Thanks for the reading recommendations, everyone. In case you missed it, I am starting an occasional section of this post called (tentatively) “A Reader Recommends.” From yesterday: “If you’ve read a recent (or older but not particularly well known) book you think Prufrock readers might enjoy, send me a note with a few sentences of recommendation that I can share. I cover a lot of nonfiction and poetry, so I’m more interested in fiction, but I’ll consider anything.” Keep sending them my way. I’ll probably run the first one on Wednesday.
Losers and sex: Adam Kirsch takes a closer look at Michel Houellebecq’s critique of modern sexuality: “After his death, Rodger became a hero to other incels, lauded in online discussion groups where rape threats and hate speech are common. (One such group, on Reddit, had 40,000 members when it was finally banned last fall.) Several other young male killers, including Nikolas Cruz, who murdered 17 people at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Fla., in February, and William Atchison, who fatally shot two people and then himself at Aztec High School in Aztec, N.M., last year, appear to have admired and identified with Rodger. But until Minassian committed his crime, the grievances of incels had received little public attention. In May, Jordan Peterson, the Canadian psychologist who has been celebrated and reviled for his views on society and gender, created a furor when he told The New York Times that ‘enforced monogamy’ might be the only way to pacify their rage. Along with some other social conservatives, Peterson sympathizes with the notion that the sexual revolution, like the free-market revolution, has created classes of winners and losers, and that the losers have a legitimate grievance. ‘No one cares about the men who fail,’ Peterson observed. To any reader of the French writer Michel Houellebecq, this lament will sound eerily familiar. For the last 25 years, in novel after novel, Houellebecq has advanced a similar critique of contemporary sexual mores. And while Houellebecq has always been a polarizing figure — admired for his provocations, disdained for his crudeness — he has turned out to be a writer of unusual prescience.”
Nick Ripatrazone writes in praise of Ted Kooser’s seemingly simple, friendly poems.
Last week, I reported briefly on the alternative Nobel Prize in Literature that a group of Swedish librarians are putting together to replace this year’s canceled Nobel. The longlist has been announced, and it includes Cormac McCarthy, Margaret Atwood, and Haruki Murakami, as well as J. K. Rowling and Patti Smith. Oh, and there’s a gender quota—of course!—for the shortlist. It must include two men and two women. Alison Flood of the Guardian gushed: “How open. How inclusive.” Why not make it really fair and just flip a coin?
“Do what you love?” “Follow your passion?” How about “cultivate a ‘growth’ mind-set”? That last phrase is as ugly as sin, but it’s better than thinking you should only do things that are accompanied by a spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings: “Carol Dweck, a psychology professor at Stanford University, remembers asking an undergraduate seminar recently, ‘How many of you are waiting to find your passion?’ ‘Almost all of them raised their hand and got dreamy looks in their eyes,’ she told me. They talked about it ‘like a tidal wave would sweep over them,’ he said. Sploosh. Huzzah! It’s accounting! Would they have unlimited motivation for their passion? They nodded solemnly. ‘I hate to burst your balloon,’ she said, ‘but it doesn’t usually happen that way.’ What Dweck asked her students is a common refrain in American society. The term ‘Follow your passion’ has increased ninefold in English books since 1990. ‘Find something you love to do and you’ll never have to work a day in your life’ is another college-counseling standby of unknown provenance. But according to Dweck and others, that advice is steering people wrong.”
Sonny Bunch on 2001: Space Odyssey at 50 and a new print of the film: “Everything about 2001, from the scale to the sound to the mid-movie break, reminds us of the indispensability of the theatrical experience. We owe Christopher Nolan a debt of gratitude for overseeing the creation of a new print of the film. A longtime evangelist for the glories of celluloid—his most recent, Dunkirk, was screened in 70mm (and about a dozen other formats) across the country last year—Nolan put together the so-called ‘unrestored’ print of 2001 by making duplicate negatives from the original interpositive print of the film and then painstakingly color-correcting them to meet an approximation of how Kubrick initially intended the film to look.”
Essay of the Day:
Everyone loves Proust while Anthony Powell is largely ignored, at least by academics. That shouldn’t be the case, Perry Anderson argues in the London Review of Books. Powell is in many ways the superior novelist:
“Quantity is one thing, quality another. There Powell stands alone. Traditionally, masters of characterisation – Balzac, Eliot, James – were omniscient, describing their creations both from without and within: representing their thoughts and feelings as freely as their carriage or clothes, if typically according one subject-position within the novel, the hero or heroine, the central point of view on the tale, recounted in the third person. Proust took the alternative of a first-person narrative, nearly as canonical since the time of Constant or Charlotte Brontë, to lengths never attempted before, if also without overmuch coherence: the narrator not only reports Swann in the third person, but assumes on occasion an impossible omniscience in the first person. By the time Powell started to write, the interior monologue – Dujardin, Joyce, Woolf – had overtaken authorial omniscience, as superior in depth and less suspect of artifice, while Hemingway was dispensing with both, for pure exteriority of speech and action. The early, prewar Powell modelled himself on Hemingway, producing terse third-person narratives with deliberately flat characters. The enormous change he made in writing A Dance was to switch to a first-person narrative that retained most of the restraints of this mode – that is, no direct psychological access to the inner life of the other characters – while giving them, with unique economy, the presence and depth of figures from the expansive tradition of old, that allowed itself every facility of purchase in its portraiture.
“Powell employed four principal means in bringing his characters to life, each offering an instructive contrast with Proust’s. The first was his gift of physical depiction, the classic introduction to them. Here is the way the best friend, in early days, of the two narrators are described. Saint-Loup: ‘Along the central gangway leading inland from the beach to the high road I saw tall, slender, his neck uncovered, his proud head held high, a young man go past with searching eyes, whose skin was as fair and his hair as golden as if they had absorbed all the rays of the sun. Dressed in a loose, almost white apparel such as I could never have believed any man could wear … His eyes, from which a monocle kept dropping, were the colour of the sea. Everyone looked at him with interest.’ Stringham: ‘He was tall and dark, and looked a little like one of those stiff, sad young men in ruffs, whose long legs take up so much room in 16th-century portraits; or perhaps a younger – and far slighter – version of Veronese’s Alexander receiving the children of Darius after the battle of Issus: with the same high forehead and suggestion of hair thinning a bit at the temples. His features certainly seemed to belong to that epoch of painting: the faces in Elizabethan miniatures, lively, obstinate, generous, not very happy and quite relentless.’
“Proust’s vision is little more than romantic schmaltz of the period: ‘golden’ (applied in due course interminably to features of the Guermantes clan as a whole), is merely a vacant signifier for glamour; ‘the colour of the sea’ is meaningless – it can be grey, blue, brown, green. Powell delivers an image of indelible precision and detail.”
Photo: St. Moritz
Poem: Bill Coyle, “[I have to admit, it does look like a brain]”
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