Wednesday, January 22, 2020

The pleasures of keeping up

One angle I might take, if I were to write something about reading not fewer books but fewer great books, would be a “pop” approach.  It does not come up much here, but I listen to a pretty good heap of current music, mostly jazz and popular music in its various forms, some of which is in no way actually popular.  In some sense I “keep up” with what is going on in contemporary music, and have done so for thirty years.

I understand the appeal of spending time with the art of right now, art that means something in the moment but is ephemeral, that looks cool now but will look like kitsch in a few years.  Maybe it looks like kitsch now.  Kitsch has its own interest and pleasures.

A real music critic may easily listen to a thousand albums from a given year.  I don’t do that, which is its own profession, or hobby, but I pay attention to music critics and what they recommend.  Some of it I love, some is junk; some seems important, some trivial.  That’s all part of the fun.

I don’t think that is how I approach literature, but I see why it would be enjoyable.  I do not quite understand how to transfer the idea of “keeping up” to books, except perhaps for the people who read 500 pages an hour.  Has a professional reviewer, Sam Sacks or Katherine Powers or someone like that, written about “keeping up”?  Maybe they don’t think that way.  I would enjoy reading that essay.

We all listen to music at the same speed.  We sure do not read at the same speed.  Maybe that is not the issue.

Still.  More time spent reading new books looking for their hooks, their energy, for what is new, that would be fun.  I spend a lot of my reading looking for the new, but the new of a hundred years ago, which now, honestly, is rather old.

Michael Orthofer and his Complete Review provide a model example of what I mean by “keeping up.” “There are currently 4509 books under review.” I am pretty sure he reads quite a bit faster than me.

My Best Album of 2019, by the way, is 400: An Afrikan Epic by Dr. Mark Lomax II, available for listening at no cost at his website.  This is a genuine “album” of music, a twelve volume jazz history of the African-American experience.  The first and last volumes are solo drums (Lomax is a drummer), and I cannot say I love those, but I love the rest.  The star performer is the saxophonist, Edwin Bayard, who plays in the idiom of John Coltrane.  For a literary connection, jump to part 8, “Blues in August,” a tribute to August Wilson.

I read, in 2019, roughly twenty books that were more or less new.  With music, I keep neurotic track of what music is really from 2019, but with books that seems silly.  Sillier.  Twenty recent books.  A long way from keeping up, but not total isolation from my own time.  I’ll write about some of them over the next few days.

21 comments:

  1. I have zero interest in “keeping up” with music; it is commonly accepted wisdom that one's musical tastes start ossifying in one's thirties, and that was certainly true of me. I was able to revel in the early years of rap when I moved to NYC in '81, and I kept up with new pop until the mid-'80s, but after that I lost interest, and the only new song that's truly grabbed me in recent years (in the sense that I ran right out and bought it) was "Uptown Funk," which of course is a pastiche of music from the era when I loved new music. But when it comes to books, I'm torn. I don't want to be ignorant of what's happening today; that turns you into a relic, a laudator temporis acti, and besides, great stuff is being written now. I'm reading Tessa Hadley's The Past to my wife these days -- what a wonderful book! But there's so much stuff from the past I also want to read, and one does have to eat, sleep, and interact with people in between reading. It's a conundrum.

    As for the "great/non-great" dichotomy, I don't believe in it. I mean, yes, War and Peace is a great novel, but it's also a mess, and very long and full of characters, and I don't look down on people for whom it's too much to deal with. And maybe Finnegans Wake is great, people whose judgment I respect say so, but it's too much for me to deal with. Meanwhile, I've gotten a tremendous amount from books that may not be "great" in the timeless-classic-for-all-ages sense (I guess Homer and Shakespeare are the usual exemplars of that) but which give me something nothing else does. That's why I'm so glad I adopted my read-it-all approach to Russian lit up through 1880; I've read some crap (though if it was really bad I ditched it before investing too much time), but I've also discovered authors I would never have read and whose books I often think about and want to go back to. The whole "greatness" thing isn't meaningless, but it's too often used as a club, and I find I'm better off not using it as a measuring stick. (And don't get me started on that guy who read "the great novels, all seven of them," meaning Jane Austen, every year and never read anything else. Humbug, say I.)

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  2. Still mulling this over. I spend most of my time reading new books looking for their hooks (like necromancy) or their energy (the idea of place and even experience being ratified by seeing them on screen). I still space out great books (of course, I'd include Walker Percy's The Moviegoer as great) but I guess I'm in the enviable position that T.S. Eliot would prescribe for us all, Wasteland-style, in that I read most of the great books written and translated into English before I turned 30 (in grad school I had an extensive list that ensured I read some things I might have otherwise never picked up.) One of the things I've been thinking about, with the proportion of new to old that I read, is how forgettable some of the new is. It's good to have some of the older classics in one's diet of books because they're memorable, both in terms of ideas and quotable lines.

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    1. That's a good point; I think to me "memorable" is more important than "great."

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  3. What a useful list, Jeanne. You don't happen to still have it, do you? I would like to see it. What was in the Sanskrit section?

    You're one of the bloggers I had in mind thinking about a "pop" approach to reading. A good pop critic still has a real background in the old stuff.

    I think of "great/non-great" not as a dichotomy but as a spectrum, with time passed - "for the ages" - useful as evidence but not exactly proof. Some art, for example, survives, but only in the hands of serious specialists. Not that you and I cannot ourselves become specialists. A great thing about the arts, the humanities, is that in the end there is no substitute for seeing for yourself. "Read-it-all" for whatever definition of "all" you enjoy.

    Oddly, I was listening to the "More of the Best" Grandmaster Flash & the Furious Five compilation when I read Languagehat's post, swear to God I was. Rap kinda clears my head in the morning, if I am lucky.

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  4. Yes, great is definitely a spectrum, and when talking about it I don't usually include my own specialty, which is long-18th-century works of satire that blame by praise, which includes broadsides and other ephemeral forms.
    I wish I still had that list. It was from the English department and so it had no Sanskrit section. It was divided into literary periods and we could skip two of them. I skipped medieval and early American. So I read the greatest works of English literature as defined by U of MD faculty in the 1980s: 16th, 17th, 18th, 19th, 20th century British and 19th, 20th century American. I remember that it was single-spaced and about one page for each century.

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  5. Sorry, I guess I misunderstood "translated into English."

    I myself have more or less skipped "early American." My 19th century list would definitely take up more than a page - I wonder how many - but that was 10 years of reading.

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  6. Oddly, I was listening to the "More of the Best" Grandmaster Flash & the Furious Five compilation when I read Languagehat's post, swear to God I was.

    The first rappers I fell in love with!

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  7. Every once in a while I binge on contemporary music, but very little of it stays in rotation for long and I end up listening to Haydn and Bartok again. But the binges are interesting, if sometimes baffling. Bafflement is a good thing.

    I keep telling myself that I'll read more contemporary novels, but I've had limited success with that project. Youmans is a reliable writer, and I think Carys Davies' quite surprising novella West should have a larger audience, but two weeks ago I was at a book shop and I picked up a Calvino and a Christie. My wife bought a stack of contemporary fiction; she is a better and more curious reader than I am. Though I have a big stack of contemporary African and Japanese novels I need to get started on. I assume there's some great stuff in that stack. I feel its greatness calling to me from across town.

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  8. My favorite rap albums of 2019 were "The Big Day" by Chance the Rapper, his wedding concept album, "Eve" by Rapsody, and "Hiding Places" by Billy Woods & Kenny Segal. All suitable for ossified tastes.

    Having said that, yes, bafflement, a good thing. The way I listen - this really is much like how I read - nothing stays in rotation. I always want new things, new to me, and thus often old.

    Carys Davies, Tessa Hadley - nice little side effect of this post - thanks! Youmans we of course all know, of course, of course. I'll write about her in a couple of days, I hope.

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  9. Rap kinda clears my head in the morning, if I am lucky.

    Might I recommend Chacun fait (c'qui lui plait) by Chagrin d'amour (1981)? Some convincingly argue that it's the first French rap track. It's certainly early morning stuff, even if morning here arrives from the sordid side of midnight. Bonus: it'll help you improve your filthy French slang.

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  10. Good Lord, that album cover, help! Are you sure about this? I'll give it a try. I'll try anything. Increases my cultural knowledge, right?

    I have had, basically, nothing but bad luck with European French-language pop music, except for Stromae. I listen to lots of French-language pop music, but its Congolese, Senegalese, etc.

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  11. This is not so bad. I'm listening to the whole album. There's a soukous, then a reggae. The rap is okay. The only rap anybody involved ever heard is Blondie's "Rapture," but at least the backing musicians have heard plenty of Chic.

    Oh no, that last song was truly terrible. So is this one. I should live-tweet listening to French pop albums. There's some entertainment.

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    1. Ma femme likes Serge Gainsbourg, though to me he just sounds like a lounge singer. I like some of Les Rita Mitsouko, especially the "No Comprendo" album. Very 80s pop/new wave, but Catherine Ringer had a great voice. There is no rapping, though.

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    2. I would absolutely subscribe to the Wuthering Expectations live-tweeting-French-pop-albums blog.

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  12. To anyone who wants to live-tweet French pop albums, Chagrin d'amour would be a great choice. Side two is pretty interesting, made up of song fragments and sound collage and all kinds of weird stuff. Surprises, lots of surprises.

    I don't quite get Gainsbourg, either. Earlier chanson singers are easy enough to enjoy. Les Rita Mitsouko I like pretty well, but they are sui generis, I am afraid. There is this whispery vocal style, that I associate especially with former French First Lady Carla Bruni, which has infected a generation of French singers and drives me nuts. Sing, will ya, sing!

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    1. I'm with you there on the Carla Bruni phenomenon, which can usually be alleviated by listening to Brigitte Fontaine's song Conne.

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    2. The French often have an antidote, an anti-whatever it is, somewhere in the culture.

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  13. I confess I don't really get/enjoy any Euro-pop. Pop music without the rhythmic vitality injected into American music by African-Americans just sounds pointless to me. But Afro-pop, now you're talking! Orchestre Baobab, Tabu Ley Rochereau, Franco, those are true deities.

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  14. The great African music compilation boom in the 1980s and 1990s, driven by Stern's and Earthworks and a handful of other devoted fans, was one of the great artistic events of my life, really.

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    1. This was my introduction. (That says it was released in 1988, but that must be the CD; the LP was one of my first purchases when I moved to NYC in 1981 -- I bought it at a table in Washington Square Park, probably from the guy who put out the record.) I still hear the "Africa" chorus from the first cut in my head whenever I think of it.)

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    2. Yeah, John Storm Roberts, in some sense the first of those devoted fans, a collector who loved he music so much he had to share it with everyone. That album is a legend, a great one.

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