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roger—

Have you ever met E. L. Doctorow? I’d come here last night to trash Gangs of New York, praise The Alienist and mention Doctorow’s Waterworks and then decided that it was all off-topic. I think Doctorow’s Ragtime is, so far as I can judge, the best historical novel of my lifetime. I’ve always wanted to ask him if he did look through Houdini’s private, unpublished papers and find the “one genuine mystical experience of his [Houdini's] life.”

Semi-irked here, Roger. Based on that editorial, I would be delighted to dismiss any writer as at best a facile technician with no significant insight into human nature. But you stand up for her books, so I will have to check out at least one.

In general, the political beliefs of writers are no more to be trusted than the political beliefs of Hollywood actors, although writers will (for the most part) be more articulate in expressing themselves.

Roger L. Simon is, as this blog proves, an exception to the rule. So is Jamie Irons, who is clearly a mensch as well as being a very fine poet.

As I commented in my own blog, please take another read of Ms. Smiley’s article. Her pain and bitterness are so evident, it is hard to read it and not see the damaged child inside. By no means does this sit her in the clear for such ridiculous charges against conservatives, but her editor should also use more sense. Her raw emotion should not be on display. It affords her no dignity, and skews her judgment. For more of my comments, please see my entry on my blog….but take another look. While her language is certainly offensive, you have to feel sorry for her, too. Apparently she is a very successful novelist – yet she has not moved past her bad experiences in religion to be able to see the world clearly.

Youth Vote

In Imaginative Qualities of Actual Things, Gilbert Sorrentino said: ìAll these people are follow-the-dots pictures — all harsh angles that the mind alone can apprehend because we have already seen their natural counterparts. Iím saying that if you know Leo, youíll see him plain. If not, youíll see what I let you see. The beauty of fiction is that it goes two ways, at least. Out, into the world of the readerís experience and in, into the stringencies of the writerís tyranny. The more harshly the latter is exercised, the purer the prose, so that as Ford builds his overwhelming lie, Christopher Tietjens, we move, with each word, into a realm of total truth. More real than the most meticulous conversation of John OíHara. Prose will

kill you if you give it an inch, i.e., if you try and substitute it for the world.î

Works of science vary in scope, but on a certain level every such work tends toward the universal.

Works of art, on a certain level, tend instead toward universesóif one can understand a universe, a gamut, the ìtotal,î as a scope just like the universal, the singular, the special, etc.

A work of art develops its own universe of ìdiscourse,î its own modality as a budding off of others, those of its genre or tradition or vein or whatever, its own overall tone or tonality or keeping, in which the parts take on special & vibrant meaning, kinds & qualities of feeling. Now, of course, any work of architecture, engineering, medicine, science, math, etc., sets up its own universe of discourse to some extent. But a work of aesthetic art takes this very much farther.

This doesnít mean that the work will necessarily seem to be in its own hermetic & separate world. Some works seem that way, while others seem like open windows on parts of our world, & some even seem orphically to infuse the everyday world with life & existence. One does appreciate accuracies of feeling in the work. And the ìpartsî & ìmaterialsî of the work may include actual things simply as mentioned & left to a reader to imagine or remember, so the work does reach out to incorporate, in that sense, actual parts of the world, & thereby subjects itself to constraints observable at work in the work. E.g., ìthe gently rolling hills of Vermontî would sound pretty stupid except maybe in a science-fiction novel.

If such simple factual inaccuracies about singular cases can weaken a work of art, so can other kinds, though artists, herding together with those of similar education, sometimes lose sight of this.