The Elegant Variation

Daniel Mendelsohn, one of my favorite critics working today, will be at LAPL next month as part of the ALOUD series, in conversation with Jonathan Lethem.  Not to be missed.  Reserve a spot for the November 8 event, which is free, here.  

Like many others, I lamented the passing of the mighty Jacques Barzun, one of the last in a line of scholars still interested in addressing a general public, as he did most memorably in his justly celebrated From Dawn to Decadence.  Here's a brief passage that's characteristic of Barzun's style:

The Modern Era begins, characteristically, with a revolution. It is commonly called the Protestant Reformation, but the train of events starting early in the 16C and ending-if indeed it has ended-more than a century later has all the features of a revolution. I take these to be: the violent transfer of power and property in the name of an idea.

We have got into the habit of calling too many things revolutions. Given a new device or practice that changes our homely habits, we exclaim: "revolutionary!" But revolutions change more than personal habits or a widespread practice. They give culture a new face. Between the great upheaval of the 1500s and the present, only three later ones are of the same order. True, the history books give the name to a dozen or more such violent events, but in these uprisings it was only the violence that was great. They were but local aftershocks of one or other of the four main quakes: the 16C religious revolution; the 17C monarchical revolution; the liberal, individualist "French" revolution that straddles the 18th and 19th; and the 20C "Russian," social and collectivist.

The quotation marks around French and Russian are meant to show that those names are only conventional. The whole western world was brooding over the Idea of each before it exploded into war, and the usual dates 1789 and 1917 mark only the trigger incidents. It took decades for the four to work out their first intention and side effects-and their ruling ideas have not ceased to act.

You can read a longer portion of this excerpt here.  

 

I'm a proud alum of LDM and will be among those checking out tomorrow's installment at the Hammer Museum.  Participants include Henry Rollins and Rex Pickett, and it's free, which is my favorite number.

Details here.  See you there.

A classic example of counter-programming:  My review of Eric Erlandson's Letters to Kurt is now live at the excellent Los Angeles Review of Books.

I include this anecdote not to parade my musical taste (or lack of it) before you, but to illustrate how possible it was, in that pre-Internet era, to willfully opt out of the zeitgeist. (It's still possible, but the shame is harder to escape, and generally requires secluded cabins in remote woods.) As grunge was roaring out of Seattle to hypnotize and unsettle a nation, my 30-year-old self was including Blue Swede on mixtapes. The only meaningful impact the movement had on my life was the sudden robust availability of high quality messenger bags. I missed all of it. Nirvana. Pearl Jam. Kurt and Courtney.

Of course, the era didn't pass me by entirely: the headlines were inescapable, especially Cobain's Hemingwayesque coda, and Love's ongoing, embarrassing theatrics. But I must admit that, prior to picking up Hole guitarist Eric Erlandson's Letters to Kurt, I had never listened to a Hole, or even a Nirvana, album all the way through. Yet I was intrigued by the book's format: a sincere preface followed by 52 almost impressionistic sketches that displayed, at first glance, a certain lightness of touch, a (perhaps unsurprising) musicality in the prose.  Erlandson, present at the creation as Love's co-founder of Hole, seemed a promising guide to all I'd missed, even if he was guilty of occasionally overstating his place in the grand scheme. (He can sometimes read a bit like the actor in Shakespeare in Love who summarizes Romeo & Juliet as being "about a nurse.") Something about Erlandson's disarmingly earnest tone initially engaged me more than I expected: "All those fallen female archetypes. Little girls wearing mother's heels and apron." I began to consider the possibility that this book might have value as something other than a post-grunge artifact, yet another piece of the true cross for Cobain obsessives to fetishize. Perhaps, coming to the work unburdened by the albatross of Cobain's martyrdom, I was uniquely well placed to consider its purely literary value. A small reward for missing a cultural moment, it turns out, and harder to accomplish than I imagined.

I've been a chess obsessive for years but it's only thanks to the great Charles Simic that I can begin to justify all the wasted hours ... 

There’s something else in my past that I only recently realized contributed to my perseverance in writing poems, and that is my love of chess. I was taught the game in wartime Belgrade by a retired professor of astronomy when I was six years old and over the next few years became good enough to beat not just all the kids my age, but many of the grownups in the neighborhood. My first sleepless nights, I recall, were due to the games I lost and replayed in my head. Chess made me obsessive and tenacious. Already then, I could not forget each wrong move, each humiliating defeat. I adored games in which both sides are reduced to a few figures each and in which every single move is of momentous significance. Even today, when my opponent is a computer program (I call it “God”) that outwits me nine out of ten times, I’m not only in awe of its superior intelligence, but find my losses far more interesting to me than my infrequent wins. The kinds of poems I write—mostly short and requiring endless tinkering—often recall for me games of chess. They depend for their success on word and image being placed in proper order and their endings must have the inevitability and surprise of an elegantly executed checkmate.

I will be appearing on a blogging panel at the 2012 conference of the Biographers International Organization. I'm still not completely certain why biographers would like to hear from me, but they asked, I was free, and so here we go.  Isn't blogging pretty 1.0 by this point?

The Worthy Readings sidebar has been updated through July with a slew of new readings ranging from Richard Ford to Dana Spiotta to Charles Yu to ... Steve Almond.  You read that right.  Click through and check out all the updates.

Ben Fountain is in town this evening to read from his long awaited novel, Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk. You can find all the details about the reading here.  Adam Langer's glowing review can be found here.

The book's not merely good; it's Pulitzer Prize-quality good, so much so that readers might find themselves wishing it had been published last year so that the Pulitzer committee could have saved themselves the bother of a hung jury, and just given its damn award to Fountain.

In his review of John Leonard's greatest hits collection, Troy Patterson - without a shred of irony or apparent self-knowledge - approvingly quotes the master:

"Any reviewer who expresses rage and loathing for a novel is preposterous. He or she is like a person who has put on full armor and attacked a hot fudge sundae.” 

Patterson, it should be remembered, turned in a review of my novel that so was vicious that Gawker - Gawker - was prompted to ask "what's up with that."  How preposterous do you have to be for Gawker to call you "mean-spirited"?

I'd have higher hopes for the new Slate project if it wasn't deploying television critics to review real books ... 

Apropos l'affaire D'Agata, I came across this amusing and i