Archives for November 15, 2003

Jennifer Howard, a contributing editor of Washington Post Book World, has a piece in the Post‘s “Outlook” section in which she complains about the chumminess of the blogosphere, citing by name a number of arts blogs and bloggers, present company included:

Part of blogs’ usefulness as a cultural barometer is that they don’t automatically buy what the establishment says about Vida or Eggers or any other overhyped phenomenon, literary or otherwise. Bloggers know what they like and what they don’t like, and they aren’t afraid to tell you why. And they get to use bad words that will never see print inside a family newspaper. But to get to the good stuff, you have to wade through more and more self-congratulation and mutual admiration. Call it blogrolling….

Maybe the back-scratching started as revolutionary solidarity. Now it’s a popularity contest in which the value of information is confused with the cool quotient of the person spreading it. Late-night TV has Jay and Dave and Conan; the blogosphere has TMFTML and Old Hag and Choire, only unlike the gods of late night, the gods of the blogosphere really, really like each other–and say so every chance they get.

They’re not so nice to the less popular kids, often establishment-media types who get flogged out of all proportion to their op-ed offenses. The last few months, it’s been all the rage to paste Laura Miller, a critic with regular gigs for Salon.com and the New York Times. One of the kinder comments, this one from Cup of Chicha: “From the way she writes about contemporary short stories, it feels obvious she doesn’t read them.” Even if you’re not a fan of Miller’s, the attacks can get so nasty it starts to feel like bloggers pick on her not because they think she’s a lousy critic but because she gets to sound off every other week in the New York Times….

If the ad hominem tactics made for a better read, I might not mind so much. Sure, it can be fun in a sick sort of way, like watching a bar fight while you nurse a beer in the corner. But more and more it gets in the way of what makes blogs useful to someone like me, and that’s information. After making my daily e-rounds, I feel more plugged into what’s going on–and ever more burned out on cronyism and negativity. Even if you rely on blogs for idiosyncratic takes on the news, even if you enjoy seeing sacred cows slaughtered, even if you believe, as I do, that the world needs the kind of Zorro-like cultural commentary they’re so good at, you start to wonder: Is this getting a little too personal?

Maybe that’s the point. In the blogosphere, everybody gets to be a critic.

Read the whole thing here.

Actually, Our Girl and I don’t do a lot of ad hominem brawling, but we do like to plug what’s going on elsewhere in the blogosphere, mainly because it’s still a very new invention about which more and more people are learning every day. That’s why we mention TMFTML
and Maud
and Cup of Chicha
and Old Hag
and Bookslut
and all the other interesting blogs that we read regularly–because we think they’re worth knowing about. “Coolness” and cronyism have nothing to do with it. We don’t party down nightly. I’ve met one of the aforementioned bloggers, once. Two of them I don’t even know by name.

In any case, the great thing about the blogosphere is that it’s an unusually pure example of an information market. People read “About Last Night” because they want to read it. If they don’t, they won’t. The same is true of all the other blogs. The ease with which you can visit a blog is part of what makes the blogosphere so competitive–and it’s not a zero-sum game, either. Anyone can play. It’s cheap and easy to set up a blog. To be a “popular kid,” all you have to do is jump in and be consistently interesting, and you’ll get noticed and mentioned and blogrolled very, very quickly. It doesn’t matter who you know or where you are. (Look what happened to Cup of Chicha.)

As for Laura Miller, I think maybe Ms. Howard is engaging in a teeny bit of snarkery herself when she suggests that “bloggers pick on her not because they think she’s a lousy critic but because she gets to sound off every other week in the New York Times.” I don’t have an opinion about Laura Miller–I don’t read her stuff–but if I felt the need to criticize her, it wouldn’t be because I resented the fact that she’s an “establishment-media type.” After all, so am I. Nor do I blog to be hip or cool or to kick sand in the faces of the “less popular kids,” whatever that means. I do it because I think blogging is an exciting and potentially significant development in arts journalism, and I want to be part of it. I’m excited by the immediacy and freshness and personal quality of blogs. I also like the bad words and knife fights, even if we don’t do that kind of stuff around here. I don’t own a shiv, and Our Girl is too sweet. (I don’t even think she knows some of those words TMFTML uses.)

Above all, blogging is fun. And that’s one thing I don’t get from Jennifer Howard’s eat-your-spinach account of life in the blogosphere: a sense of how much fun we’re all having out here. “We” meaning TMFTML and Maud and Cup of Chicha and Old Hag and Bookslut and the thousands of nice people who visit us every day. It’s not a private party. There’s no secret handshake. All you have to do is click on a link. Or not. But we hope you do.

I very much like what Our Girl wrote about not letting herself get freaked out in advance by the reviews of Master and Commander (though now that they’re out, I’d say she doesn’t have much to get freaked out about).

In my own case, I’m trying to prepare myself not to get freaked out by the differences between the movie and the books. So far, I’ve only read one unfavorable review, by Christopher Hitchens, a reflexive contrarian who likes nothing better than to fly in the face of conventional wisdom, even when it’s right and he’s wrong. Yet it’s obvious that Hitchens knows Patrick O’Brian’s books extremely well, for he unhesitatingly put his finger on a key aspect of the film about which the trailer left me extremely suspicious: the way it portrays Stephen Maturin.

The summa of O’Brian’s genius was the invention of Dr. Stephen Maturin. He is the ship’s gifted surgeon, but he is also a scientist, an espionage agent for the Admiralty, a man of part Irish and part Catalan birth–and a revolutionary. He joins the British side, having earlier fought against it, because of his hatred for Bonaparte’s betrayal of the principles of 1789–principles that are perfectly obscure to bluff Capt. Jack Aubrey. Any cinematic adaptation of O’Brian must stand or fall by its success in representing this figure.

On this the film doesn’t even fall, let alone stand. It skips the whole project. As played by the admittedly handsome and intriguing Paul Bettany, Maturin is no more than a good doctor with finer feelings and a passion for natural history. At one point he is made to say in an English accent that he is Irish–but that’s the only hint we get. In the books, for example, he quarrels badly with Aubrey about Lord Nelson’s support for slavery. But here a superficial buddy movie is born out of one of the subtlest and richest and most paradoxical male relationships since Holmes and Watson.

I regret to say that all this sounds dangerously plausible to me. I’ve read the entire Aubrey-Maturin series several times and admire it greatly (if not uncritically), but I also think its virtues, which I tried to describe when I reviewed The Yellow Admiral (one of the later volumes in the series) for the New York Times Book Review, are of a sort not easily transferred to the screen, in part because they are embodied as much in conversation as in action:

Mr. O’Brian’s present popularity is to some extent a fad, but it is also justified. To say that his books are a cut above the average historical novel is to miss the point: Aubrey and Maturin are to Capt. Horatio Hornblower what Philip Marlowe is to Perry Mason….In the end, what makes the Aubrey-Maturin novels memorable is their moral gravity: rarely does one encounter in nominally popular fiction so Trollopian an understanding–and acceptance–of the divided nature of men’s souls. Mr. O’Brian does not deal in cardboard heroes, which is why the acts of heroism he describes make so powerful an impression. We read him for his plots; we reread him for his philosophy.

I hasten to point out, however, that this is all the more reason to try and forget about the books when watching the film. A faithful film adaptation of a novel of any considerable literary complexity can never be more than a species of illustration–a commentary at best, a comic book at worst. To watch it inevitably becomes a kind of game in which the viewer scores the film according to how many surface details the director gets right. Do the actors look the way they “ought” to? Are the sets convincing? Does the dialogue sound familiar? It’s a good game, but it has nothing to do with art.

The smarter approach, of course, is for the director to depart drastically from the source–to subject it to an imaginative transformation that gives the adaptation an independent life as a free-standing art object in its own right. (It’s easier to turn a great novel into a great opera than a great film.) But if you do that, you’re likely to lose a significant part of the pre-sold audience of loyal fans whose existence is the main reason why popular books get filmed in the first place. As far as they’re concerned, the more literal the adaptation, the better–and I, hardened aesthete though I am, can’t keep myself from feeling the same way. As Dr. Johnson might have put it, I rejoice to concur with the common reader, even though I know I shouldn’t.

Hence I’m of two minds about Master and Commander. I’m well aware that it won’t convey more than a fractional part of the subtleties of O’Brian’s novels, but I’m going to see it anyway, checklist in hand, hoping against hope that the images on the screen will at least approximate the ones in my head. And that’s why I envy OGIC her blissful ignorance. Unlike me, she’ll see the film for what it is and nothing more–and if she likes it enough, she might even feel moved to buy a copy of Master and Commander, the first novel in the series, and find out what Patrick O’Brian is really about. (Nudge, nudge.)