Bookmarker tag: inspo/criticism (29 notes)

"Sad" became the tocsin ringing through the piece, sadness as the consequence of too much plenty: sad waiters, sad cruise ship-goers taking pointless videos of other sad people pointing video cameras at them from their own cruise ships, and sad, senseless attempts by Americans to amuse themselves in the absence of any larger spiritual idea. "Choose with care," Marathe warns in Infinite Jest. "You are what you love. No?" Walace's cruise ship piece was about the price of failing to choose well.

There is a passage in the work of the contemporary novelist Dorothy Allison which may help explain what I have in mind. Towards the beginning of a remarkable essay called 'Believing in Literature', Allison says that 'literature, and my own dream of writing, has shaped my own system of belief - a kind of atheist's religion ... the backbone of my convictions has been a belief in the progress of human society as demonstrated in its fiction'. She ends the essay as follows:

There is a place where we are always alone with our own mortality, where we must simply have something greater than ourselves to hold onto - God or history or politics or literature or a belief in the healing power of love, or even righteous anger. Sometimes I think they are all the same. A reason to believe, a way to take the world by the throat and insist that there is more to this life than we have ever imagined.

What I like best about this passage is Allison's suggestion that all these may be the same, that it does not greatly matter whether we state our reason to believe - our insistence that some or all finite, mortal humans can be far more than they have yet become - in religious, political, philosophical, literary, sexual or familial terms. What matters is the insistence itself - the romance, the ability to experience overpowering hope, or faith, or love (or, sometimes, rage).

What is distinctive about this state is that it carries us beyond argument, because beyond presendy used language. It thereby carries us beyond the imagination of the present age of the world. [...]

In past ages of the world, things were so bad that 'a reason to believe, a way to take the world by the throat' was hard to get except by looking to a power not ourselves. In those days, there was little choice but to sacrifice the intellect in order to grasp hold of the premises of practical syllogisms - premises concerning the after-death consequences of baptism, pilgrimage or participation in holy wars. To be imaginative and to be religious, in those dark times, came to almost the same thing - for this world was too wretched to lift up the heart. But things are different now, because of human beings' gradual success in making their lives, and their world, less wretched. Nonreligious forms of romance have flourished - if only in those lucky parts of the world where wealth, leisure, literacy and democracy have worked together to prolong our lives and fill our libraries. Now the things of this world are, for some lucky people, so welcome that they do not have to look beyond nature to the supernatural, and beyond life to an afterlife, but only beyond the human past to the human future.

There is a lonely need at the heart of this book, the need for all this ephemeral shit to mean something, for the generations nurtured by the internet to have collected something more than transient commodities and opinions about them, more than posts and tweets and days of recycling things we’ve consumed and perhaps leveraged into monetized brands. But Cline has rejected the bigger ideas that usually absorb all our mortal flailing into an arc of greater redemptive significance. Religion is out. Unsurprisingly, he doesn’t so much as flirt with Marxism, even in a rootless Hegelian form of thesis, antithesis and synthesis inexorably churning human society forward. Capitalism is portrayed as a disease unless it’s in the hands of the right people, which is indistinguishable from the view of capitalism espoused by the wrong people.

At times, you can almost sense a muffled scream trying to escape the page, the unthinkable recognition that memorizing movies and videogame speed-runs and every beat of a standup routine contains only the memory space required to store it—that it builds to nothing, achieves nothing, signifies nothing more than the story of somebody else. That you can watch Raiders of the Lost Ark 100 times, and on the 101st, it won’t reveal a greater truth or build a better you. That the passivity of life via filmstrip exacts no price because it confers no prize. That, maybe, the cold message of becoming a pop-culture savant is realizing that you’ve dedicated your life to the craft of memorizing how it happened to someone else—or as someone else happened to imagine it. That the Comic Book Guy was right to lament, “Oh, I’ve wasted my life.”

Maybe that’s the seductive—and to those who embrace it—profound appeal of a story like Ready Player One, built on the bones of hundreds of others: that somehow we can construct a scavenger hunt of narrative human significance from everything we’ve already consumed, something every bit as spiritual and whole as a more rigorous study and embrace of the world as it is. Maybe there is a mechanism by which we can collect enough skill and armament and enchantment to ineffably cohere as flesh and spirit, something more sublime than meat networked and spasming with electricity.

Cline just hasn’t watched the movie that explains that part yet, and it’s not his fault. Nobody has.

This essay on the loss of grace in tennis speaks then to the passing of a writer's first ecstatic access to creation. Wallace mourns the loss and maps a paradox that would become the seed idea of later work. The paradox is that although we need to live in peaks, these hypostatic highs of sex, success, religion, love, creation, conception, childbirth, or yes sports, we can only fully appreciate the peaks when they are passed and passing. Why? Because ecstasy's power lies in its wordlessness, its ability to make of us a happy holy blank. Because appreciation is a branch of thought, it is only in falling, in coming down from ecstasy, that we can know that we have briefly touched the ultimate. It is only in the falling too that we try to find words for the sublime [...]

In GB84 the result is more poetic than most poetry; it is, naturally, a poetry stripped of all lyricism, a harshly dissonant word-music. Peace is a writer particularly attentive to sound: the unsleeping vigilance of state power is signified by the 'Click, Click' of the telephone tap , the massed ranks of the police by the Krk, Krk of boots and truncheons beaten against shields, both sounds repeated so much that they become background noise, part of the ambience of paranoia. [...]

The question that kept recurring when I was reading both Oryx And Crake and The Year Of The Flood was: why do these books not succeed in the way that The Handmaid's Tale did? If The Handmaid's Tale was an exemplary dystopia, it was because the novel made contact with the Imaginary-Real of neoconservatism. Gilead was 'Real' at the level of a neconservative desire that was operating in the Reaganite 80s; a virtual present that conditioned the actual present. Offred, the handmaids, the Marthas, the Wall - these names have the resonant consistency of a world. But Atwood does not have so assured a handle on neoliberalism as she did on neoconservatism. Atwood gives every appearance of underestimating the cheap poetry of brands, banal as it is; her corporate names are ugly and clunky, no doubt deliberately so - perhaps this is the way that she hears the absurd infantilisms of late capitalist semiotics. AnooYoo, HelthWyzer, Happicuppa, ReJoovenEssens, and - most ungainly of all - Sea(H)ear Candies: these practically caused me physical pain to read, and it is hard to conceive of any world in which these would be leading brands. Atwood's mistake is always the same - the names are unsightly plays on the function or service that the corporations offer, whereas capitalism's top brand names - Coca Cola, Google, Starbucks - have attained an asignifying abstraction, in which any reference to what the corporation does is merely vestigial. Capitalist semiotics echo capital's own tendency towards ever-increasing abstraction. (For the Imaginary-Real of neoliberalism, you'd be far better off reading Nick Land's 90s texts, shortly to be re-published.) Atwood's names for genetically-spliced animals - the pigoon, the spoat/gider, the liobam - are also examples of linguistic butchery; perhaps she was trying to provide a parallel in language for the denaturalising violence of genetic engineering. In any case, these linguistic monsters are unlikely to roam far beyond Atwood's texts (they certainly don't have anything like the dark sleekness and hyperstitional puissance of, say, Gibson's neologisms).

I over-use the word ‘delirium’, but watching Catching Fire last week was a genuinely delirious experience. More than once I thought: How can I be watching this? How can this be allowed? One of the services Suzanne Collins has performed is to reveal the poverty, narrowness, and decadence of the ‘freedoms’ we enjoy in late, late capitalism. The mode of capture is hedonic conservatism. You can comment on anything (and your tweets may even be read out on TV), you can watch as much pornography as you like, but your ability to control your own life is minimal. Capital has insinuated itself everywhere, into our pleasures and our dreams as much as our work. You are kept hooked first with media circuses, then, if they fail, they send in the stormtrooper cops. The TV feed cuts out just before the cops start shooting.

Ideology is a story more than it is a set of ideas, and Suzanne Collins deserves immense credit for producing what is nothing less than a counter-narrative to capitalist realism. Many of the 21st century’s analyses of late capitalist capture – The Wire, The Thick Of It, Capitalist Realism itself – are in danger of offering a bad immanence, a realism about capitalist realism that can engender only a paralysing sense of the system’s total closure. Collins gives us a way out, and someone to identify with/as – the revolutionary warrior-woman, Katniss.

Perhaps the most remarkable thing about the Hunger Games is the way it simply presupposes that revolution is necessary. The problems are logistical, not ethical, and the issue is simply how and when revolution can be made to happen, not if it should happen at all. Remember who the enemy is – a message, a hailing, an ethical demand that calls out through the screen to us …. that calls out to a collectivity that can only be built through class consciousness …. (And what has Collins achieved here if not an intersectional analysis and decoding of the way that class, gender, race and colonial power work together – not in the pious academic register of the Vampires’ Castle, but in the mythographic core of popular culture – functioning not as a delibidinising demand for more thinking, more guilt, but as an inciting call to build new collectivities.)

I don't believe we can ever turn upon ourselves in the sense Ellen intends. You can't get behind the thing that casts the shadow. You cast the shadow. As soon as you turn, the shadow falls in another place. Is still your shadow. You have not gotten "behind" yourself. That is why self-consciousness is not the way to make ourselves better than we are.

Just me and my shadow, walkin' down the avenue.

It is a beautiful day here in North Carolina. The first day that is both cool and sunny all summer. After a terrible summer, first drought, then heat wave, then torrential rain, trees down, flooding. Now, finally, beautiful weather. A tree outside my window just brushed by red, with one fully red leaf. (This is what I want you to see.) A person sitting in stocking feet looking out her window-a floor to ceiling rectangle filled with green, with one red leaf. The season poised, sunny and chill, ready to rush down the incline into autumn. But perfect, and still. Not going yet.

CONSIDER THE VOICE OF Meek Mill. The inscription of dreams and nightmares in the grain. Its breathlessness, always on the verge of shrill hoarseness, gasping for air, as if the torrent of words can’t come fast enough — as if there might not be enough time to say the things that need to be said. Every syllable eked out through grit, the cold facts of North Philly firing through a monochromatic hollow, like a crack in a bell.

TRAP IS A FORM OF soft power that takes the resources of the black underclass (raw talent, charisma, endurance, persistence, improvisation, dexterity, adaptability, beauty) and uses them to change the attitudes, behaviors, and preferences of others, usually by making them admit they desire and admire those same things and will pay good money to share vicariously in even a collateral showering from below. This allows the trap artist to transition from an environment where raw hard power dominates and life is nasty, brutal, and short to the world of celebrity, the Valhalla of excess, lucre, influence, fame — the only transparently and sincerely valued site of belonging in our culture. It doesn’t hurt, of course, that insofar as you’re interested in having a good time, there’s probably never been a sound so perfectly suited to having every kind of fun disallowed in conservative America.

IMAGINE A PEOPLE enthralled, gleefully internalizing the world of pure capital flow, of infinite negative freedom (continuously replenished through frictionless browsing), thrilled at the possibilities (in fact necessity) of self-commodification, the value in the network of one’s body, the harvesting of others. Imagine communities saturated in the vocabulary of cynical postrevolutionary blaxploitation, corporate bourgeois triumphalism, and also the devastation of crack, a schizophrenic cultural script in which black success was projected as the corporate mogul status achieved by Oprah or Jay-Z even as an angst-ridden black middle class propped up on predatory credit loans, gutted by the whims of financial speculation and lack of labor protections, slipped backward into the abyss of the prison archipelago where the majority poor remained. Imagine, then, the colonization of space, time, and most importantly cultural capital by the socially mediated system of images called the internet. Imagine finally a vast supply of cheap guns flooding neighborhoods already struggling to stay alive. What would the music of such a convergence sound like?

Is it really much of a scam to lie with transparent childishness to the grown-ups around you? The way Moonee and Scooty and eventually Jancy go about getting their ice creams is by telling fibs that reveal the simple truth of their lives: they don’t have any money. And what is the alternative, exactly? Where are these six-year-olds supposed to get the money for an ice cream cone? By going out, getting a job, and earning it, like good kids would do? Or is the only alternative—the only thing that could make them good kids—to have been born to mothers who can give them the money they need?

In America, we are raised to believe that there is something intrinsically sick about criminal behavior. It is always wrong to steal, because what we own makes us who we are, because—the logic goes—we have earned it. To steal what belongs to someone else is to steal their virtue, to defraud them of their very identity. But the logic of this belief system begins to fall apart in a world where money makes more money, where how much wealth you amass has very little to do with how hard you work, and where there are few things more expensive than being poor.

And when so much money is all around you—just outside Idlewild, where Henry Hill came of age; just beyond the frayed strip malls and cracked highways that make up the entrance wound surrounding Disney World—you can also see it as passive to the point of insanity to not reach out and take some of the wealth that passes you by. And if just a little of the money that is flowing and surging and leaping its banks all around you is money that could save you and your child from hunger, from homelessness, from danger you cannot imagine and danger you know all too well—it is difficult to see the immorality in reaching out and taking what you need. Respecting ownership and property the way you were taught to, as a good American, may mean allowing your child to suffer. There are millions of Americans who seem to see no contradiction in this. There are millions more who are wondering, now, how we got to be this way, and beginning also to wonder if we were ever anything else.

Bobby’s moment comes when a man wanders into the motel parking lot and heads straight for the scuffed picnic tables that have become one of the makeshift playgrounds for the children who call the Magic Castle home. Bobby spots the man, identifies him as a threat, and leads him away from the children, scaring him off and sending him running without making a violent scene. What this sequence makes most plain, far beyond the satisfaction that comes from witnessing Bobby’s rare chance to act as an unambiguous protector, is how little stability this world is capable of offering, and how much it is still possible to lose when you have almost nothing.

This is the drama of The Florida Project: not a quest moving forward, but a period of safety falling apart. We start at a moment when things are OK, or as OK as they can be: Moonee roams the grounds around the Futureland Inn and the Magic Castle, shares free ice cream with her friends, and delights in the attraction of Bobby trying to persuade a tenant to put her bathing suit top back on; and Halley and her own friend—Scooty’s mother, Ashley—walk, arms around each other, into the Orlando night. Watching them leave the Magic Castle, you fear for them as much as you fear for their children when they run alongside the highway: they are just as vulnerable, and just as adrift in a world where there is little room for them, a world that was not made with their safety in mind.

Yet there is a stubborn beauty in this place, tough as the unrestrainable Florida flora that is even capable, sometimes, of overtaking the controlled, concrete kingdom of Disney World. At the Magic Castle, a patch of grass and a picnic table can, for a moment, become a scene of harmony, of children alone and safely at play: as long as there are a few resources, a little food, a little stability, a paycheck through next week, this can be enough. That this world suddenly wobbles, falls apart when a little security is lost—a stranger in the parking lot; a friendship broken; a bag of perfume confiscated—is not a matter of weakness in the people doing their best to hold their home together. It is a testament to how little they really need, and just how much is denied them.

Since the spiritual exercises of Loyola there has hardly been a more radical attempt at self-absorption. Proust's, too, has as its center a loneliness which pulls the world down into its vortex with the force of a maelstrom. And the overloud and inconceivably hollow chatter which comes roaring out of Proust's novels is the sound of society plunging down into the abyss of this loneliness. This is the location of Proust's invectives against friendship. It was a matter of perceiving the silence at the bottom of this crater, whose eyes are the quietest and most absorbing. Something that is manifested irritatingly and capriciously in so many anecdotes is the combination of an unparalleled intensity of conversation with an unsurpassable aloofness from his partner. There has never been anyone else with Proust's ability to show us things; Proust's pointing finger is unequaled. But there is another gesture in amicable togetherness, in conversation: physical contact. To no one is this gesture more alien than to Proust. He cannot touch his reader either; he could not do so for anything in the world. [...]

The “green translucence in the yards” is high-flown, and yet I do not doubt that it was the salient vision to share. Every sentiment and gesture in Jesus’ Son feels true, and not all writers approach anything true in what they write, but instead have other types of gifts, and skills, for braiding imagery or manipulating cadence, pulling off stunts. Literature, even really good literature, is sometimes more like a beautiful baroque carpet than it is like life. Denis Johnson, in all his work, aimed to locate the hidden, actual face of things. But the new stories build without those miraculous balls of hail, and their truths are deeper, and more precise, true as you would true a wheel. Jesus’ Son, by comparison, seems like work produced by the forceful energy of all the saved-up characters bursting to be seen and known by those who weren’t there, weren’t in the bar or out at the farm on the Old Highway. Weren’t riding around with Georgie, high on stolen hospital meds. The Largesse of the Sea Maiden operates on a different set of registers; it feels like the paced vision of a writer who has been made to understand that life is fairly rude and somewhat short, but the world contains an uneven distribution of grace, and wisdom lies in recognizing where it—such grace—has presented itself. The stories are about death and immortality, art and its reach, and they ask elemental questions about fiction, not as a literary genre but as a human tendency. The characters make narrative from what they witness: such as an Afghanistan war veteran telling a group of friends at a dinner party that he’ll remove his prosthetic leg if a woman who is present agrees to kiss his stump; she refuses but later marries this vet. As the narrator says to the reader: “You and I know what goes on.” Another man, wandering in his bathrobe in the quiet of night, encounters a sign for a store he believes offers “Sky and Celery,” but in fact it says “Ski and Cyclery.” “What goes on” is never a given, and always subjective. Wisps of narrativizing in this final collection shape thoughts that are sly, open-ended, and meticulously wise. It could be that the more a person knows, the less he needs to perform his gifts. These stories ask you to step into the room and listen closely. They are not showy anthems, and in many cases, they have dispensed with hindsight altogether.

The company had another ad in the same series, a similar couple, good-looking young professionals, reading different parts of a newspaper that is spread over the floor in some kind of magnificent domicile, huge and unfurnished. Trying to decode what kind of space it is, I’m reminded of a comment in Amazons, a novel DeLillo wrote under a pseudonym, that “apartments sprawl,” while “houses ramble.” We are in the territory of the sell. The couple lounges around in a sprawling apartment somewhere on the East Coast (he’s wearing sockless loafers). It’s clearly Sunday, given the size of the newspaper dismantled on the floor. He touches her hair with the end of his pencil. It’s the same gesture, if a different pair of actors/models, as the light tug on the shirttail at the beach. It’s, Stop pretending to finish that Times crossword puzzle. What happens next is off-screen, but on the screens of our imagining. Not anything explicit. Just possibility.

Transcendental style is not a vague label like “religious film” which can be attached to films which feature certain religious themes and evoke the appropriate emotions; it is not a catchbasin for all the sniffles, sobs, and goosebumps one has experienced at religious films. It is neither a personal vision nor an official catechism. It is not necessarily typified by Joan at the stake, Christ on the Mount, or St. Francis among the flowers; it is not necessarily suffering, preaching, or good will among men. It is only necessarily a style.

If a critic hopes to extract this style and its component parts from the individual artists who employ it, from the cultures which influence those artists, and from the emotions it must use and transform, he must have some fairly precise critical tools (and even then it’s like trying to separate sound from the waves it travels on). A term like “transcendental,” after all, is almost nonfunctional in art criticism, and “style” is little better. Causing more problems than it solves, “transcendental” has fallen under the jurisdiction of journalese, particularly among film critics. “Transcendental” is currently a catchall term for the imprecise critic: a film’s plot, setting, acting, theme, and direction are all spoken of as transcending each other or themselves, and “style” can refer to anything from a camera angle to a way of life.

“Transcendental style,” however, can be a useful term in film criticism, and when analyzing the films of certain film-makers, such as Ozu, Bresson, and Dreyer, it can be indispensable. The understandable reluctance of aestheticians and serious film critics to employ the concept of transcendence has caused these films to be underestimated and misinterpreted to varying degrees, and evaluated within critical patterns for which they were not intended. But before these terms can be of any use to a critic they must have meaning: he must know what is “transcendental” and what is “style.” And knowing this, he not only has a term which denotes a specific style, but also the critical method with which to analyze it.

[...] Anne and Martin attempt to hide their love, romancing only on clandestine field trips. This conflict is reflected in the decor: the parsonage is claustrophobic and chiaroscuric; the fields are bucolic and well-lit. [...]

The late Gothic cathedral is the reductio ad absurdum of the Scholastic method with its sic and non, its internal contradictions eternally interlocked: saints and gargoyles, Pantocrators and crucified Christs, oblique lines of force and verticals and horizontals. The lines of tension often clash randomly, lacking focus or climax; Gothic art furnished a dramatic space but not a dramatic focus to which all characters and lines were inevitably drawn. Worringer found in Gothic statuary a microcosm of the Gothic style: the face was often naturalistic, the robe abstract. The body, wrapped in stiff robes, represented the order of Byzantium; the face, often empathic, cried out the humanism of Florence. The inherent contradiction of Gothic life drove the abstract line into near chaos. The impulse of the Gothic man toward true knowledge, Worringer wrote, “being denied its natural satisfaction, thus exhausts itself in wild fantasies. . . . Everything becomes weird and fantastic.”31 The final solution of Gothic architecture was one of self-negation: instead of defining space, it attacked it; instead of creating order on earth, it thrust instability into the heavens.

At times Dreyer’s tension even bursts out of the frame. In a well-known composition from The Passion of Joan of Arc, a guard, partially hidden by the left vertical frame line, is tugging at Joan’s arm while Joan herself is struggling to pull herself outside of the right vertical frame line. The frame line seems an arbitrary restriction on a tension which is on the verge of flying apart. The effect is similar to that which one experiences standing in the nave of a Gothic cathedral as the lines of force explode from the ceiling driving straight through the aisles, through the walls, and out into the flying buttresses. The frame or the nave, the movie or the cathedral themselves, are artistic restrictions upon a reality which by itself would disintegrate.

The transcendentally minded film-maker finds himself in a unique position: he must properly dispose of a surfeit of abundant means (cinema’s inherent “realism”). He cannot ignore or neglect these means, but must turn them to his advantage. Cinema may have freed the other arts from their desire to imitate life, as Bazin and Sypher contend, but it did not free itself. In fact, Bazin writes, cinema thereby acquired new chains to the “obsession with reality.” This unique alliance of media and abundant means has its advantages as well as its drawbacks. On one hand spiritual cinema was freed from the need to prostitute itself in order to achieve a sense of “realism.” Before the advent of cinema, certain religious artists attempted to first create the illusion of the immanent, then break that illusion, thereby revealing the Transcendent. But, for the most part, these artists spent most of their energy unsuccessfully creating the illusion which they never could successfully “break.” Because the transcendentally minded film-maker already has the illusion at his disposal, he can go immediately to the next stage, attempting to break the illusion. However, the religious film-maker cannot ignore the abundant in the way other artists can. A transcendentally minded painter like Kandinsky, for example, could functionally ignore the abundant means. For him, the abundant means were given; they were the physical gallery where the spectator stood. The canvas itself could be totally sparse, the interplay of abstract forces. Because the cinema is an imitative art in time it not only creates the abstract painting but the gallery as well; a transcendentally minded film-maker simply cannot dismiss the abundant means out of hand.

[...] The opposite of Faust, this troubled Portuguese soul traded in real life for the spiritual world of his writing. Perhaps most writers do this to some extent, but who has annulled himself like Pessoa? Not Joyce. Not Pound. Not even Franz Kafka. We can see Joyce as the brilliant conductor of his daringly dissonant narratives. We can see Pound hyper-actively promoting literary, political, and personal causes. We can see Kafka suffering—as it were in his own flesh—the agony of his negative metamorphoses. With Pessoa all we can visualize is what a handful of surviving photos show: a materialized nondescriptness endowed with a mustache. Pessoa was no language master à la Joyce or Pound. He wrote careful, elegant Portuguese, inventing new locutions and recasting worn-out clichés, but his project was not to deform and reform words and syntax. His project was the universe, with himself as the raw material. He was the object clay, endlessly molded, twisted, divided, and reworked by his writing. And in this autometamorphosis there was no torment or suffering à la Kafka. As if following the recommendation of a Reis poem to “Leave pain on the altar/ As an offering to the gods,” Pessoa stoically endured nonsuffering.

The hero is a man actively engaged in becoming himself—never a very reassuring sight. The villain, on the other hand, has already become something. Everything about Tsukigata suggests that he has arrived. There is not a wasted gesture, not an uncalculated movement. He has found what is to his advantage and acts accordingly. Sugata, by comparison, is all thumbs.

Kurosawa’s preference is the preference we all have for the formed man. In the ordinary film this man would be the hero. But he is not and, despite his admiration, Kurosawa has told us why. One of the attributes of all of his heroes, beginning with Sugata, is that they are all unformed in just this way. For this reason, all of his pictures are about education—the education of the hero.

After this superb battle … one might expect the picture to end with some kind of statement that he has at last grownup, that he has arrived, that he has become something—the great judo champion. This would be the logical Western conclusion to a film about the education of a hero.

Kurosawa, however, has seen that this cannot be true. A hero who actually becomes is tantamount to a villain—for this was the only tangible aspect of the villain’s villainy. To suggest that peace, contentment, happiness, follows a single battle, no matter how important, is literally untrue—and it would limit Sugata precisely because of the limitations suggested in the words “happiness” or “judo champion.”

[...] pop culture teaches best when it isn’t so conscious of its teacherly role, when it doesn’t underline every point five or six times. (It has this in common with, well, any sort of culture.) The low-budget shock filmmaker George Romero taught the audiences of his own period far more powerfully, and with much less fuss, simply by featuring Black characters in heroic roles and by listening when the actress Gaylen Ross said, during the shooting of the 1979 zombie epic, Dawn of the Dead, that she didn’t think her character would scream. We might say that Romero rode his mind at a gallop in pursuit of making a frightening movie, whereas our popular artists live betwixt and between, now trying to emulate the artworks that they love, now trying to impart a Very Important Lesson.

Why have we settled for this strange cultural compromise—lowbrow genres, done with middlebrow earnestness, in pretend revolt against a thoroughly defunded highbrow regime? The answer is simple and depressing. We have accepted the idea of the democratization of culture—we have accepted, rightly, that, say, opera is not inherently worthier than jazz, that superhero comics are not inherently dumb, that ancient epic poetry is not automatically loftier than rap (with which it shares some features), that all of these things can be done well or badly and that they serve different ends—without accomplishing democracy. I mean this in a dully straightforward way. We are not all equally in control of our lives, and we are afraid of what becoming so would entail, of the costs of democracy, of the mess of it. We are divided by class, race, and gender and united only in being the objects of a ceaseless corporate effort to accomplish our commodification. Having lost the economic battle to economic and political elites, we celebrate, again and again, our victory over the mostly imaginary cultural elite that would scorn us for watching 90 Day Fiancé. What you can’t do practically, you do symbolically, until it becomes a neurosis.

I can’t think of a better description for the quality that is everywhere in Fisher than “impersonal care.” He talks about his own problems, his own life, in a distanced, Ballardian way, and he avoids the risk of sentimentality perhaps too carefully. But he cares. He cares about books, he cares about records, he cares about friends, he cares about students, he cares about ideas, he cares about the world. He cannot write indifferently. Even his repeated efforts to wrest something useful from Nick Land are an example of care: he couldn’t throw an old mentor in the wastebasket. Elizabeth Bruenig, in a beautiful tribute to Fisher, writes that his interest in even the worst of pop culture was an act of “intellectual solidarity” with regular people, although I’d add that this was not a strategy that he thought through consciously. Fisher simply cared about everything. He is the only person who has ever made me want to read Deleuze; he is also the only person who has ever made me want to watch The Hunger Games.

“Bleeding edge” is a techie phrase meaning beyond even the “cutting edge”—so new that it hurts. The irony of this as a title is that the novel is set mostly in the spring and summer of 2001. Pynchon offers such nostalgic references as Beanie Babies, Furbys, Pokémon, Razor scooters, and Jennifer Aniston still in Rachel mode alongside a presidency just stolen and a tech bubble just burst. Downtown, the towers of the World Trade Center throw their foreshadows over Wall Street. A stretch farther north, between TriBeCa and the Flatiron, lies Silicon Alley, a New York tech district that actually existed, or that was actually hyped to have existed—a real estate figment like NoHo or SoHa or even the West and East Villages (originally the Village and the Lower East Side).

Here, in Pynchon’s telling, two types prevailed. One consisted of generic deracinated White People who’d gone out West like the prospectors of yore, but who when they bottomed out amid the Bay’s Zen gardens and organic-smoothie chains found themselves yearning for real urban grit—or at least for the really yuppified grit of gentrifying Giulianiville. The other was made up of city lifers, the ethnically identifying—or not yet postidentity—strivers who’ve always served as New York’s color: the wise black bike messenger, the Irish cop and fireman, the social-club Italian, the backroom-fixer Jew; the “genuine,” the “authentic,” the huddled masses yearning for cash.