Overwhelming and underwhelming: that’s the phrase that some bloggers and I settled upon to describe this massive event. It’s overwhelming in the sense that it is truly massive (as any big industry trade show must be), with endless rows and rows of booths where publishers big, small, (and self-) hawk their wares. There is a seemingly endless spray of people flowing into the giant exhibition floor from all entry points, and you are jostled constantly as you thread through the crowds. On top of this there are wacky promotions going on at nearly every juncture – an author dressed up like an Elizabethan princess, dancing dogs and grannies wearing matching outfits, a balloon animal sculptor – along with lots of promotional freebies being thrust at passersby who must also avoid the snaking lines of people waiting to see some personality or another signing books at a publisher booth. The independent row felt like a safe haven – much less crowded and populated by less frenzied folks. But it was underwhelming too in that the interactions I have with some of these folks over email already are far more valuable than the hurried face to face meetings that end up happening at this event. While the Expo itself is an exercise in endurance, the parties that came after – including the LBC affair – were much more fun and relaxed. But more on that later, I need to get downtown to dive in again. I’ll wrap things up with a more detailed report – including my finally meeting so many great bloggers whose blogs I read daily – by the end of the weekend.
Book Expo Dispatch: Overwhelming and Underwhelming
Is My Book Jewish? An Afternoon with Anna Solomon
“In my early years as a writer,” she says, “I felt like I had to write. But some part of me wanted to stop. There was a real appeal for me to do something where the answers were provided … just to have a job or be in a community where it was clear what I was supposed to do. That would’ve been easier. At its base, there’s this relationship to writing itself. Writing is so scary and unknown. When writing fiction, no one tells you what to do. There’s terror in having freedom.”
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Marfa: Donald Judd’s Melancholy Monument
I recently made the pilgrimage to what the French would call one of the hauts lieus de l’art: Marfa, Texas. Like any place of pilgrimage worthy of the name, Marfa is remote and difficult to get to. One makes the journey because the artist Donald Judd, beginning in the 1970s, moved his base of operations to this former cattle trading center, gradually buying up several properties in Marfa, Then, with the help of New York’s Dia Foundation, he purchased an entire disused Army base next to the town, over 300 acres of industrial scale warehouses, barrack and office buildings, and scads of empty space. Out of this Texican cattle barony without the cattle, he created living and working spaces for himself, as well as permanent exhibition space for his work and that of a few colleagues and friends.
Like many born east of the 100th meridian, in the green, humid half of the continent, Judd fell in love with the dry crystalline air and unforgiving light of this part of the country, with its high arid plains, its horizons punctuated with mesas and buttes. For certain artists and intellectuals, the Southwest is America’s Provence, a place where (in the American mode) the configuration of the land itself, with its vast spaces, is a kind of liberation. Marfa was Judd’s Arles, and like Van Gogh, Judd dreamt of an artist’s utopia. He didn’t realize his dream, but he did create a series of ideal settings in which art could be displayed entirely on its own terms, without the misguided interference of dealers and curators. With the creation of the Chinati Foundation, Judd put in place an institutional framework for the preservation of his vision after his death.
Now, years after Judd’s passing in 1994, Chinati is a going concern. For those in the art world, it is an item on the checklist of places to see before you die. I’ve wanted to go there for a long time, but not because I am big fan of Judd’s work or of Minimalism. Judd reached for his Luger whenever he heard the word Minimalism, as well he might, since the term is entirely apt in my view. His work, and that of his brethren, ruthlessly reduced to a set of Platonic essences, provides a minimum of sustenance for the eye. It is a Stoic’s or a Puritan’s bowl of thin porridge. Everything this kind of work has to give you is exhausted by mere moments of looking. Simplification and purification of form, elimination of content and narrative, all this exacts a high price. If, in the end, we look at art for the profound pleasure it gives us, why look at work that has , in an ascetic quest for some ideal, done away with so many of the qualities that make art pleasurable? For me, at least, years of received opinion and the torrents of ink that have been spilled arguing for the far-reaching philosophical significance of Minimalism do nothing to counteract the indifference of my eyes whenever I look at the stuff.
Why then did I want to go to this place at the back of beyond? Simple. All of Judd’s real strengths as an artist—his finely tuned sense of proportion, his sensitivity to the surface facture and weight of materials, his exquisite, but not fussy, craftsmanship—resonate much more fruitfully in his architectural and design work than in his sculpture. Judd’s plans required the renovation and often radical reconfiguration of existing structures. He also designed and built much of the furniture himself. Seeing the results of this impressive effort in photographs, I found it to be both stark and elegant. Functionality brought his forms to life for me: one of his buildings or even a desk seemed to give me much more to look at (and feel) than his artwork ever did. So off I went to Marfa. And, in the back of my mind, I hoped to be won over by the artwork itself. Maybe, seeing it under Judd’s ideal conditions, my eyes would be opened to its virtues. Only a fool closes his mind completely to new sources of pleasure. Such was my thinking before arriving in Marfa itself.
One is allowed to view the art on the former military base only as part of a tour run by Chinati. There are several permanent installations; three of these best exemplify Judd’s intentions. One is by Dan Flavin, an array of light sculptures in six barrack buildings, which is conceived of as a single work. The second is in a warehouse where a display of John Chamberlain’s wadded up automobile sculptures occupies a basilica-like space. Then, there is Judd’s own work. The centerpiece of his project in Marfa is housed in two monumental buildings, the Artillery Sheds. It comprises one hundred aluminum boxes, identical in size, lined up in three evenly spaced rows running the length of these very long buildings. Within this matrix (which includes the building itself) of Euclidean geometry gone apeshit, the boxes themselves are far from being clones of each other. Sometimes sides are open, or half-open and half-closed. The internal space of a box might be bisected by one or more horizontal, vertical or oblique planes. The metal boxes, like Flavin’s piece, are meant to be taken in as a single work on a heroic scale. Judd wanted Chinati to be a place where he, and his friends, could make real their grandest ambitions, giving them permanent form, unfettered by worldly constraints. Clearly, in this, he succeeded.
If one is of a mind to, one can follow up the Chinati tour with a late afternoon peek (also guided) at the Block, Judd’s residential compound in town. Behind high adobe walls sits various structures which contain Judd’s library, workspaces ( home to some of his early sculptures) and living space, all widely separated by a vast flat expanse paved with loose cinder rock. You admire the lovely proportions of this enclosed area and the buildings disposed across it, but the mind quails at the thought of crossing this treeless waste on a hot summer day—La Jornada del Muerto in your own backyard.
So, what does all this add up to in the end? This is the question I’ve been mulling over since the middle of the tour itself. I’m afraid that the admirable open-mindedness I boasted of earlier availed me nothing; my mainlining all this Juddiana did not make a convert of me. (Putting aside both the work of the other artists and the architecture, I will focus on Judd’s 100 Boxes alone as emblematic of the whole enterprise.) Certainly, when I entered the first Artillery Shed, I was more affected than I expected. Judd had removed the solid side walls of both buildings, replacing them with rows of large floor-to-ceiling windows, the illumination from which, reflecting off the mirrored surfaces of the boxes and the shiny polished floor, choreographed a dazzling dance of light and shadow. Some of the boxes lost their hard edges, even seemed to dissolve in this play of silvery grays and chiaroscuro blacks, changing constantly as you shifted your viewpoint. Surprisingly, these cold metal boxes were actually quite sensual.
But, after this initial enthusiasm, I soon began to experience box fatigue. Initially assuming an air of the implacable in their machined perfection, the boxes secretly want you to find them fascinating, to like them. However, Judd’s endlessly clever improvisations on the boxes’ structure actually serve to trivialize them. We look at them and their permutations, as isolated instances, forgetting that they are supposed to be components of something much larger. The variety itself sooner or later becomes tiresome and boring, or simply too much to take in. The variations are really just an empty formal strategy, an arbitrary problem the artist set up for himself. They don’t interact with each other, creating a dynamic movement, a musical counterpoint, that plays out through the piece as a whole. Therefore, the boxes never coalesce into a unified experience. As a collection of individual iterations exploring a single idea, the work in the Artillery Sheds is, up to a point, fascinating, but it very quickly becomes just one damn thing after another. The modular premise underlying the work, with its tension between overall unity and the autonomy of each module, was stretched to the breaking point by Judd’s overreaching ambition. Judd was aiming very, very high here, and didn’t make it. As a coherent work of art, I think we have to count 100 Boxes a failure.
This conclusion raises a disturbing question. Why is a failed artistic endeavor being enshrined like this? Judd is an artist who deserves our attention, but the degree of cultural canonization and institutional validation that has been conferred on his work at Marfa is commensurate with the very highest levels of achievement. Who decided that Judd’s legacy is that important? Well, for one, Judd himself, aided and abetted by a coterie of partisans of Judd’s idealist avant-gardism within the rarefied upper echelons of the American art world. Judd’s really big dreams were realized not in response to a deeply felt need in the society at large, or even because of official recognition on the part of the State, but through the decisions of a very small number of self-appointed people with, crucially, access to capital.
Ultimately, in today’s world, in which society as a whole has no agreed upon use for art, money becomes the sole and final arbiter of value, in art as in everything else. In these circumstances there is tremendous financial incentive to inflate reputations. Nothing new in that observation, but there’s another, mostly unacknowledged, tendency at work here as well. In the post-war decades, for America’s art world taste makers, a driving concern was to demonstrate, to one and all, that this country’s culture had come of age. A great culture requires great artists, but faced with a real paucity in that area, critics, curators and dealers (and artists) worked assiduously to convince themselves and us that many fine second and third-rank artists rightfully deserved to be elevated to the very pinnacles of Mount Parnassus itself. Claims were made for these artists out of all proportion to the work itself. Interesting but limited talents, such as those of Pollack or Johns, were held up as proof that, as an exhausted Europe passed the torch to the New World, America was ready. The money flowed in response to this debasement of the critical coinage, validating it. Because the art world is so insular and small, and the public obliviousness to serious art so nearly complete, there is no external reality check on this process, (which continues to this day, mostly shorn of nationalist content).
Was Judd a beneficiary, and Marfa a direct result, of this process? Is Judd’s work, in other words, worthy of the exalted treatment it receives at Chinati? My answers will be plain enough by now. But, don’t take my word for it. Everyone who cares should decide for themselves. However, relatively few people will ever be in a position to do that; because of its remoteness, few will ever go there. Regardless of what you make of my thesis, agree or disagree, this is the paradox at the core of Judd’s self-willed monument. A monument, or a museum, if we care to look at it as such, implies a public, but Chinati’s public is miniscule, a molecular fraction of a population which mostly remains ignorant of the very existence of the place. Undaunted, Chinati sits on its arid upland, its back sublimely turned on everybody except the initiate, and the mildly curious willing to go way out of their way to scratch an itch.
Despite his success, Judd felt that his work and the thought behind it was never fully understood, either by art world professionals or the informed public. Even during his life, this was probably largely true. How much more so now. In response to this incomprehension, the vision he developed for Chinati was a hermetic one, informed by more than a little despair. For all its scale and ambition, what Judd built at Marfa is a refuge from a cruelly indifferent world. Its elite financial underpinnings and its splendid isolation, physically and culturally, from the lives and concerns of most people in this country, speak volumes about the plight of the arts in a society such as ours.
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The Lost Manuscript to A Confederacy of Dunces
I had nearly given up on the original manuscript of Confederacy of Dunces until a year ago when I interviewed Lynda Martin, the sister of John Kennedy Toole's best friend in high school. “The manuscript?” she said in a soft southern accent. “Yes, well I have it in my closet here at home.”
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Letters in the Wind: A Writer’s Evolution
I realized that my writing at age 28 was a lot like my golf game as a teenager: a single gust of wind and it went to Hell.
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Murder Goes to Prep School: A Conversation About Tana French’s The Secret Place
Fellow Millions staff writer Janet Potter and I enjoy a lot of the same books, and we were both giddy to read The Secret Place, the fifth book in Tana French's Dublin Murder Squad series. Janet got her paws on it early this summer and I read it in a breathless rush last week so that we could discuss ASAP. What follows is our email correspondence about the novel and French's work in general.
Janet: I loved The Secret Place. I have been a fan of Tana French since I read In the Woods and The Likeness, but I felt that with Faithful Place and Broken Harbor she was kind of in a rut. Each of her books center on a Dublin homicide detective, and although they're not strictly a series, each new book's detective has been a character in a previous book. She established a sort of trademark formula in which the murder case that the detective was working had resonance in their own lives — usually by way of dragging up bad memories. In her first two books this gave the plot more depth than an average whodunit, but in the second two the personal connections to the case seemed overbearing.
The Secret Place seemed to me both like a return to form — in that it was innovative and gripping; and a departure from it — in that she finally dumped the "this case has eerie connections to my personal life but I'm going to keep working it no matter how ill-advised that is" trope. And for this book she bravely took on the world of teenage girls — the murder in question took place at a girls' boarding school outside Dublin and a group of four friends — Holly, Becca, Julia, and Selena — are the chief suspects.
French has said that she would shamelessly hang around bus stops and shopping centers to listen to teenagers talk to each other, and my strongest impression of the book is how she used realistic teenage vernacular to convey enormous complexity. I'm a fan of YA books, but the characters in them are frequently aspirational (unless all the super hot, sensitive, artistically-inclined boys in my high school were hiding somewhere). The girls in The Secret Place are very recognizably obnoxious teenagers, and yet their lives and relationships are intricate and compelling — to the extent that I thought they were all idiots, and at one point or another I thought all of them capable of murder.
I guess I'm not really ending with a question, other than do you agree? And did you like the book?
Edan: I wish I had liked The Secret Place as much as you did! After the first 100 pages, I would have agreed with you--at first, I was compelled by this story of teenage girl friendship and, as always, I found French's trademark prose lively and surprising, phrases like, "little crunch of a grin" and "the acoustics were all swirl and ricochet." Although I hadn't gotten bored of French's mystery formula, as you had, I was pleased to see her attempt something different in her new book. As you say, it was refreshing that this murder case didn't hold a too-strong psychological power over its detectives; Detective Stephen Moran's professional motive (to get him off Cold Cases and onto the Murder Squad by working with the barbed Antoinette Conway) was enough to sustain my interest. I also enjoyed how the narrative switched back and forth between the present investigation, told from Stephen's first person perspective, and the time leading up to the murder itself, told from the teenage girls' perspectives. The structure reminded me of Gillian Flynn's Dark Places, which we've discussed before; such a sweep backward feels simultaneously magical (we can return to an innocent time!) and foreboding (we know the dead body is just around the bend!) The Secret Place plays the present off the past to provide the reader with a much fuller understanding of this private school and its machinations.
I also enjoyed thinking about how being a teenage girl is a bit like being a detective, for both roles require a near-constant behavioral accommodation in order to get what you want: from a suspect or witness, or from a friend or a teacher. Dang, Tana, that's good.
Unfortunately, for me, the book falters in its representation of the group of teenage girls that Holly Mackey and her tribe don't like. The main mean girl, Joanne, and her hangers-on Orla and Gemma, just don't feel three-dimensional. They never quite emerge from the roles they play, and, unlike Detective Moran, I didn't fully experience the power, tragedy, and thrill of their constructed selves. After about page 200, I grew bored of the drama between the girls; a lot of it felt repetitive. Likewise, the back-and-forth between Moran and Conway began to feel familiar. I wanted a more swift emotional arc. I wonder, if the book had been more taut, would it have worked for me? Generally, reading this just made me long for the terrific leanness of Dare Me and The Fever by Megan Abbott, two novels about teenage girls, secrets, and darkness.
Throughout the book, I kept thinking about how Tana French didn't give this book a female victim. I'm glad that The Secret Place doesn't have a True Detective problem--you know, how its only women are dead or dancing naked. But I also wondered if that's what made me less invested in the story (credit wendy at dresshead.com). Did I much care who killed Christopher Harper? And was that because he was just some prep school asshole? As horrible as this sounds, is a female victim more valuable and/or dramatic to me? What are your thoughts?
Janet: I hadn't drawn that connection between the adapto-manipulative behavior of teenage girls and detectives. That's really fascinating, and I think it's why those long scenes that are just a detective and one of the girls sitting on opposite sides of an interrogation table are so compelling. French has always relished describing interrogations at length, and goes into a lot of detail as to what's going on in both character's heads — how they're reading the other person, how they're adapting their behavior to regain control in the conversation — and the results could be likened both to a boxing match or a chess game. The interrogation scene in The Secret Place that involved three detectives and one teenage girl — Stephen, Antoinette, Frank Mackey (the protagonist of Faithful Place), and his daughter Holly — was psychologically complex, unpredictable, and good fun to read; perhaps the ultimate Tana French scene and by far my favorite in this book.
I agree with you that Joanne's gang was a little two-dimensional, but I opted to think it was intentional. The friendship between our four main girls deepened and strengthened considerably throughout the year, and in the process their interactions with Joanne and her friends seem to bother them less and less. I think the juxtaposition between the two groups shows the change in Holly's group in starker relief. But is "deepened and strengthened" even the right expression? Frankly, the friendship between the four main girls became so important that it took over their lives, reminiscent of the friends in Tartt's A Secret History, and seemingly manifested its own supernatural power. Can we talk about that? What did you make of the supernatural elements of this book?
Edan: You're right, French does relish the interrogation scene, and as I said a few years ago, in my analysis of her first three novels, her books teach you how to be a detective. In The Secret Place, we even get detective mythology: "And, somewhere in a locked back corner detectives think old ways. You take down a predator, whatever bleeds out of it flows into you. Spear a leopard, grow braver and faster. All that St. Kilda's gloss, that walk through old oak doors like you belong, effortless: I wanted that. I wanted to lick it off my banged-up fists along with my enemy's blood." That single passage is enough to reveal Detective Moran's weak spot: his desire, and inability, to belong. I loved the first interrogations of all eight girls. I loved seeing how each girl acted around the detectives--what a way to characterize! (It also made me wonder what Moran would sniff out in me: a need to be loved, a need to be sexy, a need to disappear...) By the time the book gets to Holly's final interrogation, though, I wasn't that interested in the mystery anymore, so it wasn't as effective.
As for the friendship between Holly, Becca, Julia, and Selena, I thought it complex and magical and tough in the way that these friendships sometimes are. Their relationship did get more intense, almost rigorous in its devotion...but then adulthood and sexual desire and natural human secrecy got in its way, which then caused all sorts of problems. The downfall of their group-friendship felt realistic and dramatic and upsetting. I guess I would have liked to see the same complexity brought to Joanne's circle, too, for certainly they are real young women, and not the paper dolls they pretend to be.
The supernatural stuff delighted but didn't totally land for me. I think French does it better in Broken Harbor where the secret of the baby monitors and the holes in the wall are revealed to have logical explanations...but something inexplicable and eerie remains unanswerable. French was edging toward the supernatural in that novel, and finally got there in The Secret Place. Unfortunately, the powers of the girls felt a bit unfocused for me, and I wanted them to play a more significant role overall. I mean--there's their ability to move objects with their minds and stuff, and then there's Chris's ghost. I couldn't connect them--did I miss something? It felt muddled...but I love the idea and I want more of that from French in her next book.
Let's talk about my favorite topic: gender roles. Moran was the feminine one, and Conway was the masculine one. He admired beauty in all its forms...and she grunted. What did you make of this role swap? Maybe this comes back to my question about French choosing a male victim--who is found covered in flowers, I might add.
Janet: I ignored your earlier question about gender roles (to no avail, it seems), because while there are a lot of interesting gender dynamics, I don't have a unified theory of what French was trying to do with it. Unless she wasn't trying to do anything other than shift roles around and see what happens.
Originally I thought the the feminine/masculine, good cap/bad cop dynamic between Stephen and Antoinette was intended to distance them from Rob and Cassie, French's detective team from In the Woods. In that earlier book, Cassie was the bubbly one whose rookie status on the otherwise all-male detective squad was legitimized by having a male partner. In this book, Stephen is the empathetic rookie and Antoinette is tough as nails, perhaps excessively so (but I guess we'll get into that in French's next book).
The murder plot also hinges around gender roles — specifically around the psychology and limitations of female friendship and what happens when a guy starts to unwittingly threaten them (erring on the side of ambiguity to avoid giving too much away here). I agree that Chris, even as the murder victim, feels secondary to the murder plot. Solving the mystery requires digging into the social and emotional dynamic between the girls, and I felt that French was more interested in that process than in the fact that it resulted in uncovering the murderer.
It's also interesting, then, that Stephen is the one who cracks the case. Antoinette had been there a year earlier and failed. Do you think was intentional? Did the case require Stephen's, uh, feminine touch? Or is he just the hero of the book?
Edan: I'm also not sure what French was up to with the role reversals. I agree that Chris is secondary to the murder plot--not only to the book's own untangling of whodunit, but also to the girls themselves and their desires and sense of being threatened. He could have been anyone. And that is a bit shiver-inducing in its own right.
I feel the need to quote this line, which, to me, was the best of the whole book, "Who who whose smell in the air of her room, whose fingerprints all over her friends' secret places." It suggests that The Secret Place is not only a bulletin board in the school hallway where girls can leave anonymous messages and pictures and the like, but also...a girl's private parts. I kind of wish the book had been called The Vagina.
This theory of why Antoinette couldn't crack the case is intriguing--is it because Stephan could see the world as these teenagers could, connecting with all that they responded to and were repelled by? Perhaps Conway couldn't adequately solve it because she was a woman in a male-dominated squad, which meant she had to listen to her partner even if she didn't like his choices, even if she was supposed to be the lead detective on the case. Also, she was somewhat handicapped by her class-rage, unable to see these girls for anything but spoiled rich girls; Stephan, on the other hand, saw the beauty of their privilege, and longed for it himself. He was able to transform his longing into intimacy with these suspects.
Now I want everyone in the comment thread to list French's novels from their most to least favorite. What do you think, Janet? We can do it too!
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Book Expo Dispatch: Blog Two Point Blah
The excitement over blogs is officially over ladies and gentleman. They are no longer new or sexy to the book industry. I just snuck out of a panel called, oddly, "Blog 2.0". The idea, I suppose, was to suggest that we are beyond the initial enthusiasm for blogs in the publishing world, but the atmosphere was remedial (and uncomfortably warm, but that might just be the bookish corduroy blazer I'm wearing.) The panel included blog and new media heavyweights like Ana Marie Cox, formerly of Wonkette, Kos of Daily Kos, and Michael Cader of Publishers Marketplace, but they were plodding the same old ground: Use blogs to promote books; blogs aren't scary, they're a part of the media landscape; blogging is so easy, anyone can do it. Though the "2.0" moniker suggested new insights in the merging of new media and publishing, the panel was decidedly "1.0", and the audience in the half-filled room wasn't exactly brimming with enthusiasm. Still, some of the comments made were worth sharing. Michael Cader suggested that blogs promote "individual voices over institutional voices," whether the blog lives at Blogspot or the New York Times. Kos decried the notion that books by bloggers have anything more than a tenuous connection to the blog medium. Blogs are not meant to be books, but blogs are a great way to find new voices with built-in audiences. All in all, though, there wasn't a sense that any new ground is being broken in the marriage of publishing and blogging.I did, however, get the opportunity to meet Booksquare, and I'll be seeing other bloggers soon, including Sarah Weinman, who's giving a talk called "Syndicating Litblog Book Reviews," shortly.
Sonya Chung at Sweet: Actors Reading Writers
My inner dramatist will have a debut outing at Sweet: Actors Reading Writers, Thurs. 12/2 at 7:30 pm, Three of Cups (First Ave at 5th Street, NYC). Actor Tonya Edmonds will perform an excerpt from my novel-in-progress, Sebastian & Frederick. Other featured writers: Ed Park, Amanda Filipacchi, Jonathan Dixon, Maya Pindyck.
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