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The Ecstasy of Influence: Nonfictions, Etc.
What’s a novelist supposed to do with contemporary culture? And what’s contemporary culture supposed to do with novelists? In The Ecstasy of Influence , Jonathan Lethem, tangling with what he calls the “white elephant” role of the writer as public intellectual, arrives at an astonishing range of answers.
A constellation of previously published pieces and new essays as provocative and idiosyncratic as any he’s written, this volume sheds light on an array of topics from sex in cinema to drugs, graffiti, Bob Dylan, cyberculture, 9/11, book touring, and Marlon Brando, as well as on a shelf’s worth of his literary models and Norman Mailer, Paula Fox, Bret Easton Ellis, James Wood, and others. And, writing about Brooklyn, his father, and his sojourn through two decades of writing, Lethem sheds an equally strong light on himself.
A constellation of previously published pieces and new essays as provocative and idiosyncratic as any he’s written, this volume sheds light on an array of topics from sex in cinema to drugs, graffiti, Bob Dylan, cyberculture, 9/11, book touring, and Marlon Brando, as well as on a shelf’s worth of his literary models and Norman Mailer, Paula Fox, Bret Easton Ellis, James Wood, and others. And, writing about Brooklyn, his father, and his sojourn through two decades of writing, Lethem sheds an equally strong light on himself.
464 pages, Hardcover
First published November 8, 2011
117 people are currently reading
3320 people want to read
About the author
Jonathan Lethem
238 books2,671 followersJonathan Allen Lethem (born February 19, 1964) is an American novelist, essayist and short story writer.
His first novel, Gun, with Occasional Music, a genre work that mixed elements of science fiction and detective fiction, was published in 1994. It was followed by three more science fiction novels. In 1999, Lethem published Motherless Brooklyn, a National Book Critics Circle Award-winning novel that achieved mainstream success. In 2003, he published The Fortress of Solitude, which became a New York Times Best Seller.
In 2005, he received a MacArthur Fellowship
His first novel, Gun, with Occasional Music, a genre work that mixed elements of science fiction and detective fiction, was published in 1994. It was followed by three more science fiction novels. In 1999, Lethem published Motherless Brooklyn, a National Book Critics Circle Award-winning novel that achieved mainstream success. In 2003, he published The Fortress of Solitude, which became a New York Times Best Seller.
In 2005, he received a MacArthur Fellowship
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January 14, 2012
This book sparked a few different emotions in me. Some of them good, like a reminder about why I love books so much, and some not so 'nice', like the recharging of the 'punk' part of me that used to write zines and point accusatory fingers at things that annoy me. Many of the essays in this book mix the borders between the personal and the real subject at hand. This is sort of like what DFW does so well (but in a more introspective manner, DFW might have laid bare an image of his psyche, but he never seemed to drag out all of his old skeletons and his life out into the open, Lethem does), and what is probably something that can be traced back to the 'new journalism' of the 1960's and has a rich pedigree of Tom Wolfe's and Joan Didion's and all of that, but which for me (because I didn't know these people back then when my own tastes were being initially shaped, or if I did I only knew them as names with no context to attach to them, I can't remember (I just lied. I would have known Tom Wolfe, my mom had recommended I read Bonfire of the Vanities when I was in high school, so I had been aware of him, but I still had no real context to place him in, he was just that guy who wrote that book about those yuppies, as opposed to that other book about those yuppies where the one yuppie kills other yuppies, a favorite book of mine around the time these sensibilities I'm now talking about began to form), what I knew of them at the time), is going to be forever tied to the personal zines and columns in Maximum RocknRoll that I loved, appropriated, re-worked and was inspired by (I may have pointed this out elsewhere, but a parenthetical aside is the perfect place to restate (or state it for the first time, if in fact I never made this comment in a review before) that before there was DFW for me (who would seem to be an obvious influence on this annoying habit of mine of interrupting almost all my reviews in this manner of writing asides within the 'actual' text, which one might think I would just use footnotes (a la DFW) if it were possible to format footnotes with hypertext in the goodreads review format), there was Rev. Norb of MRR, he constructed whole monthly columns filled with glorious asides nested within nested parentheses and I have no idea who influenced him but he was my original influence in the wonders of breaking a text with multiple streams midstream, seventeen years after first reading one of his columns I'm still playing at copying him, the footnote would come a little later to me and while it can serve the same function it is not nearly as in your face as an annoying series of parentheses (am I in one now? Shit I have to go back and check (nope I'm not)), I mean you can just skip going to a footnote, but if you want to try to read this review you'll have to navigate these asides. I understand if no one actually does navigate them. My own influences (since this is a book of influences) the ones you don't hear mentioned very often outside of certain zine-centric worlds or maybe in indie publishing are (were) Cometbus, and Ben Weasel, the above mentioned Rev. Norb, Jen Angel of Fucktooth, Al Burian of Burn Collector, Cindy Crabtree of Doris, Mykel Board, George Tabb(MRR, again. How I loved and looked forward to reading the columns), Kathleen Hanna and Ian Mackaye. This is the panoply of voices that shaped my own first attempts at writing. All the fancy 'real' authors would come later. As my friend Ben (not goodreads Ben, but Ben (whose last name I don't know, it's kind of amazing how many people from my punk days I don't know the last names of) from the Disenchanted (the band I saw more than any other band ever, I saw them something like thirty or forty times, they literally played almost every Albany DIY show for a couple of years, and my own band played almost every one of our shows with them), said the last time I saw him (over ten years ago at a Locust show at ABC No Rio) and I asked him what he was up to, he said that his new band was going to be different from The Disenchanted, "More thank yous and less fuck yous", I wish I could get to the point where there were more thank yous than fuck yous, and consider this first part of the review my own thank yous to influences, but my own influences always have a fuck you ready to explode as an almost moral imperative.
This book has made me think quite a bit about my own influences, about what made me and how I go about writing my reviews (since I don't even entertain the notion anymore of doing any writing besides ranting in reviews on the internet).
Without anymore pre-review nonsense, here is the review and inevitably more tangential nonsense.
The author
I really really like one of Jonathan Lethem's books. I like another one. And the few others I've read have done very little for me. I haven't read most of his newer work, you can go to my bookshelves to see what I've read, if you're interested. Lethem has a previous and much shorter collection of essays called The Disappointment Artist, I think that's a fairly apt title for something of his, he's not one of those writers that is always knocking it out of the park. He falls down and the readers get to see it happen. A probably un-apt comparison that I've been working with in my head while reading this book is that Lethem is like DFW's over-excitable little brother. He's got some of the same sensibilities but it's rawer and feels less mediated. For all of DFW's brutal honesty and introspection you know deep down that you are seeing exactly the DFW that he wanted you to see, it might have been close to his real person, but it was also a very crafted lens you were you looking at him through. Lethem has that same honesty but you get the feeling reading him that he has no problem just blurting shit out (even though you know that it's also mediated, it's just not as constructed..... my analogy is falling apart, and I can't get it to work right, time to move on).
Lethem is a giant nerd. And one of the things about nerds is that they have no problem waving their nerd flag around, showing the world exactly what they love even if it's not something very cool to be interested in, never mind to love with devotion. He's a book nerd who loves his sci-fi, but also loves his post-moderns, and his lesser known all-stars like Dawn Powell ("With too many uniformly lavish editions, the novice reader, wading in, is at the mercy of dumb luck. This happens a lot. Steerforth Press, meaning well, has made it as likely that a reader curious about Dawn Powell will come out of a bookstore clutching the glum early volumes set in Ohio or the misfiring The Happy Island, as that they'll snag Turn, Magic Wheel or The Locusts have No King. Will that reader try twice? Behind the gorgeous jackets, flawed books jostle beside the masterpieces) and Hartley. He's a music nerd. He's a movie nerd. Aside from some of his book nerd tendencies, he and I I think move in different worlds of nerdom when it comes to music (his being much more mainstream for my tastes), and I just have never been able to sustain enough interest in movies to move from a casual watcher of films to being someone who could get worked up over certain works.
He's also an ex-bookstore clerk, putting in more ten plus years on the job and sharing some of the stories to go along with his tour of duty ("After all, didn't every novelist work as a clerk in a bookstore until they'd published their first book?").
This book is a testament to the different things that Lethem loves. And he loves to gush and his gushing is infectious.
It's also a chronicle of himself as he tries to figure himself out in various pieces of writing. He comes across as very honest, although what he says could be a momentary belief that's liable to change.
The Book
Is good. It's tedious to read too many occasional pieces at a time though. Sort of like it's tedious to read too many short stories at a time for me, and it's why I generally don't read too many short story collections or essay collections. Only one piece (so far) was a real snooze-fest, and it actually put the brakes on this book for me for over a week. It was a short-story he included that my sleep deprived brain couldn't muscle it's way through when I was first reading the book, and I felt so blah about going back to the story that I let the book sit for a week or so before I decided I should start carrying it to work and reading it as my subway / break book. The story ended up not being as terrible as it seemed at first, and the book picked up again right after it and it's been pretty smooth sailing ever since, although the sheer number of little essays is a little overwhelming and for some reason I never want to pick up the book when I'm in my apartment.
The Review
Not the review for this book, but The Review in general. Reading this book has put me in a very self-aware mindset, thinking about my own work (pathetic that I consider my unedited book reviews on a website as my 'work', yes I know), and it's inspired in me a bit of a desire to self-flaggelate or at least pull back the curtain on my own thoughts about reviewing. Most of this I've probably said in other reviews, but maybe not. I can't remember what I've actually written and what I meant to write and never did.
I don't like book reviews. For someone who reads as much as I do, and considers himself to be a booknerd and is pretty up on the current state of the book world, I almost never ever ever read professional book reviews. They are boring to me. Actually, I think they are bullshit. When some pompous twit can only tell me that it was a book reviewed two weeks ago in the New York Times and then gives some condescending look when I have no idea which book they are talking about, it doesn't bother me (ok, this rarely happens, but it happened right before Christmas and I wanted to laugh at the man and tell him I don't give a shit what the NYTBR says about anything, I didn't though, and it turned out to not even be a book, but an essay that wasn't about any particular book and trying to explain this to the man was a failure and he called me some name and I said something back to him, and you're the dumb ass who can't understand what he read).
I don't give a fuck what Michiko Kakutani thinks about a book. If anything her praise is a sign that the book might be something I'd rather not read.
And I don't care to read some novelist 'reviewing' (jerking off) a fellow novelist's (friend's) book. It's all so polite.
I also don't like book reports. I don't like someone reiterating a plot to me. I don't like someone possibly ruining the unfolding a plot by a childish, this happened and then this happened and then this happened. I don't like boring book reviews, and I generally don't like being told by a reviewer if they would recommend the book or not. I can usually tell if you they liked the book and if they would recommend it by what they have said (I'm guilty of this also, but I still can't figure out how to write a book review for a book I love that gets my enjoyment across).
I also don't like too many gimmicks and I hate hate hate boilerplate formulaic reviews (I especially hate hate hate hate hate boilerplate formulaic gimmicky reviews). For example there is one reviewer who I'll admit that I found a few of his reviews amusing at first, but they now have the appeal of a long-running and tired sitcom re-hashing the same tired old jokes and stale structure. They are boilerplate dribble, and worse than that they are filled with tired gimmicks that feel as fresh as the jokes a tiresome uncle repeats every Thanksgiving. I will grant that they are mechanically better written than any of my reviews, but that's not saying much, most reviews on here are technically better written than mine. I'm a swamp of bad grammar and awful syntax.
Now that I've pointed out some things I hate, I'll also point out that I'm guilty of just about everything I hate (except for writing professional book reviews, I'd be willingly guilty of this, too but I doubt the NYTBR would ever come knocking on my door).
But, I like to think that I give a fair amount of thought to my reviews and their (lack of?) structure. I don't like writing the same review over and over again. It bores me, and why would I do this if it was boring to me? Writing book reports bore me, so I don't do it. But, still I keep feeling the urge to write these very long winded 'reviews', which I think of more as an extended personal narrative than individual reviews. I think of my own reviews more as a diary that I write for an audience that I believe has actually read every single one of the entries and is just able to follow the progression of ramblings and confessions I spit out. I treat my own reviews sort of as a journal of what I've thought about what I've read, even if what I've thought about might have very little to do with the books themselves but might only be tangentially related to something in a book.
I like reviews that are honest, that give away more about the author of the review than the book. I like to read how the book affected someone. I like to see them get angry or genuinely bubble over with excitement (I don't care to see that every book you read is a highest possible recommendation, but maybe some people are just better than others at picking only winners, Vegas must be great for people with that kind of skill), but that being said I can't stand reviews that judge other readers for liking something that they don't like (guilty guilty guilty, I judge all the time, but I try to keep an open mind that others can like what they like without blanket accusations, I probably hate some of my own reviews).
Does all of this say much about reviews or maybe say more about what reviews I vote for and don't vote for? Maybe. Maybe not. I actually don't vote for a lot of reviews because I never see them. I'm an awful goodreader who is bogged down constantly by the amount of material being thrown at him.
Wrapping up
If you've actually waded through all this muck, thank you! I should return to the book at hand, yes? It's a good book and it's a wonderful portrait of Lethem with all (well not all I'm sure, but quite a few) of his warts being put on display. It's a difficult book to get through just because of it being composed of so many short pieces, and they do start to run together when you try to read the book for any real length of time.
I could have done this book more justice by going in to more particulars, talking about essays I enjoyed, pointing out more subjects being discussed in the book. I could have done that.
Maybe I should have.
This book has made me think quite a bit about my own influences, about what made me and how I go about writing my reviews (since I don't even entertain the notion anymore of doing any writing besides ranting in reviews on the internet).
Without anymore pre-review nonsense, here is the review and inevitably more tangential nonsense.
The author
I really really like one of Jonathan Lethem's books. I like another one. And the few others I've read have done very little for me. I haven't read most of his newer work, you can go to my bookshelves to see what I've read, if you're interested. Lethem has a previous and much shorter collection of essays called The Disappointment Artist, I think that's a fairly apt title for something of his, he's not one of those writers that is always knocking it out of the park. He falls down and the readers get to see it happen. A probably un-apt comparison that I've been working with in my head while reading this book is that Lethem is like DFW's over-excitable little brother. He's got some of the same sensibilities but it's rawer and feels less mediated. For all of DFW's brutal honesty and introspection you know deep down that you are seeing exactly the DFW that he wanted you to see, it might have been close to his real person, but it was also a very crafted lens you were you looking at him through. Lethem has that same honesty but you get the feeling reading him that he has no problem just blurting shit out (even though you know that it's also mediated, it's just not as constructed..... my analogy is falling apart, and I can't get it to work right, time to move on).
Lethem is a giant nerd. And one of the things about nerds is that they have no problem waving their nerd flag around, showing the world exactly what they love even if it's not something very cool to be interested in, never mind to love with devotion. He's a book nerd who loves his sci-fi, but also loves his post-moderns, and his lesser known all-stars like Dawn Powell ("With too many uniformly lavish editions, the novice reader, wading in, is at the mercy of dumb luck. This happens a lot. Steerforth Press, meaning well, has made it as likely that a reader curious about Dawn Powell will come out of a bookstore clutching the glum early volumes set in Ohio or the misfiring The Happy Island, as that they'll snag Turn, Magic Wheel or The Locusts have No King. Will that reader try twice? Behind the gorgeous jackets, flawed books jostle beside the masterpieces) and Hartley. He's a music nerd. He's a movie nerd. Aside from some of his book nerd tendencies, he and I I think move in different worlds of nerdom when it comes to music (his being much more mainstream for my tastes), and I just have never been able to sustain enough interest in movies to move from a casual watcher of films to being someone who could get worked up over certain works.
He's also an ex-bookstore clerk, putting in more ten plus years on the job and sharing some of the stories to go along with his tour of duty ("After all, didn't every novelist work as a clerk in a bookstore until they'd published their first book?").
This book is a testament to the different things that Lethem loves. And he loves to gush and his gushing is infectious.
It's also a chronicle of himself as he tries to figure himself out in various pieces of writing. He comes across as very honest, although what he says could be a momentary belief that's liable to change.
The Book
Is good. It's tedious to read too many occasional pieces at a time though. Sort of like it's tedious to read too many short stories at a time for me, and it's why I generally don't read too many short story collections or essay collections. Only one piece (so far) was a real snooze-fest, and it actually put the brakes on this book for me for over a week. It was a short-story he included that my sleep deprived brain couldn't muscle it's way through when I was first reading the book, and I felt so blah about going back to the story that I let the book sit for a week or so before I decided I should start carrying it to work and reading it as my subway / break book. The story ended up not being as terrible as it seemed at first, and the book picked up again right after it and it's been pretty smooth sailing ever since, although the sheer number of little essays is a little overwhelming and for some reason I never want to pick up the book when I'm in my apartment.
The Review
Not the review for this book, but The Review in general. Reading this book has put me in a very self-aware mindset, thinking about my own work (pathetic that I consider my unedited book reviews on a website as my 'work', yes I know), and it's inspired in me a bit of a desire to self-flaggelate or at least pull back the curtain on my own thoughts about reviewing. Most of this I've probably said in other reviews, but maybe not. I can't remember what I've actually written and what I meant to write and never did.
I don't like book reviews. For someone who reads as much as I do, and considers himself to be a booknerd and is pretty up on the current state of the book world, I almost never ever ever read professional book reviews. They are boring to me. Actually, I think they are bullshit. When some pompous twit can only tell me that it was a book reviewed two weeks ago in the New York Times and then gives some condescending look when I have no idea which book they are talking about, it doesn't bother me (ok, this rarely happens, but it happened right before Christmas and I wanted to laugh at the man and tell him I don't give a shit what the NYTBR says about anything, I didn't though, and it turned out to not even be a book, but an essay that wasn't about any particular book and trying to explain this to the man was a failure and he called me some name and I said something back to him, and you're the dumb ass who can't understand what he read).
I don't give a fuck what Michiko Kakutani thinks about a book. If anything her praise is a sign that the book might be something I'd rather not read.
And I don't care to read some novelist 'reviewing' (jerking off) a fellow novelist's (friend's) book. It's all so polite.
I also don't like book reports. I don't like someone reiterating a plot to me. I don't like someone possibly ruining the unfolding a plot by a childish, this happened and then this happened and then this happened. I don't like boring book reviews, and I generally don't like being told by a reviewer if they would recommend the book or not. I can usually tell if you they liked the book and if they would recommend it by what they have said (I'm guilty of this also, but I still can't figure out how to write a book review for a book I love that gets my enjoyment across).
I also don't like too many gimmicks and I hate hate hate boilerplate formulaic reviews (I especially hate hate hate hate hate boilerplate formulaic gimmicky reviews). For example there is one reviewer who I'll admit that I found a few of his reviews amusing at first, but they now have the appeal of a long-running and tired sitcom re-hashing the same tired old jokes and stale structure. They are boilerplate dribble, and worse than that they are filled with tired gimmicks that feel as fresh as the jokes a tiresome uncle repeats every Thanksgiving. I will grant that they are mechanically better written than any of my reviews, but that's not saying much, most reviews on here are technically better written than mine. I'm a swamp of bad grammar and awful syntax.
Now that I've pointed out some things I hate, I'll also point out that I'm guilty of just about everything I hate (except for writing professional book reviews, I'd be willingly guilty of this, too but I doubt the NYTBR would ever come knocking on my door).
But, I like to think that I give a fair amount of thought to my reviews and their (lack of?) structure. I don't like writing the same review over and over again. It bores me, and why would I do this if it was boring to me? Writing book reports bore me, so I don't do it. But, still I keep feeling the urge to write these very long winded 'reviews', which I think of more as an extended personal narrative than individual reviews. I think of my own reviews more as a diary that I write for an audience that I believe has actually read every single one of the entries and is just able to follow the progression of ramblings and confessions I spit out. I treat my own reviews sort of as a journal of what I've thought about what I've read, even if what I've thought about might have very little to do with the books themselves but might only be tangentially related to something in a book.
I like reviews that are honest, that give away more about the author of the review than the book. I like to read how the book affected someone. I like to see them get angry or genuinely bubble over with excitement (I don't care to see that every book you read is a highest possible recommendation, but maybe some people are just better than others at picking only winners, Vegas must be great for people with that kind of skill), but that being said I can't stand reviews that judge other readers for liking something that they don't like (guilty guilty guilty, I judge all the time, but I try to keep an open mind that others can like what they like without blanket accusations, I probably hate some of my own reviews).
Does all of this say much about reviews or maybe say more about what reviews I vote for and don't vote for? Maybe. Maybe not. I actually don't vote for a lot of reviews because I never see them. I'm an awful goodreader who is bogged down constantly by the amount of material being thrown at him.
Wrapping up
If you've actually waded through all this muck, thank you! I should return to the book at hand, yes? It's a good book and it's a wonderful portrait of Lethem with all (well not all I'm sure, but quite a few) of his warts being put on display. It's a difficult book to get through just because of it being composed of so many short pieces, and they do start to run together when you try to read the book for any real length of time.
I could have done this book more justice by going in to more particulars, talking about essays I enjoyed, pointing out more subjects being discussed in the book. I could have done that.
Maybe I should have.
February 5, 2012
Lethem's boundless self-obsession and whiningly persistent neediness make this collection impossible to get through, despite the presence of an occasionally decent essay. But the guy's total narcissism just creeps you out after a while. Doesn't he have any friends? Or a decent literary agent? Someone to point out to him that the world might not have been thirsting for his pompously self-important post 9/11 musings, or his pathetic extended whine in response to a negative review by James Woods? Or his adolescent tastes in music. That publishing every scrap of text on his hard drive in a bloated omnibus collection just makes him seem pathologically narcissistic?
Dude. Just SHUT THE FUCK UP already. What makes you think we care?
Dude. Just SHUT THE FUCK UP already. What makes you think we care?
March 19, 2025
It's good to be done with this tiresome, almost entirely humour free book. Lethem says Mailer's Advertisements... was his model. That was a humourless book, too, full of smugness and complacency, and it has cast a terrible shadow over this collection. Way too somber. About the only time the prose came alive was when he moaned about a bad review from James Wood. (Well, what do you expect from James Wood?)
Lethem's pieces on Dylan and James Brown don't make me want to hear any more of the music of either than before, and the occasional fiction in here makes me want to keep even further away from his fiction. So this is definitely not a book I'd recommend.
Lethem's pieces on Dylan and James Brown don't make me want to hear any more of the music of either than before, and the occasional fiction in here makes me want to keep even further away from his fiction. So this is definitely not a book I'd recommend.
June 5, 2014
Sumptuous streams of intellectual rattle ‘n’ roll topped off with the ecstatic influence of Lethem’s non-fic idols (notable: David FW and Lester B and Geoff D). The title piece is alas the most ecstatic in the collection alongside the long(u)e(u)rs on James Brown and SF conventions and the opening shizzle on self-consciousness in autobrifographie. Once fangirling mode is activated (like L Bangs) Lethem gets in a lather and is less convincing (the several novel introductions or music pieces are bores and shoulda been weeded). The irksome short fictions fail to entertain (esp. those devoted to his artist friends—a whifflet of self-indulgence undeniable) and those shorter experimental pieces (a lot of them numbered, plenty about Brooklyn—ARGH!) pass through one’s ears without leaving a hint of lyrical wax. Leading us to the conclusion that Lethem is a minor writer with heaps of brio but not much memorable in the final analysisters.
August 12, 2014
Uneven, but worthwhile. Some of this is excellent, and there are some marvelous phrases. When he's talking about books, bookstores, movies...he's great. The prose gets a bit dense in places, but it's rewarding.
But some pieces really don't work. The music writing is as tedious as most music writing; I confess I started skipping, and I rarely do that. All I could think was the Billy Joel line, "You can't get the sound/from the story in a magazine"--and when Billy Joel's lyrics are more insightful, you're probably in trouble.
Worth reading, but you have to have the discipline to say, "Really, I don't care about this," so you can spend time with the really interesting parts.
But some pieces really don't work. The music writing is as tedious as most music writing; I confess I started skipping, and I rarely do that. All I could think was the Billy Joel line, "You can't get the sound/from the story in a magazine"--and when Billy Joel's lyrics are more insightful, you're probably in trouble.
Worth reading, but you have to have the discipline to say, "Really, I don't care about this," so you can spend time with the really interesting parts.
January 4, 2012
I was truly not too fond of this book. I give it three stars because my admiration of Lethem and (less than real) feeling of connection to him won't let me give it less. It's a hodge podge of essays, most from magazines. Did he have to put them all in this book? It's overlong and uncentered. It's great for him, as a novelist, that he can get paid to write nonfiction too, but it's not all great for me to read. And for the first time I felt that he writes too much about himself. Can't he stick to autobiographical fiction? It's too much.
Read
May 14, 2013Lethem divides his collection into ten sections: My Plan To Begin With; Dick, Calvino, Ballard: SF and Postmodernism; Plagiarisms; Film and Comics; Wall Art; 9/11 and Book Tour; Dylan, Brown, and Others; Working the Room; The Mad Brooklynite; and What Remains of My Plan. In addition to the usual sources or original publication--Salon, the New Yorker, various literary magazines--some of the pieces here were written for artists' catalogs, CD liner notes, and blogs.
The best known essay here might be "The Ecstasy of Influence: A Plagiarism," his brief against those who would lock down every tangible creative act in a kind of intellectual enclosure movement. It's a long, persuasive effort, with a twist ending, or, rather, a revelation: almost all of the essay is borrowed from others. Lethem provides a key immediately afterward that he introduces this way:
"This key to the preceding essay names the source of every line I stole, warped, and cobbled together as I 'wrote' (except, alas, those sources I forgot along the way)."
It's a long list. I'll briefly focus on this one essay, but the entire book is crammed with my marginalia, indicating how deeply I was engaged with almost every essay in the collection.
In "Ecstasy," Lethem grapples with appropriation and the resulting "contamination anxiety" felt by modern artists and everyday people in general. He gets right at the heart of this in a passage on Eliot's Waste Land and how deeply it relies on allusion and quotation; in the passage, he examines a line borrowed from Spenser and writes, "Two responses are possible: grant the line to Eliot, or later discover the source and understand the line as plagiarism. Eliot evidenced no small anxiety about these matters; the notes he so carefully added to The Waste Land can be read as a symptom of modernism's contamination anxiety. Taken from this angle, what exactly is postmodernism, except modernism without the anxiety?"
That last sentence is terrifically perceptive, because it comes at the end of a section where Lethem has built a case from examples in many art forms, jazz, blues, visual, cartoon. It feels apt, one of the best definitions of postmodernism I've encountered, and certainly one of the most concise.
The best known essay here might be "The Ecstasy of Influence: A Plagiarism," his brief against those who would lock down every tangible creative act in a kind of intellectual enclosure movement. It's a long, persuasive effort, with a twist ending, or, rather, a revelation: almost all of the essay is borrowed from others. Lethem provides a key immediately afterward that he introduces this way:
"This key to the preceding essay names the source of every line I stole, warped, and cobbled together as I 'wrote' (except, alas, those sources I forgot along the way)."
It's a long list. I'll briefly focus on this one essay, but the entire book is crammed with my marginalia, indicating how deeply I was engaged with almost every essay in the collection.
In "Ecstasy," Lethem grapples with appropriation and the resulting "contamination anxiety" felt by modern artists and everyday people in general. He gets right at the heart of this in a passage on Eliot's Waste Land and how deeply it relies on allusion and quotation; in the passage, he examines a line borrowed from Spenser and writes, "Two responses are possible: grant the line to Eliot, or later discover the source and understand the line as plagiarism. Eliot evidenced no small anxiety about these matters; the notes he so carefully added to The Waste Land can be read as a symptom of modernism's contamination anxiety. Taken from this angle, what exactly is postmodernism, except modernism without the anxiety?"
That last sentence is terrifically perceptive, because it comes at the end of a section where Lethem has built a case from examples in many art forms, jazz, blues, visual, cartoon. It feels apt, one of the best definitions of postmodernism I've encountered, and certainly one of the most concise.
September 24, 2018
Video review
Jonathan Lethem celebrates his happy lifelong relationship with glue with an ambitious collection project that must have slaughtered a few UHU Stics.
Jonathan Lethem celebrates his happy lifelong relationship with glue with an ambitious collection project that must have slaughtered a few UHU Stics.
September 22, 2011
There aren't many authors that can hook me on the first page, much less the preface, much less by writing the truth. It seems to be that I only read nonfiction books if I need information or examples for something I'm writing. This is the exception.
"The Ecstasy of Influence" is one of those books that may be a turning point in life for the reader. I don't know if this is so yet; get back to me in a month.
But Jon Lethem seems to understand that readers first want to be entertained, then told the truth, then told something that they didn't realize was the truth. Lethem does all this in the first two pages of his Preface.
My advice: Get this book as fast as you can; it'll be a bestseller before long.
"The Ecstasy of Influence" is one of those books that may be a turning point in life for the reader. I don't know if this is so yet; get back to me in a month.
But Jon Lethem seems to understand that readers first want to be entertained, then told the truth, then told something that they didn't realize was the truth. Lethem does all this in the first two pages of his Preface.
My advice: Get this book as fast as you can; it'll be a bestseller before long.
August 30, 2016
Well worth reading, but pretty uneven. Lethem seems to acknowledge this in multiple spots himself. Definitely don't read if you're not already a fan of his. I'd recommend skipping anything that doesn't pique your interest from the title and the opening paragraph. I for instance skipped most of the music section and the Brooklyn section. My guess is, he expects nothing less.
April 5, 2016
"I'm talking about artists with the willpower not to conform to anybody's reality but their own. Patsy Cline and Billy Lee Riley. Plato and Socrates, Whitman and Emerson. Slim Harpo and Donald Trump." --Bob Dylan, in 2006
I'll get to that quote in a moment. I want to begin by saying that there was never a time in my life when it didn't seem like Philip K. Dick was a huge and well-regarded figure, not merely as a science-fiction writer but as a writer in general. I mention that because Jonathan Lethem, as it turns out, was one of the pivotal literary critics and authors who brought that about, who revised (revived?) the academic opinion of PKD. For that alone, he deserves some credit. Many of the more literary essays in this collection name-drop Philip K. Dick or discuss his work directly. I went through a time during college when Dick's stuff wasn't a guilty pleasure but rather straight-up pleasure: I'd often go to the Illini Union Bookstore, grab a couple of his novels and blaze through them (literally). For that, and for Chronic City, and for Girl in Landscape, I have a lot of writerly affection for, and sympathy with, Jonathan Lethem. Beyond Philip K. Dick, and Stanley Kubrick, he's just... into a lot of the same stuff I am.
Now then. The Dylan quote I merely thought was interesting for the timely Trump connection, but it also brings me to the less compelling side to this non-fiction. Many of the essays are the kinds of long articles in Rolling Stone that, if I were browsing the magazine, I'd skip right over (a study of James Brown, a long interview with Dylan, etc.) But since they were between the covers of a book, being the reader that I am, I had to march through every word. Aside from these, another solid one-third of the essays are... I suppose I'd say too academic, inaccessible, written more with a motivation to impress than to express something with clarity. Much of the writing is admirable for its ambition, trying to offer some Unified Field Theory of pop culture, ranging from comic books to music (obviously) to Shirley Jackson. It's just, many essays feel kind of overwritten. A little much.
Now onto The Exegesis of Philip K. Dick, a huge tome edited by Lethem, pared and collated from an 8,000 page collection of PKD's journals from 1974 onward. Joy!
I'll get to that quote in a moment. I want to begin by saying that there was never a time in my life when it didn't seem like Philip K. Dick was a huge and well-regarded figure, not merely as a science-fiction writer but as a writer in general. I mention that because Jonathan Lethem, as it turns out, was one of the pivotal literary critics and authors who brought that about, who revised (revived?) the academic opinion of PKD. For that alone, he deserves some credit. Many of the more literary essays in this collection name-drop Philip K. Dick or discuss his work directly. I went through a time during college when Dick's stuff wasn't a guilty pleasure but rather straight-up pleasure: I'd often go to the Illini Union Bookstore, grab a couple of his novels and blaze through them (literally). For that, and for Chronic City, and for Girl in Landscape, I have a lot of writerly affection for, and sympathy with, Jonathan Lethem. Beyond Philip K. Dick, and Stanley Kubrick, he's just... into a lot of the same stuff I am.
Now then. The Dylan quote I merely thought was interesting for the timely Trump connection, but it also brings me to the less compelling side to this non-fiction. Many of the essays are the kinds of long articles in Rolling Stone that, if I were browsing the magazine, I'd skip right over (a study of James Brown, a long interview with Dylan, etc.) But since they were between the covers of a book, being the reader that I am, I had to march through every word. Aside from these, another solid one-third of the essays are... I suppose I'd say too academic, inaccessible, written more with a motivation to impress than to express something with clarity. Much of the writing is admirable for its ambition, trying to offer some Unified Field Theory of pop culture, ranging from comic books to music (obviously) to Shirley Jackson. It's just, many essays feel kind of overwritten. A little much.
Now onto The Exegesis of Philip K. Dick, a huge tome edited by Lethem, pared and collated from an 8,000 page collection of PKD's journals from 1974 onward. Joy!
September 8, 2018
It is probably presumptuous of me to claim that my career could have been similar to Jonathan Lethem's. After all, he's won a National Book award and published a good half dozen books while I've managed to barely eke out one novel. But there was a time—1988 to be exact—when our paths crossed and we weren't that dissimilar. The occasion was the World Science Fiction Convention in New Orleans held that year, where we met at the Hugo Losers Party. Neither of us were up for any award that year as neither of us had published anything at that point; instead, we had finagled invitations from author friends. In the course of a couple of hours, we discovered that we both idolized Philip K. Dick, loved Marvel Comics, ordered obscure books from Mark Ziesing, quoted Talking Heads, had a mutual friend in Andy Watson, and enthused over movies like Terry Gilliam's Brazil.
Within the next couple of years, we had both sold our stories to the same small press magazine (New Pathways, published out of Plano, Texas, not Austin as Lethem recalls it herein). But even then our paths had already begun to diverge greatly. Lethem made a number of sales to the larger SF magazines while my second was to an original anthology whose editor happened to be a friend. By the time of my third sale, Lethem was already writing his first novel, which appeared a few years after, then preceded to publish a book a year and make his name as one of the hip new writers.
I wrote code.
The truth is that even before that chance encounter in 1988, Lethem and I were nothing alike. He grew up in the Northeast in a very liberal Jewish household. His first love, following in his father's footsteps, was painting. I can't draw a thing, and my background was in a conservative Christian home in small town Texas. By the time he had entered college, he had already decided that a career in writing was a possibility. I dallied in it, writing enough to learn the craft, but never dedicating myself to the pursuit. He worked low-paying jobs in bookstores as a clerk; I leveraged my computer knowledge in successively more remunerative jobs that far outpaid what I could get from fiction.
But that's the beauty of writing and the community of writers. From two varied backgrounds we met and connected for a brief discussion that still lingers in my memory, although I doubt Lethem recalls it. In this memoir, he reflects on his past—the things he thought and wanted as a young man in his mid-20s and the likely reality of his then-situation, able to reflect on it with that clarity of hindsight two or three decades later. He's extremely honest about his ambition and how lucky he's been. But as someone who was there, I can tell you that while he may have been lucky in some ways, he also had more drive and more perseverance to accomplish what he did.
In addition to memoir, this non-fiction collection also contains some essays and interviews he did for various publications. The one on James Brown written for Rolling Stone is outstanding, a glorious portrait of both the man's incredible flaws as well as what made him special, a good compliment to the biopic on Brown released a few years ago. The interview with Dylan is almost as good.
I find reading Lethem exceedingly strange, not just for the chance encounter that I've detailed above. While not all of his interests coincide with mine—for instance, I've grown weary of people extolling the virtues of New York and I've never cared for Bob Dylan—there's enough correspondence in off-mentions that I constantly have a feeling of frisson (for example, the mentions of Anthony Powell's Dance to the Music of Time novel sequence and W. M. Spackman's novel An Armful of Warm Girl). Reading this was like rejoining a conversation that started back in 1988; I just wish I could have engaged in it during those years rather than having to catch up to it this late in life.
Within the next couple of years, we had both sold our stories to the same small press magazine (New Pathways, published out of Plano, Texas, not Austin as Lethem recalls it herein). But even then our paths had already begun to diverge greatly. Lethem made a number of sales to the larger SF magazines while my second was to an original anthology whose editor happened to be a friend. By the time of my third sale, Lethem was already writing his first novel, which appeared a few years after, then preceded to publish a book a year and make his name as one of the hip new writers.
I wrote code.
The truth is that even before that chance encounter in 1988, Lethem and I were nothing alike. He grew up in the Northeast in a very liberal Jewish household. His first love, following in his father's footsteps, was painting. I can't draw a thing, and my background was in a conservative Christian home in small town Texas. By the time he had entered college, he had already decided that a career in writing was a possibility. I dallied in it, writing enough to learn the craft, but never dedicating myself to the pursuit. He worked low-paying jobs in bookstores as a clerk; I leveraged my computer knowledge in successively more remunerative jobs that far outpaid what I could get from fiction.
But that's the beauty of writing and the community of writers. From two varied backgrounds we met and connected for a brief discussion that still lingers in my memory, although I doubt Lethem recalls it. In this memoir, he reflects on his past—the things he thought and wanted as a young man in his mid-20s and the likely reality of his then-situation, able to reflect on it with that clarity of hindsight two or three decades later. He's extremely honest about his ambition and how lucky he's been. But as someone who was there, I can tell you that while he may have been lucky in some ways, he also had more drive and more perseverance to accomplish what he did.
In addition to memoir, this non-fiction collection also contains some essays and interviews he did for various publications. The one on James Brown written for Rolling Stone is outstanding, a glorious portrait of both the man's incredible flaws as well as what made him special, a good compliment to the biopic on Brown released a few years ago. The interview with Dylan is almost as good.
I find reading Lethem exceedingly strange, not just for the chance encounter that I've detailed above. While not all of his interests coincide with mine—for instance, I've grown weary of people extolling the virtues of New York and I've never cared for Bob Dylan—there's enough correspondence in off-mentions that I constantly have a feeling of frisson (for example, the mentions of Anthony Powell's Dance to the Music of Time novel sequence and W. M. Spackman's novel An Armful of Warm Girl). Reading this was like rejoining a conversation that started back in 1988; I just wish I could have engaged in it during those years rather than having to catch up to it this late in life.
March 31, 2013
I do like these types of books which preport to be more than just a collection of writings by an author in between his novels. I would like to think they are more than just a jaded way of cashing in on a writer's reputation to sell books. My favorite and standard is Jonathon Franzen's How to Be Alone which I truly loved. This book however isn't of that quality. I don't know why I turned to it, his last book Chronic City I did find disappointing, it never really took off in my opinion. I did feel a lot of the essays in here were really about name dropping, to hitch Lethem's wagon to other current writers, especially David Foster Wallace. It was what I found annoying in Salman Rushdie's Joseph Anton which made me drop it entirely. Stick to the subject! However, I did find things interesting here. I liked his discussion of Philip K. Dick who is rightly attaining momentum these days to be considered classical. His article on James Brown was very fascinating. How can someone so successful be so broke? His interview with Dylan was also fascinating. I liked his essays on Shirly Jackson, The Man Who Was Thursday, and James Agee. Yet, there were lots of parts that made no sense at all. I even liked the idea of a collage like structure, I liked his notes on some parts. There was a lot to like and a lot to hate, but still I found this more engaging than Chronic City, so maybe there is hope. Still a book like this should be written after a major success, like Franzen's how to be alone written after a great book like the Corrections, and that as far as I know hasn't happened yet.
February 12, 2012
Lethem states in the beginning that often readers get irritated by the self awareness of modern writing. The endless MFA analysing and theorizing about literature is why I didn't major in English lit. While a little navel gazing isn't out of place when reading, the whole "postmodernism" - analysis of analysis of analysis of uber self awareness - the insertion of the author's narcissistic tendencies into the book, if you will - makes me want to spork myself in the eye. Anyway, a couple of good things in here, pop culture riff, the used bookshop, the bit on plaigarism. As much as I like Lethem, this made me go, "Quit rambling and get *on with it". Lethem even mentions the king of observing self referential minutia - Klosterman. Except? Klosterman still makes it interesting, Lethem not so much. I know. I'm a philistine. Eh bien. Minor reference to my alma mater. Memo to Lethem: The Fluttering Duck isn't a "coffeehouse". It's a bar.
January 24, 2015
This is the first book I've read in quite some time that was more like a conversation than a reading experience. Periodically I put the book down to make a note to myself, a name or a reference to chase down later. Sometimes I'd disagree out loud with a passage I'd read. This experience has inspired a few new projects for me, and yet, at the same time, I can't say I've enjoyed reading this so much as I've appreciated wrestling with it.
A very strange engagement, well worth the effort.
A very strange engagement, well worth the effort.
November 23, 2011
I think that he is an excellent writer and have enjoyed all of his fiction that I have read to date. It is A LOT of JL to read in one shot. I think that as he suggested you pick and choose. By the end I felt that I was too much in his brain! As well, some of the pieces are a bit esoteric if you are not familiar with the author/musician that he is writing about.
December 29, 2011
Disclosure: I mostly paid attention to the essays about literature, and didn't even read any of the ones about Brooklyn or visual art, but if their quality is consistent with the essays about reading and writing, then someone who enjoys reading about those subjects will find the pieces meaningful.
February 2, 2012
I savored the pieces in this collection, my first exposure to Lethem's non-fiction. There are treasures here, especially the title essay, his profile of James Brown, and his interview with Bob Dylan. Good reads for sure!
September 27, 2015
In the Dick essay when he noted that his books didn't feature a patriarch cos boomer parents are like crazy older siblings.
Didn't read it all - I'll be back - loved the James Brown essay and Rick James
Didn't read it all - I'll be back - loved the James Brown essay and Rick James
December 27, 2011
Enjoyable, but some parts are much more interesting than others. 400+ pages was maybe more than needed to be included here. Only for big Lethem fans, otherwise I'd start elsewhere among his oeuvre.
July 25, 2012
I couldn't even make it through the preface of this audiobook. This was way too left-brained and analytical for me. It sounded like a robot reading a textbook. Snore.
May 11, 2019
Lethem's Ecstasy of Influence, collecting essays and stories and occasional pieces, was published in 2011, but, besides Men and Cartoons that collected stories in 2004, it's the only Lethem I've ever read and maybe ever will. He's an encyclopedic guy, this guy, and it can be pretty interesting but also pretty tiring. Is there such a thing as ideal reader. Ideal digestion. Good to scan some certain book or books, or stack them in an interesting way on a shelf. But how, why, what is what, in your opinion, why.
The style can get pretty blurry, maybe, and I should probably try length before giving up on him. Full books. Full books with all their own things. I don't know. Maybe _I'm_ the problem and _he's_ the good one, and _you_ can be a problem too if you want (and who does not want to be a problem, _the_ problem, y'know) and what's readable anyway, for reading, each prose style toward each pair of eyes, mind, reading it. Do we have to be on the exact same level? Do you mind? Yes, I mind. He knows things -- this writer -- and will share them with you, maybe, some things, if you want. As was the style in those days.
But it's the current year, all right, and this was past year and no sense now in fiddling with it. Some's novel (like, new, and soon-to-expire young expense, I mean) but some's timeless, I guess, depending how you or an ideal reader would feel reading it. Timeless may include the titular piece, "The Ecstasy of Influence" from Harper's in '07, I guess. Go ahead, plagiarize, gift economy, it's all good? Oh?
Like, this guy knows a whole bunch of authors and stuff, in various critical considerations, and I think, self-reflexively, like, I don't know 'very many' or 'as many as that' or 'exactly those' or 'those in as deep or as careful a way as this guy must', and I don't know what I'm supposed to do, 'read more of those or something if you want and change how you consider them if you want'? Whoa, sounds like a lot of work. I was told I was doing ok right now (perfect, always; or, oh crap oh crap, never perfect, ever; or something comfortably in between those but with room for improvement) and ok is ok for me! Ok? It's not ecstatic. It's just ok.
All Philip K. Dick books, ever, have you considered them? Or trendiness, literary celebrity, collecting culture, have you considered them? I think I have, and I think I don't speak enough of this language yet to read/understand the verdict that's been handed down, but by the time I do it'll be old news anyway, and there'll have stacked up dozens of other ones around me probably, to blow in this wind if this wind ever picks back up, but I think that's the way of all news, so if I slowly learn this language anyway in order to get the verdict then I'll have the verdict, maybe, and we might be able to do with that what we will. Or not. It'll probably change by that time.
Or I don't know, James Brown in his final years or '06-era Dylan, Lethem gets these real musical masters in sort of their twilight years, for some critical pieces in Rolling Stone or something. Some of the material here is pretty promising and thoughtfully done in my estimation. It opens up some questions, like 'New York post-9/11. Whoa. It's a whoa' or 'Music. How you do it. Why' or a lot of things otherwise.
More interesting to me, I don't know quite why, are a lot of the book reviews Ecstasy of Influence seems to conclude with. Jackson, Bolaño, Agee, etc.; the encyclopedia comes out again, but I'm more accustomed to the flood this time, I guess, and ready to float on top than flounder and struggle. I wish a particular book were dealt with (Toole's Confederacy of Dunces? which I personally didn't like, found a bit overrated, but I wonder what a fellow like Lethem thinks of it) and maybe even a particular film (Kazan's Arrangement?), but, I don't know, perhaps the Toole was a jotted-off allusion and I just forgot about it or perhaps the Kazan would open up a cinematic can of worms in what was supposed to be mostly literary, just a little musical, just a little cultural.
In this section, besides a modest end I found quite wise, there doesn't seem to be a whole lot autobiographical; but that's when the autobiography's probably cooking most intensely, huh? when you can hardly tell it's there at all.
The style can get pretty blurry, maybe, and I should probably try length before giving up on him. Full books. Full books with all their own things. I don't know. Maybe _I'm_ the problem and _he's_ the good one, and _you_ can be a problem too if you want (and who does not want to be a problem, _the_ problem, y'know) and what's readable anyway, for reading, each prose style toward each pair of eyes, mind, reading it. Do we have to be on the exact same level? Do you mind? Yes, I mind. He knows things -- this writer -- and will share them with you, maybe, some things, if you want. As was the style in those days.
But it's the current year, all right, and this was past year and no sense now in fiddling with it. Some's novel (like, new, and soon-to-expire young expense, I mean) but some's timeless, I guess, depending how you or an ideal reader would feel reading it. Timeless may include the titular piece, "The Ecstasy of Influence" from Harper's in '07, I guess. Go ahead, plagiarize, gift economy, it's all good? Oh?
Like, this guy knows a whole bunch of authors and stuff, in various critical considerations, and I think, self-reflexively, like, I don't know 'very many' or 'as many as that' or 'exactly those' or 'those in as deep or as careful a way as this guy must', and I don't know what I'm supposed to do, 'read more of those or something if you want and change how you consider them if you want'? Whoa, sounds like a lot of work. I was told I was doing ok right now (perfect, always; or, oh crap oh crap, never perfect, ever; or something comfortably in between those but with room for improvement) and ok is ok for me! Ok? It's not ecstatic. It's just ok.
All Philip K. Dick books, ever, have you considered them? Or trendiness, literary celebrity, collecting culture, have you considered them? I think I have, and I think I don't speak enough of this language yet to read/understand the verdict that's been handed down, but by the time I do it'll be old news anyway, and there'll have stacked up dozens of other ones around me probably, to blow in this wind if this wind ever picks back up, but I think that's the way of all news, so if I slowly learn this language anyway in order to get the verdict then I'll have the verdict, maybe, and we might be able to do with that what we will. Or not. It'll probably change by that time.
Or I don't know, James Brown in his final years or '06-era Dylan, Lethem gets these real musical masters in sort of their twilight years, for some critical pieces in Rolling Stone or something. Some of the material here is pretty promising and thoughtfully done in my estimation. It opens up some questions, like 'New York post-9/11. Whoa. It's a whoa' or 'Music. How you do it. Why' or a lot of things otherwise.
More interesting to me, I don't know quite why, are a lot of the book reviews Ecstasy of Influence seems to conclude with. Jackson, Bolaño, Agee, etc.; the encyclopedia comes out again, but I'm more accustomed to the flood this time, I guess, and ready to float on top than flounder and struggle. I wish a particular book were dealt with (Toole's Confederacy of Dunces? which I personally didn't like, found a bit overrated, but I wonder what a fellow like Lethem thinks of it) and maybe even a particular film (Kazan's Arrangement?), but, I don't know, perhaps the Toole was a jotted-off allusion and I just forgot about it or perhaps the Kazan would open up a cinematic can of worms in what was supposed to be mostly literary, just a little musical, just a little cultural.
In this section, besides a modest end I found quite wise, there doesn't seem to be a whole lot autobiographical; but that's when the autobiography's probably cooking most intensely, huh? when you can hardly tell it's there at all.
January 12, 2012
As a teacher, I’m not sure that I’d discuss Lethem’s title essay with any students of my own below the graduate level, since some might see it as an invitation to plagiarize. At the high school and undergraduate level, it’s so important to draw a clear distinction between what’s ok to do and what’s not ok, especially knowing you’ll have to stand by exactly what you said about that distinction if you have to fail someone because he or she plagiarized. But once we get beyond the necessity for that black-and-white thinking, it become clear that of course, we are all influenced by our predecessors, and of course, all the words we use have been used an almost infinite number of times before. Plagiarism is inevitable. And we copy what we love. This essay is about the joy of being so engaged in the ongoing conversation that is literature that you can’t help quoting people. It’s about how literature itself is like my brothers’ conversations where they toss quotes back and forth at each other and riff on them (these quotes are from Will Ferrell movies, not novels, of course, but they’re having fun, and they sure are fun to watch). Rather than worrying about being influenced by the writers who came before (Lethem’s title of course revises Bloom’s The Anxiety of Influence, about how writers “wrote against” the previous generation’s greatest writers, and struggled mightily to be “original”), writers should embrace that influence as what makes them who they are. We are all a patchwork quilt of the various people who have influenced us in some way. Of course this is true. And doesn’t it take a great burden off the shoulders of a young writer, to tell her that she doesn’t have to be completely new, since there is no such thing as new? Rather than anxiously grasping for “negative capability,” she can immerse herself in the books she loves and allow them to bring her own stories out of her. How wonderful.
And when you figure out at the end of the essay that it was itself cobbled together from unacknowledged quotes from other authors? That’s when you realize exactly how brilliant Lethem is. Few authors would have the inspiration to make form imitate content like that, and fewer still would be able to pull it off into something readable, much less so good. It also makes you also realize that the type of literature he proposes is not “easier” at all. In fact, just thinking about the sheer amount of reading and research that would have to go into writing something like this blows me away.
After reading that essay, why wouldn’t I pick up the entire collection?
One thing our class agreed on was that a good literary essay or review makes a reader want to read whatever literature they’re talking about. By that standard Lethem succeeds wildly in this group of essays. He introduced me to writers I’d never much considered, but who are now definitely on my radar, like Norman Mailer and Shirley Jackson. The wildly eclectic collection also included several articles on music that really made me wish I knew more about music. Music must be incredibly hard to write about–Lord knows I’ll never try–and Lethem makes it come to life. His articles show the big picture of the career of the artists he writes about: James Brown, Bob Dylan, and a couple of bands I hadn’t heard of before. He talks about the musicians’ lives, how their music was influenced by previous artists and in its turn influenced others, as well as their impact on his own life. I think he said at one point that in these essays he’s writing primarily just as a fan, appreciating the music. His enthusiasm is catching.
Since it’s so hard to summarize a collection of essays as diverse as this one, I’ll pick 3 of my favorites and talk about them in more detail: “Rushmore versus Abundance,” “My Disappointment Critic,” and “What Remains of My Plan.”
“Rushmore versus Abundance,” makes a great argument for a large literary canon, in fact, as large a canon as possible. Though our feelings of being overwhelmed by the sheer amount of writing being produced currently are understandable, we should not allow that to drive us to limit the production and dissemination of literature, if we really care about literature. We have the impulse to erect what Lethem calls “Rushmores,” through picking out three or four “truly great” novelists or poets (or any kind of art, really) of each time period. However, that closes off so much diversity and possibility. Instead, we should embrace this abundance, without worrying about any dilution of “standards” that might result.
In fact, it is accepting and participating in this abundance which allows for standards to be established in the first place and then to evolve. Lethem makes the best argument possible for why a good critic needs to be first of all a voracious reader: “Standards require not only the acknowledgment of abundance but the absorption of abundance” (372). You can’t develop any standards until you’ve read a lot. If you don’t read much, you think everything is great or everything is awful. Only through taking in a lot of literature do you start to understand the nuanced differences between different works and their qualities. That’s what I’m hoping to do here: absorb as much of this abundance as I can, so that I can develop standards to judge what I’ve absorbed. I don’t want to reduce the literature or tell people these five novels are the only ones they should read this year. I just want to enthuse about the books I love and complain about the ones I don’t. I just want to share my opinion and grow personally through doing it. After all, Lethem says, “What matters, in reading, is discernment and engagement.” (371) I’m hoping that the blog will give me more of these two things that matter.
Lethem wrote “My Disappointment Critic” about his reaction to a bad review by James Wood (who we read for Brock’s class). He objected to the review because Wood made some sweepingly dismissive statements, criticizing Lethem for not developing a character that Lethem considered fully developed. And in general, Wood came off to Lethem in the review as a snob. He couldn’t accept Lethem’s book on its own terms, couldn’t understand a “sensibility through literacy in visual culture, in vernacular and commercial culture” like Lethem’s (388). I agree with Lethem in this. Critics are gatekeepers, and it can be dangerous if they’re too conservative, too invested in the current order, or too unimaginative to appreciate a new way of doing things. With gatekeepers like that, we risk stagnation. I much prefer Lethem’s attitude: “About books I’m a Quaker, believing every creature eligible to commune face-to-face with the Light” (388). I guess I’m a member of Lethem’s literary religion; I believe in honoring everyone’s individual reactions to books. When a reaction of mine is personal, I’ll say so. There are plenty of books I don’t like that others will, and they’ll be able to argue persuasively about why, starting from different values than mine. That’s ok. There’s room for that. I don’t want to commit Wood’s sin and allow my own snobberies, personal hangups, and undeveloped sympathies to prevent me from appreciating a book, even one that is far from my experience.
“What remains of my plan” is Lethem’s answer to the question of why he writes. He says, “I began writing in order to arrive into the company of those whose company meant more to me than any other: the world of the books I’d found on shelves and begun to assemble on my own, and the people who’d written them, and the readers who cared as much as I did, if those existed” (429-430). One of the things I find most compelling about Lethem’s philosophy throughout the collection of essays is the emphasis on engagement and being in conversation. This also makes him an author very much in tune with today’s online literary scene, which is all about authors and readers talking to each other. I appreciate this focus, and if I had to say why I’m reading, writing, and blogging, I might say something similar, though maybe not so eloquently.
Appropriately, Lethem ends the essay with this quote, and I’ll plagiarize his ending. Hope he doesn’t mind.
Nietzsche: “The thinker or artist whose better self has fled into his works feels an almost malicious joy when he sees his body and spirit slowly broken into and destroyed by time; it is as if he were in a corner, watching a thief at work on his safe, all the while knowing that it is empty and all of his treasures have been rescued” (432).
For more of my reviews, check out www.mereader.wordpress.com.
And when you figure out at the end of the essay that it was itself cobbled together from unacknowledged quotes from other authors? That’s when you realize exactly how brilliant Lethem is. Few authors would have the inspiration to make form imitate content like that, and fewer still would be able to pull it off into something readable, much less so good. It also makes you also realize that the type of literature he proposes is not “easier” at all. In fact, just thinking about the sheer amount of reading and research that would have to go into writing something like this blows me away.
After reading that essay, why wouldn’t I pick up the entire collection?
One thing our class agreed on was that a good literary essay or review makes a reader want to read whatever literature they’re talking about. By that standard Lethem succeeds wildly in this group of essays. He introduced me to writers I’d never much considered, but who are now definitely on my radar, like Norman Mailer and Shirley Jackson. The wildly eclectic collection also included several articles on music that really made me wish I knew more about music. Music must be incredibly hard to write about–Lord knows I’ll never try–and Lethem makes it come to life. His articles show the big picture of the career of the artists he writes about: James Brown, Bob Dylan, and a couple of bands I hadn’t heard of before. He talks about the musicians’ lives, how their music was influenced by previous artists and in its turn influenced others, as well as their impact on his own life. I think he said at one point that in these essays he’s writing primarily just as a fan, appreciating the music. His enthusiasm is catching.
Since it’s so hard to summarize a collection of essays as diverse as this one, I’ll pick 3 of my favorites and talk about them in more detail: “Rushmore versus Abundance,” “My Disappointment Critic,” and “What Remains of My Plan.”
“Rushmore versus Abundance,” makes a great argument for a large literary canon, in fact, as large a canon as possible. Though our feelings of being overwhelmed by the sheer amount of writing being produced currently are understandable, we should not allow that to drive us to limit the production and dissemination of literature, if we really care about literature. We have the impulse to erect what Lethem calls “Rushmores,” through picking out three or four “truly great” novelists or poets (or any kind of art, really) of each time period. However, that closes off so much diversity and possibility. Instead, we should embrace this abundance, without worrying about any dilution of “standards” that might result.
In fact, it is accepting and participating in this abundance which allows for standards to be established in the first place and then to evolve. Lethem makes the best argument possible for why a good critic needs to be first of all a voracious reader: “Standards require not only the acknowledgment of abundance but the absorption of abundance” (372). You can’t develop any standards until you’ve read a lot. If you don’t read much, you think everything is great or everything is awful. Only through taking in a lot of literature do you start to understand the nuanced differences between different works and their qualities. That’s what I’m hoping to do here: absorb as much of this abundance as I can, so that I can develop standards to judge what I’ve absorbed. I don’t want to reduce the literature or tell people these five novels are the only ones they should read this year. I just want to enthuse about the books I love and complain about the ones I don’t. I just want to share my opinion and grow personally through doing it. After all, Lethem says, “What matters, in reading, is discernment and engagement.” (371) I’m hoping that the blog will give me more of these two things that matter.
Lethem wrote “My Disappointment Critic” about his reaction to a bad review by James Wood (who we read for Brock’s class). He objected to the review because Wood made some sweepingly dismissive statements, criticizing Lethem for not developing a character that Lethem considered fully developed. And in general, Wood came off to Lethem in the review as a snob. He couldn’t accept Lethem’s book on its own terms, couldn’t understand a “sensibility through literacy in visual culture, in vernacular and commercial culture” like Lethem’s (388). I agree with Lethem in this. Critics are gatekeepers, and it can be dangerous if they’re too conservative, too invested in the current order, or too unimaginative to appreciate a new way of doing things. With gatekeepers like that, we risk stagnation. I much prefer Lethem’s attitude: “About books I’m a Quaker, believing every creature eligible to commune face-to-face with the Light” (388). I guess I’m a member of Lethem’s literary religion; I believe in honoring everyone’s individual reactions to books. When a reaction of mine is personal, I’ll say so. There are plenty of books I don’t like that others will, and they’ll be able to argue persuasively about why, starting from different values than mine. That’s ok. There’s room for that. I don’t want to commit Wood’s sin and allow my own snobberies, personal hangups, and undeveloped sympathies to prevent me from appreciating a book, even one that is far from my experience.
“What remains of my plan” is Lethem’s answer to the question of why he writes. He says, “I began writing in order to arrive into the company of those whose company meant more to me than any other: the world of the books I’d found on shelves and begun to assemble on my own, and the people who’d written them, and the readers who cared as much as I did, if those existed” (429-430). One of the things I find most compelling about Lethem’s philosophy throughout the collection of essays is the emphasis on engagement and being in conversation. This also makes him an author very much in tune with today’s online literary scene, which is all about authors and readers talking to each other. I appreciate this focus, and if I had to say why I’m reading, writing, and blogging, I might say something similar, though maybe not so eloquently.
Appropriately, Lethem ends the essay with this quote, and I’ll plagiarize his ending. Hope he doesn’t mind.
Nietzsche: “The thinker or artist whose better self has fled into his works feels an almost malicious joy when he sees his body and spirit slowly broken into and destroyed by time; it is as if he were in a corner, watching a thief at work on his safe, all the while knowing that it is empty and all of his treasures have been rescued” (432).
For more of my reviews, check out www.mereader.wordpress.com.
September 14, 2024
I love Jonathan Lethem's writing in all its forms: his novels, his short fiction, his essays, his criticism, his tabloids. He's magnificently talented and hits to all fields but the more I read his nonfiction, the more I am convinced it is comfortably his strongest muscle group. The essay's form allows Lethem to most straightforwardly pull from his expansive knowledge pool of art (both high and low), literature, music, culture, cinema, and any other dimension of American life without needing to cloth his observations in narrative.
This is not to say his nonfiction writing is straightforward or dry-- his greatest literary feat is arguably his awe-inspiring aptitude for dot-connecting. The title essay is like a knife juggler's routine of increasingly stupifying linkages between pieces of literature, revealing all literature to *be* linkages and interlocking pieces-- threads in a memory quilt where the strands can still shift and combine into new patterns even retroactively. Literature as a living organism.
The thing I most appreciate about Lethem's entire literary life is how he's been a fierce advocate for the legitimizing of Science Fiction as a tradition and medium against the forces of the traditional establishment that still views SF as sub-literary. The essays about Ballard and Dick feel like things only Lethem could have written as he's one of the very few writers to have loved books on both sides of that fence and has also decided that it's worth the effort, ink spilled, and embarrassment of trying to tear that fence down. Not many writers would even think to valorize the talents and contributions of writers like Lafferty, Lem, Dick, Ballard, Anderson etc. (as most haven't read them) and even less than that would take up the cause of validating them as Lethem does. For that, I am forever grateful.
I would give the collection overall a 4/5 as a handful of pieces in this massive collection (including all the short stories about art, for example) did nothing for me, but I'll push for the extra star on the strength of the best essays (The Ecstasy of Influence itself was an era-defining essay in literature and its legacy still echoes).
This is not to say his nonfiction writing is straightforward or dry-- his greatest literary feat is arguably his awe-inspiring aptitude for dot-connecting. The title essay is like a knife juggler's routine of increasingly stupifying linkages between pieces of literature, revealing all literature to *be* linkages and interlocking pieces-- threads in a memory quilt where the strands can still shift and combine into new patterns even retroactively. Literature as a living organism.
The thing I most appreciate about Lethem's entire literary life is how he's been a fierce advocate for the legitimizing of Science Fiction as a tradition and medium against the forces of the traditional establishment that still views SF as sub-literary. The essays about Ballard and Dick feel like things only Lethem could have written as he's one of the very few writers to have loved books on both sides of that fence and has also decided that it's worth the effort, ink spilled, and embarrassment of trying to tear that fence down. Not many writers would even think to valorize the talents and contributions of writers like Lafferty, Lem, Dick, Ballard, Anderson etc. (as most haven't read them) and even less than that would take up the cause of validating them as Lethem does. For that, I am forever grateful.
I would give the collection overall a 4/5 as a handful of pieces in this massive collection (including all the short stories about art, for example) did nothing for me, but I'll push for the extra star on the strength of the best essays (The Ecstasy of Influence itself was an era-defining essay in literature and its legacy still echoes).
February 3, 2021
The title essay, “The Ecstasy of Influence: A plagiarism” is one of the best essays I have read in a long time. It’s a sprawling meditation on the concepts of originality in creation, copyright, gift economies, and various other ideas concerning the work of art (broadly construed) as property. It’s key point is that, when we come to it, no work of art or literature is really “original”: it contains within itself, consciously or unconsciously, traces, influences, marks of those other works that came before it.
To turn such a thing into property meant to benefit a single person or her heirs, or a single corporation, perhaps in perpetuity, then, violates the very fundamental idea that such a work being a “plagiarism” (and we support plagiarism in this sense), belongs to no one, not even to society as a whole. Rather, it exists “between” us, to be used by everyone without having ownership (generally with respect to profiting from it) asserted by anyone; to inspire us and provide the fodder to create more. Nabokov almost certainly took Lolita from Heinz von Lichberg’s story of the same name; Bob Dylan’s music draws from a wide range of influences. These facts, these “plagiarisms”, do not in any way reduce the merits of Nabokov’s or Dylan’s work. And yet these facts should in some way have bearing when a Nabokov or a Dylan (or an executor) attempts to, especially after a long time, prevent us, through copyright laws or otherwise, from making something new derived from these works. I couldn’t recommend this essay more.
However, most of the other essays - particularly those on music, were tedious. They contained the erudition of the title essay, but lacked its deep insight and its easy readability.
To turn such a thing into property meant to benefit a single person or her heirs, or a single corporation, perhaps in perpetuity, then, violates the very fundamental idea that such a work being a “plagiarism” (and we support plagiarism in this sense), belongs to no one, not even to society as a whole. Rather, it exists “between” us, to be used by everyone without having ownership (generally with respect to profiting from it) asserted by anyone; to inspire us and provide the fodder to create more. Nabokov almost certainly took Lolita from Heinz von Lichberg’s story of the same name; Bob Dylan’s music draws from a wide range of influences. These facts, these “plagiarisms”, do not in any way reduce the merits of Nabokov’s or Dylan’s work. And yet these facts should in some way have bearing when a Nabokov or a Dylan (or an executor) attempts to, especially after a long time, prevent us, through copyright laws or otherwise, from making something new derived from these works. I couldn’t recommend this essay more.
However, most of the other essays - particularly those on music, were tedious. They contained the erudition of the title essay, but lacked its deep insight and its easy readability.
May 6, 2025
This collection of essays is solid and thought-provoking. Perfect for essay and CNF goofs like myself. I don't think it's required reading. A lot of these pieces are dated with big boomer energy.
This book shines in the the "Plagarisms" sections, especially when talking about copyright, sampling, and how that hit in with the rise of hip hop. Where DOES our art come from? Are any ideas original? I love that stuff. It feels like the author also has a ton of fun when they talk about sci-fi, it made me want to read some of his ficiton down the road.
This book shines in the the "Plagarisms" sections, especially when talking about copyright, sampling, and how that hit in with the rise of hip hop. Where DOES our art come from? Are any ideas original? I love that stuff. It feels like the author also has a ton of fun when they talk about sci-fi, it made me want to read some of his ficiton down the road.
July 16, 2017
Lethem is an amazing writer, and it was fun to get a sense of his background and some ideas he has about literature. He explores that broad area where influence, inspiration, borrowing, alluding to and plagiarism mingle. I liked his youthful tales of working in bookstores in Berkeley because I frequented them, and he may have kicked me out at closing time using the first lyric of Dylan's It's All Over Now, Baby Blue.
May 26, 2019
I went to get this book after reading about it in Patrick Greaney’s Quotional Practices. Only the section about plagiarisms and the article on Bolaño are of significance. Too much pop culture, unmediated navel-gazing, and name dropping to endure in this collection: it took ‘up my time, like some cheap magazine.’ Will think twice about picking up another of his books. Previously, the Disappointment Artist was a disappointment too.
April 3, 2024
There were a few really good essays and really interesting thoughts spread throughout the collection, and I think there’s such value to the question of influence and what worthwhile influences are/where the line is between influence and plagiarism (and whether it matters entirely to how we enjoy media), but there were also quite a few essays and stories that were just fine, and which felt like, in their attempt to be profound, slipped the collection as a whole into the realm of mediocrity
February 25, 2023
I like books like this, the sort you might term 'lapidarium', or collected essays. However, I thought Lethem's to be a touch to hit-or-miss; some of his writing, especially on his early career as a clerk in a used books shop, is excellent - enthralling, even - but for somebody who has little interest in music journalism, a lot was skippable.
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