TFTD

Life is motion, and motion is concerned with what makes man move—which is ambition, power, pleasure. What time a man can devote to morality, he must take by force from the motion of which he is a part. He is compelled to make choices between good and evil sooner or later, because moral conscience demands that from him in order that he can live with himself tomorrow. His moral conscience is the curse he had to accept from the gods in order to gain from them the right to dream.

— William Faulkner, "The Art of Fiction No. 12"

Waiting for the Barbarians, by J.M. Coetzee

In Coetzee one discovers that humility—an awareness of one's insignificance—liberates an artist far more than confidence. Coetzee writes as if it doesn't matter what he says: he is not, he seems to think, that important. So he tells the truth.

He also writes as if he doesn't entirely trust the novel as an art form. Which is interesting for someone commonly—and rightly—regarded as the greatest living English-language novelist.

Allegorist. Fablist. Novelist. Whatever. Writer: Waiting for the Barbarians is my lifetime's best dystopian novel.

Like Kafka and Beckett, Coetzee produces stories that glow with an aura of myth or scripture. He doesn't have Beckett's lyrical gifts or Kafka's knack for a single, acute metaphor. But he's more formally rigorous—at least as a novelist—than either of them: a bit more the Protestant, perhaps: less mystical, more lawful, neater, a better citizen, a more conscientious craftsman.

Coming myself from similar stock, I mean that as a compliment. I appreciate his attentiveness. There's nothing vainglorious or self-indulgent about his art. Unlike Kafka and Beckett, he chooses communication over innovation; and I find no writer of his generation, with the possible exception of his compatriot Nadine Gordimer, as profoundly ethical, as morally engaged. Like his narrator in Barbarians, J.M. Coetzee is our era's John the Baptist, a voice in the wilderness, describing not just the form but the content of our advancing doom.

As with Kafka, as with Beckett, we ignore him at our peril.

Bring Your Legs with You, by Darrell Spencer

America, in other words, is a very poor lens through which to view Las Vegas, while Las Vegas is a wonderful lens through which to view America.
— Dave Hickey, Air Guitar

Which might explain why Bring Your Legs with You, written by (full disclosure) a long-ago professor of mine, seems like the most American novel I've read since reading The Friends of Eddie Coyle, three years ago.

Some backstory: While escorting me through BYU's undergraduate English program, Darrell consistently argued for the value of provincial, hardboiled American fiction. He didn't want Tuscany or Paris; he wanted—as our common mentor, François Camoin once said said—a 7-eleven in Nebraska. Maybe impulsively (maybe not), Darrell declared Ray the greatest American novel of the last 25 years. You want American Lit.? Then read Hammett. Read Chandler. Read Wise Blood. Read early Carver. If you'd like, take a shot at Lot 49. And read Ray. You've got to read Ray.

And, as often as possible, go to Las Vegas.

So I'm with Hickey: I suspect that Bring Your Legs with You is a fantastic lens through which to view modern American life—with its scammers, its dreamers, its lovers, its killers—because it's a Las Vegas novel: provincial, hardboiled, desert-hot, sexy, tough-guy lyrical, and suspicious of hope (optimism just about always being a sign of deluded thinking).

Through a series of interconnected stories, we follow the possible-comeback of Tommy Rooke, one-time heavyweight contender, and his band of all-American merry-making schemers. Most of the stories are self-contained masterpieces; a couple of them felt like they served primarily to keep the narrative rolling. Regardless, they all reflect Spencer's extraordinary ear for the music of modern American English.

I haven't seen Darrell in many years. But I suppose an author's best company should be his books. Regardless, Bring your Legs with You is wonderful company. Ten years have passed since its publication—which is fine. After all, Roberto Bolaño, who knew a thing or two about literature, once said that the first requirement of a masterpiece is that it pass unnoticed. At least it's out there. And, like Spencer's toughs, it's ready when you are.

Speak, Assassin: In Defense of "Her"

"Her" is fantastic. Much of its dramatic power hinges on an exquisite scene that comes about 2/3s of the way through the film, when Theodore, played by Joaquin Phoenix, has lunch with Catherine, played by Rooney Mara, to hand over their divorce papers, for her to sign.

In a review called "Love Objects," Elaine Blair, writing for the New York Review of Books, attacks the scene for idealizing and objectifying Catherine.

But her critique misreads the scene, in my view. I posted the following comment to the review:

I took this scene to be shot in cinema's version of free indirect indirect style: we aren't seeing Catherine as the world sees her but as Theodore sees her. Jonze's reliance on free indirect style, which he uses, I think, with extraordinary delicacy, applies to every moment that Catherine is on screen. 

Throughout the film, Theodore embodies our tendency to idealize the past—particularly a past love. His professional life, his constant reminiscing, and, most poignantly, his relationship with Catherine all reflect this tendency. So it should come as no surprise that when Theodore actually comes face-to-face with his past, in the present, Jonze makes clear to us what he is seeing: not the present but the past; the idealized object of his desire, flawless, eternally young—his Beatrice. 

The fact that Theodore can only see Catherine as a desired object, that he has lost the capacity to experience her as a desiring subject, is not a flaw in the film but its triumph: we contemplate together love's greatest loss, in which the beloved is now but a memory, and as a memory no longer herself—an object, not a subject, forever.