{"product_id":"the-ecstasy-of-influence-isbn-9780307744500","title":"The Ecstasy of Influence","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cb\u003eNational Book Critics Circle Award Finalist\u003cbr\u003eA \u003ci\u003eNew York Times\u003c\/i\u003e Notable Book\u003cbr\u003eA Best Book of the Year —\u003ci\u003eAustin American-Statesman\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003eIncludes a new, previously uncollected piece: \"My Internet\"\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e \u003cbr\u003eIn \u003ci\u003eThe Ecstasy of Influence\u003c\/i\u003e, the incomparable Jonathan Lethem has compiled a career-spanning collection of occasional pieces—essays, memoir, liner notes, fiction, and criticism—which also doubles as a novelist’s manifesto, self-portrait, and confession. The result is an insightful, charming, and entertaining grab bag that covers everything from great novels to old films to graffiti to cyberculture.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cb\u003ei: My Plan to Begin With\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003eMy Plan to Begin With, Part One \u003cbr\u003eThe Used Bookshop Stories \u003cbr\u003eThe Books They Read \u003cbr\u003eGoing Under in Wendover \u003cbr\u003eZelig of Notoriety \u003cbr\u003eClerk\u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eii: Dick, Calvino, Ballard: SF and Postmodernism\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003eMy Plan to Begin With, Part Two\u003cbr\u003eHolidays \u003cbr\u003eCrazy Friend (Philip K. Dick) \u003cbr\u003eWhat I Learned at the Science-Fiction Convention \u003cbr\u003eThe Best of Calvino: Against Completism \u003cbr\u003ePostmodernism as Liberty Valance \u003cbr\u003eThe Claim of Time (J. G. Ballard) \u003cbr\u003eGive Up \u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eiii: Plagiarisms\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThe Ecstasy of Influence \u003cbr\u003eThe Afterlife of “Ecstasy”\/Somatics of Influence \u003cbr\u003eAlways Crashing in the Same Car \u003cbr\u003eAgainst “Pop” Culture \u003cbr\u003eFurniture \u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eiv: Film and Comics\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003ci\u003eSupermen!: \u003c\/i\u003eAn Introduction \u003cbr\u003eTop-Five Depressed Superheroes \u003cbr\u003eThe Epiphany \u003cbr\u003eIzations \u003cbr\u003eEverything Is Broken (Art of Darkness) \u003cbr\u003eGodfather IV \u003cbr\u003eGreat Death Scene (\u003ci\u003eMcCabe \u0026amp; Mrs. Miller\u003c\/i\u003e) \u003cbr\u003eKovacs’s Gift \u003cbr\u003eMarlon Brando Breaks \u003cbr\u003eMissed Opportunities \u003cbr\u003eDonald Sutherland’s Buttocks \u003cbr\u003eThe Drew Barrymore Stories \u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003e \u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003ev: Wall Art\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThe Collector (Fred Tomaselli) \u003cbr\u003eAn Almost Perfect Day (Letter to Bonn) \u003cbr\u003eThe Billboard Men (Larry Sultan and Mike Mandel) \u003cbr\u003eTodd James \u003cbr\u003eWriting and the Neighbor Arts \u003cbr\u003eLive Nude Models \u003cbr\u003eOn a Photograph of My Father \u003cbr\u003eHazel \u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003evi: 9\/11 and Book Tour\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003eNine Failures of the Imagination\u003cbr\u003eFurther Reports in a Dead Language \u003cbr\u003eTo My Italian Friends \u003cbr\u003eMy Egyptian Cousin \u003cbr\u003eCell Phones \u003cbr\u003eProximity People \u003cbr\u003eRepeating Myself \u003cbr\u003eBowels of Compassion \u003cbr\u003eStops \u003cbr\u003eAdvertisements for Norman Mailer \u003cbr\u003eWhite Elephant and Termite Postures in the Life of the Twenty-first-Century Novelist \u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003evii: Dylan, Brown, and Others\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThe Genius of James Brown \u003cbr\u003ePeople Who Died \u003cbr\u003eThe Fly in the Ointment \u003cbr\u003eDancing About Architecture \u003cbr\u003eDylan Interview \u003cbr\u003eOpen Letter to Stacy (The Go-Betweens) \u003cbr\u003eOtis Redding’s Lonely Hearts Club Band \u003cbr\u003eRick James \u003cbr\u003ean orchestra of light that was electric \u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eviii: Working the Room\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003eBolaño’s \u003ci\u003e2666\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003eHomely Doom Vibe (Paula Fox) \u003cbr\u003eAmbivalent Usurpations (Thomas Berger) \u003cbr\u003eRushmore Versus Abundance \u003cbr\u003eOutcastle (Shirley Jackson) \u003cbr\u003eThursday (G. K. Chesterton) \u003cbr\u003eMy Disappointment Critic\/On Bad Faith \u003cbr\u003eThe American Vicarious (Nathanael West) \u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eix: The Mad Brooklynite\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003eRuckus Flatbush \u003cbr\u003eCrunch Rolls \u003cbr\u003eChildren with Hangovers \u003cbr\u003eL. J. Davis \u003cbr\u003eAgee’s Brooklyn \u003cbr\u003eBreakfast at Brelreck’s \u003cbr\u003eThe Mad Brooklynite \u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003ex: What Remains of My Plan\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003eMicropsia \u003cbr\u003eZeppelin Parable \u003cbr\u003eWhat Remains of My Plan \u003cbr\u003eMemorial \u003cbr\u003eThings to Remember“I love this book. . . . Less of a collection than a collage, a cut-and-paste self-portrait in which we see Lethem as he sees himself. . . . A book about a big idea.” —David L. Ulin,\u003ci\u003e Los Angeles Times\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e \u003cbr\u003e“Begins with this idea of writer-as-magpie and takes it on a communitarian-artistic romp. . . . It’s a grand performance. . . . And delivered with a wink.” —\u003ci\u003eSan Francisco Chronicle\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003e“Like almost everything Lethem has written, \u003ci\u003eThe Ecstasy of Influence\u003c\/i\u003e is a reflection of, and a pixilated homage to, those whose work he fetishizes. If this book has a thesis, it’s this: For an artist, influence is everything.” —\u003ci\u003eThe New York Times\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003e“[An] exuberant whiz-bang of an essay collection.” —\u003ci\u003eThe Daily Beast\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003ci\u003e \u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“Hefty and remarkable. . . . Dominating all is Lethem’s prime concern always: the novel. . . . More exciting than any of his interesting-to-terrific fiction.” —Robert Christgau, \u003ci\u003eThe New York Times Book Review\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“[Lethem is] as sharp a critic as he is a novelist. This collection shows you why.” —\u003ci\u003eAustin American-Statesman\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003e“Lethem takes a boldly different tack on the matter of mentors, gurus, fathers, shapers and sources. . . . He not only acknowledges his literary and psychological progenitors; he insists upon them, celebrates them, and invites the reader to join in an exhilarating if sometimes baffling deconstruction of the very idea of influence.” —\u003ci\u003eThe Dallas Morning News\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003e“Lethem’s inspired miscellany is ardent and charming. . . . His essays are zippy and freewheeling.”—\u003ci\u003eChicago Tribune\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003ci\u003e \u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“Sharp and funny.” —\u003ci\u003eThe Plain Dealer\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003ci\u003e \u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“Frank and boisterous. . . . \u003ci\u003eThe Ecstasy of Influence\u003c\/i\u003e is, more than anything, a record of Mr. Lethem’s life as a public novelist, a role for which he is obviously well suited. . . . Mr. Lethem has such a gift, and \u003ci\u003eThe Ecstasy of Influence\u003c\/i\u003e is evidence of it.” —\u003ci\u003eThe New York Observer\u003c\/i\u003e \u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003e“This impassioned, voluble book is illuminating about much more than its author.”—\u003ci\u003eThe Independent \u003c\/i\u003e(London)\u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003e“\u003ci\u003eThe Ecstasy of Influence\u003c\/i\u003e is in part an attempt to discuss the things artists and writers rarely talk about—how much of their work is borrowed from other artists and how much they care about their critical reputations, among other things.” —\u003ci\u003eSalon\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003ci\u003e \u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“Smart and rollicking. . . . Brilliantly dissect[s] the various sulks, funks, and paranoias of being a writer who moans about doing writerly things—not least among them writing itself.” —\u003ci\u003eThe Millions\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003e“A wide and wonderful series of subjects that are threaded together, mostly, as a kind of autobiography of a would-be writer becoming a struggling writer and then a successful writer while all the while remaining a voracious reader.” —\u003ci\u003eNational Post\u003c\/i\u003e (Canada)\u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003e“The author invites us into the ecstasy of intertextuality, to the intertwining of thousands of words with ourselves.”—\u003ci\u003ePopMatters \u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003e\"The arguments implicit in his novels are not merely explicit here, but deliriously so, ecstatically so, as if the author is shaking you by the shoulders to show you what he loves, why he loves it and why you should love it, too.” —\u003ci\u003eKirkus Reviews\u003c\/i\u003e (starred review)\u003cb\u003eJONATHAN LETHEM\u003c\/b\u003e is the \u003ci\u003eNew York Times\u003c\/i\u003e bestselling author of eight novels, including \u003ci\u003eChronic City, The Fortress of Solitude, \u003c\/i\u003eand \u003ci\u003eMotherless Brooklyn.\u003c\/i\u003e. A recipient of the MacArthur Fellowship and winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award, Lethem has also published his stories and essays in \u003ci\u003eThe New Yorker\u003c\/i\u003e, \u003ci\u003eHarper’s\u003c\/i\u003e, \u003ci\u003eRolling Stone\u003c\/i\u003e, \u003ci\u003eEsquire\u003c\/i\u003e, and \u003ci\u003eThe New York Times\u003c\/i\u003e, among others.\u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003ewww.jonathanlethem.comPostmodernism as Liberty Valance \u003cbr\u003e\u003ci\u003e\u003cbr\u003eNotes on a Ritual Killing \u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e1.   Spoiler alert. John Ford’s \u003ci\u003eThe Man Who Shot Liberty Valance\u003c\/i\u003e is an allegorical Western that I am now going to totally pretzel into an alle­gory for something else entirely. Actually I’ll reverse it: The original allegorizes the taming of the western frontier, the coming of moder­nity in the form of the lawbooks and the locomotive, and memorializes what was lost (a loss the film sees as inevitable). My version allegorizes the holding at bay, for the special province of literary fiction, of con­temporary experience in all its dismaying or exhilarating particulars, as well as a weird persistent denial of a terrific number of artistic strat­egies for illuminating that experience. The avoidance, that’s to say, of any forthright address of what’s called postmodernity, and what’s lost in avoiding it (a sacrifice I see as at best pointless, an empty rehearsal of anxieties, and at worst hugely detrimental for fiction). \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e2.   The chewy center of \u003ci\u003eTMWSLV\u003c\/i\u003e is a gunfight. A man stands in the main street of a western town and (apparently) kills another man. The victim—for this is, technically, murder—represents chaos and anxi­ety and fear to all who know him, and has been regarded as unkill­able, almost in the manner of a monster or zombie from another movie genre; his dispatch is regarded by the local population with astonished relief and gratitude, such that they will shower the killer with regard (he’s destined to become his party’s nominee for vice president of the United States). The secret the movie reveals: The killer was not the man in the street, but another. \u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003e3.   The three persons in \u003ci\u003eTMWSLV\u003c\/i\u003e: James Stewart a.k.a. “Ransom Stoddard,” the upstanding, even priggish young lawyer from the east, defined by his naïve sincerity and dedication to the rule of law; John Wayne a.k.a. “Tom Doniphon,” cynical veteran of the frontier, who tends to an isolationist-libertarian approach toward civilization but is essentially lovable and will become heartbreaking by film’s end; and Lee Marvin a.k.a. “Liberty Valance,” a sadistic, amoral thug who delights in sowing chaos and exposing the fragility of social convention (by terrorizing family restaurants, newspaper offices, elections, etc.). \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e4.   Stewart\/Stoddard believes he’s “the man who killed Liberty Valance” (he stood, after all, in the center of town, visible to all, with a gun in his hand). More important, the witnesses believe he’s the one. In fact, it was Wayne\/Doniphon who did the deed, while hidden in a shadowy alley, after having elaborately conspired to goad the helpless and paci­fistic Stewart\/Stoddard into his public role as a gun-toting defender of public peace against the savage anarchy of Marvin\/Valance. \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e5.   Liberty Valance, i.e., “Free Persuasion”—what an absurd, obvious, Pynchonian name! But then, the characters in Dickens and Henry James have odd names, too. \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e6.   “Venturing back in time isn’t the only option for novelists loath to address the mass media that most Americans marinate in. There are also those populations cut off from the mainstream for cultural rea­sons, such as recent immigrants and their families. And then there are those at the geographical margins . . . It’s remarkable how many recent American literary novels and short stories are set on ranches . . . The American novelist is buffeted by two increasingly contradictory imper­atives. The first comes as the directive to depict ‘The Way We Live Now’ . . . Cliché it may be, but the notion that no one is better suited to explain the dilemmas of contemporary life than the novelist per­sists . . . [The] other designated special province of the literary novelist: museum-quality depth. The further literature is driven to the outskirts of the culture, the more it is cherished as a sanctuary from everything coarse, shallow and meretricious in that culture. If these two missions seem incompatible, that’s because they are. To encompass both . . . you must persuade your readers that you have given them what they want by presenting them with what they were trying to get away from when they came to you in the first place.” \u003cbr\u003e\u003ci\u003e—\u003c\/i\u003eLaura Miller, \u003ci\u003eThe Guardian \u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e7.   Let’s wade into the unpleasantness around the term “postmodern­ism”: Nobody agrees on its definition, but in literary conversations the word is often used as finger-pointing to a really vast number of things that might be seen as threatening to canonical culture: author-killing theories generated by French critics, collapsings of high and low cultural preserves into a value-neutral fog, excessive reference to various other media and\/or mediums, especially electronic ones (ironically, even a Luddishly denunciatory take on certain media and\/or mediums may be suspect merely for displaying an excess of familiarity with same), an enthusiasm for “metafiction” (a word that ought to be reserved for a specific thing that starts with Cervantes, but isn’t), for antinarrative, for pop-culture references or generic forms, for overt (as opposed to politely passive) “intertextuality,” for unreliable narration, for surre­alism or magic realism or hysterical realism or some other brand of “opposed- to- realism” affiliation, for “irony” (another term that’s been abused out of its effective contour and function, and its abusers have fewer excuses than do those of postmodernism), etc. etc. etc. Now, any writer espousing, let alone employing, all of the above things would be a gorgon-headed monster, surely deserving rapid assassination for the safety of the literary community in general. (Or maybe not, maybe they’d be splendid.) But—and I present this as axiomatic—such a person, and such writing, is impossible to consider seriously because all of the modes denounced under the banner of “postmodernist” are incompatible: You can’t, just for instance, exalt disreputable genres like the crime story and also want to do away with narrative. \u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003e8.   The reverse person, a literary person inclined toward or at least com­pelled by none of the above-named modes or gestures—and I present this not as axiomatic but as an obnoxious opinion—would be dull beyond belief. They basically would have declined the entire twentieth century (and interesting parts of several others). \u003ci\u003eYou’ve read our entire menu, sir? And nothing was of interest? Really,\u003c\/i\u003e nothing\u003ci\u003e? \u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e9.   “ . . . as a phenomenon, postmodernism is either specifically aes­thetic or more generally cultural; it is either revolutionary or reaction­ary; it is either the end of ideology or the inescapable conclusion of ideology . . . It is expressed in architecture, art, literature, the media, science, religion and fashion, and at the same time it is equivalent to none of these. It is both a continuation and intensification of what has gone before and a radical break with all traces of the past. It is, above all, simultaneously critical and complicit.” \u003cbr\u003e\u003ci\u003e—\u003c\/i\u003eKathleen Fitzpatrick, \u003ci\u003eThe Anxiety of Obsolescence \u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“Critical debates about postmodernism constitute postmodernism itself.” \u003cbr\u003e\u003ci\u003e—\u003c\/i\u003eStephen Connor,\u003ci\u003e Postmodernist Culture \u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003e10.   I suggested that abusers of the word “postmodernism” had excuses. I offer the above quotes as exculpatory evidence. The serious use of the term manifestly propagates bewilderment. But the quotes are also a reminder that the term has serious uses. It means more than “art I don’t like.” \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e11.   What postmodernism really needs is a new name—or three of them. \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e12.   The first “postmodernism” that requires a new name is our sense— I’m taking it for granted that you share it—that the world, as presently defined by the advent of global techno-capitalism, the McLuhanesque effects of electronic media, and the long historical postludes of the transformative theories, movements, and traumas of the twentieth century, isn’t a coherent or congenial home for human psyches. Chuck Klosterman details this suspicion in his essay on the Unabomber, called “FAIL” (though it might as well be called “Sympathy for Theo­dore Kaczynski”). His conclusion, basically, is that in the teeth of con­temporary reality we’d all be a little bit crazy \u003ci\u003enot\u003c\/i\u003e to sometimes wish to kill that sort of postmodernism. I speak here as one who’s spent loads of his own good faith hurling tiny word-bombs at the rolling edifice of the triumphalist Now. This postmodernism we’ll call Kaczynski’s Bad Dream.","brand":"Vintage","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":46304485998821,"sku":"NP9780307744500","price":21.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/1842\/7735\/files\/9780307744500.jpg?v=1767739131","url":"https:\/\/k12savings.com\/products\/the-ecstasy-of-influence-isbn-9780307744500","provider":"K12savings","version":"1.0","type":"link"}