It is a rare but happy thing to have a childhood friend with whom you not only remain in touch but still share enough personal connections to keep those early bonds from getting stale. I am fortunate to have two such people in my life - perhaps more, but two who have inspired me to write some thoughts down. Although these two friends of mine have never met, to my knowledge, I share with both of them a special relationship through two paths: rock music, and the written word.
One of them, Ira Robbins, I have know since we attended the same Brooklyn elementary school; we listened to the Beatles together in the auditorium when their first U.S. singles were released, and Ira played some of Bob Dylan's earliest songs for me in his living room. I met David Komoroff when my family moved to Manhattan; he was just slightly older than me, enough to be a major influence in my still developing appreciation for rock music. He introduced me to Jefferson Airplane, some early Stones albums, and Tommy, among many other glories of 1960's rock and roll. While at Stuyvesant High School he led me to my first rock concert - at Carnegie Hall, to see a group called Seatrain, in 1970. About a year later he insisted that we attend a concert at the Filmore East before it closed, where the highlight was a fairly new band called Mott the Hoople.
Ira went on to found the Trouser Press, through which he played a leading role in bringing awareness of the punk and New Wave movements to U.S. rock fans. I wasn't in touch with Ira then - in fact, I discovered his involvement in the early 1980's as I was standing in an Upper West Side bookstore thumbing through a thick Trouser Press record guide, and noticed the name of the editor. This was of some interest to me, since I was at that time playing in a rock band that performed at CBGB's during what was more or less the heydey of the punk era. Ira had also been in a band, and also lived at some point on the Upper West Side, but it was still many years before we would reconnect. Meanwhile, I had also been a journalist, intermittently, even writing the occasional music or film review for small political rags. Later on I spoke at conferences on the philosophical analysis of rock music (and still do this sordid kind of thing). We were leading sort of parallel lives that more or less began with trading baseball cards on a Brooklyn street corner, playing punchball and listening to "She Loves You" on a transistor radio.
When we got back in touch many years later we found that we both once again lived in Brooklyn, that we were both still deeply interested in rock music, and both also making efforts at writing fiction. That has been more than enough to keep us from blowing apart like leaves in the wind again.
David chose a quieter life, having moved many years ago to a small town in upstate New York. We rarely see each other, but from snail mail to email to Facebook we have never been out of touch for too long. David is also the main reason I make a living today as a computer professional: after I became more or less convinced that my rock band would not be the next Beatles, and indeed was not obviously on a path to making me financially self-sustaining as a musician, I looked around for an actual profession. (I was pulling in a small income as a bicycle messenger, which never really struck me as a career for some reason.) David had gone into computer programming, and after a visit to his office and some heart to heart talks I decided to pursue it too. He retired long ago; I'm still at it, for better or worse.
I don't really know David's tastes in music these days, but Ira's are on public view in the online version of the Trouser Press, as well as in his numerous other published writings, and for me in "personal communications", as human contact is euphemistically referred to in footnotes to philosophical papers. What attracted my attention recently - and partly prompted me to write this post - is his recent piece for Salon.Com. Taking a long look at his own history as a rock fan and a record reviewer, the history of Trouser Press and its decline as a print magazine, and the state of music criticism, he defends the position that "record reviews are now brief, upbeat and simple: download these songs, they’re good." By contrast, he brings back some of the more hypercritical views he voiced over the years about bands that rated high on the trendiness scale, and refuses to apologize for most of them. Right on, I say: these days there is always someone (indeed, an entire chorus of someones) ready to tout the aesthetic virtues of anything that does not stink to high heaven of incompetence or banality. Critical opinion in the era of online communication has a snowball effect, to the point where truly independent judgment is difficult at best. A critic who dissed the latest Frank Ocean or Passion Pit album might not lose his job, but he would lose respect because one critic after another lauded it in the kind of capsule reviews you find on Pitchfork and many other sites.
The same applies across the mass arts. Case in point: I just saw Lincoln, Steven Spielberg's latest effort at the socially conscious art film. "103 Academy Awards Minimum!", "One of the Year's .213 Best!", "Daniel Day-Lewis Is the Greatest Actor Since Richard Burton!" shout the critics (or some closely related pap). My reaction: a dubious portrait of a President who always speaks in a grandfatherly voice while presiding over the bloodiest war in history; Spielberg's usual faux-dramatic dialogue with the kind of packaged emotions that worked okay for the story of a stranded alien trying to phone home, but not so great for a beleaguered President trying to make history; modern slang mixed with 19th c. cliches; irrelevant subplots (what happened to the older son anyway?), an otiose epilogue (it was a year after the Senate adopted the 13th Amendment that Lincoln was murdered) etc. etc. Screw critical conformance. Most popular art today is intellectually insulting commercial crap, and even a lot of what isn't is just not artistically successful, however well-intentioned it might be.
Thus, when I see Ira reminding us how little moved he is by the Foo Fighters, a group whose recent album Wasting Light was a kind of cause celebre among critics, or by Sting's solo efforts, and a number of other iconoclastic positions he has taken, I am happy that someone has the guts to say these things so that I don't feel completely alone in the world. Indeed, I only regret seeing him partially back off some of his earlier apostasies: Patti smith's Horses is still unlistenable, IMHO; Television's Marquee Moon has one good song; the Ramones, who Ira, the apostle of punk rock, confesses he initially viewed as "a travesty", were exactly that - they just turned out to be a rather lovable, productive and influential travesty. (For updated 50's-style rock and roll I'll take the B-52's over the Ramones any day.) Okay, I'm a bitch - even punk is not sacred. I'm not sure Ira thinks it is either; he has too much integrity to give anything a pass because it's punk. I also have to admit that I never saw any of those groups live. Maybe I'd be kinder if I had.
One of Ira's main points is that many critics today seem to have barely brushed up on a band's Wikipedia entry before they mouth off about its virtues. (My way of putting it, not his.) It was one of the trademarks of Trouser Press in its day to do obsessive amounts of research about a band before writing it up (or down), and that was before Google was even a sci-fi fantasy, when it was widely accepted that a research library was a valuable asset for civilization. I like this line of thought, but I want to add a caveat: it is certainly possible for a critic to be so intimately familiar with his subject as to leave his audience without a clue what he's talking about. This is why I stopped paying attention to reviews in the
Village Voice about 30 years ago - smug verbal masturbation with elusive references to obscure, fly-by-night
bands that only 12 people in the world would conceivably recognize. Trouser Press reviews show considerable knowledge about the bands that are reviewed, but the references are generally within the realm of known or available rock history.
It is a little too much to ask that two friends, apart for long intervals over much of a lifetime, rediscover each other with exactly the same musical tastes after five decades of rock music, each with its own character. "Regrets, I have a few" says Ira - no doubt a nod to the famous Sid Vicious hit "My Way" (think I'm kidding?). Well, he might have one or two more regrets if I had my way. For instance, this bit of invective about The Fixx, one of my favorite bands of the 80's, where in 3 short paragraphs Ira describes them as a "pretentious synth-heavy atmospheric English dance band" ("dance band"?) whose songs are "irritating", "trivial", "wretched", "mundane", "unpleasant" and lacking in imagination. What I miss here is some criteria that might make these judgments more than mere epithets. To take one that has perhaps the greatest appearance of plausibility, a "pretentious" band is one that pretends they have ideas worthy of your attention when they really don't (Rush and Radiohead spring to mind) whereas to me, reading and repeating the lyrics of The Fixx is well worth the effort. (Phantoms, as I have written elsewhere, is a brilliant musical exploration of the concepts of place and personal identity.) Maybe Ira is in touch with another dimension of listening that I'm not - he has, after all, a vastly wider and more intimate knowledge of rock music than I do. All I know is that I can no more think of The Fixx as a "dance band" than, say, the Psychedelic Furs, or Pink Floyd for that matter, and though I will admit that I find a very small number of their songs "irritating", most of their material is deeply satisfying and creative.
Or take this sweeping assessment of Grand Funk and their significance: "the band that killed rock 'n' roll", as Ira sees it. I have to admit, I can't stand 90% of their output. On the other hand, Ira reminds us that "lots of terrible albums have been made by wonderful people", and it's equally true that some of the greatest albums have been made by bands that were
generally terrible - they found their groove, so to speak, and lost it quickly. Grand Funk's Closer to Home is high on that list for me, a spark of genius, sandwiched between a lot of really forgettable junk. (Okay, this is weird but... it was a former girlfriend of David's who first made me appreciate this album. Lack of critical distance? Perhaps.) Here I admit to being the odd man out, while Ira elaborates the standard critical opinion (as in this sympatico profile): even on that album, the band was incompetent, unoriginal and tasteless. For me, 6 out of 8 songs on the album are keepers, the other two being innocuous pseudo-soul ballads. And I could not name a song that any of those six clearly imitate. For me, the critical attitude means not only seeing the soft belly beneath the shell of popularity, but occasionally allowing that there's a lonely pearl in it.
The idea that Grand Funk were significant or influential enough to singlehandedly put an end to the Sixties is also farther than I can go. In those days there were a slew of culprits over a few short years - the James Gang, Black Sabbath, Savoy Brown, Deep Purple, and if you weren't feeling particularly generous, Iron Butterfly and Mountain to boot - soon to be followed by Bad Company and such lesser lights as Montrose, Golden Earing and Foghat - who jointly conspired to usher out acid rock and promote a sound that around 1975 began to emerge as heavy metal. There were other culprits as well, regarding the death of Sixties rock - think of Chicago taking over the jazz-rock mantle from bands like Blood, Sweat and Tears and The Soft Machine; the devolution of Fleetwood Mac from the Peter Green blues-rock band to the Buckingham/Nicks pop band; and the conversion of Motown from a vital, relevant sound to a dry disco formula. Similarly, at the end of the Seventies there was a short list - okay, a rather long list - of bands that collectively killed what was good and innovative in progressive rock and turned it into a radio-happy pop sound - think Journey, Toto, Rush, Styx, Kansas, Steve Miller, and Gary Wright, for starters. I think it takes an army to put an end to an era of musical expression, and Grand Funk were at most a highly visible unit.
Aside from that, I really wonder about the characterization of Grand Funk's musicianship as "garage-bred ineptitude" and the way Ira ties it to their working-class origin. For he does draw attention to the striking similarity of this characterization to a fair description of the origins of punk rock. What distinguishes them, he says, is Grand Funk's lack of originality. But if they were not original, I don't understand how they could have played such an outstanding role in overthrowing an era of music. A gang of imitators can't overthrow what came before them, even by doing it badly. Ira also chides them for a late-to-the-game effort at anti-war heroics. Not quite so - Closer to Home, released in the second year of their existence, already has the standard odes to revolution, freedom, love and togetherness that one would have expected in those days. Mark Farner eventually descended into a flag-waving boor, but so what - no one writes off Neil Young's or Arlo Guthrie's early work just because they tilted right later on.
Sometimes Ira's views make me wonder about the very nature of music criticism. For when he says that he doesn't think Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band is even a good album, and that he thinks Abbey Road is an even worse one, I want to scream, "But this is the standard by which other albums are judged!" Then I think of Wittgenstein, a philosopher I have studied fairly closely, who says that the one thing of which we cannot say that it either is, or is not, a meter long is the standard 1-meter bar in Paris, which defines the length of a meter. And this is obviously not true of Sgt. Pepper: for although it is probably the single most universally admired piece of recorded rock music, it is certainly not logically impossible to agree or disagree with that judgment. So I guess I should thank Ira for reminding me once again that consensus is not truth and emotional attachment is the opposite of critical objectivity. Be that as it may, to get me to believe that Sgt. Pepper is not at least one of the greatest albums of all time you would probably have to hire Christopher Nolan and the entire Inception team to screw around with my brain.
The inevitable musical differences aside, when Ira rattles off a phrase like "...the schoolyard syllogisms of the 2012 election", which he does with rather frightening consistency in both musical and political contexts, I start wishing that he would publish a Little Red Book of his best lines that I can carry around with me and read when I need to remind myself what contemporary writing should look like.
********
Speaking of which, Ira's 2009 novel Kick It Till It Breaks is a damn good read and another reason to keep an ear out for him. David has also been a literary type as long as I've known him, and had more of a flair for writing than I did early on. A few days ago, Ira and David had a psychic confluence that I suppose I alone would have noticed: they both posted comments in response to a piece in the NY Times Magazine about the writer George Saunders. "The writer for our time", according to the writer for the Times, Joel Lovell. WTF? Ira and Dave wanted know. How did I end up with a writer for my damn time whom I've never even heard of? Personally I had almost the same reaction - actually, the very same, until a bit of free association led me in another direction.
Almost a year ago I decided that as an aspiring writer I needed to subscribe to The New Yorker, knowing full well that I wouldn't have time to read even half the issues. So I did, and I haven't had time to read even a quarter of the issues. Generally I skim the concert listings, look quickly at the cartoons, check out the poetry (ugh... Ashberry again... talk about inscrutable), see if there are any absolutely essential journalistic pieces (hopefully not, since they tend to be even longer than my blog posts), and finally, lay into the short story. This way I have managed to get through maybe ten or twelve stories. Very few of them made much of an impression as I was reading them, and even fewer stayed with me for more than a day after I'd finished. In fact, exactly one did - a very bizarre tale about a young boy and an old man who do something like exchange tragic courses of life on a winter's day. (I mean literally exchange them, not talk about them.) I wasn't sure if I liked it, and certainly could not imagine what sort of mind could have come up with it. I noted the name of the author briefly, and forgot it soon afterward.
On reading a few paragraphs of the Lovell piece I said to myself, "I'll bet that story about the boy and the old man at the lake was by this Saunders dude." Yes it was. I will not jump on the Times bandwagon about this - the bandwagon that has only recently gotten through inflating Updike after his death into a literary titan, then beating the drums over David Mitchell's latest effort, then rolling the Franzen juggernaut down a hill, and the like. But I will say this: if there is a "writer for our time" it will have to be a writer whose ideas are as complex, tormented, tragic and exuberant as our time, all at once. No other short stories since those of Paul Bowles have struck me as having this kind of depth. I feel that Saunders has some deep grasp of the tragic sense of life, and the particularly ridiculous twist that a system driven by technology and finance capital can give to that situation, as well as an idea (which I dare to claim runs through some of my own attempts at fiction) that love and humor are our only hope for maintaining a semblance of sanity.
I will almost certainly be picking up Saunders' latest story collection, Tenth of December. I will almost certainly be picking up a copy of his friend David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest too. I will almost certainly be reading all this stuff as soon as I get through Ulysses. Don't hold your breath waiting for my review. For those who want to know Saunders a little better though, The Paris Review web site has just published the autobiographical Preface to a new edition of his earlier short story collection; it is quite an inspiring read for an aspiring writer. And one of the Times blogs has an interview with Lovell that sheds a little more light on Saunders.
Well, that's enough blogging for now. Back to Ulysses, Led Zeppelin and other things that keep me from the madhouse. Back to rocking the boat, writing on rock, writing in my rocker and rocking with my typewriter. And to hoping I'll always have good buddies who will prod me with their poignant posts when I get lazy, and challenge my tastes when they start to ossify. Scratch that; my tastes in music and literature already resemble a petrified forest. Which means someone can kick them as hard as they want and do no damage. We can still be great friends.
Showing posts with label literature. Show all posts
Showing posts with label literature. Show all posts
Sunday, January 13, 2013
Wednesday, August 1, 2007
Is Michiko Cuckoo? Is Laura Loopy? Literary Ethics Goes Public
The way the news has gone down lately, you would think someone really cared about the morals of authors, critics and other literary personae. The latest spark to ignite a prairie fire is the conviction of Laura Albert, the nonfictional being behind JT Leroy, who is the fictional author of the fictional work Sarah. As you undoubtedly are aware, one of the fictions jumped off the title page and signed a contract with Jeffrey Levy-Hinte, President of Antidote International Films, in which she gave no hint that she was fictional.
Michiko Kakutani, the illustrious senior literary critic for The New York Times, has also made news, offering a review of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows hours before the enormous marketing machine behind its release had approved its sale. (I don't usually insert NYTimes links because they force you to register, but even though the URL includes "restricted" I was able to link to this review through Google, for whom the right to link stands slightly above, life, liberty or the pursuit of copyright in the moral order.) Moreover she mentioned that she had simply wandered into a NYC bookstore and purchased a copy! She was also the subject of a critique in Slate yesterday by Ben Yagoda (leave it to Slate to do a critic critique), who complains loudly that Kakutani either blows kisses or comes down with a blunt ax on books she reviews, not to mention indulges in even more pathetic uses of language than the two near-dead metaphors I just used. And that is just the tip of the iceberg. (Damn those clichés, they come so easily sometimes.) Recently, we had Mark Helprin whining on the Op-Ed page (May 20) that his family would not enjoy eternal profits from a perpetual copyright on his writings. Of course everyone remembers the plagiarism scandal of Harvard student Kaavya Viswanathan, way back in 2006. Ms. Viswanathan asserted that her extensive copying from at least two other authors was "unconscious and unintentional", sort of like George Harrison's redo of "He's So Fine" as "My Sweet Lord". Which is a step up from the college President (don't have the notes on this one in front of me) who repeated the old platitude that he had failed to keep careful notes separating his own words from those of others. More likely his note taking was a little too careful. And the list goes on, especially if we widen the scope to ethics and fictions in general, which lets film and all its foibles sneak in. Thus ON 3/29/05 we had, for example, two headlines in the Times, "Documentary Criticized for Re-enacted Scenes" , and "Historical Epic Is Focus of Copyright Dispute" (p.E1). The former concerned the film Mighty Times: The Children's March, which won an Academy Award for Bobby Houston and Robert Hudson, and included fake-vintage footage of civil rights protests. The latter the film Kindom of Heaven, which was accused by James Reston Jr. of "stealing his research", according to the Times' Sharon Waxman, including "events, characters, scenes, descriptions and character tensions". Whoa, stealing character tensions, that's got to be up there with pocketing the Golden Triangle.
Bizarre and offbeat, you say; but it leads right back to one of the biggest recent literary disputes of them all, the claim that Dan Brown stole the "architecture" of his novel The Da Vinci Code from a nonfiction work, Holy Blood, Holy Grail by Micahel Baigent and Richard Leigh. Not a single passage was alleged to have been copied; rather, elements of the plot (maybe the "character tension"?) were allegedly conceptually lifted from one genre into another.
Dan Brown won the lawsuit filed by his accusers. Laura Albert lost hers. One thing joined the two outcomes in holy matrimony forever: the lawyers were the only real winners. Albert has been ordered to pay the plaintiff's lawyers some $350,000, while the plaintiff himself got $116,000. Nice work, guys, you earned it. Brown's lawyers were to receive their just deserts of 1.3m pounds. If I thought anyone were in doubt that the entire system of contract, copyright, patent, matrimonial, consumer and medical law (to name a few prominent areas) has as its primary purpose the enrichment of lawyers themselves, I would bring this in evidence... except that I might need a lawyer to do so. Luckily, no one in their right mind has such doubts.
But beyond the obvious cynicism of the system for redressing these alleged wrongs, there are some very funny lessons to be observed here. Consider, for example, what the world of literary morality might look like if most of these plaintiffs, or mere complainers, were right:
First, Laura Albert. Apparently she is JT LeRoy, the author of Sarah. What was her offense? It was, first, believing that she was JT LeRoy. Well, she is JT LeRoy. Samuel Clemens was Mark Twain. And somebody, I hope, is H.A. Monk, the author of this blog. Now, suppose Sam had signed a contract as Mark Twain, would that be a problem? No, you say (I hope). Because he in effect owns the being that is Mark Twain, who might or might not have written books in the first person, without any difference in the situation. Ralph Lifschitz can sign a contract as Ralph Lauren, can't he? Now suppose someone comes along and wants to do a film on the Ralph Lauren story. He siticks a contract under the nose of Ralph Lifschitz, who promptly signs his name as "Ralph Lauren" ( don't know or care if he had it legally changed; maybe it's a DBA name or whatever). The cameras roll up, the street signs go up, the food cart lays out its feast of grapes, Kool-Aid and liverwurst, and finally the director says, "Okay, let's start from the top. Ralph, tell us your story. Roll it!" (Archaic pre-digital-era movie language, but whatever.) There sits Ralph. He begins: "My name is Ralph Lifschitz. At some point I started presenting myself to the public as Ralph Lauren because I wanted to be a famous fashion designer, and I didn't think anyone would take me seriously with a name like Lifschitz which suggests I'm a nice Jewish boy from the Bronx." "CUT!" End of film. The Director resigns and goes off to do a documentary about Walter Carlos...
Now what, literally, is wrong with this picture? Nothing, really. The Director got what he signed up for, the Ralph Lauren Story. It's just that that story is one or two sentences long. Not Ralph Lifschitz's problem. So why did Laura Albert get sued? And why did she lose? Mr. Levy-Hinte, you see, the upholder of Truth, Justice, and the Hollywood Way, believes he was duped by Ms. Albert. You see, what he wanted was a film about the "real" JT LeRoy. When he discovered that there was no "real" JT LeRoy, he decided that instead of doing a two-sentence film about JT LeRoy he wanted to do a metafilm about Laura Albert. But Ms. Albert did not believe that she had sold him the rights to a story about Laura Albert. You see, Laura Albert is JT LeRoy, but JT LeRoy is not Laura Albert. The relationship is not reciprocal. She had sold the rights to an Albert-as-LeRoy story, but not to an LeRoy-as-Albert story. But the former story makes for a very short film: "Hi, I'm fictional. Bye." Whereas the latter is no film at all, because Laura Albert does not want to be a movie star playing herself.
Mr. Levy-Hinte may have a sense of justice, however distorted, but he has no sense of humor. You see, Jeff does not realize that he is a fictional filmmaker, at least as auteur. Every novel has a fictional author. The fictionl author is the voice from whom the story comes. Ms. Albert gave her fictional author a name - JT LeRoy - and a history and personality. Mr. Levy-Hinte may not have given his fictional narrators a name, but in his films he surely has fictional narrators. And if he has any business sense at all, he would surely jump on the first opportunity to sell the rights to the real story of one of his fictional narrators. Easiest way to make money in the arts, I bet. It is hardly Ms. Albert's fault if JT LeRoy's story is as thin as a crepe. And it is certainly Mr. Levy-Hinte's fault if he doesn't understand what a fictional author is. In fact, that gives me an idea. Mr. Levy-Hinte, if you're reading this: there is this very interested guy named H.A. Monk; he's actually part man, part parrot, and sits on top of a lamppost in Brooklyn observing the NYC arts scene. Then he gets in front of his laptop and, as H.A. Monk, pumps out verbose and little-noticed blog posts about his observations. For a cool $2 million I believe he would be happy to squawck on camera about his life in the urban jungle. Whaddaya say?
Turning now to Ms. Kakutani. Note that parrots and cuckoos have certain things in common, so perhaps this is not an unbiased judgment. But neither are any of my other judgments, so there you go. Monks and Monks also have something in common, a fact to which I call your attention only because a fellow Bloogle Gogger who signs his posts "The Monk" (I assume if it were a female she should sign it "Monkee") has posted a note on Kakutani's review in which it is stated that Kakutani has lavishly praised every one of J.K. Rowling's Potter books, including Deathly Hallows, and therefore ought not to be taken to task by Rowling, as she was, for ruining the experience of millions of readers. Now, personally, I disagree with the logic of my cousin. Rowling's complaint was, at least on the surface, on behalf of her millions of readers, not herself. The complaint should be taken on its own merits, which Monk(2) does at another point, by pointing out that reviews in the NY Times are rarely read by children. Touché. And I suppose it could be added that any adult who does not wish to have their entire life devalued by hearing something about the book before the official release date should simply not read it. But another point should be made: in fact, Kakutani's description of the plot is so minimal that only a complete idiot would find the excitement of the book to have been undermined by the review. The evil ones have infiltrated Hogwarts, some well known Hogwarts characters die, Hermione is missing, Harry leads the resistance. No point in reading the book now, right?
But the trouble with the criticism goes way beyond that. Aside from the fact pointed out by a Times letter writer that reviewers are not (better not be) beholden to marketing machines, there is the fact that the vast majority of readers will not read the entire book on the day (night) it is released, and after that there will be hundreds of reviews that can be read prior to reading the book if one so chooses. Keep in mind that film companies regularly schedule pre-release screenings for critics and other film industry types; all the secrecy about the HP release strikes one as nothing more than hype.
Kakutani consistently demonstrates in her reviews that no book worth reading can be taken at face value. Every novel has a meaning or meanings beyond the plot, character development, etc. There must be a reason why characters behave his way or that, why they are put in his situation rather than hat one. Thus for example she draws attention to Potter's struggle against "the temptations of hubris and despair". There are many other such observations in her review, and frankly, it is this, rather than blame or praise in itself, that will make or break Rowling's recognition as a writer in the long run. I don't hear anyone complaining that Kakutani revealed the deeper meaning of Deathly Hallows before the release date, even though that is far more important than who wins or dies. From this perspective, the complaints make the critic's critics seem vapid and clueless.
That said, I think there is something about the superficial aspects of the Potter books that must be said now that the series is over. Rowling has, as Kakutani points out, a brilliant sense of mystery, enchantment, diobolical plots and the like, as well as insight into the fears and passions of adolescents, professors and goblins. These are what give the Potter world its raison d'etre and make the books consistently worth reading. But, bottom line, I'm sorry to say, she is not a particularly good writer. There is little elegance or poetry to Rowling's prose. Having deeper meanings is important, but the means of expression is too. Here it is easy to see that Rowling is no C.S. Lewis or J.R.R. Tolkien, and perhaps less of a writer in the fantasy genre than even Philip Pullman. Her work has intrinsic interest in almost every other way, but the basic quality of using the English language in elegant and ingenious ways is entirely missing. In short, she has no style of any great significance. I am surprised that Kakutani, who is never one to mince words, does not recognize this. Rowling is, you might say, a great author, but not a particularly notable writer.
But I digress. On the other hand, I'm done anyway, so who cares? All I really wanted to do was call attention to a couple of the current issues in literary ethics and look a little beyond the newspaper chatter. The two cases I have looked at are interesting because there are hidden conceptual issues that underlie the arguments on either side. To what extent does an author own her "self", and how many selves can she have? What constitutes deceit, and was Mr. Levy-Hinte deceived or did he deceive himself? Does an author's right to disseminate her writings include the right to ensure that no word will be spoken about her book's content prior to the release date? Does a reviewer have higher obligations than merely annointing or disparaging a work? Currently, most of the really knotty issues in literary ethics have been , obviously or not, around technology. For example, the existence of the Internet, and even more of Google, has given the issue of plagiarism a fresh urgency. But the discussion above suggests that technology alone is not the reason why literary ethics needs much more attention than its gotten. Maybe before we can understand the technological issues we need to understand things like the self and the dynamics of interpretation as they apply to literature. Which agrees in one way with the plenitude of issues I began with: we are pretty much still at sea, and have a long way to go.
Michiko Kakutani, the illustrious senior literary critic for The New York Times, has also made news, offering a review of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows hours before the enormous marketing machine behind its release had approved its sale. (I don't usually insert NYTimes links because they force you to register, but even though the URL includes "restricted" I was able to link to this review through Google, for whom the right to link stands slightly above, life, liberty or the pursuit of copyright in the moral order.) Moreover she mentioned that she had simply wandered into a NYC bookstore and purchased a copy! She was also the subject of a critique in Slate yesterday by Ben Yagoda (leave it to Slate to do a critic critique), who complains loudly that Kakutani either blows kisses or comes down with a blunt ax on books she reviews, not to mention indulges in even more pathetic uses of language than the two near-dead metaphors I just used. And that is just the tip of the iceberg. (Damn those clichés, they come so easily sometimes.) Recently, we had Mark Helprin whining on the Op-Ed page (May 20) that his family would not enjoy eternal profits from a perpetual copyright on his writings. Of course everyone remembers the plagiarism scandal of Harvard student Kaavya Viswanathan, way back in 2006. Ms. Viswanathan asserted that her extensive copying from at least two other authors was "unconscious and unintentional", sort of like George Harrison's redo of "He's So Fine" as "My Sweet Lord". Which is a step up from the college President (don't have the notes on this one in front of me) who repeated the old platitude that he had failed to keep careful notes separating his own words from those of others. More likely his note taking was a little too careful. And the list goes on, especially if we widen the scope to ethics and fictions in general, which lets film and all its foibles sneak in. Thus ON 3/29/05 we had, for example, two headlines in the Times, "Documentary Criticized for Re-enacted Scenes" , and "Historical Epic Is Focus of Copyright Dispute" (p.E1). The former concerned the film Mighty Times: The Children's March, which won an Academy Award for Bobby Houston and Robert Hudson, and included fake-vintage footage of civil rights protests. The latter the film Kindom of Heaven, which was accused by James Reston Jr. of "stealing his research", according to the Times' Sharon Waxman, including "events, characters, scenes, descriptions and character tensions". Whoa, stealing character tensions, that's got to be up there with pocketing the Golden Triangle.
Bizarre and offbeat, you say; but it leads right back to one of the biggest recent literary disputes of them all, the claim that Dan Brown stole the "architecture" of his novel The Da Vinci Code from a nonfiction work, Holy Blood, Holy Grail by Micahel Baigent and Richard Leigh. Not a single passage was alleged to have been copied; rather, elements of the plot (maybe the "character tension"?) were allegedly conceptually lifted from one genre into another.
Dan Brown won the lawsuit filed by his accusers. Laura Albert lost hers. One thing joined the two outcomes in holy matrimony forever: the lawyers were the only real winners. Albert has been ordered to pay the plaintiff's lawyers some $350,000, while the plaintiff himself got $116,000. Nice work, guys, you earned it. Brown's lawyers were to receive their just deserts of 1.3m pounds. If I thought anyone were in doubt that the entire system of contract, copyright, patent, matrimonial, consumer and medical law (to name a few prominent areas) has as its primary purpose the enrichment of lawyers themselves, I would bring this in evidence... except that I might need a lawyer to do so. Luckily, no one in their right mind has such doubts.
But beyond the obvious cynicism of the system for redressing these alleged wrongs, there are some very funny lessons to be observed here. Consider, for example, what the world of literary morality might look like if most of these plaintiffs, or mere complainers, were right:
- It would be okay to reinvent oneself as a fictional character, but wrong to be the self that has thus been reinvented.
- It would be a sin to publish information about a book one has read if one is not supposed to have read that book according to the book's author and publisher.
- It would be necessary to pay royalties to the heirs of John Milton before reproducing much of Paradise Lost; and indeed it might be possible to sue the likes of Nikos Kazantzakis, author of The Odyssey: A Modern Sequel, for stealing "architectures" or "research" or "character tensions" from Homer. (This situation should be found highly desirable in legal circles, as it would surely entail endless lawsuits to determine just who were the heirs of Homer or Milton.)
- Who needs to write when so many millions of pages of readily available text are just sitting there waiting to be put to use? Is this not a service to the original author? For nothing provides so much publicity as a plagiarism case, and nothing helps an author's popularity so much as getting the sympathy vote after a plagiarism scandal. Why has no one appreciated the service Viswanathan did for Megan McCafferty, who I surely never heard of until her words were honored by Ms. Viswanathan?
- Why stop at faking vintage footage? Why not change the copyright date on the film to 1965? Why not get the winner of the 2007 Rev.Dr. Martin Luther King lookalike contest to put in an appearance? Why not carry subtitles: "The scene you are now seeing is really happening, or at least it was, or something similar was, or could have been anyway"? Zelig, anyone? (Excuse me, I meant Orlando.)
First, Laura Albert. Apparently she is JT LeRoy, the author of Sarah. What was her offense? It was, first, believing that she was JT LeRoy. Well, she is JT LeRoy. Samuel Clemens was Mark Twain. And somebody, I hope, is H.A. Monk, the author of this blog. Now, suppose Sam had signed a contract as Mark Twain, would that be a problem? No, you say (I hope). Because he in effect owns the being that is Mark Twain, who might or might not have written books in the first person, without any difference in the situation. Ralph Lifschitz can sign a contract as Ralph Lauren, can't he? Now suppose someone comes along and wants to do a film on the Ralph Lauren story. He siticks a contract under the nose of Ralph Lifschitz, who promptly signs his name as "Ralph Lauren" ( don't know or care if he had it legally changed; maybe it's a DBA name or whatever). The cameras roll up, the street signs go up, the food cart lays out its feast of grapes, Kool-Aid and liverwurst, and finally the director says, "Okay, let's start from the top. Ralph, tell us your story. Roll it!" (Archaic pre-digital-era movie language, but whatever.) There sits Ralph. He begins: "My name is Ralph Lifschitz. At some point I started presenting myself to the public as Ralph Lauren because I wanted to be a famous fashion designer, and I didn't think anyone would take me seriously with a name like Lifschitz which suggests I'm a nice Jewish boy from the Bronx." "CUT!" End of film. The Director resigns and goes off to do a documentary about Walter Carlos...
Now what, literally, is wrong with this picture? Nothing, really. The Director got what he signed up for, the Ralph Lauren Story. It's just that that story is one or two sentences long. Not Ralph Lifschitz's problem. So why did Laura Albert get sued? And why did she lose? Mr. Levy-Hinte, you see, the upholder of Truth, Justice, and the Hollywood Way, believes he was duped by Ms. Albert. You see, what he wanted was a film about the "real" JT LeRoy. When he discovered that there was no "real" JT LeRoy, he decided that instead of doing a two-sentence film about JT LeRoy he wanted to do a metafilm about Laura Albert. But Ms. Albert did not believe that she had sold him the rights to a story about Laura Albert. You see, Laura Albert is JT LeRoy, but JT LeRoy is not Laura Albert. The relationship is not reciprocal. She had sold the rights to an Albert-as-LeRoy story, but not to an LeRoy-as-Albert story. But the former story makes for a very short film: "Hi, I'm fictional. Bye." Whereas the latter is no film at all, because Laura Albert does not want to be a movie star playing herself.
Mr. Levy-Hinte may have a sense of justice, however distorted, but he has no sense of humor. You see, Jeff does not realize that he is a fictional filmmaker, at least as auteur. Every novel has a fictional author. The fictionl author is the voice from whom the story comes. Ms. Albert gave her fictional author a name - JT LeRoy - and a history and personality. Mr. Levy-Hinte may not have given his fictional narrators a name, but in his films he surely has fictional narrators. And if he has any business sense at all, he would surely jump on the first opportunity to sell the rights to the real story of one of his fictional narrators. Easiest way to make money in the arts, I bet. It is hardly Ms. Albert's fault if JT LeRoy's story is as thin as a crepe. And it is certainly Mr. Levy-Hinte's fault if he doesn't understand what a fictional author is. In fact, that gives me an idea. Mr. Levy-Hinte, if you're reading this: there is this very interested guy named H.A. Monk; he's actually part man, part parrot, and sits on top of a lamppost in Brooklyn observing the NYC arts scene. Then he gets in front of his laptop and, as H.A. Monk, pumps out verbose and little-noticed blog posts about his observations. For a cool $2 million I believe he would be happy to squawck on camera about his life in the urban jungle. Whaddaya say?
Turning now to Ms. Kakutani. Note that parrots and cuckoos have certain things in common, so perhaps this is not an unbiased judgment. But neither are any of my other judgments, so there you go. Monks and Monks also have something in common, a fact to which I call your attention only because a fellow Bloogle Gogger who signs his posts "The Monk" (I assume if it were a female she should sign it "Monkee") has posted a note on Kakutani's review in which it is stated that Kakutani has lavishly praised every one of J.K. Rowling's Potter books, including Deathly Hallows, and therefore ought not to be taken to task by Rowling, as she was, for ruining the experience of millions of readers. Now, personally, I disagree with the logic of my cousin. Rowling's complaint was, at least on the surface, on behalf of her millions of readers, not herself. The complaint should be taken on its own merits, which Monk(2) does at another point, by pointing out that reviews in the NY Times are rarely read by children. Touché. And I suppose it could be added that any adult who does not wish to have their entire life devalued by hearing something about the book before the official release date should simply not read it. But another point should be made: in fact, Kakutani's description of the plot is so minimal that only a complete idiot would find the excitement of the book to have been undermined by the review. The evil ones have infiltrated Hogwarts, some well known Hogwarts characters die, Hermione is missing, Harry leads the resistance. No point in reading the book now, right?
But the trouble with the criticism goes way beyond that. Aside from the fact pointed out by a Times letter writer that reviewers are not (better not be) beholden to marketing machines, there is the fact that the vast majority of readers will not read the entire book on the day (night) it is released, and after that there will be hundreds of reviews that can be read prior to reading the book if one so chooses. Keep in mind that film companies regularly schedule pre-release screenings for critics and other film industry types; all the secrecy about the HP release strikes one as nothing more than hype.
Kakutani consistently demonstrates in her reviews that no book worth reading can be taken at face value. Every novel has a meaning or meanings beyond the plot, character development, etc. There must be a reason why characters behave his way or that, why they are put in his situation rather than hat one. Thus for example she draws attention to Potter's struggle against "the temptations of hubris and despair". There are many other such observations in her review, and frankly, it is this, rather than blame or praise in itself, that will make or break Rowling's recognition as a writer in the long run. I don't hear anyone complaining that Kakutani revealed the deeper meaning of Deathly Hallows before the release date, even though that is far more important than who wins or dies. From this perspective, the complaints make the critic's critics seem vapid and clueless.
That said, I think there is something about the superficial aspects of the Potter books that must be said now that the series is over. Rowling has, as Kakutani points out, a brilliant sense of mystery, enchantment, diobolical plots and the like, as well as insight into the fears and passions of adolescents, professors and goblins. These are what give the Potter world its raison d'etre and make the books consistently worth reading. But, bottom line, I'm sorry to say, she is not a particularly good writer. There is little elegance or poetry to Rowling's prose. Having deeper meanings is important, but the means of expression is too. Here it is easy to see that Rowling is no C.S. Lewis or J.R.R. Tolkien, and perhaps less of a writer in the fantasy genre than even Philip Pullman. Her work has intrinsic interest in almost every other way, but the basic quality of using the English language in elegant and ingenious ways is entirely missing. In short, she has no style of any great significance. I am surprised that Kakutani, who is never one to mince words, does not recognize this. Rowling is, you might say, a great author, but not a particularly notable writer.
But I digress. On the other hand, I'm done anyway, so who cares? All I really wanted to do was call attention to a couple of the current issues in literary ethics and look a little beyond the newspaper chatter. The two cases I have looked at are interesting because there are hidden conceptual issues that underlie the arguments on either side. To what extent does an author own her "self", and how many selves can she have? What constitutes deceit, and was Mr. Levy-Hinte deceived or did he deceive himself? Does an author's right to disseminate her writings include the right to ensure that no word will be spoken about her book's content prior to the release date? Does a reviewer have higher obligations than merely annointing or disparaging a work? Currently, most of the really knotty issues in literary ethics have been , obviously or not, around technology. For example, the existence of the Internet, and even more of Google, has given the issue of plagiarism a fresh urgency. But the discussion above suggests that technology alone is not the reason why literary ethics needs much more attention than its gotten. Maybe before we can understand the technological issues we need to understand things like the self and the dynamics of interpretation as they apply to literature. Which agrees in one way with the plenitude of issues I began with: we are pretty much still at sea, and have a long way to go.
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