On Rachel Shteir and Linkbait

Last week Rachel Shteir’s review of The Third Coast, Golden, and You Were Never in Chicago appeared in the New York Times Book Review (though she claims it is actually an essay). Proud Chicagoans quickly responded: every city has problems, Chicago has a lot going for it, and Shteir can go back to New York if she misses a “real” city so much.

I followed up with a bit of reading on Shteir, including an interview that made her views a little clearer. Her argument is more that Chicagoans are prone to boosterism and ignore the very real problems that their city has. (She also says that the personal remarks against her are a “sad commentary on the state of criticism.” As true that sounds, it makes me think of her as the huffy old person pining for the good old days when debate held to a high level of decorum and no one ever said anything untoward). As she said that she viewed it as an essay more than a review, and as I’m someone who’s taught about writing essays here and there, I’ve got a few humble bits of advice for the esteemed professor.

1)      Beginning your essay by quoting a conversation with your friend in which you list Chicago’s problems makes it sound like you’re thesis is that Chicago sucks. If you state your actual argument (that Chicagoans are so prone to boosterism that they don’t admit to/address their problems) at the outset and people will A) know what the charges against their city are and B) be forced to reckon with those charges on your terms.

2)      You wonder how many times Milton Friedman passed by the projects on his way to Lakeshore drive from the University of Chicago campus without entering them… and then admit that you rarely left Hyde Park as an undergraduate at same. I’m not saying that students need to venture into unsafe neighborhood to have cred, but to accuse Friedman of a something you yourself didn’t do isn’t really fair.

3)      The only book of the three that you like is Dyja’s The Third Coast. It sounds quite like you find Chicago’s history as a place for radical art and architecture to be the most interesting bit of everything you read, but then you bury it in a justifiable but unconstructive complaint about Chicagoans’ inability to take criticism (and no, I don’t buy it when you suggest that ruffling feathers is in and of itself a good thing that contributes to the debate). If you’re interested in that part of Chicago’s history, and I am interested in that part of Chicago’s history, why not tell me about that and relegate the stuff about Chicago boosterism somewhere else?

All that aside, what I really think is going on is linkbait. Shteir is obviously a smart woman, and the editorial staff at the Times has, you know, a little bit of experience, but one wonders if they’re really just stirring the pot to get hits on their webpage. After all, I wouldn’t have found out about all this if it wasn’t for the criticism Shteir was taking for trashing Chicago as she does. If I’m going to imply that I’m smart enough to identify poorly constructed arguments, I should also be smart enough to recognize the fact that I get my news through filters that favor arguments that are built to inflame more than edify. Such are the modern media.

A Very Short Review of Richard Ellman’s Joyce Biography

James Joyce by Richard Ellmann

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

All of the artist, none of the art.

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On the Bedside Table

I finally picked up Richard Ellman’s biography of Joyce (the urge to call it seminal is almost overpowering, but doing so would give Joyce’s credit to the wrong person) and am going to a shoot for a chapter a night. While the writing is a sharp drop-off from Capote, Ellman does dig up a few gems, eg John Joyce’s phrase “with the help of God and a few policemen.”

Review of Capote’s Breakfast at Tiffany’s

Breakfast at Tiffany’s by Truman Capote

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

“He’d been put together with care, his brown head and bullfighter’s figure had an exactness, a perfection, like an apple, an orange, something nature has made just right.” (From BAT)

Breakfast at Tiffany’s is somewhere between a novella and a long short story, and it is easy to dismiss it as a feathery, disposable product of a self-conscious, would-be debutante looking to secure his place in New York café society;* what fan of Serious Literature, of Dostoevsky and Dickens, would find in such a slender volume anything but a momentary diversion? But the work shines like its heroine all the more for the fact that it only seems so lightweight, that it and she capture such oceans of human need and forgiveness and ugliness in what appear to be such trifles.

It’s a marvelous book, for the character of Holly Golightly (who ranks, to adapt Hemingway, among the many discoveries Man has made about himself)** and for the fact that it is composed almost entirely of sentences like that beginning this review: not too long, not too short, unassuming but perfectly clear, as tricky for a great writer as a drawn out note for a concert violinist. I’ve heard it said from a personal authority that Capote is one for the only writers to give F. Scott Fitzgerald a run for his money; this is true, and my only addition will be that this comparison is so inviting for the fact that both writers capture fleeting, important feelings that happen when one is too young to appreciate and too old to forget, and their melancholy mood is more difficult perhaps than either comedy or tragedy.

I cannot recommend this book highly enough; it is a masterwork on structuring and telling a story; it is a miracle of balance and precision, delicate, tasteful, perfect as the jewelry at its namesake. I cannot imagine how many years of practice and preparation Capote gave to be able to write this book, but he reached his mark. Sometimes it is nature that makes things just right and sometimes it is art.

*I’d come across Capote not through his writing but through the pair of recent films detailing the circumstances around his research for In Cold Blood; this did a great injustice to the man, for despite the age’s tendency in biography to show warts and all, we’d all like to be remembered for our best moments, and for all his apparent ego and delight in fashionable company I doubt that Capote would have put many things ahead of his chosen craft or its marvelous result.

**please do forgive the masculine pronouns; it does sound so much less sonorous if it is adapted too far from Hemingway’s words.

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Too good to pass up…

It just so happened that I read Breakfast at Tiffany’s on the same week I read a profile of porn starlet du jour Stoya. I can’t resist:

“Certain shades of limelight ruin a girl’s complexion.” –Holly Golightly

http://www.villagevoice.com/2013-04-24/news/stoya-pop-star-of-porn/

Another Sort of Marathon

I just finished the entire run of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine. 173 episodes, 121 hours and 6 minutes of TV that took 7 seasons to produce and 4 months to consume.  Here are a few thoughts:

• It is a huge step up from the original show inasmuch as the focus is much more on the long term plot.
• For a pop TV show it gets pretty dark: The Federation is supposedly about rationality and rights and justice and all that, but even the series protagonist Ben Sisko engages in a certain amount of arm twisting and political skullduggery. It’s all the more rewarding for the ambiguity.
• When they aren’t paying attention to the main plot, the writers can lose track of that ambiguity and fail to follow up on it.[i] It makes you think of what might have been.
• There’s a lot of fat and filler. If you subtracted the wacky Quark plotlines, the holosuite-malfunction plotlines, the time-travel plotlines and all of the potential villains that the writers test run and drop,[ii] you could probably trim 50% of DS9’s run-time and still get a decent long-form story.
• Many of the actor’s performances set up plotlines that are subsequently dropped or reversed in a way that suits the plot as it develops.[iii] These aren’t red herrings—you just get the sense that the writers were making it up as it went along, and these are just seams showing.
• It’s easy to compare the show unfavorably with later triumphs like The Sopranos, The Wire, and Breaking Bad, which shows most people agree are some of the best television produced, and which no one would scoff at you for liking or comparing to high art from other periods.[iv]
• Before doing that, though, I consider the differences between the system that produced DS9 and that which produced the previously mentioned series. DS9 was one of the last network shows that weren’t delivered over the internet. It maximized profit by producing a TON of content that could be syndicated. They wrote twice the number of episodes per seasons as The Sopranos, The Wire, and Breaking Bad. Given that task, the writers couldn’t very well write only episodes that had to do with the Dominion; they’d risk boring people who didn’t like that plotline and losing people who’d missed a few episodes and didn’t know what had happened since they’d last tuned in. And so they sprinkled these among smaller, standalone episodes.

Even with that in mind, I have to ask myself whether or not the show itself is compelling. My answer: for all the modern ambiguity, it still works primarily in the deep sort of way that we think of as childish or hokey or wonderful, depending on our temperament. It is not so gutwrenching or as challenging as some of the other shows I mentioned. It is not, dare I say, as well acted or as well executed. But that brings its own charm. It is easy and safe to like Mad Men, but it takes a good bit of youthful enthusiasm to take your cockamamie theory about how the Star Trek is really similar to Wagner’s Ring Cycle and run with it. Maybe you’ll get it wrong, but I’ll take unabashed enthusiasm over wry distan

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[i] Example 1: Dax goes off to fulfill a blood feud that she is not obligated to fulfill. She doesn’t pull the trigger, so to speak, but she has run off to murder someone, a little problem that other characters only mention within that one episode. Example 2: At a certain point Quark becomes an arms dealer. Everyone gets mad at him in the episode, but all is forgotten by the time the credits roll. Example 3: we learn that the morally upright Odo once failed to protect the rights of the accused and innocent. Major Kyra is shocked to learn that he would ever have failed so glaringly, but that doesn’t stop her from getting together with him later on.

[ii] First it’s Gul Dukat the Cardassians… then the Maquis… then the Jem Hadar… then the Dominion… then the Founders… then the Cardassians and the Dominion… then it’s the Breen… you get the idea.

[iii] E.g. O’Brien and Kyra seem to have a momentary attraction while she is carrying Keiko’s baby, Jake Cisco seems a bit infatuated with Ezri Dax, when Worf comes aboard he has a tense moment with O’Brien that is never explained. Gul Dukat and Damar’s personalities also change rather conveniently: Dukat is a heartless functionary in an evil regime; then he finds his long-lost daughter and—instead of killing her to bury the evidence as a Cardassian would usually do—he takes her back home and destroys his political career. In the process he becomes a sympathetic freedom fighter. But then the daughter dies and he becomes a half-mad religious fanatic bent on destruction. Damar is Dukat’s right hand man, then a stock heartless Cardassian (he’s the one who kills Dukat’s daughter), then an alcoholic collaborator and political puppet, then a freedom fighter in the cause.

[iv] For our part, my little circle thinks of Breaking Bad as Shakespearean tragedy and Mad Men as a Gatsbyesque.

Dostoevsky’s the Brothers Karamazov

The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoevsky

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I just finished reading The Brothers Karamazov and have some thoughts on the book.
1) If you’ve been following you’ll know that I originally planned to stop reading after every decile of the book and comment on what was going on. Obviously that didn’t work—I may have been too busy with the Hurricane and Holidays, or I may just have wanted to enjoy the experience of a book without noting every little aspect thereof; losing that habit might hurt my chances if I ever wound up in graduate school, but it made reading a little more pleasurable.
2) I first read it in college and was, as many people are, overwhelmed by it; it seemed awe-inspiringly total somehow, like Ulysses or Shakespeare. In the afterglow of my twenties I remembered it as an intricate machine that worked flawlessly to communicate FMD’s ideas about Russia and the world.
3) This time around I realized that I’d been thinking of Demons, which book has much more to do with FMD’s thoughts on Russia and which features the most beautifully engineered plot he ever produced. There are some bits about the direction Russia was taking at the time (the prosecutor self-consciously uses Gogol’s image of the galloping troika in the finale of his speech… but the speech isn’t so clean cut as the political stuff in Demons).
4) Where The Brothers Karamazov excels is in the characterizations and psychology of the characters; as a friend put it, no one speaks like the characters of Karamazov, but we believe them because they all speak very frankly about basic, conflicting motivations. No wonder Freud loved the book.
5) It’s pretty clear that Alyosha is the best or most capable of the three brothers, and that FMD almost idolizes him. I even used Alyosha’s name as a part of my email address, and yet I realize that I felt more akin to Dmitri and Ivan this time around; there is something a bit less believable about Alyosha, or maybe I’ve just lived more and realize how flawed and human and believable Dmitri and Ivan are. Dmitri eventually decides that “I am” is the most important realization he can have, perhaps the only philosophical position he can believe has consequence; it is both simple and deep.
6) The overarching plot of the book is relatively simple; the marvelous thing about it all fits together, that FMD approached the book almost like an amateur investigator or court reporter, inasmuch as everything had to add up. And yet he incorporates all of the backstories and character histories flawlessly, so that we are introduced to new, minor characters even several hundred pages into the book.
7) Those characterizations are pitch perfect; as good as the book is in its entirety, FMD is also a supremely talented miniaturist.
8) The whole thing was meant as a prelude to a larger book centered on Alyosha. It is a shame that we don’t get to read what FMD had in mind; perhaps Alyosha would have become a more complete character, more believable. But perhaps that is the point, is why FMD ends the book with Alyosha’s unpolished speech at the stone and why the characters of the school children feel so important: they are as yet unformed, their futures are unwritten, and that, so long as they can remember a moment at which they felt truly, genuinely good, there is hope; it is a countersign to Dmitri’s “I am,” and a humble response to Ivan’s moral permissiveness.

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