Subject
he likes Nabokov less ... (fwd)
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Date
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From: Sandy P. Klein <spklein52@hotmail.com>
http://www.villagevoice.com/issues/0308/park.php
Film [take4_sponsor.gif]
Reading Stones, Gathering Mossman
The Dow Is Up
by Ed Park
February 19 - 25, 2003
[park.jpg]
Mark Moskowitz's obscure object of desire
(photo: Robert M. Goodman)
[o.gif] f all the well-spoken bookmen (and they are all, indeed, men) who
populate Mark Moskowitz's documentary Stone Reader (now at Film Forum), none
carries quite the Moses-grade authority of the late critic Leslie Fiedler, who
holds forth in effortless paragraphs—on Ellison and Salinger, on the overlapping
symptoms of success and failure—with nary an errant phrase. His hands shake
visibly, and age cakes his voice, but a lifetime in literature has refined his
mind to a singularly dazzling point. If the film's title encompasses both
Moskowitz, whose midlife encounter with The Stones of Summer, Dow Mossman's
forgotten 1972 novel, forms the basis for his obsessional quest, and Mossman
himself, who (it turns out) has spent the inglorious decades since publication
burrowing in Shakespeare and Gibbon—then Fiedler is the epitome of the breed, a
reader so devout as to see! m a fact of nature.
Here is what happens. On January 29, about an hour after Stone Reader has its
first critics' screening and an hour before Moskowitz and I speak, Fiedler dies
at age 85 in Buffalo, where he has taught since 1964. We don't know this fact
until a few days later, but in the early innings of a leisurely,
have-you-read-this-yet? talk (so leisurely, indeed, that his publicist politely
kicks us out of her office), Moskowitz tells me about the shot that got away:
Out of film, his crew packing up, he watched as Fiedler scrutinized the copy of
Stones Moskowitz had brought along, considered its 552-page heft. (To
Moskowitz's chagrin, he'd never even heard of it.)
"I can't read this kind of book any longer," Fiedler concluded, adding, "I also
believe this is something worthwhile." His house had caught fire a few years
earlier, destroying over 5000 volumes. Against one wall of a room, as Moskowitz
describes it, a damaged bookcase held his slowly replenishing collection—titles
sent by old friends such as the novelist John Barth (formerly his Buffalo
colleague). Against another stood a new, completely empty bookcase.
Moskowitz paces, miming the action. "He takes it, he puts it on the blank
shelf—he puts it there and he looks at it and he slowly turns back. If I had had
that shot," he says, "we could have stopped the film right there." How perfect:
an audacious novel, lost in the shuffle and rediscovered by Moskowitz, now
asserting itself in the consciousness of the man who unearthed and championed
Call It Sleep—the American man of letters par excellence. With Fiedler gone, the
unfilmed scene haunts in its remembrance: after so long a life, so much still
unread. It is to become a willing Sisyphus.
Though Fiedler was unfamiliar with the one-and-done Mossman, the novelist had
apparently heard of him. The Summer of Mossman's title not only sets seasonal
coordinates but immortalizes Summer Letch, the narrator's high school
sweetheart—another thinly sketched female designed to drive you wild. (Great
name, though!) She's all too in line with Fiedler's contention, in his brilliant
Love and Death in the American Novel (1961), that this country has produced a
literary tradition of relentless Thanatos and immature Eros. Perhaps the
deficiency is conscious, for Mossman provides a bit of postmodern self-critique:
When Dawes Williams (Dow's alter ego) quotes a line from Twain that conjures the
critic's notorious reading of a homoerotic bond between Huck and Jim, his
paramour replies, "What? Fiedler's famous thing?"
"Throwing it all away in the end was the epitome of style," Dawes decides early
on; The Stones of Summer, organized by an intensely synesthetic fusing of
sensory information, dream and waking, forlorn memory and the dissolute present,
is a ruin-in-progress shored against the stone reality of entropy. Simple words
recombine across hundreds of pages, like elements in a massive
villanelle—throat, hat, wing, nest, and especially stone, which Mossman reuses
in a manner similar to the way William Gaddis keeps resetting the title word of
his omnivorous 1955 debut, The Recognitions (which also featured a
semi-autobiographical novelist manqué in gringo self-exile).
Word-drunk and wittingly pretentious, chocked with incident but with no plot to
speak of, Stones unfolds in three barely digested parts. (The massively reworked
drafts and notebooks, shown in the film, illuminate the nightmare capacity of
the author's talent.) But for great stretches, Mossman keeps his hooks in the
reader, shooting his audaciously dense style with casual cruelty and bolts of
inspired hilarity—from a book on the birds and the bees with "anti-Michelangelo
line drawings" to punchline-perfect refrains of stoner approval ("Atttttsssss
Dawes"). The final section's structural chutzpah—scrambled chronology, Dawes's
own attempts at fiction, letters from a friend fighting in Vietnam—exert initial
fascination, but has aged less well than the earlier parts. The old
refrain—nothing odd lasts: The book's hangover atmosphere becomes most punishing
here. At the end, it's Dawes's youth one remembers best: the wild-child
delinquent Ronnie Crown, the do! g-breeding culture as presided over by his
tyrannical grandfather, a disastrous croquet game relayed in mock-epic fashion.
(For now Stones seekers will have to pony up the cash: The book recently fetched
$1326 on eBay.)
In his voracious reading life, the engagingly glib Moskowitz gravitates toward
strong-voiced fictioneers: Faulkner and Vonnegut, James Ellroy and Joseph
McElroy, Kundera perhaps above all. As he grows older, he likes Nabokov less,
and reads more nonfiction than formerly: the sempiternal Sebald, Barbara
Tuchman, a biography of John Maynard Keynes. But in this prolonged age of the
image (the power of which Moskowitz, a successful 20-year veteran of political
campaign ads, knows all too well), are books dead? Based on energetic responses
to the film at festivals (lobbies turning into impromptu salons), Moskowitz
believes people still actually read—thoughtfully, compulsively. A meditation on
bibliophilia as holy curse, Stone Reader is simultaneously a paean to a dying
medium and a revocation of that obituary. As if anticipating his novel's second
life, Mossman writes, "Sometimes words are the longest things there are."
!
_______________________________________________________________________________________
Add photos to your e-mail with MSN 8. Get 2 months FREE*.
http://www.villagevoice.com/issues/0308/park.php
Film [take4_sponsor.gif]
Reading Stones, Gathering Mossman
The Dow Is Up
by Ed Park
February 19 - 25, 2003
[park.jpg]
Mark Moskowitz's obscure object of desire
(photo: Robert M. Goodman)
[o.gif] f all the well-spoken bookmen (and they are all, indeed, men) who
populate Mark Moskowitz's documentary Stone Reader (now at Film Forum), none
carries quite the Moses-grade authority of the late critic Leslie Fiedler, who
holds forth in effortless paragraphs—on Ellison and Salinger, on the overlapping
symptoms of success and failure—with nary an errant phrase. His hands shake
visibly, and age cakes his voice, but a lifetime in literature has refined his
mind to a singularly dazzling point. If the film's title encompasses both
Moskowitz, whose midlife encounter with The Stones of Summer, Dow Mossman's
forgotten 1972 novel, forms the basis for his obsessional quest, and Mossman
himself, who (it turns out) has spent the inglorious decades since publication
burrowing in Shakespeare and Gibbon—then Fiedler is the epitome of the breed, a
reader so devout as to see! m a fact of nature.
Here is what happens. On January 29, about an hour after Stone Reader has its
first critics' screening and an hour before Moskowitz and I speak, Fiedler dies
at age 85 in Buffalo, where he has taught since 1964. We don't know this fact
until a few days later, but in the early innings of a leisurely,
have-you-read-this-yet? talk (so leisurely, indeed, that his publicist politely
kicks us out of her office), Moskowitz tells me about the shot that got away:
Out of film, his crew packing up, he watched as Fiedler scrutinized the copy of
Stones Moskowitz had brought along, considered its 552-page heft. (To
Moskowitz's chagrin, he'd never even heard of it.)
"I can't read this kind of book any longer," Fiedler concluded, adding, "I also
believe this is something worthwhile." His house had caught fire a few years
earlier, destroying over 5000 volumes. Against one wall of a room, as Moskowitz
describes it, a damaged bookcase held his slowly replenishing collection—titles
sent by old friends such as the novelist John Barth (formerly his Buffalo
colleague). Against another stood a new, completely empty bookcase.
Moskowitz paces, miming the action. "He takes it, he puts it on the blank
shelf—he puts it there and he looks at it and he slowly turns back. If I had had
that shot," he says, "we could have stopped the film right there." How perfect:
an audacious novel, lost in the shuffle and rediscovered by Moskowitz, now
asserting itself in the consciousness of the man who unearthed and championed
Call It Sleep—the American man of letters par excellence. With Fiedler gone, the
unfilmed scene haunts in its remembrance: after so long a life, so much still
unread. It is to become a willing Sisyphus.
Though Fiedler was unfamiliar with the one-and-done Mossman, the novelist had
apparently heard of him. The Summer of Mossman's title not only sets seasonal
coordinates but immortalizes Summer Letch, the narrator's high school
sweetheart—another thinly sketched female designed to drive you wild. (Great
name, though!) She's all too in line with Fiedler's contention, in his brilliant
Love and Death in the American Novel (1961), that this country has produced a
literary tradition of relentless Thanatos and immature Eros. Perhaps the
deficiency is conscious, for Mossman provides a bit of postmodern self-critique:
When Dawes Williams (Dow's alter ego) quotes a line from Twain that conjures the
critic's notorious reading of a homoerotic bond between Huck and Jim, his
paramour replies, "What? Fiedler's famous thing?"
"Throwing it all away in the end was the epitome of style," Dawes decides early
on; The Stones of Summer, organized by an intensely synesthetic fusing of
sensory information, dream and waking, forlorn memory and the dissolute present,
is a ruin-in-progress shored against the stone reality of entropy. Simple words
recombine across hundreds of pages, like elements in a massive
villanelle—throat, hat, wing, nest, and especially stone, which Mossman reuses
in a manner similar to the way William Gaddis keeps resetting the title word of
his omnivorous 1955 debut, The Recognitions (which also featured a
semi-autobiographical novelist manqué in gringo self-exile).
Word-drunk and wittingly pretentious, chocked with incident but with no plot to
speak of, Stones unfolds in three barely digested parts. (The massively reworked
drafts and notebooks, shown in the film, illuminate the nightmare capacity of
the author's talent.) But for great stretches, Mossman keeps his hooks in the
reader, shooting his audaciously dense style with casual cruelty and bolts of
inspired hilarity—from a book on the birds and the bees with "anti-Michelangelo
line drawings" to punchline-perfect refrains of stoner approval ("Atttttsssss
Dawes"). The final section's structural chutzpah—scrambled chronology, Dawes's
own attempts at fiction, letters from a friend fighting in Vietnam—exert initial
fascination, but has aged less well than the earlier parts. The old
refrain—nothing odd lasts: The book's hangover atmosphere becomes most punishing
here. At the end, it's Dawes's youth one remembers best: the wild-child
delinquent Ronnie Crown, the do! g-breeding culture as presided over by his
tyrannical grandfather, a disastrous croquet game relayed in mock-epic fashion.
(For now Stones seekers will have to pony up the cash: The book recently fetched
$1326 on eBay.)
In his voracious reading life, the engagingly glib Moskowitz gravitates toward
strong-voiced fictioneers: Faulkner and Vonnegut, James Ellroy and Joseph
McElroy, Kundera perhaps above all. As he grows older, he likes Nabokov less,
and reads more nonfiction than formerly: the sempiternal Sebald, Barbara
Tuchman, a biography of John Maynard Keynes. But in this prolonged age of the
image (the power of which Moskowitz, a successful 20-year veteran of political
campaign ads, knows all too well), are books dead? Based on energetic responses
to the film at festivals (lobbies turning into impromptu salons), Moskowitz
believes people still actually read—thoughtfully, compulsively. A meditation on
bibliophilia as holy curse, Stone Reader is simultaneously a paean to a dying
medium and a revocation of that obituary. As if anticipating his novel's second
life, Mossman writes, "Sometimes words are the longest things there are."
!
_______________________________________________________________________________________
Add photos to your e-mail with MSN 8. Get 2 months FREE*.