Didn't read a lot when I was writing so much -- that was another odd thing. If I write more, will I read less? What an odd thought -- like breathing less. My eyes are v irritated, continually weeping and drying up. Don't know what the problem is -- v annoying. Wonder if something's really wrong, or if it is just some kind of allergic annoyance. Corporealization still disagrees with me. I'd rather be a phrase of music, embodied but fleeting, its passing and existence the same thing, bound and unbound by time.
Reread Peck's Hatchet Jobs -- yes, it has the ultra-shocker Birkerts and Moody reviews in it, but also a rather lengthy thoughtful consideration of "gay epic novels," which unfortunately is nearly so dull as to be unreadable, and a paen to a writer he does like, although honestly after reading the review I couldn't remember why he liked her work. Peck is an interesting literary phenomenon, but I'll have to think about him more systematically to write anything coherent. I have to say I am apparently the one person on the planet who kinda liked Rick Moody's memoir of depression, though, although that was probably because it was a memoir about depression -- I don't much like his fiction. (I'm a little surprised no reviewers came up with the title "Peck's (A) Bad Boy," but apparently I'm just a lot older or have a lot longer memory than I previously realized.) I like reading descriptions of panic attacks -- I can't help it. When someone confesses to panic attacks, I have a moment of warm glowing fellow-feeling, even if the fellow in question is Moody.
(The one thing I can muster up is that the size of Peck's book is bad -- the reviews aren't that long and neither is the book -- while Will Self's recent book isn't much longer but contains multitudes more. Must reread that one, too. Not sure why I am so irritated by this trend of minibooks which are either sort of nurtured from magazine articles, like floppy cuttings, or made up out of magazine articles, like collages. Not that there's anything wrong with collections -- take, frex, Kael's early criticism, in which movie reviews are gathered together into a kind of aesthetic bildungsroman -- but it's just annoying. "Pay thirty dollars for this novel which isn't even 200 full pages! With lots of white space!" I remember when New Yorker articles used to be so long (and good) they were nearly minibooks in themselves -- and then were expanded to be real books (Hiroshima, Silent Spring, the recent Genie). Now it's like someone sells an article as a book proposal, but doesn't produce a book, they just tack a little bit more onto the article. I blame Janet Malcolm, really.)
In the midst of reading Seligman's Sontage & Kael, which is pretty much a straight-up binary Kael Good Dionysian/Sontag Bad Apollonian, despite his protestations about how much he admires Sontag. I don't care for Sontag at all and bought it as a remainder book only because some of the writing about Kael is interesting -- I wish someone would really write about her influence on the culture, write about what reading her was like. I remember when people were more excited over her reviews than the movies. Which actually wasn't good, of course, but it was still pretty astonishing as a literary phenomena. The book is wholly unsystematic and pretty much bounces back and forth from Sontag to Kael and isn't chronologically arranged, either, so he bounces back and forth in their careers and between various books as well -- the only reason I'm reading it straight through is because the Kael bits aren't all in a separate section. I'm old-fashioned, I guess, or just too Hegelian, but I did expect a book like this to be something like Thesis + Antithesis = Synthesis, or, Sontag + Kael = Why I Wrote A Book About Them. And I mean a reason other than "I really like them a lot and just felt like it." The author does bring up a number of times how much he wanted to have Kael as a friend and how great it was when it actually happened, which seems to put Sontag at a natural disadvantage (indeed, he sort of anti-name-drops that he's had opportunities to meet her, but deliberately hasn't).
It's funny that Sontag is now going to be remembered as some kind of epic novelist -- unless her little 9/11 piece swamps that, or maybe the sorta art-performance air of staging (a truncated) Waiting for Godot in Sarajevo -- when I remember the intellectual horror that arose when she said maybe the Reader's Digest had, in fact, had it right about Communism -- although I pretty much only remember Brodsky's bitter amusement that only in America could such a sharp intellectual painfully admit such a thing after decades. ?? -what did RdrsDigest say? and Bodsky bitter & amused that (only) in Amer cld intellectual admit (recant?)??
Damn, my eyes hurt. Wake up in the morning and sometimes they're nearly sealed shut. No idea what this is. Going from annoying to alarming. It's not pinkeye -- there's no swelling, whites are clear, don't have a fever.
Addendum While I was typing that -- Wow, a reporter on Nightline apparently went to Vietnam to track down eyewitnesses to what Kerry did to get the Purple Heart and Koppel is now laying the smackdown ferociously on "Swiftie" O'Neill -- "Let's stop holding up books, and see if you and I can just look at each other and get the answers to a few questions." Wow. It's like the old Mike Wallace let-me-put-you-on-the-griddle one-on-one sessions. (What else was pretty amazing was looking at these old toothless people and realizing when they'd been young and in the war, Kerry had been young and in the war -- it was like -- I don't want to say "history coming to life" because that's such an awful cliche, but realizing history is living, is a living thing, made up out of living people. This deserves a fricken Peabody.) "You went to a country that is a closed society and talked to enemies of America!" O'Neill is fizzling. Jesus ghod. Koppel just sweetly calmly asked, "Just tell me why a bunch of peasants, in a truly remote part of Southern Vietnam, who have never heard of this man before, would have an interest in independently making up similar stories that would somehow benefit John Kerry?" O'Neill: fizzle fizzle closed society fizzle his own autobiography ((holds up book for the third time in two minutes)). O'Neill is blaming Koppel for not getting the "evidence" from him. What a shame only me and a bunch of other insomniac news junkies are seeing this. (What a shame you can't get Nightline transcripts for free online anymore, either. They really shot themselves in the foot over that.) Wonder how many news outlets will pick this up. Probably noone. That's OK, at least it's been aired....Rarely have I seen a direct interview so devastating. Let's see Jon Stewart do that, hey.
___________ wow what a nice post. really like what's said and how. have had bkmarked on browser since 1.29.07 & so am posting on that date. today is actually 4.21.08
also had marked, to read:
Notes on Susan - The New York Review of Books: Volume 54, Number 13 · August 16, 2007
Notes on Susan By Eliot Weinberger
No comments:
Post a Comment