Critical Mass
Jonathan Lethem’s “The Ecstasy of Influence”
Posted at The Rumpus
(02/21/2012)
Each day leading up to the March 8 announcement of the 2011 NBCC award winners, Critical Mass is highlighting our thirty finalists. In a first, the NBCC is partnering with other websites to promote our finalists as well in the categories of Criticism and Poetry. Our Criticism finalists will appear on The Rumpus, our Poetry finalists will appear March 7 at O, the Oprah Magazine website. Here is #24 in our series, NBCC board member John Reed on Criticism finalist Jonathan Lethem’s “The Ecstasy of Influence,” at the Rumpus:
In “The Ecstasy of Influence,” Jonathan Lethem skips through culture—fine arts to music to literature to the personal and collective context of it all. Lethem carries his enthusiasm with elegant but disobedient prose—plenty of adverbs and metaphors—and the self-awareness of an author who is “firmly in the doubting-nonfiction-is-exactly-possible camp.” Lethem’s authorial consciousness argues that at least a few artists do know what they’re doing—that art isn’t always smoke, mirrors and magic. Lethem’s collection—criticism, nonfiction and memoir—is an extension of this position, and in itself an exemplification of the role of creativity and creative consumption in our contemporary catastrophe. …
31 Books in 31 Days: “The Best of It,” Kay Ryan
(03/01/2011)
Each day leading up to the March 10 announcement of the 2010 NBCC award winners, Critical Mass highlights one of the thirty-one finalists. Today, NBCC board member John Reed discusses poetry finalist Kay Ryan’s The Best of It: New and Selected Poems (Grove/Atlantic):
In The Best of It, Kay Ryan, with her clockwork precision, has selected 200-plus poems from four of her five published volumes, and included twenty-three new poems.
Ryan’s welcoming intelligence is hallmark of a Poet Laureate; her trim lines and halts pull at readers with kinship and sagacity. Ryan’s associations evidence the diversity of a true original: J.D. McClatchy cites Erik Satie miniatures, Joseph Cornell boxes, the intensity of Emily Dickenson, the buoyancy of Robert Frost, and a living philosophy in keeping with that of Marianne Moore and May Swenson; Publisher’s Weekly cites Wallace Stevens, A.R. Ammons, William Bronk, and contemporary haiku “cut with a dash of Groucho Marks”; Sarah Fay, for the Paris Review, draws parallels to Philip Larken and Ripley’s Believe It or Not. While Ryan’s terse humor and two sentence poems have led critics to associate her work with “compression,” Ryan rejects the category—and perhaps she has more rightly earned the honorific of “iconoclast.
Ryan’s use of Spartan structure and internal rhyme (“recombinant” is Ryan’s term) beg formal analysis, yet Ryan’s emphasis is on the turning point—the peripeteia in a balance of emotion, logic, and aesthic. Ryan floats her lines at even keel, we bob along as if in the bay, and then she tips the boat, not with a tidal wave, but a sudden lunge.
“Stations” [from the section New Poems]:
As the
veldt dries,
the great cats
range farther
to drink,
their paths
looping past
this or that
ex-oasis.
However long
the water’s
been gone,
no places
are missed;
despite thirst,
every once-
deep pool
is rehearsed.
It’s strange
the way our
route can’t be
straightened;
how some
cruel faith
keeps the
stations.
The Best of It is a distillate of a distillation, part selected works, but more a refinement of its own. Poetic form, blues variation, DJ remix—the art of invention and reinvention is the art of living itself, or at least the better part of it:
“The Best of It” [from the section and 2005 volume The Niagra River]:
However carved up
or pared down we get,
we keep on making
the best of it as though
it doesn’t matter that
our acre’s down to
a square foot. As
though our garden
could be one bean
and we’d rejoice if
it flourishes, as
though one bean
could nourish us.
“Adventures in eReading”
(03/22/2010)
As posted on Critical Mass, the blog of the National Book Critics Circle Board of Directors:
I had lunch yesterday with a book editor from one of the corporate behemoths; the conversation now is giddy with dread and anticipation, prospects and portents dire. Talk turned to what she called, “a rush to the backlist,” which is something I’ve been hearing about for a few years. It makes sense for publishers to review their lists and emphasize their properties, especially those with some copyright left (let’s say fifty years). What’s surprising to me is the discussion of the public domain, an area of publication better suited to small presses. Imprints from the larger publishers that publish heavily in the public domain, whatever the sales numbers, will erode their identities, which is all they have of value. Small presses will always have an advantage on the public domain books; they can give more time to the translation and the package, and produce a book that, despite the original publication date of the title, still has a “new discovery”’ vibe. The e-book, with all its bells and whistles, is soon to come—not just pages that flip, but the integration of a full platform computer. The real revolution will soon follow: a whole different kind of content. What we’re about to see isn’t just a book anymore, it’s something else, a new art form. We probably have a good sense of the first generation—a sort of cross between a website and a textbook—but the second generation remains indistinct. For the public domain titles, the e-book means a lot of free reading; it also means that the backlist, the “Great Work” included, will be operating in antiquated technologies. Through retrofit, such a work will seem partial, sort of like watching a black and white show on a color tv. Long term, not where a major press wants to position itself.
30 Books in 30 Days: “Perfecting Sound Forever”
(02/22/2010)
Each day leading up to the March 11 announcement of the 2009 NBCC award winners, Critical Mass highlights one of the thirty finalists. Today, NBCC board member John Reed discusses criticism finalist Greg Milner’s Perfecting Sound Forever: An Aural History of Recorded Music (Faber & Faber):
Greg Milner, as he approaches the maturation of recording in the twentieth century, guides us with thorough research and resolve, and a casual elegance.
Perfecting Sound Forever takes a comprehensive look at the relatively young art of music recording. Beginning with Thomas Edison, and moving through generations of audio technologists versus audio purists (clinging to one outmoded process after another), Milner tracks the surprisingly constructed notion “good sound.” Recorded music is not, as we presume, natural, it is hyper natural, more real, more vibrant, more distinct in its components—more than any live auditory experience could ever be. That music can be a studio experience—made better, made cleaner, made perfect—is an argument ever-sieged, and ever-victorious. As a culture, we have come to assume the notion of “perfect sound,” and Milner deconstructs the critical history of how we listen to recordings. That music is not “real sound,” that it is an education of what sounds right, and a long evolution of sound-science, is uncontroversial, but nonetheless surprising, and broadly impactful in a critical reading of contemporary culture. And the effect of recording technology is not just an altered perception of the listener; the psychology of the recording process has found its way into the music itself. Milner details a contemporary music that is as much the result of the recording process as the subject of it. As handled by Milner, what could be an esoteric and ancillary subject finds grounding in fundamental questions of what it is to hear, and what it is to experience music.