E Y E W E A R, THE BLOG BY TODD SWIFT

I will not go into the roll call of A-list names who wrote, directed, and acted in, True Detective Season 2, except to say that the 8-part film noir cop drama set in the 21st century recently aired to mainly hostile, at times hectoring reviews. These can be divided into two categories - those that pined for the brilliant Season 1, and those that found Season 2 poor in its own right.  We can dispense with the first easily - you cannot claim Lear is not Hamlet and act all sad.  This is a new work.  Move on.

The second complaint was nuanced, but mainly revolved around the themes and structure of the new season - that it lacked drama, interesting character dynamics, that the dialogue was artificial, stilted and sometimes absurd, and that the finale lacked punch. The kindest words suggested it was High Camp - so bad it was good, a romping mess.
I beg to disagree.  This season was a complete dramatic work of Intertextual accomplishment - a very mature Tradition and the Individual Talent momen…

Sad news.  America's greatest speculative prose writer since Edgar Poe, the genius of uncanny and strange stories, short and long, Ray Bradbury, has died, at the age of 91, just as the rare transit of Venus began.  Any reader of Playboy knows his stories, which added lustre to those steamy pages.  The Martian Chronicles was much-watch TV in my childhood.  Something Wicked This Way Comes and The Illustrated Man classics.  And then, of course, there is Fahrenheit 451.  If Bradbury never quite became as big as Orwell or Burgess, he is certainly the equal or master of any science fiction/ horror writer of the last century, including Asimov, Clarke, Herbert, King and Heinlein. Perhaps his books were turned into weird, or schlocky screenworks.  Perhaps he wrote too much.  I never minded.

Sad news.  One of the great figures of our time, in politics and literature, Vaclav Havel, has died.

Sad news.  Christa Wolf, one of Germany's major post-war writers, has died.

What's with it with book reviews?  Either they are timid, or puffery, or daggers drawn, or umbrellas tipped with poison, or - well. they are rarely subtle, complex, and objective, that's for darn sure.  Anyway, a few have been making the news, or been in the air, these last weeks.  Robert Potts, the critic, scholar and editor, reviewed Don Paterson's Rain, from Faber, with rigorous glee, in the TLS.  It was a carefully researched rethink that showed the Scotsman obsessed with doppelgangers, twins and the shadow self (a long tradition started by RL Stevenson) was basically like a member of Spinal Tap.  Perhaps reviewers should drop Spinal Tap references - they have become a little tired.  They tend to turn reviews up to 11 a little too easily.  Still, this Pottsian revisionism was noteworthy for being an openly dissenting view - most sentient reviewers kow-tow to Paterson as if he were a little god fallen from the heavens onto Gilligan's Island.

So, refreshing.  And the…

It has been a bad last few days for brilliant octogenarian writers and poets of Britain - first Peter Porter, now the legendary Alan Sillitoe, has died.  I find this very sad news indeed.  Sillitoe is one of the truly iconic voices of British writing of the post-war period, and his books and screenplays, Saturday Night and Sunday Morning and The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner, are classics of the Kitchen Sink manner.  I had a most memorable dinner and drinks with Mr. Sillitoe at the Groucho Club a few years ago, and he was charming, funny, smart and slightly grouchy.  He had lots to say and great stories to tell.  He'd lived in Morocco with Tennessee Williams and knew Sylvia Plath.  He was a smoking advocate.  He was an Angry Young Man who didn't like the term.  He was a famous novelist for more than fifty years, and a good poet whose prose overshadowed that side of his writing.  Sillitoe is survived by his wife, the important American-British poet, Ruth Fainlight.  He…

Philip Pullman is having a good time. His new book The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ is out, and of course, launching it bang up against Easter, the holiest week of the year for Christians, he is getting good press - which means sales. There's something tacky about that marketing stunt, like when Antichrist was launched on DVD at Christmas, which is not heroically atheist, but just capitalist-secular-shabby. Pullman, of course, is getting credit for shooting sacred cows (or fish) in a barrel.

Surely, every theology student, and every teenager, has whimsically speculated on the possibility of a dark side to Jesus - a theme explored in The Last Temptation of Christ, for instance, to good effect. Nor is the idea that the Church wickedly betrayed the Jesus message new either - Dostoevsky made it the cornerstone of the Brothers Karamazov, one of the greatest of 19th century novels.

Only in the UK in the 21st century does it not seem anachronistic to have a donnish God-is-dead L…

Yesterday a plaque went up in my old neighbourhood, Marylebone, at the Langham Hotel, commemorating a most unusual gathering held on August 30, 1889. Joseph Marshall Stoddart, the publisher, introduced two younger writers to each other, who had never before met, and asked them both to create work for his Lippincott's Monthly Magazine. Wilde went away and wrote Dorian Gray, and Conan Doyle created Sherlock Holmes with the story 'The Sign of Four'. Easily a contender for most interesting literary lunch of all time.

It is hard being a British librarian. One has to lend, as often as not, mediocre rubbish to semi-literate readers who prefer pap to Pope. The year's most borrowed listings are out, and reveal a top 100 riddled with pulp fiction too bland even to deserve that B-side accolade. The top poetry book? Well it comes from faux-genius S. Fry, who is neither a poet or a critic, but a celebrity whose main message is to argue against vers libre, 100 years too late. In fiction, it is an American crime writer who has a Fordist production line to pump out his books so cheap they should be recalled as unsafe at any speed of reading. Literacy is so often extolled as a virtue that we often forget that reading badly can also mean reading unwisely. At least they only borrow bad books and not buy them.

More good stuff from Tom Chivers. This year's London Word Festival features a rejigged Briggflatts, John Hegley, Luke Kennard, Tim Turnbull, and lots more. Worth checking out if in London or the UK - or for that matter near a train station in Europe.

This year's Jewish Book Week looks as good as ever, perhaps even better, with appearances from, among others, George Szirtes, Adam Lebor, Chief Rabbi Jonathan Sachs, Steven Pinker, Rebecca Goldstein and David Lehman.

Good news. One of Eyewear's favourite authors - British spy-book Thirties genius Eric Ambler- is back in print, after a decade in the wilderness. 28 June marks the start of his centenary birth year, and Penguin's done a good job on five of the books. Pity they haven't reprinted his first - the spy spoof The Dark Frontier, which I think is one of his best.

I loved Ambler almost more than Greene. His books made great noir films, too - The Mask of Dimitrios, with Peter Lorre, was one of my boyhood faves, and inspired one my earliest poems (in an Audenesque style).

We often think of the Thirties landscape as ambiguous amoral territory, with debates between fascists and socialists, in a crumbling Europe, as mapped by Auden or Greene, but Ambler is the third part of that imaginary triumvirate, I think (well, one might want to add Orwell). Speaking of which, Orson Welles (there is a weird name echo there) quasi-directed the Ambler classic Journey Into Fear, and made it a madcap far…

Sad news. An age has ended, with the death of one of the great visionary British novelists of the post-Orwell era. With Burgess and Burroughs, JG Ballardcan be said to have been one of the greatest darkly comic dystopian 'cult' writers of the last 60 years, inventing entirely new landscapes for a sociopathic Western society to expose and explore its drives and desires. Eyewear will be featuring a post by Patrick Chapman, one of Ballard's literary heirs, later this week.

Poetry is, of course, a part of literature. But, increasingly, over the 20th century, it has become marginalised - and, famously, has less of an audience than "before". I think that, when one considers the sort of criticism levelled against Seamus Heaney and "mainstream poetry", by poet-critics like Jeffrey Side, one ought to see the wider context for poetry in the "Anglo-Saxon" world. This phrase was used by one of the UK's leading literary cultural figures, in a private conversation recently, when they spoke eloquently about the supremacy of "Anglo-Saxon novels" and their impressive command of narrative.

My heart sank as I listened, for what became clear to me, in a flash, is that nothing has changed since Victorian England (for some in the literary establishment). Britain (now allied to America) and the English language with its marvellous fiction machine, still rule the waves. I personally find this an uncomfortable position - but when on…

Sad news. James Purdyhas died. Purdy's great novella Malcolm was published 50 years ago, and found favour immediately with a slapdash cabal of wits, misfits and weird modernists - but was equally ignored by the more "preppy" (his words) crowd.

I read Malcolm at 14, and it had an instant effect - its grotesque flamboyant perversity enchanted me. Oddly enough, I never read more of him after that - you know how polymorphous teen readers are - there were others to curl up in bed with.

Still, reading about his career again in the New York Times obituary it struck me as surprising he had lived so long, and been quite so marginal.

I had some friends over today, one a poet, and we drank lots of wine, ate, and then they left. There was also a dog, and some children, and some crayon drawings on a lamp, by the end of it. Then as snow began falling, I read some new books. Farewell My Lovely, a new book of poems by Polly Clark, which I found exceptionally moving and well-made, with couplets that burst with surprising dark images of loss; and the new Faber debut, by Emma Jones, which seems quite good, though influenced by Wallace Stevens, and perhaps fussy and whimsical (the use of the word "fictive" in several poems is very Stevensian). Some of her poems use tropical flourishes and explorations of doubles and perception in the usual fun and clever ways; I always love both snow and tropical things in poems. Then I started reading The Savage Detectives, by Roberto Bolano, who died recently. I saw a copy of his 2666 in the Tate the other night (Rothko!) and have found his book very fun, if a little sad: first …

Sad news. Poet and prose writer John Updikehas died. Updike's was the epitome of a suave, suburban, East Coast style, cannily sexual and alert to the mores and foibles of a post-war period of boom and lust. The attention to detail in his writing was often half the fun. The poems, while often slight and merely clever, were of their age, and will likely be studied with renewed attention now. His work, it seems, may have been eclipsed in seeming importance this last decade, as his peer, Roth, emerged as a writer of greater range and output, but Updike was still a major figure to many, a man of letters who, had he lived, would always have been a potential winner of the Nobel.

Le Clezio who? No clue. The English world - recently chastised for its insularity - may scratch its collective head over the latest winner of the Nobel Prize. Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clezio is not, I would have thought, a household name in Britain, or America. That may be part of the point - though I lived in Paris for several years, and did not encounter his name there, either. Following him on Amazon, one can quickly see, despite a few translations, his work is mostly out of print, out of bounds, off-limit, for most Anglo-saxon readers. "J. M. G. le Clézio" resists being absorbed into the celebrity world of publishing, prizes, and parties, that typifies a kind of Americanized hegemony of the bookworld (or so it might seem to some jury members). However, despite the undoubted talents of this thrillingly obscure (to me) Francophone writer, I wonder how long Margaret Atwood will have to wait, to be recognised as one of the major post-colonial literary figures of the past 40 ye…

I was at a party last week, and was informed by someone there that Americans don't do irony. This is a commonplace comment, here in London, that seems to erase out of the record the irony-interested New Critics, and the ironic Mr. Eliot - among others. Now, today, comes some sort of ironic last-straw. A critic in The Guardian, complaining because the Coen Brothers have no heart in their films, just plenty of irony (called cynicism, but here meaning the same thing - see Hardy's little ironies). So - which is it then? Are Americans masters of irony, or not? I think what's at stake here is tone. I have discovered that, time and again, North Americans and Europeans in dialogue have trouble hearing each other's use (and variance) of tone, in written and spoken utterances (such as poems) - which can cause misreadings.

Irony, like ambiguity, comes in a number of shapes and sizes (see Booth's A Rhetoric of Irony). Meanwhile, I'd say most British film and TV product has …

One of America's greatest prose writers of the last half-century has died, by his own hand - David Foster Wallace: novelist, essayist, and infinitely talented wordplayer; genius might be a word to use in relation to his work. He was also, by all accounts, a gifted and caring creative writing teacher (no mean feat). It is a tragic truth of writing that one never really realises the pain and sorrow behind the exuberant verbal masks that writers put on, and publish. Writers are so very vulnerable, even the best, and most beloved. Readers, take care of them. Fellow writers, be more gentle, too.