Call me the Managing Editor of the Washington Review of Books.
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In The Hedgehog Review, Alan Jacobs on Pauline Kael:
That is to say: Kael was “always shifting our attention to the drama of her thought processes” because she was writing “a single long, indirect, and utterly original kind of autobiography.” And because she was an American of her generation, that autobiography could be told only through the experience of movies. One should think of her millions of words of movie reviews not as movie reviews but rather as chapters in her own story. Schickel says that “in a sense, she practiced criticism in much the same way that audiences leaving the theater after a film practice it. ‘I liked it,’ we say, or ‘I hated it.’” He means this point as a critique; it is better seen as the key to her importance as an autobiographer.
What Kael’s autobiography centers on, I argue, is mixed emotions—a confused and ultimately irresolvable complex of responses to the story that the movies present to us—the story about our lives, especially as Americans, but really as citizens, or inmates, of the twentieth century. John Ford’s Stagecoach (1939) she wrote, is “a mixture of reverie and reverence about the American past that made the picture seem almost folk art; we wanted to believe in it even if we didn’t.” Wanting to believe but not quite believing; questioning and doubting and yet also affirming and celebrating—this is Kael’s constant experience of the movies, and of being an American. The two experiences are, effectively, one. And now that her weekly schedule, and in many cases the movies she wrote about, have receded safely into the past, we have a chance to see her real achievement and value it for what it is.
[Later in the piece Jacobs discusses Kael’s praise of Brian De Palma’s Casualties of War (1989), from which I suddenly understood Kael’s love of De Palma and the New Hollywood more generally. These are filmmakers who, like her, grew up on movies and think about everything in terms of movies. De Palma is just the most obvious and unsubtle about it; all those fantasias on a theme by Hitchcock demonstrate that Hitchcock’s works are for him the central texts in understanding obsession, desire, the movie camera, and probably sight itself. —Steve]
In our sister publication on the sweet Thames, Anne Carson goes to a Rosalía concert:
At the same time, it’s hard to imagine a Rosalía performance without the video. If you were seated in the upper reaches of the basketball arena you would see Rosalía and her dancers as nothing but a tiny diagram of bodies way, way, way down on the stage—it might as well be the fifth century B.C. and the Theatre of Dionysos in Athens, where the dramatic action took place in view of probably fifteen to sixteen thousand spectators all peering down at a small central orkhestra. But those ancient actors wore masks. They were intended mythically. They had no personal faces. Rosalía’s face is projected six feet high behind her all the time. As the spectators in front of me remain standing, I mostly watch her on video. Her face, her theatre, her palimpsest of bad love. Emotional opulences flood across it, mythic in a technological way. I confess, saturating myself in the video like this feels a little uncommitted. Is there something too easy about video? As a form of attention? I don’t have to work for it. And I wanted to work for it, I wanted to work for her, to match her heroism.
We require heroism of our entertainers. We want them sacrificing themselves to a certain ultimate degree of input. No one can sing this loud, and yet she does. No one can dance this hard and long, but she goes on. No one can survive being this intensely cherished, but it is we who are wrung out like sponges watching her, hearts pounding, slightly afraid of what’s next.
[The heroism we want is the heroism of surviving our cherishing; we demand everything from them, and then we demand they be worthy of it as they endure it.
Not that they ever are, and not that it ever helps them if they recognize the situation—and not that we understand them any better for their efforts. Elvis has been dead for almost a half-century now; his rock and roll from the ’50s, which is mostly of interest for its historical importance, still overshadows his far more essential ’70s period, when all the kitsch and goofiness and Vegas lounge stuff both obscure and manifest his endless desire to give the audience what they want, to give them as much of himself as he could. (As an interpreter of ballads he might not have an equal.) To listen to it now, with the benefit of hindsight, is to be wrung out like a sponge knowing what’s next.
For all its faults, Baz Luhrmann’s Elvis (2022) got this—got it so well that it cribs the scene from Amadeus where a dying Mozart dictates his Confutatis to a Salieri who can’t believe what he’s hearing and has Elvis invent the intro to his ’70s live performances of “That’s All Right” as he is teaching it to his band members. Elvis is not, in that moment, dying; but the parallel is too obvious to miss. —Steve]
Two in Portico; first, Sam Sacks on Machado de Assis:
Death does inspire a liberating indifference to protocol, however, and the hallmarks of Cubas’ storytelling are frankness and distractibility. Cubas constantly audits his own writing, pointing out its failures. (One chapter reads in its entirety: “But, unless I am much mistaken, I have just written an utterly pointless chapter.”) At the same time, he browbeats his putative reading public, whom he says demands facile, plot-driven novels and is too frivolous to appreciate his meandering and digressive approach. Those digressions occasion some of the funniest moments. Cubas interpolates whatever pops into his head, be it a dream or random memory, a platitude, a complaint, or a curtailed observation. “I’ll say only that the most upstanding man I ever knew was a certain Jacó Medeiros or Jacó Valadares; I can’t quite remember his name,” Cubas notes. “Perhaps it was Jacó Rodrigues. In any event, Jacó.”
The novel is founded on a sardonic subversion, as it tries to fob off a fatuous life as a grand one, worthy of a memoir in the heroic manner of Benvenuto Cellini or François-René de Chateaubriand. That Cubas’ attempt is so hapless, and therefore so recognizably human, adds to the dark humor. Machado presents the book’s ironic premise with a knowing grin—he tests the proposition that irony can be deployed ironically. In the final chapter, Cubas concludes that his signal greatness was an act of omission: He never had children and thereby rescued another generation from the misery of existence.
[Behind the paywall are even more links to the best and most interesting writing from the past few days, Upcoming books, What we’re reading, and Critical notes. Today’s specials:
A Poem by Kingsley Amis and making fun of other poets
Richard Yates writes an amazing (I mean that pejoratively) sentence in a letter
Short stories in song
If you’re interested in any of that, and if you want to support the WRB in making the lifelong task of literacy not take anyone’s entire day, please subscribe.
And if you’re already a subscriber, thank you very much. Why not share the WRB with your friends and acquaintances? The best way to support us is by subscribing, but the second-best is by sharing the WRB with other people. —Steve]
