Martin Schneider writes:
Last night I was lucky to see a unique literary event: New Yorker book critic James Wood speaking for an hour or so about David Foster Wallace’s second short story collection, Brief Interviews with Hideous Men, at the 92nd Street Y.
An a Wallace enthusiast, I was a bit worried about where Wood would come down on BIWHM. Wood’s tastes can be a bit arid—at one point during the address, he cited Henry James as a model Wallace might have profited from emulating—and it was all too easy to imagine Wood not cottoning to Wallace’s verbal, stylistic, and formal excesses.
I need not have worried. Wood was generous in his praise of Wallace, albeit (quite properly) not unreservedly so.
I have seen Wood speak once before, at the 2008 New Yorker Festival, but it was on this occasion that he showed what a prudent, insightful, excellent critic he is. While never deviating from the basic stance of fulsome praise, Wood showed that he admired Wallace’s writings and appreciated his concerns and approach, while also pointing out some of the dead-ends that Wallace had constructed for himself.
Wood’s discourse started with an appreciation for Wallace’s “extraordinary ear for speech,” to demonstrate which he quoted several passages. At the very end Wood commented that Wallace, like Henry Green, understood the way in which people “invent” their own words as they speak. To which I’d add, the key to Wallace’s dialogue—as the title suggests, BWIHM has huge chunks of spoken discourse, which also creeps into the omniscient narrator’s patterns as well—is that he understood that even quite ordinary people speak in remarkably pretentious ways, which lead them to mix in (and mangle) hifalutin words like “environs” when they probably shouldn’t.
From there Wood moved to a discussion of a quintessentially Wallacean problem of “the helplessness of the self.” For Wood, Wallace constantly undercuts what ought to be “naive” gestures like a praise of generosity by pointing to the underlying selfishness of the act—and, importantly, each person’s awareness of the contradiction—a condition most thoughtful people suffer from. In his story “The Depressed Person,” we see all too vividly the tendency towards solipsism, a word that informs a great many of Wallace’s characters.
With reference to a brief, Xeroxed passage from Beckett, Wood demonstrated that Wallace has a knack for cannily eliding the meat of a subject, “withholding and repressing what we would actually want to know.” Several of the stories feature “ellipsis and occlusion” about key points.
At the same time, Wood (probably correctly) chided Wallace for an unwillingness to just leave it alone, to let the ambiguity remain. Wallace “tends to overplay his hand,” which tendency leads him to unveil narrative corkers in his stories’ finales that might better have gone merely suggested: “Beckett does not give you the key; Wallace spoils it by giving you the key.”
During the Q&A, there was an excellent question by an older gentleman that went something like, “Can you address the idea of meta-fiction, and meta-meta-fiction, and … how many metas one can tolerate without losing one’s mind?” Wood clearly found this very resonant, stating that one of Wallace’s key themes is indeed precisely that “one can’t escape all of those ‘metas,’ and one also can’t, unfortunately, lose one’s mind.” That is, we lose ourselves in the recursive mental spirals, in which consciousness tends to keep us mired.
I raised my hand too! Riffing off of the earlier questioner, I asked something like, “Wallace resorts to a lot of ‘tricks,’ like footnotes and brackets and so on. Do you ever find yourself wishing that there were an … alternate version of Wallace, who could display his great moral sense and feel for language and precision and character and narrative in a “cleaner” form, without all of the distractions?”
To my great satisfaction, Wood’s answer was terribly expansive and in some ways got to the heart of the conundrum of reading Wallace. He started by saying, “Yes…. I often think that Wallace is ‘performing,’ and sometimes I wish that he would ‘perform’ a bit less.” This was followed by a wonderful impression of a reader encountering a Wallace story, noticing the matchless prose of the opening passages and then flipping ahead to see how far Wallace was going to sustain the performance—and then becoming dismayed at its daunting length and complexity and, perhaps, tricksiness.
Wood then spun out a dichotomy in Wallace’s work, between the “performer” and the more straightforwardly “moral” writer, referring to Zadie Smith’s recent essay on Wallace (which Wood praised) that defended Wallace as precisely an uncomplicated sort of moral writer at root. Wood dismissed this view, citing some of the darker elements in these purportedly clean, positive, and “moral” resolutions, insisting that this tidy, “moral” version of Wallace misses his essence.
Wood felt that what forced Wallace into his great length (and tricks and repetitions and refractions) was his status “also as a great realist—too much of a realist, for my taste.” In other words, the desire to be accurate compelled Wallace to pursue the logic behind the thoughts to their logical conclusion. Wood mentioned a trope of Henry James, that it is the role of the artist to “draw a circle” around the story—in other words, it’s not necessary to replay the inescapability of the dynamic at such length: we could also get the same point in five pages. However, Wood added, even this excessive, mimetic urge within Wallace is an honorable and serious one in an artist.
Afterwards I had the pleasure of meeting well-known literary bloggers Ed Champion and Sarah Weinman for the first time. We gabbed about Wallace and Wood for a while until finally reaching the table behind which Wood had graciously agreed to sign some books. (Most everyone had fled by this time.) When Wood saw me, he eagerly took the opportunity to round out the train of thought my earlier question had sparked. It was a joy to see such a fine critical mind at work—occupied with an object worthy of his contemplation.
Category Archives: New Yorker
R.I.P. John Kane, New Yorker Cartoonist, Ukulele Player, Mensch
Emily Gordon writes:
I was very sorry to hear from illustrator and cartoonist Derek Van Gieson that John Kane passed away a few days ago. John, a New Yorker cartoonist, was also a dedicated musician and devotee of that small instrument with a big heart, the ukulele. He sent me many ukulele links and had a YouTube channel dedicated to them; I’ll find it to link to, but right now, the thought makes me too sad.
Here’s Derek writing eloquently on what made John so special.
John may have been getting up there in age by the time I caught up with him, but he was more animated and on the ball than any twelve youngsters combined. He was always going out to exhibitions, learning about some new technology, or improving himself via activities like judo. One of his most recent passions was taking up the uke. He had five models last time I remember. He’d watch Youtube clips and learn from the masters. I know he drove Sam and Sid nuts with all of his uke talk as there was usually something happening in that realm that he was very enthusiastic about. After lunch we’d walk down to the subway and talk music shop or just shop about guitars. He always had a unique theory he was thinking about or a new way of experiencing something that he’d often share. More often than not, I’d come home from The New Yorker luncheons, thinking I was one of the luckiest bastards in the world to be in the court of these fascinating gentlemen. Eventually our friendship became quite solid and if I didn’t make it one tuesday for lunch, either John or Sid would get ahold of me to ask me what the hell happened. I can’t really express how much that meant to me.
But read the whole post. It really captures the person John was, and the person we will all miss whether we were friends, acquaintances (like me), or fans of John’s dynamic, lovable, slightly unhinged cartoons.
Beat That: James Wood Investigates David Foster Wallace at the 92nd St. Y
Martin Schneider writes:
There is a fantastic event coming up at the 92nd Street Y this month—New Yorker literary critic James Wood does a “First Read” of David Foster Wallace’s adventurous, uneven, maddening, delightful, never-boring short story collection Brief Interviews with Hideous Men. The event is on Monday, March 22, at 8:15pm, and has a hipster-friendly pricing policy: $19 admission, but only $10 for those 35 and younger (ID will be checked, people, so no funny business).
I had the great pleasure of seeing Wood speak at the 2008 New Yorker Festival, and his intelligence, gentleness, and patience were extraordinary. As a longtime fan of Wallace, I’m genuinely excited to hear what Wood has to say about BIWHM (and by no means do I expect it to be entirely positive).
The announcement of this event induced me to discover that, in case you have not seen it already (I have not) and are a Netflix subscriber, John Krasinski’s 2009 adaptation of the collection is currently available to be streamed on Netflix.
Expect a writeup of the event after it happens! And meanwhile, here’s a lengthy account of the enthralling 92nd St. Y event with Frank Rich and Jane Mayer from last spring.
Eustace Tilley Squared — If You Know Where to Look
Martin Schneider writes:
As Pollux noted recently—and our friend Ben Bass posted too—there is a mind-blowing trick in the special four-Eustace 85th anniversary cover of last month. If you place the four covers in the proper two-by-two configuration, the outlines of the original classic Eustace cover can be discerned.
Now we have Adam Kempa’s excellent slider application, which allows you to find it without spreading (multiple copies of) the issue all over your living room floor.
I am endlessly impressed by such cleverness! Françoise Mouly, hats off to you! (A top hat, of course.)
Why Did Salinger Once Seem So Modern? It Was Not Holden Alone.
Martin Schneider writes:
A few days ago, on slender justification, I concocted a post about J.D. Salinger out of a news report I happened to see about the (either cancelled or postponed) premiere of a TV game show about child prodigies. The implied connection was fatuous—and yet it sparked a thought.
Until today I have shielded myself from the response to Salinger’s death (although expect a roundup post on same anon), so I would have no way of knowing if the import of this post is trite or profound. I did notice that Garth Risk Hallberg at The Millions made the case that Salinger shifted the center of American literature from “manly” attributes like courage and honor to something more urban and intellectual—it doesn’t take much imagination to trace that particular lineage. In the broadest sense Jonathan Lethem, Jonathan Safran Foer, Jonathan Ames, David Foster Wallace, and even Philip Roth are in Salinger’s debt.
So okay—the intellect, add to it the focus on adolescence. That’s two big parts of the puzzle, obvious ones at that. But I want to draw attention to another one.
As a commenter named “liza” reminded me, “It’s a Wise Child” was based on a real radio show called “Quiz Kids” (curiously, the Wikipedia entry does not mention Salinger, as it surely should).
So what does that tell us about the Glass siblings? In short, in addition to being neurotics and prodigies and suicides, they were celebrities. I speak only for myself, but in thinking about Buddy, Franny, Seymour, and the rest of them, I tend to forget this fact—partly because Salinger’s skill, whether in dialogue or the “panoramas” of “Zooey,” keeps us so firmly in the present tense.
One of the big stories of the postwar era is the rise of fame itself as a subject for contemplation. Salinger may have been the first American writer to explore it with any thoroughness. Who else did it, before Salinger?
“It’s a Wise Child” Possibly to Air on the Fox Network? Egad.
Martin Schneider writes:
I didn’t know until today that Fox has a show in the works that sounds for all the world like the modern-day version of the radio show that made the young Glass siblings national celebrities. Look:
Fox executives said the premiere of “Our Little Genius,” originally scheduled to debut Tuesday after “American Idol,” had been postponed and possibly cancelled over concerns about the integrity of the concept. The quiz show was supposed to pit super smart six to 12-year-old kids against Ivy League professors.
[snip]
The show’s premise allowed the kids’ parents to decide whether they keep answering expert-level questions to win up to $500,000 in prize money.
[snip]
The sudden withdrawal of the program so close to its debut has raised eyebrows about whether the contestants were either given the answers in advance or put under intense pressure to prepare for the program. The show had already come under pressure for putting stress on such young contestants vying for “life-changing money,” according to the Fox advertising campaign
Fox made a big push for “Little Genius” billing it as a new spin on Burnett’s popular Fox series “Are You Smarter Than a Fifth Grader?” which pokes fun at adults who can’t answer elementary-school age questions.
Prior to the announcement Burnett acknowledged that the kids on the show—who he found through nation-wide casting calls—may not have a normal social lives. One potential six-year-old contestant is enrolled in college-level classes.
“I do believe that these genius kids probably have a little more difficulty socially in peer groups,” Burnett said last month.
Didn’t any of these people read “A Perfect Day for Bananafish”?
A Pair of Observations on the Passing of J.D. Salinger
Martin Schneider writes:
I cannot top Pollux’s exemplary writeup here, so I won’t try.
Instead I wanted to make two points about Salinger, one of which will be made many times in the days to come, and the other of which might well get missed in the hubbub.
1. Like many people, I read Salinger with great enthusiasm when I was in high school and college, and I haven’t thought about him much in several years. I believe it became somewhat fashionable in recent years to dismiss Salinger as a what — “minor author” or the like? — and I never found that to be an astute or fair assessment. Salinger was the real deal, comfortably in the first rank of postwar American authors, and it would take a lot of very clever and sustained argumentation to swerve me from that view. If American letters today saw a 1 percent increase in Salinger’s skill at narrative, dialogue, theme development, wit, and subtlety, the critics would never stop proclaiming this a Golden Age of American Literature. It’s pretty much as simple as that.
That’s the point I think won’t get lost in the shuffle. But what about this?
2. In writing this post about the, er, Golden Age of the Big Nonfiction Book, I spent quite a while studying this wonderful page by Daniel Immerwahr.
One thing that becomes very clear very quickly is that it is rather rare for truly top-notch writers to crack the annual top ten list. They probably make the weekly top ten list with some frequency. But for a whole calendar year? That is uncommon.
Salinger placed two books in the annual top ten list, and one of them (Franny and Zooey) was popular enough to make the list in two completely different years. (The other one was Raise High the Roofbeams, Carpenters.) Neither of these, of course, is the monumental novel for which Salinger will always be remembered.
Compare the totals for a few other major postwar authors:
Mailer: 1
Roth: 1
Bellow: 2
Updike: 2
Heller: 1
Vonnegut: 3
Irving: 1
We all know that Salinger sold a great many books, and quickly became a cultural phenomenon. I think we still risk underestimating the sheer bookselling power—and, obviously, popularity—that Salinger represented even before he became a long-term icon known for his seclusion. Salinger published four books—how many did Bellow and Updike write?
Posit that every serious American author craves that ineffable combination of critical recognition and a readership numbering in the millions.
Nobody, but nobody, combined those two things like J.D. Salinger.
The Decline of the Non-Fiction Game-Changer: Real or Imagined?
Martin Schneider writes:
A couple of hours ago I had a very interesting conversation with four intelligent and well-informed twentysomethings (that is, people a good deal younger than myself), none of whom rely on books as a significant source of information, inspiration, and so forth.
I hasten to add that this is not in any way meant as a criticism or even something to sigh about. I know plenty of people who are really into books, and I know plenty of people who are not; these just happened to be some of the ones who are not.
If it is not implied in my presentation already, it may need to be stated explicitly that the non-book people are not in any material way (I would venture) less informed than the book people; they simply rely more on television, blogs, podcasts, magazines, and the like for their information.
We were talking about safety standards or some such topic, and someone mentioned Ralph Nader’s 1965 book Unsafe at Any Speed, which did so much to bring the subject of automotive safety into the public discourse. Then someone made a trenchant point: In the postwar era there were quite a few non-fiction books that had a profound impact on society, of which category Unsafe at Any Speed serves as an excellent paradigm. What are those books for our era?
We had a fairly difficult time thinking of more than about two.
This basic situation, the feeling that there used to be many books profoundly influencing society and the apparent reality that there are no longer very many such books, can lead further discussion in a few different directions.
To start with, is it really true? Perhaps it is worth making a kind of inventory of serious, ground-breaking non-fiction books for the different eras. Presuming that it is true, what does it mean? Perhaps it means that change occurs through different channels today, primarily computing technologies. Does it mean that intellectuals have smaller sway than they once did? Does it mean that change is less “top-down” than it once was? Are the books that are truly generating change for some reason not making much of an impact on the best-seller lists? (This is not as implausible or contradictory as it might at first sound.) Is it a sign that society required certain truly major adjustments after about 1960, and that the societal changes that we today require are but variations on those earlier upheavals? Is it just that we lack perspective on, say, 1995 in way that we do not lack perspective on 1965?
I’m not sure what I think about any of those questions. I have some ideas, to be sure, but they all seem rather tentative. Before we continue, it may be helpful to list some of the books that constitute the “canon” of major non-fiction books that played a significant role in American social and political movements in the 1955-1975 period. After that, I’ll throw out a few contenders for the 1990-2010 period.
An excellent resource for this task is Daniel Immerwahr’s “Books of the Century” project, which lists the top ten New York Times best-sellers (fiction and non-fiction) as well as a short list of notable books for each year from 1900 to 1999. It would be more helpful if the project extended to 2010, but it doesn’t.
Here’s my list of important, change-inducing books from 1955 to 1975:
Edward Bernays, The Engineering of Consent (1955)
William H. Whyte, The Organization Man (1956)
Vance Packard, The Hidden Persuaders (1957)
John Kenneth Galbraith, The Affluent Society (1958)
William J. Lederer and Eugene Burdick, The Ugly American (1958)
Barry Goldwater, The Conscience of a Conservative (1960)
Paul Goodman, Growing Up Absurd (1960)
Daniel Bell, The End of Ideology (1960)
Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities (1961)
Rachel Carson, Silent Spring (1962)
Michael Harrington, The Other America (1962)
T. S. Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962)
Betty Friedan, The Feminine Mystique (1963)
Martin Luther King, Jr., Why We Can’t Wait (1964)
The Autobiography of Malcolm X (1965)
Ralph Nader, Unsafe at Any Speed (1965)
Eldridge Cleaver, Soul on Ice (1968)
Timothy Leary, The Politics of Ecstasy (1968)
Elizabeth Kübler-Ross, On Death and Dying (1969)
Kate Millet, Sexual Politics (1970)
Boston Women’s Health Collective, Our Bodies, Ourselves (1971)
Thomas Harris, I’m O.K., You’re O.K. (1971)
Dee Brown, Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee (1971)
Alex Comfort, The Joy of Sex (1972)
Peter Singer, Animal Liberation (1975)
Susan Brownmiller, Against Our Will: Men, Women, and Rape (1975)
A few notes before moving on. I think this is a very solid list of genuinely influential non-fiction books for this period. I also think that a person perusing Mr. Immerwahr’s list might plausibly want to add a few more to the list (and perhaps remove a couple). I have intentionally tried to be narrow in my choices, however. I wanted to choose books that left an authentic imprint in social and political movements, and in my opinion the standard for inclusion has to be a legacy in the form of major legislation or a lasting political bloc. Or at least within shouting distance of such a legacy.
Therefore, if you can answer “yes” to the question “Did this book serve as a call to arms for a group with a particular identity or cause or grievance?” then the book should certainly make the list.
But the books’ influence should not primarily be artistic, scientific, academic, aesthetic, or temporal in nature.
Therefore, if you can answer “yes” to any of the following questions, then the book (I think) should not make the list:
Is the book’s primary importance restricted to those in the scientific community or academia?
Is the book a work of cultural criticism?
Is the book important because it blends fact and fiction or otherwise offers a stylistic tour de force?
Is the book a work of reportage?
These questions rule out names like Kael, Sontag, Capote, Styron, Halberstam, Theodore White, Wolfe, Chomsky, Bouton, etc., etc., and I think properly so. All of those individuals wrote fine and important books, but none of them truly alerted the broadly educated class of some wrong that required righting or of some worthy mode of expression that had thitherto gone unexpressed.
I will concede that even my parsimonious standard may have included a few books too many; I’m not sure whether, for instance, Growing Up Absurd or The Hidden Persuaders qualify, but somehow I feel they are probably close enough. Similarly, Kuhn was writing for academics, but his eventual impact was just barely diffuse enough as to avoid seeming parochial. But hey—it’s just a list. I’m quite ready to admit that this or that title doesn’t really count.
I also note that there are no works primarily about homosexuality in the list (I think), but I’m not sure what I can do about that.
Let us now turn to the 1990-2010 period. What books since the end of the Cold War had a similar societal impact? Well,
Rush Limbaugh, The Way Things Ought To Be (1992)
Francis Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man (1992)
Barack Obama, Dreams from My Father (1995)
Samuel P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations (1996)
Jared Diamond, Guns, Germs, and Steel (1997)
Tom Brokaw, The Greatest Generation (1998)
Thus endeth our involvement with the helpful Mr. Immerwahr’s list. Here is a fairly expansive list of additional candidates, with a good deal of help from Wikipedia and without the years listed:
Al Gore, An Inconvenient Truth
Sam Harris, Letter to a Christian Nation
Robert Putnam, Bowling Alone
Malcolm Gladwell, The Tipping Point
Naomi Klein, No Logo
Naomi Klein, The Shock Doctrine
Barbara Ehrenreich, Nickel and Dimed
David Brooks, Bobos in Paradise
Bernard Goldberg, Bias
Eric Schlosser, Fast Food Nation
Michael Pollan, The Omnivore’s Dilemma
Rick Warren, The Purpose Driven Life
Nicholas Negroponte, Being Digital
Bill McKibben, Maybe One
Alisa Smith and J.B. MacKinnon, The 100-Mile Diet
Chris C. Mooney, The Republican War on Science
Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein, Nudge
Sarah Palin, Going Rogue
Robert Bly, Iron John
Dave Foreman, Confessions of an Eco-Warrior
Derek Humphry, Final Exit
Ronald Numbers, The Creationists
Peter D. Kramer, Listening to Prozac
Elizabeth Wurtzel, Prozac Nation
Cornel West, Race Matters
Michael Moore, Downsize This!
Paul Krugman, The Great Unraveling
Al Franken, Rush Limbaugh Is a Big Fat Idiot
John Perkins, Confessions of an Economic Hit Man
“Anonymous,” Imperial Hubris
Harry Frankfurt, On Bullshit
Thomas Frank, What’s the Matter With Kansas?
Steven Johnson, Everything Bad Is Good for You
Ron Suskind, The One Percent Doctrine
Worldchanging.org, Worldchanging
Have I been unfair to anybody? Is anyone left out, unjustly named? I do not think that either list misrepresents the basic situation by very much. (By the bye, what are the major works of either period addressed to homosexuals, Latinos, Muslims? Anybody know?)
Now—unlike the 1955-1975 group, the 1990-2010 list resembles a brainstorming session, for which the standards for inclusion were far looser. By the standards of the first group, I count only eight titles that would definitely qualify, and just to keep the subject interesting I’ll keep that list to myself.
Conclusions? I’m loath even to venture any. But here’s a modest one: Everyone reading this knows that the 1960s plus a few years on either side were the great liberal expansion in the United States. And we all know just as clearly that the years since were a difficult time for the keepers of the liberal flame. The movements that thrived in more recent years were more pinched, more selfish, more inward, more “personal,” and more wary. With a couple of notable exceptions, even the liberal manifestos seemed to wilt or founder, in this sometimes churlish and fractious land, too often steered by money and reaction and spite. These lists show that, I think.
They also, maybe, point to a modest decline of the hardcover tome in the grand scheme of things. For the second period also contains the rise or apotheosis of goth culture, rave culture, guido culture, furry culture, lad culture, grunge, New Sincerity, metrosexuals, simple living, needlepoint, the EFF, the open-source movement, flash mobs, improv comedy, steampunk, feng shui, body modification, peer-to-peer file-sharing, hipsterism, emo, perpetual travelers, transhumanism, and three dozen other lifestyles and innovations I’m way too old to know much about.
Most of those subcultures aren’t as important as the civil-rights movement, but each did represent some new way of thought or expression, and even the courageous furries had to learn to become a properly recognized group, with the rights and rites that define a capital-C community. How many of the items in the last paragraph were sparked in any measure by a big, attention-getting non-fiction book? Darn few, methinks.
Introducing a New Imprint: Predetermined Dwelling
Martin Schneider writes:
Here’s the lede from “The Death of the Slush Pile,” by Katherine Rosman, in the Wall Street Journal:
In 1991, a book editor at Random House pulled from the heaps of unsolicited manuscripts a novel about a murder that roils a Baltimore suburb. Written by a first-time author and mother-to-be named Mary Cahill, “Carpool” was published to fanfare. Ms. Cahill was interviewed on the “Today” show. “Carpool” was a best seller.
That was the last time Random House, the largest publisher in the U.S., remembers publishing anything found in a slush pile. Today, Random House and most of its major counterparts refuse to accept unsolicited material.
What I love about this is that the name of the company is Random House.
(After I wrote the above, it occurred to me that I should find out how Random House got its name. According to Wikipedia, “Random House was founded in 1927 by Americans Bennett Cerf, Christopher Coombes and Donald Klopfer, two years after they acquired the Modern Library imprint. Cerf is quoted as saying, ‘We just said we were going to publish a few books on the side at random,’ which suggested the name Random House.”)
Notes on “Notes on Camp”: The Persistence of an Aesthetic
Martin Schneider writes:
A couple of weeks ago I caught the final show in John Waters’ Christmas Tour, which ended at B.B. King’s. He was vastly entertaining. Afterwards, he made his way to the bar area and greeted a few of the diehards who opted to hang around (it was after midnight), of which I was one. A fun experience.
In connection with this event, I was talking to my young companions (a good fifteen years younger, as it happens) about the concept of Camp, and mentioned Susan Sontag’s famous 1964 essay. Not very surprisingly, neither of my friends had ever heard of it, a circumstance for which mere youth is not the full explanation. Now, in 2010, it suddenly popped into my head to give it a look. Now that was a terrific idea.
The form of jottings, rather than an essay (with its claim to a linear, consecutive argument), seemed more appropriate for getting down something of this…. etc.
1. It’s the best-written thing I’ve read in months. Months.
2. The astonishing variety of references in the essay are a clue to a problem that was never much of a problem anyway. That is, since Sontag later became a symbol of a certain kind of highly refined left-wing thinker and aesthete (nothing of the kind ever really happened to Pauline Kael, for instance, despite her quasi-apocryphal “Nixon” remark), to what extent was Sontag occupying a necessary role in society, one that someone else might just as well have occupied, and to what extent was she an original?
It’s safe to say that Sontag was really very original indeed. The references show the wide range of her intellect, curiosity, and perhaps most important, pleasures, and that sort of thing is not readily reproducable. Sontag forged a path that led to a place only she could have reached.
3. Is there anything that any hipster has ever done, anywhere, that would have surprised Sontag? I doubt it. This is the reason there is no “Notes on Hipsterism.” There isn’t any point, Sontag had already gotten there.
4. This doesn’t make her infallible. I think punk might have perplexed her a bit, or even maybe Devo or Kraftwerk. The article coincides with the arrival of the Stones and the Beatles, so she could not have ventured any thoughts on rock or used rock bands as examples (jazz seems to occupy that slot in her cosmology). Does anyone know if she ever had any serious “take” on rock music?
5. Sontag seems to have been the first and possibly most perfect example of a type that is relatively common nowadays, the intellectual who enjoys high and low culture with equal avidity. Sontag is more “perfect” because her choices include opera, high art, and the entire gamut of high modernism. Her latterday incarnations are far, far less likely to know Richard Strauss and Jean Genet, although they probably enjoy Jane Austen and chop-socky movies about equally.
6. The essay has not dated in any material way.