Some of the interesting criticism I read this week:
Wyatt Mason on Pierre Michon:
"Many writers have produced fictions inspired by history. What is notable about Michon’s use of history is how wholly he has managed to make it submit to his larger concern: how a particular kind of violence, a uniformly male violence, an animal sexual urge to seize the world and have it submit to its will, is the source of both human cruelty and artistic creativity.". . .
Kevin Pickard on the use of topical references in fiction:
"Wallace is right in asserting that sometimes the author wants to place a novel squarely in 2016 (just as an author sometimes wants to place the novel in 1976). The debate shouldn’t be about creating timeless fiction, because that endeavor is nonsense. The debate should be about the story’s setting. Sometimes it is necessary to place the novel in a specific, historical present.". . .
Kevin Hart's Poetry and Revelation, reviewed by Christopher Watkin:
"Drawing consistently on [phenomenology] in his discussion of revelation, Hart urges his readers to bracket not only Edmund Husserl’s 'natural attitude,' but what he calls the 'supernatural attitude' that understands the propositional, creedal truths of religion 'as though they referred to states and situations of the same modal status as states and situations in the natural world.' The bracketing of the supernatural attitude does not amount to doubting (or believing, or denying) the existence of God or the supernatural order; the question of existence is bracketed in favor of a phenomenological “attentive response to what is given.”. . .
Jonathan Foltz on Twin Peaks: The Return:
"To be sure, the scope of Twin Peaks has grown larger with the new season. But it also sometimes feels like a show disintegrating before our eyes, a once-whole fictional world cracking to bits. Lynch, like the practitioner of late style that Adorno describes, does not seek to bring about a “harmonious synthesis.” Drawing instead upon 'the power of dissociation, he tears [both the subjective and objective elements of the artwork] apart in time, in order, perhaps, to preserve them for the eternal.'”. . .
Eric Lyon on Elliott Carter:
"Carter’s concern for high culture doesn’t seem very possible in the early 21st century. Instead, this is an era of hybridity. Jeffery Mumford’s shared influences of Carter’s music and disco is emblematic of 21st century classical music. The composer who also has a band (even if that band is a new music ensemble) is more the rule than the exception today. . .The enforcement of a distinction between high art music and vernacular music, which was essentially a prerequisite for Carter’s music to develop as it did, no longer holds much credibility. Although Carter’s ideas can continue to propagate in the internet space of hybridity, the space for single-strain incubation of high-art projects is severely diminished, compared to that of the 20th century.". . .
Justin Desmangles on the Beat-era poet Bob Kaufman:
"As with the mythical 'Jes’ Grew' from Ishmael Reed’s masterpiece Mumbo Jumbo, for Kaufman the sound of jazz and the message that it brings animate the body into ritual action. The word is made flesh, or rather the meaning contained in the sound of the word, the consciousness expressed by its vibration, becomes physical veracity and free movement. This principle is central to African religion as it is understood in the New World. Attempts to remove it from respectful commentary on the origins of the New World have been frequent and have no doubt contributed to Kaufman’s conspicuous absence from the canon of American literature."
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