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October202005

Three interviews

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1. The Daily Iowan talks to Sasha Frere-Jones, who's been traveling.

2. The Morning News has a spirited conversation with Jonathan Lethem, who notes, for instance, "First of all, I think my so-called originality—which is just as often called my 'surrealism' or my 'postmodernism' or what have you—tends to be overstated, at the expense of how deeply traditional my work is." An expressive Labrador occasionally interjects. This was good:


It’s not about reading. That’s the problem. It really is about—I’m repeating myself—class anxiety. Once you have an eye for this you spot it in odd places. I read a review in Book Forum where a critic, quite incidentally, in attacking Michel Houellebecq, said in an aside, "But then again, the French regard Hitchcock as art." Well, now, wait a minute! These battles were fought and won. These victories were decisive ones, fifty years ago. There’s no rolling that back. Hitchcock is art. So if you pin Hitchcock’s scalp to your belt: "Not only have I seen through Michel Houellebecq, the charlatan, but in fact I’m going to tell you that the auturists were wrong and Hitchcock is lowbrow and unsavory," you’ve discredited yourself so absolutely that you deserve to read nothing but Trollope for the rest of your life.

Hold on, I like Trollope! Although nothing but Trollope would be hard.

3. Tom Bartlett of Minor Tweaks interrogates Tom Bartlett of Elvis imitation. "The last place you want to be is in a room full of Elvises. They can get very catty."

For some reason Lethem's riff on Hitchcock reminds me of a Frere-Jones line from this week. If you're not reading the minuscule Critic's Notebooks and Pop Notes at the front of the book, you might want to give them a glance next week. Many of the critics benefit from this extremely short form, which pushes them to amp up the adjectives and make stronger statements than they might at more length. Frere-Jones says, in a review of the new Franz Ferdinand album, "Dismiss them only if you are already dancing or never bored." I—being an enthusiast about a few things, which as they diminish in number increase in belovedness—can get behind that kind of definite praise.

Later, more Lethem:

All I care about is what’s on the page. I care about the book and I also feel a compulsion—it’s not a responsibility toward anyone except toward myself—a compulsion to ensure that any given text is an absolute self-enclosing, self-describing system, that needs absolutely no apparatus or information brought to it for it to function. It should be a machine like a perfect space probe, one capable of being self-sustaining in a vacuum, forever. But, having committed to making the text function that way—and I always do—it would be a kind of bogus naiveté to pretend that innumerable readers would not be encountering this work alongside at least some hint, some whisper that I grew up in Brooklyn, that I went to public schools, etcetera.

As it happens, Frere-Jones and New Yorker person Meghan O'Rourke did a Slate Book Club about The Fortress of Solitude, Lethem's other books, Brooklyn, etc., in 2003. It seems like a sincere, focused conversation, but I haven't read the novel yet, so I can't jump in. Besides, I have various degrees of acquaintance with these people, so no real editor would let me review any such thing—an excellent policy. Since I'm a blogger, I guess I can say I'm looking forward to the book, whereupon I'll return to SFJ and MOR's dialogue and comment. Actually, you know what? I won't. Whatever I'm doing here, I'm definitely not either moderating or starting publishing-world tempests in a teaspot (as Pogo, eluder of Schjeldahl, would say). I like reading them from time to time, but there's no need for my participation, knows God.

In any case, these Slate exchanges can be great, but the casual-formal-critical-chatty format can also make for a stilted end result. It also underscores how many ostensibly civilized people close their letters with "Best," which—outside the workplace form letter—is the signatory equivalent of the blank email subject line. Which, in turn, is the skull and crossbones of cybercorrespondence. Imagine if you wrote your loved ones paper letters (as I overheard one of my freshman-comp students say, with understandable awe) and the outside of the envelope had no return address, was scrawled with your left hand in thick black Sharpie, smelled odd, and was smudged with unidentifiable grit. That, to me, is the blank subject line. If I get it, I panic. If I use it, beware.

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