ABJECTION, YOUR HONOR!: Thoughts on two books I skimmed, and one I actually read.

first volume of James Agee’s film criticism: I can’t remember the title of this. It’s… hrm. It’s easier to read a lot of Agee at once than to read a lot of James Wood at once, at least for me; but there’s still that same sense that he’s straining to fit his prose to his persona. I don’t know–it’s entirely possible that I’m just insufficiently sympathetic to that persona. I mean, Wilde probably does the same thing, it’s just that when he does it I don’t care. …And on a lower level, Agee’s less enamored of stylization than I am, I think. I suspect he’d deny that, though.

Rargh, why am I approaching this book the wrong way around?? What I should say is that his phrases are so much fun, so often; that when he dispraises something I liked (I can’t think of a good example here–maybe Double Indemnity?) he always picks up on real flaws, not made-up ones; that he has a sentimental rigorousness that makes up for his… you know… sentimentality; and that he watches movies through a theological lens, always.

This line, for example, more or less summarizes one big reason I’m a Catholic: “As the audience watches from a hill, with the eyes at once of a helpless outsider, a masked invader, and a still innocent defender, a mere crossroads imparts qualities of pity and terror which, to be sure, it always has, but which it seldom shows us except under tilted circumstances.”

Julia Kristeva and Catherine Clement, The Feminine and the Sacred: Why can’t these women follow a thought from beginning to end?? A desperately frustrating book. There are some terrific anecdotes (“Louisa of the Nothingness” is alone worth the price of admission), but nothing is ever pursued with ardent need to know the truth. Please do not let your belief that pursuit of wisdom is phallocentric damage your actual ability to hold up your end of an argument!

Oh, and both authors tend to treat race in a way I think you can treat sex, but not race: as if culture, especially racially-linked culture, is a poetic concept, an image available to philosophical and poetic thought, rather than a purely and cruelly culturally-constructed category. And actually, I wonder if this book might be a helpful corrective to people who think sex and race are both purely and cruelly culturally-constructed: Do you really think black women’s blackness can be discussed the way all women’s womanhood can be discussed?

There’s also a creepy discussion of the difference between biological life and “biographical” life, life with meaning, which I think suggests that women can rightly withhold meaning from their biological children. (Which I think becomes a defense of abortion, although that act is certainly never explicitly discussed.)

I really liked Hegel’s thing, which I only know about because of Clement, of woman as “the irony of the community.”

Richard Klein, Cigarettes Are Sublime. This is the one I read all the way through. You’ll be seeing several quotations from it in the days to come. It’s Klein’s attempt to delineate exactly what he got from smoking cigarettes, possibly in the hope of quitting.

I’m not sure what to say about it. I love its passion for the sublime, over and against the beautiful. I love its brassiness and bitchiness.

It is very scattershot. The chapters–especially the one on Casablanca, and maybe the one on Carmen–tend to waver off into vaporous clouds of association, rather than coherent thoughts. Klein unwittingly makes clear one of the ways his cigarette-sublime differs from the more obvious sublimity of alcohol: Cigarettes are a way to swing out of the ordinary for a moment, have a little ekstasis on the cheap, and then generally swing right back in. Even if The Symposium had been written in the modern age, for example, I can’t imagine cigarettes having the same effect on the company that drinking did. Alcohol tends to go places–whether or not they’re places you want to go, or should go (Thirteen Steps Lead Down, and all that)–rather than returning you to status quo ante.

Still, Klein’s very much worth reading if you’re interested in cigarettes, or sublimity, or both. I got a lot out of it. It won’t tell you about facing the Big Light; but its little fire is also intriguing.