More crankiness about boring art

I took some criticism for my complaint about newer postmodern American novels -- specifically that they're ultra-boring -- both private and public (public being the one comment from Andrew on that post). It was all good criticism. I haven't read Freedom, and I probably won't. I saw it as emblematic of a larger issue that I have with newer fiction specifically and contemporary arts & letters in general, and The Atlantic's review crystallized some of that sentiment. I have read The Corrections and while I 'liked it', it mostly made me feel tired and pretty nihilistic.

So, I was happy to find an article that more precisely frames the wider issue. I'll shout this at you: READ THE WHOLE THING. CAREFULLY. RIGHT NOW!

"Smart art: in America, the land of anti-intellectualism, it's perhaps inevitable that our art should devolve into a screech against the national celebration of the dumb.... Urban Intellectual Fodder is the prozac of the American intelligentsia."

Contrast that with:

"The art I'm talking about, the art that blows your mind, is something you feel with more than your mind. It makes your hair stand on end. It takes your head off. It has a physical effect, like some kind of vicious blow that makes you jitter with excitement, or some kind of fierce cloud that enfolds you in a hard, clammy grip."

This is the kind of aesthetic/spiritual experience I often describe as a "game-changer". Certainly it's some kind of confrontation with the sublime, a confrontation that in my experience often helps me to joyfully acknowledge uncomfortable truth (however obliquely or non-verbally). In the third section, "On Being a Snotnose", the author describes some of his personal game-changers. Here are just a few of mine:

-Blood Meridian

-The Tired Sounds of Stars of the Lid

-Ecclesiastes

-Lift Your Skinny Fists Like Antennas to Heaven

-2001: A Space Odyssey

One of the shared traits here is that many of these epiphanies take quite a while to sink in. It's not love at first sight.

The musical selections above will be perceived as middle-brow, but I'll argue fiercely that they're not, and that in fact they are more than equal to the books and film. They most closely fit the criterion for 'real' art: they demolished my inhibitions. There's some nostalgia in the article for being savvy back when the greats (Bergman, the Beatles) were making their work -- I feel that same sense of privilege that I'm aware of the work of Stars of the Lid.

Take note: he really likes Cormac McCarthy. Win! I will admit that a core problem with my credulity here is that it arises from my approval of the author's taste. I understand that's a problem. I'm more just excited at what's being said because it's helping me articulate something I've felt or known non-verbally:

"In novels, well, I'm at a bit of a loss here. There's that Brooklyn McSweeney McSmugley lot. Very smart, for sure. Kind of like unripe Woody Allen.... Jonathan Franzen? WTF? He doesn't write novels; he writes prose. Holding up a middle-brow mirror to middle-brow America: that's not going to be interesting two decades from now."

"I won't even talk about Slum Dog Millionaire -- that's just a Rocky for Occidentals who like their condescension towards Orientals to come back at them with a happy ending."

Brutal! We're so hell-bent on subverting the canon that 'exotic' is conflated with 'classic.'

Does that clear up what I was trying to say before? McCarthy makes me feel something way down inside that Franzen is never going to make me feel. The fact that McCarthy can do this while writing about cowboys while Franzen is writing about the people closest to me? That's exceptional.