http://blogcritics.org/ A sinister cabal of superior bloggers on music, books, film, popular culture, politics, and technology - updated continuously. en Copyright 2005-2007 by the authors Mon, 9 Aug 2004 09:20:58 EDT http://backend.userland.com/rss Blogcritics.org custom software http://blogcritics.org/ Phillip WinnSunday, August 26, 2007, marks the switch of all Blogcritics.org article feeds from full-content to short-content. This is the result of several converging factors, and is unfortunately a permanent decision (as permanent as any decision can be on the web, that is). We are aware of all of the reasons that this is a Bad Idea, and we are aware that some of you will be quite upset about having to click on something to read the free content, and we're sorry. Unfortunately, despite great effort, full-content feeds are not currently economically viable. 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Administration0@blogcritics.org Sun, 26 Aug 2007 12:00:00 EDT http://blogcritics.org/archives/2004/08/09/092058.php Paul De AngelisThere's two reasons to finish a book you can't stand: 1) you're forced to (by some puffed-up English teacher who's convinced he or she is the ultimate purveyor of Great Literature); or 2) if you give up half-way through, you won't be able to say you've actually read it. Well, I've earned the right to say I've read Flann O'Brien's The Third Policeman (1967). But I just know that when I'm lying on my death bed, I'm going to wish I had those hours back again.Part of my problem with the novel is it's surreal, something I'm not a fan of. I can handle eccentric (Roxy Music), unconventional (Memento), strange (Philip K. Dick), and absurd (Monty Python and the Holy Grail). I can even understand the place of surrealism in paintings or short stories. But in long form -- novel, film, or anything with an extensive narrative -- it's always struck me as a cop-out, a way to avoid structure and consistency. (It also gets tiresome, like an extended dream sequence.) Even the most improbable Fantasy novels have their own internal logic. But surrealism allows a writer to jump from idea to action to image and back again without such plebeian concerns as transition or motivation. The Third Policeman also has the corniest, most affected, precious dialogue I've ever dry heaved my way through:"The simple thing is," MacCruiskeen said calmly, "that you cannot enter the lift unless you weigh the same weight as you weighed when you weighed into it.""If you do," said the Sergeant, "it will extirpate you unconditionally and kill the life out of you."In earlier, less sensitive days, we would have referred to this as really gay.There was only one moment I connected with, when I felt O'Brien was referring to me as a reader:I turned to the wall and gave loud choking sobs and broke down completely and cried loudly like a baby.But at least I can say I read the damn thing. Books18429@blogcritics.org Mon, 9 Aug 2004 09:20:58 EDT http://blogcritics.org/archives/2004/08/07/085226.php Paul De AngelisPoor Harold Bloom. The Yale professor and champion of a Western Canon was outraged when Stephen King received the Distinguish Contributions award from the National Book Foundation last year. Yet when I picture Bloom expressing his displeasure, I don't picture a respected professor filling the hallowed halls of Yale with his provocative pronouncements, as much as an old man on a soap box, railing at the passers-by who are only trying to enjoy a stroll in the park.In his diatribe against King, Bloom trots out the tiresome argument that pop culture is ruining High Art (for Bloom and his buddies, I'm assuming), that Western Civilization is once again being threatened by the cultural barbarians at the gates. But for a scholar, his article is surprisingly devoid of convincing arguments:Bloom describes King's reward as......another low in the shocking process of dumbing down our cultural lifeMost large societies throughout history have been divided into a small, educated minority and a large, uneducated majority. And the culture-devouring middle class is a relatively recent development. So I'm not sure when this Golden Age took place, the one in which we were all admirers of literature that Bloom approves of.(King) is an immensely inadequate writer on a sentence-by-sentence, paragraph-by-paragraph, book-by-book basis.Nobody would call King a great technical writer. (I wouldn't be surprised if King himself said as much.) But King's importance and talent is best summed up by Jennifer Cruise: "The world doesn't need any more writers, it needs storytellers." King is a storyteller, and a damn good one. He has the ability to grab the reader and never let go. But that doesn't rate very high with those who put an emphasis on style, symbolism, metaphors, allusions, allegories, pathetic fallacy, and use of language. Those things are all fine, if you're an English professor (or one of their minions, a high school English teacher). But that kind of literary analysis is appreciated only by a very small circle of critics and scholars. Like astronomy, it involves specialization; it's a field of study with its own terms and esoteric ideas that rarely filter out to the general public. (This is, of course, an unfair analogy; astronomy is actually useful.)By awarding it to King they recognize nothing but the commercial value of his books, which sell in the millions but do little more for humanity than keep the publishing world afloat.I don't even know where to begin with this one. Firstly, it's common for some people to feel that their opinions are so correct that to disagree is to simply be wrong, but Bloom speaks as if his inability to recognize King's worth is something that others share. Secondly, I know that awards have nothing to do with commercial success. Nor is commercial success an automatic indication of quality. Yet there's something jarring about Bloom's juxtaposition of "sell(ing) in the millions" with "do(ing) little...for humanity", as if entertaining millions can be dismissed so readily. I'm not saying we should celebrate brain-dead movies like Independence Day or TV shows like The Bachelor for being so successful. But then I wouldn't make such a grandiose statement, claiming they were worthless to humanity. A simple, succinct "they sucked" would suffice. King has been scaring people for thirty years, keeping them engrossed with the printed word (not an easy task); he may have even helped pull Horror out of the literary ghetto that genre fiction often finds itself in (due to narrow-minded critics operating on uninformed preconceptions). So no, King hasn't helped bring about world peace through his writing, but the man has merit when it comes to crafting narratives. That's enough of a contribution to humanity.Thirdly: They shouldn't give awards for sales figures, but I still think it's strange that Bloom would dismiss keeping the "publishing world afloat" as a non-achievement. Somebody has to do it, and I'm sure Bloom's The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry isn't up to the job.Bloom on Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone:I noticed that every time a character went for a walk, the author wrote instead that the character "stretched his legs." I began marking on the back of an envelope every time that phrase was repeated. I stopped only after I had marked the envelope several dozen times. I was incredulous. Rowling's mind is so governed by clichés and dead metaphors that she has no other style of writing.I'll let the image of Bloom interrupting his reading to mark up an envelope speak for itself.Harry Potter will not lead our children on to Kipling's Just So Stories or his Jungle Book. It will not lead them to Thurber's Thirteen Clocks or Kenneth Grahame's Wind in the Willows or Lewis Carroll's Alice.Maybe I'm reading too much into this, but I think it's telling that Bloom didn't pick any example from the last fifty years. It's so much easier to comment on books that have been declared classics by earlier critics than it is recognizing great contemporary works on your own. My research assistant came to me two years ago saying she'd been in a seminar in which the teacher spent two hours saying that Walt Whitman was a racist. This isn't even good nonsense. It's insufferable.Whatever you think of Whitman's poetry, or however much you're against PC interpretations of past works, there's is no question that Bloom's attitude is one of mere stubbornness. Bloom offers no defence of Whitman here, only a swift dismissal of anybody attempting a re-examination of poetry based on shifting attitudes and values. Bloom's response definitely has a written-in-stone attitude towards what's good and what isn't. But as Ty Burr demonstrates in his excellent article "Once Upon A Classic," canons change...and that's not necessarily a bad thing.I began as a scholar of the romantic poets.Leave it to Bloom to present this as a credential.Today there are four living American novelists I know of who are still at work and who deserve our praise.I think articles like this should more or less stand on their own. Yet Bloom praises these writers without explaining why. I guess he feels his pronouncements are good enough.Our society and our literature and our culture are being dumbed down, and the causes are very complex. I'm 73 years old. In a lifetime of teaching English, I've seen the study of literature debased.Oh, blah blah blah. Shut the hell up.In the end, one has to wonder who this article is meant for. On the one hand, there will be those nodding in agreement, going tut-tut at the imminent fall of Western Civilization. On the other hand, they'll be those like me, unconvinced by such an insubstantial article, one fuelled by nothing more than doom-saying stodginess and an overblown belief in the importance of self-perpetuating literary criticism. Books18371@blogcritics.org Sat, 7 Aug 2004 08:52:26 EDT