What I read on my winter vacation

1) The final third of The Last Genet, Hadrien Laroche (1997; Arsenal edi­tion, 2010)

Certainly a great idea for a book: an in-depth exam­in­a­tion of the writing/political act­iv­ism of notori­ous thief-turned-literateur Genet, from his  activ­it­ies at/coverage of the Democratic Convention in Chicago ’68 to his roost­ing with Palestinean refugees et.al. that cul­min­ated in the cre­ation of his posthum­ous Prisoner of Love. And to give Laroche cred­it, the guy did do his home­work, and draws quite a few pro­voc­at­ive and per­tin­ent par­al­lels (his evoc­a­tions and cita­tions of Ezra Pound are extremely savvy, to say the least). But the whole damn thing is so very damn French in all the wrong ways. The thing does put one’s guard up right from the start: Laroche begins his study, for all intents and pur­poses, with a sec­tion called “Outrageous Hair.” Which top­ic is not EXACTLY beside the point but which hardly requires fore­ground­ing either. Elsewhere, and largely, this stu­dent of Derrida (the book is a ver­sion of a dis­ser­ta­tion that the Great Man over­saw) over­works a decon­struc­tion­ist pret­zel logic that leads to word-groupings like “Hitler (the good man)” and impossible con­clu­sions such as “[…] Genet misses his tar­get twice: he gives in to the cliché about the plot, and offends death.” “Offends DEATH?” I thought when I read that pas­sage. “Who wrote this, Armond White?” And then it occured to me…well, you can ima­gine. Anyway, Laroche is not entirely insup­port­able, as an Italian-born/French-raised ex-girlfriend used to call me all the time, but he’s pretty damn irrit­at­ing in too many respects. Mainly, the whole thing made me want to look fur­ther into George Jackson’s Soledad let­ters, and into The Declared Enemy, a col­lec­tion of Genet inter­views and essays and a major source for Laroche. 

2) The Death of the Author, by Gilbert Adair (1992; Melville House edi­tion, 2008)

I did­n’t plan it this way, but it turned out to be kind of funny that I star­ted this after put­ting down the Laroche, giv­en that DOTA is, for one thing, a pretty wicked and wickedly on-target sen­dup of cer­tain strains of European post­mod­ern­ist the­ory, and such. I picked it up because after eulo­giz­ing Adair after his very untimely death last month, I felt bad that I was­n’t all that up on his fic­tion, and this par­tic­u­lar example of it proved extremely easy to acquire. “Based on a real-life scan­dal,” the inner-flap promo copy reads, and I was glad they did­n’t go fur­ther and say what scan­dal, as it was pretty evid­ent once the point came up, and Adair fin­esses the point with his cus­tom­ary wit. Aside from expertly pas­tich­ing both the nov­el of aca­deme and the who­dunit, Adair uses a diabol­ic­ally clev­er struc­tur­al device that gets fun­ni­er (and, some might notice, delib­er­ately more dif­fi­cult to pull off, and does­n’t Adair know it) each time it recurs. The impec­cably craf­ted clock­work mech­an­ism works its way to a punch­line that’s as frus­trat­ing as it is inev­it­able, which is, as one could say, cent­ral to Adair’s point. Nifty, engross­ing, and entirely worthy of Georges Perec, whose La dis­par­a­tion Adair so lov­ingly and resource­fully translated. 

2) The Third Reich, Roberto Bolaño (writ­ten 1998, copy­righted 2011; Farrar, Straus and Giroux edi­tion, 2011)

Frustrated nov­el­ists might want to avoid this book. Not because it’s bad; in fact, its rel­at­ively excel­lent qual­ity is part of the reas­on. This is actu­ally an unpub­lished nov­el by the pro­lif­ic Chilean writer Bolaño, who by some accounts only began writ­ing nov­els to increase his earn­ing poten­tial and bet­ter sup­port his family—he appar­ently thought him­self a poet first and fore­most. But it’s the nov­els that are con­tinu­ing to earn the late writer (he died in 2003 at the age of 50) his inter­na­tion­al repu­ta­tion, and this early effort was found among his papers after his death. As far as the fic­tion goes—and this only goes as far as I can tell, because I’ve only read four of his oth­er nov­els and a not-unsizeable smat­ter­ing of his short stories—it strikes me as pretty quint­es­sen­tial. It’s about a young German war-game cham­pi­on vaca­tion­ing in Spain who under­goes an odd per­son­al­ity muta­tion after a fel­low vaca­tion­er he was­n’t all that enthu­si­ast­ic to know to begin with dis­ap­pears. Soon the gamer is engaged in an intense, up-and-down round of the, um, game from which the nov­el’s title is derived with a hor­ribly burn-scarred young beach bum. The storyline goes along a fairly pre­dict­able acolyte-becomes-the-master reversal course for a bit, but the pleas­ure here is in the details, and how much con­fid­ence Bolaño brings to both his droll detach­ment and mor­al fero­city. The story nev­er explodes into the meta ter­rit­ory that it appears to flirt with, nor does it con­tain the kind of mind-blowing nar­rat­ive twist/summation that made The Savage Detectives such an admir­able Borges/Not Borges exer­cise. But the fact that it makes you hink it might go to either place is test­a­ment enough to Bolaño’s entirely envi­able deftness. 

4) Mamoulian, Tom Milne (1968; BFI Silver edi­tion 2010)

The world sure can be per­verse at times. I can­’t testi­fy to what impact this study of the dis­tinct­ive dir­ect­or had on its first pub­lic­a­tion, but as of now I can­’t say that Mamoulian’s crit­ic­al rep is in all that much bet­ter a shape than the one Milne him­self bemoans in the open­ing pages of this book: “Parallel to the neg­lect by the stu­di­os, crit­ic­al eval­u­ation of Mamoulian’s work seems to have solid­i­fied to a remark­able degree […] [e]verything from The Gay Desperado to Silk Stockings is […] cheer­fully con­signed to obli­vi­on.”  Some decent DVDs of Mamoulian’s work are read­ily avail­able, but what still seems fixed in amber is a some­times kinder reit­er­a­tion of Sarris’ ver­dict in The American Cinema of an innov­at­or run out of innov­a­tions. What Milne there­fore con­cen­trates on in this, essen­tially a film-by-film crit­ic­al mono­graph, is the eleg­ance and com­pas­sion of the Mamoulian sens­ib­il­ity. This provides the through-line, and Milne also insists that Mamoulian’s innov­a­tions held him in good stead even after they ceased to be innov­a­tions per se. In the chapter on Silk Stockings, he impli­citly praises Mamoulian’s adapt­ab­il­ity, provid­ing elo­quent accounts of the way he shoots the film’s dance sequences in the “breath­tak­ing Cinemascope” one of the film’s songs sends up. He’s par­tic­u­larly good on Mamoulian’s use of col­or, mak­ing one wish for a god­damn respect­able video ver­sion of the early Technicolor Becky Sharp (pub­lic domain has yiel­ded us a caval­cade of digit­al crap on this one) and glad that one may now get the appar­ently unsung gem Summer Holiday from Warner Archive. (There’s anoth­er good Rouben hope­fully out this year from a very reput­able source, but I’m not sure I’m allowed to talk about it yet. I know of it cause I did the liner notes…) Very worth­while and largely convincing.

5) Two-thirds of Thelonious Monk: The Life And Times Of An American Original, Robin D. G. Kelley (2009, Free Press)

This is just the kind of bio­graphy I tend to really go for: fact-crammed, heav­ily researched and heav­ily foot­noted. So far it strikes a near-exemplary bal­ance between illu­min­at­ing the art (Kelley knows his stuff musi­co­lo­gic­ally, and can explain it pretty cogently, although it helps if the read­ers has SOME tech­nic­al know­ledge) and chron­ic­ling the life. While indubit­ably a warts-and-all por­trait, it largely (so far) achieves what Kelley told vari­ous inter­view­ers his aim was: cre­at­ing a por­trait of Monk that coun­ters the myth­ic accounts of Thelonious the eccent­ric, or mad geni­us, or just plain weirdo. Diagnosing Monk as bipolar and provid­ing both enga­ging stor­ies of his ups and dis­pir­it­ing examples of his downs, he’s com­ing pretty close to present­ing a bio­graph­ic­al man in full, if you will. Kelley’s style is of no small interest; while largely straight, it some­times veers into the casual/colloquial, with ref­er­ences to fam­ily as “folks” and phrases like “jazz guys.” Kelley’s a clear and sol­id enough writer that these usages not only don’t jar, but they’re even apt to make the read­er feel more at home in the text. His lan­guage also points to his con­vic­tion with respect to present­ing Monk as a Great African-American Musician, which con­vic­tion irked some of the folks who left read­er reviews at Amazon; one dude com­plains that Kelley has a “leftist/racial griev­ance axe to grind” while anoth­er finger-wags at the “left-wing socio-babble.” Yeah, Kelley sure has a lot of nerve imply­ing that those cops in Delaware who kicked the crap out of him FOR NO REASON oth­er than maybe he was in a car driv­en by a white woman were racist; I bet it’s Kelley who’s the REAL racist. Heh. By the same token, how­ever, at every point when Kelley insists that a civil rights offense “deeply affected” Monk, the lack of cor­rob­or­a­tion for this is made espe­cially con­spicu­ous by the miss­ing foot­note. As I said, I’m not done with the book yet, so I can­’t defin­it­ively talk about this issue in terms of pro­jec­tion just yet. But even if I could, I’d be inclined to for­give it as a reas­on­ably harm­less affect­a­tion on the part of an oth­er­wise largely blame­less writer, research­er, and cham­pi­on. (My only real argu­ment so far is with Kelley’s appar­ent eager­ness to go along with sources who would dis­par­age pro­du­cer Orrin Keepnews, who did, after all, have no small part in shep­herd­ing the abso­lute clas­sic records Brilliant Corners and Monk’s Music to com­ple­tion.) And of course the whole thing has giv­en me an excel­lent excuse to embark on an ever-pleasurable orgy of Monk listen­ing; I’ve loved the man’s music from the first beau­ti­fully skewed note of his I ever heard.