Category: 7. David Ross

By David Ross. The Obamas have invited some apparently outrageous rapper to the White House to participate in a ‘poetry reading,’ with predictable repercussions. The left-wing radio host Randi Rhodes fumes:

Look, the conservatives, if Shakespeare were alive, and he went to the White House to get, you know, some sort of a reading, they would be outraged about him – talking about killing his brother, and the father had to go, and a mother he slept with – They’d be out of their fricking minds with this. They don’t understand culture! Or literature!

Conservatives – at least the many who ridiculed this comment online – do know the difference between Shakespeare and Sophocles, and know that Oedipus killed his father and not his brother. Or is Rhodes hazily thinking of Hamlet? Who can tell?

The NPR-ish notion that conservatives are sub-literate is so annoyingly counter-factual, as the central vein of Anglo-American literature for the last two hundred and more years has been essentially conservative: Swift, Burke, Coleridge, Jane Austen, Carlyle, Trollope, Thoreau, Ruskin (a self-described “violent Tory of the old school”), Yeats, Lewis, D.H. Lawrence, Pound, Eliot, Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, Nabokov, Waugh, Flannery O’Connor and the Southern agrarian writers in toto, Saul Bellow. Only Dickens and possibly George Eliot, among the greatest writers, can be neatly grafted onto a liberal moral or political scheme. Even self-professed radicals, like William Morris, Virginia Woolf, and George Orwell, are only superficially or problematically so, while the elusive James Joyce is imaginable as a conservative but inconceivable – utterly self-contradictory – as a liberal of any sort. I myself consider Morris the most conservative man who ever lived and attribute his communism to a complete and rather silly misunderstanding: his communist utopia was not progressive but maniacally reactionary, a fantasy of the Middle Ages idealized and restored. Not for nothing did Yeats call Morris his “chief of men.” Some day, I believe, a scholarly fellow with a certain entrepreneurial instinct will write a fascinating book on the conservatism of Harry Potter, which borrows more than plot conventions from Tolkien and Lewis, and harks back, in its fundamentals, to the monasticism of the Middle Ages and to the legend of St. George.

In the coup de grace to the Rhodes stereotype, David Mamet, our most renowned playwright, has announced his conservative conversion with a splashy new book (see here). Continue reading Conservatism & The Arts

By David Ross. You’ve heard of yo-yo dieters; I’m a yo-yo subscriber to the New Yorker. Some clever piece by Adam Gopnik (solitary throwback to the versatile, stylish intellectualism of the New Yorker’s heyday) will catch my eye in a dentist’s office and I will subscribe once again. I will read the thing for a year, mostly on the toilet; grow increasingly annoyed with its coastal smarminess and inability to interrogate its basic assumptions about the world or even recognize them as assumptions; flush the toilet; cancel in a huff; re-up a year later; etc. This pattern has governed my entire adult life.

With each renewed subscription, I notice changes that are probably invisible to those who read steadily. My latest return leaves me appalled. The old champagne fizz of the New York mind is gone; the metropolitan dandyism embodied by the magazine’s Eustace Tilley mascot is caput. The cartoons are crudely drawn and often just crude. David Remnick, who became The New Yorker’s fifth editor in 1998, began as a dowdy geopolitical journalist for the Washington Post and has lately become a starry-eyed chronicler of the Obama millennium. Presumably in Remnick’s image, The New Yorker has become clunky, earnest, wonkish, didactic, and condescending. Just like the president whom Remnick so much admires, it seems desperate to clarify ‘the big picture,’ to sweep away all those stubborn, uneducated misconceptions that interfere with the progressive renovation of the world.

Even worse, the New Yorker has brought in Tina Fey for comic relief (see here and here). Woody Allen and Steve Martin have long wasted space in The New Yorker, but you could dismiss their pointless little sketches as vanity material designed to gussy up the table of contents and burnish their own idea of themselves as intellectuals. Tina Fey is both a better writer and a more ambitious contributor: she is not merely trading on her name, but attempting to bring her personality to bear, to stage a theatrics of the self. This makes her harder to ignore, while not making her any less cloying. Continue reading Tina Fey & Her Wounded Nerd Ego

By David Ross. I finally saw the vacuous Tron: Legacy (see here for Libertas’ original review). My motive was less science fiction completism than the desire to take a long gander at Olivia Wilde, whom I last saw kissing Mischa Barton in The O.C., but the movie managed to frustrate even this simple desire. La Wilde does not appear until the movie is half over, and then in a boyish bob and inexplicably unflattering rubber cat-suit. In the end, I had to make due with a mere glimpse of shoulder: thin compensation for two hours of Tron’s mumbo jumbo.

The movie denounces joyless soulless totalitarian mechanism, but who favors joyless soulless totalitarian mechanism? This is about as interesting as coming out against puppy torture or tulip decapitation. What two-year-old wouldn’t understand that sunless realms devoted to murderous bloodsport are somehow bad? Serious dystopian works are about the nuanced psychology of totalitarianism (v. The Lives of Others). Only Hollywood pats itself on the back merely for recognizing that totalitarian systems are – to choose an IQ-appropriate word – yucky.

All of this is water under the bridge of another exercise in Hollywood banality. What I really want to mention is the delicious Disney hypocrisy with which the film opens. Grid inventor Kevin Flynn (Jeff Bridges) tells his son as he goes through the good-guy routine of tucking him into bed: “Clu, Tron, and I built a system where all information was free and open. [Nostalgic sigh]. Beautiful.”

We then proceed by route of cliché to the dark, metallic boardroom where the evil corporation Encom is counting its money. Bruce Boxleitner, an old Flynn protégé, asks: “Given the prices that we charge to students and schools, what sort of improvements have been made in Encom OS-12?” The mustache-twirling CEO says: “This year we put a 12 on the box.” A techie-genius-for-hire chimes in: “OS-12 is the most secure operating system ever released. The idea of sharing our software or giving it away for free disappeared with Kevin Flynn.”

This is too rich coming from the company that rammed through the so-called “Mickey Mouse Protection Act“; that sued L.A. produce vendors for selling piñatas featuring unlicensed Disney characters; that sued a pair of clowns for sporting Disney-themed costumes. I recall a funny episode of The Simpsons in which – parody verging on reality – the mere mention of Disney brings two lawyers immediately to the door with a cease-and-desist order.

And the chutzpah of the allusion to “improvements”! Disney has never met a peacefully interred classic that it was not ready to disinter and pimp out. Exhibits A and B: Cinderella II: Dreams Come True and Cinderella III: A Twist in Time. This is worse than merely repackaging the same old product (which by the way Disney does all the time in the form of “Platinum Editions”); this is willfully disfiguring mythic pattern, confusing something that was unconfused.

Posted on April 25th, 2011 at 8:26am.

By David Ross. Sigrid Nunez was during the mid-1970s Susan Sontag’s secretary and her son David Rieff’s lover. Her recently published memoir Sempre Susan (read a racy excerpt here) has improbably returned Sontag to the spotlight, just when her long slow fade seemed to have begun in earnest. A mandarin even by the standards of the intelligentsia, Sontag did much to instate the European art film as a phenomenon of the intellectual vanguard during the 1960s and 1970s.

So too her look and bearing codified what it meant – and still means – to be a ‘serious intellectual.’ Sontag always struck me as feline: elegant, self-contained, sharp-clawed, well-groomed (intellectually and physically). To extend my metaphor, I imagine her as a silky Persian cat perched atop a garden wall, occasionally glancing with disdain at all the mere dogs clumsily being dogs below – romping idiotically, smelling each other’s behinds, crapping in the bushes, having fun.

This semester I gave my students Sontag’s essay on Godard’s Vivra Sa Vie, one of several self-consciously ‘important’ essays on film anthologized in Sontag’s breakthrough volume Against Interpretation (1966). I admire its elegant minimalism (rather like the movie itself), but I find it lacking in heft and emotional engagement (again like the movie itself). I paired Sontag’s essay with our own Jennifer Baldwin’s photo-essay on Vivra Sa Vie, which in many ways I consider more satisfying because more immediate and more human. My students laughed at Jennifer’s cri de femme: “I want Nana’s fuzzy black coat.” Sontag did not make the students laugh. I wonder if she ever made anybody laugh. Possibly not.

Virginia Woolf said of Yeats, “Wherever one cut him, with a little question, he poured, spurted fountains of ideas.” This Titanism – this quality of thinking and being on a grand scale, of bringing to bear the whole of one’s self – is the hallmark of the great intellectuals. Sontag never pours or spurts. She makes a clinical exercise of what should be a vast excitement.

In terms of film criticism, I favor Pauline Kael, if only because she understood the cardinal romantic truth that intellect is merely an expressive device of the personality. Kael suffers from serious lapses in taste and judgment, but her wild and woolly prose is more alive than Sontag’s and her passions more transparent and seemingly sincere. Sontag was more sophisticated in her range of interests and enthusiasms, but only more serious and ambitious in a way. She was interested in exploring her own capacity for exploration, interested in her own mind and what it could figure out. Her form of criticism is a kind of intellectual ceremony, a kind of Japanese tea ceremony in which Sontag dispenses herself in refined and smallish doses. In the end, Sontag is a bit too astringent for my taste. A film should not be an intellectual puzzle or a pretext for critical experiment; it should be a hub of personal meaning.

I reread yesterday Sontag’s “Notes on Camp,” also from Against Interpretation. It’s a brilliant little piece, but it says far more about Sontag herself than about camp. Its real content is the curious involutions of its own form and expression. It is about itself, and in this regard functions more like a poem – a clever but dry one – than like criticism properly defined. Continue reading Sempre Susan