On Actually Liveblogging The Oscars: There Will Be Blog
DO U LIKE MOVIES????
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On Dave Eggers, Wyndham Lewis and Hate
No....
"Lot of things to dislike about this guy." Yes, and....oh, okay, just stop at the really obvious anti-Semitism. (Um, fyi, pretty much all the prominent modernists had unsavory political views. Fascism a-go-go.) In addition to hating Jews (and Germans, oh boy did he hate 'em) Percy Wyndham Lewis also felt that in order to be a truly great artist, one had to cultivate a whooping case of an STD or two. He would brag about having gonorrhea. Another conviction of his, going hand in hand with the above, was that the artistic genius must have fling after fling. His high-water mark of shitheadery, I feel, was letting one chick he'd knocked up come home from the hospital alone with the baby, only to find Percy banging someone else on the kitchen table. He kind of ignored the hell out of his offspring too, but that stemmed more from his daddy issues.
In fact, Lewis relished this role of the antagonist, the gadfly. He stoked it, sunk his teeth not into just that hand that fed but any unguarded limb. Being The Enemy was his main line of artistic attack. He was hated because he actively provoked the dominant artistic cliques of the time, namely the Sitwells and the Bloomsbury Group, into doing so. His crowning achievement on this front is his novel The Apes of God, an epic satire.
Yeah, sure, Lewis was an ok painter. (How about digging up some paintings of his to illustrate the article other than the one on his wikipedia entry? No?) But it's his contributions to literature for which he will be chiefly remembered, so thanks for not mentioning those. That angular, jagged, jarring technique of his? He pretty much transposed it into a prose version in his 1918 novel Tarr. The dude even PIONEERED an experimental punctuation mark in it, the double em-dash. (It looks like a very long equals sign. And, admittedly, it was somewhat of a failed experiment; he excised it from later editions of Tarr.) Lewis also penned a collection of short stories, Rotting Hill; a magnificent play, Enemy of the Stars; and articulated a sophisticated aesthetic philosophy in several books, notably one called Time and Western Man.
As for Eggers: let's give him credit for A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius. It's definitely a keeper. You Shall Know Our Velocity and How We Are Hungry are also certainly worthwhile reads. Kudos to the dude for spearheading literary projects. But with them, he's ushered in an era of sickeningly sweet precious twee-ness, exactly the flavor of the blog Stuff White People Like. Stuff under his helm lacks any wallop. He helped open the gateway for insipid, uninformed writing. This has reached a head in his mind-numbing, feeble fetishization of childhood in Where the Wild Things Are, longing for an innocence that, perhaps, never existed. It's a sign of the manchild who can't handle the world.
Lewis stoked the hate on purpose, yet it was almost a big joke for him, a game with a persona he crafted. Eggers has engineered a post-modern hagiography, which has insulated him from criticism, making what little criticism he gets all the more important. PWL is the thinking man's asshole. Eggers is the modern-day shallow, wanna-be-thinker's false idol twerp. Please! It's like comparing apples to durians.
PS. What about checking the hate-levels for the biggest, blandest, most unoriginal hack of our day -- Cormac McCarthy? 47,500 hits dissing him. Good.
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On Matt Cherette Is Going To Move To New York City
Think "Robert Kennedy Saved from Drowning". http://www.eskimo.com/~jessamyn/barth/kennedy.html
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On The Night Lady Gaga Blew Up the Internet with 'Telephone'
Has nobody seen the video when she was just a dumb brunette chick meat puppet, before she got transformed into a different meat puppet, on MTV's boiling points?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1SIK-yzlxiU