Three books I’ve read recently:
The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction by Walter Benjamin.
“Get off my lawn,” yells Benjamin. “I’m painting here.” I’m not sure what to make of his subsequent argument; I can only say that never before have I drawn as many question marks in a book’s margins, and this book is only forty-nine pages long, and almost half of them are blank (or were, until my pencil had its way with them). Benjamin is Very Upset About Film and Photography, which today feels totally quaint. In the course of berating those two artistic modes and praising live theater and painting instead, he gets quite sloppy with his rhetoric, making claims like “if changes in the medium of contemporary perception can be comprehended as decay of the aura, it is possible to show its social causes” — a conditional statement which does not seem to follow from anything Benjamin offers about “the aura,” “its social causes,” or “the medium of contemporary perception.” He later defines “the aura of natural [objects]” as “the unique phenomenon of a distance, however close it may be. If, wile resting on a summer afternoon, you follow with your eyes a mountain range on the horizon or a branch which casts its shadow over you, you experience the aura of those mountains, of that branch.”
Benjamin does, in due course, make a few interesting points — and his line of argumentation finds parallels (echoes?) in modern discourse on media. But I find it difficult to engage seriously with his argumentation, and its whimsey and lack of rigor indeed feel designed to quash counterarguments before they’re even made.
Essays One by Lydia Davis, read by Janet Metzger.
Listening to this book on audio was tough at times, as much of it is in verse or about subjects that I am a bit lost in. Davis analyzes Proust, Barthes, and Edward Dahlberg (all authors I have not read) at length, as well as a number of her own poems and those of other writers she admires. But she also issues a series of what I found to be convincing pieces of advice, among them the idea that writers should take notes often and on a wide range of activities. Davis seems just as likely to play with language, writing things purely for the pleasure of doing so, as she is to inspect it with the utmost care, attention, and diligence. Reading her essays was inspiring, exciting, and engrossing, and it made me want to address my own work in a more earnest — and experimental — manner.
Night by Elie Wiesel, read by George Guidall.
This is an intense book. It was made a little less intense, I think, by the fact that I listened to it on audio; then again, George Guidall’s narration was expressive, desperate, pleading. Wiesel writes his story plainly and with haste (the audiobook, which includes Wiesel’s subsequent Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech and an essay about Wiesel by a French author, comes in at just over four hours), the tension and anxiety building and then slackening just enough every time Wiesel repeats the word “night.” The reader, of course, knows that the story will be horrible until the bitter end (Note: Night is about the Holocaust). Wiesel doesn’t seem to soften, heighten, or foreshadow any part it, and the book feels more effective as a result.