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Monday, February 09, 2004
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Honesty is Such a Lonely Word
In a recent interview, Steven Erlanger, the culture editor of the New York Times, said this about the new books NYT writers review: “To be honest, there's so much shit. Most of the things we praise aren't very good.” Little is verboten in America - you can flash your tit during the Super Bowl (far right wits have taken to calling the event the Toilet Bowl), etc., etc. - but saying that most of the cultural products Americans praise (new books, bad poems, the Billy Joel song “Honesty,” one of whose ludicrous lines titles this morning’s post) are actually shit will get you into the sort of trouble Erlanger’s been in since he made his remark. And yet who among us has not had the experience of rushing out in a post-rave state of arousal to buy Bel Canto or The Hours or The Shipping News or A Heartbreaking Staggering whatever only to question the very grounds of our intuition of The Real when the novel turns out to be shit? One of the most surreal experiences I’ve had occurred after a well-known feminist theorist gave a talk to the summer faculty seminar I attended (I mentioned this seminar in my recent Prolegomena post) many years ago. The talk - delivered in the Mitford girls patois of British-educated academic Marxists - was, although heartfelt, unintelligible. When our seminar group reassembled a bit later to discuss the talk, we did not, given its inexistence as discourse, discuss it. Instead around the seminar table a drama staged itself in which excited shared knowing grins and breath-gulping wide-eyed nods mixed with bits of dialogue (“Brilliant...blew me away... marvelous...she’s incredible that’s all I can say...transformative...”) to create a hypnotic mise-en-scene... The pleasant immateriality of the moment made me feel light... ethereal... a Rossetti painting floated in front of my eyes...I saw... silken hair .... Julia’s clothes .... liquefaction... sweetly flows...sweet Afton... swee-ee-ee-eet FORgiveness... |