NEW WINE IN OLD BOTTLES

I don't really mind crappy escapist fiction, a good beach read or airplane book. What I do mind is the lack of imagination and originality in these novels.

And I mind the low level of quality in so-called literary or mainstream fiction. I'm thinking of books by John Banville, Adam Ross, Jess Walter, Jonathan Franzen, John Wray and other respected, so-called literary novelists.

God damn, their stuff is disappointing, to me at least. Sorry to have to say it, but it's mostly crap, what I have seen of it. I even have problems with the works of my acquaintance Michael Chabon, who seemed like a nice enough young guy when I met him once. He's a wonderful technician, full of brilliance, line by line, but he wouldn't know a complete story if it bit him on the butt. (Sorry, Michael.)

The great literary critic Harold Bloom posits several criteria for good literature in his book "The Western Canon." One criterion is originality. He says when you read a great work for the the first time, "you encounter a stranger, an uncanny startlement rather than a fulfillment of expectations." 

In other words, a real work of art doesn't give you the same old crap that you have seen a million times before, whether it be in plays, poems, novels, or visual art -- sculpture, painting, dance, movies. 

The real thing is new, sometimes shockingly so, although that is not enough to make it art. That sense of strangeness, coupled with truth or insight into the human condition, is one way you can sort the men from the boys, the good from the bad, the wheat from the chaff.

Popular fiction is not usually original. It doesn't go for that. It does just the opposite. It gives you a warmed-over version of the same old story, the same old ideas or sounds or shapes. New wine in old bottles, as they say in Hollywood. Some people, in fact many people, prefer the familiar, like coming home to the same warm oatmeal. They read the same mystery story written under different titles by different authors. And that's fine with me. I don't have a problem with that.

As my friend Adam says, these bestseller writers are not getting paid to write well, they are getting paid to make you turn the pages.

Maybe there is a way to bring them together. We'll see.


-- Roger

© Copyright 2011, Roger R. Angle

THE VALUE OF GENIUS

Why is creativity so lowly paid and little respected in our society?

Why do we have “the starving artist”?

Why are Vincent Van Gogh's paintings worth millions now, a lot more than when he was alive?

I think I know the answer: Because we don't know how to judge art or creativity. We don't know how to value it.

We know how to measure stock values on the NYSE. Prices go up and down in hard currency. We know how to value bread or cheese, jeans or gasoline. We know how much they are worth to us.

But when we see works of genius, we don't have a clue.

Hollywood is full of creativity, yet it values mostly those movies that make the most money. The almighty $ is their yardstick.

In the art world, B.S. reigns supreme. As a friend says, If you can convince the right six or eight people you are a genius, then you are. People will gather around and kiss your fanny.

But that isn't valuing creativity. That's valuing BS. And people do love their BS. More on that in a later post.

Another thought on Van Gogh: His paintings are worth millions not because they are great art, but because they are unique, highly recognizable and highly prestigious objects. To own a Van Gogh, presumably, you have to be rich. And it is because a Van Gogh is a status symbol that it is so highly prized. At least that's what I think.

-- Roger

© Copyright 2011, Roger R. Angle

(Link:)

http://www.the-numbers.com/movies/records/budgets.php

FAULKNER, AFFLECK, AND ME

I hope this isn't too confusing, but this post, or column as I think of them, is about three things: William Faulkner, Ben Affleck and my own work.

The past few days, I have been reading and re-reading my favorite writer, William Faulkner, Nobel prize winner, son of the South, he of the long, impenetrable sentence and driven, ecstatic, almost apocalyptic prose.

Faulkner was a hell of a writer. He infused his material--his words and sentences and paragraphs and scenes and stories and novels--with an intensity of meaning found in few other writers. Certainly James Joyce. Some would say Ernest Hemingway, though I would not. Certainly Joseph Conrad and Herman Melville and their artistic descendant, Cormac McCarthy.

Isn't this what writing is all about? Yes, it is. Language charged with meaning. As Faulkner said, he "found a way of writing where each word was as dangerous as a stick of dynamite."

How did he do it? Through a combination of narrative drive and energy both from his narrators and his characters. His words do not lie dead on the page, like they do with most if not all modern popular writers. His language is alive.

I have been reading a book called, oddly, "Knight's Gambit: Six Mystery Stories by William Faulkner." Strange that the master would turn his hand to such a popular art form. I don't know if he intended these as mysteries. Perhaps he did. Certainly they have mystery elements: crime, danger, a smart "detective" who solves the mystery.

As my old poetry teacher, Charles Wright, used to say, "You have to tell 'em something new, or tell 'em something old in a new way."

Faulkner does that. These stories are further revelations about human nature as fired in the kiln of his native Mississippi, in his fictional Yoknapatawpha County, based on his own home area around Oxford. His revelations are always new.  

I don't understand why anyone would try to remove layers of meaning from his language, as some writers say they do. Suffice it to say, Faulkner is always rich with meaning.

Now let's turn to another art form: film. Last night, I tried to watch "The Town," directed by and starring Ben Affleck. I didn't last long. I have the weird notion that if you you're going to spend several million $ making a movie, it should have something new to say. Or something old in a new way.

This movie starts out with a stock bank robbery, that we have seen a trillion times before, a violent thug, a woman victim. Snore. Sorry, but I didn't see anything new here.

Not that these elements don't interest me. They do. Crime, selfishness, violence, brutality, unequal power relationships, the good people of the world protecting themselves against the bad.

That is the stuff of fiction. But whether something is art or schlock depends on how you use the elements. As the publisher and porn star Gloria Leonard famously said, “The difference between pornography and erotica is lighting.”

Well, it may be a little more complicated than that.

In those terms, what I am trying to do is similar to what I think Faulkner was trying to do: create art out of these elements.

Wish me luck.

(I'm in a hurry because the new New Yorker magazine came in the mail, and I haven't done my ten pages on my novel yet today.)

-- Roger

© Copyright 2011, Roger R. Angle

WHEN IS ART WORTH A DAMN?

Our criteria for art must be both subjective and objective.

As some great critic whose name I forget said, we don't spend the time to analyze something we don't admire.

First of all, I think, our admiration cannot come from what we tell ourselves. The power of the work must somehow come from the work itself.

I know it is fashionable these days for art critics and curators to tell us that limp, lazy, good-for-nothing art is somehow powerful and hip just because they say it is.

But I don't agree. If art is bad, it's bad. Period. that goes for music and sculpture and painting and writing and dance and any other art form.

Just because someone says it's art, that doesn't make it art.

So let's pick out some examples of good art and bad art and see if we can figure out why the good stuff is good, and why the bad stuff is bad.

First, let's compare two poems:

Gacela of Unforeseen Love - Federico Garcia Lorca
[trans. W S Merwin]

 

No one understood the perfume
of the dark magnolia of your womb.
No one knew that you tormented
a hummingbird of love between your teeth.

 

A thousand Persian ponies fell asleep
in the moonlit plaza of your forehead,
while through four nights I embraced
your waist, enemy of the snow.

 

Between plaster and jasmines, your glance
was a pale branch of seeds.
I sought in my heart to give you
the ivory letters that say always,

always, always: garden of my agony,
your body elusive always,
the blood of your veins in my mouth,
your mouth already lightless for my death.

Now let's take a look at "Trees" by Joyce Kilmer:

TREES 

I think that I shall never see
A poem lovely as a tree.
A tree whose hungry mouth is prest
Against the sweet earth's flowing breast;
A tree that looks at God all day,	5
And lifts her leafy arms to pray;
A tree that may in summer wear
A nest of robins in her hair;
Upon whose bosom snow has lain;
Who intimately lives with rain.	10
Poems are made by fools like me,
But only God can make a tree.

I think that I shall never see
A poem lovely as a tree.
A tree whose hungry mouth is prest
Against the sweet earth's flowing breast;
A tree that looks at God all day,	5
And lifts her leafy arms to pray;
A tree that may in summer wear
A nest of robins in her hair;
Upon whose bosom snow has lain;
Who intimately lives with rain.	10
Poems are made by fools like me,
But only God can make a tree.

I admire one of these poems greatly, and I despise the other one. Can you figure out which is which and why?

-- Roger

© Copyright 2011, Roger R. Angle

The Selected Poems of Federico Garcia Lorca