Bryan Alistair Charles’s “On Proust, Judd Nelson, and Some Other Things” (The Millions, October 24) is self-involved, self-conscious, and far more concerned with the actor Judd Nelson and the movie The Breakfast Club (which I have never seen) than I can imagine being, but it’s a good read for all that, and makes me want to dive back into Proust (which I finished back in 2008, inspiring a splendid reminiscence from thegrowlingwolf: “I would fall full-flat snoring asleep after trying to stay with Marcel and this woman as best I could for as long as I could”). After a long excursus about meeting Nelson (set in one of my favorite West Coast bookstores, Book Soup), it continues:
I first started to read In Search of Lost Time in the fall of 2003. I was 29, unemployed, had recently finished graduate school, was still traumatized by a frightening experience in the World Trade Center on 9/11 (and deeply in denial of that trauma), and had picked up, semi-randomly, a copy of Swann’s Way. In a dim sense I was aware that the novel was part of a vaster work that was considered “difficult,” and featured a scene where a guy dunked . . . something into a beverage and then remembered things. But I knew nothing else about the book.
Not long before, I had read Ulysses, and while I ended up loving it, I found it hard to access at first. I felt anxious every time I opened it. The book’s reputation as both the greatest and most challenging novel ever written had been drummed into me (and all of us) for years. I read with companion texts handy, pausing a ludicrous number of times to look up every abstruse reference, stray bit of a foreign language, stylistic shift, parallel to The Odyssey, Dublin landmark.That is no way to read a novel, in my opinion. Only after I stopped trying to understand the book, moved past the sheer awe I felt merely holding it, did I actually begin to enjoy the damn thing.
With Swann’s Way, I experienced no such anticipatory anxiety. From the first, terse sentence, “For a long time I would go to bed early” (in C.K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin’s Modern Library translation)—whose brevity, I would shortly discover, was uncharacteristic—I was hooked.
He understandably bogs down in the third book (“Two long set pieces—an afternoon soiree and a dinner party—consume hundreds of pages and feature a dizzying number of characters, name upon name, cousins and second cousins, uncles, aunts, spouses, many of whose histories and personal qualities are relayed at length”) and sets it aside for what turns out to be a decade, then restarts with the Penguin version (the one where each volume is by a different translator) and triumphs by using a quota system:
The days and the weeks and the months passed. I established a lovely groove with the novel, came to relish my mornings with it, drinking coffee as I navigated the long sentences, the sometimes pages-long paragraphs, unwilling—almost unable—to move on with the day until I had completed my 10 (or 20) pages.
He doesn’t mention the Raúl Ruiz movie, which makes me suspect he hasn’t seen it, in which case he has a treat in store.
I read with companion texts handy, pausing a ludicrous number of times to look up every abstruse reference, stray bit of a foreign language, stylistic shift, parallel to The Odyssey, Dublin landmark. That is no way to read a novel, in my opinion. Only after I stopped trying to understand the book, moved past the sheer awe I felt merely holding it, did I actually begin to enjoy the damn thing
Preach it, brother!
No novel – or poem – (in your L1) that is worth reading at all should be read with a commentary beside you. Especially not Ulysses.
I had to pause and gather myself, recalling consciously just how old hat is, to get myself unflabbergasted, because it really would be flabbergasting for a white American of my own generational cohort (defined sufficiently tightly that hat is well outside it) to never have seen _The Breakfast Club_. Not that I’m claiming it’s a “great” movie in some pure aesthetic sense, just that for some cohort (possibly as I noted adjusted by race and conceivably a few other demographic factors) it is an assumed-common-baseline experience for everyone born between 19xx and 19yy.
Part of it is that the director – the late John Hughes (1950-2009) – somehow had a bizarrely good intuitive grasp of the actual lives or at least perceptions and self-narratives of a generational cohort significantly younger than himself. The high-school-student characters in the Breakfast Club (although played by older actors of course) would have been born in ’66 or maybe ’67, a year or two younger than me, and I’ve never met anyone my age who found them (or the characters in the other high-school setting movies he did around the same time in his career) not ringing true to life, or obvious Hollywood fabrications, or an old person’s clueless idea of what younger people are actually like.
Mr. Charles is coming on a decade younger than the characters, so his experience of the movie may have been a tiny bit different – I don’t know how much the reality of teenage life had or had drifted in the interim. Plus he may have been more likely to have seen the movie on tv where it was edited/bowdlerized just enough to be occasionally confusing.
You may now return to discussing Proust.
I guess I should watch it to feel the vibes of the Younger Generation (that has not yet hit retirement age).
Just as etymology is not always an accurate predictor of current semantics, it’s possible that even the most accurate movie depiction of what my cohort was or at least felt like 40 years ago is not quite enough to understand who we may presently be. But origin stories can be inherently interesting even if not as explanatory as might be convenient.
(Going through the nerdy kid’s wallet) “A fake ID?! You don’t even drink! Why do you have a fake ID?”
“So I could register to vote.”
My uncle made a wildly well-referenced, some would say over-referenced, translation of a 16th century Chinese novel. It was only on the second volume when I decided to ignore the footnotes that I really got into the novel. Pursuing those details is a distraction unless you need to for scholarly purposes.
@Ryan: the best single line in the movie is “I’m not a nymphomaniac; I’m a compulsive liar.” But that may not be one of the more generationally-marked or sociologically-significant ones.
If you scroll down to the bottom of the linked piece you get the following author mini-bio with the byline: “Bryan Alistair Charles is the author of a novel, a memoir, and a book about Pavement written for Bloomsbury’s 33 1/3 series. He lives in California.” This is such a spot-on parody of a certain sort of Gen X “writer” figure as to make one wonder whether the whole thing is a hoax and B.A.C. a fictitious persona. Although maybe not played strictly for laffs when you consider the poignant brutality of “Early in 2014 I was living in Knoxville, TN. I was 39, married, and (with the aid of a therapist) trying to stay open to the idea of maybe becoming a father in the near future. And—in a grim harbinger of what I would likely be able to contribute financially to a growing family—working part-time in a bookstore.”
I have never seen The Breakfast Club. I was too young when it was in the theater, and as a teen, it just was not part of my peer group’s culture. As I have often pointed out, teen culture prior to the mid-1990s (roughly up until eternal September) was both heavily sex segregated and often very local. Ferris Bueller’s Day Off was popular on VHS and cable when I was a teenager, but the boys at my school (I don’t even know if this extended to other high schools in town) did not, by and large, watch Sixteen Candles, Pretty in Pink, or The Breakfast Club. The teen films made by John Hughes were, with that one exception, considered chick flicks.
Brett (who is a bit over a decade younger than me, I think) is here helpfully providing data to determine the value of 19yy in my comment coded at 5:55 pm. OTOH he’s much closer in age to Mr. Charles, but maybe the movie wasn’t so gender-coded wherever Mr. Charles grew up?
I enjoyed Pretty in Pink when it came out. Saw it with my then-girlfriend-now-wife who was underwhelmed. But she is from Aberdeen. They are a harsh people, those Aberdonians.
(My younger son thinks Karenin is the most sympathetic character in Anna Karenina. And he was born in Aberdeen. Just saying.)
Well, Karenin пелестрадал (suffeled) a lot, didn’t he? DE, your son is not alone. I read Ulysses in Russian translation, reading the extensive notes after each chapter. Didn’t help much, got a feeling like from a research project, not a novel. And that’s considering that I’ve been very sympathetic to Mr. Leopold Bloom right form the moment I’ve learned that he ate with relish the inner organs of beasts and fowls.
This is such a spot-on parody of a certain sort of Gen X “writer” figure
Yes, Bryan Charles wrote the volume on Wowee Zowee for the 33 and 1/3 series. I would be shocked J.W., if you, who seem to have a more than passing familiarity with rock music in its various genres, aren’t familiar with those books. What about his career strikes you as „parody“? Or makes you so dismissive of him? Or is it that you don’t like Pavement?
J.W., you are off by a few years as well. I was born in ‘66 and was therefore already in college when the movie came out. The key demo for that movie is the generation 1969-1971. My brother’s cohort.
In any case, Breakfast Club was certainly not considered a „chick flick“ in my high school. I know this because my brother and his friends all loved it. I only went to see the movie because they kept going on about it. If Brett‘s cohort was that misogynistic, I am less surprised about why so many Gen Xers voted for the rapist. Of course in those days we only had one multiplex playing 4 movies, and most people didn’t have cable. I don’t think the concept of “chick flick” really existed for us in 1985 because we couldn’t afford to make that fine a differentiation. There were movies that us kids wanted to see and there were boring movies for grown ups like Ordinary People. Boys went to see Pretty in Pink and girls went to see Porky’s or Scarface.
not alone.
The essay linked there makes the case for Karenin as a good and misunderstood man; I imagine Google Translate can do a decent job with it if anyone wants to give it a try.
https://static.wikia.nocookie.net/peanuts/images/b/be/19941118.gif/revision/latest?cb=20161128140157
?
Huh. Worked when I first pasted the link. Try
https://static.wikia.nocookie.net/peanuts/images/b/be/19941118.gif
I had to squint, but I read it and it gave me a chuckle.
This
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fresh_Horses_(film)
was apparently not very successful, but I liked it.
@Vanya: I am indeed familiar with the 33 1/3 series and have read some significant number of them. Indeed, in this six-degrees-of-separation world it worked out that the author of one of the series’ earliest volumes was a onetime apartment mate of mine (1986 summer sublet in New Haven).* I find their quality to be highly variable and being enamored of the album a particular volume is about no guarantee that I will enjoy the book.
I have not read any of Charles’ books, so I apologize if I came off sounding negative about work I haven’t read, which would be unfair to the man, and the short piece hat linked to didn’t particularly irk me. It was more the way in which the capsule career summary checked a lot of cliche boxes – many of which are of course the results of broader trends in publishing etc. rather than the completely free choices of any given writer. The even balance between exactly one published novel (for a guy who is around 50 years old), one “memoir” (that whole Gen X memoir boom which maybe dates back to the success of _Prozac Nation_?),** and one miscellaneous book described with much more detail than either the novel or the memoir struck me as very generational-cliche.
I probably find Pavement less irksome than I do their diehard enthusiasts. This may just be the simple default disdain that is easy to have for the innocent enthusiasms of those ten years younger than oneself. But my bigger thesis is that the Nirvana boom of ’91 et seq., as the improbable breakthrough of the legacy of the previously commercially-unsuccessful efforts of a whole series of American underground bands that had been working throughout the prior decade, created a weird situation where in order to be a hipster-underground-“indie” band by the mid-Nineties you had to differentiate yourself from the bands that had reached the mass audience. Which led to a loss of balance and cohesion and the destruction of a certain synthesis that had made your Black Flags and your Replacements so compelling even when they were playing to tiny audiences and not making enough money to reliably afford motel rooms for the night. What was left over (or at least one of the various things that was left over) was more arch and mannered, amateurish and slackerish and lo-fi in an unhelpfully self-conscious way rather than as a side effect of simply working with the limited resources you happened to have available to you.
*That book (a pretty good one!) was officially #17 in the series; Charles’ contribution (published five years later) was #72, and if wikipedia is up to date they are now at #185 with the most recently-published volume.
**In prior times, the likes of Norman Mailer wouldn’t publish a “war memoir,” because who cared about a memoir from someone that young. They would instead publish a novel with a wartime setting heavily informed by their own experiences. Perhaps a better system. That Charles’ 9/11-themed memoir has a blurb from MIchael Chabon seems like a big red flag to me, but OTOH I accept that Charles’ publisher and/or publicist would have thought it a good blurb to get marketingwise, so again you can’t fault the man excessively for reacting to the incentive structure he found himself in.
This may just be the simple default disdain that is easy to have for the innocent enthusiasms of those ten years younger than oneself.
Cf. me and ’70s singer-songwriters.
Young people have had bad taste in music for at least four thousand years (probably longer, but the historical evidence for earlier times is sparse.)
And they don’t talk proper.
I blame literacy. They’re always writing to each other these days instead of having proper conversations. And what it does to their attention spans is dreadful. Many of them can’t recite even the simplest epic poem from memory any more.
The thing is, though, that though I have no comprehension of the music popular among Kids Today (it all sounds tuneless and whiny to me), I don’t disdain it — different strokes for different folks, as long as they don’t frighten the horses, etc. But I will never not curl my lip at James Taylor, Peter Frampton, et hoc genus omne.
@David E.: It speaks well of us as a culture that we have moved beyond a naive enthusiasm for the supposed benefits of literacy. Consider by contrast this hopelessly naive text from the era of the U.S. Civil War: “The One Hundred and Twenty-Fifth [Illinois Volunteer] Infantry was formed of good war material, mainly drawn from the rural precincts of Vermilion and Champaign counties, with a sprinkling of mechanics, professional and laboring men and clerks from the towns, practically all of whom could read and write, so that the war and its possible requirements were well comprehended by them before enlistment.”
I may be the odd one out here, but my version of the Divina Commedia came with copious notes that I enjoyed immensely. (It’s a lot more fun to see who Dante is sending to hell when you have some sense of who they are and why Dante thought they should be there.)
I love notes too, but I think the idea is not that notes should be ignored entirely and forever but that one should allow oneself to enjoy the text for its own sake first, and only then delve into the related intricacies.
@AL:
Assuming that you have essentially-L1 command of fourteenth-century Italian (quite possible), so that my parenthesis does not apply …
I wouldn’t deny that commentaries have a place in appreciation of great literature, but not as something to be read alongside the text. I’d actually say this of the Divina Commedia too (and my grasp of the language of the text is very far from L1 level.)
(Apart from anything else, quite a few of the portraits of folk that Dante sends to Hell seem to be basically hatchet jobs, which is certainly interesting to know but may not help with the immediate literary effect.)
[Hat has said what I mean, somewhat more succinctly.]
But what if the notes aren’t intricacies but are basic knowledge needed to enjoy the text for its own sake, like what the people did that got them into Hell?
But who cares, unless you’re Dante? I, for one, don’t read poetry for the details of hell-bound moral judgments but for the poetry. If you’re not grabbed by “Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita,” you’re not going to want to bother with notes anyway, and if you are, you can enjoy the great lines castigating sinners without bothering your head about the Guelphs and the Ghibellines and what exactly the various popes had gotten up to.
It’s also a different matter with stuff in foreign languages, unless you really do know the language very well. I mean, I wish I could read Tacitus straight off sight-unseen without a grammatical commentary, but I can’t. Though even there, I think that non-grammatical commentary is unhelpful at the time of reading. For example, it’s interesting (and important) to know that Tacitus’ portrait of Tiberius is highly tendentious, but part of the joy of reading the Annals lies exactly in savouring Tacitus’ lurid portrait of the emperor.
I do agree, though, with Jerry Friedman’s implication that there is not a clearcut line between e.g. pure help with parsing Tacitus’ highly wrought Latin (which must have been a challenge to contemporary Latin speakers at times, let alone to a British barbarian two thousand years later) and vital background cultural information. You can’t discuss Latin semantics at all adequately in isolation from Roman culture.
It used to be traditional for certain sorts of Russian novels in English translation to include some sort of “dramatis personae” appendix at the beginning or end explaining very briefly who all the very numerous characters (sometimes with confusingly similar names) were, and at least that level of ready-to-hand reference seems like it ought to be a net benefit when reading the Divine Comedy.
Many moons ago when I was still in college I took a class on the Paradiso which was in substantial part a class on the history of medieval philosophy/theology, working off certain of the personages encountered by the narrator in the sequence in which he encountered them. That was an enjoyable way at getting at a lot of that substance. But I would agree that that’s not the only or best way to read the poem qua poem.
I’m talking about notes such as what “simony” means and why it has that name. As I recall, when I read Ciardi’s translation in high school, I wasn’t interested in the details of Guelphs and Ghibellines or of time zones, but there are passages that are simply meaningless unless you understand the references. And Dante lived before the time of poetry with private meaning or no meaning (as far as I know). He wanted readers to know what he was talking about, and I don’t see why I wouldn’t have wanted to be one of those readers.
Also some of the notes were interesting in themselves, if I remember correctly.
Edit: Also also, the translation is not as great poetry as the original.
And Dante lived before the time of poetry with private meaning or no meaning (as far as I know).
That’s probably not true; there was trobar clus. But still, Dante wanted readers to know what he meant.
I’m talking about notes such as what “simony” means and why it has that name.
Good point — that stuff is definitely helpful.
We seem to be getting closer to agreement. But here’s a quotation from another translator of Dante:
‘”But one has to make some sort of choice,” said Harriet. “And between one desire and another, how is one to know which things are really of overmastering importance?”
‘”We can only know that,” said Miss de Vine, “when they have overmastered us.”‘
—Dorothy L Sayers, Gaudy Night
I’m not going to comment on that as advice for life, but it might be good advice for reading. When you’re swept along by the work, you might want to save the notes for later, but when you find yourself curious about something, you might want to check the note. If I’m not being too dogmatic here.
This is one reason I like endnotes rather than footnotes. Footnotes clutter up the page and draw the eye away from the main text. If I see an endnote superscript, I can either freely ignore it, or, if it seems likely to be interesting or useful, flip to where I have bookmarked the endnotes for the chapter I’m on.
I think it depends on the work in question.
I deliberately put in the getout about L1s, because the more remote a work is from your own language and culture, the more help you’re going to need to achieve even basic comprehension of the original (though a truly good translator will try to sneak as much help as necessary into the text itself without breaking the flow.).
This same principle certainly could apply to a work in one’s own L1. But even there, one cannot generalise. On the one hand, you’ve got things like The Waste Land, where Eliot actually provides his own notes (though he is surely mostly taking the piss – and Jessie Weston’s stuff on the Grail legend is in any case actually pitiful pseudoscholarship, even if Eliot found it artistically inspiring. It sheds no light at all on the poem. I know: I have actually read her From Ritual to Romance so you won’t have to.)
Very much on the other hand, you’ve got Ulysses and the Alice books, both of which have (unsurprisingly) inspired versions with parallel commentaries. But in both cases, trying to actually read the works like that is a total misunderstanding of what the authors are actually up to, and the effect is like somebody earnestly explaining why a story they are relating is funny while they’re in the process of actually telling it.
(In fairness to Martin Gardner, I doubt if anyone’s first exposure to Lewis Carroll has ever been The Annotated Alice. Sadly, Ulysses is another matter, and countless readers must have been put off a great comic novel by supposing that it is meant to be some sort of crossword puzzle.)
[PS: anyone who cites Gaudy Night is definitely All Right in my book.]
to be a bit contrarian: i’m a firm believer in annotations – but only if they’re right alongside the main text, so that glancing at them doesn’t interrupt the flow of reading. endnotes of any kind (excepting strictly bibliographic ones) are an abomination.
and to fill out our hughesian sampling: i saw Breakfast Club on VHS when i was i highschool in the early 90s, with a gender-mixed group of friends; we enjoyed it a lot but found it a touch dated and definitely not anything like a depiction of our world, because we were city kids and it was so definitively a suburban document. possibly because of that, my circles tended to like the darker 1980s teen comedies – Heathers, Better Off Dead, etc – rather than the more straightforward coming-of-age films. and of course Pump Up The Volume was the one we most actively identified with, politically and musically.
which by way of its soundtrack – a perfect document of the parts of the pre-Nevermind “alternative” landscape that were considered to have crossover potential* – brings me to JWB’s point about music. i’d put the emphasis somewhat differently, on the destructive force that record companies’ A&R teams exerted on the subcultures that they mined from the early 90s feeding frenzy onwards. the lures (both money and Visible Success) they dangled in front of selected bands broke the necessary solidarity that makes subcultures sustainable, and the expansion imperatives of any extraction industry pushed them to attack subcultures earlier and earlier in their development, amplifying the destructive effects. and as fewer people had direct experience of vital subcultural spaces, the key distinction defining them (self-organization and comparative economic autonomy) began to be replaced by purely aesthetic criteria, so thoroughly that “indie” could describe a musical style (and be used by major labels as a genre term) where “independent” had described an antagonistic relationship to the major labels and the corporations that owned them.
.
* including, maybe most importantly, tunes left off the released soundtrack album, like “Fastlane” by Urban Dance Squad, who i suspect were considered waaaaay too black to be included** – the central industry misreading of “alternative” being that it was a rock subgenre (i.e. white-marked music for white audiences) rather than an intergenre space that drew on house and funk as well as hardcore and industrial. their interventions then made that misreading a reality, in ways that i believe robin james’ book on ohio’s WOXY traces in detail from the radio side.
** the other hiphop tracks featured in the film (by Ice-T and the Beastie Boys) were also excluded from the soundtrack album. there’s some specific irony to snubbing UDS, however, given that at the time the film came out “Deeper Shade of Soul” had likely made them the most successful “crossover” band featured, and given how ostentatiously their contribution to the movie emphasizes the metal in “rap-metal”.
Very much on the other hand, you’ve got Ulysses and the Alice books, both of which have (unsurprisingly) inspired versions with parallel commentaries.
One of my dreams is to collaborate on an effort to provide a complete-ish set of notes to Pale Fire, probably on line rather than in a print edition. But if the desire had overmastered me, I’d have suggested it at NABOKV-L… or at least kept reading NABOKV-L.
@DE:
I misunderstood you to be talking about reading in one’s L1, as opposed to a work having been written in it. I apologise — 14th-century Florentine hasn’t been my L1 for quite a few incarnations
@JF:
I think that if (per impossibile) I were writing a commentary on Pale Fire, I would be haunted by the feeling that the shade of the author was looking over my shoulder and laughing.
@AL:
No, all I meant by that was that I suspected that your grasp of Dante’s Tuscan was much better than mine (as I’m sure it must be.)
Consider by contrast this hopelessly naive text from the era of the U.S. Civil War: .
That weren’t naivete, that was pragmatism and forward thinking, doggoneit.
Most “progressive” military thinkers considered literate common soldiers a real advantage in the late 19th century, and I give those officers and military planners the benefit of the doubt. Literacy meant non-coms could read maps, infantry and artillery soldiers could be issued standard manuals on how to care for their industrially produced standard equipment, standardized training could be more easily implemented across divisions and new recruits could get that same training, accurate records could be kept by enlisted men, written messages could be passed around – a huge advantage when being shelled and unable to hear properly. Literacy meant more men with the skills to manage the increasingly complex logistics of industrial armies moving vast quanties of food, materiel and men using railroads, canals and steamships. Literacy deepened the pool of potential officers, a key feature of more meritocratic armies like the Prussian Army. Widespread Prussian literacy and better education was seen by most observers as a key reason Prussia was able to so decisively defeat the Austrians in 1866 and then the French in 1870. One of the deficiencies of the Russian military in WWI was the low literacy rate of soldiers relative to their German and Austrian opponents.
@Vanya
The fact that they may have only had one rifle for every ten soldiers or so and a corresponding level of powder and shells could also have played a rôle.
Languages have that advantage over rifles. 10 soldiers can all use the same language at once. They can’t all use the same rifle at once.
The fact that they may have only had one rifle for every ten soldiers or so and a corresponding level of powder and shells
This is an extreme exaggeration of a genuine issue (that got much worse later). The real problems that doomed them in the Battle of Tannenberg were poor generalship and unencrypted radio communications.
And of course for some reason the Russian army 1914-1916 rarely seemed to suffer from crippling deficiencies in rifles or ammunition when facing the Austrians or the Ottomans.
The worst shortages seem to have been 1 rifle for every 2 soldiers, and that was mostly because Germans had overrun Russian positions and taken their stores. Like Hat says, the real deficiencies in the Russian Imperial Army were poor senior leadership and poor logistics management (much like today).
@Vanya: Ah, for the 19th century when Prussia was the model of modernization that progressives worldwide sought to emulate … But the bit I quoted didn’t seem focused so much on literate soldiers being easier to train or more effective in actual war for that reason as opposed to supposing that they were pre-sold on the justice of the Cause because they’d been reading the vehement Unionist editorials in the local small-town paper run by some fellow who had been a Conscience Whig and then a Know-Nothing before signing on with the new-fangled Republicans.
rozele beat me to it: sidenotes/margin notes are the best, when you can use them. They can’t be too long, and are unfashionable—because they waste paper, and because they can’t be fully automated. But already ol’ Aldus knew they were a good thing, even in pocket books.
I like TBC okay. It’s a little hokey, like all Hollywood teen movies. Really, five different stereotypes? But kudos where deserved. They are talking about their problems, not primarily love or sex, and even the jock and the popular girl are outsiders in their own way. And, it had the first notable dandruff scene in movie history.
Anyway, last year I saw We Are the Best. That is the first movie I’ve ever seen about teenagers (ok, adolescents) that felt true, and all the rest feel extra artificial anymore.
Submarine is pretty good. Though I’m not sure I could defend it against a charge of artificiality, exactly … at least not as far as some of the plotting goes. But the relationship stuff is often quite uncomfortably spot on. And it’s funny too.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Submarine_(2010_film)
(US audiences might be alienated by the exotic setting.)
@David Eddyshaw: I have mentioned before staying up all night at the hospital in Estes Park, Colorado reading “The Waste Land” with Eliot’s own annotations—which I found to be very good and generally consonant with Eliot’s idea that he was not the sole arbiter of what the poem meant (although he does outright state that Tiresias, who appears in several guises throughout the “The Waste Land,” is the most important character in the poem—which I already agreed with before I read the annotations). Most of the annotations were related to things that I had noticed on my two or three prior readings, but I appreciated that Eliot pointed out allusions and connections that he had intended but I had not previously noticed.
Martin Gardner’s annotations of Alice in Wonderland are also excellent, of course. However, they seem like a very different kind of annotation from what Eliot wrote, whether about his own works or other poets’.
@rozele: Heathers was another film that it seemed was watched overwhelmingly by girls in my peer group, rather than boys. I’m less certain, naturally, but I suspect that Better Off Dead was, in contrast, a film more seen by the teen boys than the girls. For Pump Up the Volume, I don’t remember at all.
The notes to The Waste Land are surely integral to the whole effect Eliot was aiming at, so I agree they’re not at all the same kind of thing as Gardner’s (hence my implied antithesis, though of course the matter is by no means so simple.)
I persist in my view that TS is not entirely taking his annotating duties dead seriously; but that, too, is part of the special effects.
I also think that Eliot’s poetry lost something important when he became a Christian. Some kind of authenticity – not that I think his Christianity was at all spurious, but to me there always seems to be a kind of strained quality to it, in his poetry at least. Trying too hard. (Unlike Auden …) Technically brilliant, but something somewhere has gone subtly wrong …
(I perhaps should make it clear that I do know that The Waste Land antedates Eliot’s conversion; I was praising the poem at the expense of e.g. Four Quartets.)
A proper Christian, you mean. The Eliots were Unitarians. (His grandfather and my great-great-grandfather were among the seventeen prominent Saint Louisans that founded Washington University.)
He became a British subject at about the same time. So, there’s that.
I think TSE himself would have described it as conversion …
I find it difficult to be fair to Eliot qua Christian, because he seems to have been Christian in a very different mode from me. I certainly have neither the right not the wish to claim that it was in any way invalid: just that we seem to be on completely different wavelengths, somehow. (He’d almost certainly have reciprocated.)
I still find The Waste Land moving on a “religious level.” I’ve never felt that at all with Four Quartets, beautiful as they are. He evidently found his answers to the Waste Land; but they’re not my answers, and I prefer his questions.
@David Eddyshaw: Yeah, I have never quite understood the acclaim for “Four Quartets,” often called Eliot’s best work. Apart from being more than twice as long, I have never found anything to recommend “Four Quartets” over “The Waste Land.”
How could I have omitted to mention Gregory’s Girl?
Gregory’s Girl was the favorite movie of one of my college roommates. Somehow he’d managed to see it growing up in Hawaii. American teenagers didn’t see movies with soccer playing teenager heroes in those days. Gregory’s Girl was for him what Repo Man was for those of us in the punk scene , it validated his alternative lifestyle.
I probably find Pavement less irksome than I do their diehard enthusiasts. This may just be the simple default disdain that is easy to have for the innocent enthusiasms of those ten years younger than oneself.
Malkmus was born in 1966, and the band started in 1989. I think of Pavement as peers. Although I get that bands you discover in grown up life will never be as exciting as bands you followed in high school or college.
I think _Gregory’s Girl_ had a brief theatrical run where I grew up and my poor mother made the mistake of telling me that she’d heard it was very good in depicting teenage something or other, which naturally then gave me zero interest in going to see it because of the reflexive and unreflective assumption she was not a reliable guide in these matters.
@Vanya: As I had tried to make clear I’m not talking about the age of the actual members of Pavement but stereotypically-assumed-in-my-mind (presumably based on some real-world evidence, but not necessarily rigorously analyzed) age of their more fervent devotees. That will usually lag at least modestly the age of the musicians. A few examples of frontmen of bands of whom it was possible to become a fervent devotee when I was 18: Gordan Gano is two years older than me, Henry Rollins is four years older than me, and Michael Stipe is five years older than me. Obviously bands can have younger members – e.g. I’m a year older than the youngest member of the original Replacements lineup, who fulfilled the traditional “okay your kid brother can be in the band if he agrees to play bass” niche.
The principals of the Throwing Muses were mostly born in ’66 but they got their first album out in ’86 compared to Pavement’s ’92, which is a key fairly dramatic timing difference in terms of which subcohort might likely make up the initial key/fervent fanbase. Plus I personally had already heard Throwing Muses’ obscure self-released EP from late ’84, which I guess is like having heard Pavement’s more obscure EP’s released in ’90 and ’91? Another example would be Dinosaur Not-Yet-Jr., whose youngest member was born in ’66 (with one bandmate each from ’65 and ’64), who got their first album out in mid-’85. I think I was giving them airplay before the end of the month in which I turned 20.
@DE: I think that if (per impossibile) I were writing a commentary on Pale Fire, I would be haunted by the feeling that the shade of the author was looking over my shoulder and laughing
That could be a valuable corrective to the Zembla-scale fantasies of certain commentators—not me, of course.
@J.W. Brewer: There is obviously a longstanding conflation of the ages of the people performing in young, upcoming bands and the ages of their typical fans. Often the bands encourage this in one direction, with musicians in their twenties writing and performing songs that are explicitly from the point of view of teenagers (“Be True To Your School” by the Beach Boys or “Smells Like Teen Spirit” by Nirvana). This is rather natural, since there are lots of potential teen fans and fractionally very few performers who are actually under eighteen (although there are some who are not just younger siblings of key personnel; witness the Runaways—the name presumably intentionally referencing how young some of the members were).
However, there is also commonly conflation by people outside the relevant musical culture in the other direction. Back when “Generation X” might have actually meant something,* among the Baby Boomers and yet older folks, it seemed common to believe (or at least assume) that a Generation X band like Nirvana would have lots of Generation X fans. However, peak interest in Nirvana tended to happen when kids were about fifteen—so about forty percent younger than the band members at the height of their fame, but a natural age given Nirvana’s lyrics (as described above).
* As in: If your parents are Baby Boomers, you are too young to belong to Generation X.
“… it seemed common to believe (or at least assume) that a Generation X band like Nirvana would have lots of Generation X fans. However, peak interest in Nirvana tended to happen when kids were about fifteen…”
I’m going to have to disagree on this one. I was in my late teens when Nirvana’s “Smells like Teen Spirit” came out and it was huge among my Gen-X cohort from teen years to mid-twenties.* Plus, Kurt Cobain was only 27 when he died so Nirvana was only a little bit older than many of their fans.
*edited to add: Plus probably late twenties and early thirties as well. I think that generational boundaries are fuzzy and many of the people I remember being involved in Gen-X type things were a little older and younger than the strict definition for that generation. There is even a name, X-ennial, for millenials that identify more with their Gen-X peers.
@Brett/Pancho: Two different points.
1. For the older Gen X’ers like myself it was actually pretty significant that we were the last cohort of American kids whose parents were too old to be Boomers or at least Sixties People. Because when the goddam Boomers/Sixties People finally had kids of their own they became the first generation of overprotective bubblewrap helicopter parents who were too nervous to just tell their kids to get out of the house, figure out how to occupy themselves for how ever many hours, and just be back home for dinner when the streetlights came on. So we were the last cohort to have a traditional “free-range” childhood in a way that the younger Gen X’ers didn’t quite. (My dad was enough of an atypical safety nerd that having been socialized into the weird-at-the-time minority taste of habitually wearing seatbelts may have saved my life when I was 16 but on the other hand I got a concussion when I was 13 because the idea of wearing a helmet while skateboarding down a steep hill was totally outside our adolescent Overton window and parents didn’t push for it.)
2. Cobain and the other guys in Nirvana were more or less my age (he was about a year and a half younger than me, not enough to matter; Novoselic is seven weeks older than me; Grohl is my little brother’s age but he wasn’t an original member). On opposite coasts of the U.S. we were both in our own ways committed members of the radically autonomous and to a certain degree economically self-sustaining (for those who could abide living in dire poverty, which some young people with a certain aesthetic commitment managed to do for a while) Eighties rock underground subculture that rozele romanticized upthread. We listened to quite a lot of the same poorly-selling records by the same commercially-marginal bands released on the same economically-precarious underground labels and thought they were great. So Nirvana’s massive commercial breakthrough in the fall of ’91 (which unfolded approximately as rapidly and unexpectedly as the collapse of East Germany had two autumns previously – in both cases if you didn’t live through it while old enough to pay attention and hadn’t had your prior low expectations formed by the status quo ante you can’t fully understand how dramatic it was) was in a certain real sense “our” victory, the culmination of ten or twelve hard years of R&D trying to create and sustain something that was more viscerally exciting and authentic than what the mainstream arena bands had been providing throughout that decade. But it wasn’t really, personally, my victory in terms of how it felt. I had checked out emotionally from front-line duty in that particular cultural struggle literally just a few months earlier, on a hot summer day when the Replacements broke up on stage in front of me on my 26th birthday and it seemed a heavy-handed hint from the cosmic scriptwriters that a certain phase of my life had come to a close. So I wished the best to the 16 year olds who thought this was the most amazing new band they’d heard in their life, avoided the temptation to explain to them how much of the sound was prefigured by e.g. some regrettably obscure 45 released in very late ’84 by a band that had then broken up by the end of ’87, and instead devoted my time to filling in holes in my personal collection of 1970’s albums by taking advantage of the fact that the major labels had just given up on vinyl and were selling off their warehouses full of pristine-condition shrinkwrapped inventory of old titles really cheap.
o, i’m not romanticizing – or at least not without some direct experience, though admittedly of a slightly later moment! by 1990 i was on the boston punk/hardcore/ska scene* at any show that i could get into – an era of many all-ages shows (even at commercial venues), and a reasonable number of 16+ shows (though a certain anti-townie sentiment was palpable in the 19+ standard at a lot of venues) – and by 1996 i was very tied into the queercore/riot grrrl and avant/punk scenes in nyc and dc.
the people in my early-90s worlds – centered about ten years younger than cobain – wanted nothing to do with Nirvana or the rest of the breakthrough gang. part of that was regional chauvinism: we mainly listened to “local music”, and barely made time for new york or new jersey bands. and part of it was regionally-inflected stylistic preferences (though on that axis, Nirvana was the exception – we’d all grudgingly admit that some of their songs rocked, especially “Endless, Nameless”). but a big part of it was an understanding that those bands had actively chosen to step outside of the mutuality that defined the scene(s) and networks we were committed to. the fact that some of our local heros (i’m thinking of Heretix, in particular – never a politicized band, it seems important to mention) had already been chewed up and spat out by major labels by ’91 was also likely a factor, though i can’t remember how clearly we understood their trajectory at the time (we certainly knew that the earlier records were on Island, and the later ones self-released or on local independent labels).
i should emphasize that we weren’t purists about music – we were into Urban Dance Squad before Pump Up The Volume came out because we’d seen “Deeper Shade of Soul” on MTV; we listened to more Queensrÿche than i’m entirely comfortable remembering; both The Orb and Front 242 were in our regular rotation; “Groove Is In The Heart”, “Love Shack”, and “Give Up The Funk (Tear The Roof Off The Sucker)” would get us on the dance floor; and several of us were cultivating deep obsessions with mingus, miles, and ivo papasov (okay, i was probably the only one listening to Orpheus Ascending).
what was at issue for us with Nirvana et al was about the scene/subculture/community – and (i’d retrospectively say) specifically its political economy – not the sound. we didn’t see their success as a victory; we understood (if only semi-articulately) that it threatened the survival of the social ecology that we were committed to. we were well aware of the precarity of that ecology (by the time i was 16, i had friends gigging regularly and putting out tapes and 7″s), but we knew that the “breakthrough” wasn’t a solution to it.
.
* dominated in its non-ska parts, at that point, by what could more accurately be called a regional strain of metalcore, with some more conventional hardcore outfits, and a few experimental/postpunk and ‘spirit of 77’ bands in the mix.
I didn’t mean to suggest that what I said rozele was romanticizing wasn’t deserving of being romanticized! It was in many ways glorious and back around ’83 or ’84 bliss was it in that dawn to be alive but to be young blah blah blah.
Act like you want to act
Be what you want to be
Find out who you really are
And don’t pay any attention to me
Painfully naive-sounding if you were much out of your teens, but I was still in my teens and the now-deceased fellow who wrote those words was I think only 21 when they were recorded.
Probably where I differ from rozele is that I cared more about the generation of music qua music and the scene/ecology/subculture we were trying to do that within had imho developed as a pragmatic response to specific situational obstacles that had arisen to making good rock music within the mainstream biz. The sense of community and at least part of what I take it rozele means by mutuality was wonderful (I doubt Peter Frampton ever let random kids off the street like me just hang out chatting in his dressing room the way Mike Watt did …) but it was not, for me, an end in itself. (Plus certain people who talked about the “scene” qua scene as an end in itself back then tended to be a little off-putting and in hindsight may have turned out to be predatory.) Others may differ!
Ward Sutton on Generation X. The self-deprecation is on point.
> (I doubt Peter Frampton ever let random kids off the street like me just hang out chatting in his dressing room
I don’t know anything about Frampton’s tastes or morals, but if he was anything like the prototypical 70s/80s rock star, “like me” is doing an extraordinary amount of work in that sentence.
@Ryan: I had started to add some convoluted wording to explicitly distinguish what I was talking about from the classic High-Seventies backstage-groupie scenario, but decided it was making the sentence too baroque. FWIW I was on the occasion I was referencing (40 years ago come next April) accompanied to Mr. Watt’s dressing room* by a teenage girl even younger than myself and Mr. Watt seemed to have no discernable interest in her charms beyond her ability to serve as another member of a captive audience for whatever the hell he wanted to talk about before someone nudged him and told him it was time to go onstage. So maybe the point is more that “chatting” was doing a lot of work in the sentence by being extremely literal and not a euphemism for anything else?
*OK I don’t think this lo-rent venue had multiple dressing rooms so bandmates could isolate from each other! The other guys must have been moving around somewhere other than the corner with too-crappy-for-the-salvation-army furniture we were ensconced in.
Thanks to ETHZ, you can read Ernst Robert Curtius’s 1927 translation of The Waste Land, here.
Unfortunately it mistranslates “Bin gar keine Russin, stamm’ aus Litauen, echt deutsch” as “Bin gar keine Russin, stamm’ aus Litauen, echt deutsch.”
Admittedly, the original English is quite subtle here.