Dave Hickey, _Air Guitar: Essays on Art and Democracy_

 I HAD HAD this on the shelf for years and had read in it desultorily, but it took the news of his death to get me to actually go through it from beginning to end...and he really is as good as people always said. 

And as distinctive. Hickey gets cited by fully-credentialed art historical sorts of people (e.g. Alexander Nehamas), even though he writes about subjects beyond the pale of traditional art history (customizing cars, Hank Williams, Perry Mason, Siegfried and Roy) in an aggressively personalized style much more reminiscent of Hunter S. Thompson than of (say) Clement Greenberg, Leo Steinberg, or Michael Fried, to say nothing of Roger Fry. Or Walter Pater. (Although it's fun to imagine Pater and Hickey having a dinner in Art Critic Heaven.)

He takes mass culture as seriously as high culture--maybe more seriously, as he sometimes plainly states (e.g., in noting "my own predisposition to regard popular recorded music as the dominant art form of this American century"). He does not seem to take writing art criticism seriously at all, hence the book's title: "It [criticism] is the written equivalent of air guitar--flurries of silent, sympathetic gestures with nothing at their heart but the memory of the music."

Notwithstanding his penchant for popular culture and his unabashedly shoot-from-the-hip prose, Hickey was about as well-regarded a writer on art as anyone else in the U.S.A. So, I am wondering--why does literature not have anyone like this? Someone who, with literature as home base, could go this far afield, could leave so definitive a fingerprint on their prose, could as persuasively analyze the smudged groove of Watts, Wyman, & Richards, and then turn around and tell exactly what was going on in Pynchon, DeLillo, Ashbery, Notley, Robinson, etc.? The long-gone John Leonard had a bit of this quality, maybe...but it's hard to think of anyone extant who is even close.

Brit Bennett, _The Vanishing Half_

 I AM CATCHING up here--when school started, I fell woefully behind in my blogging. Fiona Hill (see post of a minute past) was our book club selection of August, and this novel that of September. I read Richard Thompson back in July. I have about five more to catch up on. But I will.

Anyway.

The main plot of The Vanished Half is about light-complexioned identical twin sisters, one of whom decides to pass and cuts ties with her family. Much later sisters' daughters, cousins who have never met, do meet; one of them figures out what is going on, leading to one final meeting of the original twins. A little soap-opera-ish, but plausible enough if the reader decides to just roll with it.

Bennett's novel reminded me much of Toni Morrison, thematically. Relationships between women, within and across generations, get more attention than relationships between women and men. We get to watch the dynamics of almost entirely Black communities; we get a sense of what differences darker or lighter shades of skin color can make. 

What the novel does not have, though, is that special Morrison density. Morrison would give you a paragraph from this or that character's perspective and the paragraph would be veined with that character's history, memory, regrets, and hopes, saturated with that character's discourse. Bennett just isn't there yet, maybe. 

Chapter 8 was the best episode, I thought. The twin who is passing (Stella) hazards all by striking up a friendship with the wife of the Black family that is integrating Stella's (supposedly) all-white neighborhood. Bennett gives us a convincing account of Stella's trying to manage her yearning to re-connect to her culture and her attraction to the new neighbor while also trying to stay friends with the neighborhood wives who want to freeze out the interloper. 

Fiona Hill, _There Is Nothing for You Here: Finding Opportunity in the 21st Century_

 IF YOU REMEMBER Fiona Hill, I expect it is because of her brave and revealing testimony in the first Trump impeachment trial. I imagine that testimony had a lot to do with why she got a book deal. 

Such being the case, I was expecting that testimony to be the book's big set piece: what led to her being called to testify, how it felt to be in the national headlines for a number of days, what it felt like to be in that room, and so on.

But...no. A few pages early in the book on picking out her outfit. That's about it.

What Hill really wants to write about, it turns out, is what she had to cope with as the daughter of a working class family in northern England: the petty snobbery of classmates, teachers who dismissed her abilities, the class warfare of the Thatcher era. The title is her father' advice to her, telling her to forget about trying to get ahead in County Durham. 

Hill pivots from the story of her own against the-odds rise to the top of her profession to the story of how the ever-shrinking opportunities for working class people in the USA made possible the election of Trump. The problem of self-perpetuating elites and the resentment they generate among the excluded and marginalized is the book's main (and continually underlined) point.

And it's a fair point. I would have liked maybe a chapter or two on that, though, and a lot more about testifying in an historic impeachment trial.

Richard Thompson (with Scott Timberg), _Beeswing: Losing My Way and Finding My Voice, 1967-1975_

THOMPSON HAD AN eventful youth and early manhood. He was a founding member of Fairport Convention, the seminal English folk-rock band, and he survived the terrible road accident in which the band's drummer and Thompson's girlfriend of the time died. After that disaster, the band, having accidentally arrived at their greatest lineup, went on to record their masterpiece, Liege and Lief, but nonetheless Thompson left the band to form another seminal folk-rock ensemble with his new wife, Linda. They both converted to Sufism. Then, when things went south, they collaborated on one of the greatest break-up albums of all time (rivaling Blood on the Tracks and Blue), great both by reason of its musicianship and its giving both sides.

In short, Thompson has the material for a page-turning musician's memoir. However, he elects to be not at all that forthcoming about any of it and tends to play down even the inherently dramatic moments. Maybe it's the Sufism? Or maybe just English reticence? Considering what Thompson had to work with, the book is a bit on the tea-with-the-vicar side.

Oh, well. Enjoyable nonetheless. I enjoyed reading Thompson on the recording of Fairport classic "A Sailor's Life," and there's a great Buck Owens anecdote.

Hilton Als, _Alice Neel, Uptown_

 AN ART BOOK, basically, with fifty-some full-page color reproductions of paintings by Alice Neel, who lived in Harlem in the 1940s, '50s, and '60s and mainly painted her neighbors there, a few of whom were famous (Harold Cruse, Alice Childress, Faith Ringgold) but were mostly not.

The paintings are remarkable, walking a line between European expressionism and social documentation, but I likely would not have tracked this down were it not for Als's contributions, a short introduction and texts for a dozen of the paintings. It was worth the tracking down. Als's criticism is at its most interesting when it is most autobiographical (see White Girls) and Als's introduction to this book suggests why:

I believe that one reason I began writing essays--a form without a form until you make it--was this: you didn't have to borrow from an emotionally and visually upsetting past, as one did in fiction, apparently, to write your story. In an essay, your story could include your actual story and even more stories; you could collapse time and chronology and introduce other stories. In short, the essay is not about the empirical "I" but about the collective--all the voices that made your "I." When I first saw Alice Neel's pictures, I. think I recognized a similar ethos of inclusion in her work.

Als's most fascinating criticism (I think) fascinates because he tells us his story in telling us about the art that engages him. That he himself grew up in Harlem and as a child might have walked by adults who had been the children in these paintings gives the book its spine.