Miranda July, author of the just released No One Belongs Here More Than You, appears in Blonde Redhead’s newest music video. The song is “Top Ranking,” from the band’s 23.
Watch it in: Quicktime [recommended by moi] / YouTube.
Listen: Play in new window | Download
I never want to hear the phrases ‘It was just like a TV show,’ or ‘It was just like a movie,’ or any variation on those in word choice or arrangement, ever again.
A few nights ago on the 10 o’clock news—which I never watch and shouldn’t have—the lede for a story about a local bail bondsman who (1) was kidnapped, (2) was tortured, and (3) escaped, was the following: “If you were a TV writer for a show like LAW & ORDER, you’d probably come up with a story like this.” That was the anchorman’s introduction, after which the show went to an eyewitness who said essentially the same thing: “It was just like a TV show.” Must we revel in our detachment?
The bondsman was tortured for days and that’s how his story’s introduced. No focus on the pain/suffering. Focus rather on his story’s similarity to an episode of your favorite cop/lawyer show, which by the way has stories “ripped from the headlines.” TV reflects reality, reality is compared to the TV show and then turned into a TV show—and so on and so on until we can’t live through any sort of life-drama without seeing ourselves as fictional figures at the center of a television show that must, therefore, have some epiphanic moment, or closure, and end with a song by Los Lobos.
I wouldn’t level the same complaint at those who—of 9/11—said, “It was just like a movie.” That was an incapacity to describe a tragedy whose magnitude we’d never witnessed except in films and so is forgivable. What happened to this bail bondsman goes on every day, though. We are capable of a fitting description. By reducing his story to the level of an L&O plotline, we’re reducing what he suffered through and the achievement of his escape. We aren’t doing his story justice.
Neither would I complain the same of someone who says, “I feel like a character in a novel,” because the long forms of fiction and non-fiction writing allow for a fuller approximation of reality. Television shows and movies are, by necessity, boom-boom-boom, from set piece to set piece, from one emotional drama to the next. Every scene/shot is essential. Meanwhile, novels can afford to include sections that reveal only character, that focus on the events of everyday life. So, novel readers are allowed this, thanks.
I hate this even more: “Everyone tells me I should have my own reality show, because blah blah blah…” Such statements are always followed by the most boring stories you’ve ever heard.
Finally you have returned, John Rambo. Where have you been?
At first, this trailer appears to advertise a serious drama. The Goldsmith score, the Christian prayer, the debate about whether to interfere in a genocide until a pretty American blonde is killed. By the end, it looks like it’d easily belong sandwiched between PLANET TERROR and DEATH PROOF.
The way craggy-faced ole Sly says, “John” and “long time” at the trailer’s beginning breaks my heart. JOHN RAMBO and ROCKY BALBOA are obviously his double aught attempts to deconstruct his iconic, superheroic characters from the ’80s. They’re equivalent to THE WATCHMEN, in a way. Rocky’s now a gentle old man, managing a restaurant and wearing his huge spectacles and cute hat to the supermarket. Rambo’s still the loner, caressing his cross in solitude, but older now, more pacifistic. UNTIL, a horrific act occurs that rips him from his peaceful life and forces him to become a decapitating, throat-ripping badass. To which I say, YES.
And I will be there for the midnight screening. Fourth row center. You can count on me, Stallone.
Please pardon my momentary resurgence, but a recent newspaper piece must be addressed. After this post, I will disappear once again to a week of purging and packing, leaving this fecund territory to the kind and vibrant guest bloggers.
The most elitist words I’ve read in a newspaper recently were from Richard Schickel. The piece, written by a divorced transplant from Milwaukee who received a mere bachelor’s degree at the University of Wisconsin* (curiously, this “education” is elided from Schickel’s online resume, as well as Schickel’s lengthy article about revisiting Milwaukee), declares criticism to be work “that requires disciplined taste, historical and theoretical knowledge and a fairly deep sense of the author’s (or filmmaker’s or painter’s) entire body of work, among other qualities.”
In fact, this article is something of a cannibalization of Schickel’s more level-headed Harper’s article from January 1970, in which he also evoked Sainte-Beuve:
Ideally, of course a critic is not a performer, not a walking edition of Consumer Reports, not a foppish snob of the sort George Sanders defined for us (with the historical help of George Jean Nathan) in All About Eve. Ideally, and especially if he is functioning in a mass journal, he should be, I think, a well-informed leader of the theoretically endless discussion between artists, commercial interests, and the audience.
Actually, it was Joseph L. Mankiewicz, who wrote and directed All About Eve and put the words in Sanders’ mouth, thus defining this notion of foppish snob. Sanders was merely the actor. And I’m troubled by the idea of a critical viewpoint being interwoven with commercial interests.
But no matter. The question then is whether Schickel, in his reviews, truly has the chops to live up to his own critical definition.
Here is a man who spends half of his review of Lucky You speculating upon how Curtis Hanson’s film perform at the box office. For the “disciplined taste” portion of Schickel’s review, we are told that the film has “a touch of romance, a touch of suspense and a touch of wildness.” I was unaware that good criticism involved emulating a Betty Crocker cookbook.
Here is a man who declares of the late Adrienne Shelly’s film Waitress, “It appears to be a true reflection of her spirit.” Did Schickel personally know Shelly? Or is he buying into what the newspaper articles represented Shelly to be? And if the latter, what bearing does this any of this have on the film in question?
Here is a man who begins his review of Perfect Stranger with this lede: “Halle Berry is, in my opinion, the most beautiful woman in the world.” Schickel has apparently confused writing a review in Time with sliding a Viagra prescription form across a pharmacy counter.
It is clear from these recent samples that Schickel is no Wilson or Orwell, and certainly no Dan Green. That a man with decades of journalistic experience would be writing such trite summations is a testament to his flaccid abilities.
And if these dubious exemplars of “disciplined taste” aren’t enough, here also is a man who wrote a bitchy article in the December 1971 Harper’s about the small audiences that received him as a lecturer. “We could all have met in Uncle Ralph’s living room,” wrote Schickel.
We thus form a clearer picture of Schickel’s motivations, which are not so much about being a critic, but about commenting in a gossipy and digressive matter upon “commercial interests,” the sinuous and sensational qualities of the artists in question, and, above all, the grand desire of being read and received in person by bounteous audiences. This would seem to work against the very “hairy-chested populism” that Schickel is bemoaning.
I do not disagree that criticism, whether appearing in print or online, should be written at the highest level possible and should be as all-encompassing and interconnected as it can under the rather frazzled circumstances. I am now working on a review. Within twelve hours of landing in San Francisco and still suffering from jet lag, I made a trek out to Berkeley to obtain and read a hard-to-find, out-of-print volume to put this author — which falls into the “inflated” reputation and “trash culture” that Schickel refuses to take seriously — into context. I have done this neither to win over audiences, nor because of hubris or the need to be “showy” or “quotable.” I do this because it is my job and I do it as honorably and as honestly as I can, no matter who the author or the media outlet. And if I ever remarked about an author’s physique or third-hand gossip associated with an author within a review, I would hope that readers would roundly pillory me for such wankery.
That latter consequence is what comes from the blogosphere being a democratic medium. It is a beneficial mechanism that acknowledges merit (or lack thereof). Why can’t bloggers (or anyone for that matter) comment upon a book? How then are they to form and develop their own literary opinions and sensibilities? And instead of declaring them parasites, why can’t the critical community learn to assist or encourage them?
Schickel fails to understand that, by way of expanding options in a democratic medium, it remains ever more possible to find “oases of intelligence and delight,” if one looks hard enough. He seems inured to even contributing to these potential oases. He presumes that criticism and the joyful archipelagos of art must remain perennially dictated by a select mainstream elite.
But how does one live life, whether as human or reader, with any personal growth or joie de vivre when one is incapable of overturning a few rocks or occasionally rejecting this imperialism? How can one maintain “disciplined taste” if one is in an ivory tower, perched too high to hear the splendid susurrations of the street?
* — If Schickel is to cast aspersions upon Dan Wickett’s personal background (as opposed to his work), it seems only fair to do the same with Schickel. I do not know what area Schickel’s BA was in (he has, indeed, been less than forthcoming about it), but I have been apprised by the University of Wisconsin — Madison that confirming such a detail can be done through the National Student Clearinghouse, of which I cannot get a human being on the phone to set up an account and thus perform a verification of his degree.
One of the writers in my 1979 “Some Young Writers I Admire” article did have a substantial, if offbeat, literary career in Candada, but as his Wikipedia entry notes, he “retired from writing in 1995, and is now self-employed as a day trader.” As he told the Toronto newspaper Eye Weekly in his final interview, “I intend to disappear totally. I already stopped writing two years ago. I will never publish another book–why should I? I’ve produced more literature than this country ever deserved.”
Yet he’s still well-known and admired by those who bought his books directly from the author in the many years he sold his self-published editions on the streets. For example, see the reminiscences of this Greece-based blogger:
Kilodney would stand on the busiest streets in Toronto with a small cardboard sign hanging from his neck. They would read
Pleasant Bedtime Reading
Putrid Scum
Slimy Degenerate Literature
Dull Stories for Average Canadians
Literature for the Brain-Dead
Worst Selling Author — Buy My Books
Rotten Canadian Literature
Albanian Chicken StoriesHis face was serious, even forbidding to some people who passed by and happened to make eye contact with him. I don’t remember ever feeling intimidated by him or if I spoke to him much the first time I saw him. Soon enough, however, I knew him well enough to stand around and chat with him whenever I saw him. He would complain about how bad business was and gape stupidly at passers-by who ignored him. I remember him once droning, “Hockey books. Hockey books. Get your hockey books.”
Once, a tough-looking teenager passed by as we were talking and shot him a glance.
“You know,” I said when the kid was about five paces away, “I don’t think he’s going to mention to his friends that he saw you today.”
“Are you kidding?” Crad said. “He’s forgotten me already.”
I first read something by Crad Kilodney when I was an MFA student at Brooklyn College in 1975. The fiction editor of Junction, the literary magazine of BC’s English graduate students, I found an issue in our files that began with a remarkable story, a punning, sly narrative told by a father watching his five-year-old son Dick at the beach as he muses on three topics: crabs, sand and McKinley assassin Leon Czolgosz. It ends with the narrator observing “an interesting natural phenomenon” when his child gets hit by a lightning bolt. Five years later that story, its nondescript title changed, would become the title story in Kilodney’s successful 1980 commercially-published collection, Lightning Struck My Dick.
Before that, in the 1970s, I read many of Kilodney’s wonderfully funny, weird, idiosyncratic stories (“The Hardworking Garbagemen of Cleveland,” “The Mentally Disturbed Astronomers of Cincinnati,” “Forget That Grapefruit; Here Come the Midgets”) in many literary magazines, from Rick Peabody’s Gargoyle and Ed Hogan’s Aspect to Tom Whalen’s Lowlands Review, which devoted an entire 1978 issue to a Crad Kilodney chapbook, Mental Cases.
It was through Tom that I learned the real name of Crad Kilodney and we began an intense correspondence, sending long letters back and forth several times a week between Brooklyn and Toronto. I learned that “Crad” (his identity has never been revealed and I will not do so here) was born in 1948 in Jamaica, Queens; raised on Long Island; had a degree in astronomy from the University of Houston; and moved to Canada out of disgust with Watergate and U.S. culture generally. He decided to become a writer and had an early success with the first unsolicited story accepted by The National Lampoon.
While on Long Island after college, he’d worked for a leading vanity publisher, giving him a lifelong affection for and inspiration from the crackpots who paid to have their horrendous novels and bizarre conspiracy theories and weird treatises “published” by Exposition Press. In Canada he’d had a series of miserable jobs in publishing, working as a sales rep for major publishers like McClellan and Stewart and finally ending up doing menial work in book warehouses among colleagues he considered mentally deficient.
At the first of many meetings during his annual summer visit to his grandparents’ house in Jamaica (my mouth still waters thinking of the sweet “Greek goodies” made by his grandmother, who once owned a diner), when we were both about to have short story collections come out from commercial publishers, I learned of Crad’s plan to quit work and begin selling his books on the street.
Having never in my life met such a misanthrope, I wondered why he would subject himself to a public he despised. On the other hand, he was very kind to nearly everyone he met: he spent three weeks with me in Florida one winter and when we traveled to New Orleans to teach at NOCCA in Tom’s writing program, Crad was excellent and much loved by the students. I still recall how they adored his reading of a story with about sixteen false starts, “Jap Scientologists Ate My Grandfather.”
Working on the streets of Toronto for seventeen years — often he’d stand near the Toronto Stock Exchange building — Crad lived a meager existence selling the nearly 30 little books he published under his own Charnel House imprint. (He also occasionally had a commercial book out, like Pork College from Canada’s respected Coach House Press.) His titles were often memorable: Bloodsucking Monkeys from North Tonawanda; Bang Heads Here, Suffering Bastards; Sex Slaves of the Astro-Mutants; Junior Brain Tumors in Action; Suburban Chicken-Strangling Stories; I Chewed Mrs. Ewing’s Raw Guts; Simple Stories for Idiots; Foul Pus from Dead Dogs. Ignored and ridiculed by most of Canada’s literary establishment, Crad nevertheless had for years a secret affair with an older, respected writer (she had won the prestigious Governor General’s Award) that ended only with her death.
As “The Rev. Crad Kilodney” (he was a Universal Life minister), he wrote a monthly advice column for the Canadian porn magazine Rustler, in which he answered mail from people with sexual perversions, all attributed to real-life people who’d crossed him or his friends, like the Minneapolis Tribune reviewer who called my first book “unbelievably bad.” He also had a column in Toronto’s alternative weekly Only Paper Today, “Crad Kilodney’s Vanities,” in which he reviewed horrendously awful vanity press books; later, he got Tom Whalen, me and other writers to join him in creating deliberately terrible short fiction for several volumes of his Worst Canadian Stories.
By the late ’80s, Crad had become a Canadian cult figure, beloved by many who befriended him and championed his works. A film documentary about him premiered at the 1993 Toronto Film Festival. In a 1988 prank, Crad submitted a number of stories by famous writers to the CBC Radio literary competition, many under absurd names. When the stories by Hemingway, Chekhov and others were screened out by the jury, it made a funny news story as Crad said he’d proven that the establishment could not recognize quality literature.
As his Wikipedia entry notes, in 1991 Crad was arrested for selling commercial goods without a license, “making him the only Canadian writer ever arrested for selling his own writing. At various times he kept a tape recorder with him and recorded quite a bit of bizarre byplay between himself and prospective customers; the tapes are extremely rare and are collector’s items (much as original printings of his books are). Several of his stories (such as “Henry”, featured in Girl on the Subway) are also inspired by these experiences.”
Crad and I gradually grew less close over the years. He did not want to get a computer to correspond by email. To me, his stories began to be more scatalogical (one book, a very dark one about his life on the street, was called Excrement) and to some extent racist and xenophobic. I believed he stayed too long on the streets, but what else was there for him to do?
Finally, when his grandmother and then his parents died in the mid-’90s, his inheritance allowed him to retire and concentrate on being an investor — something he’s been very successful at. He specializes in Canadian mining and energy stocks and has become quite well-known in these circles. The Toronto writer Syd Allan has set up some Crad Kilodney web pages which for a while contained monthly columns by Crad. But he’s gone from the literary scene, which has led to blog entries like Whatever happened to Crad Kilodney?
I hope one day that some publisher will revive Crad Kilodney’s literary career and republish his best stories, like “The True Story of My Dentist, Dr. Mark Litvack,” which begins:
You know how it is when you’re a writer. Everyone you know wants you to write about him. One of these days, I’ll put all of those people in one story, give each of them a few good lines to say, and that’ll be that.
However, my dentist, Dr. Mark Litvack of 1500 Bathurst St., Toronto, has finally persuaded me to devote a story to him. The fact that I have a bill outstanding since last year is not the main reason for doing so. When I find a fascinating character, I can’t help but sit down and write about him.
I’ve come to learn quite a lot about Dr. Litvack, or Mark, as I call him since we’re about the same age. He never rushes with me, because he likes to chat. Sometimes he poses questions I cannot adequately respond to when he’s working on me, but I’m sure when I grunt, he knows exactly what I intend to say. That’s the kind of rapport that one only finds between a writer and his dentist.
Before I get down to the story itself — although it’s more of a biographical sketch, I guess — I want to take a moment to tell you that a lot of my success as a writer is due to Dr. Litvack. When you have pain in your mouth or have lost a filling, you just can’t concentrate on writing nice Canadian stories. At least I can’t, and I’ll bet if you’re honest, you’ll admit you can’t either.
So I see him regularly to take care of those cavities before they get big. Usually I don’t have any because I take good care of my teeth. Dr. Litvack showed me how. He took out this giant-size plastic set of teeth and showed me the proper way to brush. I also floss, which a lot of people don’t. A lot of the confidence that comes across in my writing is really the result of good oral hygiene
Crad, we hardly knew you.