Submitted For Your Perusal

Ben Mathis-Lilley asks, “Why do rappers whose work I hold in such high regard have such terrible taste in rock?” His answer, that middlebrow rock artists “are seen by their hip-hop collaborators … as living samples, picked out of the musical spectrum because their voices have some distinctive quality,” is a good one.

“I have myself always been terrified of plagiarism – of being accused of it, that is. Every writer is a thief, though some of us are more clever than others at disguising our robberies. The reason writers are such slow readers is that we are ceaselessly searching for things we can steal and then pass off as our own: a natty bit of syntax, a seamless transition, a metaphor that jumps to its target like an arrow shot from an aluminum crossbow.

“In my own case, I have written a few books built to a great extent on other writers’ books. Where the blurry line between a paraphrase and a lift is drawn–not always so clear when composing such books – has always been worrisome to me. True, I’ve never said directly that man is a political animal, or that those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it. Still, I worry that I may somewhere have crossed that blurry line.” —Joseph Epstein

There’s a rather lengthy profile of Christopher Hitchens in the May 2008 Prospect which contains some fascinating insights into his personal life and work habits, as well as his protean political views. Of course, it’s not really cool to like Hitchens – he is someone, after all, who isn’t afraid to savagely attack his friends in print – but as a polemicist he’s second to none, and I admire him for that. That and his thick skin.  The following two quotes, in particular, stood out to me:

• “Christopher Hitchens’s apartment is curiously unchanged in the 13 years since I first visited him in Washington. A portrait of him and his wife, screenwriter Carol Blue, is still unframed. There is little art on the walls, few travel mementos; just bookshelves, a spacious living room, a modest kitchen and an annex for the alcohol. The aesthetic is not so much utilitarian as uncluttered of anything that would distract from the essentials of his life: reading, meeting people, drinking, laughing, arguing, writing.”
• “The appearance he gives of living improvisationally must obscure a ferocious interior organisation. Articles get written at any time of day or night, with extraordinary speed and fluency—however much he has drunk. He turns out a couple of pieces in the intervals while I’m taking a breather from merely talking.”

A number of graphic designers weigh in on John McCain’s campaign’s choice of typeface. The consensus seems to be that a better choice might have been made.

A report that Heath Ledger “was told to seek professional help for his personal problems while filming The Dark Knight” surfaced earlier this week.

Money Quote: “Heath refused to talk to anyone out of character. If you tried to communicate with him normally instead of The Joker, he would just ignore you.”

This statement seems to support some of the things I’ve been saying for weeks now.

(Related post: “Did the Joker Kill Heath Ledger?”)

From The Chronicle of Higher Education comes an interview with M.H. Abrams. This bit stood out to me: 

The Mirror and the Lamp had been Abrams’s dissertation, and he also reminds us of a different era of academic production, when the tenure gun was not quite so impatiently pressed to a junior professor’s head. Abrams says he took “10 years of hard work revising the text,” rewriting the first chapter “at least six times.”

I love stories like this because they remind me that things, despite the rampant amnesia, were once quite different, and thus needn’t be the way they are presently.

(Related post: “Fewer Books, Better Thinking.”)

“When a colleague of mine returned from an MLA convention in Toronto around that time, he told a story that nicely illustrated the trend. One afternoon he hopped on a shuttle bus and sat down next to a young scholar who told him she’d just returned from a panel. He replied that he’d just returned from France, where he’d been studying for a semester.

“What are they talking about?” she asked.
“Hmm?”
“Is there any new theory?”
“Yeah, in a way,” he answered. “It’s called ‘erudition.’”
“What’s that?” she wondered.
“Well, you read and read, and you get your languages, and you go into politics, religion, law, contemporary events, and just about everything else.” (He’s a 16th-century French literature scholar who comes alive in archives.)
She was puzzled. “But what’s the theory?”
“To be honest, there isn’t any theory,” he said.
“That’s impossible.” He shrugged. “Okay, then, give me the names, the people heading it.”
“There aren’t any names. Nobody’s heading it.”

—Mark Bauerlein

To mark the release of Lost Highway on DVD (finally), Dennis Lim offers up a trenchant (re)consideration of the film on Slate that’s well-worth reading.

Money Quote:

The scene is a textbook illustration of that uncanny sensation so specific to Lynch films that they are often simply called Lynchian (per David Foster Wallace, “one of those Potter Stewart-type words that’s definable only ostensively—i.e., we know it when we see it”). At their creepiest, Lynchian moments involve a shock of recognition (or self-recognition) and a metaphysical impossibility: déjà vu, seeing a doppelgänger, being in two places at once. When the heroines of Mulholland Drive are huddled in Club Silencio, the onstage cabaret is revealed as a sham (the singer collapses but the song goes on), forcing Naomi Watts to confront the failure of her own fantasy.

“Today everyone is a blogger, but where are the readers? A New Yorker cartoon reverses the usual picture of a literary festival with book lovers lined up to get the author’s autograph. The cartoon shows a table and a queue, but authors line up to see ‘The Reader,’ who sits behind the table. On the Internet, articles, blog posts, and comments on blog posts pour forth, but who can keep up with them? And while everything is preserved (or ‘archived’), has anyone ever looked at last year’s blogs? Rapidly produced, they are just as rapidly forgotten.” —Russell Jacoby, “Big Brains, Small Impact”

In my previous post, I shared with you a recent statement by David Mamet. Mamet’s name has been bandied about the blogosphere of late because of a piece he wrote called “Why I Am No Longer a “Brain-Dead Liberal,’” which appeared in the Village Voice a few weeks ago and created a mild stir. The piece itself is worth reading – if only for the hilarious bit about the World’s Perfect Theatrical Review – as is Counterpunch’s point-by-point response. But for my money, all of the talk about Mamet’s politics isn’t as interesting as the new movie he has coming out: Redbelt, which looks to me like Karate Kid-for-adults. (That, by the way, is a compliment.) As of this writing, there are two trailers online; each gives a different impression of the movie, and each, I think, is worth watching.