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Tag: clive james

Published February 21, 2013

Midweek Miscellany

The Importance of the Unimportant — Dwight Garner interviews Clive James for The New Republic:

I was the first person to take unserious television seriously. There were plenty of people who were writing profoundly about profound stuff. I was first to spot the importance of stuff that was unimportant: the stuff in between the shows, the link material, the sports commentators, the trivia. I started writing about that. It was illustrative, and you could be funny about it. You start describing a culture by taking that approach. That was my contribution.

Savage Satire — Samuel Carlisle considers whether American Psycho would be better without the violence, at The Believer:

Ellis… had trouble with American Psycho’s violence while writing it: the murder scenes remained unwritten until the rest of the book was completed, at which point Ellis read FBI criminology textbooks detailing actual serial killings and returned to insert the scenes that would be most unsettling to author, reader, and public alike. “I didn’t really want to write them,” he told an interviewer later, “but I knew they had to be there.”

What this leaves us with is violence that is mostly self-contained in a handful of brief chapters. To remove that violence would more or less be a clean excision, leaving the rest of the savagely insouciant satire intact.

And on a related note: The LA Times theatre critice Charles McNulty on depictions of violence on stage:

What is the line between acceptable and unacceptable violence in art? If gruesomeness is the criterion, much of Jacobean drama would have to be banned, including Shakespeare’s “King Lear,” with its graphic scene of Gloucester’s eyes being mercilessly plucked out. Some may believe they can identify pornography at a glance, but violence places keener demands on our sensibilities. Its artistic validity isn’t a function of how many liters of blood are spilled or how many limbs are dismembered. The question is one of gratuitousness. Or to put it another way: How does the brutality fit into a work’s larger vision?

And finally…

Ahab — New research suggests that Fredric Wertham misrepresented his research and falsified his results for his controversial book on the corrupting influence of comic books The Seduction of the Innocent, published in 1954:

Michael Chabon, who researched the early history of comics for his Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, “The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay,” said that while Wertham had been viewed as “this almost McCarthyite witch hunter,” he was actually “an extremely well-intentioned liberal, progressive man in many ways,” providing mental health services to minorities and the poor.

But of “Seduction of the Innocent,” Mr. Chabon said: “You read the book, it just smells wrong. It’s clear he got completely carried away with his obsession, in an almost Ahab-like way.”

(pictured above: The Phantom Lady drawn by Matt Baker was one the comics cited in Seduction of the Innocent. A reappraisal of Baker, one of the earliest African American comic book artists, has just been published by TwoMorrows Publishing.)

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Published September 5, 2012

Midweek Miscellany

Steven Heller shares a few pages from Effective Type-use for Advertising, self-published by Benjamin Sherbow in 1922, at Imprint.

Lost in the Shuffle — Brian Appleyard profiles the writer and critic Clive James:

James’s television work, brilliant as it was, has tended to blur his identity as one of the most influential writers of his time. At one level every newspaper is still packed with James wannabes, his prose tricks and tropes are imitated everywhere; at another level, the whole 1980s wave of new British fiction, especially Martin Amis, showed signs of having learnt from James. Most important was his invention of a way of writing seriously about popular culture.

Listed — Phil Patton on the age of the list, for the New York Times:

We’re living in the era of the list, maybe even its golden age. The Web click has led to the wholesale repackaging of information into lists, which can be complex and wonderful pieces of information architecture. Our technology has imperceptibly infected us with “list thinking.”

Lists are the simplest way to organize information. They are also a symptom of our short attention spans.

And finally…

Swallowing Up the Past — John Gray on J. G. Ballard and memory, for BBC Magazine:

Through a kind of inner alchemy, the Shanghai of his childhood became the London of his first major novel The Drowned World, also published in 1962.

Irreversibly altered by climate change so that it has become a region of tropical lagoons and advancing jungle, the city is almost unrecognisable, though the weed-choked streets remain intact in the depths of the lagoons and the upper floors of a few crumbling hotels continue to be habitable.

Like many of Ballard’s characters, the novel’s central protagonist – a biologist who shares many of Ballard’s own preoccupations with time and memory – doesn’t regret the passing of the old world. At the end of the novel he finds fulfilment in the sun-filled wilderness that is swallowing up the past.

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Published August 30, 2012

Midweek Miscellany

Drowning Not Waving — A short profile of Toronto-based cartoonist Jeff Lemire, creator of Essex County and The Underwater Welder, for The Globe and Mail:

Lemire, who profited from art classes in high school but is otherwise self-taught as a graphic artist, first heard about the profession of underwater welder from a colleague at one of the restaurants where he worked before comics started paying the bills three years ago. The father of a three-year-old boy, also named Gus, Lemire felt that underwater welding seemed like a good metaphor for parenthood.

Burdened with Cinema — Clive James reviews The Age of Movies: Selected Writings of Pauline Kael, for The Atlantic:

She could talk well about popular art because she had not only seen all the movies that there were, she would have gone to all the opera performances that there were if she had not been so burdened with tickets to the cinema. When she talked about Fred Astaire or Gene Kelly, her remarks were up there with the professional dance critic Arlene Croce’s because she, Kael, had been a connoisseur of dance all her life. She knew her way around a jazz band. Apart from mental equipment like that, her reading was prodigious in its volume, and fully serious in its content. Her house had all the Oz books in first editions—I saw them, and marveled; they looked as beautiful as her Tiffany lamps—but she was by no means restricted just to film-linked popular literature. When she reviewed a Russian movie based on a Dostoyevsky story, she could refer with daunting ease to anything by Dostoyevsky, including all the major novels chapter by chapter.

And finally…

An interview with film director David Fincher at Art of the Title:

I was eight years old and I saw a documentary on the making of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. It had never occurred to me that movies didn’t take place in real time. I knew that they were fake, I knew that the people were acting, but it had never occurred to me that it could take, good God, four months to make a movie! It showed the entire company with all these rental horses and moving trailers to shoot a scene on top of a train. They would hire somebody who looked like Robert Redford to jump onto the train. It never occurred to me that there were hours between each of these shots. The actual circus of it was invisible, as it should be, but in seeing that I became obsessed with the idea of “How?” It was the ultimate magic trick.

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