CRITICAL MASS

Classics on posters, new words, bound

"The Collaboration" by Ben Urwand
"The Collaboration" by Ben Urwand

“Words have their own firmness,” Susan Sontag wrote in her journal in 1964. “The word on the page may not reveal [may conceal] the flabbiness of the mind that conceived it.”

It is good to remember that, just as words exist beyond and apart from the people who issue them, neither are they defined by the covers that bind them. Words ultimately reverberate - echo and decay - in the minds of readers. There is something about loving books in this post-literate age that seems faintly pretentious, like the hipster fetish for the authentic that leads them to embrace antique and obsolete technologies such as vinyl records and fixed-gear bicycles. Books are an effective means of mind-to-mind communication, but they’re a delivery system. For a lot of us, books carry an emotional cargo. We associate the heft of a volume, the grass and vanilla tang of old paper with the sensation of reading. We like the way books look on a shelf, the way they seem to insulate us from the rougher world outside.

What’s most important about a book is not its form, but its content. Before books, we had scrolls and clay tablets. Words can survive outside their bindings. If we trust our money to the cloud, then why not our words? Our love of books is just affectation, a way of advertising our sensibilities and taste.

In this spirit, the posters sold by the British firm Spineless Classics seem well-suited for book lovers.Each consists of the words of an entire out-of-copyright novel such as Anthony Burgess’ A Clockwork Orange or Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, splayed out in sharp four-point type and arranged in an apt graphic pattern over a single page. (I particularly like the treatment of Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness; the text is presented in the shape of Africa.) The company stresses that the posters are legible (if your vision isn’t 20/20 you may need magnification) and that, for the most part, they retain the novel’s original typography.

Several titles are available at spinelessclassics.net. Most sell for $66.99 for an unframed 36-by-24 inch print.

(Go to blooddirtangels.com to enter to win a print of A Clockwork Orange.)

This month’s books:

The Collaboration: Hollywood’s Pact With Hitler by Ben Urwand (Belknap Press, $26.95). While a bit of sensationalist overreach, Urwand’s book about how Hollywood conducted business with and within Germany after Hitler’s ascent to power is a fascinating examination of capitalist amorality in the face of evil. Urwand does a good job of cataloging the ways Hollywood studios - largely headed by immigrant Jewish entrepreneurs - took measures to placate the Nazis so they could continue to show films in Germany throughout the 1930s, until the Nazi invasion of Poland.

Urwand details how planned anti-Nazi movies such as Herman Mankiewicz’s The Mad Dog of Europe were scuttled, while other projects (such as Four Comrades, based on Erich Marie Remarque’s sequel to All Quiet On the Western Front) were sanitized to the point of incoherency. By the mid-1930s, Jewish characters had all but disappeared.

Urwand argues that the German consul in Los Angeles, Georg Gyssling, had what amounted to the power to censor films and that the Germans referred to their relationship with Hollywood as a “zusammenarbeit,” which Urwand says literally means “collaboration.” Others, notably Brandeis University history professor Thomas Doherty (his book Hollywood and Hitler was published earlier this year), suggest he’s overplaying his hand. While Louis B. Mayer was, in Doherty’s words, “a greedhead,” he was not the moral equivalent of the French Vichy government or Vidkun Quisling, the Nazi puppet prime minister of occupied Norway.

Despite the controversy, The Collaboration is a valuable contribution to our understanding of how the American motion picture industry negotiated the Great Depression. While I’m not sure that moguls were more responsive to Gyssling’s concerns than they were to the views of the anti-Semitic censor Joseph Breen, Urwand has uncovered a very interesting, heretofore unknown, true Hollywood story.

Rivers by Michael Farris Smith (Simon & Schuster, $25). Extrapolating from the indifference displayed by the U.S. government after Hurricane Katrina, Smith, the Mississippi-born son of a Baptist preacher, has fashioned a dystopian first novel about life below “The Line,” a storm-ravaged Gulf Coast that has been exorcised from the corpus of the United States of America. This is where monsters be, as well as Cohen, a grieving widower too stubborn to move. While there are obvious similarities to Cormac McCarthy, Smith most puts me in mind of his fellow Mississippian Larry Brown. They share the same smooth-worn grace running toward minimalism and offhand masculine power. You never feel like he’s straining for significance.

Essays of the 1960s & ’70s by Susan Sontag; edited by David Rieff (Library of America, $35). Susan Sontag is, like Noam Chomsky, a writer who is invoked more than read. But anyone who has tackled the works that, along with a clutch of previously uncollected essays, comprise this volume - Against Interpretation and Other Essays (1964), Styles of Radical Will (1969),On Photography (1977) and Illness as Metaphor (1978) - can attest to the precision and acuity of her mind. Sontag was a remarkable critic in that she was as much an influencer and provocateur as she was an observer.

This could be seen as sort of a greatest hits collection, as it brings together Sontag’s seminal essays “Notes on Camp,” “The Pornographic Imagination” and “America, Seen Through Photographs, Darkly.” For some of us, the highlights will be in the outtakes and bonus tracks. I’d never read Sontag’s “On William Burroughs and the Novel” or “Beauty How Will it Change Next?,” a 1974 piece she wrote for Vogue.

Also out: Two Arkansas-connected titles I intend to treat on the blood, dirt & angels blog - C.S. Lewis and the Arts: Creativity in the Shadowlands (Square Halo Books, $18.99), a compendium of essays on the Christian philosopher edited by Hendrix College professor Rod Miller; and Voices of the Razorbacks: A History of Arkansas’s Iconic Sports Broadcasters (Butler Center Books, $16.95) by University of Arkansas professor Hoyt Purvis and Stanley Sharp of Booneville.

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Style, Pages 51 on 09/29/2013

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