Announcing Postmodern Mystery

HERE at The Misread City we’re longtime fans of Ted Gioia, whose book West Coast Jazz recreated the worlds of Dexter Gordon, Chet Baker, Dave Brubeck and others, reframing the way we looked at postwar California music.

Ted, who also writes on the blues and runs the blog Conceptual Fiction, which looks at the intersection of literature with fantasy and science fiction, has just launched Postmodern Mystery: New Angeles on an Old Genre.

He’s already posted on Borges’ Ficciones, Pynchon’s Lot 49 (!!), Flann O’Brien’s The Third Policeman and Nabokov’s Pale Fire.

This week, Ted writes about one of our favorite contemporary novels – Jonathan Lethem’s Lew Archer-with-Tourette’s novel Motherless Brooklyn.

Here’s what Ted Gioia tells The Misread City about the impetus behind the new blog.

There is a disconnect going on in the literary world when it comes to genre fiction.  These books have traditionally been marginalized or ignored by literary critics, academics, and even book reviewers.  Yet some of the most creative works of modern fiction draw on genre elements, either openly or subversively. 

When I launched my Conceptual Fiction web site two years ago, my aim was to celebrate some of the finer works of science fiction and fantasy, both straight genre works as well as literary fiction that drew on genre elements.  But I realized that the mystery genre was also widely misunderstood.  It had inspired a large number of intriguing, and often explicitly experimental works in recent decades -- books that turned genre formulas upside down and inside out.  For the last 18 months, I've been working on my new site Postmodern Mystery (www.postmodernmystery.com), which finally launched on October 7.

My Postmodern Mystery site looks at unconventional and experimental stories of crime and suspense.  Readers might be surprised to learn how many of the leading fiction writers of recent decades have drawn on elements of the mystery genre for their works.  My site has essays either published or soon-to-be-published on books by Jorge Luis Borges, Paul Auster, Vladimir Nabokov, Robert Bolano, Alain Robbe-Grillet, Leonardo Sciascia, Thomas Pynchon, Friedrich Durrenmatt, Flann O'Brien, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Jonathan Lethem, Thomas Bernhard, Truman Capote, Haruki Murakami, Gilbert Sorrentino, Witold Gombrowicz, Michael Chabon, Miguel Syjuco and a dozen or so other authors.  Soon I will be publishing a complete reading list and survey essays tying together the various threads of this body of literature.

I hope the site will spur a few people to read some fine books they might otherwise have missed.  But also I'd like to challenge conventional views of what constitutes important literature.  I believe that a shift is already underway.  Strange to say, the writers already understand what is happening.  If you have any doubts, just look at the works of a Jonathan Lethem or a David Mitchell or a Michael Chabon.  They understand that the longstanding division between literary fiction and genre fiction is both arbitrary and misguided.  I'm aiming to make the same point, but via a body of criticism.   

Jazz, 1959 and Today

ONE of the exciting things in music this year was the excuse a 50th anniversary gave to us jazzheads to return to what I consider the best year ever in the history of the art form. Okay, I know that sounds like something between an advertising slogan and a gloomy denial of the ensuing 50 years. But in a year when Miles Davis, John Coltrane, Art Blakey, Dave Brubeck, Ornette Coleman, Bill Evans, Charles Mingus, etc. were all punching at their respective peaks, it's hard not to miss it.

The winner of this blog's poll for best 1959 jazz album, of course, was Miles' "Kind of Blue." HERE is a link to my Sunday LATimes piece on that album and its musical / cultural context.

Sony has reissued that masterpiece as well as several others in expanded editions this year. The 2-CD versions of "Blue," Brubeck's "Take Five," "Mingus Ah Um," and Olatunji's "Drums of Passion" -- which the late great dj/critic Tom Terrell called one of the century's overlooked masterpieces -- make perfect Christmas gifts.

(I'm happy to say I own the deluxe-anniversary set of "Blue," bigger and alas pricier than the 2-CD version, with photographs of the session and vinyl LPs in addition to outtakes.)

For those of you interested in listening closer to the present, HERE is a best-of-2009 list from Jazz.com's Ted Gioia (author of the truly awesome "West Coast Jazz") which includes albums by Joe Lovano, The Bad Plus and Matthew Shipp. Those three alone make me happy -- as much as I love the old-school cool of 1959 -- for the form's last five decades of evolution.

 

The Birth (and Death) of the Cool

NOT long ago, I attended a lively discussion at LA's Book Soup about the origins and demise of cool. Ted Gioia, the author of "West Coast Jazz" and "Delta Blues," was talking about a seismic, beneath-the-surface cultural shift. The cool detachment --sometimes spiked with irony or cryptic gestures -- originated by Bix Beiderbecke, Lester Young and Miles Davis is reaching its sell-by date.

How can cool lose its cool? And what kind of "post-cool" culture will replace it?

Now, I don't agree with every line in Ted's new "The Birth (and Death) of the Cool." At times he is too reductive and sweeping, and movements like '70s soft rock show that a yearning for feeling and authenticity can exist right in the middle of an otherwise "cool" era. But he's certainly on to something, and I like the audacity of the way he puts modern jazz, styles of acting, trends in black culture, and corporate sponsorship into the same argument. Overall, he's persuaded me.

Here is my conversation with Ted. We've become friends, but I read his work (starting with the book-length essay "The Imperfect Art") a decade and a half before we met.

Q: So where did cool come from?

A: There was a major shift in American culture in the 1950s as people embraced cool in a way that previous generations hadn't -- after fighting for survival during the Depression, they were adding some flair to their lives. Cool came out of nowhere via jazz, from actors like James Dean and Marlon Brando. And in the '60s and '70s it was in the ascendancy.

Q: Why did so much of cool come from black culture?

A: In an odd sort of way, the predicament of black culture in the early part of the 20th century predicted what would happen to everybody. Urbanization, being torn from family roots, from cultural roots -- this happened to black people when they came to this country. The modern predicament is to have these ties cut loose. And many of the mechanisms for coping and surviving from black culture were adapted by everybody.

Q: Is there a special West Coast resonance to the notion of cool?

A: When I was growing up in Los Angeles in the '60s and '70s, it was far more pronounced than it is now. I remember the first time I went to New York, the intensity overwhelmed me.

The works of art that came our of the West Coast had that tone: West Coast jazz played off that cool sound and found a receptive audience. People responded more fully to the music because they associated it with the lifestyle of California -- a Hollywood of the mind. Bill Claxton understood the psychology of the West Coast and captured it in his photography.

Q: What happened to cool?

A: A number of things too place in the last 10 to 15 years to rob cool of is centrality -- 9/11, the mortgage meltdown, terrorism. The aging of the Baby Boomers.

But more important, cool has been commoditized by corporations eager to market it, and as people have become suspicious of corporate marketing they've become suspicious of cool as well.

You can generalize: There are eras where people follow the crowd, and others where they follow deeply held convictions. There's a fundamental instability to cool: When you decide you want to be cool, you're looking outside.

Cool is always in danger of being replaced by something deeper and more intrinsic. I list the lifestyles that are replacing cool -- eco-friendly, Nascar dads, the return to traditional religion. These people have very little in common, but they all believe they are going beyond cool.

There are many good aspects to this -- people are embracing the authentic and sincere, and returning to roots. But there's a downside: I think there's a connection to the new anger and confrontation in our discourse.

Q: What does postcool music sound like?

A: Part of the problem the music industry faces right now is they're still operating under the cool paradigm. When someone like Susan Boyle or Norah Jones emerges, who appeal to authenticity or feeling, they're puzzled by it.

Q: Anything that's surprised you as you barnstorm the country talking about cool?

A: About 10% of the people get angry. They don't want to discuss it -- they just rant. I realize now, These people must think they're really cool. It's like I had attacked their religion or something.