Betty Boop's got more metamorphing going on than Ovid!
May 1, 2016 11:24 PM Subscribe
I'd kind of lost interest but thanks to your comment I went back and read the bit about Don Marquis, which I quite enjoyed. So thanks.
posted by Segundus at 3:27 AM on May 2, 2016 [1 favorite]
posted by Segundus at 3:27 AM on May 2, 2016 [1 favorite]
There’s a lot to be said for the things Mr. Glazov likes; and indeed he says quite a lot about them, but it does seem like another exercise in ‘why the things I like are the best things, and the things I dislike are the worst.’ I would have enjoyed his piece more had it better exemplified the happy modernism it extols; as it is, it’s hardly any different than the kind of thing a devotee of regular (sad?) modernism might have written.
It’s odd that he tweezes up a piece by Ana Blandiana, of all people, as his exemplar of all that is inadequate about contemporary fiction. Blandiana is primarily a poet—apparently a popular and well-respected figure in Romania, and once a prominent & courageous opponent of the Ceausescu regime—and, while I’ve not read Review of Contemporary Fiction vol. XXX. I find it hard to believe they would claim that she’s ‘at the cutting edge of East European magical-realist fiction.’
posted by misteraitch at 3:39 AM on May 2, 2016 [1 favorite]
It’s odd that he tweezes up a piece by Ana Blandiana, of all people, as his exemplar of all that is inadequate about contemporary fiction. Blandiana is primarily a poet—apparently a popular and well-respected figure in Romania, and once a prominent & courageous opponent of the Ceausescu regime—and, while I’ve not read Review of Contemporary Fiction vol. XXX. I find it hard to believe they would claim that she’s ‘at the cutting edge of East European magical-realist fiction.’
posted by misteraitch at 3:39 AM on May 2, 2016 [1 favorite]
Great rant. Agree with about 1/3 of it but anyone willing to posit Betty Boop > Nabokov gets a gold star for inconoclasm.
posted by Potomac Avenue at 4:48 AM on May 2, 2016
posted by Potomac Avenue at 4:48 AM on May 2, 2016
Don Marquis was some kind of genius, but I'm surprised that the piece does not even mention George Herriman, who visualized archy and mehitabel, to say nothing of Krazy Kat and Ignatz Mouse.
And even went a bit Hollywood
posted by BWA at 4:50 AM on May 2, 2016 [4 favorites]
And even went a bit Hollywood
posted by BWA at 4:50 AM on May 2, 2016 [4 favorites]
I'd appreciate this more if instead of a made up term they just called it Comedy. The argument that absurdist comedy is the highest/more moral form of art I can get behind 100%.
posted by Potomac Avenue at 4:51 AM on May 2, 2016
posted by Potomac Avenue at 4:51 AM on May 2, 2016
If there's one thing Hollywood needs to be encouraged to do, it's making frivolous lowbrow entertainment. Our theaters are so swamped with brooding, intellectual art films that it's impossible to find comedy or spectacle without diving into the historical cinema archive. If only there were courageous iconoclasts willing to make romcoms, fark-joke comedies, and pandering superhero boomer-nostalgia films, the working class would finally get the entertainment it's always wanted.
Less sarcastically, holding up Buster Keaton as a working class hero is an bizarre choice. In almost every role, he plays the aspirational tip of the working class, desperate to leap into high society. The story is always the same: plucky, hard-working, incredibly lucky guy who's almost but not quite a part of the elite performs some heroic feat, gets admitted to the bourgeoisie, and lives happily ever after, unlike all the other stupid chumps he steps over on the way to the top. The idea that Steamboat Bill Jr. has anything to do with Marxist theory is hard to take seriously. It's got more in common the a Silicon Valley VC narrative: innovative disruptor makes good, so why the hell can't you?
To pick up the "film 101" obvious comparison, Charlie Chaplain, who was even more popular at the time, creates characters that are far more entertaining and also show a happy ending that doesn't involve leaping beyond one's class to join the elite. Most Chaplain films show a working class kid who wins out over the big-wigs and then becomes happy and satisfied working class person.
It may be that the aspirational climber actually is a better representation of the working class in America. (To be fair, my own biography almost certainly lands in the same category as Keaton's characters.) But, it's certainly not something the film industry needs encouragement to pursue. They're rushing towards it with wild abandon already. And the result is usually awful.
Also, Archie? I like Archie, but I don't quite understand what its doing in this essay.
posted by eotvos at 5:15 AM on May 2, 2016 [2 favorites]
Less sarcastically, holding up Buster Keaton as a working class hero is an bizarre choice. In almost every role, he plays the aspirational tip of the working class, desperate to leap into high society. The story is always the same: plucky, hard-working, incredibly lucky guy who's almost but not quite a part of the elite performs some heroic feat, gets admitted to the bourgeoisie, and lives happily ever after, unlike all the other stupid chumps he steps over on the way to the top. The idea that Steamboat Bill Jr. has anything to do with Marxist theory is hard to take seriously. It's got more in common the a Silicon Valley VC narrative: innovative disruptor makes good, so why the hell can't you?
To pick up the "film 101" obvious comparison, Charlie Chaplain, who was even more popular at the time, creates characters that are far more entertaining and also show a happy ending that doesn't involve leaping beyond one's class to join the elite. Most Chaplain films show a working class kid who wins out over the big-wigs and then becomes happy and satisfied working class person.
It may be that the aspirational climber actually is a better representation of the working class in America. (To be fair, my own biography almost certainly lands in the same category as Keaton's characters.) But, it's certainly not something the film industry needs encouragement to pursue. They're rushing towards it with wild abandon already. And the result is usually awful.
Also, Archie? I like Archie, but I don't quite understand what its doing in this essay.
posted by eotvos at 5:15 AM on May 2, 2016 [2 favorites]
Any one of these could make an interesting article on its own, but there's precious little to unify them except for Ramon Glazov's overmastering hatred of 20th century literature. (This was also the organizing principle of Glazov's infamous DFW piece, which made huge detours to run over Hubert Selby and William T. Vollmann.)
I wonder what Don Marquis would have thought of DFW and his cult, if it still even exists anymore. That's something I would've liked to have read.
posted by gehenna_lion at 5:27 AM on May 2, 2016
I wonder what Don Marquis would have thought of DFW and his cult, if it still even exists anymore. That's something I would've liked to have read.
posted by gehenna_lion at 5:27 AM on May 2, 2016
Glazov's infamous DFW piece
Oh THAT guy. It's hard not to get a shelter-in-place vibe from these 8000 word spittle-flecked rants. I'm not sure I'm ready for another.
posted by octobersurprise at 6:57 AM on May 2, 2016
Oh THAT guy. It's hard not to get a shelter-in-place vibe from these 8000 word spittle-flecked rants. I'm not sure I'm ready for another.
posted by octobersurprise at 6:57 AM on May 2, 2016
If there's one thing Hollywood needs to be encouraged to do, it's making frivolous lowbrow entertainment.
Missing the point by a mile or two I think.
posted by atoxyl at 9:45 AM on May 2, 2016
Missing the point by a mile or two I think.
posted by atoxyl at 9:45 AM on May 2, 2016
All the stuff about "working class" strikes me as... questionable. There's a long and dubious history on both left and right of people just declaring, without much evidence, that their opinions are those of the workers. Was "this is what I personally like" too hard to utter?
It's hard to take seriously any rant about how they don't make Real Art any more, but so far as I can understand what Glazov wants, I'd suggest to him that he could find it in comics. There's a golden age of playful experimentation going on right now.
posted by zompist at 3:38 PM on May 2, 2016
It's hard to take seriously any rant about how they don't make Real Art any more, but so far as I can understand what Glazov wants, I'd suggest to him that he could find it in comics. There's a golden age of playful experimentation going on right now.
posted by zompist at 3:38 PM on May 2, 2016
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1) A revival of Manny Farber's "Termite Art" thesis.
2) A comparison of interwar Fleischer cartoons and postwar literary fiction, which is kind of a weird juxtaposition. (Glazov seems to be working out a personal aesthetic issue here: he hates metafiction and distancing devices in books, but he finds he enjoys the very same tricks when used in cartoons. The resolution? "Prose isn’t as good as cartoons at handling that kind of ambiguity." To justify this claim, he picks a single example from a magazine he despises.)
3) A short biography and critical reappraisal of Don Marquis.
Any one of these could make an interesting article on its own, but there's precious little to unify them except for Ramon Glazov's overmastering hatred of 20th century literature. (This was also the organizing principle of Glazov's infamous DFW piece, which made huge detours to run over Hubert Selby and William T. Vollmann.)
posted by Iridic at 1:38 AM on May 2, 2016 [6 favorites]