Simcoe, among other eminent weblogs, has pointed to one of those attacks on the fraudulence of Modern Art that crop up about as often as my gout. This one drags out dusty whipping-boy Mapplethorpe, but distinguishes itself by spending more time on the blandly corporate-friendly Gilbert-and-George, who apparently once managed to outrage someone. Probably the same guy who wanted to ban the Pet Shop Boys.

Yeah, so the art world of teachers, curators, critics, trust funders, and investors is absurdly indiscriminate. So journalist pundits aren't? We're given a choice of blindnesses -- are you philistine or are you gullible? -- that assume homogeneity among objects made and displayed by people and homogeneity among the people who look or prod at the objects.

As a gullible philistine, I apply the same pair of criteria to all art whether Ancient or Modern: Is it pretty? And is it funny?

Caravaggio and Botticelli and Pollock and Jess are in their different ways all very pretty and very funny. Piero della Francesca isn't exactly funny but he gives me a funny feeling, which is extra points. Duchamp is King of Comedy. Mapplethorpe is always pretty but only funny once in a while; I mostly think of him as a society portraitist, like Annie Leibovitz except prettier. "Piss Christ" was astonishingly pretty, which made up for the dopiness of the joke. On the other hand, the Koonses and Kellys remind me of those "Far Side" rip-offs in the paper: slick and inept at the same time. For sheer entertainment value, you're unlikely to find anything in the local art collections that'll compare to George Herriman. But that would've been at least as true 100, 200, or 300 years ago.

Art critics should explain why they think a particular piece of art is pretty or funny. Art teachers should explain how to make particular pieces of art prettier or funnier. Otherwise they're just being blowhards and they're well on the way to a successful career. And why all this fuss about the stuffed horse? I bet there are stuffed animals in plenty of English museums. Not to mention the House of Lords.

Chip Morningstar's Postmodern Adventure (via Cardhouse) is the best geeks-look-at-gobbledegook piece I've seen. But the peculiarities of the contemporary American academy have confused his take on the French origins of poststructuralist style: Derrida, for example, is a professional philosopher, not a critic; his work is interesting as philosophy (and, depending on one's taste, as literature), not as lit-crit. And Morningstar doesn't go far enough in his paralleling of the two communities. If I may demonstrate:

Modernist Class

You can tell by the jarring sound of "Zukofsky" in The Trouble With Genius : Reading Pound, Joyce, Stein, and Zukofsky that Bob Perelman is better read than most academics. He's also better to read: his observations are sensible and accurate.

But those being observed are "Modernist," and Perelman is "Postmodernist." And, apparently as a result, his tone is one of such versatile hostility that no book could escape censure. He holds the proselytizing rhetoric of critics against the writers' own works, and he's pissy about these four writers in particular 'cause they weren't able to meet the supposed "Modernist" ambition of perfect synthesis of every conceivable human goal. He provides a brilliant short introduction to the unique virtues of Ulysses and then claims that the lovely object he just described is proof of Joyce's ineptitude.

But it's not all that clear that such weirdly individualistic writers as Joyce, Stein, and Zukofsky actually ascribed to the dopey ambitions Perelman posits, except inasmuch as any working writer has to deal with them: Sure, we got to try to do the best we can think of doing, right? And that can get pretty inflated before it gets punched down. And what we end up with is never quite what we thought we were doing, but sometimes it's still OK, and we can at least try to have a sense of humor about the yeasty smell.

After that performance, Perelman's sequel book, a collection of upbeat reviews mostly of his fellow Language Poets, is about as convincing as the happy ending the studio slapped onto Face/Off. Despite their own lunatic ambitions, Perelman's compeers don't piss him off the same way Joyce, Stein, and Zukofsky did. Why? 'Cause they're "Postmodern" and so they're smart enough to undercut their own claims to textual mastery.

The trouble with that is that The Trouble with Genius spends most of its time showing how those stuck-up Modernists also undercut their own claims to textual mastery. I mean, out-of-control-ness is pretty much what you (and Perelman) notice in the second half of Ulysses or in almost anything by Stein or Zukofsky, and it's pretty fucking arrogant to claim that such a pleasurable (and obviously labored-over) effect is attributable to blind error with those guys any more than it is with Ron Silliman or Susan Howe -- or with Melville, Dickinson, Austen in Mansfield Park, the indomitable bad taste of Flaubert, or the wild line-to-line mood swings in Shakespeare, for crying out loud.

At the end of the book, Perelman says that blanket-statement theorists, snippy critics, and it-is-what-it-is poets are playing an unproductive game of paper-scissors-rock. Probably that's a fair assessment, at least when any of them are responding to professional challenges by the other players. But who except a rhetorically worked-up poet would say that a poem was a rock (let alone say that Ezra Pound was the Alps)? Who but an allegiance-drawing theorist would announce in print that any theorist was in any conclusive fermez-la-porte! sense correct?

What Perelman leaves out of his game and out of his book is the possibility of the reader. And publishing gets to be a pretty sad affair without an occasional appearance by that self-satisfied little cluck.

A Small Circle of Jerks

It's not always that critics are mean people. Sometimes we just tend to feel a little shy around what we love. Unfortunately that means we tend to be more expressive around what we have contempt for.

From schoolyard and classroom to bar and coffee-shop, American rhetoric is honed for debate and attack, for winning arguments and shooting off wisecracks. We don't receive the same level of training in the rhetoric of affection. And so even the most articulate of us can often only manage a fast embarrassed hug before dashing out the door. When what we should really be supplying is good solid Joy of Sex-type research....

Irony Watch

Chris Ware - art = Dave Eggers ?

Among other equations derivable from San-Francisco-to-New-York transformation functions (well, more like Berkeley-to-Brooklyn, but you'd hardly expect a bohemian spokesperson nowadays to admit to being from Berkeley, would you?), we find that old favorite:

Snob + hypocrisy = Times rock critic

(Continuing with what Samuel Taylor Coleridge called "that gentle degradation requisite in order to produce the effect of a whole"....)

The 100 Super Movies au maximum: The Married Woman

One of the nice things about works of art, and vacations and drugs, is that they give us delimited events to point to and say, "This -- this was the turning point. This was where my life changed," as opposed to the usual waking up to find yourself in a strange bedroom thousands of miles away with a resculpted nose and no left leg and the phone off the hook and the cops hammering on the door.

For example, I used to be pretty normal about movies. I liked them and so forth. I'd say things like "Wanna see a movie?" and then later on say things like "That was pretty good."

Then, twenty-three years ago, I went to the Temple University Cinematheque (which I guess is closed down now) and saw Jean-Luc Godard's movie from thirteen years earlier, The Married Woman. And by the time it was over, I had turned into me.

An essential aspect of turning into someone is that other people don't simultaneously turn into the same person. Even while I sat there head ringing and sparkle-eyed, comments like "Did you get that?" and "Weird!" began to worm their way through my protective daze. On my shamble out, I stopped to thank the wizened Anglophile who ran the place. "I hate Godard myself," he said, "but someone has to show him."

Yeah. Nowadays I'm just embarrassed when I see those 1960s Godard movies, but I wouldn't blame the old guy for that any more than I would blame my mom for how embarrassing it is to think about toilet training. The only one I enjoy all the way through is his comedy noir, Bande à part, which reminds me of the Coen Bros., who, like Godard, seem to have been raised in some sort of white plastic box from which they take random stabs at what real life might be like -- there's a very thin crust of experience sagging under the weight of all these violent gesticulations, a bouncing on the plywood mood that seems to work best with dimwit comedy. Of Godard's work from the 1970s, I like the TV interviews with "real people" where he sounds like Charles Kuralt from Mars; from the 1980s and 1990s, his crazy old coot self-typecasting in Prénom Carmen. The only serious Godard moments that still work are the ones where he finds himself back in that white plastic box trying to figure out why everyone looks at him funny: for example, staring into a coffee cup while taking a break from trying to show off those supposed Two or Three Things I Know About Her that, nowadays, it seems obvious to me that he never knew at all.

Not that anyone called him on it. There's no safer way for an uncool nerd to show off than by bragging about his up close and personal knowledge of women (or, safer yet, "Woman"). All those nouvelle vague guys leaned on that tactic big time; Godard, being Godard, just did so most explicitly. (As French censors realized, the title's "The" is an important part of The Married Woman's ambition.)

And, to Godard's credit as a forever uncool nerd, he was the only one of the nouvelle vague guys to try to engage equally explicitly with feminism. Unfortunately, he's also forever unable to approach female characters without interposing the clearest (and most brain-dead) demonstration of "inside knowledge": nude photography.

At the time, of course, I was more than willing to fall for such demonstrations; as an eighteen-year-old sex-crazed uncool nerd, they seemed like a darn fine idea.

And at the time, all such considerations seemed completely unrelated to what was most important about the experience, which, the next day, I inadequately described as the realization that "movies can do anything."

At the present time, my inadequate description would be that "movies can combine the discursive and the narrative."

I don't feel as comfortable with either account as I feel with explaining why they differ: It's natural for the individual who's gone through an ecstatic revelation to assume that there must be some relevance to the individual's life.

What's changed in my life is what seems relevant.

Twenty-three years ago, I probably thought of myself as someone who "could do anything," so that's how I was predisposed to understand the experience. Right now, I think of myself as someone who has to drag the discursive into every experience, so I think that the movie just happened to strike a natural-born critic.

You see, even though I promised a couple paragraphs back that I wouldn't bring blame into it, I couldn't just leave the question alone; I felt like I had to try to figure out what happened. For us natural-born critics, it's not enough to say, "My taste changed," or "Can you believe we used to like that stuff?" When we like something, it's a public statement, like pledging our troth.

Not that marriages really do last till the death-do-us part. What marriage means is that, having made a public statement of allegiance, you have to make some correspondingly public statement of divorce.

And then you get to make jokes about your ex for the rest of your life.

Doug Asherman queries: "Here's something probably no one cares about, but....is there a conspiracy to hide all the good music from us? And the good books? Are people in the arts laughing at us for buying their crap? And if so, what can we do about it?"

Meanwhile....

"a specialized shop, department of a store, etc., usu. catering to fashionable clients"

Pamphleteer Juliet Clark writes:

Re the Salon.com Guide to Feeling Hip Because You've Heard of John Updike:

I'd like to point out that Eggers misspelled "aficionado," and the copyeditor didn't catch it.

I think your copyediting/programming analogy is apt in a lot of ways. In fact the whole Salon Guide reminds me to a painful degree of startup culture: young people who won't be young much longer demanding to be taken seriously for not being serious; seeking the Big Time while clinging to a fantasy of countercultural identity; using strained irony, self-created urgency, and an excess of spin to mask a fundamental laziness.

All I can suggest is that you sell your author copy and use the money to buy a good book. Wouldn't that be, like, "ironic"?

I do think that the Salon guide fills a void. We currently have no one to tell us which of the many, many idiomatically similar novels are the real thing and which are the product of overheated middle-class ramblings. The academics can't be bothered with it, since they're too busy keeping their own little flame alive. People like Lewis Lapham hate it all, and people like Michiko Kakutani are either indiscriminate (if you agree with them more often than not) or too harsh (vice versa), and they lack consensus-building skills. The remainder of the book-reviewing populace don't have enough credibility to be reliable. So I think contemporary mainstream book reviews, if there's a strong enough drive to hold people's interest, will go the way of movie reviews and devolve into capsule reviews, top ten lists, and "personality-based" reviewers. I don't think I can blame anyone for this process; it just happens when the collective standards of the producers and the consumers are low enough that the work being produced becomes undifferentiated.

Consequently, tho, Carol Emshwiller will certainly be ignored, and even someone like Disch, who has needed to work his material into ostensible potboilers for the last 20 years. There is a need for something of a unified conception, and Carol Emshwiller may as well be Les Blank for all they care. (Which might make Michael Brodsky Kenneth Anger.) There definitely is a "celebration of shared limited knowledge", but who were the Salon editors to deny those who looked towards them for guidance?

If Auerbach's right about the editors' ambitions, the match was doomed a priori, since I'm even less of a consensus-builder than Michiko Kakutani. (Case in point: For the last twenty years every single time I've tried to read the NYTBR I've ended up throwing it across the room, and so I didn't even recognize her name.) When it comes to art, I don't see that consensus is necessary, or even desirable. That's probably what attracts me to the subject: I wouldn't be so exclusively an aesthete if I were a more enthusiastic politician.

One clarification / pettifoggery as regards "personality-based" reviewing: It's true that I believe a critic can only speak as an individual, and that criticism is most useful when individual works receive close attention as individual works. That means that I consider generalities issued from a presumed position of consensus to be bad criticism. It doesn't mean that I consider class-clown-ism a guarantee of good criticism. In my Salon.com tantrum I emphasized voice because voice was being emphasized by the book's publicity and reviews, but what really set me off was the 400-page-long lack of new insight into individual works: a generic free-weekly voice was just the means to that dead end.

In my own practice I use an overtly performative voice only because I have to. When I attempt a detached tone, I become too stumble-footedly self-conscious to move; when I do the jutht a darn-fool duck shtick, life seems better. That's a personality flaw, not a deliberate choice. Behind the Dionysian mask, I'm ogling those Apollonians plenty: I empathize with Jean-Luc Godard's film criticism but I'm in awe of Eric Rohmer's; Lester Bangs is a role model but I'd be so much more uncomplicatedly proud of something like Stephen Ratcliffe's Campion; my favorite Joycean is eyes-on-the-page Fritz Senn; my favorite historian is no-see-um Henry Adams; I loathe the bluster of Harold Bloom and Camille Paglia....

What matters is whether you communicate anything of what you see. If you don't have to keep twitching and waving and yelling "Hi, Mom!" while you do it, all the better.

Talking to yourself in a public place (prompts via NQPAOFU and Alamut and David Auerbach)

Insider Art is art produced to fit the particular marketplace in which it's exhibited. Outsider Art fetishizes the disconnect between the artist's assumed goals and the audience's assumed attitude.

Of course, most inedible artifacts have at least some chance of outliving or being shipped outside their original context. Which is to say that, just like all writing eventually becomes readable as Literature, all art eventually becomes viewable as Outsider Art. But that's in the long run, which is notoriously hard to plan for.

In the short run of our lives as producers and consumers, what we'd like -- what we turn to these models of artmaking for -- are rules that will guarantee success and relief. Unfortunately, neither model guarantees anything but occasional outbursts of wistfulness or petulance: industry pressure usually leads to disappointing results and, in contrast, purely personal initiative almost always leads to disappointing results. Back-and-forth-ing between "insular self-absorption" and "meeting expectations" is what most artists seem to compromise on, but, as critic Nora Charles concluded in her exhaustive genre investigation, "it's all pretty unsatisfactory."

For completely other reasons, a correspondent directed me this morning to the critical work of Gerald Burns, but, coincidentally, the only online piece I can find by him is this truly horrid poem addressed to his old Harvard classmate the Unabomber:

Just yesterday a young maybe gifted writer said he'd write a poem about Nabisco executive offers, sock it to 'em. I told him Socrates said a cobbler has two jobs, making shoes and persuading people to buy them. "Writing is the easy part." Buried in a mimeo'd magazing isn't an action, and told him at least you had distribution. He liked the wit of that. . . . Why'd you do it isn't interesting. I know why you did, pretty much. It's much the reason I write poems in sections.

So why I don't want to persuade people to buy my shoes must be much the reason I don't send letter bombs...? Insular self-absorption looks better all the time.

Movie Comment: Ghost World

"The reason why so many critics like Elvis Costello so much is because they all look like Elvis Costello." -- David Lee Roth interviewed by Dave DiMartino, Creem, 1980

I don't like Pauline Kael's writing, and I didn't like her influence on movie criticism. And it's not like my opinion would have bothered her or interefered with her influence, but now I feel like I was being a little unfair, albeit cheating in a different game. Who would've been allowed to become a major American movie critic in the 1960s and 1970s except someone capable of creaming over Bertolucci? Is the virus to blame for the filter that lets it through?

After all, Manny Farber, the only American movie critic (that I've read) who's approached the level of the best French movie critics or the best American music critics, all the way back in 1966 was already smickety-smacketing his painfully sensitive skull against the terminal decline of the Hollywood studio system:

In a situation where what counts is opulence and prestige -- a gross in the millions, winner of the Critics' Award, Best Actor at a film festival -- the actor has to be fitted into a production whose elements have all been assembled, controlled, related, like so many notes in a symphony....While today's actor is the only thing in the film that is identifiably real, his [sic] responses are exploited in a peculiar way. His [sic] gaucheries and half-hitches and miscalculations are never allowed their own momentum but are used self-consciously to make a point.... The idea of movement per se has also lost its attraction to moviemakers. The actor now enters a scene not as a person, but like a Macy's Thanksgiving balloon, a gaudy exhibitionistic fact. Most of those appurtenances that could provide him with some means of animation have been glazed over. The direct use of his [sic] face as an extension of the performance has become a technique for hardening and flattening; and the more elliptical use of his [sic] face, for showing intermediate states or refining or attenuating a scene, has vanished, become extinct. In fact, the actor's face has been completely incapicitated; teeth -- once taken for granted -- or an eyeball, or a hairdo, have all become key operators. They front the screen like balustrades, the now disinherited face behind.

So what was Farber supposed to do? Hold out, violently ill, for the all-too-passing pleasures of '80s horror and Bill Murray and the Hong Kong boom? And then be faced with the final blockbust of the '90s and 'oughts? No, better for Kael to stuff her timely craw till even it could take no more....

Movie comments

Some writers like to write about food, or about sexual experiences, or about how tough they are or how sorry we should feel for them (usually in combination), or they try to make a person's life into a narrative. Critics are writers who like to write about artifacts. And that's about all there is to criticism.

You'll note that the job description doesn't explicitly require an attitude of jealous spite or a habit of sneering. Sure, reviewers, like students, can permanently lose their appetites due to force-feeding, but burn-out is possible in any genre. And sure, the dialog-from-a-distance nature of such encounters overly encourages l'esprit de l'escalier. And of course some combinations of personality-and-artifact (e.g., morose loner meets rock band) are more optimized for envy than others...

Well, OK, I guess critics are messed up.

But my point was that, in fact, plenty of critics prefer enthusiasm to contempt: enthusiasm is what revved up their motor-mouths in the first place. Paying-and-drawing attention to what one loves seems like the best deal all round, and that's certainly the writing I'm proudest of.

Critics are no stabler than anyone else, though. And just like the artists themselves, even if it is special nice to be like all life-affirming and shit, sometimes we're too depressed to handle the job. When you're feeling awkward, a kneejerk seems much more manageable than an interpretive dance. Thus:

"Go on, our glory, go; know better fates."

The last time I saw Marc Laidlaw was when he worked at the law office and I worked at -- jeez, was it Aeneid? ("It's the name of a Greek god," explained the publicist in the neighboring cubicle.) No, it was earlier, because it was around the same time he said, "weird writers form mutual admiration societies in which we can sit around and admire each other's handicaps." During that lunch, though, Laidlaw seemed more interested in the games company he'd covered for Wired and the game he was novelizing.

Yesterday, I caught up with what he's been doing for the past five years:

He spotted a promising path and took it.

Which just sounds like good sense, or a chapter from Everything I Need to Know I Learned in First-Person Shooters. But good sense is a rare thing and few its acolytes.

An art form alive enough to make a living at, rather than one reliant on the sacrifices and squabbles of role-playing volunteers; too new, wet, squirming, and squalling to attract serious critical notice.... Aside from any practical considerations, such a path must hold a special glow for any historian of comics, or pop music, or movies, or pulp genres, such as fiction.

Myself, I'm too much a natural-born critic to join him on it -- as I've had frequent occasion to admit, we only join a party after it ends -- but I'm enough of a historian to appreciate the glow. And I'm heartened by what Laidlaw wants to bring over from his last art form: "mood, character, dramatic rhythm and pacing"; -- and by what he doesn't: "For me, the game design process is already granular enough. I don't want to make plot one of those elements."

'Cause it's not like narrative is a precious waif to be coddled on its sickbed: narrative is something we can't escape. And whenever I've been promised ambitious storytelling in hypertext or interactive multimedia or dynamic websites, whether by a heartwarming NPRish family chronicler or by a pin-cushioned anorexic art-school outlaw, it's always been something cohered only by triteness, like some self-congratulatory version of Stars on 45.

Although two or three years old, this is the cheeriest news I've heard about anyone for a while, so I thought I'd pass it along.

The enemy of my friend is confused; the friend of my enemy is instructive

I write to work out problems, and the stories of Karen Joy Fowler rarely leave me anything to say except "Read this."

Attacks on the stories of Karen Joy Fowler are a different matter. Richard Butner recently referred me to an appetizingly al dente specimen authored by Dave Truesdale and inexplicably incited by "What I Didn't See." (Not that the story doesn't push buttons; it's just not clear how it pressed these.)

This is absurd on the face of it down past the hypodermis, but there's something about it that interested me.

Face first:

1. There's no genre activity less productive than defining the genre. No, not even masquerade contests. And when play cartographers start policing their delusionary border, they're promoted from nuisance to the rank of actively destructive parasite. Determining the worthiness of an individual work on the basis of its typicality is like choosing friends based on how closely they match the traits on a eugenicist's chart.

2. Truesdale's fervor seems particularly misplaced here, since "What I Didn't See" is clearly science fiction: Where else could the Bride-of-the-Gorilla theme be treated seriously and realistically?

   Intragenre call-and-responsiveness also anchors Fowler's story. Its title points to James Tiptree Jr.'s "The Women Men Don't See," its setting and voice point to Alice Sheldon, and its acerbic mix of escapist eco-fantasy and repressive violence points to effects characteristic of both Tiptree and Racoona Sheldon, while the focus on those left behind is pure Fowler.

   A story, like it or not, which could only exist inside a genre and which has been published in the genre is pretty securely part of the genre.

3. The supposed specifics of Truesdale's discomfort make no more sense, since the episode described by the story was a pivotal experience for the protagonist and her husband, pivoting the latter right into his grave. The characters change significantly, all right. They're just not necessarily happy about the change.

4. The reader modification that Truesdale purportedly wishes to chase away is instead a long-time distinguishing trait of science fiction. What's "sense of wonder" if not a change in perception and what's "world building" but a way to accomplish that without character development? What romance authors have become successful cult leaders? How many libertarians were birthed by Mencken and how many by Heinlein? Is the New Yorker as responsible for Westchester as Astounding is for NASA?

5. And if allowing the reader's understanding of characters to grow more complex over time counts as being "lectured at" and "told what to feel," what coercive terms are strong enough for writing that tells you exactly what attitude to take toward every character from the beginning (or even before)?

6. No, what bothers Truesdale isn't lack of incident, or lack of change in the characters, or being bullied by assumptions about the characters, or even reader modification, but lack of expectedness. The revelations gained by Fowler's characters aren't the ones that intrepidly well-meaning white explorers are supposed to end up with. And it's not just a matter of pessimism: a Harlan Ellison story might climax in far splashier violence and much louder breast-beating without tripping up readerly expectations in the least.

   This question of fulfilled expectation has helped bisect the bookish world before, into "readerly work" and "writerly work," "passive recipients" and "active recipients," "text de plaisir" and "text de jouissance," "easy" and "challenging,""childish" and "mature," "novelized" and "novel." But it would be absurd to claim that the line divides "mainstream" from "science fiction" when both types of reader and both types of writer are also found, to their mutual irritation, in mysteries, thrillers, horror, porn, romance, and every brow level of mundane fiction.

   He has confused the genre and the generic.

7. Given the nature of Truesdale's indigestion, a better analogy than "vegetarian meal for a carnivore" would be "offputtingly exotic meal in place of comfort food." Or, if we take the insulted host's point of view, "preparing gaeng kiao wan ped from scratch for someone who refuses to eat anything but popcorn shrimp."

1. Like Fowler, "I like stories that only fall into place when you've read them." Obviously, you can't experience crystallization unless you've kept expectations in suspension. When I'm enjoying what I enjoy, I'm not thinking about how moral and intelligent and shit I'm being; "writerly," "active," "challenging," and "novel" are just the labels for what I need to stay entertained instead of bored and disgusted.

   But you may have noticed a hierarchy behind those dichotomies. As usual, academics and critics haven't been shy about exaggerating the importance of their trades' minor differences, and Truesdale's preferred mode of consumption has been blamed for such ills as global capitalism, the formation of subject-identity, and compulsory heterosexuality.

   Villainous though that makes him, I can't suppress a sense of fellowship with anyone who complains about feeling manipulated. After all, when not stunned by tedium, my reaction to "readerly" texts ranging from Steven Spielberg and Mike Resnick to Mark Amerika and Robert Hass has been a straight-from-the-gut "Get your filthy hands offa me afore I call a cop."

   A sleepy dog and a fidgety cat have different notions of fun and of irritation, and the switch between pleasurable "play" and aversive "manipulation" isn't always clearly marked. As Truesdale correctly insinuates, what I enjoy is also manipulation -- it's manipulation that provides the illusion of interaction rather than the illusion of being catered to, but it's manipulation all the same.

   As for the question of "maturity," every writerly writer I can think of started readerly and then switched teams; often, as with the Brontës, at the end of adolescence. My own childhood preferences weren't just readerly but speed-readerly, and I grew extremely annoyed when the work exhibited any bumps that might impede my progress. At puberty, bumps became more interesting and my reading slowed to its present Karloff-like lurch. But that doesn't so much imply that readerly readers are immature, as that the maturing of writerly taste is dependent upon having gained a certain amount of readerly ease with the conventions being disrupted.

   Regarding the broader brushwork, I'm sure I hope that a certain flexibility and a certain suspicion of narrative patness are healthy for the species. But is it necessary to be flexibly suspicious all the time? About everything? Would Franklin D. Roosevelt really have achieved more as President if he'd spent his free time reading Proust instead of gobbling murder mysteries like candy? Would you vote for Harold Bloom? Heck, I wouldn't even vote for Ralph Nader!

   To return to the dining room, some people find it unappetizing to have their attention drawn to the food they're eating, and others find it unappetizing to ignore the food they're eating. One might guess that the latter type of person is more likely to become a cook, and one might therefore call their approach to dining "cookly" as opposed to "eaterly," and think them handier in some circumstances, but that's about as far as my value judgments could stretch.

... the escapist aspect is something to think about. It's seldom admired, and yet it seems to me often that if people's lives are hard and a book takes you out of it for a few hours, what's wrong with that? Why isn't that an admirable thing for a writer to have done?

Reading Zukofsky's 80 Flowers by Michele J. Leggott

80 Flowers was published in an edition of 80 in 1978, soon after Louis Zukofsky's death, and left at that. I didn't own any of the 80.

I first tracked down a library copy of Leggott's book not long after its own publication in 1989, but I didn't read it, really, just her citations. Like Stuart Gilbert in 1930, under cover of criticism Leggott had smuggled extensive excerpts from an inaccessible work. Although I was grateful, criticism of an unread work needs to be awfully coherent to seem anything more than discardable cover. I discarded it .

In 1997, the Flowers were finally reprinted.

Last month, while browsing another library, I rescued Leggott's book from a misshelving and decided to read it anew.

There are three ways of defending and elucidating a pointedly difficult work. They build on one another: the upstairs neighbor gets access to the downstairs neighbor's heat, but she's on shakier ground.

1. The close reading

   The thing itself and you yourself, nose to nose, mano a mano, pas de deux, no time limits and no props other than the ones you walked into the room with. Structure is grasped, experience is applied, pleasure is described. When faced with relative transparency, a plot summary might be attempted. When faced with apparent chaos, a celebration of apparent chaos is likely. Rewards are hit and miss, as followers of this site may have noticed over the years.

   Kent Johnson took more or less that approach in his 1996 essay, "A Fractal Music: Some Notes on Zukofsky's Flowers." For hit, he usefully described Zukofsky's 8-line-by-5-word stanza as a grid of multidirectionally associative vectors. For miss, he then vanished into Catchphrase Forest with his fuzzy-wuzzy friends Quantum and Fractal and Noneuclidean. (Few English majors notice that Zukofsky's own mathematical figure for poetry was the frumpish chore of calculus.)

2. The researched reading

   You maintain the pretense that some ideal reader -- an ideal reader who doesn't trade on any personal relationship with the author but who has fingertip access to all other possibly relevant sources of knowledge -- might have the reading experience you describe. You give up the pretense that it's you. Instead, you seek to become that ideal reader. The work supplies your checklist, your syllabus, your scavenger hunt; assignments radiate from the object and are reflected back again. You report as the person you've become.

   Volumes of the OED circled round him, David Levi Strauss took more or less this approach in the first published criticism of 80 Flowers in 1983 (sadly excluded from this online edition of the book in which it appeared).

3. The genealogical narrative

   The author-artifact barrier is perforated, leaking special knowledge, special relationships. Work sheets, drafts, charts, conversation, and diaries are brought to bear. As scholarly infotainment in its own right, or as instructive example to those learning a useful craft, this is straightforward enough. As criticism, it seems to assume that if the writer had something in mind and can document it, then it's up to the reader to find it communicated.

   The assumption is flawed:

   • Experience teaches us that intentions often fail to be carried out. Or at least it teaches me that. A lot.
   • If you introduce authorial intention into the game, then the game becomes one of communication. In a communication game, the author must be judged by how clearly intention was communicated. And embarrassment on that point is presumably what led the critic to this pass in the first place.

   Nevertheless, the strategy has proven a useful defense against charges of arbitrariness or sloppiness, Stuart Gilbert being the pioneer here, too.

Ressentimental Journey

When the Happy Tutor and Turbulent Velvet and Jeff of Visible Darkness convene, we should choose our words (or rhetorical figures) carefully, if only because it suddenly sounds like we're living in an Alan Moore comic book, where words (and clichés) actually count for something. (The Happy Tutor's costume we know; TV I picture masked as V as in Vendetta; JoVD, a bit blurrier, as a John Constantine / Swamp Thing morph who blends the sartorial approaches of Chow Yun-Fat's two Jeffs. Actually, I guess that would just leave him looking like Alan Moore.)

There's an immediate appeal to the ethic that satire should only be directed upwards. The difficulty is in determining just what direction that might be. When Peter Parker or Clark Kent quip at the expense of villainy, is that bullying? Or does it only become so once they're suited up?

With increased power comes thinning skin. It takes less to insult a king than to insult a peasant; traditionally, a child or wife can infuriate a parent or husband simply by assuming equal status as a human being. Should I be noticed insulting the king, the proper king has me whipped or hung: I have wounded his sensibilities.

In the United States (every man a king), such injury usually releases itself in an aggrieved whine, the bully's whine: "I never get what I really want" (that is, everything).

When anyone (no matter how powerless) takes offense at some asshole's thoughtless words and actions, it gets called "fascism." When anyone (no matter how podunked) disagrees with someone who controls continent-spanning broadcasting, it gets called "censorship." When anyone (no matter how politely) fucks or worships in an unfamiliar fashion, it gets called an "attack." And so it shouldn't have so surprised me that the French have received the rhetoric historically due a war's aggressor merely for declining to join the war we initiated.

William Bennett cannot sleep easy so long as a single reader enjoys unprescribed work; Pat Robertson's soul will not be free until all on earth agree with him and have donated their savings accordingly; Wall Street Journal editorialists writhe under a tax yoke unjustly shifted from the shoulders of lucky duckies. Despite the protection of their god, their wealth, their state, and their family, they still feel victimized. And when they crush the peasant, the villain, the upstart, they do so in self-righteous self-defense.

The process is hardly confined to talk radio. Here in liberalville, few will admit to security or to influence, and fully-tenured mistresses of the postmodern are as scrambling and resentful as the merest billionaire.

So in this game of loser-takes-all, who wins the right to satirize? The last great period of Hollywood comedy taught us that cheats (Bill Murray, Eddie Murphy) and the crassest wealthy (Rodney Dangerfield) are lovably put-upon underdogs fighting against the repressive forces of hard-working sincerity (the EPA, snobs, and literati), and I know which camp I'm assigned to.

Rightly so. I, singularly, find myself with no kicks to make. American, white, male, hetero, clever: I know exactly what further privileges I've gained thanks to those enviable starting points, having counted them one by one as they released into my convulsive grasp, and I'm very pleased with each.

That being the case, who's left for me to mock? Snoop Dogg? Because otherwise, by their own sincere admission, everyone else is worse off than I am.

And so I try to mock only those who I can't imagine weeping over my attacks. Given my hot temper, sometimes I guess wrong, and then I'm very sorry. Or sometimes I attack myself, and (being a critic, and thus myopic and trembly) scatter my shot. Still, that's my rule of nose-thumbing: harmlessness.

This would make me an ineffectual satirist. But I'm no satirist. The blind gesturing obscenely at the blind, the deaf whispering insults behind a broad hand -- is that satire? Dixit insipiens, at most.

Why take the risk of mocking at all?

Well, see, me, I like being criticized. And although I don't like hurting people's feelings, I also don't want to be ignored. A tawdry impulse, but, like most tawdriness, heir to its own peculiar glamour. A dream drives me, as it drives so many, a dream best described by that no-hit-wonder of unpopular music, Professor Anonymous, in his big non-hit "Got To Let It Out":

But people are hostile shit-throwing little monkeys, and if we want to make 'em happy, we must accept the consequences.

Errata

The Happy Tutor had in fact already pegged me as no satirist, and my little essay would have benefited by careful study of this chart.

We regret any inconvenience.

Then am I / A happy fly, / If I live, / Or if I die.

One of the pleasanter aspects to being a critic rather than a pundit or preacher is that we, by definition, don't want everyone else to be the same as ourselves. Because if they were, we'd vanish.

It's odd how many of us want to throw that advantage away.

Let us follow instead the example of Musca domestica, who buzzes and infects without debate or enmity.