/lit/ - Literature

[Anonymous No.7068524]

http://mileswmathis.com/joyce.html

Discuss.

Here's an excerpt:

>I maintained sanity as a teenager not by reading transgressive novels but by lusting naturally after Samantha Stephens or Jan Brady, and if I had been privy to Jan or Sam nude, in life or photos, so much the better. It is not being introduced to sexuality that is warping for kids, it is being introduced to propaganda posing as art, and bad art posing as good art. Henry Miller and his promoters are the ones who deserve a gob of spit in the eye, not for being immoral but for passing off formless journals as something special. The entire artistic and literary establishments should be shunned, not as transgressive, immoral, or perverse, but as boring, inartistic, and false. They should be shunned because the museums are empty of real art, the poetry journals are bereft of poetry, and the novels don't tell interesting stories or contain interesting ideas. You might as well buy a car that that doesn't have a steering column, tires, or a gastank.

[Anonymous No.7068944]

>>7068524
Seems like the usual rant against modernism, though this time it comes from someone who's apparently capable of personal opinion. I'm not sure why the ranking of the Modern Library have any bearing on anything at all though.

I can agree with the spirit of the paragraph you quoted, that is also that of the quote he displays at the beginning, namely that through critics and institution we make art into a stale commodity. It's an old complaint, however.

I find less justifiable his dislike of Joyce, or Miller for that matter. I have read little of Miller, but what I've read struck me less as "transgressive" than as simply enjoyable and hearty (it's worth noting that what I've read of Miller had surprisingly little sex in it, so that's perhaps why).

Simply put, his idea that Miller is only about shock value sex, or that Joyce is only narcissistic modernist chaos, sounds unfair to me. Sure Miller wrote a lot about sex, and perhaps he doesn't shine too much or sometimes he get repetitive there. But to only read that into him I suspect you'd need to have made up your mind before finishing ten pages. You could say the same about his argument that writers since after Flaubert have written loathesome characters, I've always found Zola's characters to be surprisingly sympathetic despite their flaws.

However, I'll agree that "literary sex scenes" are boring more often than not.

His complaint against "realism", while on-point, is very tired, and was expressed by some of the realist themselves (Maupassant, in the preface to Pierre et Jean, argued that good realists should be rather called illusionists, and he was talking as Flaubert's student in that respect).

Mathis' criticism is articulate, motivated, principled but, ultimately, superficial with his targets. The casual jab at Duchamp as the epitome of modernist fraud is very telling here (has he ever read anything by Duchamp, or tried to understand what he was actually saying with those pseudo-artworks ? Because I know some very well-informed people who would disagree with Mathis on this count).

But as I said I can understand the motives between his stance, and I can only commend his commitment to principles.

Looking at his site, he seems like that prof of mine who was a tenured mathematician with a strong background on philosophy, and who would publish poems alongside philosophical musings and mathematical articles. An obviously talented, genuinely erudite person teeming with frustrated artistic aspirations. This made for very interesting, controversial opinions, that could not be dismissed as crazy or half-baked, but that would often be very tiring in their bombastic claim to relevance.

[Anonymous No.7069015]

>>7068944
Read his "Gauntlet" against the avant-garde for instance. Genuine drive (though it is funny to see him raising Cellini's banner, considering what Mathis thinks of mannerism) flowing through disgracefully emphatic writing.

Currently reading his take on what he calls uncorrected mistakes in Relativity. Very interesting so far, but I'm not knowledgeable enough to agree or disagree.