March 28

Jeff VanderMeer at Omnivoracious conducted an email interview with Daniel Maier-Katkin, author of a new joint biography of Hannah Arendt and Martin Heidegger. No book on such a fraught subject, involving both Heidegger's apparent Nazism and the Jewish Arendt's apparent forgiveness of her former teacher's and lover's "error," could fail to be controversial -- or interesting.

http://www.omnivoracious.com/2010/03/stranger-from-abroad-daniel-maierkatkin-on-hannah-arendt-and-martin-heidegger.html

The genre of the email interview has also yielded a stimulating discussion between Garth Risk Hallberg at The Millions and Hungarian novelist Peter Esterhazy, who like many fine European writers is immersed in literature to an extent that I think is rare among Americans:

I....read a lot of classical literature, all the Hungarians – Kosztolányi, Móricz, Mikszáth – the great French, the great Russians, the great English writers. When I read something, I didn’t think of it as a chore. I always read for my own amusement, my own pleasure. The way I drink wine....I read Joyce the way I read Balzac. But Joyce was important because – though it sounds like the arrogance of a young man – I saw that I wasn’t alone. That’s why the Austrian avant-garde was also important [to me] at the time. For example, Handke. Or the modern classical authors, mostly the Austrians rather than the Germans, Musil rather than Thomas Mann, Broch rather than Hesse. Still, I had great, orgiastic experiences reading Mann into the wee hours of the morning. That goes without saying.

http://www.themillions.com/2010/03/the-millions-interview-peter-esterhazy.html

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P%C3%A9ter_Esterh%C3%A1zy

The litblog Eve's Alexandria posted a helpful guide to the longlist for the Orange Prize, given to a novel written in the English language by a woman of any nationality. Literary prizes and their related longlists and shortlists generate much greater interest in Great Britain, in France -- let's face it, almost anywhere in the world -- than they do in the United States. The value of the prizes and the lists is that they bring so many great reading possibilities to people's attention (if they are paying attention), and the international literary Web and blogosphere does its bit to keep to us all informed about the prizes (just as the film Web and blogosphere performs the same function for the world of international film festivals). Be warned, though, that the resulting debates, as with any disputes in cyberspace, can become vicious; some European contributors to the World  Literature Forum came this close to taking out a hit on me after I mentioned "Amelie Nothomb" and "Nobel Prize for Literature" in the same blog post!

http://evesalexandria.typepad.com/eves_alexandria/2010/03/the-orange-longlist-the-closeup.html

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orange_Prize 

The release of the legendary and long-unavailable mid-Sixties rock concert film The T.A.M.I. Show on DVD is creating quite a stir:

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/21/arts/music/21TAMI.html

http://www.coffeecoffeeandmorecoffee.com/archives/2010/03/the_tami_show.html

Greta Gerwig, the "mumblecore" star who is now playing opposite Ben Stiller in Noah Baumbach's Greenberg, has been tagged by the New York Times's A.O. Scott as "the definitive screen actress of her generation," a judgment which, as much as I like Scott (and may like Gerwig once I've seen some of her movies), is unlikely to resonate beyond the small but intense circle of hardcore film geeks:

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/28/movies/28scott.html

Gerwig herself has given an intelligent, disarming interview to The Faster Times that scarcely suggests she wants to be an icon, even in the ironic way A.O.Scott meant the phrase "definitive screen actress":

http://thefastertimes.com/film/2010/03/19/faster-filmmaker-qa-greenberg-star-greta-gerwig-on-nakedness-noah-baumbach-and-movies-that-make-it-easier-to-keep-living/

In a recent discussion at the film noir discussion board The Blackboard, we were talking about the DIY aesthetic of certain under-the-radar Fifties film-makers such as Hugo Haas and Ed Wood, and I brought up mumblecore (a style of film-making that has generated some epic debates in the blogosphere):

"The DIY reference is apt. An equivalent in movie-making today is the 'mumblecore' movement, which David Denby wrote about in kindly terms in a recent New Yorker piece. If you criticize such movies on their lack of 'production values' or 'professional acting,' you're falling into a trap, because that is distinctly not what they're about. Which is not to say that no distinctions of quality can be made among them -- indeed, they must be. But criteria need to be adjusted on the grounds of the filmmakers' intent and the resources available to them. As Denby said, it is rather 'cheering' when creators take back a form from the money-men who often act as culturally witless gate-keepers. A problem I have with Avatar (say) being proclaimed as the 'future of the movies' has less to do with technology than with scale and financing. What, you need $500 million to make a movie now? That's a pretty plutocratic concept of movie-making, and although I'm not against the existence of spectacle, I think the notion that spectacle trumps everything else needs to be resisted. I'd be more impressed by a good-looking, intelligent movie made for $5 million (or $500,000, or $50,000) than I am by Avatar. And indeed, such movies are made all the time. A film world without Hugo Haases and, yes, Ed Woods, would be a poorer one in many senses."

http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/cinema/2009/03/16/090316crci_cinema_denby?currentPage=all

I very much liked that Denby was willing to meet these movies half-way and give them their due. Many critics and consumers are not so open. And some of the worst are male twenty-somethings raised on and conditioned by a steady diet of nothing but "pop" -- fanboys, in short. They are exactly the audience that should be interested in a movement like mumblecore, since it's about their age cohort, but it also falls too far outside their preferred video-game stylistics of thrills delivered intravenously.

The Delaware Art Museum has mounted an ambitious show. "On Assignment: American Illustration, 1850-1950":

http://www.artdaily.org/index.asp?int_sec=11&int_new=36900

http://www.delart.org/exhibitions/on_assignment.html

Two architects, one artist: "Eamon O'Kane takes on the controversial story of Le Corbusier's admiration and eventual vandalism of fellow architect Eileen Gray's villa, E-1027, in the south of France."

http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/culturemonster/2010/03/art-review-eamon-okane-at-see-line-gallery.html

http://www.seelinegallery.com/okane10.html  

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eileen_Gray

Among notables born on this date are novelists Nelson Algren, Russell Banks, Maxim Gorky (Russia), Bohumil Hrabal (Czech Republic), and Mario Vargas Llosa (Peru), historian Iris Chang, philosopher Daniel Dennett, composer Robert Ashley, conductor Willem Mengelberg, bandleader Paul Whiteman, pianist Rudolf Serkin, bass Samuel Ramey, country singer Rena McEntire, film directors Mike Newell and Richard Kelly, and actors Dirk Bogarde, Flora Robson, Conchata Ferrell, and Dianne Wiest.

I recently finished reading Iris Chang's The Rape of Nanking, and am intensely saddened not just by the subject of the book but by my knowledge of Chang's own unhappy history, culminating in her suicide at the age of 36. The book uncovered an enormous amount of previously unknown or under-studied material about what happened in Nanking in 1937, but because Chang was a journalist (and an impassioned one at that) rather a PhD historian, her work came in for attack from some members of the academic history community as well as (predictably) right-wing Japanese who have always denied the massacre. Any intelligent reader of The Rape of Nanking can guess that it is probably not unflawed and that, as an early attempt in popular English-language historiography to come to grips with an under-reported sequence of important events, it leaves much for specialists to fill in and correct. Not having a knowledge of the Japanese language, Chang undoubtedly missed sources and commentary on the Japanese side. Should she, then, not have written the book? That is a preposterous conclusion. Historians' books are not flawless either. Chang cared enough about the material to grapple with it and bring it to a needed wider audience.    

The grappling cost her, not just in terms of that criticism by academics (which you have to be prepared for when you venture onto "their" turf), but in depression brought on her prolonged engagement with the most horrifying examples of human misconduct. Perhaps inadvisedly, she planned and researched a never-finished book on the Bataan death march which re-launched her into the field of historical atrocity. I have read that there is a higher-than-usual rate of suicide among Holocaust scholars, and can readily believe it; Chang may have fallen victim to that same effect, at least in part. No one but a psychiatrist could fully explain what happened to Chang, who had "everything to live for" in an important career, world attention, a supportive husband, and a two-year-old son. Her last writings before she took her life read painfully, paranoiaically:

I can never shake my belief that I was being....persecuted....by forces more powerful than I could have imagined....As long as I am alive, these forces will never stop hounding me... I had a deep foreboding about my safety. I sensed suddenly threats to my own life: an eerie feeling that I was being followed in the streets, the white van parked outside my house, damaged mail arriving at my P.O. Box....I will never be able to escape from myself and my thoughts. I am doing this because I am too weak to withstand the years of pain and agony ahead.

Having suffered from suicidal ideation myself, if not quite that full-bore sense of persecution, I have an inkling of what Chang must have gone through during those final months. I wish she could have been saved, just as I wish David Foster Wallace and others who have gone over that edge could have been saved. But Iris Chang accomplished much in her short life, and ennobled the rest of us through her work.