A Few Words on Texture, with the help of John Cheever

I should like to offer some words on one of the most important elements in human made things in general and the arts in particular. Normally I would mention style or tone, but here I will speak of texture as a valid critical category.

When I speak of texture I in no way am speaking of objects which must have volume and mass, or even have a visual import or representation. I am talking about something different too from tone, a quality I consider the most crucial in any art (to say nothing of life). Texture possesses less specificity than tone. One way of understanding texture is to see it as a whole overarching set of assumptions in figural or representational form (say, that things should be hard and shiny, or light and airy, for example), whereas tone is more involved in particular emotional meaning. Texture deals with the most general of perspectives: how paragraphs are constructed in prose, mise en scene in film, quality of cloth in dress. This post will consist only of one quote from John Cheever. On posts to follow, I will use other examples from the different arts.

My example comes from the opening of John Cheever short story. I feel we can only fully appreciate this marvelous passage if we empty our mind of all the accumulative contextual stuff that we think we know about Cheever. I have to state it out in the open to clear the air. We should forget ideas about affluence, suburbia, alcoholism, the show Madmen, the sociology of the suburbs, his daughter Susan Cheever, what John Cheever's letters say, what Queer Theory has to say, his alleged bisexuality and the rest of it.

Now that I have gotten that out of the system we should proceed to the work. Not that those elements are unimportant. They might serve as a useful way for Cheever to get started, as initial generation of his electricity. But a passage like the following cannot be reduced to such discursive, conceptual notions. Moreover such concepts such as the ones in my list will prevent us from fully entering into Cheever's art, in essence feeling fully for his creations. Indeed its very existence is an explicit challenge to any attempt to contain it, so full it is of exuberance for the subject at hand.  What I am interested in Cheever is precisely what gets left out of my previous list. I have a feeling that what is left behind was what finally most interested John Cheever as well.

Reading the following passage makes one want to inquire about an entire mode of writing and its affective powers, its relationship to the reader. What does it mean that prose of this kind is no longer in great evidence? It surely cannot be that our times demand a different or more knowing kind of prose. I think the matter is quite the reverse: it is that we don't regard the texture of prose in the same way and we have given to prose a new set of work to do.  The times are what they are: the texture of art is a choice and it is only because we believe in notions like relevant and the appropriate - believe as the most fundamentalist believer does - that we see a reduction in a certain kind of prose. We brandish ourselves as worldly-wise and place older modes that appear to us as less informed into the category of  History: that which belongs to the past. We would do well to remember Faulkner however, who said that the past is never past.

Here then is the opening of John Cheever's "O YOUTH AND BEAUTY!"

"At the tag end of nearly every long, large Saturday-night party in the suburb of Shady Hill, when almost everybody who was going to play golf or tennis in the morning had gone home hours ago and the ten or twelve people remaining seemed powerless to bring the evening to an end although the gin and whiskey were running low, and here and there a woman who was sitting out her husband would have begun to drink milk; when everybody had lost track of time, and the baby-sitters who were waiting at home for these diehards would have long since stretched out on the sofa and fallen into a deep sleep, to dream about cooking-contest prizes, ocean voyages, and romance; when the bellicose drunk, the crapshooter, the pianist, and the woman faced with the expiration of her hopes had all expressed themselves; when every proposal-togo to the Faquarsons' for breakfast, to go swimming, to go and wake up the Townsends, to go here and go there-died as soon as it was made, then Trace Bearden would begin to chide Cash Bentley about his age and thinning hair. The chiding was preliminary to moving the living-room furniture. Trace and Cash moved the tables and chairs, the sofas, and the fire screen, the woodbox and the footstool; and when they had  finished you wouldn't know the place. Then if the host had a revolver, he would be asked to produce it. Cash would take off his shoes and assume a standing crouch  behind a sofa. Trace would fire  the weapon out of an open window,and if you were new to the community and had not understood what the preparations were about, you would then realize that you were watching a hurdle race. Over the sofa went Cash, over the tables, over the fire screen and the woodbox. It was not exactly a race, since Cash ran it alone, but it was extraordinary to see this man of forty surmount so many obstacles so gracefully. There was not a piece of furniture in Shady Hill that Cash could not take in his stride. The race ended with cheers, and presently the party would break up."


We must immediately remark that there is, to some eyes, something of the pathetic in the spectacle of a middle aged "Cash Bentley" reliving his glory athletic days for the amusement of his fellow affluent suburbanites. All of which leads us into Cheever's genius which partakes of a certain Balzacian or Flaubertian naturalized view of a scene, a whole way of life. Note he says "nearly every long party", "the ten or twelve people always remaining". There is a detached, objective quality in this, not unlike what Jean Renoir will do in his ensemble set pieces in films like Rules Of The Game or The Golden Coach. There is the sense that everybody is doing these things specific to a whole way of life. He writes "the chiding was preliminary to moving the table." There are certain types: "the crapshooter, the pianist, the bellicose drunk." The cumulative result is a kind of texture of a certain lifestyle.

Where Cheever is unique, I think, in moments like this, is that the people he is depicting are his people, in his neighborhood. In this he is not only objective but subjective for he is one of them and he partially tries to bring the reader into this neighborhood. As such, it is implicit in the prose that there is something actually universal about his admittedly narrow social milieu.

And last, but not least, there is an elegiac quality. Cheever loves these characters with his whole heart and soul. There is a naive kind of compassion that I think is rather American and for which there is great misunderstanding and misreading by certain readers who wish for a harder, cynical social satire.  It is the latter approach - that of Madmen specifically - that is so favored these days. The chief reason Cheever rises above the merely critical and skeptical is that Cheever actually sees something of faith and admiration in Cash Bentley's dreams. (This respect for dreaming connects a lot of Cheever's figures and connects Cash Bentley deeply to the hero of The Swimmer, for example.) This notion of a dream realized in prosaic or earthly, sometimes banal guises, and this notion that the dream must be realized while wrestling with community is a notion that is important to American arts and letters: community is both a source of meaning and feeling as much as emptiness and alienation. (It is in Hawthorne, Pynchon, Toni Morrison, in lots of places). Cheever achieves all of this through his language: though he offers a list of various items, he nevertheless combines such list of details with a specific affect. Of course such a strategy on Cheever's part leaves him open to criticism for real skeptics: those that see in his "WASP" characters nothing but error and privilege. Yet I would argue that all the very best writers have a similar attitude towards their subjects, whatever nation or status they happen to inhabit.

The general loss of Cheever's belief in a kind of sustaining dream is one of the reasons why writing like this is so rare these days. Few of us "believe" anymore in the way that Cheever did. This is not because we can't, but rather that we have given up or have chosen not to.

Any recourse to the zeitgeist will not do to justify the absence of this social lyricism from todays "realists". Rich Moody opens his novel on suburbia, The Ice Storm, with a direct address to the reader: "I am going to dish you this comedy about a family I knew when I was growing up." Moody then proceeds to list all of these technological and cultural differences between the 1990s and the 1970s. ("No answering machines. No call waiting.") There is the same use of a panoramic list, but the effect is completely "wised-up". I liked The Ice Storm; yet we are in a world, stylistically rather removed from Cheever. Rick Moody is like a young anarchist or Marxist out to kill off his parents rather than attempt to inhabit or understand them. Instead his sympathies are with the children.

Always the point of view in  contemporary art and culture is that of the children. (This is also the case, as critic Daniel Mendelsohn pointed out in The New York Review of Books, with Madmen, where Mendelsohn argues that the point of view of the show is through the often absent children, even though the jaded adults are the ostensible main figures of the series That is, the show is unable to finally come to terms with the adult leads - Joan, Don, Pegg, Roger etc. - because it is imaginatively narrowed by being from only the point of view of today's assumptions, those that would have been very young children in 1962.)

Similarly, I believe Rick Moody's choices reflect not the needs of our moment but rather what we think to be the needs of our moment. He - and we - could have gone in different or other directions than what we consider the relevant ones.

We see here an example of how much texture can do to create meaning. Space permitting I could have a whole panoply of examples of varying and differing textures - all of which would give us equally varying and differing views of the world or philosophies of life.

Gradations of Evaluations

There is a matter of daily life that is little discussed, even less understood and yet holds a key to our understanding of value. I am referring to the mode whereby we are engaged with an object with some interest, we find it serviceable in some way, functional, and yet, for a variety of reasons we do not exactly love or fully embrace the object in question. Too valuable to be mediocre yet too compromised to be great we might use words like average or okay to accurately express our reception.

It is a pity that this mode is so little discussed since it comprises the majority of our artistic experiences in this life (or it ought to, lest we are too promiscuous with our enthusiasms). One might say that the majority of experiences in life are like this as well. They are not irritating or tedious, yet do not create strong joy either. But we might find things to like in them.

This positive acknowledgement of that which is okay or "good enough" is pervasive in other parts of cultural life. It is certainly a key concept in newer psychologies, such as the concept of the "good enough parent."

One of the cultural reasons why this mode is underrepresented and under appreciated is the hyperbolic nature of our popular media and our linguistic habits. When the word "awesome!" is used to describe practically everything we experience to the point where it it functions as a thoughtless preposition rather than a superlative adjective, this can only signify our inability to take seriously the distinction between our likes and our loves. We might lose our appreciation of the above average.

Inability to read in this way accounts for the extraordinary enthusiasm for works which do not merit the volume of attention, especially mass cultural attention, upon them.

For example, whatever the merits of the epoch shaking show Madmen - i.e. the wardrobe is authentic and attractive, the drama is entertaining by contemporary standards of entertaining representation in drama, the behavioral and narrative events are emotionally absorbing - the show is not of the excellence of, say, Anton Chekhov. Yet one would never know this to read the reviews and reception of this award winning show. Curb Your Enthusiasm, on the other hand, is a kind of comedic masterpiece. It is rather like Chekhov! Indeed, one of the reasons why Curb Your Enthusiasm is superior to much of the rest of dramatic television is that it absolutely refuses to "glamorize" or overtly dramatize our terrible dailiness. This is not only because it is a comedy, because certain non-comedic dramas traffic in a similar dailiness (the films of Mike Leigh are an excellent example).

Importantly it is because Curb Your Enthusiasm confronts most directly the dilemma of the individual and the collective or community in ways that avoid the temptations of solutions. Madmen, on the other hand, cannot escape from a need to flatter our advanced progressiveness concerning class and gender, specifically even as it romanticizes a past that is objectively so much superior to our own in terms of quality of commodities, design, fashion, and so on. It wants us to enjoy the past vicariously, without having to specifically undergo too painfully the oppressiveness of the past, if, for example, we are women. This contradictory two-step is perfectly accomplished through that rather new Bill Condon influenced genre of contemporary costume drama, where getting all of the period details correct becomes the theme of the work, a mode that afflicts our cinema as well. (Walk The Line, Ray, Kinsey, and An Education all do this).

We imagine so extravagantly the past because we are unable to imagine sufficiently, save for a few bright figures like Larry David, the present. The problem is in part linguistic.

What has been lost is the kind of language used to describe most of daily life, which is, after all, concerned with events and states of consciousness which are neither bad nor great. They are not even mediocre. Rather they are are a curious yet most common variant of "okay".

Curiously and almost paradoxically, the inability to deal with the middle of life and art is connected with a loss of reverence for the "high" and loss of suspicion or skepticism for that which is "low". Everything that is merely passable is defined upwards and the "high" might become invisible or irrelevant. In her new book The Age Of American Unreason, Susan Jacoby makes the claim that we have lost a truly middle-brow culture, a phenomenon I can't help but be convinced is connected to the lack of a place afforded the "middle" in life; or at least a feeling for and understanding of the middle as a conceptually real and distinct, though large, part of culture.

In the current issue of Raritan, (Summer 2010 Volume xxx, Number 1), critic Robert Boyers, in an essay entitled "Pleasure Revisited", offers an evaluation of our inability to evaluate and even read that makes me see in him as close a kindred spirit as I could ever hope to find. Since his essay is such a perfect distillation of a background theme throughout these blogs I am compelled to quote him at great length. His word shall be the last.

"The militancy required to dismiss certain kind of work as 'popular' or 'pandering' or 'obvious' is rarely in evidence in our culture, where trash may be solemnly studied in the academy and accorded respect for its political content, and professors of literature no longer think it a part of their function to educate taste or rescue their students from escapist fantasy".

"If pleasure was, not long ago, associated with the capacity on the part of most writers, artists, and intellectuals to maintain a certain spiritual militancy that would allow them to savor works uncommonly rigorous or demanding, works that withheld from their audience an easy or immediate gratification, and that militancy is no longer felt to have anything to do with the pleasure most of us seek, then a momentous change has surely occurred. The reluctance to invoke certain distinctions brings in its wake an increasing inability to make them. thus do we see the blurring of boundaries between one kind of thing and another, the debasement of the language of value and description into meaningless labels or the borrowing of terms that once had a particular meaning for entirely alien purposes".

Book Review: David Shields Reality Hunger, A Manifesto (2010 Knopf)

"An artistic movement, albeit an organic and-as-yet unstated one, is forming. What are its key components? A deliberate unartiness: “raw” material, seemingly unprocessed, unfiltered, uncensored, and unprofessional. (What, in the last half century, has been more influential than Abraham Zapruder’s Super-8 film of the Kennedy assassination?) Randomness, openness to accident and serendipity, spontaneity; artistic risk, emotional urgency and intensity, reader/viewer participation; an overly literal tone, as if a reporter were viewing a strange culture; plasticity of form, pointillism; criticism as autobiography; self-reflexivity, self-ethnography, anthropological autobiography; a blurring (to the point of invisibility) of any distinction between fiction and nonfiction: the lure and blur of the real". (From David Shields, REALITY HUNGER: A MANIFESTO)

David Shields has written a book, a literary manifesto, that entertains nothing less than grand and venerable questions concerning both life and art and their relationship between them. In keeping with his dismissal of and contempt for traditional boundaries between forms and genres, his insistence upon the value of progressive newness as a criteria for artistic evaluation, and his upholding of the value of the aesthetic in an age increasingly dominated by journalistic obsession with facts on the one hand and fantastic escape from reality in the popular on the other, Shields has conceived the book as a motley mosaic, a patchwork quilt of aphorisms, many of them attributable to the author but just as many, if not more, taken from everywhere else: pop interviews, canonical works of art and English criticism, politicians' rhetoric, and more. His idea is to conceive of a literary art that has all the freedom of borrowing and quotation that we more normally associate with sampled DJ music or contemporary visual and performance art. More important for the present author of this blog's purposes, Shields wants to give nonfiction the same aesthetic value and independence normally given fiction and poetry, in essence to save nonfiction from the legions of popularizers, simplistic biographers, and obsessive history buffs.

In invoking the Oprah Winfrey and James Frey scandal, (concerning the revelation that the James Frey's memoir that Oprah Winfrey touted was in fact a work of fiction), Shields wants to remind us that to make an issue of truth and falsity of Frey's account is to confuse and conflate two notions of truth that should be kept quite separate, the confusion of which is a mark of philistinism. One account of truth is how closely an account adheres to the facts; the other is spiritual and aesthetic and has to do with truth in a more profound and qualitative sense. The former sense is, as hardly needs to be said, rather trivial in the aesthetic realm.

This latter sense is the view of truth that accords with Ezra Pound's "news that stays news", William Carlos Williams' line "it is difficult to get the news from poems/yet men die miserably every day/for lack/of what is found there", and an eternal verity about art being a lie that tells the truth. In keeping with this mission and conviction Shields makes sure we note that what was good in Frey's memoir was the fact that some of it was made-up but that the execution was not good. David Shields wants memoir to be regarded in much the same way as we regard the novel or short story and wants us to question naive and indeed philistine assumptions concerning how we we define and value veracity and mendacity.

Firstly, Shields' aphoristic book is a delight to read. Every paragraph or passage compels us to argue and think alongside it, to respond and question, as much our own motives and assumptions as well as the passage we are reading. Then there is the issue of Shields' taste. Shields often has exceptional taste as when he lauds the short fiction of Lydia Davis or gushes over the comedy of Sara Silverman, both of whom are arguably among the more important artists working in any medium today.

REALITY HUNGER is a dense work. Though it might strike one as minimalist on first appearance and in the truncated nature of its formal operation, in fact it is anything but minimalist: in the accumulative effect and weight of all of the quotations on art and life, its tonal shifting between casual jokeyness and modernist and classicist seriousness, its alternation of collage-like play and rigorous argument, its mixture of bald assertion and explicit demonstration, the completion of reading REALITY HUNGER makes one realize that one has been in the company of one of the more serious critics today. A more trendy way to put it is to say REALITY HUNGER is part of move towards a new sincerity or "post-irony" culture.

Throughout Shields extols the virtues of ellipsis which appears to support the potential "minimalist" tag. "How much can one remove and still have the composition be intelligible? This understanding, or its lack, divides those who can write from those who can really write. Chekhov removed the plot. Pinter, elaborating, removed the history, the narrative; Beckett, the characterization. We hear it anyway." This one passage is so excellent because in just one sentence Shields distills what in essence made those playwrights so valuable. But again, after about 300 of these numbered passages, the effect is to very much fill us in, to give us a dense history and a very clearly delineated plot. Because so many of the passages return to the same "master narrative" in a most incessant and compulsive fashion, the narrative that does emerge will be the concern of the remainder of my remarks.

David Shields is also careful in his book to never separate ethical from aesthetic questions. The issue of artistic form comes up incessantly and middlebrow culture often comes in for attack as being false or unreal in its effects. Nowhere is this seriousness about the ethics of artistic styles more clear than in Shields' decision to quote the infamous rightwing politician in the George W Bush administration who talked about the US being an "empire now" one that "makes its own reality" while liberal reporters merely play catch up as said reporters are stuck in a past and false paradigm where one "judiciously analyzed" reality. The policy wonk had nothing but contempt for the assumptions of the "reality" based community.

A more chilling quote has yet to be heard in a long time, because in it the speaker borrows a key assumption of hippie and antiestablishment spiritual and political movements: that our minds or consciousness determines in large part what happens to us and that detached observation is impossible, and uses that assumption in service of the worst aspects of the political and corporate establishment. One wonders if the usage of that belief by such company condemns the belief and is a final verdict on the hazards of Postmodernism. The speaker is not merely saying that because his gang is in power they can do what they want. Rather the speaker is saying that in this new world order there is simply no other way for any of us to live or comprehend reality.

Doubtless this state of affairs worries Shields as he seems to see it as connected with more innocent but banal forms of lowbrow entertainments. Unfortunately this is the one part of Shield's book that goes awry. Shields, in spite of his fondness for artistic innovation and criticism of tired and "false" forms, ironically holds to what is now a rather old line about art.

An example and clue to Shield's narrative of this can be found in the passage found above that introduces this review. This contains the belief that there exists this artistic movement that holds certain tones and styles and modes in common and this movement represents a kind of progress.

Though Shields might deny it, by holding to this belief he is indulging in a kind of historicism. By historicism I mean the word as it was specifically used by philosopher Karl Popper, especially in Popper's POVERTY OF HISTORICISM. As in many of the quotes where Shields complains about "novely" novels that no longer work, or when he quotes the critic Geoff Dyer about how "jazzy jazz" is not interesting anymore, David Shields believes that an age demands unique and quite specific works of art that are relevant and belong to that age.

If we took every single one of the qualities in Shield's passage we could gleam them for their fruits and possibilities; even better we can see their application in some of the greatest works of art of the past forty years. I read that list and think of Bruce Conner movies (speaking of the Zapruder film) of Rauschenberg, performance art, the great cinema verite movement. I think of jazz improvisation, of innovative novels with incredibly unreliable narrators, of the great comic monologues of Sara Silverman.

And above all, though Shields unfortunately does not mention his name, the three films of Andrew Bujalski that gave rise to the unfortunately named and misapplied term "mumblecore", FUNNY HAHA, MUTUAL APPRECIATION, and the latest BEESWAX. In Bujalski's case in particular the "deliberate unartiness" is actually the result of the most rigorous and sincerely involved attempt to make fictional and dramatic art out of the lives and culture of youth in a way I don't believe we have seen performed so successfully since the French and American New Wave some forty-five years ago. But of course it is, as in all art, the most arty thing imaginable, the product of writing (rather than nonprofessionals clowning around on the set), all of the indirection and ellipses as planned as they were in Shield's dramaturgical examples.

But if we look seriously at Shield's list of qualities, as excellent as some of the work is of which the list is constitutive, we are faced with some rather serious questions. Are the terms on the list more needed now than in the past? Do they even constitute a serious movement? And if they do should we herald such a movement as superior to other movements or modes?

Let me proceed carefully because I don't want to appear as defending an "anything goes" "its all good" ethic of relativism. I DO however proceed from a certain PLURALISM, because quite frankly, I don't see how a single mode can be said to be more truthful or valuable than others.

It is not merely that we cannot compare or rank differing styles, because, at times we can, as I will do now. I do this when I tell people that I think the writing on Curb Your Enthusiasm to be better than on Madmen. They might respond, you can't compare comedy and drama. But we compare them all of the time. If we say that AVATAR is stupid and unintelligent and FORTY YEAR OLD VIRGIN is witty and intelligent we are comparing a comedy with a drama. Though, like Rick Moody, and unlike Northrop Frye, I have very little use for genre as a critical tool.

One of the questions we have to ask concerns whether the aesthetic result is INTERESTING and MEANINGFUL, and, in accordance with those criteria, whereas MADMEN flatters us and offers us familiar ways of looking at the past and the present and the history of sexual politics, CURB asks many more involved questions about individual freedom, the nature of moral responsibility, free will, selfhood, and the conflict between community and individuality than does MADMEN. Both shows are involved in similar issues, that is, issues of the community and the individual (and in that sense are both deeply AMERICAN works of art in the tradition of, say, Hawthorne or James) but whereas MADMEN, as good as it is, resolves those questions in ways that are limiting and certain, and above all in conformity with certain beliefs we already have about emotion and psychology, CURB raises those questions not to be finally and fully answered but as an opportunity for yet further questioning. If MADMEN is enjoyable and entertaining (though at times for me irritating because of its aesthetic conservatism) CURB YOUR ENTHUSIASM is sublime. It is curious that as a comedy CURB is of course utterly dependent on commonplace sentiments and notions we have about human nature since that is one of the ingredients that generates laughter. Yet in the the course of a single episode such ideas are rigorously scrutinized chiefly through the tension between the anti-hero Larry David and the larger community. The answers are never so certain. Sometimes the problem is the political correctness and earnestness of the community, sometimes in the brutal honesty and tactlessness of Larry David or Jeff Garlin.

In MADMEN we are never in doubt about the repressiveness of Roger Sterling, for example. We are never for a moment allowed to forget the dilemma for women in the historical period in which it is set. And it is NOT a question of drama because the three playwrights Shields cited for their indirection were not chiefly comic. Because CURB YOUR ENTHUSIASM is largely improvised and MADMEN is painstakingly written this would appear to match Shield's opposition of spontaneity to contrived. But this is of little help because Andrew Bujalski's films are written yet appear to many onlookers as excessively improvised and CURB would appear to have been intricately planned in how all the misunderstandings and mixups play out and all of the story lines tie together at the end. Thus how a work of art FEELS has little relation to some of its most important constitutive procedures.

But some of the greatest works of art are comprised of exactly opposite modes to those on Shield's list. Anna Biller's films are most artful. They are painstakingly constructed and indeed often call attention to their craft. And yet the end results are marvelous, indeed marvelous precisely because of the resistance to a certain kind of accident in their construction and the most diligent commitment to a certain kind of planning. Tsai Ming Liang's films are from Taiwan and they are some of the most interesting and vital in cinema today. Yet Ming-Liang's films, like Biller's, are absolutely dependent upon qualities very different from those found on Shield's list. To name one example, to invoke the influence of Jacques Tati and Antonioni as Tsai does would be impossible without a certain commitment to rigorous planning. Conversely, it is equally true that certain works of art achieve their greatness from a principled commitment to accident. The controlled affect of the actors alone (In both Biller and Liang) is one crucial exception and a contrast to Shield's confession. Like the approach to rock criticism I decried in a previous post, Shields, for all of his devotion to the aesthetic is too tied to the journalistic, he believes the art to be a matter of "the scene" alone.

And if Shields has his Lydia Davis what of more traditional modes of fiction? indeed what does it mean to even discuss traditional versus modern styles of fiction? Joyce Carol Oates' accounts of consciousness are the most involved and involving imaginable as are those of Alice Monroe. That is, they avoid the sort of conscious (or seemingly unconscious?) omissions or ellipses of which Shields is so enamored. Both Oates and Munro situate their works in a seemingly naturalistic world and the kind of hermetic and imaginative enclosed spaces found in Lydia Davis' stories would be unthinkable and impossible in Oates and Munro.

And what of Frederick Seidel's poetry? In some ways it is raw and confessional yet Seidel is one of the last of the Decadents in that his poetry is the most worked over, gloriously exhibitionistic voice around. They speak of worlds and realms as far removed as possible than is found in, say, Gary Snyder, or Jorie Graham. And in jazz, the "rawness" of pianist Brad Mehldau's playing, the spontaneity of his angular lines and sparse ballads is something to revel in. But it is worlds apart from the planned extraversion and exuberance of someone closer to Oscar Peterson like Benny Green. Must we be forced to choose? And if so, what reasons are there to be given? And, how is any of it connected to issues of morality per se?

Another way of putting it is to say that different styles have different ways of doing things if only because we as individuals are so different from one another. David Shields worries about our middlebrow tastes lead him to be unduly exclusive at times in his assessments.

It is telling that at a conference at the Philoctetes Center it was a novelist, Rick Moody, who argued with Shields. Rick Moody was not so interested in questions of genre at all, still less in whether something was new or relevant; like most artists Rick Moody was interested above all in finding a way to express what he had to and finding the right form for that. This is a different matter than finding the correct form for the age we happen to be living in. Rick Moody has little patience for Shields' dismissive attitude towards certain forms thought to be tired - like the novel. After writing The Ice Storm and Purple America, surely if Moody believes in anything, its the novel. David Shields believes in the world too much; he has almost too much faith in the saving powers of documentary, broadly understood.

But might this faith in documentary be seen one day as in part a fashion and enthusiasm from the past? As always we are faced with the same questions with which I introduced this blog a month ago: what is the value of a thing? Where is this value to be found? What in its value is bound by a time and what in its value flows freely outside of a given time? Theses are good questions. David Shields is to commended for taking such questions seriously. He is a marvelous literary stylist to be sure. I had hoped, though, in the end that he were more skeptical and less sure than he is.

But perhaps I had wanted more criticism and less manifesto. He might proclaim his attraction for Sara Silverman but he missed an opportunity for a close reading of her linguistic achievements. For all of Shields' commitment to "rawness" and "spontaneity" he had already decided in advance what he thought and rather than see criticism as an opportunity for better or more interesting questions, Shields seemed to have had perhaps one answer too many.