as I probably would if I were better at reading French.

But that's not really what I set out to discuss in this post. I just felt like I should go out there and let everyone know that, yes, real people do read this stuff, and that it's actually literature, as opposed to pornography—not that I'm sure what literature means—and clearly more affecting and effective than most.

Vox is a good read. A high-velocity read, which is what I say when I mean that a book is a “quick read” but want to sound more intelligent. A book that propels you through its pages. This is all the more remarkable because no one aspect of the book is all that compelling.

The style is virtually nonexistent, which is appropriate since the whole thing is virtually nothing but dialogue, with the traditional “he said” and “there was a pause” stuff—which, very correctly, Umberto Eco tells us remain wary of nonetheless. But the characters aren't that affecting either, neither likable nor unusual enough or well-drawn enough to be all that persuasive.

But then again, that may be one of the keys to this book's success, which it was financially and remains artistically. Baker (I've never read a single other word by this guy, though he's been pretty prolific) makes/lets these people talk and talk and talk, and because they're talking about sex we keep wanting to read what they're saying. And then a weird thing happens: we begin to care about them. Because along with all the details of their fantasies and unorthodox encounters, we learn a lot about “who they are” and “what matters to them” even though they don't say these things straight out.

Actually, what I just said is very wrong in at least one regard: I said “along with” when I probably should have said “through”. Details about people's sex lives or fantasies are absolutely part of “who people are” and “what matters to them.” People tend to downplay this, perhaps out of some vestigial Romantic, transcendent idealization of love, life, and our bodies.

This book argues, without arguing, something very, very important: that real intimacy can be achieved by embracing and exposing our darkest regions. And I suspect that real intimacy (and here I'm not only speaking of sexual relationships) is not possible without this.

A few remarks on the formal aspects of Vox, always so important in the process of redeeming a work of erotic fiction: the long dialogue form (when non-demonstrative and non-philosophical) lends, as I said earlier, a certain velocity to a work of fiction, actuating as it does the unity of time. An interesting question is raised here: is it possible that there is also active the unity of place?

Aristotle formulated his rules in an era when “place” and “communication” (at least in the direct, person-to-person sense) were closely tied. Yelling across a valley was about as far as you get and still send a coherent message; this sort of case would certainly have maintained the unity of place in classical theatre.

There is also, despite the digressive nature of the dialogue, very much a unity of action, as anyone who is familiar with the purposes of such phone calls can imagine. Funny, but I think not many people would consider this a “neo-classical” piece of writing, but in a certain sense it's exemplary. (Mohsin Hamid's The Reluctant Fundamentalist is another interesting example in this regard.)

Also, and I might be flying way off into left field here, but is it possible that in a world were individuals are constantly bombarded with advertising both consciously and unconsciously, that a book like Vox is the only way to maintain or experience any honestly unfractured account of human experience? I don't know, but I think Ballard would have admired this book at least in it's formal aspect.

Another thing to think about: this book was first published in 1992. It's so old that Monica Lewinsky is supposed to have given (along with several other things) a copy of Vox to President Clinton during their (supposedly oral-sex-only?) affair.

So what would a novel dealing with similar issues of sexuality and properly engaged in the “moment” of its creation look like today? I shudder (or perhaps on the literary traditionalist in many shudders) at the thought of a novel written in the form of a conversation copy-and-pasted from a cyber sex chat room.

And even that's “old hat” (kind of like the phrase itself? there has to be a word for expressions that embody themselves, like “sesquipedalianism”—please let me know if you know what it is): we've got “sexting”, and I have no idea what else is waiting in the wings for our poor, overfed libidos.

Another artifact of its age is the way the characters express themselves: I really didn't buy a lot of the way they talked, and I actually have to take back what I said about it being an artifact of 1992. I just think Baker has a much better ear (if that's what you use) for ideas than he does for dialogue. I'd give you an example, but I'm tired and there's a dozen or three on nearly every page. Of course I'm exaggerating, but that's how is sometimes feels.

Although I really liked the book, I think it's doubtful that this book, or any book, has “firmly” placed Nicholson Baker “in the first rank of major American novelists,” even just among the living. But maybe I'm wrong. Writers like Nicholson Baker should write a lot more books, because you never know when you're going to write your masterpiece, and in fact you may not ever know, because it may not be recognized until long after your death. But that's no reason not to write it.

Okay, one more thing: there's a long-standing problem, as Foucault points out somewhere, in the West in general and certainly in its literature of not being able to talk about desire very well. It seems to make people uncomfortable, and I think that's why erotic literature remains so maligned and also of a fairly low quality, or at least with fairly low aims.

So I just want to say that there are some very different strains in erotic fiction, and people should pay attention to these: one is the novel whose focus or driving force is power, domination, and discovery—the Marquis de Sade, Leopold Ritter von Sacher-Masoch, Georges Bataille, Pierre Klossowski (maybe); the other is about pleasure, desire and what we modern people would describe, if we were forced to label it as something, love—Sappho, Ovid, Louÿs, John Cleland, Anaïs Nin.

By the way, I'd contend that Anne Desclos/Pauline Réage's Story of O very much belongs to the latter tendency: despite its sadomasochistic trappings, it is very much a love story.

Also, it's probably no accident that this second camp was staked out by truly classical writers and bolstered by writers of a very neo-classical mindset. As for the “Divine Marquis”, he remains a man astride fate, partly inside and partly outside the past, his time and even our own. Who knows when his ideas will truly, succinctly converge with history, like a scalpel finding a tortuous but perfect path through soft flesh between bone, cartilage and tendon—we have, perhaps, come close, but I pale at imagining what that future day would look like.

Memorandum on William Seward Burroughs II, aka "William Lee"

“Hitman for the apocalypse in trench coat and snap-brim fedora, William Burroughs steps out of his life and into his fiction like a secret agent charged with the demolition of all bourgeois values.” What a sentence. I'll never get the chance to be the one who it wrote now because J.G. Ballard did it first, back in 1991 at the start of his review of Literary Outlaw: The Life and Times of...

And maybe it's a good thing I won't be able to write that sentence, because in a sense it belongs to a time that was already passing away when Ballard penned it (literally; he wrote everything longhand). It is probably accurate, though, because Burroughs—as beloved as he is to me—belongs mostly to an imagination, to a set of dreams, that is gone. We've moved past the viability of “the demolition of all bourgeois values;” wouldn't it be nice if things were still that simple? If they ever were.

Reading Burroughs now I can see that, like many other writers of speculative fiction, too many and too few of his waking nightmares and fever dreams have come to pass: we live in a world where “One Nation Under CCTV” is spray-painted on a public building and then hailed as art, without any corresponding alteration in the status quo (the UK continues to be the most surveilled state in the world, 63 years after Orwell finished 1984 on his deathbed: take a look at this):

You can run a government without police if your conditioning system is tight enough but you can't run a government without bullshit.

Not that that should be taken as too emblematic of Burroughs' writing. Although nobody is likely to accuse him of subtlety, subtlety sort of doesn't enter into it: Burroughs speaks to each reader to the degree that they will listen. Burroughs' novels (or books, whatever they are) are, as Umberto Eco writes “machines for generating interpretations”—these are truly “open works,” his specially-engineered “soft machines”.

Burroughs himself might have been disappointed to see his aura of impenetrability and subversiveness dissipating on the Fiction & Literature shelves at Barnes & Noble, but then again he probably would have seen it as symptomatic of a certain mode of civilization, which is true. However, the very ubiquity of various of the great postmodern raconteur's ramblings—for example, the free online availability of literally hours upon hours of his voice reading or lecturing or babbling—gives credence and potency to two of his favorite images: the virus and the tape recorder. In a sense, history and William Burroughs seem to have proved William Burroughs right.

“Do you understand your orders, Mr. Lee?”

Re-Watching "High Tension", or How to Watch a Movie?

The other night, I watched the horror movie High Tension for the second time. I first saw it after it came out on DVD in the US in 2005 or 06, when I was in college. I like horror films, but nothing like the way that people who love horror films love them—those people kind of scare me, quite a bit more than any of the movies do.

Anyway, the first time I saw it, I thought it was good, but kind of meaningless: everything seemed to be done really well, it was tight and realistic, and—in short—the movie lived up to its title. But there didn't seem to be any message in the film, nor any formal aspect of it that really interested me. At the time, I didn't recognize any name from the credits except for Giannetto di Rossi, the acknowledged master of special effects make-up.

I watched it with my two roommates at the time, both of whom also watched a lot of movies. I think my then-girlfriend was there, too. Either way, I never really thought about the movie after that, except as another one that I'd successfully checked off on my list of every movie ever made.

I had a very different experience the second time around. For one thing, I rented the movie with a purpose, an idea in mind. Recently, I'd become more and more interested in a group of films and filmmakers collectively referred to as the “New French Extremity”, “New French Extreme”, or “New French Extremism”—whichever. I'll be referring to it as “NFE” from here on.

I became interested in them, dweebish as this sounds, because I saw a potential connection between them and the ideas of George Bataille, who in works such as Story of the Eye, Ma mere, and Literature and Evil sketched out and demonstrated his conception of storytelling as transgressive by its very nature. This can be seen most clearly in Pascal Laugier's film Martyrs, in which aspects of Bataille's biography as well as his thinking seem to be referenced.

High Tension belongs to the NFE (“genre” or “sub-genre” doesn't really seem appropriate) and in a way has flown its flag overseas, at least in the US. By this point a lot of the names on the back of the DVD case meant something to me. Alexandre Aja, the co-writer and director, had rebooted The Hills Have Eyes, and to honest I liked his version better than Wes Craven's original. Grégory Levasseur, Aja's writing partner and the “artistic director” of High Tension, was also heavily involved in that project, and the two of them have worked together on every film the other has made. Philippe Nahon, the brutal, monolithic serial killer of the film, has had a role in every one of Gaspar Noé's film, starring in his short Carné and his first feature-length I Stand Alone (Tout contre seul). Cécile de France I immediately recognized from her role as the curiously-attractive butch lesbian in L'Auberge Espagnole and its sequel Russian Dolls.

Above all of this, I recognized something else much more important: this movie really takes it's time; it's an exercise in exactly what you'd expect it to be—creating tension in the audience. From a few minutes into the more or less hour and a half running time, the suspense begins and doesn't let up until the end credits roll.

As the co-writers claim on their commentary track: “It's not really about the story so much, it's about the direction, about creating the tension.” From that angle, I have give this film a lot of credit. It knows what it is an isn't ashamed or afraid of it. Aja and Levasseaur are young filmmakers, but already they're great technicians—technicians not only of the concrete aspects of filmmaking (cinematography, sound design, etc.) but also extremely adroit at a certain type of narrative.

So, like I said, I enjoyed this movie a lot more the second time I saw it. But this fact reveals something about the experience of a work of art: on the one hand, you can look at, read, or listen to something without knowing anything about it—not for example where it belongs in the huge superstructure of genre that surrounds the world of individual films—or, on the other hand, you can know all sorts of things about it: who created it, why, how, where, when—you can even read entire books about a movie, a symphony or another book before you experience that work yourself. While I think that instinctively a lot of people (myself included) would feel compelled to say that the first of these two ways is better, now that I'm really considering it I'm not so sure that case is that clear.

After all, the second time I watched High Tension I experienced it in the second of the above ways and enjoyed it much more than I did the first time I watched it. I'm not saying this would be true of everyone; after all, the movie achieved its relatively high level of success in this country without most viewers knowing anything about it except that it was supposed to be a really intense horror film. Those people by and large got what they were looking for; maybe they were surprised to get in a package postmarked “Paris, France” but that's about it—the movie is, after all, far more indebted to American models than to French or European models generally. (You could make an argument based on the NFE the French New Wave et al. that this is always true of French film.)

But to me, High Tension isn't just a movie I liked that happened to be French. It's a movie that aside from the very suspenseful experience of watching it fits in my mind into a network of other things: the aforementioned Bataille, the other films and filmmakers of the NFE, as well as the American movies and directors who inspired Aja and Levasseur (e.g. Maniac, Wes Craven). In this way, I saw a lot of things I might not otherwise have noticed or thought important in High Tension, and it's one of those movies that I enjoyed almost as much with the DVD commentary track as without it.

Which way is better, I have no idea. But there does seem to be a gulf separating these two ways of watching movies. Maybe it's more a matter of attitude, or approach, because to be honest no one except an aborigine (and maybe even them anymore) can watch a movie in anything the pure state of innocence that the opposition I presented above implies. This purity doesn't exist because in today's world we are exposed to a bombardment of sights and sounds and learn from a very early age to make dialectical sense of what becomes, as we grow older, a more and more synthetic world. We are all familiar (even if we are unconscious of being so) of the “logic” (“language” might be a better word) of standard film editing: the 180° rule, shot-reverse-shot, etc., etc., etc.

And that's just the beginning; for almost no one will High Tension be their first horror film (if that happened it would probably be some kind of mistake) and so the enormous question of the prejudices of genre conventions comes into this conversation, which I'll have to stop here because I'm really too tired to go onto to deal with it.

Tom Wolfe's "The Painted Word" and "From Bauhaus to Our House"

I'd like to start out by saying that I don't have any kind of apology ready for why I'm writing about two books published three decades ago. I'm sure I could come up with one, but the fact is that I got them at a used bookstore for next to nothing, saw that they complemented each other, and because to me Wolfe is one of the most readable journalists out there.

The Tom Wolfe of The Painted Word (1975) and From Bauhaus to Our House (1981) is an angry Wolfe, but happily angry (perhaps “generously angry” as Orwell once said about another Chronicler of His Times) and this condition of somewhat goodnatured irritation is probably due to the fact that these two books allow Wolfe to engage in what may be his favorite pastime, calling “Bullshit!”

Both Painted and Bauhaus appeared in Harper's before their publication as stand-alone volumes, and acknowledging the journalistic nature of their individual conceptions and the slant of Tom Wolfe's oeuvre as a whole really help in understanding these books' goals and messages, many of which they share. They are neither, as many people incorrectly categorize them, works of “art criticism” or “architectural criticism”, although there are moments, particularly in the later, more strident Bauhaus, when the author's own prejudices show through the scrim of his arguments.

What these two books/articles/essays are at their core are works of social criticism—as is virtually every piece of writing, nonfiction and fiction both, that Wolfe has ever produced. Seeing them as something else will mislead the reader, as happened to a lot of critics at the times of publication. Wolfe isn't trying to make sense of art or architecture per se, which in the context of the 20^th century he might very well consider a crazy idea, but instead to understand the social relationships inherent in the “art world” or between architects and their clients.

Up front, it's got to be said that Wolfe has no positive response to the contemporary situation as it stood in the 1970s and 80s, i.e. what should be done about all this stuff that pisses him off so much. This is typical of Wolfe, and he can make a good argument that putting forward any kind of propositions for what art or architecture should be isn't his place. However, this contrasts with his criticisms and ideas regarding fiction writing (of which he was a practitioner) put forward in, among other places, Hooking Up, and also regarding the question of what place literature holds in a world of multimedia.

Enough foreplay (something I also recall Wolfe touching on in Hooking Up): so, what are these two books about? Well, aside from the obvious—Painted concerns art, Bauhaus architecture—they are run-downs of what went on in these sometimes enigmatic and often abstract realms of human endeavor (and commerce) during the 20^th century, or as much of that century as Wolfe had seen up until the time he was writing.

Firstly, in Painted, Wolfe hammers and riffs repeatedly on a few observations/accusations:

(a.) The “art world”, as it is so often called, in fact involves a mind-numbingly small number of individuals; Wolfe sets the number at “approximately 10,000 souls—a mere hamlet!—restricted to les beaux mondes of eight cities."

(b.) During the 20^th century but not much before that, theory began to precede creation, and dictates the criteria not only of art criticism but of art's conception as well.

(c.) Since the 1920s, art has come to mean a game played with avowedly antibourgeois rules – and played only by artists, theorists, and the same elite whose culture is supposedly “under attack” within such an antibourgeois paradigm. Epatéz les bourgeois, ¿ne pas?

(a.) This is true, and annoying, given that art in one form or another ends up being consumed by so many of us. It irritates me to think that a small group of people decide what gets made and what doesn't, but then again I think it's got to be our (the “public” as Wolfe calls us) fault, since we don't really seem to do much to encourage art at its source, just consume it in whatever form we are given it. But at least on this point I share the author's irritation.

(b.) Theory, its rise and dominance, especially in the six and a half decades since WW2, is a really interesting thing. The fact is that this is true not only of the art world, where it's probably most thoroughly enshrined, but also in architecture (as we'll see) and literature, where literary criticism and theory is seen by some as the “final frontier” of philosophy, or something like that. It's interesting to live in a time—and maybe not a good thing, at that—when the rules get written before the game is played, as counterintuitive as that may seem. It gives some perspective to recall that J.S. Bach didn't own any books on music theory, yet his work embodies the structures and patterns that are now considered musical orthodoxy—there could be no projects of atonality or serialism without Bach as their bête noire.

(c.) Another curious situation, and I think one of the things that makes Wolfe, the conservative, even reactionary Wolfe most angry: Who do these artist people think they are, these leeches? Well, there I slip into the kind of polarizing attribution that I dislike in Wolfe's writing, central as it is to what passes for argumentation in much of these two books. But I'll discuss this more later.

As for Bauhaus, Wolfe argues variations of the following points:

(a.) Everybody except an elite group of architects, including himself, hates the International Style.

(b.) The client (that is, whoever commissioned the work) has little say in determining any part of the design aside from the functional requirements (e.g. the number of conference rooms or offices needed).

(c.) The International Style rests on a fundamentally antibourgeois ideology, despite the obvious paradox that the bourgeoisie or it's representatives in a capitalist society (to take up John Dewey's definition of government) are the ones paying to have these buildings built.

(d.) That the world of architecture is basically a world of “compounds”—in the U.S., mostly located within large elite institutions of higher learning such as Yale, Harvard, MIT—and that those who do not tow the ideological line are cast out and ostracized as heretics. This argument gives Wolfe the chance to repeatedly use the words “anathema”, which he seems to enjoy.

Now, I'll just take these in turn as well:

(a.) The revulsion which Wolfe alleges is a part of every right-thinking person's reaction to the International Style that has, it's true, come to dominate so much of the 20^th and now the 21^st century is one of the most important and basic things you have to believe in order to agree with Wolfe's essay. Now, I'm not saying I know much about architecture, but frankly I don't feel any particular revulsion to a lot of the examples he gives in his book (which reproduces a number of small black-and-white photographs of buildings he discusses). Neither do I think that many people in general share his all-out hatred for it. Most people have either grown up or lived long enough in the kind of place that the US is to not see anything strange about the coexistence of traditional forms (many of them anachronistic) with more modern, International Style-inflected architecture. No one seems to notice anything strange about it or mind; this in itself is interesting in terms of American culture, but because of the polarity of Wolfe's argument he can't discuss this: every normal person has to simply hate this shit, no questions asked. As an example of what I mean, take a look at this from the second paragraph of Bauhaus:

Every child goes to school in a building that looks like a duplicating-machine replacement parts wholesale distribution warehouse. Not even the school commissioners, who commissioned it and approved the plans, can figure out how it happened. The main thing is to try to avoid having to explain it to the parents.

(b.) I don't really know what to say to this one. This is the least well-documented of Bauhaus' assertions, seemingly based for the most part on things people told Wolfe that other people said. Or not even that: sometimes it's just how Wolfe feels about a building, assuming that the people who paid for it think something similar or even care very much. What Wolfe seems to be overlooking is the possibility that the individuals or companies who paid for these buildings to be built might have hired these architects because they wanted something that was “cutting edge” or “avant-garde” or whatever. Something “with it,” as I think they used to say back in Wolfe's day.

In fact Wolfe's objection to the way (in his account of things) the client-architect relationship appears to work is based on the idea that the client (whether they be an individual or a large group, like the board or directors at a large corporation) has really, firm ideas on what type of building they want, how they want it to look, what “style” they want it to be. I think this is a little doubtful. We're not talking about an 18^th century folly on Robert Walpole's estate, we're talking about something that at least in the case of large buildings (company HQ's, civic museums, etc.) is almost an advertisement as much as a functional building.

Take a look at the cover of my mass-market paperback copy of Bauhaus: I think in terms of architecture I'm a fairly middle-of-road kind of American guy. I'm sometimes impressed by a nice big building with lots of glass and interesting angles, but I like a nice solid building with some decorative or traditional touches. But look at that picture again—I'd take the Modernistic “glass box” over that Victorian birthday-cake P.O.S. any day.

(c.) That the Bauhaus, Le Corbusier, Mies van der Rohe, etc. were ideologically leftist and incorporated fairly radical ideas into their manifestos and into their designs as well, there is no doubt. After all, they wrote manifestos saying so. It's ironic that though their ideas started out as a way to, for example, design better housing for workers, or especially in Corbu's case to redefine the idea of the city in terms of an idealized proletarian utopia that he really never did anything to help arrive except draw pictures of it, these guys all ended up “selling out” to varying degress, either by designing buildings for the bourgeoisie or else (and this is probably a greater dogmatic sin, in retrospect) entering those elite institutions aforementioned to train a generation of American architects who didn't care about ideology except inasmuch as it determined their aesthetic choices when designing something.

(d.) As I mentioned earlier, Wolfe has carries a real dislike for “compounds”, these in-or-you're-not cabals that, in his view, largely determine who is considered a “true” architect and who isn't. In the chapter “Heretics”, Wolfe mentions some people who were ostracized from the compounds, as he tells it usually as the result of building a single building in contravention of prevailing orthodoxy.

What this means, however, is hard to tell, because Wolfe also tells us that these things did virtually nothing to affect these architects commercial prospects, many of who had far, far more prolific careers than the “compound” architects that Wolfe seems to take so seriously while simultaneously taking every opportunity to poke fun at them.

So what, I'm left wondering, does their supposed domination of “the world of architecture” add up to? Not much, apparently, unless you're an architect.

Since this is neither a tract nor an academic essay, but a polemic whose main concern is probably more or less to entertain the literate middle class and upwards of the United States, there are no notes and little rigor, except in “sticking it” to anybody with a facial deformity, unhappy love life or professional jealousy who happens to cross Wolfe's stage at any point. However, it is very clear that for someone who is not in any sense an expert on what he's writing about, Wolfe knows a hell of a lot.

While going to great length to give the impression that everything he's telling us was pieced together from snippets of cocktail conversation in the fashionable drawing rooms of Madison Avenue, it is very clear that this man has read widely and in detail about his subject, including coming to grips with what must be for him some epicly stultifying theorectical works. Then again, at times he seems to eat that stuff up, if only to spit it back out like poison in passages like this, where he discusses Greenberg being one-upped in his antibourgeois pretentions by Leo Steinberg:

Greenberg had always argued that the Old Masters, the classic 3-D realists, "an illusion of space into which one could imagine oneself walking," whereas—to the everlasting glory of Modernism—you couldn't walk into a Modernist painting and least of all into an Abstract Expressionist painting. . . . Just a minute, said Steinberg, but you're talking about a "pre-industrial standard of locomotion," i.e., walking. Perhaps you can't walk through an Abstract Expressionist painting—but you can fly through. Right! You could take a space ship! Just look at a de Kooning or a Rothko or a Franz Kline. Look at that "airy" quality, those "areas floating in floating in space," those cloud formations, all that “illusionistic space” with its evocations of intergalactic travel. Why, you could sail though a de Kooning in a Mercury capsule or a Soyuz any day of the week! All along, the Abstract Expressionists had been dealing with “open atmospheric effects.” It was aerial “double dealing,” and it did “clearly deny and dissemble the picture's material surface”--and nobody had ever blown the whistle on them!

Wolfe is fond, overly so, of the exclamation mark, and makes corresponding overuse of it. He also attempts to summon up a carnivalesque atmosphere through various devices and tactics of the 18^th century “storm in a teacup” school. And another thing that is evident in the above paragraph: Wolfe's extremely entertaining and highly suspect use of free indirect style. He puts a lot of words in a lot of people's mouths, and while this may help them and their conflicts to better “come alive” on the page, at the same time it intentionally attempts to mislead the reader into thinking that these words are more or less exactly what a person thought, what they must have said in private conversation or in their diary or when talking to themself in the bathroom. (Yes, I just used “themself”.) This, and the humorous juxtaposition of two discordant registers, is the explanation for Wolfe's always fluid and often comedic use of direct quotation.

As Wolfe himself makes clear, even if he doesn't realize it himself, the art market drove on this vicious cycle, encouraging as it did the conditions where theoretical revolution and artists' submission to the tenets of various schools and -isms were the correct economic decision, if little else. In fact, the three choices seemingly open to artists was, and probably still are (a.) give in, make a living and maybe get rich, (b.) do your own thing as starve, or (c.) get another job, either totally giving up art in disgust or becoming reduced to the status of an “amateur” painter. Talk about a Catch-22 of the soul, huh, Tommy Boy?

Sometimes I wonder how I've ended up reading so much of Wolfe's work, when my sensibilities are and always have been in many ways opposed to his. There is a constellation of reasons for this seemingly incongruous fact, and they include: (a.) his ubiquitous cultural gaze, (b.) his prolific and popular career, which gives him a kind of default relevance, and (c.) his almost unsurpassed, 100 mph style, which though quirky, idiosyncratic and sometimes very irritating is among the best of the best journalists'.

So why does Wolfe write stuff like this? Partly I think he's a performer doing a routine, this particular routine being taking the mickey out of people who behave very self-importantly. Partly, like most performers, he's wanting us to love him, both for what he is—a great guy with words, really laugh-out-loud funny sometimes—as well as for what he's not—in this case, not one of those silly bastards.

He also very clearly identifies with the bourgeois with whom he was raised and educated, and probably as a cultural critic he has to take a slightly condescending, paternalistic attitude towards them in order to perpetuate his own myth of identification (look at that suit: what could be more late-19^th century eccentric gentleman than that?)—a myth that many artists and writers abandon for exactly the opposite kind of myth, something he actually discusses is Painted and alludes to in Bauhaus (Gropius, for example).