Collected Miscellany

Many lit blogs have re-awakened from their holiday slumber to post links and thoughts on the passing of Susan Sontag. I am not really that familiar with Sontag’s writing, and her left-wing politics are the opposite of mine, but (or perhaps as a result) I found this Roger Kimball post interesting and so thought I would pass it along. Here are a few quotes I enjoyed:

Almost overnight these essays electrified intellectual debate and catapulted their author to celebrity. Not that Sontag’s efforts were unanimously praised. The critic John Simon, to take just one example, wondered in a sharp letter to Partisan Review whether Sontag’s “Notes on `Camp'” was itself “only a piece of `camp.'” No, the important things were the attentiveness, speed, and intensity of the response. Pro or con, Sontag’s essays galvanized debate: indeed, they contributed mightily to changing the very climate of intellectual debate. Her demand, at the end of “Against Interpretation,” that “in place of a hermeneutics we need an erotics of art”; her praise of camp, the “whole point” of which “is to dethrone the serious”; her encomium to the “new sensibility” of the Sixties, whose acolytes, she observed, “have broken, whether they know it or not, with the Matthew Arnold notion of culture, finding it historically and humanly obsolescent”: in these and other such pronouncements Sontag offered not arguments but a mood, a tone, an atmosphere. Never mind that a lot of it was literally nonsense: it was nevertheless irresistible nonsense.

[ . . .]

Having immersed herself in the rhetoric of traditional humanistic learning, she is expert at using it against itself. This of course is a large part of what has made her writing so successful among would-be “avant-garde” intellectuals: playing with the empty forms of traditional moral and aesthetic thought, she is able to appear simultaneously unsettling and edifying, daringly “beyond good and evil” and yet passionately engagé. In the long march through the institutions, Sontag has been an emissary of trivialization, deploying the tools of humanism to sabotage the humanistic enterprise.

Those interested in Kimball’s perspective might want to check out his The Long March: How the Cultural Revolution of the 1960s Changed America. It is on my TBR pile and I hope to get to it in 2005.

UPDATE: Here is another post on Sontag from a conservative perspective, but this author is more willing to give Sontag credit where it is due:

If she could not quite grasp the inexorable logic that leads directly from her courageous stands (pace the deceased, courage is not morally neutral) for Poles, Bosniacs and Kosovars to the present struggle for Iraqis, are we to hold that so dearly against her? It is a long road from shilling for genocidal Communism to nearly arriving at a consistent worldview of freedom’s inexorable expansion. In the case of Susan Sontag, she ought to get credit for the distance traveled.

Many lit blogs have re-awakened from their holiday slumber to post links and thoughts on the passing of Susan Sontag. I am not really that familiar with Sontag’s writing, and her left-wing politics are the opposite of mine, but (or perhaps as a result) I found this Roger Kimball post interesting and so thought I would pass it along. Here are a few quotes I enjoyed:

Almost overnight these essays electrified intellectual debate and catapulted their author to celebrity. Not that Sontag’s efforts were unanimously praised. The critic John Simon, to take just one example, wondered in a sharp letter to Partisan Review whether Sontag’s “Notes on `Camp'” was itself “only a piece of `camp.'” No, the important things were the attentiveness, speed, and intensity of the response. Pro or con, Sontag’s essays galvanized debate: indeed, they contributed mightily to changing the very climate of intellectual debate. Her demand, at the end of “Against Interpretation,” that “in place of a hermeneutics we need an erotics of art”; her praise of camp, the “whole point” of which “is to dethrone the serious”; her encomium to the “new sensibility” of the Sixties, whose acolytes, she observed, “have broken, whether they know it or not, with the Matthew Arnold notion of culture, finding it historically and humanly obsolescent”: in these and other such pronouncements Sontag offered not arguments but a mood, a tone, an atmosphere. Never mind that a lot of it was literally nonsense: it was nevertheless irresistible nonsense.

[ . . .]

Having immersed herself in the rhetoric of traditional humanistic learning, she is expert at using it against itself. This of course is a large part of what has made her writing so successful among would-be “avant-garde” intellectuals: playing with the empty forms of traditional moral and aesthetic thought, she is able to appear simultaneously unsettling and edifying, daringly “beyond good and evil” and yet passionately engagé. In the long march through the institutions, Sontag has been an emissary of trivialization, deploying the tools of humanism to sabotage the humanistic enterprise.

Those interested in Kimball’s perspective might want to check out his The Long March: How the Cultural Revolution of the 1960s Changed America. It is on my TBR pile and I hope to get to it in 2005.

UPDATE: Here is another post on Sontag from a conservative perspective, but this author is more willing to give Sontag credit where it is due:

If she could not quite grasp the inexorable logic that leads directly from her courageous stands (pace the deceased, courage is not morally neutral) for Poles, Bosniacs and Kosovars to the present struggle for Iraqis, are we to hold that so dearly against her? It is a long road from shilling for genocidal Communism to nearly arriving at a consistent worldview of freedom’s inexorable expansion. In the case of Susan Sontag, she ought to get credit for the distance traveled.

A Ha-Ha is a sunken fence used to divide land without visibly altering the landscape. This tidbit from landscape architecture forms the central metaphor of Dave King’s debut novel THE HA-HA.

Howard Kapostash can’t speak, read, or write, but he can communicate. Disfigured by a landmine in Vietnam, Howard is the novel’s first person narrator. He lives in the midwestern town where he grew up, not far from Sylvia, his high school sweetheart. Sylvia is headed to rehab and asks Howard to look after her nine year old son Ryan. Howard readily agrees; Sylvia is his last good memory, the lingering image of first love. With his parents dead, she is the only person in his life who knew him before the war, the only person who’s heard him speak.

Howard maintains the grounds of a convent. His favorite activity is steering his big John Deere across an expanse of lawn toward the ha-ha. His household consists of Laurel Cao, a Vietnamese-American woman with a Texas drawl; two young men he thinks of as Nit and Nat, and now, Ryan, Sylvia’s African-American son. Ryan’s arrival inspires Howard and the others to emerge from their private worlds to ease the boy’s transition. As school ends and high summer begins, Howard enrolls Ryan with a baseball team. Ryan’s a prodigious hitter, but an angry young man, a feeling Howard knows too well. Despite Laurel’s urging, Ryan refuses to call his mother in rehab. After some false starts the five people who live in Howard’s house begin to function as a family.

Sylvia brackets THE HA-HA’s storyline. Her departure incites the story and her return sets up the book’s climax and resolution. What occurs in between revolves around Ryan as much as Howard. Some of the best scenes in the novel occur in the middle of the book. Howard takes Ryan for a ride on the John Deere, a simple outing that ends on the brink of the convent’s ha-ha. Ryan falls off the tractor; the supervising nun suspends Howard after slapping him.
A chance meeting with Sylvia at a barbecue joint exposes hope and expectation as a folie-a-deux for Howard and Ryan. Her patter is as vain and self-absorbed as an adolescent’s. Her imminent release promises disasters to come.

Howard’s encounters with a homeless man set up the novel’s most violent scenes. Is he a high school buddy, fellow survivor of the war? More importantly is he real or an apparition? These scenes undermine the reader’s trust in Howard’s perceptions; they feel abrupt and strangely inconsequential.

Dave King tells the story front to back while showing us what it is to be Howard. The flashback scenes to Vietnam are moving and well placed in the narrative. He creates a language for Howard, a vital interior monologue within a damaged façade. The terrain of Howard’s life was altered in one flash bang moment, one collision with an unseen wall. Howard searches for that moment again, trying to understand it, something nine-year-old Ryan intuitively senses. I think this forms the bond between them; it’s up to the other characters to pull them apart, make them safe, plant warning flags, call the authorities and restore order. It’s a powerful, well-written novel and a very impressive debut.

A Ha-Ha is a sunken fence used to divide land without visibly altering the landscape. This tidbit from landscape architecture forms the central metaphor of Dave King’s debut novel THE HA-HA.

Howard Kapostash can’t speak, read, or write, but he can communicate. Disfigured by a landmine in Vietnam, Howard is the novel’s first person narrator. He lives in the midwestern town where he grew up, not far from Sylvia, his high school sweetheart. Sylvia is headed to rehab and asks Howard to look after her nine year old son Ryan. Howard readily agrees; Sylvia is his last good memory, the lingering image of first love. With his parents dead, she is the only person in his life who knew him before the war, the only person who’s heard him speak.

Howard maintains the grounds of a convent. His favorite activity is steering his big John Deere across an expanse of lawn toward the ha-ha. His household consists of Laurel Cao, a Vietnamese-American woman with a Texas drawl; two young men he thinks of as Nit and Nat, and now, Ryan, Sylvia’s African-American son. Ryan’s arrival inspires Howard and the others to emerge from their private worlds to ease the boy’s transition. As school ends and high summer begins, Howard enrolls Ryan with a baseball team. Ryan’s a prodigious hitter, but an angry young man, a feeling Howard knows too well. Despite Laurel’s urging, Ryan refuses to call his mother in rehab. After some false starts the five people who live in Howard’s house begin to function as a family.

Sylvia brackets THE HA-HA’s storyline. Her departure incites the story and her return sets up the book’s climax and resolution. What occurs in between revolves around Ryan as much as Howard. Some of the best scenes in the novel occur in the middle of the book. Howard takes Ryan for a ride on the John Deere, a simple outing that ends on the brink of the convent’s ha-ha. Ryan falls off the tractor; the supervising nun suspends Howard after slapping him.
A chance meeting with Sylvia at a barbecue joint exposes hope and expectation as a folie-a-deux for Howard and Ryan. Her patter is as vain and self-absorbed as an adolescent’s. Her imminent release promises disasters to come.

Howard’s encounters with a homeless man set up the novel’s most violent scenes. Is he a high school buddy, fellow survivor of the war? More importantly is he real or an apparition? These scenes undermine the reader’s trust in Howard’s perceptions; they feel abrupt and strangely inconsequential.

Dave King tells the story front to back while showing us what it is to be Howard. The flashback scenes to Vietnam are moving and well placed in the narrative. He creates a language for Howard, a vital interior monologue within a damaged façade. The terrain of Howard’s life was altered in one flash bang moment, one collision with an unseen wall. Howard searches for that moment again, trying to understand it, something nine-year-old Ryan intuitively senses. I think this forms the bond between them; it’s up to the other characters to pull them apart, make them safe, plant warning flags, call the authorities and restore order. It’s a powerful, well-written novel and a very impressive debut.

Much gripping has been heard across the blogosphere regarding the film version of Phillip Pullman’s His Dark Materials Trilogy. People are upset because the films are apparently being stripped of their anti-religion content for fear of offending the masses. Pullman is reportedly not concerned as he is set to make big bucks regardless. Comically, his agent blames it on President Bush:

You have to recognize that it is a challenge in the climate of Bush’s America.

.
Gregg Easterbrook thinks this is a shame. While finding Pullman’s anti-God invective unpersuasive, Easterbrook thinks the movies should be made to reflect the book:

The film is being made under the auspices of New Line Cinema, the company that struck gold with the Lord of the Rings trilogy; speculation is that New Line feared religious groups would boycott His Dark Materials if it were anti-God. But His Dark Materials must be anti-God–abhorrence of religion is the whole point of Pullman’s books! I disliked the anti-religion element of His Dark Materials because the thinking struck me as shallow, university-sophomore arguments: everything negative about faith trumped up, no positives mentioned. But Pullman deserves to have his books filmed the way he wrote them. (Ursula Le Guin deserved to have her books filmed the way she wrote them too, but that’s now water under the bridge.) New Line should make His Dark Materials as an anti-God polemic, or not make the flick at all.

I agree. In fact, I think New Line is missing a great opportunity. It seems obvious to me that this is the perfect chance for a little red state backlash. Blue America is pissed about the last election, relentlessly secular, and suspicious of a new “Theocracy” under President Bush (see the comment above by Pullman’s agent). Add to this mood the fact that nothing spikes interest in a movie more than protest and controversy and you have the potential for a big splash.

I think New Line should courageously make the movie as anti-religion as the books and let the well intentioned but not market savy red state fundamentalists attack it as blasphemous and dangerous for kids. This will only increase the interest in the movies as the controversy itself becomes news and creates millions in free publicity. Every secularist, libertarian, and iconoclast in the country – and a large amount of the merely curious – will want to see the film. Some will see it as an act of courage in Ashcroft’s Gonzales’s America while others just want to see what all the fuss is about. Kids will sneak in by the droves. After all what is more interesting than something your parents think is bad for you. Like every other movie that becomes an object of protest, His Dark Materials could become a blockbuster based on the issues surrounding it rather than on its merits alone.

I have my own opinions about Pullman and his work (see here and here), but it seems to me that changing the film to play it safe is both artistically and financially cowardly. My advice would be to ride controversy to the bank. It has a long history of success.

Being a rather restless person, I often enjoy books whose plots are unconventional or whose stories center around something fantastic. This interest cuts across genres and subjects. I like to use literature and reading as a way to explore ideas not just as a way to kill time. It’s not that I don’t enjoy more conventional story lines or novels, but unconventional or fantastical ones just seem to peak my interest.

P.J. Fischer’s debut novel, Julia and the Dream Maker, was one such work. Here is the blurb that caught my attention:

Three graduate students’ lives and ambitions collide in this near-future drama where experiments in genetics and computer intelligence converge, leading to courtroom confrontations and to an evolutionary leap that may redefine humanity.

Sounds exciting right? Seems like a highly relevant and intriguing plot given our own moral and ethical dilemmas and problems in an age of ever increasing technology. But despite some quality character development and an interesting premise, Julia and the Dream Maker never quite takes off; it reads like an overly long introduction to a series. To be fair it is the first in a series (the next installment is expected in 2005), but a novel – even the first in a series – should stand on its own. Science fiction fans, and readers with a science background in particular, may have an easier time wading through the exposition, but I mostly found it slow going. Now that he has set out the background, and has had the experience of writing the first book, perhaps Fischer can pick up the pace in the next few books.

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