tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4951486642731990675.comments2023-10-02T06:07:30.625-07:00CONTRA JAMES WOODEdmond Caldwellhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02651618912907453630noreply@blogger.comBlogger208125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4951486642731990675.post-90426602179206989812013-09-03T09:17:49.386-07:002013-09-03T09:17:49.386-07:00'Punting' is not just a football term. It&...'Punting' is not just a football term. It's also what you do if you're at Oxford or Cambridge and you go in for the whole Brideshead Revisited thing. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Punt_(boat)#Punting_in_Cambridge<br /><br />If Wood had any association in mind, it was probably that one, rather than football.Leohttps://www.blogger.com/profile/04288883839684928616noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4951486642731990675.post-89987057232841886172012-05-23T10:28:43.935-07:002012-05-23T10:28:43.935-07:00Apparently James Wood has risen from the dead, bri...Apparently James Wood has risen from the dead, briefly, once again:<br /><br />http://www.wsws.org/articles/2012/apr2012/hitc-a25.shtml<br /><br /><i>"Vanity Fair magazine hosted a memorial in New York City April 20 for the late journalist Christopher Hitchens, who died of cancer in December. According to the Guardian, the event, at Cooper Union, a private college in lower Manhattan, paid tribute to Hitchens’ “wit and warmth.”<br /> <br />"The memorial brought together a diverse group of personalities, including novelists Martin Amis, Salman Rushdie and Ian McEwan, playwright Tom Stoppard, <b>literary critic James Wood</b>, historian Douglas Brinkley, journalist Carl Bernstein, actors Sean Penn and Stephen Fry, former Nation editor Victor Navasky and numerous others."</i><br /><br />Cynthia Ozick, a decade ago, about Wood: "He is, for the moment, our Hazlitt. He may become something more." <br /><br />..... Or less.Anonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4951486642731990675.post-82452126997757672562011-11-20T13:59:06.454-08:002011-11-20T13:59:06.454-08:00Xmas really did come early for the righteous, flee...Xmas really did come early for the righteous, fleet and word-mad, this year. Don't forget that the season got its glittering kick-off with Nigel Beale (aka Count Woody's Renfield) doing 15 minutes of (by far) the least-inspired, least-well-prepared, least-intelligent, least-convincingly-sane TED Talk I have ever had the luck to cringe at (I downloaded it before Nigel deleted/moved it; will post it one day for fun).<br /><br />Along those lines, I'm sorry I forgot to drop this quotation, in that glorious "The Millions" skirmish, as proof of Wood's... erm... critical apparatus? Ethical fortitude? Needy delight in being rimmed?<br /><br />---<br /> “I wanted to thank you for your many generous and intelligent words about my new book How Fiction Works (and other stuff)…I get great pleasure from reading your blog.”<br /><br /> Critic, James Wood, The New Yorker.”<br /><br />---<br /><br />It was to Nigel, of course, about whom another critic wrote, soon after (on a Beale-bashing blog):<br /><br />---<br /> "I was reading Nigel Beale’s website, just going through and being more and more stunned by the idiocy that permeated damn near everything he published online. At that point I googled 'NIGEL BEALE IS A FUCKING TWAT.' This is the first thing that came up.<br /><br /> Thank you so much for this.<br /> Comment by Kate June 21, 2009 @ 7:39 am" <br /><br />---<br /><br />In Woody's system, Don DeLillo = bullshit; Nigel Beale = great pleasure. <br /><br />Which makes sense, really.A. Ominoushttps://www.blogger.com/profile/13807400943709124236noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4951486642731990675.post-18225176851731043712011-11-10T09:07:57.970-08:002011-11-10T09:07:57.970-08:00Isn't it? I noticed the same thing. I suppose ...Isn't it? I noticed the same thing. I suppose Nigel is in hiding after... you know...A. Ominoushttps://www.blogger.com/profile/13807400943709124236noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4951486642731990675.post-71732472819652262212011-11-10T08:29:29.142-08:002011-11-10T08:29:29.142-08:00Ha! Indeed. What I notice is that even if some o...Ha! Indeed. What I notice is that even if some of the folks in the comments trash Lethem for responding to the review, nobody is really trying to make much of a case for Wood himself as a great or important critic. That's the key difference from a few years ago.Edmond Caldwellhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/02651618912907453630noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4951486642731990675.post-64631239208380549002011-11-10T00:45:46.668-08:002011-11-10T00:45:46.668-08:00Deathness.Deathness.A. Ominoushttps://www.blogger.com/profile/13807400943709124236noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4951486642731990675.post-70016538313093887342011-05-14T07:47:19.535-07:002011-05-14T07:47:19.535-07:00@Chris: You really nailed it there.@Chris: You really nailed it there.A D Jamesonhttp://adjameson.com/lit/writing.htmlnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4951486642731990675.post-35910964610911717992010-12-07T18:29:49.012-08:002010-12-07T18:29:49.012-08:00Hugely illuminating! Thank you. Though disagreei...Hugely illuminating! Thank you. Though disagreeing with Wood's critique, and uneasy with his tone, I was unable to LOCATE my disgruntlement until you put it in such plain idological terms. Looking back, of course Wood was trying to domesticate Bolan[y]o, but I was so taken with his essentially aesthetic argument that I couldn't see, right then, his colonial ambitions, or, in less political terms: Wood's insistance on a kind of hygeine, in which style goes neatly here, and politics neatly there, and lucidity within the context of a certain, explicable [and probably academic] literary tradition made him blind to what I see as an essentially revolutionary work. My overwhelming impression of Bolan[y]o's writing is that it is propelled from without, or generated by real and external conditions that moved him so fundamentally that his style and ideology are inseperable, totally united by need, and too close to the edge of the abyss [the one he often wrote about] for Wood's aesthetic approach to mean much at all, resting as it does on precedent and the assumption that writing is, first and last, creative and the product of heroic makers.V.https://www.blogger.com/profile/16863843229750216929noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4951486642731990675.post-34175125643245092902010-09-02T07:36:27.789-07:002010-09-02T07:36:27.789-07:00I started diagraming this posting to follow the ja...I started diagraming this posting to follow the jangling embeddings...<br /><br />Caldwell reposts:<br /><br /> Augustine piece about Adam Kirsh which describes:<br /> <br /> Kirsh writing a eulogy of Frank Kermode<br /><br /> Kermode introduces a review of Amis' War against Cliche <br /><br /> which is Amis' collection of LRB essays...<br /><br /> Amis' piece on Larkin confirms our opinion...<br /><br />Now -- someone thinks he's giving a devestating put-down of s.o. else but it's really high praise....<br /><br />Oh darn, I hear a baby cry...Female Scientisthttp://cogsciandtheworld.blogspot.com/noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4951486642731990675.post-18382991223911429012010-08-31T11:23:38.509-07:002010-08-31T11:23:38.509-07:00As usual, Bloom makes a huge claim (there's no...As usual, Bloom makes a huge claim (there's nothing to Wood, he'll be forgotten) and offers no reasoning in support of it.Anonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4951486642731990675.post-88880769595351543042010-08-27T02:29:41.347-07:002010-08-27T02:29:41.347-07:00Talk about "cynical", eh...?Talk about "cynical", eh...?sienna_skinhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/12490347674590749149noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4951486642731990675.post-44845807042948024542010-08-11T16:55:41.180-07:002010-08-11T16:55:41.180-07:00It's astonishing to me that I was in Philly (j...It's astonishing to me that I was in Philly (just back from college) when all this (Mumia) first happened... this has been one of the backdrops of my entire adult life! Only the name "Leonard Peltier" has been there longer...<br /><br />At least they released the Lockerbie "Bomber" patsy.A. Ominoushttps://www.blogger.com/profile/13807400943709124236noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4951486642731990675.post-23879476135403812392010-08-09T21:11:44.288-07:002010-08-09T21:11:44.288-07:00My fingers are crossed, Meg. Ona Move!My fingers are crossed, Meg. Ona Move!Edmond Caldwellhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/02651618912907453630noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4951486642731990675.post-30723030855821320942010-08-09T21:01:14.469-07:002010-08-09T21:01:14.469-07:00Wonderful post and yes, Free Mumia...love that you...Wonderful post and yes, Free Mumia...love that you have his photo right up there. <br /><br />Keep your fingers crossed for me would you? I've submitted a piece and it centers around the Mumia tragedy of 'this' (not our or mine anymore) country...the racism and the blindness to such a thing.<br /><br />So few people probably recall the BlackoWaco fire bombing in Philly which followed Mumia's incident.<br /><br />Another item that they don't cover in the mainstream NYC press.<br /><br />PeaceCarmenisacathttps://www.blogger.com/profile/11023871171456340729noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4951486642731990675.post-56840944099404540042010-08-09T17:29:48.079-07:002010-08-09T17:29:48.079-07:00It's that old old story of 'normalization,...It's that old old story of 'normalization,' where pathological class conflicts are assimilated and lobotomized into electoral politics--a process even deeper than money. That need, that irresistible impulse to power up the hologram and patch its leaks--to become a servant--and this is important--not of the Corporate Masters, not directly at least--but of the reigning narrative, the myth that only those who don't believe in it are free to freely manipulate. Liberals and the liberal intelligentsia are dupes--because they're addicted to this Redemptive Myth where Justice really does have power--like magic--to raise up saviors and martyrs to get the pendulum to swing back in the right direction just in time. <br /><br />Nothing to suggest that it might not work this time, or the next, will ever find a place in their stories. Addicted to a false notion of 'hope' ... like crack addicts.Jacob Russellhttp://jacobrussellsbarkingdog.blogspot.comnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4951486642731990675.post-74770272157662417472010-08-09T17:12:07.368-07:002010-08-09T17:12:07.368-07:00The New Yorker is a little like Obama. Maybe more ...The New Yorker is a little like Obama. Maybe more than a little. You can find a lot to like. Seymour Hersh. One or two innovative fiction pieces in the course of a year--which is more than you get in any other MS pub. But over time what they leave out, what they don't do or say, is telling. <br /><br />If you ask 'em, "Whose yer Daddy?" ... you know the answer. And that they'll never tell ya.Jacob Russellhttp://jacobrussellsbarkingdog.blogspot.comnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4951486642731990675.post-54101134538746226442010-08-09T16:41:56.896-07:002010-08-09T16:41:56.896-07:00Excuse me, 50!!! bullets were just fired in an NYP...Excuse me, 50!!! bullets were just fired in an NYPD police shootout in Harlem. Covert Operation HELTER SKELTER is on! Watch the coverage on that in The New Yorker; it was probably written weeks ago, locked in David Remnick's desk drawer in a manila file folder labeled: "Harlem Real Estate Final Solution."Frances Madesonhttp://www.booktour.com/author/frances_madesonnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4951486642731990675.post-61698204133806957682010-07-30T11:18:40.419-07:002010-07-30T11:18:40.419-07:00Thank you, comrade. It was Jonathan Ames' Wake...Thank you, comrade. It was Jonathan Ames' Wake Up,Sir! that first put me in mind of hidden valets. Recently, they've been popping up all over the place.Frances Madesonhttp://www.booktour.com/author/frances_madesonnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4951486642731990675.post-89088122637782590962010-07-29T10:41:48.839-07:002010-07-29T10:41:48.839-07:00"when he specifically points to Pynchon's..."when he specifically points to Pynchon's 'bright lights,' he always points to Pynchon's fondness for useless trivia and pop culture, he never ever draws the reader's attention to Pynchon's real trademark: his lifelong interest in math and science. Wood points us towards Pynchon's trivial pop culture references and not his more formidable erudition (whereas virtually every other reviewer of The Crying of Lot 49 or Gravity's Rainbow or Against the Day has drawn particular attention to the latter)."<br /><br />Excellent point, Chris. Have you ever noticed how Wood uses the adjective "ambitious"? It's always a cut when applied to someone like Pynchon or DeLillo, and then he'll turn around laud as "genuinely ambitious" something actually far more modest, because it deals with, yes, depicting "consciousness" (or even "the soul!"), and is really more of his preferred mode of psychological-domestic novel. I believe this is what he does for instance with Monica Ali's "Brick Lane", which of course we all know is a much, much better novel than Underworld or Gravity's Rainbow.<br /><br />Along the same lines, Wood tells us that Franzen's Corrections is at its best (and most "ambitious") when it confines itself to dealing with that "typical" Midwestern family; that Underworld only really succeeds as something that could be dignified by the name of "novel" when it deals with the protagonist's memories of his Italian-American family; that Jeffrey Eugenides' "Middlesex" succeeds in spite of its coquetting with Hysterical Realism because it stays "loyal" to its depiction of a Greek-American family... These are Wood's family, er, literary values.Edmond Caldwellhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/02651618912907453630noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4951486642731990675.post-87711089982659911662010-07-29T09:20:55.875-07:002010-07-29T09:20:55.875-07:00I'd never noticed this envy of knowledgeable c...I'd never noticed this envy of knowledgeable critical precursors before, but this trait of Wood's is clearly present in his dislike of very erudite novelists as well, such as DeLillo and Pynchon.<br /><br />In fact, I think you've sniffed out the key to understanding Wood. This resentment and envy of those more learned than himself is the key refrain running through almost everything memorable he's ever written. Again and again, he castigates writers for revealing any esoteric knowledge they might possess: even a mere passing mention gets an immediate wrist-slap from Wood for parading, flaunting, showing off.<br /><br />Take another gander at this piece, published in the Guardian in the wake of 9/11, what does Wood demand from writers? <i>Tell me, how does it feel?</i><br /><br /><a rel="nofollow">http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2001/oct/06/fiction</a><br /><br /><i>Nowadays anyone in possession of a laptop is thought to be a brilliance on the move, filling his or her novel with essaylets and great displays of knowledge. Indeed, "knowing about things" has become one of the qualifications of the contemporary novelist. Time and again novelists are praised for their wealth of obscure and far-flung social knowledge. The reviewer, mistaking bright lights for evidence of habitation, praises the novelist who knows about, say, the sonics of volcanoes. Who also knows how to make a fish curry in Fiji! Who also knows about terrorist cults in Kilburn! And about the New Physics! And so on. The result - in America at least - is novels of immense self-consciousness with no selves in them at all, curiously arrested and very "brilliant" books that know a thousand things but do not know a single human being.</i> <br /><br />Note the hostility towards anyone more erudite than himself that oozes off the page: "Anyone in possession of a laptop is thought to be a brilliance on the move..."<br /><br />And who can forget the keystone of his famous reply to N+1?<br /><br /><i>At present, contemporary novelists are increasingly eager to "tell us about the culture," to fill their books with the latest report on "how we live now." Information is the new character; we are constantly being told that we should be impressed by how much writers know. What they should know, and how they came to know it, seems less important, alas, than that they simply know it. The idea that what one knows might – to use Nietzsche's phrase – "come out of one's own burning" rather than free and flameless from Google, seems at present alien.</i><br /><br />Note the snide remark about knowledge coming "free and flameless from Google," as if a writer like Pynchon, for example, didn't genuinely have a solid grounding in physics or the other sciences, but was just a typical kibitzer or dilletante. And notice how whenever Wood discusses his problems with Pynchon's writing, he always talks about how "bright lights are not evidence of habitation" - but when he specifically points to Pynchon's "bright lights," he always points to Pynchon's fondness for useless trivia and pop culture, he <i>never ever</i> draws the reader's attention to Pynchon's real trademark: his lifelong interest in math and science. Wood points us towards Pynchon's trivial pop culture references and not his more formidable erudition (whereas virtually every other reviewer of The Crying of Lot 49 or Gravity's Rainbow or Against the Day has drawn particular attention to the latter). Coincidence? I think not.<br /><br />Wood's reference to Nietzsche in his N+1 reply is certainly pertinent however: Nietzsche as the analyst of <i>ressentiment</i>.Chrisnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4951486642731990675.post-35165039452399160812010-07-29T03:52:20.040-07:002010-07-29T03:52:20.040-07:00Lord, I haven't owned a car since 1977, but I&...Lord, I haven't owned a car since 1977, but I'd consider buying a used car from James Wood. Why not? This one looks not only pristine. http://www.jameswood.com/?http://www.autofind.com/group/listing/266/used/ but “solidly novelistic: nicely paced, socially and historically acute.” And at just under $10k it comes far cheaper than the per capita social cost of Wood's unprincipled and unwholesome, wanton jottings. (As for Nigel, the Beale menfolk are a ruggedly proud and stubborn lot. His little brother climbed Everest last year. No reasoning with him on this score, I'm afraid, even if you threw in a free GPS, a cash rebate, a low financing and a extended warranty.)Frances Madesonhttp://www.booktour.com/author/frances_madesonnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4951486642731990675.post-78771799114003985622010-07-28T19:42:40.476-07:002010-07-28T19:42:40.476-07:00by which standard Malcolm Gladwell is a “man of sc...by which standard Malcolm Gladwell is a “man of science” -- great observation for a throw-away one liner. I've was annoyed last year when students in my honors freshman seminar on the history of the cognitive revolution continually referred to Gladwell as if he were the originator of the insights discussed in his various popular science writings. Recent insult: Gladwell blurbed a book by Harvard psychologist Daniel Gilbert. Gilbert conducts experiments and tests theories. Gladwell reports on other people's findings. Alas.Woman of sciencenoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4951486642731990675.post-35468425909029386972010-07-28T15:17:04.315-07:002010-07-28T15:17:04.315-07:00He evacuates the syntagmatic axis and reduces hims...<i>He evacuates the syntagmatic axis and reduces himself, in effect, to being a critical pointillist. Why?</i><br /><br />One of the most remarkable instances of this procedure is in his essay on Virginia Woolf, where at times he seems to prefer "the superb descriptions" recorded in her diaries to her published novels. Now, the sentences he quotes from her diaries are indeed lovely, but reading Wood, you don't get any real sense of why her novels are a <i>greater overall achievement</i> than her diaries. You don't get a sense of the novels as artistic wholes, only as beautiful snippets and extracts. You don't get any sense of why an abridged edition of To The Lighthouse couldn't be an adequate substitute for the complete version.<br /><br />To be fair to Wood, on at least this occasion, the sentences and passages he draws attention to really are, I believe, examples of excellent writing. But once again, we're back to the "quote and dote" school of criticism: if you like the sentences he quotes, you'll nod your head, if you don't, you won't. (With DeLillo or Morrison, Wood's method reverts to "quote and bitch.")<br /><br />As if to prove your point about his biases, Wood specifically notes the importance of "the language of metaphor" and "the yoking of metaphor." After quoting and doting on some of her sentences, he informs us: "But Woolf disliked being compliment for her sentences.... In truth, her achievement is not measured in sentences, and it is not measured in chapters either. <i>Her break with the Edwardians lies in the way she writes about consciousness.</i>" (Here we go again...!)<br /><br />While his essay on Woolf is far better than his absurd misreadings of Joyce or Saramago, his fixation on only two things - individual sentences and depictions of isolated consciousness - leaves him unable to discuss at all some of the most fascinating dimensions of Woolf's novels. He can even write, without a moment's hesitation, about Woolf's "mental instability," that she broke down "most severely in 1913," and then inform us that "she committed suicide in March, 1941--<i>not because of the war, but because she was certain that she was about to become ill, and she could not bear it.</i>"<br /><br />Wood betrays not the slightest doubt that mental illness and instability is something that occurs apart from the world at large, without external social/political/economic/moral/ethical triggers. Despite the fact that he himself informs us that Virginia Woolf's first incapacitating breakdown happened in 1913 (i.e. on the cusp of the <i>First</i> World War), he insists that the progress of the <i>Second</i> World War had no relevance to Woolf's suicide - is Wood aware that Leonard Woolf was Jewish and that the Woolfs were prepared and ready to take their own lives should Germany win the war?<br /><br />Absurdly, Wood can drone on about "representations of consciousness" without ever noticing that Woolf expresses some very strong opinions in her novels about the <i>social</i> causes and etiology of severe mental illness. Septimus Smith in Mrs Dalloway, after all, is a shell-shocked war hero who receives ineffectual treatment from a smug, self-satisfied establishment figure, Dr. Holmes. <br /><br />Nowhere in Wood's entire essay do you get any sense that Woolf sees something profoundly wrong with the established social order, that Mrs Dalloway is a profoundly unsettling novel, that "consciousness" doesn't exist in some pure Platonic state, that Woolf's heart goes out to "the insulted and injured" like Septimus Smith, that Woolf strongly implicates the social order in the creation of tormented "consciousness" (which are not so unproblematically free) like that which Septimus possesses. <br /><br />For the kind of pleasure in reading Wood seems to prefer, you could do just as well, or nearly as well, to read Michael Cunningham's The Hours as Virginia Woolf's Mrs Dalloway.Chrisnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4951486642731990675.post-65620542078707957372010-07-28T14:04:27.897-07:002010-07-28T14:04:27.897-07:00Oh, and Parker probably chose Amazon.com because h...Oh, and Parker probably chose Amazon.com because he wanted to reach people who were thinking of buying Wood's book. Just a hunch, though.Edmond Caldwellhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/02651618912907453630noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4951486642731990675.post-5583853909924238732010-07-28T11:32:21.285-07:002010-07-28T11:32:21.285-07:00"Distinguished valet" -- jeez, comrade F..."Distinguished valet" -- jeez, comrade Frances, I wish I'd come up with that. Spot on!Edmond Caldwellhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/02651618912907453630noreply@blogger.com