AMUSINGLY AMIS(S)

My beach reading this year consisted of Martin Amis' first two novels: The Rachel Papers (1973) and Dead Babies (1975). Of the two, I probably preferred the first, though the latter is no doubt "better." In other words, the first proposes a coming of age story in what could still be called "a sentimental education." And if no one in Amis is actually sentimental in any sense of the word, well, that's really the point, isn't it? Sexuality is simply the basis for comic misadventures, as is most other things desire might inspire (like trying to get into Oxford). But if "droll" is the word that comes to mind most while reading The Rachel Papers, "rot" is the word most prevalent in the consciousness (or somewhere just in the anteroom) while reading Dead Babies: not that the narrator of either uses either word, but it's more like the tone of the novel takes its impetus from the implications of its respective word when applied to behavior.

In Rachel there is at least that long tradition of long-suffering first person narrators -- for instance, Holden Caulfield, though Salinger's malcontent is not quite as stymied by his own hormonal surges, or Portnoy, which is more to the point since the teen-age impetus to have sex at any cost (including the cost to dignity and the fact of not much fun) is the main driving force.  In Rachel it's as if someone as self-aware as Nabokov's Humbert were merely a feckless teenager, yet one with Nabokovian ego issues and literary panache. Amis' Dexter is glib, oily, jaundiced, horny, conniving and ingenuous as is required by the simple fact that teens are in flux, and his voice makes for diverting reading, to the extent that such persons as Amis populates his world with can ever be diverting (and sometimes they can be, of course, if only because he writes them so well).

But the only point in reading Dead Babies is to indulge the narrator's manic glee in concocting pay-offs. For this is a narrator for whom "rot" (as in, love, and all that rot, or art, and all that rot etc.) is the basic fact of our mortal existence and must be countenanced in order for any work to be true, clear-eyed, and "funny." Whatever one does is "rot" because everyone is rotten. It's certainly a propitious novel, in as much as Johnny Rotten himself was soon to burst upon the pop cultural scene. So Amis has got his feet (or his shoes at least) planted in the right swim. It could be said that there are glimpses in DB that Amis is not subsumed by his narrator, that in fact he believes a "road not taken" existed at one time and that fact -- even if of no use now -- indicates some other potential. But not for him to point the way there or attempt to render its demands or consolations. Rather let's gas about with the fallen, give 'em their day and their due and them and us our/their just deserts. No lack of ingenuity in inventing humiliations, but not much else.

Considering the Brit-ness of this Brit lit, we might almost say that the fact that their culture as it existed since the apex of Empire was now fucked made them rather acid. Then along came Maggie. So it's either get right down with the guttersnipes, or exhibit the posh stuff that works for tourists, à la Princess Di (also yet to come) and Merchant/Ivory. So it goes -- while I was at the beach, Salman Rushdie (straight from cameos in a movie with Helen Hunt and in a video with Scarlett Johansson) appeared on Craig Kilbourne ("the Scottish guy") to hawk his latest novel -- fitting in as much as, after all, novelists are simply a species of entertainer. As such I can say, sorta, that Amis kept me amused -- he's so artfully arch, idn't 'e? -- and did give me a not unnuanced feel for that great sinking feeling called living in the '70s.

I don't wanna hear about what the rich are doing
I don't wanna go to where the rich are going
They think they're so clever, they think they're so right
But the truth is only known by guttersnipes
--Joe Strummer/Mick Jones, "Garageland" (1977)

THE FILM-VIEWER'S BUCKET LIST

My brother Eric gave me a copy of 1001 Movies to See Before You Die, edited by Stephen Jay Schneider. The book is better than the same press's 1001 Books to Read Before You Die for two reasons: 1) it's much easier to enter into the spirit of Scheherazade's 1001 Nights because it's possible to watch a movie a night, whereas reading a book a night is well-nigh impossible; 2) the selections only have to span the period from the earliest films (the list begins, as it should, with Voyage to the Moon, 1902) to the present (or rather 2004, in this 2005 edition), so there's not as much sense of disservice to the earlier eras -- whereas 1001 Books should obviously be "1001 novels" since it doesn't at all delve into the insurmountably great works that appeared before the novel did. But even the novel, being so much older than film, is not best served by so many still-living authors whose works, however much one might conceive them as "must reads" of our particular era, don't necessarily translate into "fiction for the ages." That's partly true of the movie list too -- wherein Kubrick and Spielberg dominate -- and the various editions of the film book keep playing about mostly with the latter day stuff. In terms of write-ups, the comments on the older films are more satisfying because they actually make critical points or provide a bit of reception history. The newer films -- in my edition many with commentary by Joanna Berry -- are lackluster "fan-bytes," perhaps inevitable given much of the "must" fluff on the list.

By my quick count I've seen more than half (about 520) of the films on the list at some point -- if we count TV and video-tape and DVD viewings; the number I've seen in a cinema is far smaller. Where I'm weakest is on silent films and films from nations somewhat less than "high profile" in the world of cinema. The best aspect of the list is there: providing a reference to movies that in some cases I haven't heard of or have forgotten about. It's easy to be dissatisfied with the choice of films that one knows and abhors, and with the absence of films one prefers, but more to the point is to consider which recommended films might add significantly to one's "store," as it were.

But at once it all seems not nearly selective enough. I prefer the idea of a more stringent"bucket list" (from a film I recently saw) in which one lists the "must do before death" activities. I doubt that anyone would put viewing movies on an actual bucket list (unless, perhaps, one was already bed-ridden), but I still like the idea of a list of "musts" or "bests," as in the AFI's recently aired Top Ten American Films in each of ten genres, culled from a provided ballot of 50 films in each genre. Similarly, the challenge of the 1001 list is to whittle it down to a manageable 200 or so. The 10 per genre strategy isn't finally satisfying because some films don't easily fit into a genre and because 10 films in a more generic genre (sci-fi, horror, suspense) won't necessarily be among the best things ever committed to celluloid. I'm more inclined to try a "100 best" from the decades of my own life: the '60s, '70s, '80s, '90s and twenty-oughts. It may be that at least twice as many worthwhile films could be chosen from the period from the nineteen-oughts to the 1950s, but I would rather leave their choice to the film historian, which I don't pretend to be.

But the real fun is to be found in the kind of commentary offered in another book my brother gave me: 101 Movies to Avoid. The book, unfortunately, is lacking in wit and insight, showing no real grasp of the films it tries to savage. A pity. I think a real service could be provided by pointing out -- even in a list of one's favorites -- what a film's strengths and weaknesses actually are. I'm a firm believer that just about anything can be successfully mocked, particularly works that are revered in a "bandwagon" fashion or which obviously take themselves too seriously. But poking fun should be fun for the reader -- and it rarely is in this lackluster book.

So what's the upshot of all this? I'm already engaged, ostensibly, in writing a comment on every artist I own a CD by -- perhaps I'll supplement this evaluative activity with comments on the movies of my lifetime that I'd like to recommend. The problem there is that one is engaged in praising and recommending. It might be more fun to find fault with some of the 1001 films on that list -- or on any of the AFI "best" lists. But that would necessitate re-watching movies I have no intention of ever sitting through again. Anyway, on with the show...

THE MUSIL MOMENT

"He looked around, contemplating his environment. All these circular lines, intersecting lines, straight lines, curves and wreaths of which a domestic interior is composed and that had piled up around him were neither nature nor inner necessity but bristled, to the last detail, with baroque overabundance. The current and heartbeat that constantly flows through all things in our surroundings had stopped for a moment. 'I'm only fortuitous,' Necessity leered. 'Observed without prejudice, my face doesn't look much different from a leper's,' Beauty confessed. Actually, it did not take much to produce this effect: a varnish had come off, a power of suggestion had lost its hold, a chain of habit, expectation, and tension had snapped; a fluid, mysterious equilibrium between feeling and world was upset for the space of a second. Everything we feel and do is somehow oriented 'lifeward,' and the least deviation away from this direction toward something beyond is difficult or alarming. This is true even of the simple act of walking: one lifts one's center of gravity, pushes it forward, and lets it drop again -- and the slightest change, the merest hint of shrinking from this letting-oneself-drop-into-the-future, or even of stopping to wonder at it -- and one can no longer stand upright! Stopping to think is dangerous. It occurred to Ulrich that every decisive point in his life had left behind a similar feeling."--Robert Musil, The Man Without Qualities, Chapter 34

Perhaps it's because my back is bothering me again that this passage seems unusually evocative: that bit about taking walking for granted and not easily standing upright certainly resonates more than it might otherwise. But I also think it's because I've been away, and the passage seems to point at the problem with "vacations": they are opportunities for "dangerous" thinking. One gets to withdraw from one's normal environment, from one's day-to-day activities, and so can contemplate how -- in Musil's terms -- they are "neither nature nor inner necessity," but are, in fact, habit, or "the job," or what-have-you (home?). The pause of "time off" frees one from the routine version of "letting-oneself-drop-into-the-future," and one might conceivably contemplate a different future to drop into, one which, if also neither nature or inner necessity, is at least "some kind of change."

I wish I was
On some Australian mountain range
I got no reason to be there
But I imagine it would be some kind of change
--Bob Dylan, "Outlaw Blues" (1965)

HULK'D

While away I went to see the new movie from Marvel, The Incredible Hulk, despite some misgivings (after all, Ang Lee's version was only so-so). I was pleasantly surprised to find that I was gripped by it from the opening credits (which show a flashback of how Bruce Banner became the Hulk and the effect that had on his loved one, Betty Ross, and her dastardly dad, General "Thunderbolt" Ross, who wants to create a kind of "Hulk serum" to make "super soldiers" to serve the U.S. of A.). Banner/Hulk goes rogue and Banner goes into hiding which is where the film begins, swiftly becoming a great chase that ends with Banner transforming into the Hulk and raising characteristic hell.

What got me into the theater was the casting: Ed Norton as Banner, William Hurt as Ross, Tim Roth as Emil Blonsky, who undergoes a series of experiments to become the lethal behemoth called The Abomination. In other words, I was assured by the presence of class-A actors that the film wouldn't just manifest itself as predominantly a CGI slug-fest. But what kept me riveted to the action was the fact that director Louis Leterrier and the script by Zak Penn are fully at the service of The Incredible Hulk as a Marvel comic in action. Which is to say that it doesn't go off into unwarranted changes to the formula of the original comic -- like most other Marvel-inspired films, whether Bryan Singer's The X Men (2000) or Sam Raimi's Spider Man (2002), both of which cut fairly close to the spirit of the comics they're based on.

While my memory of reading The Incredible Hulk comic is that it was never one of my favorites, the film successfully renders those elements which did keep the mag interesting. And part of that area of interest falls to Liv Tyler as the heart of the film: without her deep commitment to Banner, even when he's in Hulk form, the film would be just a bunch of guys fighting for the claim to be (or to control or manufacture) the major badass. Tyler, who I generally find boring and flat, has gotten better now that she's begun to age enough to have a few character lines in her face. Her presence next to the towering Hulk gave me more thrills of the "beauty and the beast" variety than Peter Jackson's King Kong (2005) ever managed to generate (despite Naomi Watts being a far superior actress). And mention must also be made of Tim Blake Nelson as the glibly engaging Prof. all-too-eager to tamper with serums and antidotes -- in future, he'll be showing up as The Hulk's great arch-nemesis The Leader, something to look forward to.

What it all boiled down to for me, as I sat watching, was that I was able to recall my inner grade-schooler who, back in '67-70, loved Marvel comics way more than Hollywood movies. Movies were always so lame when they tried to present superhuman heroes; even their attempt to render monsters and other aberrations were pretty corny and disappointing. Not until The Matrix (1999) did it become clear that the technology and stylistic know-how existed to render something like what went on imaginatively in the mind while contemplating the static but evocative images of the classic Marvel comics (particularly as rendered by Jack "The King" Kirby, the Michelangelo of the form, the man able to render power and feeling simultaneously).

And now, the Marvel production company is finding actors of sufficient caliber to render figures who, for their dedicated readers, are almost archetypal in their long-standing associations. It may say something about our collective zeitgeist that, since the dawn of the depressing 21st century, the best stuff happening on-screen is in the fantasy genre -- from Jackson's Lord of the Rings (2001-03) to these Marvel films --(e.g., escapist action is about all we are capable of), but what it has more to do with than any pop cultural crit symptom-spotting is that the ability to make these things work on screen has finally arrived. And it should be noted just how long after the initial breakthrough of Star Wars (1977) this has occurred. Which is to say that the mind-numbing dullness of Episodes I-III in that series (1999-2005) provided perhaps the main incentive to turn finally to the action heroes worthy of the effects and budgets devoted to films ever in search of blockbuster status. Add Lucas to the list of all those whose mighty concoctions pale beside the likes of Tolkien and Stan "The Man" Lee. You can keep your Darth Vader (a poor man's Doctor Doom at best) and Neo (for existential cosmic drama, let's see someone do justice to The Silver Surfer), Make Mine Marvel!

THE CDS: LAURIE ANDERSON

I’ve been reading a lot about the art world in the early ‘80s recently, so it’s fitting that Laurie Anderson, performance artist and sometime recording artist whose spoken word song “O Superman” was an improbable #1 hit in the U.K. in 1981, should come up now. In the summer of ‘82, Big Science seemed to illuminate the possibility of a real rapport between art and popular music, or, put another way, Anderson’s work, on vinyl, became a kind of symptom of that confluence: it seemed to both build on and comment on the sense of an “avant-garde” of rock music, a trajectory that runs from Andy Warhol’s collaboration with the Velvet Underground to the deliberate fetishizing (I guess the art critics would call it a simulation) of the New York Dolls’ glam to the punk sloppiness of The Ramones and the oracular guitar of Tom Verlaine and the gutter-Rimbaud posturings of Patti Smith to RISD dropouts Talking Heads and their characteristic danceable minimalism, produced by ambient music savant and studio wizard Brian Eno. In the art scene of the time, there were occasionally events where punk or new wave found its way into gallery spaces, and, with this record by Anderson, avant-garde performance found its way onto turntables generally devoted to rock rather than the likes of Philip Glass or John Cage. It was a crossover disc, in other words.

For me the title track has always been the standout. I have fond memories of one night when the night shift at Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, myself included, were sitting around drinking and whatever, and my friend Paul Herman set up speakers (they must’ve been on hand from some lecture earlier in the evening) on the huge Frank Furness-designed staircase and blasted “Big Science.” It sounded incredibly eerie in that big echoey museum space. Anderson’s spoken voice modulates so minimally but effectively between lines of a kind of “readymade” or “found” conversational mode to lines that are clichés but seem cryptic mantras, to lines that carry implications of the kind of art criticism as anthropology that was in the air at the time and in the slogans Barbara Kruger affixed to photos or that Jenny Holzer put on T-shirts or in Times Square. Add to that the strand wolf howling and a drum track that would be at home on Peter Gabriel’s Security (which arrived in the fall) and you’ve got a hypnotic, timely tour de force that never stands still long enough to let you decide its scene or setting or occasion.

Golden cities, golden towns

And long cars in long lines

And great big signs

And they all say

Alleluia

Yo-de-lay-hee-hoo

Every man for himself

Since I was also a participant in the Philly poetry scene at the time, I was also mightily impressed by how Anderson was able to create a very simple sonic backdrop in “O Superman” (a looped voice hitting the same note over and over together with lots of musical or rhythmic effects, none of which could be called the basis for a tune) while on top of this is a voice that seems childlike, and for that very reason slightly mad, or a more robotic, “treated” voice that sounds sinister and disconcerting.

And the voice said:
Well you don’t know me
But I know you
And I’ve got a message

To give to you:

Here come the planes.

The album mainly stands on these two tracks, but there are moments in other tracks that still leap out at me, sometimes more effective for their non sequitur status or as lines that seem to drop into place with a kind of forceful inevitability, such as the “all in favor say aye” in “Big Science” or “So pay me what you owe me” in “Example #22.” The opening track, “From the Air” features a kind of gleeful paranoia about being trapped on a plane that certainly hasn’t lost any of its resonance in our even more paranoid-about-planes era. All in all, the album could be considered “a novelty,” but because it unites things I cared so much about in 1982 -- spoken word performance, “avant-garde rock,” and ideas about art -- with trenchant glimpses of the “passionate aloofness” of so much of the art of the ‘80s, I give it a more central place in the decentered world of the commodity-art object that we were all so ineluctably stumbling through.

This is the time
And this is the record

Of the time
–Laurie Anderson, “From the Air” (1982)

CAVEAT LECTOR

There was a fairly amusing piece in The New York Times Book Review today, about the rigors of reading “jumbo lit” and the toll it takes on one’s day to day life. Joe Queenan talks about using Musil’s Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften as a way to avoid dealing with things like getting his car repaired. I’m in complete agreement with the spirit of his piece except it’s a bit too much a name-dropping exercise. Nothing in the piece indicates any value from the reading experience other than distracting oneself from the quotidian. There is, certainly, a sense in which reading things like Musil or Proust or Gaddis or Pynchon or Joyce is tantamount to immersing oneself in the National Baseball League and its endlessly repetitive endless games, or trying again and again to get to the next level in some unspeakably difficult video game, or even mastering a foreign language or chess or the piano, or what have you. People have been known to drop out of relationships and housekeeping for the sake of cyberlives or relentless TV watching. You don’t need Musil for that. So, what do you need Musil for? I’m not sure, but I’m hoping to get through Der Mann this summer, so, drop in again later and I may have something to say on that score.

A novel I’ve just finished reading is Robert Coover’s Gerald’s Party (1985). Not that long, as novels go, but a disconcerting reading experience in many ways. Coover is of that “old school” avant-garde, which is to say that his work came of age in the era of what is sometimes called metafiction or hyperfiction -- the late ‘60s, early ‘70s -- and this novel, surfacing in the mid ‘80s just after the punk-New Wave surge of new school avant-gardes, shows a writer so fully in command of his technique and his vision as to be utterly daunting -- the way a few other novels of the ‘80s are daunting, like Gaddis’ American Gothic (1985), like McCarthy’s Blood Meridian (1985), like Morrison’s Beloved (1987), like DeLillo’s The Names (1982) -- and also more engaged than any of those I’ve just mentioned with what we might call the theater of social behavior. And Coover is quite successful, ultimately, at convincing me (did I ever really doubt it?) that that is what the novel is and should be about.

Leave it to others to explore the deformations of place and race and language. Coover has his eye on theater as the ancient and unavoidably modern site of all configurations of the self -- particularly the social and sexual self. The party is on at Gerald’s house, but so is murder and a murder investigation, and various liaisons, and a cacophony of voices crisscrossing and stepping on each other’s lines, and numerous sex acts and acts of food preparation and consumption and costume changes and tellings of jokes and stories and dreams, also filming and play-acting and paintings and gangbangs and a stopped-up toilet and straight-faced farce and slapstick death.

Coover’s narrator -- Gerald -- is attuned to the rhythms of human interaction to a degree that . . . well, one way to say it might be to think of how Henry James’ narrators handle consciousness and try to imagine that applied to furiously busy action and party conversation. In other words, Gerald’s consciousness is a fabric of what is happening at any moment, moving through the rooms of his house and the incidents occurring there in the chaos of the party as an ambulatory recording device never fully grasping or elucidating what is actually happening. It takes some getting used to, but my encounter with reading it had the effect of making life -- my own or some version thereof -- cognitively accessible to that manner of telling. It’s something that happens when reading DeLillo too, I’ve noticed: the way the world around one suddenly begins to “speak” with the voice of that kind of narrative.

“What had he said? ‘It was as if the very geography of the world had shifted.’ Yes, ‘something anarchical and dangerous’ -- it was coming back to me.”

Anarchical and dangerous, yes, that’s the feel of the party, which devolves upon the role we so often play in this world, that of spectator, or audience, or reader, or observer of the pageant, the play, the drama, the ritual, inevitably the dance of death that keeps us, well, nothing if not attentive . . . and apprehensive, and maybe responsive and at times depressed, amused, indifferent, and so on, much like our experience of the party and the investigation. (The brilliance of the murder plot is in the fact that it’s unresolvable -- like any act of ‘blame’ for death -- but also in the fact that, as staged so familiarly in any number of entertainments, it always implicates everyone present (including the reader) in the roles -- or let’s say acts -- of victim and murderer.)

“To be a member of the audience, then (so many thoughts, one after another, I staggered on, feeling myself consumed by my own consciousness), was a form of martyrdom . . . .”

Once again I find myself thinking of Joyce's phrase "cruelfiction" as a sense that fiction at this level is a crucifixion, which is to say it partakes of the religious purpose of theater (the death of the god for the sake of the audience who are in turn martyred for the sake of ritual enactment), much as the ritual purpose of sex is always "a death" that denies death. And Coover grasps better than most the feeling that no two people having sex are only or merely two people having sex, but are rather enactments of a human, perhaps even a metaphysical, condition.

"Central to the art of love, I knew [...] as to the art of theater, was the essential fusion of process and product, an acknowledgment of the inherent doubleness -- one's particularity, one' s universality, one's self, one's persona -- of the actor/lover." Say as well "of the act (art) of reading/writing."