I found myself in the awkward position of agreeing with two opposing views at once, and I’m trying to work through the implications in advance of my thesis on copyright and the literary canon.

The work I’m reading now is Remix: Making Art and Commerce Thrive in the Hybrid Economy by Lawrence Lessig.  Lessig argues for the value of remix, both in the social and economic realms; in doing so, he praises Steven Johnson’s book on mass media, Everything Bad is Good for You.  This citation sent my mind back to Susan Jacoby’s polemic against anti-intellectualism, The Age of American Unreason.  Lessig summarizes Johnson’s argument as follows:

Aiming to rebut the view that television has become “brain dead,” Johnson argues that TV has in fact become more rich and complex over time, not less.  The reason relates in part to technology.  As people collect not only television sets but DVD players, producers of television programming to give their audience an interest in after-broadcast sales.  A show maximizes its revenue when there’s a postbroadcast demand for DVDs or for reruns.

So how do you create that demand?  One way is through complexity.  As Johnson demonstrates, the most successful television shows have multiplied the number of plot lines running through them.  And though thte shows are always understandable at one viewing, few viewers would understand everything going on in every show.  The fan thus has a reason to watch it again–which means, buy the DVD or tune in to reruns.  Complexity thus drives follow-on consumption. (94)

The point Lessig tries to make is that much of the professional mass media are oriented toward response and community for market reasons–I’ve certainly seen this in my lifelong devotion to various science fiction communities.  The rise of the serial drama in recent years underscores this trend.  Remix of this culture is not only inherent to its form but a valid cultural response.

I don’t have Jacoby’s book at hand, so I can’t specifically account for her rejection of Johnson’s argument.  I can say with confidence, however, that it fit into a larger rejection of the idea that the mass media are intellectually neutral or even beneficial.  Much of The Age of American Unreason is concerned with examining the deleterious effects of video culture concomitant with the death of print culture.  Television not only promotes passivity, Jacoby argues, but it encourages us toward anti-intellectualism and “unreason.”

I agree with much of this argument, particularly because I’ve seen it in my own life.  TV and internet video often makes me intellectually and physically lazy.  I do not approve of myself spending an entire Saturday on Hulu any more than I would approve of someone else watching VH-1 reruns for the same amount of time (and, to be honest, I’ve done the VH-1 marathon thing too).

But I also agree with Lessig’s point–some mass media are good for us, and response and criticism of said media are essential to the advancement of our society.  We need to reexamine the culture of professionalism that legally and culturally limits us in our remix and (dare I say it?) deconstruction of our culture.

Lessig and Jacoby are addressing completely separate subjects, and I suspect they would agree on many fundamentals–and what I derive from the two is an ethics of remix.  Lessig touches on this somewhat by detailing how remix is good for education and personal development, but he never addresses the issue of quality.  Jacoby addresses quality at length, lamenting the rise of academic units devoted to popular culture and fat studies, lambasting literary criticism that takes seriously the ludicrous notion that Bob Dylan and Paul Simon are true poets.  She focuses on what we consume and how it affects our engagement with society and cultural debates, but she never offers a method by which we can intellectually engage the mass media environment we live in.  Both authors describe in horrific detail the decay that a read only–as opposed to a read/write–culture engenders: passivity, laziness, blind consumerism.  Hence the ethics of remix–not remix for its own sake, but a cultural response or even a celebration of the mass media.  And from there, we can develop a means by which we assess quality and even canonicity.

—

Jacoby, Susan. The Age of American Unreason. New York: Pantheon, 2008.

Lessig, Lawrence. Remix: Making Art and Commerce Thrive in the Hybrid Economy. New York: Penguin, 2008.

Sorry. I’ve given up on C.S. Lewis. Not on his scholarship or his apologetics (though I’m skeptical of those at this point), but on his didactic, overbearing fiction.

It’s useful to trace how I got to this point.

First, there was Narnia. I remember reading The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe as a kid–or, rather, I remember having read it. I don’t think I read any of the other volumes, though they were in my library. Fast-forward to a couple years ago, when that book’s adaptation was brought to life by Disney. The film was decent (not great, certainly not as good as Jackson’s Lord of the Rings), so I was interested enough to pick up the Narnia books again. I didn’t remember anything from them, so I went into my one-volume Chronicles of Narnia with the expectation that I would enjoy it. I should also note that I was reading J.K. Rowling and Lemony Snicket at the time, so I was generally positive toward children’s literature.

So I read Lion.

I hated it. There were some spectacular lines, but the story was disjointed to the point of near-incoherence and the dialogue was stilted, like the worst of Victorian prudishness. It was one of the most singularly horrible reading experiences I had subjected myself to.

Being a glutton for punishment, I read Prince Caspian. More of the same, really; the dialogue improved somewhat, but did Aslan have to jump in, deus ex machina, without any connection with the previous 75 pages? Finally, I gave Lewis a third shot and read The Magician’s Nephew. The only thing–and I do mean the only thing–I got out of it was the observation that Neil Gaiman stole his beginning to Anansi Boys from the creation of Narnia. Other than that, it was crap.

I know I’m being pejorative, and I know I have some Lewis aficionado friends who occasionally read this, but I simply must be honest: I found all three books pretentious, awkward, and intensely overrated.

My impression of Lewis improved somewhat when I listened to John Cleese’s reading of The Screwtape Letters. Finally, here was the Lewis I had been told of–clearly a prose stylist who understands the subtle hypocrises and real triumphs of modern religion. The words themselves, not just Cleese’s performance of them, were marvelous. Screwtape is the only reason I hold out hope for Lewis’s apologetical and scholarly writing.

Unfortunately, I was duped again by Lewis when I also downloaded Out of the Silent Planet from Audible.com. It started out well, more or less. Ransom is a lovable, solitary professor at the beginning–a stock character if there ever was one–and I had hopes he would develop out of that. The séroni are truly terrifying in their first appearance, and the narrative held me on the edge of my seat until the lowly doldrums that is Ransom’s encounter with the hrossa. This sequence reveals the total flatness of Ransom; the book might have been called C.S. Lewis Goes to Space. Ransom’s two-dimensional self-righteousness, and the weird neoplatonism of the author, weigh down every paragraph. Ransom learns from the hrossa, but only their language and some transparently didactic religious points that Lewis wanted to get across (particularly when Hyoi tells Ransom about the restrained sex life of hrossa). It was at this point in the narrative that I truly resented the early confrontation between Ransom and Weston; the latter plays the nihilist (we’re supposed to boo and hiss at him, I guess) and the former plays the dignified humanist who is against vivisection. I had recognized Lewis’s precise honing of that conversation for his didactic purposes, but I didn’t realize the extent of it until Ransom meets another species and utterly fails to change.

But the oddest things about the encounter with the hrossa is its parallel with Gulliver’s Travels. Gulliver, too, is a fool in a strange land. In each voyage, he–like Ransom among the hrossa–is instructed in the local language and learns it quickly because of his supposed facility for languages. Ransom is an anti-Gulliver in some respects; he is an Oxford philologist, so it makes sense that he recognizes Hyoi’s linguistic capabilities when they first meet. But in other respects, he is a pale imitation of Gulliver; neither character changes, but at least Swift’s protagonist is delightfully complex in his chauvinistic idiocy. Ransom is just the stereotype of an Oxford don who makes strange lands and strange peoples dreadfully boring.

So I gave up. I downloaded Jonathon Lethem’s The Fortress of Solitude from Audible.com and was delighted, in the first five minutes, to know that I was going to be given complex characters and questions rather than propositions.

I am profoundly disappointed in my reading of Lewis. I was intrigued by the idea of a Christian science fiction novel, but I won’t be picking Out of the Silent Planet up–or anything else by Lewis–for a long, long time.

Besides school books (of course), here’s my priority reading list (with current publisher, original publication date):

1. Toni Morrison, Mercy (Random, 2008): Wikipedia tells me that this will be released in October.  I will be there the day it comes out.  That is all.
2. William Gibson, Neuromancer (Ace, 1984): I’ve been wanting to read this because it so often comes up in critiques of modern SF literature; it’s sort of the book equivalent of Blade Runner.  I’ve started to read it, and I’m amazed at how it seems to have a coherent story despite its disorienting premise.
3. David Michaelis, Schultz and Peanuts: A Biography (Harper, 2007): I love the idea that the man behind Peanuts was a tortured artist and that one of the most ubiquitous commercial properties in American culture has a great deal of pathos behind it.  I was first introduced to this idea by a comic artist (I forget who) who pointed out that the absent parents are the most striking feature of Schultz’s strip; when I heard that Michaelis had uncovered the reason for this pathos, I knew I had to read his biography.
4. William Empson, Milton’s God (Greenwood, 1961): I don’t know if I’ll agree with all of Empson’s conclusions (probably not), but I’m intrigued by the idea that Milton was so towering a poet that even the most ardent atheist had to pay attention.  Also, I think one of the greatest heresies of Milton scholarship is the one that supposes that he always and everywhere wrote orthodox poetry.
5. Frank Kermode, The Sense of an Ending: Studies in the Theory of Fiction (Oxford, 1967): This one is more of a line of research, while my interest in Empson is mostly curiosity. I’m intrigued by the endings of GenX novels and, specifically, how the endings relate to the tension between cool disaffection and melodramatic sincerity.  My hope is that Kermode, having written the definitive book on endings, will aid me in my research.
6. Alister McGrath, Christianity’s Dangerous Idea: The Protestant Revolution (Harper, 2007): This was recommended by the Internet Monk as a cogent and sometimes damning history of the Reformation.  I like the idea of scholars committed to a certain religious cause taking a serious look at its origins.
7. Zora Neale Hurston, Dust Tracks on the Road (Harper, 1942): Last year, I fell in love with Hurston’s writing.  Few modern American writers are so poetic (for me, she is only eclipsed in this regard by Morrison), and none provide such eloquent–if occasionally shocking–expositions of racial inequities.  Dust Tracks is her autobiography, and it now includes what her white editors made her cut in the interest of political correctness.
8. Toni Morrison, Paradise (Penguin, 1997): It is my understanding that Paradise completes a trilogy started by Beloved and continued in Jazz.  Both of the latter novels are remarkable, and I simply must know how Morrison binds her books together.
9. Jacob Weisberg, The Bush Tragedy (Random, 2008): Most anti-Bush books are foaming-at-the-mouth affairs, but I like Weisberg’s approach.  He begins with the assumption that Bush is a failure–debatable, but not debated here–and uses his book to examine the man’s character.  It sounds like solid journalism from what he describes in interviews (I recently heard him on Fresh Air).
10. Douglas Coupland, Microserfs (Harper, 1995): I adored Generation X, even though the ending was extremely odd (see above), and I’m desperate to learn more.  Though I didn’t enter the corporate workforce until the 2000s, I’ve always felt drawn to the business and technology culture of the 1990s.  The tech boom to the tech bust is the most interesting period of business history for me, probably because I grew up with it.  Also, there’s a wild-west/hopeless-slacker combination going on.  I’ve heard good things, and I’m looking forward to reading it.

I’m reading…

• Soon I Will Be Invincible by Austin Grossman (Pantheon, 2007; via Audible.com): Just started this one, and it’s a true delight.  It’s a dual reading, appropriate for its dual voice narrative.  Grossman seems to take superhero and supervillain tropes seriously and provides a world to explain how they operate.
• Pontoon: A Novel of Lake Wobegon by Garrison Keillor (Viking, 2007; via Audible.com): Just finished this one, and I’ve concluded that audio is the only format to read a Keillor book.  Pontoon begins with a transcendent description of Heaven and descends to the earth, to Lake Wobegon, to examine what happens when a citizen dies.  The strength of the novel is that the situations and the characters are both unique and universal; you feel that these people are down the street from you, but you also feel they’re unlike anyone else.  You feel that these situations have happened to you, but they never have.  But most importantly, Pontoon is an example of what happens when an author truly understands oral literature and incorporates it into the Western novel.  Thus, the narrative is recursive, with each person’s story being told, as if the novel itself represents what future generations of Lake Wobegon will say about these people and these events.

Of Kahlil Gibran’s Collected Works, by Alan Jacobs, in First Things.  (Via Little Professor)

…seen the Alamo Drafthouse decked out like Hogwarts for 5 midnight showings of Harry Potter Part the Fifth…

…then drank an alcoholic butterbeer and eating treacle fudge…

…then watched a superb “wizard rock” performance by the Remus Lupins…

…then watched the best Harry Potter movie of the bunch.

A major part of my thesis project will be an examination of just what the canon is.  I will admit, first of all, that I don’t have a firm grasp on the critical debate surrounding the issue.  I have a fair understanding of what the different sides believe and what’s at stake, but I’m not so clear on the specifics.  That’s what I’ll figure out when I get to researching my thesis topic systematically.

I understand the basic importance of having a canon, but I don’t think it’s anything but a matter of convenience.  We simply must decide which books we’re going to teach and which books we won’t teach.  Of course, that “list” (and a list makes a weak canon indeed) must be flexible and humble.  It must not be a declaratory statement, “These books will stand for all time.”  Few books can or will stay on such a list, and it’s a good thing.

One of the most important things I learned in my postmodernism class is  the place of current crises in canon formation.  Specifically, I’m appropriating Borges’s idea of Kafka’s predecessors–that is, we had to create Kafka’s influences, though they would never have been grouped any other way.  So it goes with the Angl0-American canon,*  which bizarrely places Shakespeare alongside Mark Twain alongside Toni Morrison alongside (soon, anyway) Thomas Pynchon.  I’m realizing that canon formation is simply a way to account for the literature and attitudes of the present.

*And we really must separate the Anglo-American canon from the Continental canon.  Ulysses may top our unofficial (and even official) lists of the greatest novel of all time, but L’Etranger has the title in France and Don Quixote has it in Spain.

Doppelganger at 50 Books has a post of lists that she intends to write, among them "Books I read only after seeing the movie."  Most of the time, it’s the other way around–I read the book, and then I bemoan the adaptation.*  But here we are…

• J.R.R. Tolkein, Fellowship of the Ring: To be fair, I had read The Hobbit years before the LOTR films were released.  I still haven’t read the other two thirds of the trilogy.
• C.S. Lewis, Chronicles of Narnia: Well, the first three books, anyway.  I was getting sick of Lewis by the end of the third book and had to put my impressive one-volume set down.  I know I should like it, but I just don’t.
• Lemony Snicket, A Series of Unfortunate Events: The film was great, and I soon received the first two books as a Christmas gift.  I was hooked immediately.  Since first receiving those books (Christmas 2005), I’ve read all 13 books and the Unathorized Autobiography.  Wonderful stuff, and the film was a decent interpretation.
• J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the [X]: I’m noticing a fantasy theme in this list.  I long resisted Potter-mania, fulfilling my Anglo-American duty by restricting myself to the films.  I’ve been pleasantly surprised by the books, though I think that Snicket and Gaiman are far better writers in the children’s lit genre.

That’s all that comes to mind.  Short list, but I’ll add some more if I can think of any.

 Anyone else?

*A secondary list: Worst movie adaptations ever.  Of course, to qualify for this list, the book has to be really good and the movie proportionately bad.

• Timeline (2003, dir. Richard Donner): Oh, my.  Where do I start?  The Crichton novel was truly innovative, and one of his best.  It balanced astrophysics and story nearly perfectly–also, it noted the language differences between modern English and middle English.  But Donner’s interpretation is a silly action film that is sillier and more cliche-laden than the worst Lethal Weapon film. 
• Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire (2005, dir. Mike Newell): Perhaps I’m being unfair when I group this mediocre film with the mindless dreck in the first item.  I place it here, though, because the novel is excellent while the film has a great deal of problems.  Characters appear in places without any context for them being there, important subtexts are excluded–all in all, I think this book was simply too big to be adapted to film.  Newell tried the best he could, but I’ve never been satisfied with the result.
• The Lost World: Jurassic Park (1997, dir. Steven Spielberg): Filmmakers just don’t get what makes Michael Crichton such a good writer.  He’s not a stellar master of prose, but he’s a genius at making science both entertaining and thrilling.  He creates characters that the reader can care about while crashing toward an inevitable conclusion.  Spielberg, who got it right the first time (although, notably, Crichton was involved in the script only for the first film and not for its sequel), delivered an awful adaptation with cardboard characters.  The movie was pretty, and it was entertaining, but it bore little resemblance to Crichton’s excellent sequel.
• The Shining (1980, dir. Stanley Kubrick): Maybe I could have a secondary list to this one (I won’t, but I could–and Timeline would be on it, as well) titled, "How dare you so thoroughly screw up my favorite books."  Kubrick was a master of enduring images, but his reworking of one of King’s best novels (only second to The Green Mile, Hearts in Atlantis, and maybe Bag of Bones) is a pathetic excuse for a psychological thriller.  Ech.  I’m going to stop before I go on too long.

Incidentally, I’m suspicious of any film adaptation of Michael Crichton or Steven King.  King is especially good at psychological terror, but filmmakers just want to show the gory parts; Crichton novels are robbed of any nuance and made into bad action films (I’m looking at you, Congo). 

After she sees an error that I missed in a paper I was grading: “I feel like Lady Macbeth when I tell you that you should mark something.”

Bad grade=death, I guess.