House of Mirth

More than twenty years ago, on Walnut Street in Philadelphia, I climbed a steep and rickety set of stairs to the offices of the American Poetry Review. I had called earlier to pitch a short translation from the Italian--a piece Eugenio Montale had written on Michelangelo's verse--and one of the editors, David Bonanno, suggested I drop it by. At the time I felt as if I were ascending the steps to Parnassus (not the magazine). This was the APR, after all, with its iconoclastic tabloid format and glamorous author photos! Bonanno, seated at a desk by the door, took the manuscript from my trembling hand. A disappointing fact: he rejected the piece. A happier fact: the APR has continued to defy the death sentence that hangs over the head of every little magazine, and celebrated its 33rd birthday last week with a snazzy blowout at Philadelphia's National Constitution Center.

At the VIP reception beforehand--no, I'm not a VIP, but my pal Mark Stein managed to shoehorn Nina and me inside--a stellar cast of American poets prowled the room: John Ashbery, Robert Pinsky, Jorie Graham, Robert Hass, Rita Dove, Ed Hirsch. A few steps from the bar, clutching my champagne flute like festive prop, I almost failed to recognize Ashbery. He looks less studious without his glasses on, almost jolly, like the village toymaker in a Disney movie. I introduced myself and asked what he thought of Larissa MacFarquhar's recent profile of him in The New Yorker. "That's what everybody keeps asking me," he replied. "You know, I used to have this recurrent dream where I was the only naked person in a crowded room. That's exactly how I feel now."

Not wanting to be yet another media-driven tormentor, I asked him about Laura Riding's poetry. I had recently been reading Other Traditions, and was intrigued by his description of Riding's wretched life and thorny aesthetic: "As may be evident from what I have said so far, Laura Riding was what we would call today a 'control freak.' Her poetry, hedged about with caveats of every sort in the form of admonitory prefaces and postscripts, presents us with something like a minefield; one reads it always with a sensation of sirens and flashing red lights in the background." She was, Ashbery told me, a difficult person. "Many years ago, I sent her a couple of notes," he recalled. "Words of admiration." What he got in return were cantankerous shots across the bow. Ashbery went on to note that he was playing hooky from the National Book Awards ceremony in Manhattan. At this point I began to fear I was monopolizing the great man (no irony there), so I moved off, and heard another person ask him about the New Yorker article. Poor guy.

Nina and I reconvened near the cheese-and-cracker table. From there we could observe Robert Pinsky (grinning that benign alligator's grin) and Robert Hass and--Meryl Streep! The actress had agreed to juice up the proceedings by reading a selection of Emily Dickinson poems. She was wearing a long, white, tunic-like blouse, and her pop-cultural wattage promptly made everybody else in the room look like factory seconds. We watched her greet Jorie Graham with a soulful hug. Then we were all herded toward the stage downstairs, where the readings were to take place. On the way, we passed through a life-size display of bronze figures: the Founding Fathers, debating the Constitution. There was Benjamin Franklin, and John Hancock, and philandering Gouverneur Morris with his wooden leg--supposedly he did most of the actual writing. James Monroe was small. I could have beaten him up. But we couldn't linger, the poets were about to mount the stage.

Ed Hirsch, one of American poetry's great enthusiasts, did the introductions. Ashbery batted first. He read two short pieces from Where Shall I Wander (the same two he had read the previous night at an NBA curtain-raising event): "Ignorance of the Law Is No Excuse" and "Interesting People of Newfoundland." The second one in particular struck me as a signal event: the beginning of Ashbery's Garrison Keillor Phase. There's often an undercurrent of bemused, register-hopping comedy in Ashbery's work. But here he worked wonders with his deadpan delivery: people were laughing, as if poetry might actually give Larry David a run for the money.

Newfoundland is, or was, full of interesting people.
Like Larry, who would make a fool of himself on street corners
for a nickel. There was the Russian who called himself
the Grand Duke, and who was said to be a real duke from somewhere,
and the woman who frequently accompanied him on his rounds.
Doc Hanks, the sawbones, was a real good surgeon
when he wasn’t completely drunk, which was most of the time.
When only half drunk he could perform decent cranial surgery.
There was the blind man who never said anything
but produced spectral sounds on a musical saw.

Like Ashbery, most of the poets kept things light, or at least celebratory. Dove read three short pieces about Rosa Parks, chocolate, and ballroom dancing, plus a playful prose poem about the many deficiences of prose. Hirsch evinced a similar sweetness--there was one piece about eating cotton candy with his grandfather--and even the more politically charged utterances from Pinksy and Hass had their moments of rhetorical uplift. But Graham, reading from Overlord, was a definitive bummer. I give her credit for dipping into this metaphysical spin on the Normandy Invasion. Still, nothing dampens a party like a poem about a dying cat (from AIDS, no less), and Graham's tortured cadences left a lot of unhappy campers in the audience: "There is no excrement but she is trying to cover it / everywhere. Her claws make a horrible sound on the stone floor as she tries. / No no there is nothing there you have done nothing I say. It is some other /species. The compartment of species-distinction I'm in slides its small door / shut." Luckily Streep delivered a palate-cleanser before dinner. She read with the kind of control and dramatic modulation you seldom hear from poets (it's not their job, after all), and wrapped up with eight ecstatic lines and a look of relief:

If all the griefs I am to have
Would only come today,
I am so happy I believe
They'd laugh and run away.

If all the joys I am to have
Would only come today,
They could not be so big as this
That happens to me now.

At dinner, I asked the charming Rita Dove whether prose was really as bad as all that. "Oh, no," she said, laughing. "I've written plenty of prose--short stories, criticism, even a novel." Just joshing, then. Next question: what were the primary duties of the Poet Laureate, in which capacity she served from 1993 to 1995? To judge from her answer, the Poet Laureate makes it all up as he or she goes along. Dove dwelled with particular relish on a series of spots she had made for the Lifetime Channel: 30-second bits and bobs of poetry wedged between the usual tearjerking fare (I speak from experience).

I went back to my roast beef. My final poetic enounter came as the lights were being turned out. I chased down Robert Hass and told him how much I loved his Milosz translations--especially the expansive pleasures of A Treatise on Poetry. "There's another long poem I may try to translate," he told me. "It's called A Treatise on Morality." (Poking around the Web, I see that Traktat moralny first appeared in a Polish magazine in 1948.) Hass also shared an amusing anecdote about Milosz's appearance at a Poetry Flash reading in San Francisco: against that backdrop of ethnic militancy and New Age vapor, the late, great Nobel laureate was evidently something of an odd man out. Still, he read his poem, then returned to his seat next to Hass and inquired: "Did I do good?" Needless to say, he did good.

I've been poking through a library copy of Poets at Work: The Paris Review Interviews, revisiting the golden oldies (Pound, Frost, Eliot) and reading a few that I had never encountered before. There's a sly and sparklng chat with Elizabeth Bishop, for example. And Peter Stitt's conversation with John Ashbery is a keeper. During the interview, Stitt notes, the subject gave "the impression of distraction, as though he wasn't quite sure just what was going on or what his role in the proceedings might be. The interviewer attempted valiantly to extract humorous material, but--as is often the case for readers of Ashbery's poetry--wasn't sure when he succeeded." For non-fans of Ashbery's work, this might be considered a damning description. Of course he has no idea of what's going on! For me, though, the interview itself is a classic example of the poet's unwillingness to play by the rules, meet the formal requirements, etc. Meanwhile, there's the $64,000 question: is Ashbery a solipsist? Here's his answer, at least in part:

This is the way that life appears to me, the way that experience happens. I can concentrate on the things in this room and our talking together, but what the context is is mysterious to me. And it's not that I want to make it more mysterious in my poems--really, I just want to make it more photographic. I often wonder if I am suffering from some mental dysfunction because of how weird and baffling my poetry seems to so many people and sometimes to me too.... When I originally started writing, I expected that probably very few people would read my poetry because in those days people didn't read poetry much anyway. But I also felt that my work was not beyond understanding. It seemed to me rather derivative of or at least in touch with contemporary poetry of the time, and I was quite surprised that nobody seemed to see this. So I live with this paradox: on the one hand, I am an important poet, read by younger writers, and on the other hand, nobody understands me. I am often asked to account for this state of affairs, but I can't.

I just flew in from Abu Dhabi, and boy, my arms are tired. Before Abu Dhabi it was Mumbai, where the long list of forbidden weaponry on the plane included not only bazookas and hand grenades but pickles and pickling spices. Before Mumbai it was a resort on the Arabian Sea. As we approached the resort in a rented car, the terrain grew more and more tropical, and the road itself reverted to loose gravel, then dirt. The vegetation was thick but much of it seemed desiccated and drooping--strange, since there had been no drought. I saw, for the first time, somebody using a small elephant as a domestic animal, to move what looked like construction supplies. We approached a low wall of cinder blocks. Beyond it, we assumed, would be a South Indian Club Med. But no, beyond the wall was the exact same vegetation, and a row of bamboo bungalows, in one of which we watched Robocop later that night, as the rain pattered on our bamboo roof and the movie was interrupted by numerous commercials for skin-lightening compounds.


The next morning, in the hazy sunlight, I studied the ferns, the low deciduous trees I couldn't identify, and especially the palms. Despite the rain last night, they looked thirsty, in need of assistance--they brought to mind Bellow's famous line in Humboldt's Gift, where "the very bushes might have been on welfare." Yet in some odd way, they compelled your respect. And just the other day, I came across a perfect, metaphor-mad description of them by Henry James, who was discussing the Florida variety in The American Scene. Buckle your seatbelts, folks:

I found myself loving, quite fraternally, the palms, which had struck me at first, for all their human-headed gravity, as merely dry and taciturn, but which became finally as sympathetic as so many rows of puzzled philosophers, dishevelled, shock-pated, with the riddle of the universe.

Human-headed gravity--exactly what I have been aiming for all these years. Now, I cannot tell a lie: I didn't encounter that Henry James quote in The American Scene itself. It occurs in "The State with the Prettiest Name," from William Logan's latest, Our Savage Art: Poetry and the Civil Tongue. I know what you're thinking: more critical mayhem. But what struck me, as I read through the tongue-lashing assessments of our wittiest critic, is that many of Logan's best lines are directed at poets who have earned his exasperated admiration.

Take John Ashbery. Logan has sometimes grumbled about Ashbery, whose playful convolutions of the American language have poured out, with hardly a pause for station identification, since the appearance of Turandot and Other Poems in 1953. It's like one long, sad, waking dream; it's like a game of tiddlywinks that goes on for fifty years. But in a single paragraph, Logan nails his signal strength (his absolute mastery of the American idiom, which he plays like a pipe organ) and his weakness (he can't stop playing, like E. Power Biggs with a stash of pep pills). I will now yield the floor to Logan:

John Ashbery was born when Pola Negri was still box office, yet his poems are more in touch with the American demotic--the tongue most of us speak and few of us write--than any near-octogenarian has the right to be. He has published more than a thousand pages in the last fifteen years, almost twice as many as Wallace Stevens wrote in half a century--and Stevens was no slouch. Ashbery's poems are like widgets manufactured to the most peculiar specifications and in such great numbers the whole world widget market has collapsed.

It's that final sentence that kills me: perfect. I will quote just one more, on Frederick Seidel, whose elegant, icky verse would sooner die than beguile the reader. Writes Logan: "It's hard to get the radical sympathy and aristo loathing in focus--Seidel's an original, but you're glad there aren't more like him."

Labels: Frederick Seidel, Henry James, John Ashbery, palms, William Logan

The original idea was to fly directly from the Istanbul airport to Izmir--formerly Smyrna, Homer's stomping ground--and then pop over to nearby Ilica. There were, alas, no seats available. Instead we spent sixteen hallucinatory hours on a bus. I took half a Unisom the moment we rolled out of the otogar, which never really put me into a deep sleep: I kept having these lurid dreams, with men screaming in Turkish and copious gunfire. Finally I realized that the bus people were showing Die Hard 2 dubbed into Turkish on the overhead screen. At that point I gave up on sleep and settled for an exhausted, head-lolling stupor. Hours later we crossed the rippling Sea of Marmara on a ferry. Not until we had climbed off the bus and mounted the upper deck did I say to Nina, "Are we on a boat?"

Anyway, one of the things that kept me going during my interludes of consciousness was Richard Stern's STITCH, part of an excellent reissue program from Northwestern University Press. Festooned with the sort of blurbs that most writers would die for--"brilliant," says John Cheever, as opposed to "beautifully damn good" (Howard Nemerov) or "superb" (Saul Bellow) or "[among] my favorite two postwar novels" (John Berryman)--this is early Stern, first published in 1965. The author's evocation of postwar Venice is a major accomplishment. His portrait of the sublimely cantankerous Ezra Pound is even more impressive. Now, it happens that Stern encountered Pound in Venice during this very period, and his brief recollection (reprinted in One Person and Another) is wonderfully vivid:

Pound was flat on the bed, a blanket to his chin. The face was thinner, the beard sparser than my expectations, the face lined like no one else's, not the terrible morbid furrows of Auden, not the haphazard crevices of so many benign elders. For me, at least, these lines had the signatory look of individual engagements. Brow and cheeks, arcs and cross-hatches, with spars of eyebrow and beard curling out from what the sculptors worked with, the grand ovoid, the looping nasal triangle.

That final sentence points straight to the author's strategem in STITCH: he transforms the epic and erratic poet into an epic and erratic sculptor. Like his real-life model, Thaddeus Stitch has descended into an anti-Semitic lather during the Second World War, and earned himself a long stretch in a jail cell. (The dicey issue of Pound's sanity, and his residence at St. Elizabeths, has been left out of the picture.) Now a free man, too feeble to work and too guilty to savor his retirement, he crosses the path of two artistically-inclined young Americans in Venice. Innocence does its fender-bending thing with experience, as it inevitably must. I won't give away the plot, but suffice it to say that the perfection of life and the perfection of art are both in short supply. Run, don't walk, to the bookstore and pick up these reissues. Also, keep an eye peeled for a Brief Encounter with Richard Stern, which should appear on HOM during the next couple of weeks.

Meanwhile (according to the Scotsman), a Parliamentary firestorm is underway regarding the most pressing issue of our time: discounted pricing of the new Harry Potter book. Labour MP Lynne Jones declares: "I note that copies of Harry Potter And The Half Blood Prince are selling in supermarkets for as little as £4.99 compared with the trade price for lower volume outlets of £10.70 and the retail price of £16.99." Not exactly Churchillian, is it? To be fair, Jones is concerned for the viability of small bookstores, an issue close to my own heart. But I'm afraid this horse left the barn a long time ago. Consumers expect deep discounting and will turn away in droves if they don't get it. On a cheerier note, ten other MPs have put forth a declaration defending J.K. Rowling against the Pope's doctrinaire spitballs. Hooray. We must take our good news where we can find it.

I'm sure that's what Roman Polanski is thinking, anyway. The pint-size Pole has just won his defamation suit against Vanity Fair. I haven't been following the case very closely--and God knows that Polanski has committed his share of sexual misdemeanors over the years--but it brought to mind the related material in the Dino de Laurentiis bio I translated in 2002. Some fascinating facts: De Laurentiis originally wanted Polanski to direct his goofy 1976 remake of King Kong. The mind boggles, does it not? Jessica Lange, a giant mechanical monkey, and Roman Polanski at the helm? Anyway, the Italian version of the book also stipulated that De Laurentiis was the last person the director visited before fleeing the country in 1978. According to Dino, in fact, he dipped into the petty-cash drawer to fund Polanski's airplane ticket. True or not, this stuff has been expunged from the American edition.

Finally, I picked up The Double Dream of Spring the other day, thinking I might have a refreshing dip in Ashbery's swift-running stream of consciousness. I wasn't in the mood. I didn't feel like letting my free-associative hair down. However, I did latch onto this final stanza from "It Was Raining in the Capital," more morbid and balladic than is Ashbery's wont:

The sun came out in the capital
Just before it set.
The lovely death's head shone in the sky
As though these two had never met.

The NBCC threw itself a nifty 35th anniversary bash a few weeks ago. The highlights were speeches by two of the earliest winners, John Ashbery (antic) and E.L. Doctorow (gloomy), as well as shorter addresses by a cavalcade of former board members. I was among that cavalcade, toward the end, when there was no time left. That obliged me to speak very quickly, with no pauses between the words, like the man disclosing the side effects on the Viagra commercial. (If you have an erection lasting longer than four hours....) My remarks have now been posted over at Critical Mass, along with those of many other board members. I'll paste in the mini-speech here, but I urge visitors to check out the proceedings of the entire evening, including video of Ashbery and Doctorow:

According to tonight's program, I'm batting for the 21st century. In fact I was on the NBCC Board back in the storied Nineties. I left the board in 2001, spent some time in detox, and have now fallen off the wagon again. So here I am.

Anyway, I think this positions me nicely to note the sea change that has taken place here over the past decade. During my first tenure on the board, things had gotten a little sleepy. This is no criticism of my excellent and energetic colleagues of that era. But I think we all had a premonition that the old world of print and Sunday book supplements was about to go the way of the dodo. None of us knew exactly how fast that transformation would take place. Nobody operating a butter churn foresees the advent of margarine, either. Before we knew it, the Age of Margarine was upon us--not golden, but bright yellow, and full of suspicious adulterants.

Now, I know that sounds awfully negative. So I will change tack, retire the margarine metaphor, and argue that the NBCC is now a much more vibrant organization than it was ten years ago. The Internet, which was supposed to torpedo what was left of our trade and leave us on par with thimble makers, has given the conversation about books a massive shot in the arm.

Yes, the dust is still settling. The shrinkage or outright disappearance of the old reviewing outlets is painful to watch. The drastic redefinition of those cherished terms, professional and amateur, has given many a seasoned critic a bad case of the psychological bends. But the audience has multiplied, and gone global, and the barriers to entry for a young critic have fallen. So I'm going to look on the bright side, and argue that the best work still rise to the top--like cream, or margarine. I promise.

Afterwards, while I fought my way toward the wine-and-cheese area, a member of the audience told me margarine was a very, very bad substance. I countered with a fact I had just learned from Nicholson Baker's The Anthologist (I think): unsalted butter often has butter flavoring in it. And with that, the War of the Condiments was over.

Labels: margarine, NBCC

Last night I was walking down the hallway, and for no particular reason I grabbed The Autobiography of Charles Darwin off the shelf. Well, perhaps there was a reason: I had recently watched Master and Commander with a feverish teenager, and the scenes in the Galápagos Islands--shot, to my amazement, on location, with authentically freaky lizards and flightless cormorants--must have stuck in my head. I opened the Darwin to page 10, and found this recollection of the author's trigger-happy youth:

When at Cambridge I used to practice throwing up my gun to my shoulder before a looking glass to see that I threw it up straight. Another and better plan was to get a friend to wave about a lighted candle, and then to fire at it with a cap on the nipple, and if the aim was accurate the little puff of air would blow out the candle. The explosion of the cap caused a sharp crack, and I was told that the tutor of the college remarked, "What an extraordinary thing it is, Mr Darwin seems to spend hours in cracking a horse-whip in his room, for I often hear the crack when I pass under his windows."

As any musket geek will tell you, this Victorian Travis Bickle was firing his weapon with a percussion cap, but no ammunition. The nipple is a hollow metal passage at the rear of the barrel, through which the flame from the percussion cap would ordinarily travel and ignite the main powder charge. Sigh. Later in life, a disgusted Darwin gave up hunting. It wasn't the sight of blood that turned him off. It was the discovery of a small bird on the forest floor, which had been shot the day before and was now just barely hanging on. Hope was not the thing with feathers. Darwin, who loved nothing better than to gun down an entire posse of snipe in one go, resolved to hunt no more.

For me, on the other hand, the sight of blood is an ongoing problem. Two weeks ago, I gashed my right pinky while washing out a drinking glass. The glass was an old one, from the Fifties, and came apart very neatly into two sharp-edged fragments. I bled and bled, even as I applied pressure with dozens of paper towels and tried to quell my racing, wimpy heart. A phrase from one of Randall Jarrell's letters came to mind--he had cut his own finger, and exclaimed at the cheerful red color of the blood. Do I live so vicariously through books that I really needed to borrow my reaction from somebody else? Perhaps. (I just thumbed through Randall Jarrell's Letters, and couldn't find the passage: drat. But I was floored once again by his 1951 letters to Mary Von Schrader, who he would marry the following year. Such love! Such elation! A small blaze of wit and metaphor-making seems to be burning continuously in his head--maybe an inspirational flame was traveling through a nipple at the base of his hypothalamus. It's a self-portrait of a happy man. You don't encounter so many of them. Plus this penetrating sentence, which made me wonder about myself: "Really complete egotism is so hard on you because you feel that everybody else is, essentially is or should be, like you--so you're alone, really alone.")

Anyway, I applied pressure. The bloody towels accumulated in the wastebasket. Nina got me to sit down, dabbled an antibiotic ointment on the gash, then dressed the whole thing very professionally with gauze and tape. A subsequent trip to the doctor was anticlimactic: no sutures necessary, the cut would close on its own (and it has, there's a pink, innocent, V-shaped patch of skin on my finger.) For a few days, however, I wasn't allowed to get the dressing wet. I showered with a plastic bag wrapped around my right hand, which I held aloft at all times, resembling a cranky, hirsute Statue of Liberty. And for some reason this ridiculous image began to strike me as meaningful. Representative of my stato d'animo. What was I doing? What did it all mean? I lift my lamp beside the golden door--also beside the perpetually stopped-up drain, which my 84-year-old father insisted on plunging the other week, in a nostalgic nod to his youthful stint as a plumber's assistant.

Since everybody may not care to have that image stuck in their heads for the rest of the day, I'll leave you with another. I already posted my micro-speech from the NBCC anniversary bash back in November. I just discovered that the video is now available, so I'll share it below. The audio is out of synch. At one point I have five o'clock shadow, then it disappears, in an eerie time-lapse effect, and I'll admit that the dime-store reading glasses are not flattering. Whatever. I had fun. At 1:06 you can see John Ashbery in the front row, wearing a jacket and tie:

James Marcus at NBCC's 35th from NBCC on Vimeo.

Labels: Charles Darwin, cut, NBCC, Randall Jarrell

Phillip Lopate is best known for his supple and surprising essays, which have been collected most recently in Getting Personal: Selected Writings. But as far back as 1963--when he cranked out a piece about the very first New York Film Festival for his college newspaper--Lopate has been pursuing a left-handed career as a movie critic. He published a hefty sampler of this criticism nearly a decade ago, in Totally, Tragically, Tenderly. And now, casting his net considerably wider, he has assembled American Movie Critics: An Anthology From The Silents Until Now. This whopping volume should entertain and outrage film buffs across the land, even as it charts the "narrative trajectory by which the field groped its way from the province of hobbyists and amateurs to become a legitimate profession." Lopate, groping his own way through a host of promotional activities, kindly agreed to answer a few questions for House of Mirth.

James Marcus: Can you tell me just a little about the genesis of the book, and how you became its editor?

Phillip Lopate: The idea of the anthology was mine from the beginning. It grew out of my two previous anthologies, The Art of the Personal Essay and Writing New York, and especially the first, because I wanted to put forward film criticism as a belletristic form. I also wanted/needed an anthology like this to teach the course, and since none was available, I realized I had to do it myself, or go broke photocopying pieces for my students.

Marcus: Otis Ferguson, James Agee, Manny Farber, Pauline Kael, and Andrew Sarris occupy the upper tier of your own film-reviewing pantheon. Off the top of your head, who would be the next five, and why?

Lopate: The next five would probably be Parker Tyler, Robert Warshow, Stanley Kauffmann, Vincent Canby and Molly Haskell. Tyler is really a major, interesting critic, who could put forward ideas about gender and myth, and at the same time do very creditable, intriguing reviewing. Warshow wrote beautifully and soberly, and certainly would have been in the first rank if he lived a little longer. Kauffmann is just a marvel in terms of longevity, probity and consistency--the kind of critic I rejected when I was younger, but now am very impressed with. Canby is, as I said in my book, the best daily reviewer this country has ever had. Molly Haskell has opened up a whole area of film studies, and is very knowledgeable about film history, and writes with flexibility and amusement--in short, a delight.

Marcus: Are there any writers, or even specific pieces, that you particularly regret leaving out of the book?

Lopate: I have tons of regrets, but I should preface them by saying that I pushed hard to get the number of pages I did, and Library of America was very tolerant of my pressure, but they also have to think about things like paper costs and unit price, so that it isn't prohibitively expensive. That said, if I had had, say, a few hundred more pages to play around with, I would have liked to include: Dave Kehr, David Ansen, David Sterritt, Abraham Polonsky (he wrote a few film essays), Meyer Schapiro (nothing on the level of his art criticism, but still), Joe Morgenstern, Bosley Crowther (for perversity's sake!), Peter Bogdanovich, David Bordwell, Elizabeth Kendall, B. Ruby Rich, P. Adams Sitney, Robert Hatch, Iris Barry, David Edelstein, Louise Bogan, Arthur Knight, Archer Winsten, Herman Weinberg, James Stoller and probably a dozen more whose names escape me. At one point or another, the ones I named were all in the mix. But we ran out of room.

Marcus: Were you tempted to include a great many more "kibitzers"--that is, occasional film critics such as Edmund Wilson, Susan Sontag, and John Ashbery?

Lopate: There is no end to other kibitzers one could have included: for instance, Jack Kerouac, Donald Barthelme, Norman Mailer, Mary McCarthy... But I chose the half-dozen or so examples I thought worked best; I did not want the kibitzers to swamp the professional critics.

Marcus: In your introduction, you mentioned one criterion for inclusion that you were "almost embarrassed to admit"--ie, whether you ultimately agreed with a critic's assessment of a film. Can we assume, then, that you share Otis Ferguson's distaste for Citizen Kane, or James Agee's delight at Story of G.I. Joe (and, just to make things complicated, Manny Farber's consignment of that very same production to "the almond paste-flavored eminence of the Museum of Modern Art's film library")?

Lopate: I didn't mean I agreed with all their judgments. I think Citizen Kane is a great great movie, and I don't share Ferguson's objections, though I found them mighty interesting. I do like Story of G.I. Joe quite a lot. I am not a huge fan of Eyes Wide Shut, but I thought Jonathan Rosenbaum's evaluation of it was quite intelligent and made me want to give it another chance. In all cases, the critic touched on my own ambivalence or enthusiasm, even if I didn't necessarily share his or her final judgment in toto.

Marcus: You also argue that a working film critic must develop a Philosophy of Trash--in other words, "strategies for writing about entertaining junk." Pauline Kael and J. Hoberman have been fairly eloquent on this subject. But what is your P. of T.?

Lopate: I am not a working film critic and therefore I have no need for a "philosophy of trash," nor do I have one. I am free to write about obscure art movies that touch me. Of course there are many mediocre movies that I can watch with a certain degree of pleasure, especially if I am tired and viewing them on TV.

Marcus: You quote John Simon as to the reviewer's traditionally low spot on the totem pole: "Reviewing is something that newspaper editors have invented: it stems from the notion that the critic is someone who must see with the eyes of the Average Man or Typical Reader (whoever that is) and predict for his fellows what their reaction will be. To this end, the newspapers carefully screen their reviewers to be representative common men, say, former obituary writers or mailroom clerks, anything but trained specialists." Factoring in a grain of Simon-style spleen, was he correct then? Is he correct now?

Lopate: I do think that in the past newspapers and magazines tended to assign writers to the movie post without particular regard for how much they knew about the medium, and with an eye toward mirroring the common reader. That's less true now, partly because of the emergence of graduate film studies programs, which spew out many qualified young people with a knowledge of film history. Most daily reviewers continue to adopt a chummy, I'm-like-you pose toward their audience, but not all. For instance, Manohla Dargis doesn't; she wears her cine-knowledge proudly.

Marcus: Some of the critics here gravitate toward High Art, others toward expedient craftsmen, who (in Manny Farber's words) "spring the leanest, shrewdest, sprightliest notes from material that looks like junk." In the post-studio age, is this still a valid or useful distinction? Looking at the current scene, who's our preeminent High Art guy (or gal)? Who are the killer craftsmen?

Lopate: I doubt that the High Art/expedient craftsman distinction makes much sense in an age when the studio system no longer functions, and every schlockmeister considers himself an auteur, with the right to include a title that says "A film by Joe Dokes." We know who the High Art types are: Wes Anderson, Atom Egoyan, Hal Hartley, Charles Burnett, Noah Baumbach, for starters. Michael Mann is a killer craftsman who presents himself as a semi-high art auteur, a perfect example of the current confusion. Spielberg is in a league of his own as a great craftsman who wants to be considered a great artist (and sometimes is). There are craftsmanlike directors such as Joe Rubin, Amy Heckerling, John Carpenter, Wes Craven, Joe Dante, John Woo, who almost always turn out well-made films. Someone like Curtis Hanson is also right on the cusp.

Marcus: I was struck by Jonas Mekas's take on A Hard Day's Night: "Art exists. Aesthetic experience exists. A Hard Day's Night has nothing to do with it. At best, it is fun. But 'fun' is not an aesthetic experience: Fun remains on the surface. I have nothing against the surface. But it belongs where it is and shouldn't be taken for anything else." Substitute "pleasure" for "fun," I would suggest, and his whole argument goes up in smoke. But what do you think? (This isn't ultimately a question about Mekas, of course, but about sensual versus cerebral pleasures. Assuming the two can truly be separated.)

Lopate: You cannot substitute "pleasure" for "fun," they are two entirely different notions. I thought Mekas was brave and intelligent and precise in using the word "fun" to define A Hard Day's Night, and I think he was reacting in part to the over-praise of Richard Lester, by Sarris, among other critics who were grateful to enjoy a youth movie and feel hip. Art requires complexity, not cozy complacency, and many of the youth-culture assumptions that underlay A Hard Day's Night refused complexity. As for some distinction between sensual and cerebral pleasures, I don't see how you can draw a hard and fast line, but both or either have to promote a sense of rich complexity for a movie to be considered art.

Labels: A Hard Day's Night, Manny Farber, movies, Phillip Lopate

At Rowan Oak, William Faulkner's home in Oxford, Mississippi, John Grisham announced the 2005 National Book Award finalists. In fiction, E.L. Doctorow is likely to be leader of the pack: his Civil War novel, The March, put him back on the bestseller lists and restored his luster after the mixed response accorded to his story collection, Sweet Land Stories, last year. Joan Didion's The Year of Magical Thinking won a nomination in nonfiction, along with Alan Burdick's Out of Eden, Leo Damrosch's Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Jim Dwyer's and Kevin Flynn's 102 Minutes: The Untold Story of the Fight to Survive Inside the Twin Towers, and Adam Hochschild's Bury the Chains. (The Didion is tremendous and deserving, but not having read the other contenders, I can't exactly handicap this one.) In poetry, two hardy survivors will go toe-to-toe: the 78-year-old John Ashbery (Where Shall I Wander) and the 78-year-old W.S. Merwin (Migration), with Frank Bidart, Brendan Galvin, and Verdan Rutsala bringing up the rear. For a less scattershot report, try this piece by Hillel Italie, as well as the official NBA site.