Greg Sandow has posted two thoughtful, challenging entries regarding arts bailouts/stimuli in the current economic climate—how there are problems with the very idea, and how arguing for the economic importance of the arts isn’t sufficient. Read what Greg has to say, then perhaps take a look at a piece I wrote for the Tucson Weekly in 2004 about the dangers of commodifying culture.
Apropos of nothing except that it would be nice if I blogged more substantially than has been my recent norm, here's an essay I wrote about 10 years ago when I was doing a monthly literary column for an e-zine called The Whole Wired World (TW3). Yes, it's dated, but on the Internet, everything lives forever.
A NOVELIST'S FAVORITE cliché is that "my characters just took on a life of their own." This could be true, because those characters -- and fictionalized versions of novelists themselves -- are increasingly likely to cavort in some other novelist's work.
But once in a rare while, those characters' guardians will find them in suspect precincts and yank them home. On Nov. 6, Farrar, Straus & Giroux agreed to cancel its planned July '99 publication of Lo's Diary, Italian author Pia Pera's retelling of Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita from the point of view of the title nymphet. Lo's Diary, published in 1995 but not yet having appeared anywhere in English translation, is reportedly a parody. As such, it should be immune to charges of copyright infringement, but that's just the complaint filed in court by Nabokov's son. The American publisher backed off, which is no surprise considering how wussy American publishers have become in the '90s. [UPDATE: The book was eventually published in the United States with a scathing introduction by Nabokov's son.]
I think the battle would have been worth fighting on intellectual grounds. But I can't help feeling that the whole idea of a Lolita parody is a bad mistake, and I'm a little relieved that it will now be impossible for me to read the thing.
Pera's not being especially innovative here. These days, novelists readily appropriate characters from stories no longer under copyright. Browsing through a catalog of remaindered items recently, I spotted Fred Saberhagen's Seance for a Vampire. The plot, according to the blurb: "When two suspicious psychics offer Ambrose Altamont and his wife the opportunity to contact their recently deceased daughter, the wealthy British aristocrat hires Sherlock Holmes to investigate." Why not? Arthur Conan Doyle's most famous creation has been in the public domain for some time now.
Some characters never belonged to a particular author. The Hardy boys, for example, were a franchise; over the decades, the publisher farmed the adolescent sleuths out to any number of authors, all writing under the same pseudonym.
More recently, authors' estates or relevant publishers have allowed new writers to complete or continue stories from the backlists. Raymond Chandler's detective Philip Marlowe found new life, of a sort, in Robert B. Parker's completion of the novel Poodle Springs (pointedly ignored by Colette Bancroft in her Colette's List survey of Chandler, although she does have fine things to say about Parker's own work elsewhere). More recently came Alexandra Ripley's authorized sequel to Margaret Mitchell's Gone With The Wind. Janet Maslin, in a New York Times review, deemed this a "fearless act of cultural cannibalism." She didn't mean it as a compliment.
These efforts, however misguided, were sanctioned by relevant authorities. No such permits are required for raiders pillaging the literary tombs of authors dead a century or more.
As far as The Great Unwashed were concerned, Jane Austen's novels were submerged as deep as the Titanic until Hollywood raised them to public consciousness in the 1990s. Now, in print, various completions and sequels cling like barnacles to Austen's authentic works. Further examples would be equally and needlessly depressing.
In 1975, E.L. Doctorow's Ragtime launched an odd, somewhat related fad: populating novels with figures from fairly recent history. Ragtime is essentially about fictitious characters from conflicting classes in turn-of-the-century America, but they mingle with the likes of Harry Houdini, Henry Ford, J.P. Morgan, Sigmund Freud, Emma Goldman and Emiliano Zapata.
One of the more recent successes in this line is Carol de Chellis Hill's Henry James' Midnight Song, a murder mystery that mixes in Sigmund Freud, Carl Jung, Edith Wharton and, of course, Henry James. Hill's and Doctorow's works are not traditional historical novels -- loosely accurate dramatizations of actual events. Instead, these fabricate events, pulling in historical figures as if they were stock commedia dell'arte characters to be used and abused at the author's whim. Doctorow and Hill spin their tales with a sense of historical responsibility, but I wonder about some of the other items I see in that remainders catalog ...
The Marble Orchard by William F. Nolan: "Amateur detectives Raymond Chandler, Dashiell Hammett and Erle Stanley Gardiner join forces to investigate the apparent ritual suicide in a Chinese cemetery of the former husband of Chandler's wife." Exquisite Corpse by Robert Irwin: "Caspar, an unpromising 1930s painter, falls madly in love with Caroline, a sensible typist, and when she vanishes he embarks on a terrifying comic journey through war-ravaged Europe, encountering Orson Welles, Salvador Dali and Dylan Thomas along the way."
To borrow one of Dave Barry's taglines, I am not making this up.
This is not just a publishing craze; it's hitting the boards, too. Steve Martin's mystifyingly popular play Picasso at the Lapin Agile not only revolves around an imaginary encounter between Pablo Picasso and Albert Einstein in a Paris bistro just before World War I, but, as if it were a throw-away Saturday Night Live sketch, squanders its last scenes on an intrusion by that other defining genius of the 20th century, Elvis Presley. Shakespeare may have played fast and loose with the events in Richard III, but at least he didn't prop up the play with cameos by Julius Caesar and Prince Hal. Shakespeare had enough understanding of the character he half-borrowed, half-created to let him stand without pandering to the cheapest tastes of his restless audience. (Elizabethan theater was, by and large, bawdy, violent, lowest-common-denominator crap, just like today's TV. We can now regard the Elizabethan-Jacobean period as a golden age because the crap eventually got flushed from literary history, with only the likes of Shakespeare and Marlowe remaining as the era's Tidi-Bowl men.)
What worries me about Lo's Diary is, does Pia Pera really understand the Lolita/Lo/Dolly/Dolores Haze created by Vladimir Nabokov? Has she revived this Nabokovian nymphet without pandering to our current sanctimonious horror of child abuse? This is critical, because even though it's a novel in which an adult repeatedly engages in not-entirely-consensual sexual relations with a minor, Lolita is not at all about child abuse. It's a terrifically funny novel about obsession, repression, romantic literature, the vacuity of the American middle class, and, especially, the seriocomic self-delusion of one Humbert Humbert, an arrogant, emotionally traumatized fetishist whose tragedy is not that he's a sex offender but that he winds up deeply loving a girl who cannot love him -- or, apparently, anyone -- back.
Lolita is Humbert's story -- his tale told in his voice. Because Humbert doesn't really understand Lolita as an individual, she comes across as shallow, manipulative and cruel, with just enough flashes of intelligence to keep Humbert (and us) interested. In other words, a typical teenager. Perhaps Pera wants to rehabilitate Lolita, dress her up as a distaff Holden Caufield. This would be a more honorable literary effort than just tarting the story up as an incest novel and trotting out little Dolores Haze as a pathetic victim. Even so, I just don't want to understand Lolita as anything more than a kid broken by her own trampishness (remember that, initially, Lolita and Humbert are each the other's willing victim). I have no interest in learning more about any character in Nabokov's first-person narratives. In great novels like Lolita and Pale Fire, Nabokov's point is to parse the psyches of the delusional narrators. The other characters aren't intended as much more than funhouse mirrors to reflect, attract and bedevil the central figure.
Compare this to the works of, say, Elmore Leonard, wherein you feel that every richly odd walk-on character is another novel waiting to happen. But it's a novel you'd want to be written by Leonard himself -- not, for instance, by Pia Pera.
Literary characters seem to be up for grabs, though. Real people are, too. Individuals who do something especially heroic or heinous can easily sell their tale to the highest bidder: ABC News, The National Enquirer, a Hollywood producer. The woman who murders her children, the celebrity who bottoms out and belatedly dries out -- for a fee, these people gladly relinquish control of their own past experiences. Perhaps Nabokov's son wasn't offered a high enough fee to relinquish control of Lolita to Pia Pera.
Or perhaps he was sincerely trying to protect the integrity of his father's work and characters. But it's a futile effort. A life, real or fictitious, is no longer a grand story. It's merely a commodity.
Distracted by this week’s membership drive, I’m not blogging faithfully, but here’s an easy one: a link to my latest screed in the Tucson Weekly:
Neil Simon's _Lost in Yonkers_ would be a superb play if there were less Neil Simon in it. What could be a serious, moving character study with flashes of wit is compromised by Simon's obsession with wisecracks and one-liners. Simon's theatrical blows again and again are weakened by periodic snickering, and too much of what could have been a forceful play ends up with the impact of a pillow fight. And yet Live Theatre Workshop has mounted a production of it that is assuredly worth seeing; actresses Holli Henderson and Roberta Streicher infuse it with tremendous heart and soul.
The full review awaits you here.
These days we're playing a lot of tracks from Cameron Carpenter's newish CD on the air; here's a review of the disc I wrote for Fanfare:
REVOLUTIONARY Cameron Carpenter (org) * TELARC SACE-60711 (hybrid multichannel SACD: 64:33)
CHOPIN Etudes, Op. 10: No. 12, “Revolutionary”; No. 1 BACH Toccata and Fugue in d, BWV 565; Chorale Prelude on “Nun komm, der heiden Heiland,” BWV 659 ELLINGTON Solitude DEMESSIEUX Etudes, Op. 5: Octaves LISZT Mephisto Waltz No. 1 CARPENTER Love Song No. 1; Homage to Klaus Kinski DUPRÉ Prelude and Fugue in B HOROWITZ Variations on a Theme from Bizet’s Carmen
& DVD: CHOPIN Etudes, Op. 10: No. 12, “Revolutionary” BACH Toccata and Fugue in d, BWV 565
Another contributor has turned in a detailed report on organist Cameron Carpenter and a review of the standard two-channel version of this disc in the features section of this issue. So I’ll skip the background info and just get on with it, except to complain that the booklet, despite spreading over several pages, conveys very little solid information. Like, what exactly is Carpenter playing here? In case you haven’t yet read the feature, this is the instrument originally planned as only a temporary replacement for the Aeolian-Skinner pipe organ at New York City’s Trinity Church, which was damaged in the 9/11 attack on the nearby World Trade Center. But the temporary replacement proved so popular that it earned a permanent spot in the church. It’s a “virtual organ” that employs a conventional console but uses digital samples of real pipe organ timbres, and plays them through a computerized system that feeds nearly 100 speakers hidden behind dummy pipes. In addition to the regular (abundant) array of church-organ stops, this one features another 125 theater-organ stops. Depending on what the player wants, sometimes it sounds like a massive if not especially warm cathedral organ, and sometimes it sounds like a dorky Wurlitzer.
Carpenter has cultivated that thin David Bowie glam-rock look, and on the accompanying DVD you can see him applying his high-heeled white shoes to the pedals most spectacularly. But there’s nothing rock-star about Carpenter’s performance demeanor; he makes a few grand gestures with his arms, but not nearly as many as are indulged by some leading classical pianists. He’s a serious, talented musician with a lot of interesting interpretive ideas, some of which don’t work, but all of which add up to an engaging experience.
Just consider his performance of Bach’s notorious BWV 565 Prelude and Fugue. It’s as if Leopold Stokowski (who started out as an organist) had transcribed his orchestra transcription of the work back to the organ. Carpenter and his virtual organ produce a tremendous dynamic range, sometimes from phrase to phrase, and superbly guaged crescendos that would make Stoky proud. Carpenter verges on distortion, but that’s because this is show-off music. Bach (or whoever actually wrote it) intended it to display the player’s imagination, and Carpenter makes the most of it.
Carpenter really goes his own way interpretively in his version of Chopin’s Op. 10 No. 1 étude, giving it a quiet, moonlit character completely unlike the original. It offers maximum contrast to the roiling “Revolutionary” étude, which here is a workout mainly for the organist’s feet and right hand (on the video, you can see him using his left hand mainly to anchor himself to the bench). Carpenter has a vivid imagination as a performer and as a composer (his Homage to Klaus Kinski is appropriately schizophrenic), but he can sound less inspired by straightforward pieces like a Bach chorale. The Liszt item is more impish than Mephistofelean, but it’s still great fun. I don’t think that Carpenter’s treatment of Duke Ellington’s Solitude works, though. The initial treatment wouldn’t be out of place among the slow movements of Vierne and Widor, but within two minutes it becomes a lounge version of Sheep May Safely Graze. Part of it is effective, but some of Carpenter’s chosen effects are just cheesey.
Telarc’s SACD layer provides a very convincing rendering of a big pipe organ with an impressive dynamic and frequency range. The accompanying DVD is a straightforward presentation of Carpenter playing the disc’s two most popular Chopin and Bach items, no music-video cutaways involved.
Carpenter takes lots of chances, and more often than not the results are exciting and musically rewarding. Gird your loins. James Reel
Once again, it's Thursday and I'm not linking to my stuff in the Tucson Weekly. But this time it's because I've got no "stuff" there. I was sick last weekend, and deputized my friend Gene Armstrong to cover two plays for me. Gene was one of the first two people (the other was Ed Severson) to come over and say "hello" and "welcome" when I was introduced as a new contributor to the Arizona Daily Star back in late 1988. Since then, Gene and I have both moved on to better things, including the Weekly. There, he most often writes for the Music section, but you can see his work as a theater critic here.
Misused terms seem to come in little epidemics. This week, in the course of filling in again as editor of the Tucson Weekly, I’ve seen three writers get “begs the question” wrong, and online I’ve seen two highly questionable uses of “lumpen.” (At least I was recently pleasantly surprised to hear someone say “immensity” instead of misappropriating, as is common, “enormity.”)
“Beg the question,” according to a site devoted exclusively to setting the matter straight,
is a form of logical fallacy in which a statement or claim is assumed to be true without evidence other than the statement or claim itself. When one begs the question, the initial assumption of a statement is treated as already proven without any logic to show why the statement is true in the first place. A simple example would be "I think he is unattractive because he is ugly." The adjective "ugly" does not explain why the subject is "unattractive"—they virtually amount to the same subjective meaning, and the proof is merely a restatement of the premise. The sentence has begged the question.
What people who misuse “begs the question” really mean is “raises the question.”
“Lumpen” tends to be misused by fairly erudite writers who ought to know better than to employ odd terms without looking them up. They seem to associate the word, perhaps, with “lumpy,” at least in a metaphorical way, but it’s a short form of “lumpenproletariat,” which one dictionary defines first as “Of or relating to dispossessed, often displaced people who have been cut off from the socioeconomic class with which they would ordinarily be identified.” By extension, and especially as critic Robert Hughes loves to use it, “lumpen” means “vulgar,” “common,” “plebeian.”
Class dismissed.
James Reel's cranky consideration of the fine arts and public radio in Tucson and beyond.
