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June 15, 2009

New Essay at Critical Distance

A new essay has now been posted at Critical Distance. This one considers Nicholson Baker's The Mezzanine and is written by Steven Augustine, who is no doubt familiar to many as a thoughtful commenter on this and other blogs.

An excerpt from the essay:

So imagine Kubrick’s Lolita minus Sue Lyons, minus James Mason, and with lots of close-ups of various features of the interior of the Chevy Two-Ten, plus a running, personal, scholarly-digressive-obsessive commentary by Kubrick himself. Imagine the kind of novel such a film would be based on. Imagine laughing out loud at some parts of this hypothetically weird novel and being strangely moved (despite the book’s best intentions) by others… and that would be something like reading The Mezzanine.

Thanks to Steven for taking on this assignment to be the first author on CD who isn't, well, me.

I would also like again to renew the invitation for submissions and queries for future installments of Critical Distance. Any work of fiction since 1980 for which a case could be made it might stand the test of time would be an appropriate subject of analysis.

Note: Comments are enabled on Steven's essay. I have also enabled the comments on my previous essay on Russell Banks's Affliction.

Later note: Printable .pdf versions of both essays are now available, here and here.

June 15, 2009 |

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About

The Critical Sphere

  • Blographia Literaria:
    ". . .politics does not harm aesthetics—not finally. In discrete public moments when the novel is used as a whipping-boy or as a bludgeon for one partisan cause or another, yes, maybe it does, but I am confident that these blows are never mortal." (more)
  • Joshua Cohen at Tablet Magazine:
    "Kabbalistic practice—which, our sages hold, created angels and golems, animals for food and labor in the fields and even, once, in an experiment the Talmud attributes to Rabba, a walking talking human being—became, by the time fiction and poetry came to be written, a cultural act in which letters and words didn’t create life, but merely simulated it. Perec understood this virtuality, and exploited it to present the Oulipian writer—a writer of orders and systems, of cosmogonies and laws given only to be miraculously broken—as a sort of fallen god. Though in his time the new religion was art, or a religion of art, the mysticism underlying all making remained." (more)
  • Everything Unfinished:
    "Should e-publishing be touted as a way of drawing attention away from the fetishistic qualities of a book, and towards the redemptive properties of its content?" (more)
  • Litlove reads a passage from Lolita:
    "Look at the vocabulary here: prophylactic, pacific, equanimity, cubistic, demeanour, this is not a man who will use one syllable when three or four would suffice. And these are cold, hard-edged words, academic, distanced, intellectual words used to display the mental agility of their speaker against the tacky tedium of the world. But that vocabulary in continually undercut by words that come from other registers and dress themselves in violence – purge, brutal, trash, bloodripe. Our narrator becomes more implicitly dangerous because he coats his language with a veneer of intellectual control; we become aware of that most alarming proposition, that underneath something clever and polished, ugly drives lurk and threaten, pushing at the boundaries of language’s containment and liable to break out." (more)
  • That Shakespearean Rag:
    "I have now finished two of the five books shortlisted for this year’s Giller Prize, and am well into a third. . .And my verdict at the midway point is as dispiriting as it is surprising: I don’t want to read any more. Not these books, nor anything else. The first three Giller contenders have managed to do something I never would have thought possible: robbed me of my delight in reading." (more)

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