Paul Auster, James Wood, post-modernism, roaring in the mirror

James Wood ripped Paul Auster a new asshole in this week's New Yorker. I'm fond of Auster, even if I think his recent books have been a bit mechanical and drowsy. Wood calls him out for being repetitive, cliché, and not in the least bit 'post-modern,' the label that Auster has been tagged with since his "New York Trilogy," which came out in the late 1980s.

Wood is a big fan of Philip Roth and those other tortured, bad-tempered big types who deliver dense manuscripts. I see why he was asked to review Auster's latest book, "Invisible." When two very different forces conjoin, there is a naughty spark. Wood opens his critique with an Austerian parody, a bit like a schoolboy would. It's accurate and funny, but to me, it enforces Auster's relevance. My feeling is: if someone is easy to parody, then there is a certain completeness and sincerity to them. This makes them untouchable.

Wood makes fun of Auster's taste for uncanny coincidences and twists of fate, but I am not sure he fully recognizes how central these occurrences are in both Auster's and his reader's imaginations. These flutters are always terribly significant to a person, and blasé to everyone else. When I first read "Leviathan," I thought the artist character Auster described was convoluted and odd. A few years later, I saw a photograph of the French artist Sophie Calle, and somewhere in the back of my head, I remembered Auster's artist. It turns out he had appropriated certain characteristics of Calle for his own use. With this realization, I had my own private metaphysical flutter. It's a trite coincidence for anyone else, but is very similar to what Wood insists literature should be - complex, needling, intense. My Austerian moment  happened outside of his book, after much time had passed. I think that's quite post-modern, actually.

Wood ends his critique with the following:

"The classic formulations of postmodernism, by philosophers and theorists like Maurice Blanchot and Ihab Hassan, emphasize the way that contemporary language abuts silence. For Blanchot, as indeed for Beckett, language is always announcing its invalidity. Texts stutter and fragment, shred themselves around a void. Perhaps the strangest element of Auster’s reputation as an American postmodernist is that his language never registers this kind of absence at the level of the sentence. The void is all too speakable in Auster’s work."

I've seen Auster read. He writes in the same way he speaks - gently and simply. To me, that creates a void of a different kind. Perhaps it is not a void, but an entrance, or platform. Which brings me back to the idea of two different forces meeting and sparking. There's a lot to be gained from it (especially page-views) but in the end, it felt like Wood was roaring in the mirror.

Here's a brilliant cartoon parody of David Lynch, starring Goofy:

Tips for Survival: Get The Job Done Properly

For positive outcomes, there are many occasions when "good enough" suffices, and other times when if you don't almost break your neck to get a result, nothing will happen.

I'm reading Julia Child's "My Life in France" at the moment, which is a nice distraction from The Thing I'm personally hauling myself at to get The Best Result. Julia talks about the pure dedication she invested into her cookbook, which as we all know, is brilliant and now legendary. Anyway: during her time in Marseille, she invited Clifford Wharton and his wife Leonie Wharton to dinner at her apartment. This was, I think, in 1953. Wharton was the new American consul general. During the meal, they all talked about the US government. She remembers him fondly, and closes her description with an anecdote about Wharton, who, furious at a wishy-washy problem-solving suggestion, snaps, "You can't fertilize a five-acre field by farting through the fence!"

I will say this to everyone from now on. 

Hipsters Ruin Everything by Kate Beaton

Kate Beaton is one of my favorite cartoonists. Click the image to enlarge. Visit here for more madness.

Illustration taken from Kate Beaton's website

Today in world madness and beauty

Olaf Breuning's new show is opening tonight at Metro Pictures Gallery in New York.

Artforum talks to Tacita Dean about her Merce Cunningham film, "Stillness." Of the project, she says, "Merce told me I didn’t have to be faithful to the chronology of the dance."

Martin Amis slags off Katie Price in a pique of jealousy, because she sells more books than he does, then reveals that his latest book is based on her. Will Self talks about the "It Girl" factor, using Sienna Miller as his example. What's wrong with these boys? Although, it's nice that writers and books still cause drama over in the UK.

I wasn't familiar with writer Lydia Davis until a few days ago, until I read this, and then I read some of these and was just blown away.

Greenlight Bookstore is new to Fort Greene, Brooklyn, and is run by two book freaks who won a huge Citibank grant to open it.