Archive for ‘Art & Culture’

June 12th, 2011

2 Short, 1 Long

With the acquisition of my iPad has come an exploration of the world of ebooks and Kindle software. I had resisted previously–I do enough digital reading as it is, and I like the certainty and feel of printed words on bound pages–but in adding the large screen to the smaller one of my phone, my defenses against at least trying it out started to crumble. I can say now that I’m not sorry; at least, not entirely.

First I discovered Barry Eisler’s first short story “The Lost Coast,” featuring Daniel Larison, a wayward special ops agent from his most recent novel, “Inside Out.” Eisler has become even more famous recently for walking away from a big, traditional publishing deal in order to pursue the world of self-publishing aggressively. “The Lost Coast” was a good read, and Eisler clearly has a talent for story telling that works just as well in a short format.

Larison, on the run from his former bosses, is skulking around the quieter bits of California, keeping his own company as much as possible. In “Inside Out,” Eisler cast Larison is gay, an element one might not have imagined or predicted–but also one that he makes seem as natural and normal for a special ops agent as … well, as it probably is in real life. Here this is the twist on which the plot turns, and the story again marries Eisler’s traditional strengths of combat strategy and martial arts with his liberal politics. However, where “Inside Out” got preachy, “Lost Coast” just knuckles down, literally and figuratively. A couple bits were more gruesome than expected, but this story was so gripping that I wound up installing the Kindle app on my iPhone just so I could keep reading.

That led me to “Paris is a Bitch,” Eisler’s next short story, which picks up the tale of the half-Japanese / half-American assassin John Rain and his Mossad-agent girlfriend Delilah. Rain is the focus of an extended (and terrific) series by Eisler, and it is one of the author’s singular skills that he has made Rain a sympathetic figure: one cannot help but cheer him on, despite his deadly assignments. Here we find John Rain employing his traditionally well-tuned antennae to resist an attack, and deploying his own martial arts and combat strategies right on time. We also gain insight on aspects of Rain’s emotional side that Eisler has been slowly teasing out over the last couple of books. If slightly less visceral than “The Lost Coast,” it is nonetheless entertaining and a must-read for Rain fans.

Both ebooks include chapters from Eisler’s new novel-in-process, “The Detachment,” which will bring Rain and Larison together with a few other characters and, already from the first three chapters, it’s clear it will be a killer thriller, all puns intended. My only regret is about the ebook format: as digital short stories, I don’t have them available to put on my shelf next to the other Eisler novels. If that sounds like a small complaint in this context well, yes, it is. But as a collector of books, I like having more than a mere virtual possession of the things I read. Perhaps some day Eisler will release an actual book of his short stories.

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Print isn’t the issue with the longer book I read on my iPad, Lee Goldberg’s entertaining story “The Man With The Iron On Badge.” For any fan of John D. MacDonald’s series of novels with Travis McGee, or any devout followers of 70s-era detective TV shows, this story (also available in print) is a must. But I will say that one character that came to mind repeatedly (though unreferenced by Goldberg) was Lawrence Block’s delightful Chip Harrison. Goldberg seems to be channeling a similar kind of late-adolescent delight in watching his detective-obsessed Harvey Mapes become a man. No matter what format you choose, this story is fun.

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February 1st, 2011

Googly Eyes For Google?

I have to admit: a little part of me was rather saddened today to see the launch of the Google Art Project.

The arguments in its favor make perfect sense, in the abstract.  It offers easy access to a lot of art, globally (or at least, for those with a good internet connection and a good computer).  In mapping galleries and providing scanning options of the space, it can help someone understand a work of art in its museum context – what works are adjacent, what surrounds it, etc. – as well as get a feeling for a place they may be planning to visit.  Providing selected works for high-definition, very detailed viewing offers some joys, too; it can be hard to see most paintings at this level of magnification while they hang on the walls of a museum.

And then there’s the broader trend: museums are digitizing their collections, developing online companion pieces to 3-D exhibitions, creating Smartphone apps, developing teaching tools, and more.  All of which – I can say unambiguously – is the right thing to do, and must be done.  The museum person and the technologist in me are in agreement on the need to embrace this challenge.

Still, I felt sad by the digital rigor mortis of this art, and those clinically captured galleries. For one thing, it’s hard to see even a small work of art effectively on a computer screen.  (In my office set-up, I have two; that is, one computer running two, new, 19″ flat panels. Even with that luxurious arrangement, I still don’t feel like it’s adequate, not least because Google compresses the viewing picture into an inset box.)  Zooming in on specific works of art shows you much detail, but you lose the three-dimensionality to which the human eye responds so well in person, as it moves back and forth between different zoom levels and focal points in nano-seconds.

You might (rightly) ask yourself whether my perspective means much, as an insider: that the value of this system is for the people who cannot get to these museums in person.  But if you are a regular museum goer, it’s hard to see this really taking the place of an in-person visit.  And if you’re not a regular museum goer, either because you don’t like museums or you don’t find art particularly stimulating … well, I just wonder how much allure – or benefit – there is to seeing works of art you probably are not familiar with as they hang in galleries you haven’t visited.  In fact at some level, this is a very elite take on the idea of accessibility: you need to be able to appreciate art in order to appreciate art in this context.

I admire Google for trying this out, just as I appreciate so many of the company’s Beta and Lab initiatives; Google has the resources to test out solutions to problems real and imagined, and I consider myself generally better off for their experiments.  Certainly the museums that participated made the right choice: why wouldn’t you want to collaborate with Google on such a project?  If it had been my client, I would surely have recommended they move ahead.  But this whole thing feels cold to me, demonstrating once again the challenge of trying to replace (or even supplement) the in-person experience of an authentic work of art with a simulation, where so much detail and context is lost.  Untangling the gordian knot of digital solutions for art museums is not going to be as simple as one slice through the center with the Google Art Project.

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Update: Also read this piece by Menachem Wecker on the Iconia blog, with other perspectives (as well as mine) on Google Art Project. Boston Globe art critic Sebastian Smee weighs in. ArtInfo has a piece on another company that created and deployed a similar (perhaps better) technology.

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November 4th, 2010

Don’t Ask

“The Ask”, by Sam Lipsyte – New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2010

Let’s get right to it: This is no master work. If anything, it feels like two books that got workshopped into one.

The majority of Sam Lipsyte’s 2010 novel “The Ask” is an exercise in witty glibness, a chance for Lipsyte to show off his humor skills. Lipsyte is clever and creative–funny is the right word–and he has created some entertaining foils for protagonist Milo Burke. It’s hard not to smile at the joke of an unwanted child whose mother named her “Vagina,” and of the kindly hospital worker who introduced an “r” to save her some self-respect. Likewise the entertaining, faux-hip linguistic stylings of Horace, who makes up words and terms at will, and who (we discover) lives in some cage-filled converted Brooklyn warehouse that seems both realistic and far-fetched. Together the three of them work in the development department of one of New York’s lesser universities, hence the title’s reference to a basic fundraising activity.

But the jokes about Horace and Vargina wear thin after a while, as does the antagonism with and between Milo and his son Bernie and wife Maura. Milo himself grows tired of them all, and in an unwritten and explosive moment early in the book, he loses his job by offending a student whose very expression bore the kind of entitlement that Milo couldn’t stand (and also envied). But while it would be charitable to ascribe all of this ennui to authorial intent, I have the feeling it’s mere coincidence. Tiresome is tiresome.

It is also hard to make a legless Iraq war vet a good comic foil for anything, and so it’s hardly a surprise that it doesn’t work well here. Don is the bastard son of Milo’s long-lost, wealthy college friend of Purdy, and Milo–whose own childhood suffered from a different kind of bastardization–seems to want to find some sympathetic kinship with Don, to express an appreciation for a level of childhood loss that Milo believes is part of his own pain and yet, of course, Don has more pressing concerns.

Purdy gets Milo his job back, as part of the a vague commitment to make a gift to the university. Purdy also sets Milo to the task of being his go-between with Don, the son he can barely stand to acknowledge let alone see. But the humor again grows thin as Milo himself starts to fall apart, under the weight of an adulteress of a wife, an ungrateful child, a demanding friend, a lost-and-barely-regained job, and his own misery at having abandoned his artistic pursuits in favor of some kind of faux-bo-ho existence.

The book, too, starts to fall apart under this weight. Then, in the last 5o pages, Lipsyte takes off ardently in a different and, at times, more earnest direction. It is a transition–from glibness to sadness–that doesn’t work well, and the arrows in Lipsyte’s quiver are neither as sharp nor as well-aimed as he thinks. Unlike (say) a Roth or an Updike, who (particularly in their early work) managed such effective takedowns of different parts of society along with the unhappinesses of their characters, Lipsyte offers no such salvation here. Early on there’s an effective series of jabs at the fundraising culture at unesteemed institutions of higher education. But as social commentary it ranks low and, by the end of the book, it’s lost in Milo’s self-absorbtion.

Lipsyte is clearly good for clever, 21st century turns-of-phrase. Perhaps this story just got away from him. But honestly, I’d have run away too.

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July 23rd, 2010

“Inside Out” is Right Side Up

I do not identify much with the Kristols, either father or son; their blowhard brand of elitist neocon bullshit has never sat well, and their cheerleading for the war-mongering, anti-Constitutional presidency of George W. Bush only sealed their fate. (See my piece “Kristolize That Thought” as one sample.) In that context, it was particularly apropos (and amusing) to find this quote from Irving Kristol kicking off part three of Barry Eisler’s new book, “Inside Out”:

“‘There are different kinds of truths for different kinds of people,’ he [Kristol] says in an interview. ‘There are truths appropriate for children; truths that are appropriate for students; truths that are appropriate for educated adults; and truths that are appropriate for highly educated adults, and the notion that there should be one set of truths available to everyone is a modern democratic fallacy. It doesn’t work.’”

The quote comes from a 1997 Reason Magazine story about the renewed rejection of Darwin and various justifications (excuses, really) for the “intelligent design” movement, for which the senior Kristol is also an apologist. But it is just as appropriate in this spot in Eisler’s novel—a book about the intellectual corruption of our government, its terrifying commitment to torture, the degree to which most of the American citizenry are complicit, and the importance (implicitly) of independent journalism—as it was in its original context. (It’s on page 237.)

I have been reading Eisler’s novels for a few years, and writing about them periodically (here and there) as well. Like many authors in the thriller / espionage genre, he brings a particular political and worldview to his stories, though this aspect of his fiction has grown stronger since he branched out from writing about the assassin John Rain to the covert operative Ben Treven. Treven was introduced in the novel “Fault Line,” which was entertaining and useful for establishing a new set of characters, but less sharp and well-defined than the Rain series. “Inside Out” has Eisler coming back strongly, and picks up where “Fault Line” left off: exploring the political undercurrent and motivations, not to mention the pervasive distrust, that is so sadly central to our country’s failings over the last decade. The premise of the new book (about a hunt for secret torture tapes) only serves to underscore the point.

It is also why the Kristol quote fits in so perfectly and disturbingly well: because in order for our government and our political parties to sustain such levels of dishonesty, there must be an internal rational—and Kristol has clearly framed it. Whether we are talking about George W. Bush, or Barack Obama, or Bill Clinton, or George H.W. Bush, or Nancy Pelosi, or John Boehner, or Henry Waxman, or Jeff Sessions, or Arlen Specter, or Sarah Palin, or…whoever you can think of in positions of power and “leadership,” this seems rather clear. Our country increasingly survives by drawing different levels of distinctions around the truths that citizens are allowed to know and understand. Even among the conservative (faux-)anti-elites, it functions as a clear form of elitism.

This is also why there is little significant discussion about the meaninglessness of healthcare reform (aside from misleading partisan talking points) or Social Security (ditto). It’s why we channel people through low-level state college systems that pretend to educate in ways that matter, but ultimately create false expectations for intellectual quality and credibility—instead of training people for jobs that serve our society and our lives. It is why President Obama can campaign on the idea of closing down the illegal prison at Guantanamo Bay, and claim in his December 2009 Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech to have ordered the prison closed, and yet the prison remains open and the issues surrounding it largely unresolved. (If anything, the issues are now more fraught, as the Obama administration has picked up the mantle of executive supremacy and pushed back on what had been a growing sense that the prisoners there have rights under the U.S. Constitution and international law.)

“Inside Out” is a good, brisk, engaging read, with the usual bits that make such thrillers compelling. It surpasses many of its peers because of Eisler’s insights, and his ability to interweave these different issues—realtime issues, not just fictions—into the story. That he credits so many different journalists and critics at the end, has dedicated some appearances as fundraisers for independent journalism outlets, and includes a list of actual sources and stories, makes it even stronger. If you like these kinds of thrillers, you will certainly enjoy this book. If you are politically engaged, you can’t help but enjoy it and find it very disturbing, too.

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