the death of the hip

I’ve been to New York many times before actually going there. I’ve seen it through Bartleby’s nihilist eyes, from Patrick Bateman’s grotesque point of view, or in a jazz and drug infused frenzy with the Beat writers, through Woody Allen’s paranoid hipster glasses, Gatsby’s love sick eyes and from the deck of the immigrant ship coming to the New World, the big cliche entrance. After having walked up and down that island for real though, I now have it all mapped out in my mind, so reading Chronic City by Jonathan Lethem allowed me to navigate the streets of his imaginary New York and connect it to the real one. A giant tiger is loose in the city roaming its underground tunnels and causing buildings to collapse; a dense fog is permanently looming over the financial district and the New York Times has a separate “war-free” version. These are some of the elements of magic-realism in the novel, but they paradoxically work to make this imaginary version of the city even closer to the real, expressing the violence and beauty with which things become out-dated and replaced there, the very strange sense that one is completely isolated from world conflicts and somehow at their core, making veiled references to the city being cleaned up and “smoke free”, or to 9/11. I remember reading about the famous Washington Square Park as being the hang-out place for junkies and the like in the 70s. Standing as one example of the city’s transformation, the place is completely sanitized and baby-walking proof nowadays.

A funny and extremely clever, although at times annoyingly geeky, male bonding story, the novel centers on a group of friends, a former child star living out of his long gone glory, a former self hating rock critic and artist without an oeuvre and a former squatter now turned square and working for the mayor. There’s a set of remarkable, though secondary, female characters and one of them is my favorite: Janice Trumbull, an astronaut stranded out in space with a bunch of Russian cosmonauts, who writes lovely letters to her sitcom actor flame. The plot is too complicated and weird to bother summarizing it and it is probably the great weakness of the novel that keeps some pretty obvious revelations to the end, which are cheap and unnecessary. Its strength however, lies in the characters, who are odd, but relatively lovable, particularly Perkus Tooth, the self hating rock critic that is to me the embodiment of the former glory of New York, versed in popular culture, avant-garde, weird and most of all untied by power-structures. In a way, the story is that of the death of Perkus Tooth and of New York as it once was (counter-cultural, paranoid, hip) and its gradual co-option by the square power-structure.

It was very strange to read a book that brings to mind the postmodern generation, there’s something pynchonesque about it, the whole cultural paranoia, the sense of humor and the pace of the plot, the fable-like character names and their almost cardboard personalities. There’s also a bit of DeLillo and Coupland, but other than that it’s mostly its own thing. There’s so much beauty in it, but there’s also too much stuff that is unnecessary. Its nostalgia for the hipness of former New York(s) struck me as a bit childish and it might so be that the avant-garde no longer has its home there, in the now sanitized, smoke-free avenues. But only time will tell. The avant-garde is sneaky that way, it has kept being pronounced dead, only to reappear again. For that matter, I didn’t think a novel so “late 20th century” as this one could still captivate me, but, well, it did…

And an excerpt from the novel, from the time of Perkus Tooth’s demise, when he is left homeless by a tiger attack and forced to take refuge in an apartment building, literally, for dogs.

Why we read

Anyone who has gotten a degree in the humanities, like I did, or even worse, is working or trying to work in the field, is most certainly familiar with “the look” and reaction some people have when they get the answer to the question “so what exactly have you studied?”. It’s a pretty universal reaction mingling disappointment, with pity and a symbolic step back away from you, kind of like an instantaneous distance that is being created between you and the “non-humanist” professional. Not long ago, I’ve eavesdropped on a conversation between two students; the computer specialist type asked the pretty girl that accompanied him what she was studying. The girl answered that she was studying history. I then immediately noticed the distance materializing itself between them when the guy asked what job would that qualify her for upon graduation. The girl answered self mockingly, as most of us humanists do in such situations, that she’ll probably become a qualified unemployed person.

It has always been clear to me that reading is a very important part of my life, that reading fiction informs my way of seeing the world. Sometimes I perceive the act of reading as a sort of religious practice that binds me to my fellow men. Entering someone else’s fictional world is both a way of self knowledge and of connecting with the Other in a way that everyday experience does not allow one to. Actual being in the world does not allow one to reflect on the act of being, life is meaningless as it is being experienced. Literature compresses experience and emotion, it distills them and allows one to make sense of them, to assign them meaning. And it is particularly this ability to assign meaning that makes the act of writing fiction and that of reading it so important.

Edward Said’s book Humanism and Democratic Criticism has reminded me of the importance of reading and literature, why an apparently useless bunch of people that call themselves humanists should continue to exist and what their role actually is. Being part of the generation that has been “indoctrinated” with postmodernism and multiculturalism as a student, I’ve naturally grown a bit disenchanted with the academic mambo-jumbo that it involves, a convoluted and essentially pointless language play that in the end has very little to do with the actual work of fiction.

Making a case for the return to close reading and doing away with useless obscurantist jargon, Said says that the reader and the critic should try to put themselves in the shoes of the writer and to try to recreate the social and historical, but also the frame of mind that produced the work of fiction. Although he is aware that this is a utopian endeavor, which can never be fully achieved, the act of trying to do so is much more important, it is the only way through which some kind of a connection between the two agents can be appear. He also stresses how a telling detail in the construction of a work of fiction can function as the key to understanding and decoding the whole, which is something I have often thought myself.

One chapter is dedicated to Erich Auerbach’s Mimesis, a book that I would very much like to reread in light of Said’s perspective on it. I was unaware that Auerbach was Jewish and exiled in Istanbul during the Second World War when he wrote his major work and also that this situation influenced some of the ideas in his book. Said does what he preaches and tries to recreate the context in which Auerbach wrote Mimesis, revealing aspects that would have remained unseen in a purely academic reading.

But probably the most impressive effort in Said’s life long work is that of trying to bring together the multicultural revolution in the humanities with the old classical canon. The two camps have been shooting poisoned arrows at each other over the last 40 years and the fight continues to this day. Said defends the classics, but criticizes elitist defenders of the established canon like T.S. Eliot or Allan Bloom, while he is at the same time one of the main theorists of the multicultural age and continues to argue that literature is one of the discourses that perpetrate power structures that need to be debunked, considered and reconsidered.

A staunch defender of humanism he points out that humanism today can only survive if our understanding of the term and particularly of the practice is reconsidered and understood anew. Humanism is challenged nowadays by the confrontation between different ways of seeing the world, particularly after 9/11, when, for many, the limits of humanism became equal to those of the Western world. Almost prophetically, before the revolutions in the Middle East, Said, himself a Palestinian, showed that, despite the cultural and religious differences, there are values that characterize humanity in general. Rebelling against tyranny is one of them. True humanism can only survive if the encounter with the Other is a productive one that leads to some amount of self-criticism and is not limited to creating or propagating a Manichean view of the world.

The role of the people in the humanities and of intellectuals in particular is to complicate things in a way that people can understand and not in an obscure way, rejecting the simplified dichotomies of the mainstream media, to put things in perspective and not take them out of it for propagandistic reasons. My understanding of Said’s view on humanism is that it lies in the act of telling stories and doing it in good faith, completing the view of the present with a detailed view of the past that produced it and paying attention to the telling detail that can be the key to seeing the larger picture in a new light.

life is biutiful

Sometimes death makes life look beautiful, it reveals it as the mystery that it really is in all it’s strangeness. Two  films I’ve seen recently manage to deal with this very delicate theme. Biutiful, the latest Inarritu, appears to be all about the process of dying, but the effect it has is that it makes you feel the wonder of being alive. The breathtaking cinematography includes moments that haunt you for a long time, like the bodies of Chinese illegal immigrants washed up on the see shore, the breaking dawn, the general atmosphere of a Barcelona that the average tourist will find unrecognizable and, most of all,  the dreamed encounter in the snowy forest. Like in 21 Grams, but more elegantly so, Inarritu manages to bring to life the drama of the human soul by setting its aspirations against the ballast of a body that gradually fails it in the most gruesome way. All the suffering, vomiting, degradation and pain do nothing but accentuate the “biuty” of life

The Tree, on the other hand, starts with a death and focuses on how the living deal with the pain and with the very present loss. The metaphor is quite obvious, but that doesn’t make is less effective. And Charlotte Gainsbourg has got to be one of the most imperfectly beautiful people in the world:

and a song I’ve rediscovered after seeing the film:

shopping the self to death

I haven’t seen many authors in the flesh, but I have seen Brett Easton Ellis reading from his recent book Imperial Bedrooms. I’ve sometimes wondered what it would be like to meet authors I admire and I suspect it would be quite pointless because you can’t really strike up a meaningful conversation and the kind of adoring fan attitude that people manage to put up on the spot must be quite tiresome for them. I know I get annoyed when I read interviews taken by journalists that can’t shake off this attitude, because nothing meaningful can come out of reservation-less adoration that is unable to challenge the subject of this adoration.

Anyway, I went to see Ellis taken there by a friend and without feeling any of the adoration that I have mentioned, because I hadn’t previously read any of his books. The passage he read involved a blow job and some blank eyed model as far as I remember and the crowd of “nice” people giggled like kids when the biology teacher casually mentions the word “penis” in class, the same reaction when Ellis talked about another supposedly real life blow job at the Frankfurt book fair. I left there quite unimpressed and definitely not interested in reading more from the new book, but also scolded by a friend for not being able to appreciate one of the greatest authors out there and with a lecture on why American Psycho is such a great book. So I promised to read it.

It’s strange to read a book after seeing the person responsible for it, I somehow couldn’t shake of the image of that guy in hoodie with a WASP nose thinking all this violence up and putting it down in the most gruesome detail, in his pajamas, safe in his lonely apartment somewhere. The construction of this novel is flawless; it’s a world in itself, the sick twisted world of the ugliest truths about human nature, civilization in general and a historical era in particular. It is probably one of the most powerful critiques of consumerist culture but, although I appreciated the consistency with which every character description involved an elaborate enumeration of all the brands they were wearing, I’ve started skipping over them after just a few pages. The same went for the ever more elaborate scenes of violence that I literally couldn’t stomach after a while, they made me feel disgusted with myself as if I were some kind of a silent witness and accomplice to all that. Although I was completely aware that the violence should function on a symbolic level, I couldn’t quite shake the feeling that it was put down on paper with a gusto that somehow contradicts the very act of criticizing a culture that fetishizes it, by actually doing the same thing. There is some dark humor involved, but you never laugh quite whole heartedly, because the novel leaves no glimmer of hope, as the ending says there’s “no exit”. A while ago I was criticizing Colum McCann for being too pollyannaish, but the belief in the inherent goodness of human nature is probably the quality that makes his characters so endearing. Ellis is at the opposite pole of that, there’s nothing human about his characters in Psycho. They are islands, consuming automata, and there is no meaningful connection between them. The worst of it is they are replaceable and interchangeable, Patrick keeps being mistaken for other people throughout the novel and he keeps doing the same thing to other Wall Street guys.

John Updike said somewhere that American culture and literature is obsessed with youth and adolescence, it glorifies it,  it is a culture that refuses to grow up, to accept inevitable defeat and decay with grace and see it as a natural process of becoming wiser, it denies the wisdom of the aged. And I see some of this in Ellis. This absolute “nay-saying” is so adolescent like despite it’s complexity and I cannot help but laugh at it imagining the author writing another dark portrayal of the human tragedy and the “pain” of existence and then relaxing with an episode of Glee.

His twitter rantings look uncannily like they’ve been written by Patrick Bateman himself.

newyorknewyork

As a restless teenager in a small Romanian town I would read Kerouac and dream of New York. My life was ordinary and predictable and I craved for the adventure that New York represented, the multitude of people, the high highs and the low lows, the alcohol and the jazz, the sex and the rock’ n roll. My New York was a mythical, imaginary place, where everything lacking in my life was taking place. With such high expectations you can only be disappointed when confronted with the real New York. But still it is hard to get disappointed by New York altogether, there’s too much in it to be awed by, even though the experience of actually being there is not quite as life changing as you would have expected. You don’t bump into Neal Cassady and end up drinking and talking like mad in a bar, but you may bump into his shadow as you walk around, just one of the anonymous tourists taking pictures of places that give you a strange sense of deja vu.

For this trip though, I have found a perfect companion: Colum McCann’s Let the Great World Spin. It’s a novel and an ode to the city, however lame that might sound, with its people, its gutters and its high end lofts. It’s a novel without a main character, because the main character is the city, a web of streets and of surprising, sometimes invisible connections. On the day when the real life Philippe Petit walked a tight rope between the two World Trade Center towers, the lives of several characters are changed by fortuitous encounters. A judge generously lets a young heroin addict prostitute go without charging her, only for her to end up in a deadly car crash a few hours later, the death of an Irish monk driving the car ends with his brother marrying the hit and run driver’s wife and so on. Every chapter is told from the perspective of a different character and in the end they all add together like puzzle pieces, revealing the surprising connections. Make no mistake, there is nothing forced or sensational about these coincidences, however Dickensian they may seem, although the tone often verges on the sentimental. I did appreciate the ventriloquism of the author, who writes from the perspective of a whore, a Latina nurse, an old Black woman, an Irish man, a hip young artist and a rich upper-middle class mother of a soldier who died in the Vietnam war, although at times I did have the feeling that these were creative writing exercises. My favorite was the voice of Gloria, an over weight Black woman who lives in a spotless apartment, up in a block of flats, surrounded by drug addicts, pimps and prostitutes and spends the money the state gives her as compensation for the three sons she has lost in the war, on opera tickets.

What I found touching, but at the same time a bit problematic about this author is that he has the immigrant’s unconditional love of America, there is a certain positivism in him that makes him see the light even in the darkest corners of this country, that I find a bit pollyannaish of him. Still, although I can rationally be quite critical of the book in many ways, the truth of the matter is that I’ve gotten engrossed in it all the way and it has been one of my best recent reading experiences, probably due to the context too. And I was happy to see we have the same Kerouac affinity in this interview.

My own bits and pieces of the city:

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And the appropriate soundtrack:

Where the novel came from

I am still trying to decide if I like this neo-realism and why this novel has caused such a buzz.

Franzen on Freedom

Feminismul trece prin stomac

Ce s-ar fi intamplat cu eroina Sylviei Plath din Clopotul de sticla, daca n-ar fi suferit atat de crunt de depresie, s-ar fi nascut in Canada si ar fi incercat cu orice pret sa fie normala? Ar fi fost personajul feminin al lui Margaret Atwood din Femeia comestibila. Singura problema e ca personajul lui Atwood, in incercarea ei foarte apatica de a se incadra normelor societatii, e foarte unidimensionala. Atwood in general mi s-a parut mai capabila sa creeze tipologii cu tuse destul de ingrosate decat personaje cu carne si oase. Asa ca in loc sa avem o femeie crizata bine portretizata ca in romanul lui Plath, avem trei tipologii feminine: mama eroina, roscata vrajitoare feministo-manipulatoare si viitoarea sotie perfecta. Personajul principal e viitoarea sotie perfecta care desi se straduieste din greu sa-si intre in rol, n-o lasa subconstientul si stomacul. Respingerea institutiei evident patriarhale a casatoriei creste exponential cu vegetarianismul si culmineaza in final cu producerea unui tort sub forma de femeie oferit spre consum pretendentului complet siderat. (Insert analiza freudiano-feminista)

Cum nu-mi plac tusele groase nu prea am putut aprecia povestea asta a crizei existentiale feminine plasata in anii 50-60. Dar pentru un prim roman nu e deloc rau. Atwood are mana formata pentru satira si un umor negru sanatos care mi-a picat bine si a mai domolit feminismul subliminal. Cred ca mi-ar fi placut mai mult daca povestea ar fi fost a roscatei manipulatoare decat a posibilei sotii perfecte, dar nu poti sa le ai pe toate.

Philip Roth e bine

Pentru mine Philip Roth e unul dintre autorii aia care parca scriu despre tine si te trezesti dand din cap in timp ce citesti ca un caine de jucarie de pus in geam la masina. Mi-a placut din prima cinismulul lui, amestecul foarte straniu de spirit rebel adolescentin si intelepciune de batran. Ne-am cunoscut cu Complexul lui Portnoy care a fost o revelatie a tineretii mele si a continuat sa ma socheze cu fiecare roman pentru ca toate au ceva nou si neasteptat, dar aceeasi doza de cinism a la roth de care se pare ca nu ma satur.

Trebuie sa recunosc ca penultimele lui 2 romane m-au cam dezamagit desi le-am citit cu aceeasi placere. Miroseau a batranete Exit Ghost si The Dying Animal, nu intamplator, avand in vedere ca personajele principale sunt doi batrani amorezati penibil adolescentin de doua tinere. Batranetea e un subiect la fel de legitim ca oricare altul, dar doua romane consecutive in care personaje aproape identice au probleme similare e un pic prea mult. De asta am pus mana cam cu teama pe Indignare si deja imi imaginam noi probleme legate de scutece pentru adulti & co. Dar acest ultim roman, pe cat e de scurt si concis, pe atat e de puternic. Nu degeaba ii lauda personajul autor din Exit Ghost pe modernistii transanti gen Joseph Conrad.

Un pusti evreu din anii cincizeci care, desi se straduieste din toate puterile sa faca totul corect, are un sfarsit tragic. Scriitura are  o puritate data probabil de simplitate si de faptul ca Roth a renuntat la discursurile teziste din ale romane. Acum cititorul e lasat singur sa faca ce vrea cu povestea si cred ca asta e cel mai greu lucru, dar si secretul marilor romane. M-a dus cu gandul la Bartleby. Ca si nuvela lui Melville, desi iti da senzatia ca spune ceva mare, e foarte greu sa articulezi lucrul ala mare care  se citeste printre randuri si mai mult din elipse decat din textul propriuzis.

Dupa multe carti pe care le-am pus de-o parte cu bucurie imediat ce le-am terminat, in sfarsit am dat peste una care mi-a ramas in gand mult dupa aceea.

OTV si post-modernism

De Joyce Carol Oates am tot auzit in ultima vreme inaite sa ma apuc de citit. Unii au mers asa de departe incat sa spuna ca “marele roman american”, balena alba dupa care au alergat toti marii scriitori ai respectivei natiuni, va fi scris nu de un autor ci de o autoare, mai precis sus numita. Fanii sunt dati pe spate de cantitatea uriasa a operei oatesiene, femeia e mai ceva ca un grafoman, scrie cate 2-3 chestii pe an, dintre care cel putin un roman fluviu demn de secolul 19. Si avand in vedere ca scrie de vreo 40 de ani, un calcul aproximativ arata marimea cel putin fizica a operei sale.

Cu astfel de informatii la bord am pornit lectura primului meu roman de Oates dintre cele 3 primite cadou de la prietenii mei si fanii ei, anume My Sister, My Love. “Motorul” povestii e “cel mai poetic lucru din lume”, ca sa il parafrazez pe narator, adica moartea unei copile. Evident ca fraza e folosita intr-un mod ironic post-modernist si nu e vorba de nimic poetic in toata povestea asta bazata pe un caz real si demna de un talk show in serial la OTV care sa-i sparga fata pana si Elodiei. O fetita de 6, faimoasa patinatoare copil minune, e gasita moarta in pivnita casei familiei sale.

Naratorul autoproclamat “unreliable” e fratele victimei, adolescent traumatizat care isi aminteste de copilaria lor pana la data crimei si dupa, intr-un stil auto-ironico-postmodernist care nu m-a amuzat deloc si mi s-a parut foarte transparent. Cei interesati de soarta copiilor bogati americani (in)dopati cu medicamente pentru tot felul de boli inchipuite care au initiale in loc de nume, de genul ADHD, si dealerii lor legali care se cheama psihologi, vor gasi tot felul de situatii interesante in cartea asta. Cine cauta un roman politist cu suspans s-ar putea sa fie dezamagit. Desi criminalul e dezvaluit abia la final, chestia e evidenta inca inainte de comiterea crimei.

Dar pentru cei care se uita in secret la OTV, dar in public cititesc autori postmodernisti, asta e romanul perfect. Nu zic, Oates surprinde foarte bine tabloidizarea societatii, disperarea de a prinde macar 15 minute de faima, viata de plastic din suburbiile americane, mizeria din spatele idealurilor corporatiste, perversitatea societatii de consum in general si ce-a mai ramas din visul american, dar, desi e destept scrisa, cartea mi-a dat aceeasi senzatie de jena si scarba simtita atunci cand mai nimeresc pe OTV si raman hipnotizat pret de cateva minute. E o lume in care nu vreau sa intru pentru ca nu exista catarsis pentru scarba pe care mi-o provoaca.

Autori clasici vs. autoare contemporane

Vara asta planuisem o intoarcere la clasici, dar cartile recente scrise de autoare contemporane, pe care le tot primesc cadou in ultima vreme nu imi dau pace. E o lupta inegala fiindca domnii clasici sunt greoi, mai fac si rime si te ingroapa in subsoluri, pe cand mai tinerele doamne fac tot posibilul sa te tina cu sufletul la gura chiar si pe cea mai mare caldura…