Month: April 2014

On Thursday, Kiss was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. Chuck Klosterman, who has written about the band “semiconstantly for the past 20 years,” celebrates their success while acknowledging “there’s never been a rock group so easy to appreciate in the abstract and so hard to love in the specific”:

Kiss do not make it easy for Kiss fans. … They inoculate themselves from every avenue of revisionism, forever undercutting anything that could be reimagined as charming. They economically punish the people who care about them most: In the course of my lifetime, I’ve purchased commercial recordings of the song “Rock and Roll All Nite” at least 15 times (18 if you count the 13-second excerpt used in the introduction to “Detroit Rock City” on Destroyer). … To “qualify” as a Kiss supporter, you have to be a Kiss consumer. And this is nonnegotiable — it doesn’t work any other way. If you try to enjoy Kiss in the same way you enjoy Foghat or Culture Club or Spoon, you’ll fail. You might like a handful of songs or appreciate the high-volume nostalgia, but it will inevitably seem more ridiculous than interesting. To make this work, you need to go all the way. And this is because the difficult part of liking Kiss — the manipulative, unlikable part — is how you end up loving them.

Here’s a statement only a fool would contradict:

There’s never been a band inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame whose output has been critically contemplated less than the music of Kiss, at least by the people who voted them in. I can’t prove this, but I’d guess 50 percent of the voters who put Kiss on their Rock Hall ballot have not listened to any five Kiss records more than five times; part of what makes the band so culturally durable is the assumption that you can know everything about their aesthetic without consuming any of it. That perception doesn’t bother me, and I certainly don’t think it bothers the band. In many ways, it works to their advantage. But I definitely disagree with anyone who thinks these albums are somehow immaterial. It’s traditionally hard to get an accurate appraisal on their value, because most people who write about Kiss either don’t care at all or care way too much. My publishing this essay arguably puts me in the latter camp (and the argument is not terrible). But it doesn’t feel that way. I know what I know: A few of these records are great, most are OK, several are bad, and some should be buried in sulphur.

Continuing the endless quest to determine the Great American Novel, Michael Dirda steps back and ponders the Great Novels of other countries:

Readers around the world have already elected Gabriel Garciá Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude as the Great Latin-​American Novel. But is India’s central work of fiction Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children—​or could it be Rudyard Kipling’s panoramic Kim, which captures so much of the subcontinent’s rumbustiousness and variety? In Australia Henry Handel Richardson’s saga-​like The Fortunes of Richard Mahony still battles for top honors against Patrick White’s more intense Voss. Though Goethe remains Germany’s leading contributor to Weltliteratur, his finest prose work, Elective Affinities, may be too Mozartian, too heartbreaking to be called the Great German Novel. I suspect that the GGN’s author is, inevitably, Thomas Mann, though whether for Buddenbrooks, The Magic Mountain, or Doctor Faustus remains open to debate.

Dirda brings the debate back to the States with a comment on Lawrence Buell’s The Dream of the Great American Novel:

In his epilogue … Buell returns to the current validity of the GAN ideal. For many writers and readers today, the all-​American super-​novel must seem, on the surface, utterly outmoded in an age when literature has grown increasingly global and transnational. Yet Buell argues that the GAN isn’t necessarily a representation of jingoist brag, and that its greatest exemplars have usually offered diagnoses of our nation’s fragilities and failures, especially with regard to race and class. Given the fraught nature of twenty-​first-​century American life, whether one looks at the increased stratification of our society or the overall loss of status of the United States in the world community, there should be every expectation that the “national” novel will continue to offer writers a form in which to capture and critique the way we live now. After all, the GAN merely exemplifies a more operatic version of what all art aspires to do: structure the chaos of experience, give clarity to complexity, transform a world of troubles and confusion into a thing of beauty and a joy forever.

Previous Dish on the GAN here, here, here, and here.

In a review of Linda Leavell’s biography of Marianne Moore, Bruce Bawer describes the poet’s exceedingly bizarre home life. After a brief stay at college, Moore returned to live with her “terribly sick and suffocatingly possessive mother—a woman who, quite calculatingly, set out to imprison [her children] in a hermetically sealed little world of their own with its own peculiar customs, moral codes, and rules of behavior, all of them determined exclusively by her”:

Consider this: [Moore’s mother] Mary established a pattern whereby Marianne, in family conversations and correspondence, was invariably referred to as a boy and identified only with male pronouns. Furthermore, Mary encouraged the siblings to regard each other as “lovers,” and to think of her as their “lover,” too. (In a letter to [Marianne’s brother] Warner, for instance, she told him: “you are Mr. Fang’s lover”—Mr. Fang being one of their names for Marianne—and in another letter she described Warner as being her “lover, father, and son all in one.”)

But maybe domestic despotism is what allowed Moore to thrive creatively:

[T]he closest thing Marianne had to an escape from life with Mary was her poems. A key fact about them, underscored by Leavell, is this:

On the one hand, she “could never have become the poet she was without the four years away from her mother at Bryn Mawr,” where she first became part of a creative community and found the freedom and confidence to forge a poetic voice of her own—in reaction, one might say, to the family language Mary had invented—and where, taking biology courses, she was drawn to the rigorous language of science. On the other hand, it was being back home under Mary’s thumb that made her feel compelled to write—compelled to escape from the world Mary had fashioned (itself an escape from the real world) into a literary landscape of her own devising.

Many of Moore’s poems, Leavell reminds us, feature “camouflaged and armored animals” that are “misunderstood, self-reliant, and invariably solitary”—a manifest reflection, of course, of Marianne’s own circumstances. But the poems, as any reader of Moore well knows, are the very opposite of cries of the heart. Mary, after all, read every word—so raw confession, or anything close to it, was not an option. Hence Marianne was forced to devise what amounted to a new type of poem, stunning at the time, not only for being syllabic in form (something which was previously all but unheard of in serious English poetry) but, perhaps even more so, for its extraordinary, even clinical, degree of precision and dispassion. … [J]ust as so much of the power of first-rate Iron Curtain poets like Joseph Brodsky and Czeslaw Milosz can be accounted for by the terrible pressure of the circumstances under which their poems were composed, so the strength of Moore’s own work owes much to the fact that she, like them, created it while living under an iron-fisted tyranny. Only in Moore’s case, the tyranny was that not of a totalitarian state but of a little old lady.

Previous Dish on Moore here.

Tara Isabella Burton reviews The Collected Stories of Stefan Zweig, pronouncing the Austrian writer a master of psychological complexity who has “lapsed into an undeserved obscurity”:

His worlds are dream-like, their atmosphere colored by a memory that is, more often than not, unreliable. In the 22 stories that comprise Pushkin Press’s new Collected Stories, expertly and atmospherically translated by Anthea Bell, most are told through concentric circles of narrative — unobtrusive narrators meet the tale’s real raconteurs on board ships, trains from Dresden, and guest houses on the Riviera. Each level of narrative adds a degree of nostalgic uncertainty, a veil of emotions through which facts become ever more vague.

Zweig has sometimes been criticized for an excessive tendency to whitewash, to create a vision of pre-war Central Europe that is, as Robert S. Wistrich puts it, “gilded, sanitized [and] pure nostalgia.” But such a reading of Zweig fails to take in account his pronounced sense of tragedy. He treats the personal and the political with equal sensitivity: the atrocities of war are no more surprising than the atrocities of human nature from which they spring. While it’s easy to accuse Zweig of too-ready nostalgia — of falling in love with a world, a place, a time, that never really existed — such a reading is simplistic. The vanished world Zweig longs for is never really just the Vienna of 1900. It is the world of our childhoods, of our illusions, of the faith we have in human goodness that the world so often does not confirm.

Burton notes the author’s influence on Wes Anderson, remarking that the director’s latest film, The Grand Budapest Hotel, “does much to bring Zweig’s particular brand of elegiac to the screen”:

From Zweig’s almost cloying candy-colored atmospheres — virtually tailor-made for Anderson’s brand of visual whimsy — to the inevitability of global catastrophe, casting a pall over even the happiest moments of domestic comfort, The Grand Budapest Hotel manages to capture nearly all of Zweig’s most striking qualities.

Jason Diamond also picks up on Anderson’s inspiration, and hopes the filmmaker will bring Zweig’s work a bigger audience:

“It’s more or less plagiarism,” Anderson recently told the press about the huge influence Zweig’s work had on his latest film, Grand Budapest Hotel. Zweig, who Anderson pointed out was among the biggest writers in Europe in the 1920s and ’30s, never attained the sort of popularity in America that he did on his own continent. …

Zweig’s story, unfortunately, will never quite have the rosy glow of most Anderson films no matter how many of his books sell, considering the tragic way his life ended. Constantly in exile beginning in the early 1930s, the Jewish author and his wife, Lotte Altmann, escaped his home country of Austria to avoid Nazi persecution. As the couple roamed from England to America before finally ending up in Brazil, Zweig felt more and more hopeless about the course humanity was taking, as well as his own constant running. In his suicide note, he explained, “to start everything anew after a man’s 60th year requires special powers, and my own power has been expended after years of wandering homeless. I thus prefer to end my life at the right time, upright, as a man for whom cultural work has always been his purest happiness and personal freedom — the most precious of possessions on this earth.” Zweig and Lotte were found dead from a barbiturate overdose, holding hands in their bed.

(Video: Trailer for The Grand Budapest Hotel)