I write the words

Obviously Sellars and Adams have worked together long and fruitfully, and collegiality should count for something; but if, as a composer, I were presented with this libretto, I’d have torn it to shreds.
- Mark Adamo, on Doctor Atomic

What the hell is a librettist? I've written a libretto, and I still have no clue. If Le Nozze di Figaro is by Mozart, with a libretto by da Ponte, what percent of the opera is da Ponte's? 50%? 0%? What about when two people sit down and decide to write an opera together, like Alice Goodman and John Adams have? It would be fascinating (but probably not useful) to look at what percent cut of the profits of performance each of them gets. I would have loved to overhear that conversation. But because we're asking what the hell a librettist is, we also get to ask what the hell an opera composer is. And maybe this is where things get touchy.

We in music aren't priviledged, by-the-by: film has way more problems. Where do you start when you have a director, a screenwriter, an original writer (of the book, play, whatever), actors, editor, cinematographer? Cameraperson? Purely by convention, we attribute authorship to the director. "A film by Francis Ford Coppola." But this has not always been the case, and many people (including lots of screenwriters) feel that the writer should have credit, and this seems to make more sense - or does it? What about something like Paul Thomas Anderson's There Will Be Blood, which to me plays like an opera of images and evocations and (yes) of sound? There are films that only "exist" when they are in film, which is to say that the essence, the message, the good stuff is the stuff that happens on screen, and doesn't exist on paper. What then?

The easy answer (and, if there is a right one, probably the right answer) is that it is a sliding scale: There Will Be Blood is maybe 99% directing, Cast Away is maybe half story half directing, Legally Blonde is 40% story, 10% directing, 50% Reese Witherspoon. That is who those movies "belong to." Our conscience, however, is not satisfied by that answer. Because what the sliding scale neglects, what it doesn't account for, is the idea of accountability - with a compound author there is no way to tell who is responsible for what. A work of art is not like a house, built by a team of carpenters and masons and what have you - art is an utterance, a statement made by somebody. Which is why we ask questions like, "What does this mean?" or "Why is this here, and not there?" There is a reason, an intention behind every gesture.

Which is maybe part of the reason why I think the issue of authorship is more problematic in opera than film. Yes, we say that the director is the author of the film, but more realistically, the film exists on its own - it is lofted upward from the masses that produce it, and it earns a kind of independence. When I say Don Giovanni you think Mozart, but what do you think when I say Citizen Kane? Maybe Orson Welles, but if you do, it's still not with the same duality, the same necessity that binds Mozart to Don Giovanni. More likely you just think of Citizen Kane, the movie, and whatever that might mean for you. This is not the case in music.

How do I see the breakdown of authorship in an opera? 100% composer, 0% librettist. I think this is the only way it can work. A good libretto is one that inspires, evokes, and disappears, in the same way that a tonal language or an old text does. If you are distracted by something as you listen, an untucked edge or an errant word, then something has gone wrong. A libretto may be authored, but when it is taken by a composer it becomes a source, just like genre is a source, just like G# minor is a source. It may sound like I am being harsh to myself and librettists, but I am actually putting the pressure on composers. If you want opera to sit alongside your symphonies and trios and quartets in your oevre, then you must take responsibility for your materials and what you do with them.

I am also of the opinion that Doctor Atomic fails, in large part because the libretto kept drawing my attention away from the opera. It's clunky; you can easily see where the ideas came from, and how they would have looked appealing on the drawing board but fail in practice. The language is too rich poetically to work in a sung medium. Peter Sellars is a clever guy, but not a writer, and - like all clever non-writers who try to write - tries to cram too much in, too much of the "good stuff" he knows is part of good art. The libretto may work as a poem, but what Sellars forgets is that music is already a metaphor - it's already a reading, an interpretation. If you have a metaphor within a metaphor, where is the meaning? It is lost. Thus Doctor Atomic loses itself in abstraction and pretty language, and forgets its footing.

Ringmistress

Isn't this a great song? I ask the question with absolutely no trace of a snicker. I am humble before it; I marvel at its feat. Ever since Britney's "comeback" she has hit a note that is absolutely right for her, one that threatened ever since "Baby One More Time" but was watered down by the necessities of the late-90s pop idiom. Now, technology, the world, whatever, has caught up with her, and she can finally make the music she was born to make. She has tried on a huge range of personas, from coquettish schoolgirl ("Baby One More Time") to doeful virgin ("Sometimes") to panting sexpot ("Slave For U"), but in her newest incarnation she has found the one that fits: consummate entertainer. The new songs get this cold, and "Circus" is the culmination of them all.

As I go back now and listen to "Gimme More," the song that got her back into the game, I think I'm already starting to forget how fresh and how strong it was when it first came out. This was a new Britney, confirmed by the fact that nobody ever called her "Britney Spears" anymore. Whatever else the paparazzi years did for her, they put her and the world on a first-name basis. Most pop stars are strangers; but we've known Britney for a decade now, from pop girl to messed up mom, and we know her too well not to care - even if we pretend not to.

But I wanted to talk about the music. Circus is so complex that it is easier to approach obliquely, through earlier songs that contain seeds of its genius but fall short of its audacity and achievement. Britney's songs have always had moments of inspiration that absolutely work - for example, when the main motive in "Toxic" appears in retrograde:



Or this inspired falsetto lick at the end of "Gimme More":



But her songs have also had a tendency to over-electronicize, and this is a mistake. "Toxic," for example, suffers from too little Britney. The electronics overwhelm her airy, thin voice, and half the time it sounds not like Britney but a chorus of two or three girls, none of them Britney. What's needed is the edge and provocation, the menacing, more grown-up quality that the electronics provide, but with Britney still running the song.

Which brings us to "Circus." Immediately we have a throwback to an older time - the title, the accordion boom-chuck-chuck that opens the song. But there is also the menace of the 21st century in the beat, which is electronic only in the sense that it resembles the hum of machinery, or the off-stage whir of an engine on standby:



This is how to use tech in Britney: not with your typical dance/techno manipulations, but as the evocation of something alive.

Now look at the video. The beginning of the song crackles with energy, but the video is patient - look at how slowly she puts on her jewelry, how we follow every movement. The first 25 seconds of the video average out to an astonishing 2.25 seconds per shot, unbelievably slow for this kind of music video. Now watch the montage at 0:25. There is a move away from the high-gloss polish of her earlier videos; here, the scene engages with its liveness. Notice the vibration around the edges of the shot, the unsteady camera, the erratic centering of the subject.

And then the song begins. For such an explosive, energetic song, the first half is remarkably spare - if you listen carefully to the verse there is really only Britney, the whir of the machine and an incredibly compact percussion track. Lyrically, the song is insiduous. It begins narratively ("There's only two types of people in this world...") and then reveals itself to be a story about herself ("Well I'm a put-on-a-show kind of girl"). "Piece of Me" was also a story about herself, practically to the point of autobiography, but you realize that Britney doesn't work best when she is being defensive or too "real." At a deep level, what we want from her is entertainment, and that "Circus" provides in spades.

There's only two types of people in the world
The ones that entertain, and the ones that observe
Well baby, I'm a put-on-a-show kind of girl
Don't like the backseat, gotta be first

I'm like a ringleader, I call the shots
I'm like a firecracker, I make it hot
When I put on a show...

Here we see a pretty typical device, which is to follow the verse (first four lines) with a couple of lines that then provide a transition to the chorus:

I feel the adrenaline moving through my veins
Spotlight on me and I'm ready to break
I'm like a performer, the dance floor is my stage
Better be ready, bet you feel the same

But is it the chorus? What it sounds like is actually a break in the momentum, a slight side-track into what I think of as an epic pop mode before returning to the song. In other words, it's what is usually the third verse, the "different material" that offers a contrast in melody, mood, theme, before the chorus returns and seals the end of the song.

The result of all this mucking about with structure is a tremendous anticipation, reflected in the scenes shot in the music video: you get only half glimpses of Britney backstage, or in a strange corridor that seems just off the ring. Where a pop song normally culminates in a chorus and then deflates slightly on return to the verse, "Circus" has found a way to bristle with potential energy and then release it in a would-be chorus, essentially getting us to lower our guard. And then, where we expect a return to verse, the real chorus comes in, with an energy I find shocking no matter how many times I listen to it:

All eyes on me in the center of the ring
Just like a circus
When I crack that whip everybody gonna trip
Just like a circus

Where a chorus is normally more melodically interesting than a verse, this one compresses the energy of the song into a flat line. I'd like to take a moment here to comment on how brilliant the rhyme is. Aside from the fact that there may be no word in English that rhymes with "circus," let me ask: what would be gained by finding a rhyme for the second line that is not already achieved - or indeed better achieved - by simply repeating the word? Instead, the rhymed word is one that has an effect: the internal "whip"/"trip", all the more effective for being unexpected, since there is a deliberate lack of rhyme in the first line. The over-repetition of the choruses of "Gimme More" and "Womanizer" (which basically consist of the titles on endless loop) here finds a subtler incarnation; "Circus" knows exactly its own limits and strengths.

I mentioned before that the start of the second verse in a pop song is usually accompanied by a letdown in energy. In "Circus," it becomes a reevaluation. You hear the verse with fresh ears, knowing how far this song is willing to go; and when Britney says "There are two types of guys out there," guy or girl, you realize the implicit challenge to yourself: which category do you fall into? The first time she says

Don't stand there watching me, follow me
Show me what you can do

it sounds just like your typical pop song rhetoric - but when it comes again at the end, you feel it as a real and frightening invitation to test your strength against hers.



She can say "Don't stand there watching me" because she knows that you are; she is such a good entertainer that you have to rise to her level just to follow. In the last chorus, when the shrill sirens from "Toxic" come in, it's like a final nose-thumbing, a last ballsy move - an assertion, if there still needed to be one, that she can get away with anything and make it work.

If we must ask questions, let us ask the right ones

Sometimes, when an answer cannot be found to a question, it is not the answerer's fault but the questioner's. How a question is framed is often the cause of an inability to find an answer. Is that perhaps why "What is the purpose of life," or "What is our purpose in life," and so forth, engender so many varied and often passionate answers, but ultimately none which satisfy?

One answer is that our only real duty, our only real striving point, is to achieve happiness. Still this is not clear. Do we mean a total of happiness over the span of our lives? Do we mean to be happy in every moment? Or do we mean that only the last moment - the moment before death - needs to be filled with happiness, since happiness exists in the present and erases all that comes before?

It is often remarked that geniuses and other people who benefit the race as a whole, or are pioneers of some great change in the world, are seldom happy. Hegel speaks of this in the Philosophy of History, and essentially says that their sacrifice is one that must be made, for their action transcends their limited particularity. How is that consolation for them? They may have their own motivation, their own reason for which such a life is the only possible pursuit, but ultimately I do not think it is selfish (or rather, it is selfish but it is not amoral, not even incorrect) to prize your own life and your happiness over the advances of the world. For ultimately no one can bring you happiness or invest thought in your life but yourself. The external paths which connect our actions to others, the translation of our effort into physical quantity, be it energy, empathy, the way in which our efforts move into the world and then are re-translated into another's life, into change - these are so unpredictable since so complex, without any guarantee that what you have done will make any difference in the ultimate balance. You may see the fruits of your labour directly, and be glad; and think to yourself that you have made a difference - but what difference is this? Are you certain that, ten years from now, fifty years, your difference will have been a positive change in a person's life? Sometimes it may seem, indeed, to be so. But these ways are often unpredictable, and even a person whom you never thought you had influenced, whom you didn't try to help, will consider you to be one of the prime factors in her life. I am not saying that we should give up hope altogether, shut ourselves off from people because no change can be made, because it is clear that change can be made. But we cannot expect that the actions of others will lift us up when we need it, because the ways in which we are touched and inspired are impossible to predict. Thus we must, in the final equation, fend for ourselves.

I believe it a sacred, crucial duty for each person to find their way to a personal, deep, and fulfilled happiness. Yet what does this mean? What is happiness, and how is it measured? One of the great poisons of the so-called developed world is the idea that as human beings our best state is when we are happy all the time. We have an obligation to find spiritual peace, to find physical satisfaction, to take ourselves seriously and afford ourselves any pleasure we may seek, and any moment that is painful or causes us to suffer is a waste, an unnecessity, and is to be rejected as soon as possible. The most insidious agent of this poison may be magazines, which are expert in creating problems where none existed, and then offering solutions to those very same problems - solutions that you, a second ago, did not need. I have actually seen a blurb that read: "Think you're happy? Take this test and find out" on the cover of a magazine. What this manages to do is to remove the reader from the state of unconscious happiness she is already in - for a state of true happiness is perhaps unnoticed, or even unremarkable (but more on this later) - and to then supply their own criteria for happiness. But this is not enough. For it has created suspicion in the reader, an uncertainly and an unwillingness to trust herself in judging those paramaters which she and she alone is qualified to judge. No woman felt her pores to be large until she reads that there are 10 ways she can minimize her pores. There is no problem - and thus no customer - until a problem is created and a solution offered. The worst part, though, is in their unspoken opinion that our goal in life should be to iron out all our small difficulties, because they, being negative, have nothing to offer us.

This lie, that human beings must be pleasured and satisfied at all times, extends beyond the blatant medium of media and into subtler realms, where the naive may feel that they are buying into something deeper than they are capable of. Yoga, for instance, is described as spiritual by its practitioners, and is in fact spoken of in a way that is difficult to understand by the unwashed. This generally means that the converted believe that they hold a secret, and that because of this secret there is a kind of barrier separating them from the unwashed population, those who must be converted to join in the admiration of the secret. The truth is that true spirituality, religious or no, is a difficult and painful process. It may be that many people can discover their true spirituality through yoga, but for most it is a convenient and comfortable way to reap the titular rewards of something that is normally awkward and socially excluded (i.e. organized religion). Thus a young person can sign up for a yoga class and feel that she is doing something good for her soul, that she is finally treating herself well and that she deserves such good treatment, and this reinforcement of the absolute positive will continue to stand in the way of her path towards understanding and wisdom.

At a high enough level, all thought begins to look alike, and all great people share the same thoughts, to paraphrase Emerson. And all great thought seems to point out that in life and in everything there must be balance. There cannot be great without small, there cannot be happiness without pain.

Thinking and Doing

I have always lived too much in my head. I lose myself in abstractions and hypotheticals, and my vision is all peripheral. Nike would be appalled - I can't just do it, I have to think about it first. And I usually end up not doing it.

When I was 12 or 13 I was seized with a sudden panic that I would go my entire life without accomplishing the things I wanted to accomplish, and stuck pieces of paper with the words "TIME IS SLIPPING BY" all over the house. Of course, very little in my attitude to the world changed, and this would set a theme for my life: ideology without application. I am a master plan-maker, I delight in making plans - and somehow the act of planning, the industriousness and initiative of it, absolve me from the need to actually follow through. In fact, I do the most work when I have no plan. But I am addicted, not to real accomplishment, but to the feeling of it.

When you make a plan, you essentially split the universe: there is the universe you invent where you get up at 7am, go running from 7:30 to 8:15, work on your thesis from 8:15 to 10:45 and then take a fifteen minute break before, I don't know, writing at novel at 11:00. And then there is the other universe, unwritten, waiting to realize itself into the ideal you have imagined. After conjuring my alternate universe, I sit there and admire it, while the universe around me shapes itself into something that looks like me sitting on the couch with a strange sort of smile on my face. This is why I get nothing done.

Back in my LiveJournal days I quoted this from RWE: "It is easy in the world to live after the world's opinion; it is easy in solitude to live after our own; but the great man is he who in the midst of the crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude." Back then, I thought he was talking about having lots of friends but also getting lots of work done. It probably does mean that, but I think there are a lot of ways to approach the idea. Now, when I look at it, I think that the world and the self are in a kind of perpetual dialog, a back-and-forth where each can spill over into the other and shape it in its own image. To "live after the world's opinion" is to let your circumstances lead you down the river, following the prescribed bends and turns over which you have no control. But this situation, which is one that I think most people in the world find themselves in, most of the time, suggests an alternate possibility as well - one in which the self pours itself outward, and shapes the bends and turns of the river through sheer audacity and will.

Thus the ending of the movie Adaptation (spoilers, probably), in which Charlie Kaufman, a loner who lives in his head and can't say a single coherent thing to any woman he fancies, is given perhaps the greatest gift he's received in his life, a few words from his twin brother Donald as they cower in a dark swamp from a gun-toting Meryl Streep: "You are what you love, not what loves you. I decided that a long time ago." Note the words: they are directional. You are what you love, and in that moment the dialog that Charlie Kaufman has with the world reverses its direction, and the things he imagines begin to actually take place, simply because he now believes that it is possible. How brilliant that Kaufman is a screenwriter, both in life and in the movie. After struggling over a defunct, impotent script (in life and in movie), he at last can write the script for the world in which he lives. At the end of the movie, he tells a girl that he has loved for a very long time that he loves her, for the very first time, and she - miraculously - tells him that she loves him back. He pours himself out, and tunes the world to his vibrating string.

Flight

Whenever I drive across long distances, what always strikes me is the unchanging flatness of the land, the refusal of each bend, each twist in the road to offer up anything other than what has come before - so that the road, stretching ahead, compresses to a single horizontal line, making all distance, near and far, seem the same. And perhaps this contributes to my feeling of precariousness while driving, which stems from my amazement that the surface of something so large (Earth) can hold itself in such a delicate, even state. I think: it must be covering something. The smooth paved road that I hurtle across, the houses erected on common soil, all of this rests on a delicate film that will, at any instant, reveal itself to the chaos beneath. For how else to deal with the scale, how else to understand the unbelievable ratio of size between ourselves and the ground beneath our feet? How we deal with it is simply that we don't. We mark our square space of land, and think of the "Earth" as the 1m² space where we are standing, or sitting, at any given moment. It is only while traveling, while covering a vast distance that we realize how insignificant that distance really is, and see ourselves.

It's said that, were the planet a basketball, the livable ecolayer would be thinner than a coat of varnish on the ball's surface. This is excellent fodder for environmentalists, who can thus point to the fragility of our lives and the systems they rely on. But my concern here is not geological; it is philosophical. For that ecolayer presumably includes the kilometres of breathable air above ourselves, and the fertile soil below. How thick is the space that we actually take up, the space through which we move and thus understand the world? Would it be fair to say a few metres, for most of the inhabitants of this planet? Add a few more for residents in cities. I'm sure the situation would appear different for people who live on slopes, hilly regions with their unique challenges for architecture and transportation. But here in southern Ontario, it is far easier to see that three-dimensionality is an abstract wish, at most a helpful delusion. How flat must something become before it moves from three dimensions to two? If you stretched out the surface of the world, the ratio of the vertical space we use daily to the length of space available to us (pardon my math) would be about 1:4,000,000. Or, it would be about a millimeter high on a plot of land 4 km wide. I don't think the human brain is capable of imagining that degree of flatness. And if we can't imagine it, doesn't that surface in practice lose its third dimension?

There is a common illustration, used (I think) mostly in philosophy and science fiction, of a three-dimensional person who comes across a two-dimensional person, and lifts that person out of the sheet of paper (or whatever) he or she was just in. What happens next? Can the two-dimensional person understand what has happened, or does the idea of a third dimension not even exist in the mind, and is therefore incomprehensible?

Perhaps that is why airports are constructed the way they are, huge, unwieldy structures with unreachable ceilings and populated with shops that seem like they might be brand names in an alternate universe. You first have to leave your city behind, to arrive at this structure, a massive, beached whale lying improbably on a flat, empty expanse of land. It is all so impersonal, and somehow the hangar-like quality of the terminals and the exorbitant food prices and the tunnels that stretch endlessly to nowhere all conspire to remove you from your reality, from the world you know, in preparation for the flight ahead. And then you rise. And as you accelerate upward in a spiral, your ears popping as if to say no, this is not what you were meant to do, and you look out your window and try to reconcile yourself to the idea that you were down there, there, only a few hours ago, it is as if some hand has reached into your two-dimensional universe and lifted you out into the third. You move against the Earth, skimming across its layer of white skin, as your once brothers and sisters move slowly, fractionally, below.

It was really, really ... good.

This morning on the 2 Dundas, the bus (or some part of it) was emitting a high-pitched wail. Three or four girls, sitting at the back:

Girl #1: Ohmygod. The bus is like ... dying.
(All laugh.)
Girl #2: I know! It's like a ...... kettle.
(All laugh.)

I hate to use more than three dots in my ellipses, but I want to convey the break, the enormous, palpable mental effort it took for that poor girl to come up with a suitable analogue for the wail of the bus. I am not just being mean, folks. You know when you're in a group and something funny happens, and then everyone just sort of waits for somebody to make some witty riposte, so that they can laugh and thus defuse the tension? It was like that. It was clear they were going for wit. What they got was ... well. Maybe Oscar Wilde was on the 13.

This bothers me more than it probably should (sidenote: I feel like this happens a lot with me) because I really don't think it should have been that hard for that girl to come up with something a little wittier. Even if she had said "dying baby," that would have already been a great deal more interesting that what she actually went with. And I wonder: if it takes that much mental strain to come up with "kettle" for a high-pitched, whistling sound, how is this girl doing in her postsecondary education? Is she really freeing herself up, exploring the mind and making associations across her field? In short, is she imaginative?

A moment later, one of the girls at last achieved something subtler, but the implications of the statement are more troubling than reassuring. She said: "Maybe we're all really fat or something!" This is imaginative: it requires you to picture, vividly, a group of fat students weighing down a bus to the point where it causes mechanical strain. Much better than "kettle." Had she said it right away, it would have been quite witty. But notice that her brain is far more capable of following rich, creative pathways on a subject related to body image. Body image, perhaps, is one of the things she might spend time thinking about by choice (as opposed to the "forced" thinking that takes place in school), and so the brain is much more receptive to thoughts in that category.

I am not saying that kids these days are stupider than they used to be. I think that's nonsense. What I am saying is that kids these days are probably investing more and more of their creative faculties on quick, easy, super-digestible kinds of information: Facebook posts, text messages, blogs. Reading a newspaper through is unthinkable now for almost everybody, not because they can't, but because they can't fathom setting aside that much time for one thing. I would also argue that they may no longer have the attention span for it.

Here is Tom Hanks on the topic of Starbucks in You've Got Mail:

"The whole purpose of places like Starbucks is for people with no decision-making ability whatsoever to make six decisions just to buy one cup of coffee. Short, tall, light, dark, caf, decaf, low-fat, non-fat, etc. So people who don't know what the hell they're doing or who on earth they are can, for only $2.95, get not just a cup of coffee but an absolutely defining sense of self: Tall! Decaf! Cappuccino!"

That was exactly ten years ago. How much things have changed since then. What was once novel enough for a fairly hip dude in a romantic comedy to say would now never make it into a movie, unless it was to show how backdated the speaker was. The reality is that the world is now more customizable than ever. Facebook is perhaps the most extreme example, because it is nothing less than a customization of the self.

But picture this: what might that girl have done this morning, before getting on that fateful bus? She might have checked her Facebook. She might have tried to come up with something new to put next to her status (thus pushing her to the top of the queue and attracting notice and, God be praised, wall posts). She might have fussed about how to wear her hair or what outfit to go with. And then what shoes. Or she might have done some online shopping, checked out what's on sale, what's worth it and what's not, what she needs and what's just an indulgence. My point is not that she did all (or any) of these things, and I am certainly not judging (I do a lot of those things myself, so I'm including myself on my chopping block). My point is the range of decisions we are required to make, decisions that may seem trivial but which take up more and more of our mental space. When we have to make a thousand such decisions a day (it's probably more than that, actually), do we have space in our minds to consider anything else? If we read a book, in private or for class, do we have any time to process, to allow the language, the metaphor, the richness that does not exist in our daily lives to sink in?

If our thoughts and decisions are all instantaneous, our writing mostly in fifteen-word twenty-second junkets, multiplied by a thousand per day, can you really expect that girl on the bus to come up with a better metaphor?

How to Recognize Beauty

Some of the best teachers in my life have been people I've never met. They've also happened to be teachers in the most classic sense: not people who pass on knowledge, but people who have developed strong stances that (usually) have challenged my own, people who have developed their own rhetoric and towering opinions. You struggle with them and come out a little more clearly defined, a little more sure of yourself in the end.

One of my first teachers was Orson Scott Card who, in addition to being a fiction writer, also has a column wherein he reviews whatever the hell he feels like every two weeks. At first, I was crazy about him - I thought he was deliciously vilifying to things he didn't like, and I agreed with 98% of his judgments. Over time, I came to realize that he approached his subjects with a specific set of criteria in mind - his judgments were based on how well they ticked off his OK boxes, and avoided his peeves - to the degree that he was actually unable to see the thing in front of him. My change in opinion of him was more than just that; I think it showed that I had changed as a critic as well. But he was a teacher in the sense that he was someone I approached first in awe, contended with, and eventually "outgrew."

I don't think I will ever outgrow Daniel Mendelsohn, or if I do, I don't think I will ever lose respect for him. He too writes across the board - movies, plays, classic literature. A bunch of his reviews first published in The New York Review of Books are collected in a book released just this year, How Beautiful It Is and How Easily It Can Be Broken, and I have been devouring them over the last few weeks.

Thing is, he's actually a pretty so-so writer, technically. Maybe because of the deadlines that are part of the magazine game, where most of these reviews were first published, his writing is sometimes inelegant and clumsy, as if he didn't have time to really clean something up. ("And so the classical Greek angelos, grimly transmitting his urgent report of the horrors he has seen, horrors that always result when men find themselves trapped in irresolvable dilemmas, may be thought of as the Angel of Tragedy, and hence very different from the adorable, glittering sylphs who have, lately, alighted in stationery stores and aromatherapy counters and on our television screens, bringing the comfy tidings that everything will be OK: the Angels of Sentimentality.")

But what he lacks in elegance he makes up for in seriousness of purpose, generosity toward his subject, and the deep penetration of his insights. The first half of a Daniel Mendelsohn review is typically description. For example, in his review of Sofia Coppola's Marie Antoinette, he spends several pages not only describing the real Marie Antoinette's life, but also Sofia Coppola's earlier movie Lost in Translation; he gives, in other words, both the artist history and the subject history. The result is that when he does get to his argument about the work in question, he has already shown you the stakes and made you care about the story and context in a way that you want this work to get it right - and if it doesn't (Mendelsohn tends to choose things that are popular and set himself against the public tide), he's already made you care so much that you feel as strongly as he does.

One of his favourite techniques - and I think it's brilliant - is to describe the reception of a work by critics, usually positive, as if he is going along with it. He is observing, and apparently endorsing the high praise that surrounds the work. But then, as if suddenly noticing something, he drops a single line that, in its simplicity, suddenly reverses the viewpoint by introducing his own view. Let me offer an example. He begins a review of the uber-popular novel The Lovely Bones (which I found insulting somehow, but for reasons that I didn't fully understand until I read Mendelsohn's review) by describing how fantastically popular it has been with both public and critics, who were all blown away by its unflinching portrayals of the worst horrors that can afflict little girls and families. He does this for a good two or three pages. And then this: "And yet darkness, grief, and heartbreak are what The Lovely Bones scrupulously avoids. This is the real heart of its appeal."

Bam! Can you get away with saying something like that without first offering any evidence? Usually, no. How Mendelsohn gets around it is by always following these brash thesis statements with a page break, and then beginning a new "section." On the page, this is really visually effective. The page break stops the reader from exploding with "But wait!", and the long passages of text seem to promise: "We contain all the evidence you need to be convinced. Just read along and you'll eventually see things the way I do." And you usually do, because he has taken so much time to give you context and information about the work in question that a) you feel like he's given you everything you need to know to make a judgment, b) he's shown you what is at stake and the deeper issues his arguments are rooted in, and c) you feel like he really cares about the subject and is really interested in finding out the truth, rather than simply going on a bash-fest.

That last point is probably the most important quality for a critic to have: generosity. You approach every work with the fervent hope that it can do well, that it can succeed and offer whatever it is that good works offer. This way, you don't punish any good works, and because of your initial optimism people tend to believe you when your opinion of something turns sour.

It is perhaps unsurprising that one of his most perceptive reviews is of another book of reviews, Hatchet Jobs, which just about accommodates the opposite theory of how critics should behave. But Mendelsohn doesn't jump down his throat, enraged that another critic could be so mean and self-serving. He is honest; he is fair in spite of what he may feel. Roger Ebert, another superlative critic of a different field, likes to quote: "A man goes to the movies. The critic must be honest enough to admit that he is that man." In other words, if a literary critic sheds a tear while reading The Sisterhood of the Travelling Pants, he might write:

"The book is juvenile, saccharine, and finally does not probe or stimulate the human spirit on any meaningful level."

Which would be a lie, because something about the work, despite whatever flaws it may genuinely have, nonetheless found a way to move him - and as a human being who comes in contact with a work, he has to recognize this. But equally bad would be this:

"This book moved me to tears. It is therefore a great book that I would recommend to everybody. I read James Joyce's Ulysses last week and I did not cry at all."

Why is this bad? Doesn't it manage to recognize beauty? Yes - but it confuses personal emotion with the value of the work. You may have been moved by it, but - why? What does it say about the work, and not about you? Look deeper.

"The book has some touching moments, and indeed one moved me to tears. Yet the sometime genuine scenes of recognition and reconciliation are founded upon a suspension of disbelief that the author demands of the reader, a suspension that, in the end, contradicts the very 'realness' of the girls' interactions with one another."

That's criticism. Honesty in recognizing your reactions and honesty of purpose and observation. Where was I? Oh yes, Hatchet Jobs. Mendelsohn admits that the author is intelligent, and that he laughed a lot while reading the book. But his eventual point is that the author's writing can't be called criticism because it accomplishes nothing of value - just breaks things down. To get there, his analyses of the text are beautiful in their matter-of-factness and vision. Of a long and verbose metaphor in Hatchet Jobs, Mendelsohn writes:

"This is a wonderful bit of writing, but two things strike you: first, that by the middle of the passage you (and, you suspect, Peck) have temporarily forgotten just where this metaphorical road trip is headed, and second, that what's really going on here isn't so much criticism as a kind of performance - it's as if Peck wants to show you not what's wrong with Barnes, but how good a writer he, Peck, is."

Not only is this right on the money, but did you notice how he assumes he knows what you are thinking? He does it often, and never was he wrong about what I was thinking. His observations are universal, and rooted in the text, rather than reflections of himself and his own biases.

I have been having many a conversation with friends and well-wishers lately about aesthetics - and specifically criticism. Mostly, I was really surprised to see that many people see criticism as mostly a negative thing - a way to say that your opinion is better than someone else's, which somehow makes you smarter or perceptive. This is not it at all. Daniel Mendelsohn is a perfect example of the idea that criticism is the ability to see clearly - maybe to be guided by instincts and opinions and feelings, but in the end to look at something in an uncompromising way. That is the value of criticism. The alternative situation can be described as one in which "everyone is entitled to their opinion" - which, I think, is an insult to just about everybody. It says that the works don't matter, because anyone could like them or not like them and they'd always be right, and it says that people can't be trusted to see beyond their own likes and dislikes. In the end, we want to be able to see others, and, finally, see ourselves - clearly. And this is what criticism teaches.

The Fall

I am losing my ability to spell.

It's always come naturally to me, and I have a couple of spelling bee wins under my belt from my ability to accurately spell words I've never heard before. I've known many people for whom spelling is not an innate ability, and have to think hard every time they come across something with ambiguous sounds, such as "separate." How do you know the second vowel is an "a," and not an "e"? A huge percentage of words in the English language feature such seemingly arbitrary choices. Do you memorize them all?

In a way you do, since the words themselves don't offer hints one way or the other. (Unless you are very very into etymology, and know that "separate" comes from the Latin "separare," to pull apart.) But most of us don't actually choose between "a" and "e" every time we spell "separate" - it's wired into our brains. Same goes for most words that we've learned. It becomes instict.

But instinct is by definition an insubstantive, ungraspable thing - there is never a guarantee that you will still have it tomorrow. And I've been losing it. For instance, the other day I wrote "irreverant" ... and only noticed a good few sentences later, when I glanced back at the page. Even with words that I spell correctly (hopefully, most of them), I find myself slowing down to ask myself questions I've never asked before: double r? double l? double the first s or the second? It's likely that lack of confidence is playing a part as well, as I doubt my spelling powers more and more with every mistake.

This all reminds me of The Golden Compass, where Lyra has an innate ability to read the alethiometer, but loses it at the end of Amber Spyglass and must learn to read the symbols from scratch - a process, she is told, that will be painstaking and lengthy, but at the end of it she will have the symbols for good. In the books, this change is a symbol for the loss of the innocence of childhood when we become adults. The curtain is pulled back, so to speak, and we see that nothing is magical, or easy, in life - all good things are contingent and fragile, and nothing that you value is safe or exempt.

I read somewhere that the progression of humankind has been marked by its gradual removal from the centre of things. We begin with the notion of ourselves as central in some way, and time after time we are shot down and revealed to be anything but. We first thought the sun and moon revolved around us, but Copernicus removed us from the centre of the solar system and placed us on an orbiting ring. Then, 20th century astronomers displaced us from the centre of the galaxy, and our galaxy from the centre of the universe. Ouch. Some have asserted that the discovery of altruism and selflessness in animal societies has constituted the next step in this abasement; we once thought of ourselves as superior to animals because of our ability to transcend animal insticts, but it looks like being a nice guy is really part of our genes and, moreover, nature!

I am slowly getting to my point. Let us combine the above with Ralph Waldo Emerson's assertion (and, since we're talking about RWE, replace 'assertion' with 'truth') that the entire history of civilization is encapsulated in every individual life. So every human life enacts the progression from blubbering cave-brute to sophisticated, articulate twentieth-centuryalite, and the simple reason for that is that history cannot be inherited. There is some reason for why the caveman ended up here, where we are, some six thousand years later, and each individual has to "catch up" with her time, to live through six thousand years of progress and arrive where everyone else has arrived.

Anyway, I wonder if the same applies for our constant shifting away from the centre of things? When you're born, you are at the centre of everything - not just because everyone fawns over you, but because you have no real sense of other, no inkling of the possibility of multiple perspectives. As you get older, this becomes more apparent (I just typed "apparent" and then "apparrent" and then "apparent," see what I mean?), but it is clear after talking to any teenager for five minutes that their bubble hasn't yet burst, so to speak - their problems are the worst, their their their. I find it compelling that in one interpretation of the ideological start of the universe - the story of Adam and Eve - we begin in a state of ignorant innocence that is complicated by a fall. The first significant event for humankind is a fall from the awesomeness of Eden, which really had nothing to do with Eve's disobedience of God and was in fact due to the acquisition of knowledge in itself. (I have no idea if this is true, by the way - it just makes sense in my mind.) So what, really, made Eden so great? Symbolically, it was this great garden filled with naked people (and pigs you could munch on) - but what is Eden a symbol for? Isn't it just ignorance? A simple life uncomplicated by what goes on behind the curtain?

I would argue, then, that each of our lives is marked by a series of falls, falls that are caused by knowledge and resultingly push us farther and farther from our centrality. What is our centrality? Maybe our belief that we have it all figured out, that we know how to deal with life, that we are somehow immune because we are smart or clever or lucky. That we have a hand in our fate and are not the victims of casual, devastating chance. This process of displacement, which is a result of our acquisition of knowledge, is the exact same thing as the progress of humanity over the entire span of its existence, as humanity acquires knowledge and is displaced again and again.