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The Challenge to Book Culture

By Morris Dickstein
dissent magazine

The following remarks were prepared for a panel on “The Next Decade in Book Culture,” with special emphasis in criticism and book reviewing, at the PEN World Voices Festival, April 27, 2011, cosponsored by the National Book Critics Circle.


On the face of it, it would be hard to imagine a more depressing cultural subject right now than the future of book culture. Publishers are hurting badly; droves of independent bookstores have closed down; Borders, a major chain of booksellers, has filed for bankruptcy and is currently dumping the dregs of its stock at its flagship store on E. 57th Street and Park Avenue; floundering newspapers have cut loose their reviewers and, at best, folded their book review sections into their shrinking pages. The newspapers themselves may not be far behind. The Great Recession delivered the coup de grace; advertising revenue is in free fall. Ask any editor, any author, any media maven: it is not a pretty picture. The executive editor of the New York Times wonders whether there will still be a print edition five years from now.

On the other hand, some would argue that this worst of times is also the best of times. Thanks to the Internet, to online booksellers like Amazon, to the ubiquitous Google digitizing whole libraries, books have never been so readily available, including rare books, out-of-print books, and, thanks to the famous “long tail,” older titles once hard to find, since bookstores rarely stocked them. Loving the serendipity of browsing in bookstores, actually fingering the merchandise, we forget the frustrations of the fruitless search, the books we could not find. Browsing online we find it’s all there yet tantalizingly out of reach.

Without fetishizing the physical properties of the book, which after all do not reach back to the tablets on Sinai, we can acknowledge the difference between reading print, flipping pages, plunging ahead or backward, and reading on a computer or miniature electronic device. There is something of a generational divide here, but screen reading, while near-miraculous for retrieving hard-to-find information, is less than ideal for the focused attention of literary reading. As storage devices books indeed are cumbersome. We can be grateful for the amazing horizontal connectivity of the Internet without slighting how shallow those connections often are. It gives us the world at a glance but often no more than a glance.

In the case of book reviewing, or critical writing of any kind, cyberspace offers a few advantages, but to my mind they are outweighed by the drawbacks. There is that vast storehouse of material that can be retrieved, such as reviews, old and new; biographical information; profiles of writers, movie directors, artists, composers; but also, for reviewers, something genuinely new, a vast grey hinterland between publishing and not publishing. The Internet is an open grid for bloggers, commentators, cranks, obsessive enthusiasts who have made cults of individual writers, but not least of all for the fabled man in the street, the consumer now empowered to talk back, to emerge from anonymity, or take cover in anonymity, to make his or her peeves and passions known.

To put it simply, the professional reviewer, who has a literary identity, who had to meet some editor’s exacting standard, has effectively been replaced by the Amazon reviewer, the paying customer, at times ingenious, assiduous, and highly motivated, more often banal, obtuse, and blankly opinionated. What works for a website like TripAdvisor, which gives us unfiltered but welcome criticism of hotels and restaurants, most assuredly does not work for literary reviewing, which demands taste, training, sensibility, some knowledge of the past, and a rare feeling for both language and argument. Barring this, we’re stuck with the thumbs-up, thumbs-down school of reviewing. Raw opinion, no matter how deeply felt, is no substitute for argument and evidence. The democratization of reviewing is synonymous with the decay of reviewing.

But what about bloggers, you may ask. They may not be professionals but they certainly can be devoted and persistent. Blogging has a style of its own, most commonly diaristic, spontaneous. As with online reviewing in general, it has opened the culture to a vast spectrum of writing and opinion, most of which no one will ever read. I enjoy casual blogging myself as a relief from the formal essay, with its carefully honed prose. I plan to post these very remarks in a blog, and would be gratified if they found a few readers. But it’s striking that there are twenty successful political blogs for each effective literary blog. With all due respect to Critical Mass, the valuable website of the National Book Critics Circle Board of Directors, there’s not a single must-read literary blog I turn to on a regular basis. The ones that I do read are linked to print magazines like the New Yorker, the New Republic, or the Atlantic, or the ones actually modeled on print magazines, such as Slate and Salon or gateway sites like Arts & Letters Daily. But will the online extensions of print journals still thrive when the magazines themselves go under, as some surely will when they run out of millionaires nostalgic for the old print culture who are willing to subsidize them. What will happen to online journalism, especially investigative journalism, when it destroys the print journalism on which it feeds, or to aggregator sites when they find themselves aggregating only from other websites?

As writers of books and as reviewers ourselves, what do we expect from a book review? In the case of a movie review we’re usually content with learning what it’s about and deciding whether to see it. Because books are literature we hold book reviewing to a higher standard. We expect much more than plot summary or summary judgment. We expect it to be really written, exacting, to rise to the level of its subject, to display an understanding of the medium, a personal point of view. We would be outraged if new novels were rated with a certain number of stars, as movies commonly are. We demand incisive judgment, not mere consumer guidance. Book reviews should be a province of writing, not of marketing—or polling. Criticism is a refined art, not a popularity contest. We expect it to be done with style and intelligence.

The last thing we want to do is idealize the old middlebrow culture with its genteel book industry, its banal bookchat and boosterism, its highly stratified culture—a pyramid capped by a small cadre of little magazines and rigorous critics. But we may miss its respect for the written word, the life of the mind, the culture of the past. The Internet accelerated a democratization of culture that had long been under way, a shift toward visual media and popular music that consigned literature to the outer margins. The revolution initiated by the movie screen and the TV screen is being brought to high definition by the computer screen. Here critical writing has a small niche, but will it acquire a real presence? Deployed with technical savvy, it can become a form of resistance, a rampart of personal vision within a relentlessly homogenized culture, ever in thrall to the fashions of the moment. Thanks to its open grid and easy access, the same technology that marginalizes literature and drowns out criticism leaves room for dissent, for the still, small voice that may yet find ways to be heard.

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This is just sad — but not surprising

When to Come Out

Unlike most minority groups, gay people have some control over when they reveal their identity. And on that question of timing, a study suggests that later in an interaction is better.

Forty-five people, mostly undergraduates, were told that before meeting a man they would listen to an audio of him answering 20 questions about his background, interests and relationships. Half the time, the relationships question (in which the man mentioned a male partner) came second. The rest of the time that question came 20th.

Asked how they felt about the prospective meeting (which never occurred), women didn’t react differently to the early or late disclosure of homosexuality. But men expressed more negative expectations when the disclosure came early. Men who heard the early disclosure also expressed more negative views about homosexuality in general.

“Interorientation Interactions and Impressions: Does the Timing of Disclosure of Sexual Orientation Matter?” David M. Buck and E. Ashby Plant, Journal of Experimental Social Psychology (March)

— Christopher Shea, Ideas Market blog, wsj

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How Rembrandt Reinvented Jesus

By Dan Neil
wsj.com

Did Christ really have awesome abs? Western art has frequently stumbled over the contradiction between the ascetic figure of Jesus of Nazareth and the iconography of Christ inspired by the heroic, Hellenistic ideal: Christ as beautiful, tall and broad-shouldered, God’s wide receiver; blue-eyed, fair-haired, a straight aquiline nose, Christ as European prince.

Rembrandt van Rijn, in a career rich with artistic innovation, begged to differ. A new exhibition at Paris’s Louvre museum—and coming to Philadelphia and Detroit later this year—shows in dozens of oils, charcoal sketches and oak-panel studies how the 17th-century Dutch painter virtually reinvented the depiction of Jesus and arrived at a more realistic portrait.

As “Rembrandt and the Face of Jesus” shows, before Rembrandt painters tended to reiterate the conventional imagery of Christ. Catalog authors Larry Silver, of the University of Pennsylvania, and Shelley Perlove, of the University of Michigan-Dearborn, call this “the predictable majesty” of the subject.

Where artists did rely on life models, they were uniquely beautiful specimens, such as in Michelangelo’s Pietà. Rembrandt, working in the relatively open and tolerant society of Golden Age Holland, turned to life models for Jesus to give an “earthly reality” to the face of Christ. He often relied on one model, a young Dutch Jew, whose face appears in the seven oak panels. An unnamed Dutch auditor assaying Rembrandt’s possessions during the painter’s later bankruptcy notated one of these panels as “Head of Christ, From Life,” and the curators use this note as an evocative departure point for the exhibit.

The poor and ascetic Jesus likely was small and thin and almost certainly olive-skinned, with black hair and brown eyes, and so Rembrandt painted him. In this he anticipated much more recent studies of what the historical Jesus was like. The savior of Rembrandt’s faith was a young man with a sweet, homely face, heavy-lidded, stoop-shouldered and wan.

Rembrandt’s recasting of Christ culminates in the 1648 “Supper at Emmaus,” where the unprepossessing figure of Christ seems almost stunned, slack with preoccupation, rapt in a conversation no one else hears. The painter’s Jesus is no hero of suffering and sacrifice; instead, he’s a kindly, hungry pilgrim.

Viewing the pictures in order of their creation shows how Rembrandt’s own coarse features gradually infiltrated the images of Christ. It feels like the most spiritually edifying aspect of these works: When Rembrandt looked into the face of his savior, he saw his own.

The exhibition lasts through July 18 at the Louvre, will go to the Philadelphia Museum of Art from Aug. 3 to Oct. 30 and will end at the Detroit Institute of Arts (Nov. 20-February 2012).

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Marijuanalysts Anonymous

The night after the chilly and sort of awkward joint Interdependence Day picnic for Enfield’s Ennet House Drug and Alcohol Recovery House, Somerville’s Phoenix House, and Dorchester’s grim New Choice juvenile rehab, Ennet House staffer Johnette Foltz took Ken Erdedy Kate Gompert along with her to this one NA Beginners’ Discussion Meeting where the focus was always marijuana: how every addict at the meeting had gotten in terrible addictive trouble with it right from the first duBois, or else how they’d been strung out on harder drugs and had tried switching to grass to get off the original drugs and but then had gotten in even terribler trouble with grass than they’d been in with the original hard stuff. This was supposedly the only NA meeting in metro Boston explicitly devoted to marijuana. Johnette Foltz said she wanted Erdedy and Gompert to see how completely nonunique and unalone they were in terms of the Substance that had brought them both down.

There were about two dozen beginning recovering addicts there in the anechoic vestry of an upscale church in what Erdedy figured had to be either west Belmont or east Waltham. The chairs were arranged in NA’s traditional huge circle, with no tables to sit at and everybody balancing ashtrays on their knees and accidentally kicking over their cups of coffee. Everybody who raised their hand to share concurred on the insidious ways marijuana ravaged their bodies, minds, and spirits: marijuana destroys slowly but thoroughly was the consensus. Ken Erdedy’s joggling foot knocked over his coffee not once but twice as the NAs took turns concurring on the hideous psychic fallout they’d all endured both in active marijuana-dependency and then in marijuana-detox: the social isolation, anxious lassitude, and the hyperself-consciousness that then reinforced the withdrawal and anxiety — the increasing emotional abstraction, poverty of affect, and then total emotional catalepsy — the obsessive analyzing, finally the paralytic stasis that results from the obsessive analysis of all possible inplications of both getting up from the couch and not getting up from the couch — and then the endless symptomatic gauntlet of Withdrawal from delta-9-tetrahydrocannabinol: i.e. pot-detox: the loss of appetite, the mania and insomnia, the chronic fatigue and nightmares, the impotence and cessation of menses and lactation, the circadian arrhythmia, the sudden sauna-type sweats and mental confusion and fine-motor tremors, the particularly nasty excess of saliva — several beginners still holding institutional drool-cups just under their chins — the generalized anxiety and foreboding and dread, and the shame of feeling like neither M.D.s nor the hard-drug NAs themselves showed much empathy or compassion for the ‘addict’ brought down by what was supposed to be nature’s humblest buzz, the benignest Substance around.

Ken Erdedy noticed that nobody came right out and used the terms melancholy or anhedonia or depression, much less clinical depression; but this worst of symptoms, this logarithm of all suffering, seemed, though unmentioned, to hang fog-like just over the room’s heads, to drift between the peristyle columns and over the decorative astrolabes and candles on long prickets and medieval knockoffs and framed Knights of Columbus charters, a gassy plasm so dreaded no beginner could bear to look up and name it. Kate Gompert kept staring at the floor and making a revolver of her forefinger and thumb and shooting herself in the temple and then blowing pretend-cordite off the barrel’s tip until Johnette Foltz whispered to her to knock it off.

— David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest

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The Mighty Sentence

A cold comming they had of it, at this time of the yeare: just the worst time of the yeare, to take a journey, and specially a long journey, in. The ways deepe, the weather sharp, the daies short, the sunn farthest off…the very dead of winter.

— Lancelot Andrewes, in a letter to King James

If the devil has the best tunes, sometimes the bandits have the best sentences.

— Simon Blackburn