Posts Tagged ‘Michiko Kakutani’

Joseph Brodsky on “the spirit of tolerance, the spirit of intolerance”

Saturday, August 23rd, 2014
Share
brodsky7

We liked the “merciless honesty” of the Avedon photo, too.

NEWS FLASH! Newly discovered 11-year-old review says great things about Joseph Brodsky: Conversations! Bless you, Theo, whoever you are! Much to our surprise, we just learned that long ago, on September 23, 2003, we got a nice write-up in a blog called Private Intellectual, which still exists today (though Theo seems to have disappeared from it) – this is not something to be taken for granted in the blogosphere, which has much deadwood floating in it. We ran across the review when we were looking for an article on Madame de Staël, of all things.

Theo lamented that the book was not published by Farrar, Straus & Giroux, he wished it had been reviewed by Michiko Kakutani, he decried the lack of public notice (well, we got a little notice, in the Times Literary Supplement, among others…) What can we say? We love him.

Here‘s what he wrote, way back when, a year after the book was published:

The role Edward Teller played in freeing Joseph Brodsky, is told rather briefly in the single most rewarding tome of what the darkening Atlantic skies over Providence, Rhode Island, tell me has already been my summer reading.

In San Francisco two months ago, I picked up Joseph Brodsky. Conversations, at City Lights Bookstore (Ferlinghetti was winding down, in the background, from preaching in the Beatnik mode: a Jeremiad against this country in the name of this country – the classic exemplum being Ginsberg‘s “America I’ve given you all and now I’m nothing. /America two dollars and twenty-seven cents January 17, 1956. (…)/America when will we end the human war?/ Go fuck yourself with your atom bomb /(…) America when will you be angelic?” ).

The book is a compilation of interviews with the poet recorded throughout Brodsky’s short life, collected from wide and far by Cynthia L. Haven. Because many of the pieces are from small literary magazines and many of the questions are outright stupid – no literary publisher – not even JB’s own Roger Strauss (not a publisher, more like my living room, JB said), seems to have wanted to bring them out. Not even the merciless honesty of the cover photo by Richard Avedon caught the eye of Manhattan’s literati. One wonders whether if this book would have been brought out by FSG, it would have been hailed by Michiko Kakutani as “monumental, of the essence, the poet continues to speak from beyond the grave”, etc. but since it comes from the Mississippi State University Press [No – the University Press of Mississippi’s “Literary Conversations” series – ED.]  it has been utterly neglected – a decadent snobbery of the worst kind; for I daresay this is a posthumous collection of perhaps the greatest poet who lived on earth when we did (born as we were, after Auden and Celan‘s deaths).

Mississippi

Mississippi (Photo: Bengt Jangfeldt)

At the end of the day, Brodsky being a blues singer of sorts (one of his rare poems in English is even titled Blues – “Eighteen years I’ve spent in Manhattan,” it starts), it’s just as well that the little book’s from Mississippi. [We might also note JB’s beloved cat was named “Mississippi” – ED]

Ask a stupid question, as the saying wrongly goes, get a stupid answer. Brodsky answers some of the most embarrassing and awful questions (an interviewer asking about his internment for manual labor in the polar circle as if it was a trip to Disneyland), in ways only he could. They are mostly unedited, and brilliant. I give one little excerpt, since no one anywhere seems to have discussed a book that deserved much more attention. I am struck by the following, from as far back as the pivotal year 1989:

InterviewerAndre Malraux said that the twenty-first century will be either spiritual or it will not be at all.

André_Malraux_1933

He said lots.

Brodsky It may be … Well, Malraux said so many things.The French are very fond of making up reasons, ever since La Rochefoucauld, and presumably before, I don’t know. Milosz thinks that we are entering, the world is entering an entirely nihilistic stage. I am not so sure of that, although on the face of it, reality doesn’t conform to any ethical standards, as we see it. It’s getting rather paganistic. I think what may emerge – and this is on of my greatest apprehensions – what may emerge is a tremendous religious strife, not exactly religious, between the Moslem world and the world that is vaguely Christian. The latter won’t be able to defend itself, the former will be terribly assertive. It’s simply for the numerical reasons, for pure demographic reasons, that I perceive the possibility for such a strife. I am not a sage, I am not a prophet, I can’t presume to say what the twenty-first century is going to be like. To say the least, I am not going to be there, for one thing, so why would I bother … And it was easier for Malraux, it was clear that he wouldn’t be there, so it was easy to fantasize … The foreseeable future, that is, foreseeable by me, which again can be terribly erroneous, is precisely the conflict of the spirit of tolerance with the spirit of intolerance, and there are all sorts of attempts to resolve that conflict now. The pragmatists try to suggest that there is some equivalence between these principles. I don’t believe that for a minute. I think that the Moslem notion of universal order should be squashed and put out of existence. We are, after all, six centuries older than the Moslems spiritually. So, I think we have a right to say what’s right and what’s wrong …

Perhaps Michiko would like to review the Italian edition, which my publisher tells me will be coming out next year with Adelphi.

Are they overrated? Anis Shivani knocks the famous 15.

Saturday, March 30th, 2013
Share
shivani

Here comes da judge.

“Are the writers receiving the major awards and official recognition really the best writers today? Or are they overrated mediocrities with little claim to recognition by posterity? The question is harder than ever to answer today” – yet the fearless Anis Shivani takes a shot at it in the Huffington Post here.  A few days we wrote about the outspoken literary critic. Did you catch his post on “The 15 Most Overrated Contemporary American Writers”?  Shivani roams freely among genres, condemning essayists, poets, novelists, journalists, you name it.

He writes:

“The ascent of creative writing programs means that few with critical ability have any incentive to rock the boat – awards and jobs may be held back in retaliation. The writing programs embody a philosophy of neutered multiculturalism/political correctness; as long as writers play by the rules (no threatening history or politics), there’s no incentive to call them out. (A politically fecund multiculturalism – very desirable in this time of xenophobia – is the farthest thing from the minds of the official arbiters: such writing would be deemed ‘dangerous,’ and never have a chance against the mediocrities.)

The MFA writing system, with its mechanisms of circulating popularity and fashionableness, leans heavily on the easily imitable. Cloying writers like Denis Johnson, Amy Hempel, Lydia Davis, Aimee Bender, and Charles D’Ambrosio are held up as models of good writing, because they’re easy enough to copy. And copied they are, in tens of thousands of stories manufactured in workshops. Others hide behind a smokescreen of unreadable inimitability – Marilynne Robinson, for example – to maintain a necessary barrier between the masses and the overlords. Since grants, awards, and residencies are controlled by the same inbreeding group, it’s difficult to see how the designated heavies can be displaced.

450px-BillyCollinsbySuzannahJamaica2010

Collins – resting on his laurels? (Photo: Suzannah Gilman)

As for conglomerate publishing, the decision-makers wouldn’t know great literature if it hit them in the face. Their new alliance with the MFA writing system is bringing at least a minimum of readership for mediocre books, and they’re happy with that. And the mainstream reviewing establishment (which is crumbling by the minute) validates their choices with fatuous accolades, recruiting mediocre writers to blurb (review) them.”

Sounds a lot like what Dana Gioia was saying a couple decades ago in “Can Poetry Matter?”  (The controversial Atlantic article was eventually published in his book of that title in 1992.)  And Dana spared us the tedious little click-through of the line-up of the condemned writers and their photographs.  But still …

Shivani concludes:

“If we don’t understand bad writing, we can’t understand good writing. Bad writing is characterized by obfuscation, showboating, narcissism, lack of a moral core, and style over substance. Good writing is exactly the opposite. Bad writing draws attention to the writer himself. These writers have betrayed the legacy of modernism, not to mention postmodernism.”

The list of the condemned includes: Amy Tan, Billy Collins, Antonya Nelson, Jhumpa Lahiri, Michael Cunningham, John Ashbery, Mary Oliver, Sharon Olds, Jorie Graham, Louise Gluck, Junot Diaz, Jonathan Safran Foer, Jorie Graham, Michiko Kakutani, William T. Vollmann, and Helen Vendler.  Something for everyone.

Read it here.

You may not agree, but feel free to mount your defense in the comment section below.  We’ll be curious to know what you think. Truly.

Meanwhile, it’s proving an exceptionally busy weekend, what with editing interview transcripts, answering a backlog of letters, proofs to review, a visit to the East Coast to organize, and weekend engagements.  See you on Monday.

The n-word: Michiko Kakutani has spoken.

Saturday, January 8th, 2011
Share

She has spoken.

Michiko Kakutani adds her two cents on the n-word debate in the New York Times today:

Mr. Gribben’s effort to update Huckleberry Finn (published in an edition with The Adventures of Tom Sawyer by NewSouth Books), like Mr. Foley’s assertion that it’s an old book and “we’re ready for new,” ratifies the narcissistic contemporary belief that art should be inoffensive and accessible; that books, plays and poetry from other times and places should somehow be made to conform to today’s democratic ideals. It’s like the politically correct efforts in the ’80s to exile great authors like Conrad and Melville from the canon because their work does not feature enough women or projects colonialist attitudes.

Radford's mini-bowdlerization

Authors’ original texts should be sacrosanct intellectual property, whether a book is a classic or not. Tampering with a writer’s words underscores both editors’ extraordinary hubris and a cavalier attitude embraced by more and more people in this day of mash-ups, sampling and digital books — the attitude that all texts are fungible, that readers are entitled to alter as they please, that the very idea of authorship is old-fashioned. …

Michael Radford’s 2004 film version of “The Merchant of Venice” (starring Al Pacino) revised the play to elide potentially offensive material, serving up a nicer, more sympathetic Shylock and blunting tough questions about anti-Semitism. More absurdly, a British theater company in 2002 changed the title of its production of “The Hunchback of Notre Dame” to “The Bellringer of Notre Dame.” … According to Noel Perrin’s 1969 book, “Dr. Bowdler’s Legacy: A History of Expurgated Books in England and America,” Victorians explained their distaste for the colorful, earthy works of 18th-century writers like Laurence Sterne and Henry Fielding by invoking the principle of “moral progress” and their own ethical superiority: “People in the 18th century, and earlier, didn’t take offense at coarse passages, because they were coarse themselves.”