Wednesday, May 19, 2010

Six Months Later: A Goodbye

Blogging: a literary form that encourages many of my least appealing qualities: arrogance, know-it-allness, rage, laziness, egocentrism, dishonesty, evasion, impetuousness, worshipfulness, small-mindedness, conformism. Petty clamoring after an ultimately meaningless form of (self)-recognition.

The blog: written, like just about everything else these days, for the crowd. For the mob-mind. (See Cynthia Ozick, who says this best.)

If I were to write honestly, this would be nothing but a love letter. It would be addressed to a tiny audience: those I've loved, those I continue to love.

At its best, at its most intense, I've imagined it that way. As a kiss to the lost souls I required, require, and in some cases miss—so terribly. Including, I suppose, my own.

Listen to Ms. Ozick. Get thee to the novel.

This, if it's to exist, must now be something else.

Tuesday, May 11, 2010

The Last Pop Star

This morning I read a provocative article about Lady Gaga in The Atlantic. (It can be found here.) The article essentially argues that Lady Gaga represents the end of Pop.

I'm always drawn to essays like these, which examine an important cultural phenomenon and from it draw a radical conclusion. I happen to think that in this case the conclusion is wrong. I attached the following comment to the article to explain why:
Lady Gaga is not finishing off Pop; she's finishing off Pop for you. Various artists, some of whom you name, have done this for others in the past, and they did it using the same strategies: irony, satire, hyperbole, extravagance, excess, naughtiness—all graced with a note of genius. Welcome to our world. I've lived here since Nevermind.

Like most of my friends, I still venture over to Popland now and then. It's like playing Twister: not as fun as it once was, but fun enough. The pleasures of "Bad Romance" persist, even after all these years.

But your essay raises a serious question: What kind of art puts an end to an art form? Allow me to suggest that ironic art cannot do that. Irony signals an art form's decadence, but irony is not the arrival of something new. And only the new really puts an end to the old. You do not end an art form by replacing it with nothing.

How to spot the new? For one thing, it's earnest. It will absorb what went before it, but it won't merely put quotation marks around what it's absorbing: it will speak earnestly, unironically. Don Quixote comes to mind. Don Quixote possessed all the pleasures of the chivalric romance while adding to them a pleasure that was not merely satirical or self-aware. It saw the world in a new way—novelistically—and we have been seeing it that way ever since.

Lady Gaga is great, but she's no Cervantes.
Radiohead, on the other hand. . . .

Sunday, May 9, 2010

TFTD

If you will be your own Heaven you must last forever.

—Martin Corless-Smith, Nota

The Week in Review

* A superb article on the Tea Party Movement, written by Mark Lilla, a professor of political history at the University of Chicago and the highly regarded author of The Stillborn God: Religion, Politics, and the Modern West.

* A fascinating analysis of the relationship between illegal immigration and crime.

* My new favorite conservative blog.

* And the discovery that on March 22, 1989, we came within 422,000 miles of a very bad day.

Wednesday, May 5, 2010

Saturday, May 1, 2010

2666, by Roberto Bolaño

No one pays attention to these killings, but the secret of the world is hidden in them. —Oscar Fate, 2666
I'm aware of two authors who have made lasting formal innovations in the novel during my adult life: W.G. Sebald and Roberto Bolaño.

Both writers died—Sebald in a car accident; Bolaño, as predicted, of liver failure—precisely when they were becoming internationally recognized as major figures in world literature.

Not surprisingly, they were exploring the same phenomena: the decadence of civilization, organized evil, the transformation of beauty by science, an obsession with literature, the relationship between storytelling and love. Bolaño adds to this list an unapologetic fascination with the connection between sex and violence, suggesting that the two are not merely interrelated by indistinguishable.

The reader's great fortune, of course, is to see the difference in their formal approaches to those phenomena. They could hardly be more different. And yet like all great art both possess an aura of inevitability.

With each passing week, 2666 looks more and more like the great novel of our time. Like all great novels, it's prophetic—by which I mean: it announces, in advance of everyone else, where the seeds of our destruction lie buried. Dostoyevsky foresaw the destruction of Europe in the death of Christianity and the displacement of 19th century liberalism by totalitarianism aligned with science. In our case, Bolaño sees our doom sprouting in a dusty desert Mexican city named Ciudad Juárez.

Five years ago, to declare Ciudad Juárez the source of our doom would have seemed crazy. No longer. Mexico's descent into madness and our inability (political, moral, economic, aesthetic) to cope with that descent looks more and more like Yeats's rough beast. And the rise of the police state in Arizona demonstrates that we're placing our hopes for the future in armed conflict. History has given us plenty of lessons on what happens next.

I suppose it's a shame that Bolaño didn't quite finish his book. Like The Savage Detectives, it suffers from untidiness. On the other hand, untidiness is no doubt one of its ambitions, being a repudiation of the myths of control and perfection that Bolaño saw as dishonest and dangerous ugliness. He spent his youth, after all, in exile from Pinochet's Chile.

2666 can be exceedingly difficult to read. The long middle section, called "The Part About the Crimes," gives us an unblinking collage of the murders of hundreds of girls. I don't know how Bolaño intuited that the 1990s murders of girls in Ciudad Juárez foretold the dissolution of the Mexican state—and possibly the beginning of the end of liberalism in the Americas. Regardless, the question now is, What else does this novel foretell, that we're still failing to see?