It’s All Greek to Me is one of those compendium books that, in a series of snippets and vignettes, tries to give the casual reader (commuting on the train or hanging out in a café trying not to be distracted by everything go on around her) a sense of where she came from.

But that sense will only be even moderately inclusive if our imaginary casual reader is very, very white. There’s no sense in Higgins’ book of there being any foundational culture other than the Greeks. Indeed, there’s no indication here that having the Greeks as the foundation of all that is good, true and beautiful might not be such a good or beautiful thing. There’s no sense here of the horrible xenophobia that is central to the ancient Greek cultures, nor of the racist sense of superiority that infuses much of ancient Greek literature. Even though they lived in a Mediterranean culture themselves, the Greeks figured that pretty much everyone living in the “warm climates” was lazy, uncultivated — and dark-skinned.That said, there are no real surprises in what Higgins includes or excludes from her book of snippets. It’s all been done before, pretty much in exactly the same way. Higgins loves her Homer, so that’s what we get here: a love letter to Homer, along the lines of her Latin Love Lessons: Put a Little Ovid in Your Life. If you haven’t read Homer (or Ovid, for that matter), her books are worth checking out.

But if you’re up for the dark side of ancient cultures, there’re plenty of more interesting books out there. Simon Critchley’s morbid, wacky and altogether fun The Book of Dead Philosophers will help you put your ancient Greeks into a far-sighted context. James Davidson’s Courtesans and Fishcakes: The Consuming Passions of Classical Athens, for instance, is a wonderful (and wonderfully twisted) look at everyday life in that ancient navel of culture (until you’ve thought of fish addiction, you’ve never really thought about addiction). Or Sailing the Wine-Dark Sea by the ever-marvelous Thomas Cahill gives a decent introduction with much more depth and narrative arc than Higgins’ lightweight book. Likewise, Vicki Leon’s book on Working IX to V: Orgy Planners, Funeral Clowns, and Other Prized Professions of the Ancient World or Philip Matyszak’s The Classical Compendium: A Miscellany of Scandalous Gossip, Bawdy Jokes, Peculiar Facts, and Bad Behavior from the Ancient Greeks and Romans both harbor all sorts of offbeat naughtiness that, once you’ve had your eyes opened, will make you wonder why milquetoast books like Higgins’ still get published.

The reason, of course, is that Higgins is brainy, generous with what she does choose to include, and an elegant writer. It’s All Greek to Me is an idiot’s guide to a key ancient culture and so, for idiots, it’s a great place to start.

via Book review: Charlotte Higgins’s *It’s All Greek to Me: From Homer to the Hippocratic Oath, How Ancient Greece Has Shaped Our World*.

Originally published on Curled Up With A Good Book at www.curledup.com. © Brian Charles Clark, 2010

Ettore Majorana, we learn, was the wunderkind of the early atomic age. In his native Italy, the Sicilian worked with Enrico Fermi — or worked circles around Fermi and his circle of geniuses, according to Magueijo. Himself a physicist of some repute, Magueijo isn’t a great writer (his sentences sometimes get tangled in their dangling participles), but he’s clearly a passionate one who cares enough about his subjects to have done vast amounts of homework.

The underlying metaphor in A Brilliant Darkness is that the mysteriously disappeared Majorana is the elusive neutrino which passes through ordinary matter unperturbed and is notoriously hard to detect. (In the time it took you to read the foregoing sentence some 100 trillion neutrinos passed through your body.)

It’s not just a conceit: Majorana was hot on the trail of the neutrino, whose existence had been theorized, when he disappeared on March 26, 1938. Majorana’s work was important to Fermi’s project during World War II: developing the atomic bomb. Magueijo wonders, if Majorana had disappeared, whether the younger man might have tempered the venerable Fermi’s decision to join the Manhattan project.

We’ll never know, of course, and Magueijo, a physicist who deals in probabilities but never in certainties, revels in the epistemological uncertainty. In any case, we get a mystery story wrapped up in a biography that unfolds the history of particle physics in a most enjoyable way.

Originally published on Curled Up With A Good Book at www.curledup.com. © Brian Charles Clark, 2010

Pollack doesn’t bother to tackle the climate change deniers head on. At this stage of the game, there’s really no point. Although surveys inform us that Americans remain stubbornly pig-headed about the subject, the rest of us are innovating and positioning ourselves to capitalize on the inevitably growing demand for greener, cleaner technology. For example, roughly thirty percent of greenhouse gas emissions come from the buildings we live and work in. Reducing emissions from buildings (either by building new ones right or by retrofitting existing ones) not only lowers our overall carbon footprint but lowers utility bills, as well. So the deniers can fume all they want; they’ll modify their tune soon enough when their wallets are empty.

Alas, behavior modification won’t happen nearly fast enough to blunt the sharp edge of climate change extremes. The planet will be largely ice-free by 2030, Pollack argues, which will mean severe hardship for many hundreds of millions of people. We’ve already seen the government of the Maldives hold a cabinet meeting underwater to dramatize rising sea levels, but tiny far-flung islands hardly register in the media-clotted American’s brain. When New Yorkers start swimming to work, though, perhaps the tune will change.

We are who we are, Pollack shows, because of ice. Our landscapes were shaped by ice, our cultures formed in the give-and-take of glaciers. Pollack writes,

Ice is nature’s best thermometer, perhaps its most sensitive and unambiguous indicator of climate change. When ice gets sufficiently warm, it melts…. It is not burdened by ideology and carries no political baggage as it crosses the threshold from solid to liquid. It just melts.

And that’s exactly what it’s doing.

Say goodbye to ice by taking a tour through time and place with Pollack. It may make you sad, but it’s a fascinating journey with a voluble guide. And, who knows? Maybe if enough people read this book, we’d wake up to the fact that we’re acting like a bunch of dope fiends and admit we have a problem. Then again, no. We’d just have a better appreciation of what’s going on as we watch the ice melt.

Originally published on Curled Up With A Good Book at www.curledup.com. © Brian Charles Clark, 2010

The Irish invented surfing? Yeah, right, and Jamaicans gave us bobsledding. But wait: the Irish have waves. Big ones. The wall of water known as the North Atlantic slams into the wildly west coast of Ireland and makes waves. Really big ones.

Waveriders argues that Ireland really does have a claim to a central place in the history of surfing. And, based not only the majesty of those west coast waves but the fact that the messiah of the modern surfing revival was Irish as well, we need to take that claim seriously. The messiah’s name was George Freeth, and he was born on the island of Oahu in 1883. He had a part-Hawaiian mother and an Irish father. California clams him as one of their own, but so does the Irish city of Ulster. What there’s no argument about is Freeth’s important role in the popularization of surfing and his modernizing of lifeguarding.

Freeth learned surfing from its true inventors, the Hawaiians. The arguably Irish man brought his talent for surfing to California, surf-crafting the paddleboard and rafting it into service for saving the lives of those imperiled at sea. Freeth died in 1919, a victim of the global flu pandemic. A bronze bust of Freeth was stolen from the Redondo Beach Pier in 2008, probably for its melt value.

Freeth was a medicine man of the surf, a role model conqueror of our collective horror of amphibianism, and he shines on, in one form or another, for all those who cross from terrestrial to aquatic environments. Freeth is the Irish father of the tantric phrase Breathe through it; we celebrate him not only for his unfathomable mastery of oxygenation but his uncanny sense of direction in the storm-toss of disaster.

The digressions into the history of surfing are what make Waveriders different from previous surfing movies: Waveriders isn’t just here to catch the wild ride but to explain just how the hell it is that the ride of big-wave seekers came to be found here in the freezing-ass waters slamming the west coast of Ireland.

“Slamming” is the highly operative verb here, and it’s the beauty of watching human beings scaling gigantic roaring walls of water while balancing on something akin to Popsicle sticks that gob-smacks the viewer with mirror neurons of high-tension sympathy, that glues your eyeballs to the screen with the sheer poetry of vertiginous motion.

Waveriders is a rare treat. It’s a film that gives generous slurp to the three essentials, the salt, fat and umami of film: exciting images, engaging detail, and dramatic narrative dynamism. The eyewitness photography of some of the world’s most respected surfers is thrilling, to say the least. World champion Kelly Slater gets good face time in this flick, and he and the other wave riders are a pleasure to watch. The Irish surf in Waveriders is for these experts a powerfully cold, gray and merciless character consistently improvising wave-form chaos mathematics in an off-the-cuff aqua-physics that is craftily enabled by immersive photographers focusing on their subjects in artful shot after wave-smacked shot.

In Waveriders’ hands, the treated-intelligently viewer is led down a rocky path to unscalable cliffs above the sea and then through the opal tunnel of a wave just before it crashes in breathtaking beauty on a rocky beach defended by those self-same high-brow cliffs. The best waves of Ireland are accessible only by entrepreneurial surfers in boats and jet skis. Through the numinous mist and spray, a new mythology of the Hibernian wilds is revealed, of modern surfing with the west coast of Ireland as its Mecca, the wilderness from where rises the untamed curl in a perfect rage of self obsession, the same place a people of wit and courage, men and women both, come to slip one over on the wildly goddesses of the spitting seas.

Waveriders’ award-winning record speaks for itself: the film is a masterpiece, its cameras like otters and nimble whales slicing and dicing the waves searching for the proper angles of expression. Finding its perspectival angels, the film conveys not just the emotions, the quest for new waves, the yearning to roam, but the wisdom of physics, too.

Originally published on Curled Up with a Good DVD, 2010, Brian Charles Clark.

As if by touched by fate or brushing up against coincidence, the novel’s bookends (the outer story) communicates only barely with the story in the middle. The inside story is woven by three characters who spend their time talking.

The younger man wants to make a film featuring Richard Elster, the older man, who was an advisor to warmongers. The younger man wants to get him up against a wall and hear what that was like. Ester tells him that they wanted “an individual of his interdisciplinary range, a man of reputation who might freshen the dialogue, broaden the viewpoint.” Someone who could bring new insight to the stumbling war on that adjective, terror, to “the blat and stammer of Iraq.” Someone who could deepen and make rigorous the banality of evil.

The older man is not evil, just ambiguous. He’s non-committal about making a film but doesn’t dismiss the younger man out of hand. Elster is peripherally intrigued, so they talk it over in the desert. Drink on the deck of a house in the middle of nowhere Anza Borego. Think big thoughts in unassuming, tightly-wrought sentences that ripple the dunes and stir the tectonic hearts of desire, aspiration and fear as they speak of those all-too-human geological forces: war, nothing, meaning, destruction, creativity.

Then, enter stage left, the daughter. Elster’s child is more or less the younger man’s contemporary. The dynamic in the house in the desert changes; the men go from mentor and student to family, from the professorship of history and aspiration to father and son as the younger two find a tenuous romantic camaraderie budging into their shared spaces. They touch spark points: “I never know what to say when he talks like that.” (The father is he who speaks like that.) “He’s been talking to students all his life,” responds the narrator. “He doesn’t expect anybody to say anything.” “Every second’s the last breath he takes.”

Elster wrote an essay called “Renditions,” a sort of post-modern, follow an idea’s sound and fury and intuition until it yields up a brilliant Derridean thing, full of linguistic history, etymologies forged in the fire of cultural exigency and burning with intelligence. The essay began, “A government is a criminal enterprise.” It caught the attention of the defense sector – and got him hired into the Pentagon as a consultant. (As John Le Carré showed us in A Most Wanted Man, a successful rendition takes great cunning of narrative; the botched ones, where the public finds out and becomes enraged and full of scrutiny, are plots full of holes, failures of the imagination.)

These characters pay close attention to the details of story: of life history, relationships, careers, legacies — or at least try to, as does the narrator of the frame story, whose life barely intersects with those of the interior narrative. That other narrator stands against a museum wall (not unlike the way the younger man wants Elster to), in an art installation, watching 24-hour Psycho, the Hitchcock perennial slowed down until it takes a day to run:

“It takes close attention to see what is happening in front of you. It takes work, pious effort, to see what you are looking at…., the depth of things so easy to miss in the shallow habit of seeing.”

But, then there is the “omega point,” the end of time and knowing: “a leap out of biology,” and the begging question that leaks forth from exhaustion: “Do we have to be human forever?”

And exhausted, “We want to be stones in a field,” done with consciousness at last. We want to be disappeared in the desert, invisible to the habit of seeing, to become the pure phenomena of analysis free of intention.

And then the terrible thing happens that rips the story, and we are forced from the desert, forced out of the haven of the story, back to mule-ing our burdens through reality.

Such a short book, such a heavy sigh, such a scimitar-like way to have the top of your head taken off, to be opened up to something inexorable, tragic, limpid and therefore nevertheless resigned to be determined to do the best possible thing. Point Omega is an inspiration, best smoked in one long draught like it’s a last irreproducible breath.

Originally published on Curled Up With A Good Book at www.curledup.com. © Brian Charles Clark, 2010

Welcome to Lipstick Traces: A Secret History of the Twentieth Century, Greil Marcus’s collage-o-phonic booklike substance that rings with voices in a thousand registers.

“As I tried to follow this story [the one he perceives running through chapters filled with medieval heretics, Dadaists, Situationists, and the Sex Pistols: “I am an anti-christ,” sang Johnny Rotten]–the characters changing into each other’s clothes until I gave up trying to make them hold still–what appealed to me were its gaps. and those moments when the story that has lost its voice somehow recovers it, and what happens then…. [quoting an ad for Potlatch he found in a “slick-paper, Belgian neo-surrealist review” dated 1954:] ” ‘Everywhere, youth (as it calls itself) discovers a few blunted knives, a few defused bombs, under thirty years of dust and debris; shaking in its shoes, youth hurls them upon the consenting rabble, which salutes it with its oily laugh.’ ” (20)

Situationist gnome, 1963: “The moment of real poetry brings all the unsettled debts of history back into play.” (21) That’s getting personal: I’ve resisted reading this book for twenty years. Now that I have, and since you’ve read this far, I recommend you do, too. So much for the niceties of the book review. What follows is engagement with Lipstick Traces.

“For years that seemed like decades,” Marcus accurately notes, all you got on the radio was “Fire and Rain, “Stairway to Heaven,” “Behind Blue Eyes” and “Maggie May.” (44) That, and then one day in the 1980s, the music we heard on the radio in the 1970s became classic rock.

Everybody who gives a shit caps on Greil Marcus for what they perceive as a slight or jab at their own history of punk because he starts with the Sex Pistols. But, as he says, “If what is interesting about punk is something other than its function as a musical genre, there is no point in treating it like one.” (77) The whole point is the impossibility of pinpointing the origins of popular cultural phenomena: such things are subject to “blind inheritance,” presumably via memes floating in our shared mental marketplace, as punk inherited from British folk rocker Richard Thompson: “Take the sun from my heart / Let me learn to despise.”

Reading the film Five Millions Years to Earth, “a film make in England in 1967 under the title Quartermass and the Pitt” (80), Marcus writes:

They [the genocidal Martians] meant to perpetuate themselves on earth by making its history–by coding its end in its beginning. A passion for prophecy, it seems, is also a Martian trait: they loved drama as much as death. (81)

And of course it would be impossible to write a “secret history” of the 20th century without including Martians and Cro-Magnons, both of which are present at least in passing.

Really, though, Marcus is writing about “Spectacle,” and its as if he’s wrestling with a ghost or a being made of smoke: the ideas swirl and often slip away from him for pages at a time. The term ‘Spectacle’ had become a fashionable critical commonplace by the 1980s. It was a vague term, devoid of ideas. It simply meant that the image of a thing superseded the thing itself. Thus, “Rambo movies in the U.S.A. could win the Vietnam War backward, that consumers were being seduced by advertisement instead of choosing rationally among products” and “that citizens were voting for actors rather than issues.” In other words, something funny is happening in Lipstick Traces, though it never is exactly clear because Marcus is absolutely subject to epistemological uncertainty if for no other reason than a) not being there personally and b) eyewitness aren’t worth shit but you talk to them anyway.

For situationist Guy Debord, the spectacle was not merely a stoner-paranoid “collection of images, but a social relationship among people, mediated by images.” The spectacle really is a conspiracy of relationships that kept empires running (if rising and falling) just as an engine is a conspiracy of relationships that moves things down the road. The sense of going somewhere is just an illusion, though, as what spectacle gives spectacle also takes away: Anwar Sadat, for instance, “was a [spectacular] hero of the electronic revolution, but also its [spectacularly assassinated] victim.” (97)

But the other side of spectacle is seen in a point made by situationist Veneigem, where “objectivity… meant ‘I love that girl because she is beautiful’; subjectivity meant ‘That girl is beautiful because I love her.’” Such is the power of spectacle that it bends us most certainly to its cultural will but also gives us the power to believe we are able to bend the social fabric our way, and to desire “something different from everyone else.”

Capitalism benefits most from, is powered by, spectacle – and that makes it tricky business, “dangerous,” perhaps criminal. For the situationists, there was a double-edged sword in the thought that “comfort will never be comfortable enough for those who seek what is not on the market.” Therefore, Debord said years later, “Where there was fire, we carried gasoline.”

Punk and the rest of the major phenomena Marcus writes about in Lipstick Traces are basically forms of Sinopean skepticism. Diagnose of Sinope, like punks and situationists, the medieval Japanese poet Ikkyu and Chuang Tzu the aimless wanderer, refused to work, taking up sacred peregrination and (as Diagnose replied when asked what he was doing in Athens) “debasing the currency.”

The situationists practiced the dérive, the art of drifting lost through the streets, seeking “the Northwest passage” of a city, Paris most especially for years on end in the case of Guy Debord. Though they despised surrealism and especially its pope, André Breton, the situationists in their wanderings partook of the surrealists’ disponibilité, a state of existential availability – to anything, everything – an attitude of creative readiness and perpetual resistance to “the Society of the Spectacle.” As William S. Burroughs once said in a parallel context, Spectacle is a “vampiric process;” Burroughs advised resistance through the cultivation of good character.

The situationists, like the punks, “debased the currency”: punk “music” was (per the cliché) an oxymoron: those motherfuckers can’t play. The situations took “official” publications (cartoons that ran in newspapers were a popular target) and practiced détournment, doctoring texts or, like Burroughs, cutting up newspapers and magazines, then pasting them back together at will to new effect. Rock and punk designers took the technique as a signature for gig flyers.

For what if you really could warp reality? What if, through design, you could get people to come to a band’s show and drink too much? Wasn’t that, after all, the goal of every revolutionist? “What if you could really make it happen?” What if the man dreaming he was a butterfly woke up, finding himself a butterfly?

“The spectacle was itself a work of art, an economy of false needs elevated into a tableau of frozen desires, true desires reduced to a cartoon of twitching needs. Spreading the bad paper of détournment until it began to turn up everywhere, the SI [Situationist International] would devalue the currency of the spectacle, and the results would be total inflation.” (168)

As if; but somebody had to try.

Another technique for discovering “psychogeographic” highways and byways, methods for invoking the derive, include “gramologues’ or magical floating words and resonant sounds [that]… are irresistibly and hypnotically engraved on the memory, and they emerge again from the memory with just a little resistance and friction.” (206) Notice that gramologues don’t preclude semantic content and thus include a variety of gnomic utterances we call “catchy phrase”: tag lines, mottos and all manner of cursing would be included here. Gnomic utterances are noted for their suasive power as noted in their deployment in all campaigns of propaganda.

And that in turn points out the danger that rears its head occasionally throughout Marcus’s book: The danger is, per Nietzsche’s warning, that in fighting a monster one risks becoming one. (203) For capitalism and the spectacle are quite adept at détouring the détourners; after all, the practitioners (photographers, designers, writers) are ultimately the same people. Every dropout who tunes in while turning on others must also make a living, and PR is the default calling of every out-of-work revolutionary in need of a paycheck.

Then there’s the psychiatrists, also known as those who play both ends against the middle, who say (these are Richard Huelsenbeck the dadaist’s words, circa 1920 long after he’d switched practices): “Do you understand? We are psychiatrists; we are Germans; we have read Nietzsche; we know that to gaze too long at monsters is to become one – that’s what we get paid for!” (211) Huelsenbeck was always saying, “The dadaist is a man of reality who loves wine, women and advertising.” (213)

The punks couldn’t help but love the gramologues of advertising, even if they hated them, too, rejected their authority, and repelled them with taut fiber, venom and erosive sonic armies. They were born into an unavoidable and irresistible media milieu, so the only strategy left was to détourne the meaning of images of the spectacle: flyers for punk shows still stand as exemplars of graphic design.

The plasticity of meaning is why controlling it matters so much – to the dadaists, the lettrists, the situationists, the punks – who gets to words and gramologues first, who controls the language. Before Dada, there was an ad for Dada Shampoo. (213) And that’s why so many of marks of social identity are rallying cries: paralinguistic, animalistic, and naively musical – catchy, memorable, amusing, provoking things that work especially well when there are crowds of people willing to be entrained. And that’s why the punks stripped playing music down to its pragmatically emotional essentials: one is either wailing in pain or in ecstasy: “you only had to tell the right story, and turn up the volume.” (362)

“Dada!”

The potential energy of the individual in the crowd inspired Debord to remark, “the future belongs to the passerby.” Readiness, disponibilité, to make answer to a passing look, to make responsibility out of the flow of anonymity is what distinguishes psychogeography, “the science fiction of urban planning.” (362)

(In his tale of two cities, latter-day science fiction situationist China Miéville takes psychogeography to its logical extreme. The City and the City is a hard-boiled murder investigation in overlapping twin cities whose inhabitants practice cognitive blindness in order not to see across state lines and “unsee” the other side of the street and its passersby. The derive is co-opted by authoritarian ideology through a détournment of cultural norms and social codes.)

We will not be prisoners to the fiction of utility, say the punks through Marcus’s trace detection system. And Marcus is no prisoner to the utility of literary criticism, and so has fun, chews, digresses. (369) With Marcus, we are always at the crossroads, one of the great themes of popular music since about the time people first met up there and had a jam session, “and, instead of passing by with eyes averted,” we pause and recognize that “Now, damn the consequences, we have met,” as D.H. Lawrence put it. (366)

Originally published on Curled Up With A Good Book at www.curledup.com. © Brian Charles Clark, 2010

Farber wrote scores of film reviews for The Nation, Time, The New Republic and other publications. But his reviews rarely fit into the “first this, then that, and I liked it because” box that most reviewers cram themselves into. Farber mused on the beauty of images, confronted actors’ choices, challenged directors, and digressed down rarely trod paths in order to introduce pertinent impertinences and relevant social revelations.

Farber was a self-described champion of “termite art”: he loved eccentric virtuosity rather than “white elephants,” conformist monstrosities that “pin the viewer to the wall and slug him with wet towels of artiness and significance.” Termite art, in contrast, is “ornery, wasteful, stubbornly self-involved, doing go-for-broke art and not caring what comes of it.” White elephant art was seamless mass in “pursuit of… continuity” and “harmony,” while termite art participated in the world: it is “an act of observing and being in the world” and

goes always forward eating its own boundaries, and, like as not, leaves nothing in its path other than the signs of eager, industrious, unkempt activity.

Farber taught film classes at UC San Diego that, as professors at the university are (or at least were) wont to do, made huge demands on the student. You’d have to not only watch every film listed on the syllabus but remember every detail, too. Farber tore down the idea that a film is a whole, with first this, then that happening – which is, of course, the way the vast majority of people watch films. Indeed, per Farber, most people aren’t watching so much as being pickled in white elephant shit. In his classes, says Duncan Shepherd, who wrote film reviews for the San Diego Reader, “It wasn’t so much what he had to say… so much as it was the whole way he went about things, famously showing films in pieces, switching back and forth from one film to another, ranging from Griffin to Goddard, Bugs Bunny to Yasujiro Oz,” and playing clips without sound, backwards, mixed in with slides of paintings, and so on. Farber taught his students to observe, to ravage like termites.

The hundreds of film reviews in this book are, in short, a guide to Western culture in the 20th century. Your guide is witty, scathing, unforgiving, and never so high-browed that he’s afraid to love a good roll in the mud. One quote, from a 1953 review, will have to suffice: “Stalag 17 is a crude, cliché-ridden glimpse of a Nazi prison camp that I hated to see end.”

Originally published on Curled Up With A Good Book at www.curledup.com. © Brian Charles Clark, 2010

Witold Gombrowicz is a novelist of psychological entanglements, and Pornografia is a novel of erotic entanglement. It is often cruel and sometimes cruelly funny. It is a novel by a man certain that language in some profound way determines ontology, that what we hear and say sculpts the way we are.

Set in a country idyll with the war roaring dully in the background, two refugee intellectuals conspire to contrive a liaison between a pair of kids who have grown up together there in the Polish countryside. Pornografia is an unholy little novel, chillingly dark, at times dripping with cynicism, but at its best beset by bracing, high-brow hilarity and jaded, deeply sublimated hysteria. First published in 1966, it’s only recently that readers have begun to talk about Gombrowicz as a Latin American writer rather than a Polish one. The question of influence is good, if ultimately divisive. Division is precisely Gombrowicz’s strength; you imagine he not only enjoys taking the frog apart with a tiny knife, he begins to split the world apart as if it were empirically just an intimately interbleeding network of heartbeats.

In 1939, Gombrowicz left Poland, escaping to Argentina, where he lived for the rest of his life. I think, as best he could, he 86ed the invasion of Poland by Germany in the fall of ’39 from his life while embracing it as an element in his biography. He wasn’t so much guilty as alive and smart. And that hurt, in that way that surviving disaster sometimes does. So he kept that quiet, at first, then, later, leaked it as attitude, insolence and fiction.

Above the street in Buenos Aires, Gombrowicz wrote a career of large intellectual appetites. His opus includes a major dent in the history of Argentinean theatre – but, in the 20th century, Argentina was so intellectually close to (some would say preoccupied with) French, Spanish and Italian thought that it is easy to see why Gombrowicz was mistaken for a European writer.

To my mind, Gombrowicz is in fictional league with the likes of John le Carré, who also writes as if he thinks that people can be made by the words shared by two or more people. Usually two. When a third is introduced, per Charles Sanders Peirce, randomness, sway and betrayal wag people’s tails (money and sex are the typical thirds played upon in the Gombrowiczian personality trade). Made here means made real: made to act in a certain way; to command; to be taken under the confidence or control of another.

The difference between the crypto-modernist spy novelist, whose philosophical imperatives and narrative interests significantly overlap those of Gombrowicz, is that Gombrowicz practiced point of view from the terrorist’s self-explosion while le Carré at the last minute rips the point of view from the victim to the perpetrator so that, at the wall, we witness the shooting of children, animals and, at his most wrenching, the beloved. With Gombrowicz, though, things are always kept at a distance.

And that’s the rip-off with most of modernism, and post-modernism, too: you never get to love the characters. You’re minimally or otherwise challenged to recognize them as antecedents, precedents and portents, without ever being rationed the responsibility of response in the dialogical sense of the word.

Like 1970’s-era J.G. Ballard (especially The Atrocity Exhibition and Crash), Gombrowicz’s novels make for a fascinating read, but don’t expect to be more than intellectually engaged.

Originally published on Curled Up With A Good Book at www.curledup.com. © Brian Charles Clark, 2010

Gain

Not Clare, the transnational corporation whose history is charted across three generations in this saga of a novel. The company makes soap — a cleaning product that offers the homemaker so much to gain. And the company, of course, has gained, prodigiously, over the years: it has profited immensely.

Clare manufacturers its products in Lacewood, Illinois, where Laura Bodey is an estate agent. Laura has ovarian cancer. Her story – of her illness and how, as she disintegrates, her family reunites around her – is intertwined with the story of Clare International.

Long before the novel makes the facts plain, we’ve already drawn connections: our chemistry is killing us. The brilliant Powers draws parallels and cycles in abundance but, to his credit, he never once hits over the head with any moralizing message.

Perennial plants flower and die, and so do people and industries, he implies. It’s the way of the world. We can change things, perhaps and, after reading Gain, we may well join one crusade or another, seeking justice for victims of industries focused on nothing but gain or, contrarily, seeking to eliminate the tort system that is, at this point, the victim’s only source of recompense and punishment for the polluters who make us sick. Either way, or no way, that’ll be what you got out of the novel, not what’s there.Gain is a history of a cancer, then, but also a history of the American corporation — a frightening parallel, but also apropos. Clare starts out as just a few people but, because they are incorporated, they have all the rights of individuals but none of the responsibilities. In our lust to profit and consume in an environment unfettered by regulation or consequence, we too quickly forget this strange contortion of the Fourteenth Amendment. Written to declare the personhood of those held as slaves and thus set them free, it quickly came to be wielded as a blunt instrument in the creation of corporate personhood.

Corporations attained the rights of individuals (without the responsibilities – that is, they cannot easily and directly be held responsible of their actions) through a reading, an interpretation of the word “person,” in the U.S. constitution. So Powers is riffing on a cycle of healing and sickness: in the hands of a great writer, reading is curative. In the hands of lawyers, though, interpretative powers can be perverted and make us sick.

Gain is, in short, a brilliant, exhilarating novel that, like all Powers’ novels, deserves and rewards our closest reading. Richard Powers is without a doubt one of the two or three best living writers working in the English language. With Gain, he flexed his considerable muscles, letting us see ourselves through both the wide-angle lens of history and the microscope of the cancerous body. Gain is a major achievement, a novel of conscience for a largely unconscious culture. And he didn’t stop with Gain. Soon after came novels about terrorism, the environment, race and, most recently, a return to science in a novel about the creativity of genetic engineering (and the engineering of creative writing).

If you care about ideas and their power in the world, you should be reading Richard Powers.

Originally published on Curled Up With A Good Book at www.curledup.com. © Brian Charles Clark, 2010

From 1958 to 1973, Bernstein delivered four TV music performance/lectures per year, illustrated lavishly with the likes of the New York Philharmonic: the Young People’s Concerts series is still one of the longest-running programs on classical music. Earlier in the 1950s, he delivered for Omnibus a handful of performances that are considered among the finest of the so-called “golden age of television.” Omnibus was a dignified, mid-century monumental series hosted by Alastair Cooke that explored art, science and the humanities.Bernstein posed his viewers questions: what made a certain composer tick, what is it about this piece of music that so captivates and moves us, what makes opera grand? He then proceeded with confident charm, humor and generous intelligence to systemically answer them.

Bernstein broke things down, created formal, patterned structures out of music that he could communicate in discrete bits that accreted and formed whole lessons — if you could stay with him all the way. But even if you couldn’t, Bernstein’s knack for breaking out and illustrating the structural bits — the rhythmic beams beneath our feet and they buttresses of melody soaring above our heads, he might say — meant that most people could grasp enough of a handle on him to gasp right along with him at the wondrously complex simplicity of the music all around us.

Bernstein made even opera sound good, while his programs on modern art music, musical comedy and jazz are sonically radiant and pedagogically masterful productions. In the almost 8 hours of TV on these four DVDs, Bernstein goes deep and wide through a variety of musical forms, all of them involving large numbers of players, singers and actors in need of collective direction under the will of a maestro.

There’s definitely a bias toward Western European art music with Bernstein, but he also rocked with popular culture. That bona vide had been laid down early on with his 1949 hit, West Side Story. “Summertime,” a song from West Side Story, is so deeply bound into the songbook of world musical culture that it long ago graduated from “hit” to “standard.”

Leonard Bernstein was the Walter Cronkite of classical music TV. He covered classical and modern musics in a fair and balanced way, was accessible, and made you feel smart. He was strikingly easy on the eyes and moved like both a dancer and like he was a good fuck and knew it. In places where Cronkite had to worry about his reputation, Bernstein, being a musician, an artist, was freer.

And so, over the years, a mystique grew up around Bernstein: he was a giant living among us; he brought the great halls of Manhattan into his viewers’ living rooms. He befriended his audience’s children — I was one of those children — and coaxed our minds to scale big ideas, to hear voices and ideas in the structure of a symphony, to fill our lungs with the narrative wave of a musical or do a kind of ecstatic shimmy while listening to the mathematical story ticking inside a piece by J.S. Bach.

A Bernstein show was never over when it was over: he deliberately and with aforethought incited riots of curiosity. He burned with an inner flame and he stoked the ego, suggesting that you could gain mastery of music if you followed his example.

In 1955’s “The Art of Conducting,” he hands over the keys to his kingdom, describes the path to his very door – but you’d better start practicing now if you were ever going to be as good as he is, to reach his castle and take charge of the keys.

Originally published at Curled Up with a Good DVD.