Book Review Bis: Spending the Fourth in Bed

7/4/2008

Neil:

A very pleasant day. Fireworks popping or plopping in the wet distance. Chris called from Beverly Hills where she said she was sitting beside a pool across the street from the hilltop palace of Paul Allen. I've spent the day in bed, except for getting up to wash and dry and fold and shelve laundry. Read a few chapters of Marvin's book, watch a South Park episode, read and write some email, feed the cats, take a shit, eat some more... My idea of a really swell day.

The book includes some passages from other books, like Greil Marcus' The Old, Weird America:

"Here both murder and suicide are rituals, acts instantly transformed into legend, facts that in all their specificity transform everyday life into myth... Here is a mystical body of the Republic...a declaration of what sort of wishes and fears lie behind any public act."

Yeah sure. For some, art is a springboard to their own flights of fancy, like the "reviews" in the New York Review of Books that briefly mention a book, then fly off on the reviewer's own unrelated tangent for five or ten thousand words.

Art criticism of this kind is the equivalent of homeopathy. The final product is so dilute it contains not a single molecule of art. Yet somehow it's supposed to make us feel better. As Dylan Thomas said in another connection, "The reward is purely psychological."