As discussed...

...ad infinitum.

One reservation: a residue of elitism in the notion that a key to the fun of reading genre stories is the knowledge that we could be reading something better. Betcha some genre fiction defenders would find that patronizing.

"And part of the pleasure we derive from them is the knowledge that we could be reading something better, something that, in the words of [Matthew] Arnold, reflects "the best that has been thought and said in this world. ... readers who seek out mystery novels are seeking to escape not from life but from literature, from the 'pluperfect tenses of the psychical novel.'"

Looking at the quotes again I realize he's being sarcastic; patronizing the snobs, if anything.

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Good grief...

The only TV show to date to be covered episode-by-episode in a New Yorker blog (by sainted Godard-worshipper Richard Brody) is now the subject of the sort of lead-review rave that the NYRB usually reserves for seasons of "Downton Abbey." I love the show, but this level of tastemaker over-reaction suggests that the fix is somehow in. Is "Girls" really that much better than everything else on the air?

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Just a taste...

"Trailers From Hell"

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Just maybe not so bad.....

Joe Morgenstern on Polisse:

  ...What makes this astonishing French feature a singular experience is the convergence of fine acting, moral urgency and a willingness to linger on moments of great intensity. ..... Fred embodies the movie's moral and dramatic center. A passionately dedicated public servant, though also a volatile and violent one, he's played by the French rapper Joeystarr, a burly figure whose tenderness put me in mind of Wallace Beery.......  (The director and co-writer) Maïwenn—who was born Maïwenn Le Besco—plays Melissa, a photographer assigned to document the unit's activities. Like everyone else in the cast, she's an excellent actor with a great director.

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At long last...

..."Castle" takes the plunge.

The show at its best is near-perfect escapism, bending but not breaking the conventions of Old School, pre-cable primetime detective foolishness. But the increasingly strained contrivances needed to keep the leads apart were becoming irritating. Now "Castle" has a chance to become, if not "The Thin Man" at least "Hart to Hart," than which many things are worse.

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The worst ten best? Or, how to get laughed at in the teens.

John Podhoretz, whom I generally admire, has been making great fun of Richard Brody's list of the ten greatest films of all time, posted and explained here.  He calls it the worst ten best list ever published and then goes further by posting Brody's picture and making fun of THAT. (To quote a line from Rocky "I don't see any crowd around you...") Adolescent hi-jinks aside -- and that 's what Twitter is for, right? -- there is a point to be made about the dangers of going too far in refining your taste for something that is, after all, a vital and popular art.  Here's the list.  (Turns out that I've seen all of these except "Voyage to Italy", and there are only two movies on the list -- "Playtime" and "Rules of the Game" of course -- that I seriously treasure.  It is truly a strange list, I must say.)

“King Lear” (1987, Jean-Luc Godard)
“The Great Dictator” (1940, Charlie Chaplin)
“The Last Laugh” (1924, F. W. Murnau)
“Marnie” (1964, Alfred Hitchcock)
“Shoah” (1985, Claude Lanzmann)
“The Rules of the Game” (1939, Jean Renoir)
“Gertrud” (1964, Carl Theodor Dreyer)
“Playtime” (1967, Jacques Tati)
“Husbands” (1970, John Cassavetes)
“Voyage to Italy” (1953, Roberto Rossellini)

UPDATE: Fanning the flames, Podhoretz in back to back tweets today quotes both James Wood on Hilary Mantel's gift of being interesting and Salman Rushdie saying: "Art is not entertainment. At it's very best, it's a revolution." To which Podhoretz adds: "Which is why he's a bad artist."

You could write a book on turning common-or-garden variety anti-intellectualism into its own aesthetic. Lots of people have, I'll bet.  I often lean that way myself, especially when confronted with the company I'd have to keep otherwise.

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Broken-spined paperbacks

An interesting summary review of the six contenders for this year's Nebula by Chris Barsanti in The Millions.  Nothing here really attracts me this year (except Embassytown, of course, but I'm not sure if I'm up to it), but I loved his description of  "Among Others" by Jo Walton. (Especially since I just talked to an old friend who was reading a much-loved Ace Double until it fell apart in his hands.)

Walton’s real story is Morwenna’s love of science fiction. The novel is told in diary form, and nearly every entry includes some finely argued notation on the joys and merits of what she’s reading. Her list is heavy with dark transgressors like Samuel R. Delany and John Brunner, as befitting Walton’s late-1970s setting. There’s a gripping, deeply-learned love here that goes beyond mere fandom, delivering one of the most intelligently impassioned odes to science fiction, and reading in general, ever put to paper. As Morwenna says on entering her father’s study: “I actually relaxed in his presence, because if there are books perhaps it won’t be all that bad.” Anybody who has felt the glow and tug of mind-warping joy that comes with devouring a stack of broken-spined sci-fi paperbacks will know exactly what she means.

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"Black Wings" and Black Lizard

The incessant buzz around upcoming films can indeed be irritating, and to some of us more than others. But this report led me to information about a possibly great vintage (not Vintage, or at least not yet) noir novel that was completely unknown to me. And yet, no less an authority than Black Lizard founding guru Ed Gorman is willing to entertain the possibility that the "flawless" "Black Wings Has My Angel," by Elliot Chaze, is "the single best novel Gold Medal published during its heyday." Elsewhere, Bill Pronzini offers a picture of Chaze and says he wrote three other books that are almost as good. Marching orders, if I ever heard any.

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For my friends who want to discuss serious music

Offered here as an educational service of the Hungry Ghost blog:

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This is what matters, right?

James Wood, recommending Hilary Mantel's novels about Thomas Cromwell:

When a historical fact is central to a novelistic detail, Mantel uses it in a way so novelistically intelligent that the historical fact seems to have been secretly transposed into a fictional one:

This season young men carry their effects in soft pale leather bags, in imitation of the agents for the Fugger bank, who travel all over Europe and set the fashion. The bags are heart-shaped and so to him it always looks as if they are going wooing, but they swear they are not. Nephew Richard Cromwell sits down and gives the bags a sardonic glance.

Do you know if Mantel has manufactured or borrowed from the record this information about the fashionable Fugger bag? In some sense, it doesn’t matter, because the writer has made a third category of the reality, the plausibly hypothetical. It’s what Aristotle claimed was the difference between the historian and the poet: the former describes what happened, and the latter what might happen.

If you want to know what novelistic intelligence is, you might compare a page or two of Hilary Mantel’s work with worthy historical fiction by contemporary writers such as Peter Ackroyd or Susan Sontag. They are intelligent, but they are not novelistically intelligent. They copy the motions but rarely inhabit the movement of vitality. Mantel knows what to select, how to make her scenes vivid, how to kindle her characters. She seems almost incapable of abstraction or fraudulence; she instinctively grabs for the reachably real. Her two most recent novels concern famous historical events—Henry VIII’s divorce from Catherine of Aragon, his marriage to Anne Boleyn, her execution at the King’s orders, the English split from the Roman Church and the authority of the Pope—but they make the stories fragile again, with everything at suspenseful risk.

In short, this novelist has the maddeningly unteachable gift of being interesting.

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Jane Smiley on ownership...

From Horse Heaven:

...there was no reason for the man not to sell the horse. Herman Newman was not a horseman, and seemed uncomfortable in his new role as owner. All over the world, on the other hand, there were deserving men who had spent dozens of years and millions of dollars without ever coming to a horse like Epic Steam. Why should Herman Newman, a man who couldn't remember what a blinker was from one day to the next, run a horse like this one, when men who knew horses, who had horses in their blood, who in some cases believed that they had been horses in previous lifetimes, had no chance at him? Ah. Well. Of all the things that were unfair, ownership, the simplest of them, often seemed the unfairest of all.

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Oh. Now I get it.

 From a review by David Shields of a book called "The Grey Album", by Kevin Young:

“Pleasure is a revolutionary act in the face of pain,” Young argues. “Hip-hop at its zenith insists on thinking and dancing simultaneously. In fact, it sees them as synonymous.”

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In memoriam Levon Helm

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Thai food gallery

The offspring documents some of the high points of her trip to Thailand.

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Without comment

HT to Michael Lavorgna

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The 40 Year Rule

As explicated by Adam Gopnik in the current New Yorker, while discussing "Mad Men": "The prime site of nostalgia is always whatever happened, or is thought to have happened, in the decade between forty and fifty years past." Explains why pizza parlors when I was a kid always looked like barber shop quartets lived there.....

He has this lovely thought:

And so, if we can hang on, it will be in the twenty-fifties that the manners and meanings of the Obama era will be truly revealed: only then will we know our own essence. A small, attentive child, in a stroller on some Brooklyn playground or Minneapolis street, is already recording the stray images and sounds of this era: Michelle’s upper arms, the baritone crooning sound of NPR, people sipping lattes (which a later decade will know as poison) at 10 A.M.—manners as strange and beautiful as smoking in restaurants and drinking Scotch at 3 P.M. seem to us. A series or a movie must already be simmering in her head, with its characters showing off their iPads and staring at their flat screens: absurdly antiquated and dated, they will seem, but so touching in their aspiration to the absolutely modern. Forty years from now, we’ll know, at last, how we looked and sounded and made love, and who we really were. It will be those stroller children’s return on our investment, and, also, of course, a revenge taken on their time.

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The things you learn from The New Aesthetic, pt. 2

Just how many people surf porn sites?

Engineers know: they know everything these days...

At peak time, YouPorn serves 4000 pages per second, equating to burst traffic in the region of 100 gigabytes per second, or 800Gbps.

To put that 800Gbps figure into perspective, the internet only handles around half an exabyte of traffic every day, which equates to around 50Tbps — in other words, a single porn site accounts for almost 2% of the internet’s total traffic. There are dozens of porn sites on the scale of YouPorn, and hundreds that are the size of ExtremeTech or your favorite news site. It’s probably not unrealistic to say that porn makes up 30% of the total data transferred across the internet.

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The things you learn from The New Aesthetic(tm)

Others here may scoff, but Sterling keeps circling around the issue really, really ,really, trying to figure out whether The New Aesthetic project is the first strike in an attempt to come to grips with the digitization of everything. Says Sterling in an essay entitled "Still Freaking Out!!!!!"

How would you know if some new aesthetic was really and truly a “new way of seeing?” How would you prove that this had happened in real life? What would be convincing evidence that such an event had taken place in our world? What proofs could one demand, or offer, that such a thing was an authentic cultural change?

So far, the best evidence that something has really changed is of this kind. Imagine you were walking around your own familiar neighborhood with some young, clever guy. Then he suddenly stops in the street, takes a picture of something you never noticed before, and starts chuckling wryly. And he does that for a year, and maybe five hundred different times.

That’s the New Aesthetic Tumblr. This wunderkammer proves nothing by itself. It’s a compendium of evidence, a heap of artifacts, and that evidence matters. It’s a compilation of remarkable material by creative digital-native types who are deeply familiar with the practical effects of these tools and devices.

They’re looking for instances when this use-activity pops out of the background of some older, contrasting worldview. Without this eye-catching glitch aspect, without this sharply perceptible and thought-provoking contrast, it wouldn’t look or feel “new.”

Consider, for instance, the Indian legislators porn-surfing on iPads while their legislature is in session. These dignitaries are not performing-freaks who are there to amuse us. They are fellow human beings just trying to get through their day. Real legislators are always bored silly by legislation. That’s rather the point of grinding down the opposition in long procedural debates. But it doesn’t occur to these Indian nabobs that their brand-new Apple anti-boredom toys are big screens flashing sleazy softcore pr0n to indignant shoulder-surfers.

That’s why this interesting incident shows up on the New Aesthetic tumblr radar. The prurient Indian press thinks that this story is all about porn and the class privilege of the Indian ruling caste. The New Aesthetic crowd thinks it’s about the social impact of handheld-device deployment. They’re both right, but porn and class privilege are both eternal, while iPad deployment is a phenomenon we’re all still getting our heads around.

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Clive on Danes and the Danes

With a snarky aside about "24".

The Swedes and Danes make even the Americans look formula-ridden. I never miss an episode of Homeland (Channel 4) but nor am I ever able to forget that the same production outfit made 24. Sooner or later either Claire Danes or Damian Lewis will be asked to do something stupid.

But at least the Americans, on occasion, know that the fizz of fine brains working on a problem can be good television. Here in Britain it is often as if the people who made the show – let’s say it’s about the political loyalties of a bunch of people who shared a house in their student days – got all the way through university without meeting even one person smarter than they were. You just don’t get the sense that television drama here is being made by the top grade of minds. In the Scandinavian countries, evolution seems to have gone further.

This observation is probably too generalised to be useful and there are, of course, exceptions: if you remember State of Play, you remember something truly intricate, with Bill Nighy given ample room to groan and purr. But on the whole our television drama conveys no sense that there might be an elite within the elite: a dedicated bunch who think that television drama is the top dog among the creative media and who have the mental wherewithal to prove it. I am just one of the millions of people in my generation who have never been very confident about finding Denmark on the map, but look at the Danes now: they’ve got the whole world talking about them, and every bright young man in the English-speaking countries wants to emigrate to Denmark and marry a Danish girl on the off-chance that she might turn out to be a television producer.

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Rereading...

When the Guardian calls, everybody answers. Today the question is about the books you read over and over again.. Philip Hensher claims to have read "Code of the Woosters" and "Rum Punch" and "Buddenbrooks" numerous times. Also "In Search of Lost Time" four times. Well. Ian Rankin loves Anthony Powell; John Banville reads The Great Gatsby because it isn't quite good enough to risk disenchantment. John Gray, who's the most gnarly of the bunch, reads Borges a lot. Makes sense to me. My hero Geoff Dyer has read "The Names" by Don DeLillo six times.....

I pick up "Lucky Jim" every three or four years because it makes me laugh and feeds my sense of social resentment at the same time. Also "Code of the Woosters". I try to read Proust often, but that's not quite the same thing.

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More "New Aesthetic" quotes

One of the SXSW panelists was a guy confusingly named Russell Davies.... Some cool quotes from his blog follow. I love this because it is so resolutely not-Tulkinghorn. Like a vacation from my usual obsessions

I'm also depressed about the lack of future in fashion. Every hep shop seems to be full of tweeds and leather and carefully authentic bits of restrained artisinal fashion. I think most of Shoreditch would be wondering around in a leather apron if it could. With pipe and beard and rickets. Every new coffee shop and organic foodery seems to be the same. Wood, brushed metal, bits of knackered toys on shelves. And blackboards. Everywhere there's blackboards.

Cafes used to be models of the future. Shiny and modern and pushy. Fashion used to be the same - space age fabrics, bizarre concoctions. Trainers used to look like they'd been transported in from another dimension, now they look like they were found in an estate sale.

......

Mr Gibson mentioned Bruce Sterling saying that maybe bohemias were the dreamtime of industrial societies and wondered what that implied for a post-industrial society (and made me wonder about whether you'd need to create new bohemias if you wanted to re-industrialise, which would seem like a good idea.)....

His explanation for why his novels have snapped to the now is that there's not enough solid present around on which to erect a plausible future. There are too many wild cards around. Writing something set in 2060 demands you address so many issues that we know about now, but can't imagine how they'll pan out, that convincing prediction becomes impossible. That made sense to me.

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I love a good manifesto....

While the less gifted in Austin last month were looking for the new Lena Dunham or Mumford and Sons, Bruce Sterling was attending the panel on The New Asethetic, which is a British art and design movement devoted to digital technology. Kind of like the Futurists, only eighty years on, and not, you know, fascists. He's blogged about it... A good idea first to check out the related Tumblr.... and the blog of movement godfather, James Bridle. These guys all link to one another and tweet like berserkers. A good Saturday morning project, and less time consuming than watching the NCAA tournament.

What is kind of cool about this is that Sterling is not consumed with love of the results, only of the process. He's rather wistful about it all, and, unless I'm projecting, is both passing on the torch and telling these guys that "new" isn't enough. Poor Bruce, in short, sounds like somebody has just walked over his grave....

Sterling says:

This is one of those moments when the art world sidles over toward a visual technology and tries to get all metaphysical. This is the attempted imposition on the public of a new way of perceiving reality. These things occur. They often take a while to blossom. Sometimes they’re as big and loud as Cubism, sometimes they perish like desert roses mostly unseen. But they always happen for good and sufficient reasons. Our own day has those good and sufficient reasons......

It requires close attention. If you want to engage with the New Aesthetic, then you must become involved with some contemporary, fast-moving technical phenomena. The New Aesthetic is inherently modish because it is ferociously attached to modish, passing objects and services that have short shelf-lives. There is no steampunk New Aesthetic and no remote-future New Aesthetic. The New Aesthetic has no hyphen-post, hyphen-neo or hyphen-retro. They don’t go there, because that’s not what they want.

It is generational. Most of the people in its network are too young to have been involved in postmodernity. The twentieth century’s Modernist Project is like their Greco-Roman antiquity. They want something of their own to happen, to be built, and to be seen on their networks. If that has little or nothing to do with their dusty analog heritage, so much the better for them.

So. These seem to me to be fine things. They’re not my own things, but I can see why they make good sense. They show promise. They have depth and breadth. They matter. They will have lasting consequence........

That’s the big problem, as I see it: the New Aesthetic is trying to hack a modern aesthetic, instead of thinking hard enough and working hard enough to build one. That’s the case so far, anyhow. No reason that the New Aesthetic has to stop where it stands at this moment, after such a promising start. I rather imagine it’s bound to do otherwise. Somebody somewhere will, anyhow.

That is my thesis; that’s why I think this matters. When I left the room at the SXSW “New Aesthetic” panel, this is what concerned me most. I left with the conviction that something profound had been touched. Touched, although not yet grasped.

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She likes us. She really likes us.

Mary McNamara, television critic of the LA Times, is approving in her review of "Game of Thrones". They should have let her review "John Carter (of Mars)":

This season proves, once and for all, that there is nothing remotely slackerish about fantasy culture. To be a fantasy geek requires the obsessive focus of a miniaturist and the artistic intellect of a medieval scholar....

"Game of Thrones" is breathtakingly ambitious, an ever-unfurling tapestry that threatens, at times, to overwhelm its frame. That it does not is a testament to the power of piecework — art is not defined by the space it occupies but by its details, the truth it captures. Many heads bend over this adaptation, each belonging to a master of his or her craft, and what emerges is a truly new, and miraculously accurate, definition of epic television.

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White on Kael and, implicitly, White

Long fierce piece in defense of Kael and in contempt of today's critics: all of them. Bracing stuff.

In today’s culture, journalism’s collusion with the entertainment industry has come to be expected. Post-Kael publications like Premiere Magazine, Movieline, and Entertainment Weekly have created a gushy, starstruck culture where hype and reviewing are inseparable. Today, mainstream entertainment journalism is so hand-in-glove with Hollywood in terms of what is and is not worth praise and attention—so tied up with promotional campaigns and fan-boy fervor—that journalists are bewildered and suspicious when they encounter someone who consistently deviates from that consensus. Audiences these days seem to want to be validated in their own opinions, and take personal offense to critics who do not oblige.

Considering that hype, from advertising pages to review pages, is perceived as the only way to respond to popular art, perhaps Kael’s most radical maxim comes from her 1970 piece “Notes on Heart and Mind,” when she averred: “Without a few independent critics, there’s nothing between the public and the advertisers.” That notion seems perverse today, when criticism occupies a different, more indulgent position in the culture.

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More Noir in the Library of America

Another sign that the US is getting more like France every day. David Goodis joins Philip K. Dick in the Library of America.

Good roundup and some cautionary words about Paul Cain in the WSJ. Also a reading list, which I can never resist.

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