Archives for September 7, 2009

In honor of the release of its new DVD edition of The Last Days of Disco, the folks at the Criterion Collection invited Whit Stillman to submit a top-ten list of his favorite Criterion releases. He chose Mario Monicelli’s Big Deal on Madonna Street, Marcel Camus’ Black Orpheus, Marcel Carné’s Children of Paradise, François Truffaut’s The 400 Blows, Perry Henzell’s The Harder They Come, Preston Sturges’ The Lady Eve, Alfred Hitchcock’s The Lady Vanishes, Gregory La Cava’s My Man Godfrey, Hitchcock’s Notorious, and Ingmar Bergman’s The Seventh Seal, and his comments on each film are both astute and revealing.

What would I choose from the Criterion catalogue? I like nearly all of the films on Whit’s list, but only one, The Lady Eve, would make my personal top ten. Here are my other nine picks, in alphabetical order:

• Michael Powell’s I Know Where I’m Going!
• Noah Baumbach’s Kicking and Screaming
• Wes Anderson’s The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou
• Whit Stillman’s Metropolitan
• Samuel Fuller’s Pickup on South Street
• Jean Renoir’s The Rules of the Game (of course!)
• François Truffaut’s Shoot the Piano Player
• Carol Reed’s The Third Man
• Ernst Lubitsch’s Trouble in Paradise

Runners-up: Billy Wilder’s Ace in the Hole, Kevin Smith’s Chasing Amy, Ronald Neame’s Hopscotch, Hitchcock’s Notorious, and Renoir’s The River.

Surprised?

P.S. I encourage my co-bloggers to do likewise!

Patrick Kurp of Anecdotal Evidence and D.G. Myers of A Commonplace Blog are jointly conducting a serial symposium called “The Function of Book Blogging at the Present Time” whose participants have been invited to “speculate about the past, present, and future of this youngest of literary genres.” Even though I’m not strictly a book blogger, they asked me to join the fray anyway. Here’s my contribution. Their questions are followed by my answers:

• What are the non-electronic precursors of book blogging?

Diaries, letters, commonplace books, periodical essays. I think of blogging as introspection made public.

• Who do you look toward for inspiration and models?

No one. I’ve been blogging for six years–much longer than most artbloggers–and it stands to reason that I should have a pretty clear idea by now of what I want to do and how I want to do it.

• How does book blogging differ from print counterparts such as book reviews?

For me, the only difference (other than the absence of a paycheck) is brevity and the constraints it imposes. I write the same way everywhere.

• How do you respond to this statement?–Blogging is just another hobby, like stamp collecting or hockey.

It depends on how you blog–and how you define “hobby.” I’d say it’s more like painting for pleasure, or playing chamber music in the home. If you think those are hobbies, then so is book blogging.

• How has the experience of blogging changed the way you write?

I think it’s probably reinforced my tendency to write in a conversational style–but, then, I’ve always tried to write the way I talk.

• What about the sometimes vicious nature of the beast?–the ad hominem attacks, and the widespread tendency to confuse harsh disagreement with such ad hominem attacks.

To blog is to become a public figure. Ad hominem attacks go with the territory. If you can’t stand the flames, log off.

• Some say the golden age of blogging has already passed, that blogging has failed to fulfill its early promise; and the evidence which is given is that no one becomes famous from blogging any longer. Do you agree?

Er, who are all those “famous” book bloggers? Blogging is no longer a novelty, but artblogging of all sorts, including literate commentary on literature, has always been a minority pursuit and always will be.

• In a recent blog column, the technology writer Michael S. Malone suggests that a handful of bloggers have “earned huge audiences, while millions of others have not,” because readers have learned to trust the more popular bloggers “to either consistently entertain us, or we trust their judgment in selecting interesting items for us to read, or we trust that their world view is just like our own and their ability to enunciate those views even better.” Do you agree? Does this explain why no book blogger has earned a huge audience?

I think this is true, but I also think it’s irrelevant to book blogging, for the reasons specified above. No book blogger will ever earn a huge audience, unless he limits himself to commentary on the novels of Dan Brown or J.K. Rowling.

• Are book bloggers wise or foolish to include political commentary?

It depends on whether you identify wisdom with traffic. I’m much less likely to pay attention to any critic of the arts who sees the world through politics-colored glasses–whatever their shade–but I suspect that the average reader feels differently.

“She is a person with many friends and many internal and moral and intellectual resources, yet she confesses in the most disarming–and helpful–manner how much the Internet came to her aid, first when her son was killed and second when she discovered that a term had been set on her own life. The importance of this medium in bringing about a great unspoken social reform–the abolition of loneliness–has not to my knowledge been better evoked.”
Christopher Hitchens, “The Pain of Elizabeth Edwards” (The Atlantic, September 2009)