§ An unlikely-but-welcome source for Kelis remix mp3s: Franklin Bruno. In case you hadn't heard, Mr. Bruno has of late switched blogs from semiprivate Imagined Slights to semipublic nervous unto thirst, in what seems to be a sort of experiment in the fate of the diaristic and the materiality of the fantasy audience.
§ I challenge you: Michiko Kakutani's review of the new Thomas Pynchon novel seems calculated to clarify the enduring fog of her dislikes into an incisive moment, a hat in the ring of Best Insult Review Ever. The opening graf:
Thomas Pynchon’s new novel, “Against the Day,” reads like the sort of imitation of a Thomas Pynchon novel that a dogged but ungainly fan of this author’s might have written on quaaludes. It is a humongous, bloated jigsaw puzzle of a story, pretentious without being provocative, elliptical without being illuminating, complicated without being rewardingly complex.Study questions: When did Michiko ever argue in favor of the "rewardingly complex"? Also, who here thinks Michiko really ever took a Quaalude? (Maybe back when it was Mandrax; anyway, tell your copy editor that brand names take a capital letter near the start.) The review itself, naturally, reads like a the sort of imitation of a Dale Peck review that a dogged but ungainly fan of that hatchet man's might...well, you get the idea. We have no judgment of its judgment, having not read the novel under review; however, such is scarcely necessary to point out that the review's stance that Mason & Dixon is Pynchon's masterwork puts the opinions expressed therein within a particular frame to which the term "contrarian" can't quite do justice. "Dumb" seems closer, or the less wieldy "still panicky about modernism." Such dumb panic leads to its share of howlers, inevitably: "The problem is these characters are drawn in such a desultory manner that they might as well be plastic chess pieces." Linger over that for a moment, won't you? If you find something odd about "drawn" and "plastic chess pieces," that may be a mixed metaphor you're sensing. They don't look like chess pieces, after all. Now, we here at sugarhigh! would have at least hoped that someone — family dog? Quaalude dealer? — would have noted, pre-publication, a passage that appears just three paragraphs earlier. In a flurry of insults familiar from the books sections of third-tier college papers worldwide, Kakutani has already proclaimed that, while Pynchon's novels usually treat characters "merely as pawns in the author’s philosophical chess game, the people in “Against the Day” are little more than stick figure cartoons." So you mean they're not chess pieces? But you said....! Ooh the surgical virtuosity — and they say the drugs don't work anymore. A truly vicious review will have to achieve more clarity than this, one fears; it feels less like a hit piece than a condensation of decades of Kakutani's ambient hostility and cultural anxiety into, well, a poorly-written instance of ambient hostility and cultural anxiety. Not less foggy, just less of it.
§ Conversely: anyone and everyone can get a free subscription to the latest print-at-work literary micro-omnibus (omni-microbus?), The New-York Ghost, with the greatest of ease, by visiting here. The most recent issue starts with the paranoid rantings of some New Yorker who feels certain his life has been pirated away into a character in the season's literary succes d'estime, pardon our French. Highly regarded.
Posted by jane at November 20, 2006 09:01 AM | TrackBack