Year: 2013

Mary Mann praises the cantankerous writing style of Max Beerbohm:

Max Beerbohm hates going for walks. He also hates when lady writers are more successful than he is. He wishes that people were more honestly unkind in their correspondence, and he doesn’t care too much for socializing. When reduced to a line, his essays — each a perfect parody of a different genre or author — sound annoyingly negative. They conjure up the greatest fear for a new essayist: how does one write about the self without being narcissistic and unlikable? The full essays, written in Beerbohm’s distinctive curmudgeonly voice, answer the question with a paradox: be willfully unlikeable, and people will like you.

Mann highlights some choice Beerbohm lines, such as, “Though I always liked to be invited anywhere, I very often preferred to stay at home.” Why his pejorative style was successful: 

Validation of human imperfections seems to be most important in times of great change, when everyone is feeling unsteady. This makes the specific imperfections of the curmudgeon especially valuable because the old grouch is always longing for the “good old days.” Beerbohm certainly did, once noting in his youth that his long-term goal was to go off and live away from modern things so he could “look forth and, in my remoteness, appreciate the distant pageant of the world.” In his lifetime he saw the advent of electric lights, home telephones, television, radio, airplanes, escalators, vacuum cleaners… even such ageless-seeming items as the teabag and the cross-word puzzle. He took some things more in stride then others — he broadcast on BBC radio during World War II and writer Rebecca West gushed that he sounded like “the last civilized man on earth” — but was almost impossible to reach on the telephone because, as writer S.N. Behrman tactfully put it in The New Yorker, “he tolerated the instrument, but he didn’t coddle it.”

J. Hoberman reviews a new installation by James Nares at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Street:

Most of Nares’s subjects are oblivious or indifferent to their documentation, although a few are hyper-alert. People point to things we cannot see or make hieroglyphic gestures that unfold too slowly to be decoded. Tourists take their own images and occasionally one catches a glimpse of the filmmaker’s silver SUV reflected in a storefront window. Kids clown, adults stare. The moments when someone locks eyes with the camera are always electric. Nothing may be more dramatic than the focused concentration of New Yorkers hailing a cab, but small sensations become thrilling events. Rain falls. A woman’s hair is caught in the breeze. A merchant demonstrating a child’s toy produces a trail of soap bubbles. A low-flying pigeon comes in for a landing.

The moment-expanding, arrested-time effect has appeared in any number of Hollywood films, including Taxi Driver and virtually every feature made by action-movie director Michael Bay. Here, however, congealed temporality is the main point: Street is a motion picture predicated on two types of motion.

The first is the inexorable forward movement of the filmmaker’s car, proceeding at a constant speed although periodically—and almost invisibly—reversing direction. The second is provided by the wildly contrapuntal activities of the people on camera. Nares is best known for paintings made with a single brush stroke. Street, which is composed of thirty or more smoothly conjoined separate shots, is a comparable gesture.

Transforming the city into a kind of mass choreography, Street may suggest an updated version of Godfrey Reggio’s 1982 Koyaanisqatsi, the only non-narrative avant-garde film to ever play Radio City Music Hall; actually, it is quite the opposite. Where Koyaanisqatsi is essentially a jeremiad, using pixilation as well as slow motion, along with Olympian camera angles and an overwrought Philip Glass score, to portray urban life as an unnatural catastrophe, Street, shot at eye-level and deliberately paced, is more investigation than judgment. There is much that can be gleaned from it regarding New York’s social structure but, far from condemning the metropolis, Street revels in its diverse types, feasting on what the sociologist Georg Simmel described 110 years ago as the psychological conditions of modern urban existence: “the rapid crowding of changing images, the sharp discontinuity in the grasp of a single glance, and the unexpectedness of onrushing impressions.”

Benjamin Kunkel reflects on a hard couple of weeks in America:

I’m more than ever grateful to be alive, for the interest and pleasure I have in the people I know, in thinking about the world, in the prospect of doing good if politically unavailing work, and in little things like the sight last week of some just-bloomed forsythia. (My grandmother, in her dementia, was each spring in New Hampshire surprised repeatedly by the beautiful yellow blazes.)

But whenever I raise my head from more intimate concerns there is the miscarriage of my society and civilization going on around me, robbing many people of what I still have to enjoy, and I find myself appalled enough at the gradual and sudden calamity that it seems to reveal hopes that I never knew I had, evident only in the dashing. These are hopes for this world “which is the world/ Of all of us,—the place where, in the end,/ We find our happiness, or not at all.”

Those lines come from Wordsworth, whose 1805 version of his book-length poem The Prelude I’ve nearly finished for the first time. I wish I’d read it years ago, but at least I’ll have done it once, when no long work in English has made me gladder for my native language. …

Wordsworth, in other words, who as a child “with the breeze/ Had played, a green leaf on the blessed tree/ Of my beloved country,” has come in part to hate his country, and to have impulses of vengeance toward young Englishmen much like him except for their being soldiers. And then, at this knowledge, he feels hatred for the hatred bred in him, compounded with disgust at the French revolution’s turn toward terror and disgust at the counterrevolutionary alliance arrayed against it. It comes to seem, terribly, that the stream of contemporary events doesn’t at all lead into some ocean of peace and justice but deserves a different aquatic image, as if all history were “a reservoir of guilt/ And ignorance, filled up from age to age,/ That could no longer hold its loathsome charge,/ But that burst and spread in deluge through the land.” He consoles himself with the thought that even such a “disastrous period did not want/ Such sprinklings of all human excellence/ As were a joy to hear of.” But the consolation is small. Mass violence has contaminated his joy in either of the opposed countries that he loves, and twisted some of his deepest feelings, with their inclination toward beauty, into ugliness. It must have done something for him to write about all this, and it’s done something for me to read it. But what does it do, to read or write or speak about our grief, anger, and improbable stupid hopes?

In the moment an emotion is expressed or an event reported on, I don’t quite feel the emotion or the event; the names for things partially and temporarily replace their actuality. The need for this relief may explain the desperate quality of my and perhaps your online reading, and of much that is written online or said into TV cameras. Language in the utterance is some escape from what it says. But then the world that is not bits or syllables resumes its undeflected course.

Previous Dish on American terror here and here.