Author Jonathan Lethem pairs with Mark Deakins, whom Lethem calls his favorite narrator, in an excellent rendition of this sprawling, sometimes plodding, oftentimes sublime collection of essays, introductions, and reviews. A collection of “occasional pieces” is by nature a ragtag form. This one has a central theme—cultural influences—and the range and disparity of subjects are in this case a virtue. Lethem’s and Deakins’s voices are highly compatible, and you might not notice the difference except that Deakins’s is more polished and steady, Lethem’s more natural and more true to the text. There are excellent pieces on James Brown, Bob Dylan, and Lethem’s central theme of plagiarism and “sampling,” in which he shows once again the novelist’s ability to open and shape our outlook. D.A.W. © AudioFile 2012, Portland, Maine
A constellation of previously published pieces and new essays as provocative and idiosyncratic as any he's written, this volume sheds light on an array of topics from sex in cinema to drugs, graffiti, Bob Dylan, cyberculture, 9/11, book touring, and Marlon Brando, as well as on a shelf's worth of his literary models and contemporaries: Norman Mailer, Paula Fox, Bret Easton Ellis, James Wood, and others. And, writing about Brooklyn, his father, and his sojourn through two decades of writing, Lethem sheds an equally strong light on himself.
A constellation of previously published pieces and new essays as provocative and idiosyncratic as any he's written, this volume sheds light on an array of topics from sex in cinema to drugs, graffiti, Bob Dylan, cyberculture, 9/11, book touring, and Marlon Brando, as well as on a shelf's worth of his literary models and contemporaries: Norman Mailer, Paula Fox, Bret Easton Ellis, James Wood, and others. And, writing about Brooklyn, his father, and his sojourn through two decades of writing, Lethem sheds an equally strong light on himself.
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The Ecstasy of Influence: Nonfictions, Etc.
Narrated by Jonathan Lethem
Jonathan LethemUnabridged — 16 hours, 27 minutes
![The Ecstasy of Influence: Nonfictions, Etc.](http://img.images-bn.com/static/redesign/srcs/images/grey-box.png?v11.11.4)
The Ecstasy of Influence: Nonfictions, Etc.
Narrated by Jonathan Lethem
Jonathan LethemUnabridged — 16 hours, 27 minutes
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Overview
A constellation of previously published pieces and new essays as provocative and idiosyncratic as any he's written, this volume sheds light on an array of topics from sex in cinema to drugs, graffiti, Bob Dylan, cyberculture, 9/11, book touring, and Marlon Brando, as well as on a shelf's worth of his literary models and contemporaries: Norman Mailer, Paula Fox, Bret Easton Ellis, James Wood, and others. And, writing about Brooklyn, his father, and his sojourn through two decades of writing, Lethem sheds an equally strong light on himself.
Editorial Reviews
…hefty and remarkable…Lethem is not strictly a literary man. Even when he sticks to literature he's not strictly a literary man. He championed the canonization of Philip K. Dick, and is given to mixing genre fiction, particularly science fiction, into putatively belletristic projects. His extraliterary enthusiasms are all over The Ecstasy of Influence…These byways, all of which make room for eccentric flights as well as proper essays, augment the charm and impact of what Lethem prefers to call an "autobiographical collage"…
The New York Times Book Review
Novelist Lethem’s collection of new and previously published works is embedded with cultural influences; particularly prominent is Norman Mailer’s 1959 Advertisements for Myself, which functions like a template for this compendium of obscure writings, liner notes, book introductions, memoir, early unpublished fiction, and even blog bits. The title essay, which first appeared in Harper’s in 2007, is a “collage text” in which Lethem borrows the words of others, from T.S. Eliot and Muddy Waters to Disney films, creating a commentary on plagiarism, allusions, and appropriation. Lethem writes: “Art is sourced. Apprentices graze in the field of culture.” Like Mailer, self-exposure commentaries are interleaved throughout, and Mailer’s notorious “Evaluations: Quick and Expensive Comments on the Talent in the Room” gives Lethem a springboard for evaluations of writers: J.G. Ballard, Paula Fox, Shirley Jackson, and especially the cosmic consciousness of Philip K. Dick, a major influence on Lethem. In a tsunami of literary and cinematic references, familiar and obscure, Lethem easily rises to the surface as a brilliant, incisive essayist who loves to sing the body eclectic. (Nov.)
I love this book. . . . Less of a collection than a collage, a cut-and-paste self-portrait in which we see Lethem as he sees himself. . . . A book about a big idea.” —David L. Ulin, Los Angeles Times
“Begins with this idea of writer-as-magpie and takes it on a communitarian-artistic romp. . . . It’s a grand performance. . . . And delivered with a wink.” —San Francisco Chronicle
“Like almost everything Lethem has written, The Ecstasy of Influence is a reflection of, and a pixilated homage to, those whose work he fetishizes. If this book has a thesis, it’s this: For an artist, influence is everything.” —The New York Times
“[An] exuberant whiz-bang of an essay collection.” —The Daily Beast
“Hefty and remarkable. . . . Dominating all is Lethem’s prime concern always: the novel. . . . More exciting than any of his interesting-to-terrific fiction.” —Robert Christgau, The New York Times Book Review
“[Lethem is] as sharp a critic as he is a novelist. This collection shows you why.” —Austin American-Statesman
“Lethem takes a boldly different tack on the matter of mentors, gurus, fathers, shapers and sources. . . . He not only acknowledges his literary and psychological progenitors; he insists upon them, celebrates them, and invites the reader to join in an exhilarating if sometimes baffling deconstruction of the very idea of influence.” —The Dallas Morning News
“Lethem’s inspired miscellany is ardent and charming. . . . His essays are zippy and freewheeling.”—Chicago Tribune
“Sharp and funny.” —The Plain Dealer
“Frank and boisterous. . . . The Ecstasy of Influence is, more than anything, a record of Mr. Lethem’s life as a public novelist, a role for which he is obviously well suited. . . . Mr. Lethem has such a gift, and The Ecstasy of Influence is evidence of it.” —The New York Observer
“This impassioned, voluble book is illuminating about much more than its author.”—The Independent (London)
“The Ecstasy of Influence is in part an attempt to discuss the things artists and writers rarely talk about—how much of their work is borrowed from other artists and how much they care about their critical reputations, among other things.” —Salon
“Smart and rollicking. . . . Brilliantly dissect[s] the various sulks, funks, and paranoias of being a writer who moans about doing writerly things—not least among them writing itself.” —The Millions
“A wide and wonderful series of subjects that are threaded together, mostly, as a kind of autobiography of a would-be writer becoming a struggling writer and then a successful writer while all the while remaining a voracious reader.” —National Post (Canada)
“The author invites us into the ecstasy of intertextuality, to the intertwining of thousands of words with ourselves.”—PopMatters
"The arguments implicit in his novels are not merely explicit here, but deliriously so, ecstatically so, as if the author is shaking you by the shoulders to show you what he loves, why he loves it and why you should love it, too.” —Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
Quirky is the best word to describe Lethem's (Motherless Brooklyn) thoughts about contemporary culture, from science fiction conventions to the music of James Brown, Otis Redding, Rick James, and Bob Dylan. This collection of essays he's published since 1996 shows how Lethem wrestles with his belief that a writer has a role as a contemporary intellectual. Many of the essays explain how Lethem's love of books and writing grew from the reading lists of his "city hippie parents'' and his own work in used-book stores. This collection will have a wide appeal to all fans of contemporary reading, writing, and song. Writers will appreciate Lethem's mastery of various forms of the personal essay, all showing his skills as an observer and writer. [See Prepub Alert, 5/2/11.]—J.S.
Author Jonathan Lethem pairs with Mark Deakins, whom Lethem calls his favorite narrator, in an excellent rendition of this sprawling, sometimes plodding, oftentimes sublime collection of essays, introductions, and reviews. A collection of “occasional pieces” is by nature a ragtag form. This one has a central theme—cultural influences—and the range and disparity of subjects are in this case a virtue. Lethem’s and Deakins’s voices are highly compatible, and you might not notice the difference except that Deakins’s is more polished and steady, Lethem’s more natural and more true to the text. There are excellent pieces on James Brown, Bob Dylan, and Lethem’s central theme of plagiarism and “sampling,” in which he shows once again the novelist’s ability to open and shape our outlook. D.A.W. © AudioFile 2012, Portland, Maine
Conceptual ambition, sense of purpose and a fan's evangelical devotion distinguish this collection from the typical novelist's gathering of nonfiction miscellany.
If this is a closet-clearing exercise by Lethem(Chronic City,2009, etc.), his is an impressively rich closet. In addition to being a writer who blurs the distinction between genre fiction (sci-fi, detective, western) and postmodern literature (a term he questions), Lethem writes with a commitment to sharing his enthusiasm for whatever obsesses him—underdog novelists such as Paula Fox and Thomas Berger, under-acknowledged rock bands such as the Go-Betweens, seminal inspirations such as Philip K. Dick and J.G. Ballard. "I began writing in order to arrive into the company of those whose company meant more to me than any other: the world of books I'd found on shelves and begun to assemble on my own, and the people who'd written them, and the readers who cares as much as I did," he writes toward the conclusion of this collection. While the results illuminate his formative influences and artistic development, they also cast considerable light on the culture at large, which is both reflected in Lethem's work and has profoundly shaped it. His personal pantheon extends from popular music (he writes at incisive length about both Bob Dylan and James Brown) to the international literary alchemy of the late Roberto Bolaño, enlisting the reader as an accomplice in his quest. Intensifying that intimacy, he shares his complicated relationships with two college buddies, Bret Easton Ellis and Donna Tartt, who both achieved precocious literary success well before he did, and he recalls his bitter response to James Wood after the latter wrote a mixed review of Lethem's breakthrough,Motherless Brooklyn.
Inevitably a mixed bag, but with high ambitions and a strong sense of purpose.
Product Details
BN ID: | 2940172135842 |
---|---|
Publisher: | Penguin Random House |
Publication date: | 11/08/2011 |
Edition description: | Unabridged |
Read an Excerpt
Postmodernism as Liberty Valance
Notes on a Ritual Killing
1. Spoiler alert. John Ford’s The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance is an allegorical Western that I am now going to totally pretzel into an allegory for something else entirely. Actually I’ll reverse it: The original allegorizes the taming of the western frontier, the coming of modernity in the form of the lawbooks and the locomotive, and memorializes what was lost (a loss the film sees as inevitable). My version allegorizes the holding at bay, for the special province of literary fiction, of contemporary experience in all its dismaying or exhilarating particulars, as well as a weird persistent denial of a terrific number of artistic strategies for illuminating that experience. The avoidance, that’s to say, of any forthright address of what’s called postmodernity, and what’s lost in avoiding it (a sacrifice I see as at best pointless, an empty rehearsal of anxieties, and at worst hugely detrimental for fiction).
2. The chewy center of TMWSLV is a gunfight. A man stands in the main street of a western town and (apparently) kills another man. The victim—for this is, technically, murder—represents chaos and anxiety and fear to all who know him, and has been regarded as unkillable, almost in the manner of a monster or zombie from another movie genre; his dispatch is regarded by the local population with astonished relief and gratitude, such that they will shower the killer with regard (he’s destined to become his party’s nominee for vice president of the United States). The secret the movie reveals: The killer was not the man in the street, but another.
3. The three persons in TMWSLV: James Stewart a.k.a. “Ransom Stoddard,” the upstanding, even priggish young lawyer from the east, defined by his naïve sincerity and dedication to the rule of law; John Wayne a.k.a. “Tom Doniphon,” cynical veteran of the frontier, who tends to an isolationist-libertarian approach toward civilization but is essentially lovable and will become heartbreaking by film’s end; and Lee Marvin a.k.a. “Liberty Valance,” a sadistic, amoral thug who delights in sowing chaos and exposing the fragility of social convention (by terrorizing family restaurants, newspaper offices, elections, etc.).
4. Stewart/Stoddard believes he’s “the man who killed Liberty Valance” (he stood, after all, in the center of town, visible to all, with a gun in his hand). More important, the witnesses believe he’s the one. In fact, it was Wayne/Doniphon who did the deed, while hidden in a shadowy alley, after having elaborately conspired to goad the helpless and pacifistic Stewart/Stoddard into his public role as a gun-toting defender of public peace against the savage anarchy of Marvin/Valance.
5. Liberty Valance, i.e., “Free Persuasion”—what an absurd, obvious, Pynchonian name! But then, the characters in Dickens and Henry James have odd names, too.
6. “Venturing back in time isn’t the only option for novelists loath to address the mass media that most Americans marinate in. There are also those populations cut off from the mainstream for cultural reasons, such as recent immigrants and their families. And then there are those at the geographical margins . . . It’s remarkable how many recent American literary novels and short stories are set on ranches . . . The American novelist is buffeted by two increasingly contradictory imperatives. The first comes as the directive to depict ‘The Way We Live Now’ . . . Cliché it may be, but the notion that no one is better suited to explain the dilemmas of contemporary life than the novelist persists . . . [The] other designated special province of the literary novelist: museum-quality depth. The further literature is driven to the outskirts of the culture, the more it is cherished as a sanctuary from everything coarse, shallow and meretricious in that culture. If these two missions seem incompatible, that’s because they are. To encompass both . . . you must persuade your readers that you have given them what they want by presenting them with what they were trying to get away from when they came to you in the first place.”
—Laura Miller, The Guardian
7. Let’s wade into the unpleasantness around the term “postmodernism”: Nobody agrees on its definition, but in literary conversations the word is often used as finger-pointing to a really vast number of things that might be seen as threatening to canonical culture: author-killing theories generated by French critics, collapsings of high and low cultural preserves into a value-neutral fog, excessive reference to various other media and/or mediums, especially electronic ones (ironically, even a Luddishly denunciatory take on certain media and/or mediums may be suspect merely for displaying an excess of familiarity with same), an enthusiasm for “metafiction” (a word that ought to be reserved for a specific thing that starts with Cervantes, but isn’t), for antinarrative, for pop-culture references or generic forms, for overt (as opposed to politely passive) “intertextuality,” for unreliable narration, for surrealism or magic realism or hysterical realism or some other brand of “opposed- to- realism” affiliation, for “irony” (another term that’s been abused out of its effective contour and function, and its abusers have fewer excuses than do those of postmodernism), etc. etc. etc. Now, any writer espousing, let alone employing, all of the above things would be a gorgon-headed monster, surely deserving rapid assassination for the safety of the literary community in general. (Or maybe not, maybe they’d be splendid.) But—and I present this as axiomatic—such a person, and such writing, is impossible to consider seriously because all of the modes denounced under the banner of “postmodernist” are incompatible: You can’t, just for instance, exalt disreputable genres like the crime story and also want to do away with narrative.
8. The reverse person, a literary person inclined toward or at least compelled by none of the above-named modes or gestures—and I present this not as axiomatic but as an obnoxious opinion—would be dull beyond belief. They basically would have declined the entire twentieth century (and interesting parts of several others). You’ve read our entire menu, sir? And nothing was of interest? Really, nothing?
9. “ . . . as a phenomenon, postmodernism is either specifically aesthetic or more generally cultural; it is either revolutionary or reactionary; it is either the end of ideology or the inescapable conclusion of ideology . . . It is expressed in architecture, art, literature, the media, science, religion and fashion, and at the same time it is equivalent to none of these. It is both a continuation and intensification of what has gone before and a radical break with all traces of the past. It is, above all, simultaneously critical and complicit.”
—Kathleen Fitzpatrick, The Anxiety of Obsolescence
“Critical debates about postmodernism constitute postmodernism itself.”
—Stephen Connor, Postmodernist Culture
10. I suggested that abusers of the word “postmodernism” had excuses. I offer the above quotes as exculpatory evidence. The serious use of the term manifestly propagates bewilderment. But the quotes are also a reminder that the term has serious uses. It means more than “art I don’t like.”
11. What postmodernism really needs is a new name—or three of them.
12. The first “postmodernism” that requires a new name is our sense— I’m taking it for granted that you share it—that the world, as presently defined by the advent of global techno-capitalism, the McLuhanesque effects of electronic media, and the long historical postludes of the transformative theories, movements, and traumas of the twentieth century, isn’t a coherent or congenial home for human psyches. Chuck Klosterman details this suspicion in his essay on the Unabomber, called “FAIL” (though it might as well be called “Sympathy for Theodore Kaczynski”). His conclusion, basically, is that in the teeth of contemporary reality we’d all be a little bit crazy not to sometimes wish to kill that sort of postmodernism. I speak here as one who’s spent loads of his own good faith hurling tiny word-bombs at the rolling edifice of the triumphalist Now. This postmodernism we’ll call Kaczynski’s Bad Dream.
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