Here’s a straw in the wind that I’ve been waiting for, and a possible indication that our pop culture may soon begin to catch up with 21st-century reality.

The Independent reports that the Brits’ love affair with memoirs about misery and wretchedness is over.

Depravity, drink, drug addiction and abuse are hardly the most uplifting subjects for a leisurely read. But for years, misery memoirs have been the toast of the book world, with stories of human suffering generating huge sales. But new figures suggest readers have reached their pain threshold and the mis lit boom may be over.

At its height, profits topped £24m a year and authors could be sure that the more they plumbed the depths of despair and depravity, the deeper publishers would reach into their pockets. But industry research firm Nielsen now estimates that sales for the top 10 best-selling misery memoirs will be down from £3.87m last year to £2.59m this year.

Regular readers know that I’ve been appalled at the poverty of imagination that’s been on display in the pop culture for a long time. The wretched-family-and-dysfunctional-child memoir has been one of the most prominent features of this trend. There is no more grappling with big ideas in the culture; instead there’s the obsessive focus on the minutiae of miserable everyday life and on the unique ways in which individuals suffer their particular wretchedness.

It’s a fucking bore! Leon Wieseltier agrees with me (sorta)!

The decline of The New York Times remains worthy of comment, as does the poverty of imagination in American theater and film.

I’m no expert, and there are plenty of people discussing the culture, in depth, all over the interwebs. What I am, though, is a very disappointed reader and movie-goer, because I’m not being presented with any big stories and big themes—books or music or movies or plays that address things that are way larger than individuals and larger even than the sum of individuals—that get my juices flowing.

Two decades ago Tom Wolfe called for more novelists to stalk what he called the “Billion-Footed Beast“ (subscription to Harper’s required). You can read all about it here, at the NYT blog Paper Cuts.

Wolfe has for decades complained that in about 1960 American novelists made the decision to turn inward, to take their work in abstruse directions and to reject realism. All this was a disaster, Wolfe has maintained, especially because the social changes in America during this period offered such rich material. With “Bonfire,” he set out to reclaim the ground once occupied by Theodore Dreiser, Sinclair Lewis, James T. Farrell and the other Americans of the first half of the 20th century who wrote in the tradition of Balzac, Dickens and Zola.

About two years after “Bonfire” came out, Wolfe published a famous essay in Harper’s, “Stalking the Billion-Footed Beast,” (subscription required) laying out his theory in detail, and what really struck me while reading it again was that he could have written it yesterday and hardly changed a thing. He has gained no followers.  [e.a.]

More’s the pity. There is one exception: Jonathan Franzen, whose novel The Corrections was in fact a correction to the obsessive inward-looking trend in writers—a sprawling social novel in the tradition that Tom Wolfe had talked about (albeit, one with postmodern touches as well)—as James Collins notes in Paper Cuts:

The only book I can think of that has reached for something like the same realistic density, sweep and accessibility is “The Corrections” by Jonathan Franzen. But the core of that book is a bourgeois family drama, and so it is really more like a gargantuan short story than a novel of the type that Dickens or Balzac would recognize.

Franzen himself addressed the discouraging landscape of contemporary fiction in a 2002 essay titled “Mr. Difficult,” in the New Yorker. It’s not available online. It provoked a dispute between him and Ben Marcus a few years later; discussion here.

Though Marcus’ essay extends over 13 pages of small text, at its core is a very simple premise: Contemporary American fiction has lost its innovative edge and its interest in language as art, and Jonathan Franzen is largely, if not exclusively, to blame. In particular, Marcus focuses on Franzen’s 2002 essay “Mr. Difficult,” in which Franzen chronicles his growing disenchantment with the novels of William Gaddis, and more generally with the modernist-inspired ideal of “difficult” literature—the belief that “the greatest novels were tricky in their methods, resisted casual reading, and merited sustained study.” Writers like Gaddis, Franzen argues, are “Status” authors, who see themselves (again, in the modernist mold) as obligated only to their art, and who for the most part ignore the interests and desires of the reader. With some reluctance, Franzen places himself in an opposing camp: “Contract” authors, who place a high value on the relationship between narrator and reader, who primarily see the novel as a device for social and cultural communication, and who take human life (rather than, say, language or ideas per se) as the ultimate subject of their fiction.

While I’m waiting for all these novelists to sort themselves out and to start to grapple with 21st-century realities—and there’s a new generation of writers who seem eager to engage—I enjoy dipping into old pop culture favorites.

Like this 1961 movie (based on—gasp!—a trilogy of books! in French! which inspired a Broadway musical!), which was featured on TCM last night:

That’s my best guess, anyway, after reading this item at Publishers Lunch ($$):

How Many More eBook Releases Will We See?

The press release from Ectaco draws on a variety of cliches (”kiss your
old-fashioned, dusty library goodbye”) to announce the company’s new jetBook ereader. The cheap-looking device weighs just 7 ounces and has a five-inch screen (smaller than Kindle and Sony Reader) and appears to handle only .txt, .pdf and .jpg text files, along with mp3s. The company specializes in translation dictionaries and those are a focus feature of this device as well, which sells for $350.

Mostly you look at their site and realize how relatively easy it must be to design and produce a reader like this, and how many similar products must be on the way.

Duh.

From the press release:

jetBook(R) is an incredibly sophisticated e-book reader with a built-in
mp3 player that allows users to listen to AudioBooks as well as keep up
with their reading. Preloaded with translating dictionaries, you can
simultaneously enjoy a good book, improve your vocabulary by looking up and
translating any words you want, listen to your favorite audio files and
check out photos — all in the same device! With an incredibly simple to
read, large 5-inch, high-resolution display that is easy on the eyes, users
can now read for hours without the eyestrain that comes from ordinary
computer screens. And those with trouble reading normal-sized print books
will benefit from the different fonts and sizes you can change to
instantly. Weighing in at a remarkable 7 ounces, the super-slim device fits
easily in the palm of your hand for a truly comfortable reading experience.

I don’t yet own an e-book reader. (I don’t have a commute, so there’s no urgency. I’m waiting for early adopters to test them out and to advise me on which one to buy.)

My motto, however, is: if you love books, set them free^TM.

The last time I urged book lovers and book cultists to embrace the technological revolution was here.

What do you do if you’re a young writer facing a future in which the book is not a treasured cultural product? You become an explorer, a pioneer, an experimenter, and a partner with a traditional publisher, and you move into the unknown:

Some of the UK’s best young novelists are working with computer games designers to create digital short stories, each inspired by a classic work of literature but featuring games, blogs and web tools.

The first of the six stories is Charles Cumming’s The 21 Steps, based on John Buchan’s classic thriller The 39 Steps.

It uses Google Maps and Google Earth to follow the trail of a bewildered young Londoner who witnesses a murder and is forced to smuggle a mysterious liquid on to a plane.

Read about it here, in the Guardian.

David Harsanyi wonders where all the superheroes have gone:

In a world crawling with merciless terrorists, corrupt politicians and sociopath hedge-fund managers, we need a fictional hero to save us.

Or are we so unsure of ourselves, so morally conflicted, that we can’t even win in fantasy?

Well, not quite.

Back in 1941, Captain America, a purely political creation, was charged with a single task: to kick Nazi butt. The Captain, in fact, confronted the Germans before the United States did, in one issue punching Adolf Hitler’s lights out.

I think we’re a little confused. Also: it’s hard to make a comic book about kicking Terrorist butt. How do you draw “Terrorist”? Not to mention: how do you draw “Terrorist” without being accused of racism or something?

Or perhaps we simply exaggerated the threat.

On the other hand—to call some people “superheroes” means that you’re privileging them. Brad Bird made a really popular movie about that a while back.

I’ve been saying for a good long while that we’re living through a very fallow time culture-wise. Luckily we have such a rich and deep pop and high culture that we’ll have enough to satisfy our souls for a good long time in the unlikely event that nothing new and exciting catches fire culturally.

As for stories that tell us something about how we live now and who our heroes are … well, that’ll have to wait. People aren’t ready to tell those stories yet.

But “we’re the ones we’ve been waiting for,” so maybe something will come of that.

Breaking the Waves—an incoherent and sadistic movie—pretty much sealed my interest in the so-called “transgressive”*** back in 1996. Sadism posing as art isn’t my cuppa. Am I surprised to see that the flirtation with sadism continues unabated in 2008? Not really.

Report from Sundance:

Worst Sundance Film: Sex and Self-Mutilation

The worst film …? “Downloading Nancy,” …

Mari [Bello] one of my favorite actresses, plays Nancy. She hires a murderous pen pal on the Internet to come and kill her. (I think it’s because she’s depressed.)

While she’s waiting to be offed by [Jason] Patric, Nancy self-mutilates with a razor blade. She cuts herself all over the place. Not even her shrink, played by “Judging” Amy Brenneman, can talk her out of it. Nancy’s husband, played by British theater star [Rufus] Sewell, has no luck either.

By the time Nancy meets up with Patric’s Louis, she’s cut herself to ribbons and bleeding all over.

Long ago, I stopped wondering why anyone would greenlight such a picture—the reason is obvious: because some insecure idiot, repelled by the movie but compelled by the notion that he might be missing out on the next best thing since Pulp Fiction, said yes. It’s the same instinct that animates the art world and the world of culture: people don’t understand the “new” but don’t want to be thought of as old school, so they go along with a trend, even if it’s repulsive (because they think it’s sophisticated).

I’ve got no argument with the people making these movies. If they can find backers to fund them and actors to star in the movies and film festivals to showcase them and reviewers to write about them and audience members to pay for tickets, I will lay down my life for their right to make their gross-sounding movies.

But I do ask myself who would want to muck around in the darkest of the dark side and spend years of his/her life writing, directing, producing, editing, and acting in such a film. Not my cuppa, either.
——————

*** I’ve been meaning to write about this for a long time but can never find a moment. In 1996, David Denby published a piece in The New Yorker called “Buried Alive” in which he talks (in retrospect, it looks like a warning) about the effect on our (baby boomers’) children of a pop culture that wallows in the transgressive. Here’s an abstract of his piece.

Also, it’s never a bad occasion to bring back my favorite cultural reference:

Inspired by the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s German Expressionist show of the same name, I wrote about Glitter and Doom here and here.

  [updated to clarify that this photograph was taken in Afghanistan, not Iran, as might be inferred from what I wrote below]   

Writing in Der Spiegel, Leon de Winter asks us not to turn away from but rather to contemplate the UNICEF Photo of the Year 2007. Click on the link, which will take you to a larger version of the picture of the 11-year-old girl sitting next to the 40-year-old she’s about to be married to.

De Winter writes:

There are people who will look at this image and be able to continue with business as usual — without disgust, nausea and rage.

He is not one of them:

Many of us in the West … ask themselves: Who are we to believe that it is inhumane to sell an 11-year-old girl? Who are we to impose our values so vehemently on the Afghans, on this man and on this girl?

I don’t have a clue who we are. But I know that this universe is not only a universe of iPods, Disneylands, CO2 penalties, tax write-offs, and New Year’s sales in our department stores. No, I know that this is also a universe of human rights. I know that this universe is deeply shaken — right down to its core — by the suffering of this lonely, lonely little girl.

A useful reminder: the legal age of consent for girls in Iran is 9, according to this piece in the BBC.

When Ayaan Hirsi Ali campaigns against the terrible things done the world over in the name of Islam, this is one of the practices she is talking about.

As the Hollywood writers’ “strike” continues, various heavyweights have started to make power plays–um, I mean, separate deals. Like Letterman:

CBS’s late-night star, David Letterman, is pursuing an interim agreement with the Writers Guild that would allow him to return with his writers on Jan. 2. Mr. Letterman is in a position to make such a deal because his production company, Worldwide Pants, owns both his show and the one that follows on CBS, which features Craig Ferguson.

The fly in the ointment?

One representative of a late-night show said that some members of the guild leadership might have concerns about making a separate arrangement with Mr. Letterman, and that an agreement was far from a sure thing.

Ya think? Nah. I think that everyone will be making separate arrangements soon enough. The same NYT article notes that Conan and Leno are going back on the air in some way, shape, or form come the New Year. No word yet on Stewart and Colbert, but I’m sure they’ll feel the pressure soon enough from their network, too.

The way they will rationalize this breakdown of strikers’ discipline is also suggested in the Times piece. In contrast to Ellen DeGeneres and Carson Daly, who are already back on the air and to whom “the writers [which ones? --ed.]] “reacted with anger”:

the NBC hosts, along with Mr. Letterman, Mr. Kimmel and the Comedy Central hosts, have won praise from the writers for staying off the air so long and for paying their staffs.

So the game is over. Those who played by the rules and paid the proper respect won the moral high ground—the only ground that seems to count inside the Hollywood bubble. The only problem with this formulation is that this time, the game was played (and it’s not over yet) in full view of a nation that is already furious with Hollywood, bored by its products, and contemptuous of its residents, except as fodder for deliciously corrosive and often ruinous gossip.

If the point of this strike was for Hollywood writers to garner respect for themselves, it is to laugh. Instead, they have exposed themselves as beyond clueless about the technological revolution that is swallowing up not just their future but their present.

Via Mickey Kaus, I’m encouraged to find out that some folks have been trying to get through to Hollywood:

The video is funnier than most TV comedies. It reportedly got 400,000 hits–more than many cable shows. It was put up on the Web by unpaid performers seemingly just for the hell of it (and maybe the exposure). Doesn’t that sort of make Marc Andreesen and Rob Long’s point about the tenuous positon of both Hollywood and the Writers Guild? … It’s as if the Linotype operators went on strike and decided to publish their story in four color offset!…10:36 P.M.

Steve Boriss is a little more pointed in his analysis, and sees Hollywood (properly) as only part of a much larger picture:

By placing all forms of entertainment, including news, on the same medium, the Internet has launched a Darwinian struggle where the news, entertainment, and video game industries are now direct, head-to-head competitors for the distraction of audiences from their daily concerns. Crueler still, they must also now compete against mere amateurs, talent around the globe, blogs, porn, and also their former selves — their own archives of older articles, older movies, older programs, and older games never before available. That’s why audiences are plunging and pink slips are flying across all media – newspapers, TV, and Hollywood. The emerging, unified Internet entertainment, a.k.a. “InterTainment,” industry is now just one big happy family – but only if you happen to be a member of the audience

So why “worms” in the title of the post? Because, as Stephen Jay Gould reminded us in 1997, natural selection favors worms:

Darwin himself told us in his last book, The Formation of Vegetable Mould Through the Action of Worms, that we should never underestimate the collective power of worms on the move. Our general culture also recognizes two primary metaphors, one inorganic and one organic, for the reversal of received opinion. Well may traditionalists fear the turning of these two objects: tables and worms. The inversion of the humble worm, especially when disturbed, may bring down empires. Shakespeare told us that “the smallest worm will turn being trodden on.” And Cervantes wrote in his author’s preface to Don Quixote that “even a worm when trod upon, will turn again.”

A new media world will rise. Hollywood will not be left behind in the dust. Trust me.

There’s lots of ink—virtual and dead-tree—being spilled about the problems of Hollywood.

Time’s Richard Corliss knows what’s wrong:

The winner, in the film, director, screenplay and supporting actor categories? The Coen brothers’ No Country for Old Men, which three different people told me they’d been meaning to see. The runner-up, with wins for best actor and cinematographer? There Will Be Blood, an audience-punishing epic that doesn’t open for another two weeks. Best actress? Julie Christie, in Away from her, which earned less than $5 million in its North American release. …

By the time I’d got back to my office I had realized that we critics may give these awards to the winners, but we give them for ourselves. In fact, we’re essentially passing notes to one another, admiring our connoisseurship at the risk of ignoring the vast audience that sees movies and the smaller one that reads us.

So the reviewers are “connoisseurs,” and they’re reviewing the work of independent Hollywood spirits like, say, George Clooney, who are proud of being out of touch with the mainstream.

And then everyone wonders why the audience isn’t connecting with the movies on offer? How much “connoisseurship” does it take to recognize that I’m Not There, for example, is a dog? Not a lot! And yet reviewers fell all over themselves to declare it genius.

Blech.

A lot of ink has been spilled about Iraq-themed movies bombing at the box office. I contributed my share back in September, before the movies started bombing. It wasn’t that hard to foresee: Even the most casual student of the culture (never mind the political culture) could have predicted the financial failure of these films.

For example, Sheila Nevins of HBO had this to say to the NYT’s David Carr, also in September:

“Paying money at the door of a movie theater to see the suffering of others is different than watching [a documentary] on television. It is a much tougher sell in a theater.”

So everybody involved should have known the risks.

Thus, the really interesting question is why, despite such knowledge, Hollywood “creatives” chose to make these movies and why Hollywood “suits” chose to green-light them. Note that this is a two-part question, because in Hollywood, as just about everywhere else in life, it takes two to tango.

Brian De Palma for one wasn’t shy about announcing his intentions for his highly controversial Redacted. It was propaganda—the good kind, that is.

In October, before the movie was released, he told Karen Badt that he wanted to shake people up. Images, he said, are a very powerful tool of persuasion.

[K.B.] What was your aim in making this film?

[B. DeP] With the Vietnam War, I remember picking up Life magazine and seeing pictures that would horrify me. The pictures are what will stop the war. If we put these pictures in front of a mass audience, maybe we can stop the war, The hope is to get Americans to be incensed enough to stop the war. Americans have not learned from their past mistakes because the architects of this war are the same that were right there

So De Palma’s aim was to make propaganda. As I’ve written before, propaganda efforts can fizzle, as Civil War photographer Mathew Brady found out.

In this piece, Roger L. Simon nails De Palma for ignorance, and nails Hollywood’s reflexively anti-war stance for reeking of phoninessness.

[T]here is a subtler and more treacherous roadblock to authenticity in all this that is not frequently acknowledged. While the Vietnam and Iraq Wars are often equated by the liberal-left, the differences between the two are greater than the similarities, especially in the critical area of who is the adversary. For Vietnam: The evils of communism could be and were rationalized by the left as a plea for social equality in an economically unjust world. For Iraq: The evils of Islamofascism and just plain fascism are considerably harder, indeed almost impossible, to rationalize.

This problem is particularly true for Hollywood because the evils of Islamofascism – notably extreme misogyny and homophobia – are justifiably big no-nos to people in the Industry. In fact, they are close to the biggest no-nos of all for them in their daily lives. Who is worse than a sexist pig? Only a violent, murderous sexist pig who wants to take over the world. It then becomes a complex balancing act indeed to make a movie that ignores or downplays this in order to criticize the US as the larger villain. No one has been able to come close to pulling off this balancing act in a film. In fact, it may well be impossible because it is fundamentally dishonest.

Finding credible villains and credible good guys for the movies is Hollywood’s big challenge, of course. It’s going to take a long time. I don’t expect the search to be over anytime soon, because America’s got a self-image problem. That, I believe, is what’s reflected on our movie screens. Like the rest of us, the people making our entertainments are confused. They’ve lost the thread of the American narrative. They focus relentlessly on the dark, the deviant, the dispossessed, and the disenfranchised. Or on the transgressive.

For a change, they should look to accentuate the positive and eliminate the negative. I think they’d find a nice surprise awaiting them at the box office.***

———————-
*** Politicos should also take note of this. Der Spiegel’s Gabor Steingart published a piece last week on America as a “depressed superpower.” Here’s his (uplifting) conclusion:

Sometimes real life mirrors fiction. Three of the country’s most renowned political consultants recently got together for the first time in a lecture hall at the New York Public Library: George Lakoff of the University of California at Berkeley and a close advisor to the Democrats, Frank Luntz, a Republican pollster, and Drew Westen, a psychologist from the University of Michigan, also a Democrat. The three men have spent decades practically at each other’s throats.

But now they were talking about ideals, the best way to run a campaign and language, including the wrong kind of language. The Republican said that he was troubled by the term, coined by Bush, “War on Terror,” because it spreads fear and stifles optimism.

Westen, one of the two Democrats, said he had fond memories of Ronald Reagan and his legendary campaign ad titled, “It’s morning again in America.” The ad tells the story of a country in which inflation is down and marriages are up, a country that is “prouder and stronger and better” than it was before. The rich voice of the announcer tells Americans that they can “look forward with confidence to the future. It’s morning again in America.”

Westen insisted on playing the ad for the 500 people in the audience. The effect was dramatic, as if someone had suddenly declared a cease-fire in an era marked by political conflict.

The three experts on the stage were also visibly moved. Luntz, the Republican, was the first to speak, and his words were in the language of reconciliation: “Can’t we understand each other again? Can’t we come together again? Can’t we all regain hope again?”

His words were met with thundering applause.

TNR rallies around the beleaguered book and mourns the loss of respect for book reviewing:

A book review may be many things. It may be only a tip, a consumer’s guide to what might satisfy at the airport or the beach. But it may be much more. The intelligent discussion of a book has the power to change its reader’s ideas about how he votes or who he loves–to furnish nothing less than a “criticism of life,” in the old but still sterling Arnoldian phrase. In less than an hour–we are all of us, even us high-minded types, busy people–it can transform a person’s thinking, and also redirect it by leading him to other books with other theories and other beauties. It can also, if it is lucidly thought and written, teach by example. And if the reader of a smart and learned book review finds himself in vehement disagreement with it, well, his little lesson has been even more rich. Book reviewing is a training for controversy, without which no open society and no open individual can flourish.

Very true. These days, however, if a reader finds herself in vehement disagreement with a review and she happens to be an author, she can go on her blog and denounce the reviewer as a “very bitter, confused old lady” with her “granny panties in a bunch.”

That too is “training for controversy,” albeit of a different kind…