Tuesday 9/10/24
Salvador Dali was not an artist. He was a brand. The real legacy of that brand is freshman college dorm room posters.
Says a lot about someone if they state that John Steinbeck was a great writer. They're saying what they think they should say. So ham-fisted as a writer. But better than Hemingway, who was also a brand and was a lousy writer. No, not MFA writer bad--we aren't talking Motorollah, Motorollah, Motorollah levels of worthlessness--and you can read it if you had to, but give it a rest, guy. Your one-note thing. The same deal every time out. The ego, too. The forced machismo. The desperate attempt to mask the obvious insecurity. When his gimmick stopped working critically, there was nothing he could do save do more of it because he couldn't invent another approach, there weren't additional voices, styles. He could just grind on that one note.
Rimbaud's letters as an unsuccessful solider-of-fortune are better than his poems. Two Modern Library books contain the whole of his writings. You want the volume of his letters if you can only pick one. I wrote about this collection not long after I was out of college for The Missouri Review back when Evelyn Somers Rogers decided I could be her book review whore. The problem, as we've seen, was when I kept achieving, and now the book review whore she believed she could talk down to was on a totally different level in terms of achievement and, as was plain to all--and worse yet--his ability and the quality of his work as a fiction writer. I was allowed to be there as the book whore, but not as the artist who absolutely dusted the likes of people like Evelyn Somers Rogers and Speer Morgan. That was too threatening. Book review whore = okay, but writer we all know is better than us (who began as book review whore) or anyone we have ever published = not okay.
John Clare's prose is nearly as valuable as his poetry, but I can't imagine there's anyone else who reads Clare's prose. Someone in academia, maybe. I don't really count that.
Alfred Hitchcock got very broad once he got to America. He wasn't incisive anymore. Also: There isn't a worse ending to a "great" movie than there is Psycho. Some guy just talking and talking and talking at you. What happened to pure cinema?
James Agee's writings on film are among the best of all film-related works. Agee's letters to one Father Flye are what's most worth reading from him after the film criticism which is really so much more than "just" film criticism--or it can be, as with his essay on Buster Keaton.
Agee understood Keaton and Keaton's art. He had both a special understanding of that art and an ability to put into words what many people, I think, had felt when they watched Keaton's films. Keaton has a certain way of getting you and getting to this special part of you. Agee articulated that. It's a big thing when a writer can make you say, "That the thing I've been thinking!" when you weren't consciously using those words or anything like them. A great writer can help you realize what you didn't know you were actually thinking. Does that make sense? They help you put your finger on a part of you.
I think to baseball fans who watched him in person that Roberto Clemente was like an artist. You didn't know what was going to happen at any time with Clemente. He was kind of like a Jackson Pollock painting that way.
My antipathy for To Kill a Mockingbird--both book and film--is sizable. The book is a simple-minded, actually racist con job tailor-made for the fake, lip-service racial guilt of white people who neither think nor read. Harper Lee treats African Americans as sock puppets in the book, spoon-feeding white people of a certain type what they want to see. You have to have such a simple conception of the world, in my view, to think anything positive about the book. This lady was a charlatan in the extreme. Writes her single pandering thing and cashes in, never to write again. Cha-ching. I didn't fall for that book's bullshit at fourteen.
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