3quarksdaily

Talkin' Gibbon in the Hypercloud

by David Schneider

If you're asked, "So, what are you reading these days?" do not under any circumstances reply The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. Unless, of course, you intend to frighten off acquaintances, old friends, petrified Republicans, pie-eyed Democrats, overstaying guests, job interviewers, potential lovers–  heck, just about anyone. Trust me. In this age of Life, Inc., in that mumbled admission you instantly brand yourself: prolix, patrician, and pessimistic. (Yeah, names don't hurt me, but ouch.)

Look, blame Battlestar Galactica for my parade of pedantry. You might remember–– a while back I was thinking about that sci-fi epic as "Romans: Remixed," so – as part of my new venture, Reading Books So You Don't Have To, Unlimited – I decided to check out the original track recorded by Gibbon. (Decline and Fall must have sounded pretty interesting when it premiered, in London, in 1776.)

I regret to report that, as a literary work of art, it has a few significant defects.

We'll note, dismiss and forgive its impossible length. If Bolaño could get away with it in 2666, I suppose you can too. No, no, Mr. Gibbon: what I object to is your narrative strategy: more switchbacks than a sherpa track! History moves in a straight line, Mr. Gibbon, just like a Roman road. Reading your history is like playing 'Chutes & Ladders. Like living in a hamster wheel. The pomposity and idiocy of your protagonists – and how many there are! – beggar belief. Sir, your Rome is always declining; I'm waiting for the Big Finish, okay, here's Odoacer on Italy's throne, "Goths Win!" in duodecimal overtime, and now you tell me we're playing a double-header in the Eastern Conference.

Mr. Gibbon, I am greatly crestfallen by your lack of attention to the effective construction of a cliffhanger and its resolution. You really set up a corker at the close of Chapter XXVI (the last page of Volume I in my Modern Library edition):

Such were the scenes of barbaric rage which disgraced the palace and table of the Roman emperor; and, as the impatient Goths could only be restrained by the firm and temperate character of Theodosius, the public safety seemed to depend on the life and abilities of a single man.

Bang! A worthy parting shot. Imagine my disappointment, bewilderment, and general annoyance when I began Volume II with Theodosius nowhere to be found, and your wheedling encomium to Gratian – who's he, anyway? – commandeering the page. Does "Who shot J.R.?" mean anything to you?

Furthermore, Mr. Gibbon, your paragraphs seldom feature conspicuous, easily identifiable topic sentences. They undoubtedly consternate both English teachers and test-makers of the College Board. It is impossible to cut-and-paste your work into the standard five-paragraph essay; how does this study intend to have any longevity when, as you must know by now, plagiarism is the one guaranteed form of cultural transmission left to us?        

Still, I suppose we must give you credit for ingenious hilarity when it comes to the names of your characters. A tyrant named Maximin? I know of at least one consultancy and three Mike Myers movies that ought to be paying you royalties. In general, I'll admit, a sterling job. Far better than the abridged edition, published by Penguin Classics, which I tried (and failed) to read a few years ago. Now that was just a blizzard of dates and names. Ugh. Kind of like an AP exam. Like pornography without the dirty bits.

I confess, Mr. Gibbon (in the tone of an English schoolboy scolding his tutor), I'm slightly cross with you. You have so many trees in your forest that these days, there are few who have time to walk with you. Are you related to Virgil, by any chance?

•••

Mr. Gibbon, in light of America's recent history (as epic as any you've lived through, or have written about) I'm inclined to ask different questions about your book than it seems a lot of people have been asking.

From what I can gather, we spend an awful lot of time arguing about how Rome fell, why Rome fell, the true date for the Fall of Rome; arguing whether the barbarians should have been better integrated or kept out completely, or whether Christianity or taxes or environmental pollution (lead poisoning) did them in. but as you make clear through 800 pages chronicling 500 years – your doubling-back upon a particular period six times over, framing each moment with regard to the military, the imperial family, the intrigues of advisers, the domestic economy and the "international situation" – there are no answers to be arranged in neat ScanTron bubbles.

The question to me, at least, is: "Why didn't Rome fall?" –I mean, it didn't fall for a while, at any rate. The amount of carnage, chaos and panic you describe each year, every year, 500 times over, makes our past decade look like a sunny afternoon at Coney Island. Bread and circuses in the bad times, I suppose; and between you and me, America is plenty good at baking both.

I'll admit, the Roman culture of bling looks very much like our own (but perhaps it can be said of all high societies in all of history); Abramoff and Cunningham and the K Street Project bear an uncomfortably close resemblance to your descriptions of the corrupt Roman Senate. And you puncture my hopes repeatedly, as when you sing all the virtues of Gratian's royal education, only to conclude:

Gratian neglected the duties and even the dignity of his rank to consume whole days in the vain display of his dexterity and boldness in the chase.

You do this time and time again, setting pride up for a fall like a bowling pin. I can see my cocktail conversants' point: you are a bit of a pill. But I think that in this, by this constant accrual of negative example, you have a close companion in Plutarch (even as that writer tends to celebrate his subjects): you're seeking to sculpt an idea of the character of leadership that commits such actions, whether for good or ill.

The Roman emperors were too large, their decisions too capricious and absolute: like the Olympian gods they emulated, I suppose. So distant in the past (unlike the monsters of the 20th century), so baroque in their depravity, they're almost comedic – like comic-book SuperHero/Villains – or miniaturized like the clay figurines posed by Zeus in that "Clash of the Titans" amphitheatre. It seems to me as though, as types, they comprise a vast range of leadership styles from which one might mix and match – were one an emperor. Or, shall we say, from the one-armed bandit of heredity and ambition, every couple dozen years, Time puts in a quarter and cranks out two BARs and a Cherry; every century or so, a JACKPOT. One that restores or re-creates the identity of Roman-ness to, shall we (hedgingly) say, fight another day.

It's funny: over the last decade, through volleys of the term hyperpuissance hailing from "Old Europe," America spent some time debating whether or not it is, in fact, an empire. (And then: what kind of empire is it?) As I recall, those most vociferously denying that allegation of imperialism, were actually performing that imperial role most energetically by invading Iraq.

Now, I wasn't intending to put Joni Mitchell and Colin Powell in a blender to make an Obama smoothie, but the catchphrases "You don't know what you got 'til it's gone" and "You break it, you bought it" are earworming my brain. I think that we're only now fully comprehending the ramifications and scope of the American commercial and cultural empire, now, in its fading colors: its endangerment raises its visibility, like the California Condor.

Mr. Gibbon, I don't know how you managed to accomplish this work in the space of a single lifetime. I can't even catch up on C-SPAN Congressional hearings, not even with a TiVo. I heard about that failed romance of yours; maybe… overcompensatory sexual sublimation? After all, when you finished Decline and Fall, and there was no more history for your pen to ink, your testicles swelled up. But I think I understand why you wrote it, why it consumed your life: you were trying to help your country. You had a Mad King George, tossing away his empire. By your last volume, we'd written a Constitution over here across the pond. (Can I just say, thanks for taking the time? No, seriously.)

Mr. Gibbon, noting the slowness of your voluble pen, and your considerable antiquarian nature, I think you'll find a couple of recent events most interesting. First, there was, rather is, this rather monumental financial crisis. Think of it this way: the barbarians we'd let in to protect the empire (you know, under that whole "competing self-interest" thing) – yeah, well, they've just sacked Rome. It's an inexact comparison, open to a lot of debate I'm sure, but it's a serviceable model for now.

That's sort of snowballed together with the Decline and…Whoknows of the media establishment, which delivers the raw material you and I try to make sense of. But, as you'd say, something funny happened on the way to the Forum.

President Obama made that White House Correspondents' Dinner address. Shortly afterward – coincidence, surely? – I discovered some writers you'd find really fascinating. Mainly a gentleman named John Lanchester. It's as if he's tailed the Vandals all the way to the Breadbasket, by which I mean the Financial District. Two articles, one right after the next: in the London Review of Books, Lanchester shows us how you make 3+5 = 64 with a 10% down payment. Meanwhile, over in The New Yorker, Lanchester teaches us how Wall Street bakes an upside-down cake with zero calories! It's a miracle! – no, not this financial chicanery, which would dip Attila the Hun's knee to admiring genuflection – but the speed, the rapidity, with which we are learning the detailed history of our Dark Ages.   

On June 4, two other remarkable events occurred. First, Obama gave a landmark speech at the University of Cairo – an initial attempt at reconciliation and progress with the Muslim world which, in its admissions of colonialism and proxy wars, reminded me slightly of Gorbachev's Glasnöst. Second, June 4 marked the 20th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square Crackdown in Beijing: an event that, we learned in the days preceding the anniversary, has been totally excised from the Chinese historical record. Totally? Not quite. In the last few days, the New York Times has reported on a handful of Chinese activists and artists who are struggling to fill in that titanic national aporia.

Learning about this, I can't help but think back to my own American history education. Twenty years after 1968, what could I know about the '60s? To a lot of American parents, the decade was an embarrassment – "if you remember it, you weren't there" and Joe Cocker slurring Beatles' lyrics at Woodstock – and, as I recall, "The Wonder Years" was primary source material, right? At any rate, it was a handful of pages in an outdated textbook, covered at the very end of the year, and you could probably wing the one question they'd place on the AP Exam.

See, Mr. Gibbon, I'm getting the impression that history works like the human psyche: trauma results in amnesia. It took more than 11 centuries for you to collect the fragments of Western memory into a coherent pattern. We don't have that much time. But we're working fast.

Wish you were here, Mr. Gibbon. I'm sure you'd have something interesting to say. You Twitter, right?

The President As Writer

by Katherine McNamara

the tragic vision

“No ideas but in things,” wrote William Carlos Williams; and about Lincoln: “the walking up and down in Springfield on the narrow walk between the two houses, day after day, with a neighbor's baby, borrowed for the occasion, sleeping inside his cape upon his shoulder to give him stability while thinking and composing his coming speeches....”

Here is Obama, for three years a community organizer in Chicago, during the mayoralty of the great Harold Washington, the hope of black people. Suddenly, Washington dies. The young man goes to the wake and sees the skull beneath the skin.

“There was no political organization in place, no clearly defined principles to follow. The entire of black politics had centered on one man who radiated like a sun. Now that he was gone, no one could agree on what that presence had meant.

“The loyalists squabbled. Factions emerged. Rumors flew. By Monday, the day the city council was to select a new mayor to serve until the special election, the coalition that had first put Harold in office was all but extinguished. I went down to City Hall that evening to watch this second death. . . .

“But power was patient and knew what it wanted; power could out-wait slogans and prayers and candlelight vigils. Around midnight, just before the council got around to taking a vote, the door to the chambers opened briefly and I saw two of the aldermen off in a huddle. One, black, had been Harold's man; the other, white, Vrdolyak's. They were whispering now, smiling briefly, then looking out at the still-chanting crowd and quickly suppressing their smiles, large, fleshy men in double-breasted suits with the same look of hunger to their eyes — men who knew the score.

“I left after that. I pushed through the crowds that overflowed into the streets and began walking across Daley Plaza toward my car. The wind whipped up cold and sharp as a blade, and I watched a hand-made sign tumble past me. HIS SPIRIT LIVES ON, the sign read in heavy block letters. And beneath the words of that picture I had seen so many times while waiting for a chair in Smitty's barbershop: the handsome, grizzled face; the indulgent smile; the twinkling eyes; now blowing across the empty space, as easily as an autumn leaf.”

Amid desolation, beyond irony, the writer has assented to the tragic sense of life. He does not give way to hopelessness; he observes what exists and must be engaged with, not wished away. He will bend his will like the arc of a bow to a higher purpose, which is, he recognizes, as real as, but of a different nature than, worldly power. Shedding only some of his skepticism (he notes wryly), he embraces — is embraced by — a Christian faith carried in traditions of the black church: its embodiment of the Word as agency, and so, its spur to social change.

“Out of necessity,” he would write, “the black church had to minister to the whole person. Out of necessity, the black church rarely had the luxury of separating individual salvation from collective salvation.” His hard-won knowledge, as radiant as his smile, is that “the sins of those who came to church were not so different from the sins of those who didn't, and so were as likely to be talked about with humor as with condemnation.” (He knows they see that he “knew their Book and shared their values and sang their songs,” but that part of him would always remain “removed, detached, an observer among them.”)

What he loved was the thisness of the community. “You needed to come to church precisely because you were of this world, not apart from it; rich, poor, sinner, saved, you needed to embrace Christ precisely because you had sins to wash away — because you were human and needed an ally in your difficult journey, to make the peaks and valleys smooth and render all those crooked paths straight.”

Obama's beloved community was the Rev. Jeremiah Wright's Church of Christ, which, for years, he attended every Sunday at 11 a.m. You can imagine his grief at the sacrifice which a media-amplified politics demanded of him, his forced parting from Wright, the man who had given him his beautiful shield against desolation, the audacity of hope.

still don't know how to put morality ahead of politics

Two writers, two post-modern presidents. One, Barak Obama, community organizer and law professor, is about to take office. The other, Vaclav Havel, dramatist, an organizer of his country's Civic Forum and its great spokesman against communist absolutism, serves as a moral voice in the world. In some respects, the distance between them is not very great.

On October 27, 1989, Havel was arrested by the old regime. Two months later, by unanimous vote, he was elected president of newly-independent Czechoslovakia. Two months after that, in February 1990, he stood before the American Congress, speaking (he understood) to the world. He had few political illusions. “As long as people are people, democracy in the full sense of the word will always remain an ideal,” he said, “a horizon” that might be approached in ways better or worse, but never wholly achieved. (Obama would call democracy a “conversation” in which the members of the polity worked out their future, based on the Constitution.) Rather, Havel spoke of what he called the “philosophical aspects” of the change that had come to “our corner” of Europe, because these would have wider implications, he warned, even for those nations, such as the United States, that had fortunately never suffered the horrors of a totalitarian system.

“Interests of all kinds — personal, selfish, state, national, group, and if you like, company interests — still considerably outweigh genuinely common and global interests,” he said. “We are still under the sway of the destructive and thoroughly vain belief that man is the pinnacle of creation, and not just a part of it, and that therefore everything is permitted to him. There are still many who say they are concerned not for themselves but for the cause, while they act demonstrably in their own interests and not for the cause at all. We are destroying the planet that was entrusted to us. We still close our eyes to the growing social, ethnic, and cultural conflicts in the world. From time to time we say that the anonymous megamachinery we have created for ourselves no longer serves us but, rather, has enslaved us, yet we fail to do anything about it.

“In other words, we still don't know how to put morality ahead of politics, science and economics. We are still incapable of understanding that the only genuine core of all our actions — if they are to be moral — is responsibility. Responsibility to something higher than my family, my country, my firm, my success. Responsibility to the order of Being, where all our actions are indelibly recorded and where, and only where, they will be properly judged. The interpreter or mediator between us and this higher authority is what is traditionally referred to as human conscience. If I subordinate my political behavior to this imperative, I can't go far wrong. If on the contrary, I am not guided by this voice, not even ten presidential schools with two thousand of the best political scientists in the world could help me.”

no one is exempt

Obama's conscience was formed by the influence of his mother and his grandparents, he has written, who taught him empathy, a virtue he places at the center of his moral code. It is, for him, the expression of the Golden Rule, which is “not simply a call to sympathy or charity, but as something more demanding, a call to stand in somebody's else's shoes and see through their eyes.”

If we were a country of empathetic citizens, he writes, perhaps bitterly, “[w]e wouldn't tolerate schools that don't teach, that are chronically underfunded and understaffed and under-inspired, if we thought that the children in them were like our children. It's hard to imagine the CO of a company giving himself a multimillion-dollar bonus while cutting health-care coverage for his workers if he thought they were in some sense his equals. And it's safe to assume that those in power would think longer and harder about launching a war if they envisioned their own sons and daughters in harm's way.”

The standard he sets for the citizenry is justice: “[I]f they are like us, then their struggles are our own. If we fail to help, we diminish ourselves.”

What he requires of himself is stringent: “I am obligated to try to see the world through George Bush's eyes, no matter how much I may disagree with him. That's what empathy does — it calls us all to task, the conservative and the liberal, the powerful and the powerless, the oppressed and the oppressor. We are all shaken out of our complacency. We are all forced beyond our limited vision.

“No one is exempt from the call to find common ground.”

a way to end the war that involved all sides in its solution

Early in 2007, in Washington, the Tory MP Michael Ancram spoke to an informal political salon — as he had talked to many such gatherings — about the necessity of talking with your enemies. For several years, he had been part of a forum working unofficially throughout the Middle East to organize exploratory dialogues among long-standing enemies. You do not have to like your enemies, he said firmly, but you do have to respect them, and dialog is part of the respect you must show them.

For background, he recounted an incident from earlier days. In 1993, he was minister for Northern Ireland. It was a time of great violence: assassinations, mass bombings, gun running, sectarian attacks. Terrible things happened. Yet, a signal had come through back-back channels from the IRA: “The war is over; help us end it.”

The words still give me shivers. Ancram, scion of an ancient Scottish Catholic noble family, educated by Benedictines who taught the necessary virtue of attentive listening, told us how the government proceeded. They revised their analysis, and understood they could not win the war. They began to change their public language, avoiding words and phrases they knew would incite adverse acts by the other side. They listened. They realized no permanent peace could be made without the IRA. They needed to open a dialog. A time came when direct talks would begin, without preconditions. The man Ancram had to face was the man who, as he knew full well, had sanctioned the death of one of his closest political friends.

The room gasped. Ancram did not flinch. It had been necessary to talk, he said, for we had to find a way to end the war that involved all sides in its solution.

the product of men

Obama wrote playfully that, as a professor of Constitutional law at University of Chicago, he sometimes imagined his work as being not unlike that of a theologian, “for, as I suspect was true of teaching Scripture, I found that my students often felt they knew the Constitution without having really read it.” Drawing the comparison a bit further, he noted how when we argue about deeply-held matters such as abortion or flag-burning, “we appeal to a higher authority — The Founding Fathers and the Constitution's drafters — to give us more direction.”

A deft play on the American ideal of a civic religion. But then he made a sharp — and, as I read him, essential — distinction in his thought between matters of faith, including, significantly, natural law, and matters of the polity. For, he wrote, our fundamental documents remain accessible after more than two centuries and if he has guided his students to them, he has nonetheless been no intermediary, "for unlike the books of Timothy or Luke, the founding documents— the Declaration of Independence, The Federalist Papers, and the Constitution— present themselves as the product of men.”

Pay attention to this: “the product of men.” At one time — Obama is clear about this — a man who looked like him would not have had the rights of an American citizen, but because the Constitution is a “living document, and must be read in the context of an ever-changing world,” it can be modified and adapted as the polity changes. He is deeply affronted, intellectually and morally, however, by the Republican habit of “changing the rules in the middle of the game,” by sheer force of power. He is critical of his own party when warranted, but finds, reasonably, that the Republicans have consistently used power politics at the expense of Constitutional processes.

He insists that, as citizens, no matter how deeply held our cause, we must make our case “subject to argument and amenable to reason.” (The one time he uses the verb sell, he puts it in quotes, as if with tweezers.) He is said to be a pragmatist, and if this is so, he puts himself squarely, vehemently, in line with the Founders, “as they sought to prevent not only absolute power,” but also “the very idea of absolute truth, the infallibility of any idea or ideology or theology or 'ism,' any tyrannical consistency that might lock future generations into a single, unalterable course, or drive both majorities and minorities into the cruelties of the Inquisition, the pogrom, the gulag, or the Jihad.”

He goes on: “The Founders may have trusted in God, but true to the Enlightenment spirit, they also trusted in the minds and senses that God had given them. They were suspicious of abstractions and liked asking questions, which is why at every turn in our early history theory yielded to fact and necessity. Jefferson helped to consolidate the power of the national government even as he claimed to deplore and reject such power. Adams's ideal of a politics grounded solely in the public interest — a politics without politics — was proven obsolete the moment Washington stepped down from office. It may be the vision of the Founders that inspires us, but it was their realism, their practicality and flexibility and curiosity, that ensured the Union's survival.”

Obama, the skeptic, the man of reason, can love the Union as ardently as Lincoln or Whitman ever did. It is a political love which might be possible only for the tragic sensibility, for we have become a nation in which torture has been justified at the highest levels of government. We have terrible truths to come to terms with, for as citizens we are responsible for the harm the nation has done, quite as much as for the good. Yet — it is the tragic vision again — he recognizes full well the limits of human reason and human intention, even when employed in good faith; nor does he suppose that good faith and politics are constant bedfellows.

reading Obama

In his books, a meditation on race, and a long reflection on the polity and the just and the immoral use of power, Obama — like Havel, like Ancram — has no illusion that the political conversation is not a difficult process. He distrusts the call to “bipartisanship,” which he sees, accurately, as a rigged kind of power play. He does not suppose, as I read him, that in public life people must like each other, but he does insist that they must learn to treat each other respectfully, and must talk to each other, and must, somehow, listen to each other, for in civic life reason and persuasion are the instruments of democratic governance. “Our politics are broken,” he told Pastor Rick Warren at the Saddleback Forum. He would hope to persuade us, without falling into fatal cliché, that we, citizens, must reasonably become the change we hope for. In an interesting way, his political realism echoes Dr. Williams’s poetics.

further reading

William Carlos Williams:
In the American Grain

Barak Obama:
Dreams from My Father, A Story of Race and Inheritance
The Audacity of Hope, Thoughs on Reclaiming the American Dream

Vaclav Havel:
The Art of the Impossible, Politics as Morality in Practice
Summer Meditations

“Obama's Fascinating Interview with Cathleen Falsani”

Mark Danner:
“Obama & Sweet-Potato Pie”

Jeremy Mercer's top 10 bookshops

From The Guardian:

After his life as a crime reporter in a Canadian city took a turn for the worse, Jeremy Mercer decided to head for Paris, where he happened upon the city's most famous bookshop, the legendary Shakespeare and Co. In Books, Baguettes and Bedbugs, Mercer describes the time he spent living in the bookshop, the people he met and his relationship with the shop's octogenarian owner. Here he chooses his 10 favourite bookshops from around the world.
"Bookstores are sanctuaries. Places to lose yourself, escape the harsh demands of daily life, find new ways to dream and new sources of inspiration. I love all booksellers; anybody who helps spread the word is doing noble work. But my favourite bookstores are the small eccentric independents run by passionate and usually slightly mad book lovers. These are some of the best."

More here.

Lifting the veil

From The Dawn:

Sughra Mehdi, Fahmida Riaz and Sadia Baloch focus on the past history of feminism which many have forgotten or are deliberately trying to erase from memory.

A champion of women’s movement: Khawaja Altaf Hussein Hali
(A few objections and their answers)
By Sughra Mehdi

With the advent of modern thought and the new era, people began to think of the lowly status of women in society. The world over movements for the education and freedom of women were initiated. In English the word “Feminism” began to be used for this movement. Its priorities were varied at different times and in different countries. The reason for this clearly is that the concept of feminism acquired breadth. The feminist movement began in India in the 19th century. The Brahmo Samaj, Arya Samaj and the Theosophical Society stressed the education and freedom of women. Voices were raised against all those traditions in whose name women were targets of oppression and cruelty. The most barbaric form of this was “sati”.

More here:

All mapped out

From The Guardian:

I once ordered a copy of Charles Booth's 1889 Descriptive Map of London Poverty from the London Topographical Society. Weeks, then months, passed, and I heard nothing. I may even have forgotten that I had ordered it. Then, early one Sunday morning, I was woken up by the sound of the doorbell. An elderly gentleman in a deerstalker hat with a tube under his arm asked my name, confirmed that I was the intended recipient of Booth's map, handed it to me, and was off. If only all purchases were made like that.

As any good geographer will tell you, all of life lies in maps and atlases, whether it be Booth's analysis of London, or something more monumental, like Joan Blaeu's magisterial Atlas Maior of 1665, recently reprinted by Taschen. If Booth's map offers you a tour of London's streets, Blaeu's mammoth atlas is a round-the-world trip from the safety of your armchair. As Blaeu wrote, "we may set eyes on far-off places without so much as leaving home: we traverse impassable ranges, cross rivers and seas on safety ... by the power of the imagination we swiftly journey East-West and North-South at a single glance".

More here.

The 10 Best Books of 2005

From The New York Times:

ON BEAUTY
By Zadie Smith.
Penguin Press, $25.95.
In her vibrant new book, a cultural-politics novel set in a place like Harvard, the author of ''White Teeth'' brings everything to the table: a crisp intellect, a lovely wit and enormous sympathy for the men, women and children who populate her story.

PREP
By Curtis Sittenfeld.
Random House, $21.95. Paper, $13.95.
This calm and memorably incisive first novel, about a scholarship girl who heads east to attend an elite prep school, casts an unshakable spell and has plenty to say about class, sex and character.

SATURDAY
By Ian McEwan.
Nan A. Talese/Doubleday, $26.
As bracing and as carefully constructed as anything McEwan has written, this astringent novel traces a day in the life of an English neurosurgeon who comes face to face with senseless violence.

More here.

Critical Digressions: Thanksgiving, Drama, or Turkey and Capote

Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls,

We celebrated Thanksgiving with traditional fervor and gaiety in the American capital. Being an expatriate, we have coveted invitations to native Thanksgiving dinners in years past but recently have been able to manage something on our own; Turkey, drunkenness, familial tension. It really is a wonderful sort of holiday as we all thank our Gods or each other for being where we are, kind of like that song that goes, "It's not where you're from/ It's where you're at."

Thanksgiving produces great drama: there's drama in the way the turkey is pulled out from the oven, arrives on the table, and in the way the knife is held in abeyance over the large bird, typically with the largest hands of a particular clan. And the inevitably drunk patriarch may rise up after the meal, bang his belly against the edge of table, and make slurred pronouncements causing bottles to fall, faces to redden. Some run out to sniffle or smoke. Others, in attempting to steady the old man, take elbows in the jaw. You get the picture.

Through this weekend, we watched several movies including "Capote" - all critically feted, none dramatic. Capote, the New York Review of Books notes, "might have been about anything...a bittersweet coming-of-age story with a triumphantly happy ending...[or of the] genre of celebrity decline" but it is instead the "story of how Capote came to write and publish In Cold Blood." And strangely, we were underwhelmed (and find ourselves not only in the minority but in the company of the cantankerous octogenarian, Stanley Kauffmann). The problem is that a writer writing about something, anything, is not dramatic - even a flamboyant, voluble writer writing about a couple of grisly murders.

So how does a director, even one as able as Bennett Miller, depict a series of writerly crises on screen? Facial twitches? No. Falling bottles? Perhaps. Facial twitches and falling bottles? More likely. It is, to be fair, a tall order. Bottles do fall and knives are held in abeyance in films that feature writers including "Barfly" and "Misery" but neither is attempting to transcribe a writer's inner life. In fact, the only comparable project that comes to mind is the Coen Brothers’ "Barton Fink", another pretty, flat film. Joel may tell you that drama was not his ambition but acknowledging the lack of drama doesn't make it okay.

Dellilo, for instance, has attempted the lack of drama as an aesthetic project. The following is characteristic the prose in Cosmopolis, a pretty, flat, generally poorly reviewed novel: “He didn’t know what he wanted. Then he knew. He wanted to get a haircut.” Not only is there no drama in the narrative trajectory of the book - man gets haircut – but there’s no drama syntactically; read together, the effect of the sentences is of briskness and there is no drama in sustained briskness.

On the other hand, there is more drama in Updike’s prose (even though Updike is not known to be a great dramatist): “With an effort of spatial imagination he perceived that a mirror does not reverse our motion, though it does transpose our ears, and gives our mouth a tweak, so that the face even of a loved one looks familiar and ugly when seen in a mirror, the way she – queer thought! – always sees it. He saw that a mirror poised in its midst would not affect the motion of an army…and often half a reflected cloud matched the half of another beyond the building’s edge, moving as one, pierced by a jet trail as though by Cupid’s arrow.” You will, of course, notice that the rich, sonorous cadence of the coupled sentences is broken by the short, comma-less, next sentence: “The disaster sat light on the city’s heart.” This is drama.

So if you’ve had enough drama this weekend, lie on the couch, arms dangling, reading Cosmopolis, watching Capote. On the other hand, if your old man didn’t get up, drop things and yell at everybody, pick up Franzen’s Corrections - a dramatic book that ends with Thanksgiving dinner - and watch the Oscar nominated "Affliction" - a character study in a bleak setting that beats "Capote" hands down. For more pointers, pontification, and of course, dramatic digressions, ladies and gentlemen, remain tuned. Right here.

Other Critical Digressions:
Gangbanging and Notions of the Self
Dispatch from Cambridge (or Notes on Deconstructing Chicken)
Literary Pugilists, Underground Men
The Naipaulian Imperative and the Phenomenon of the Post-National
Dispatch from Karachi
The Media Generation and Nazia Hassan

A new biography looks at a crucial time in the life of the master of spiritual desolation

From The Washington Post:

Like Pascal, Kierkegaard and Baudelaire, Franz Kafka (1883- 1924) is one of the great masters of spiritual desolation. We don't actually read his work, we are harrowed by it. In German of classical directness and purity, this desk functionary of the Prague Workers' Accident Insurance Institute presents tableau after tableau of what Pascal called " la misre de l'homme sans Dieu ," the misery of man without God. All of Kafka's unfortunate protagonists -- Georg Bendemann in "The Judgment," Gregor Samsa in "The Metamorphosis," Josef K. in The Trial -- struggle against the one great, serious truth about life: Each of us is fundamentally and inescapably alone, especially in the face of death.

Reiner Stach's Kafka builds on much of this research. (Drawing by Franz Kafka and a portrait taken in 1910 (From "Kafka").

More here.

100 Notable Books of the Year

From The New York Times:

Fiction & Poetry

BEYOND BLACK. By Hilary Mantel. (John Macrae/Holt, $26.) Neurotic, demanding ghosts haunt a British clairvoyant in this darkly comic novel.

A CHANGED MAN. By Francine Prose. (HarperCollins, $24.95.) A neo-Nazi engages a Jewish human rights leader in this morally concerned novel, asking for help in his effort to repent.

COLLECTED POEMS, 1943-2004. By Richard Wilbur. (Harcourt, $35.) This urbane poetry survived the age of Ginsberg, Lowell and Plath.

EMPIRE RISING. By Thomas Kelly. (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $25.) A muscular historical novel in which the Irish erect the Empire State Building in a cheerfully corrupt New York.

ENVY. By Kathryn Harrison. (Random House, $24.95.) A psychoanalyst is unhappy but distant until Greek-tragedy things start happening in this novel by an ace student of sexual violation.

More here.

Young and Privileged, but Writing Vividly of Africa's Child Soldiers

From The New York Times:

POTOMAC, Md., Nov. 21 - Uzodinma Iweala's brutal debut novel, "Beasts of No Nation," is filled with the stink of violence. Mr. Iweala's own life couldn't be further removed from his main character's. Mr. Iweala, or Uzo, as his friends call him, grew up in this Washington suburb. He attended the elite St. Albans School, then Harvard, from which he graduated in 2004. He has perfect posture, a soft, polite voice, a scarf elegantly draped around his neck. He has just turned 23, and he has known little suffering in his young life. From where, then, did this horrifying story about child soldiers in Africa come?

"In my senior year of high school, I read an article in Newsweek about child soldiers in Sierra Leone," said Mr. Iweala, sitting in the large living room of his parents' home, his voice still hoarse from yelling at the Harvard-Yale football game. "I felt a sense of shock - this was happening in the region where I'm from and people don't know about it. I wanted to understand." So he wrote a three-page sketch about a child soldier, then put it away.

At Harvard, Mr. Iweala studied creative writing, learning the basics of character and plot development in fiction. Then, one day in his junior year, Mr. Iweala, who was co-president of the African Students Association, heard a speaker, China Keitetsi, describe her experiences after being kidnapped at 9 and forced to fight in the Ugandan civil war. Afterward, Mr. Iweala said, he told Ms. Keitetsi that his parents wanted him to go to medical school. "She said, 'Oh, that's interesting; I have no parents.' "

Deeply moved by their meeting, he dug up his old sketch and began to expand it. This time "it just flowed," he remembered.

More here.

A Self-Help Book of Science

From American Scientist:

The Velocity of Honey's 24 chapters are short meditations on questions that are probably never going to make the cover of Science or Nature, such as why toast falls butter side down and why time seems to speed up as we grow older. You might call them crossword puzzles for the scientifically minded—they offer a mental workout for its own sake but also soothe and amuse. In fact, author Jay Ingram calls The Velocity of Honey "a self-help book." Its essays "reduce stress," he says, and offer "a brief interruption in the ridiculous rush of life." Ingram, who hosts the Discovery Channel's science program Daily Planet, says he picked the topics for their appeal—adding with characteristic self-irony that this means their appeal to him. Somehow, he says, that turned out to mean there is a lot of physics and psychology and not much in between. (Ingram himself has a master's degree in microbiology from the University of Toronto.)

But the greatest attraction of The Velocity of Honey is Ingram's intelligent but gentle, even self-deprecating, personality. Maybe I'm getting old, but I"m increasingly reluctant to buy a book by a brash young man who wants to buttonhole me and convince me that science is dead or everything bad is good for me. I'd rather spend the time with someone who asks me with a twinkle in his eye whether I'd venture to guess why toast always falls butter side down.

More here.

Yes, Virginia

From The New York Times:

IN January 1915, when Virginia Woolf was 33, she and her husband, Leonard, resolved to do three things: lease a house outside London; acquire a printing press; and buy a bulldog. As Julia Briggs recounts in her intelligent and well-researched new biography of Woolf, the couple never got the dog, but the creation of the Hogarth Press - named after Hogarth House, their new home - significantly influenced 20th-century literature. Purposely seeking out "work that might not otherwise get into print," they published T. S. Eliot, Katherine Mansfield and Woolf herself. Freed from commercial pressures, Woolf could now pursue her most "radically experimental" leanings, and in her formal innovation, she became a pioneer of modernism.

Today, some of Woolf's books seem stylized, at times experimental for the sake of being experimental - "The Waves" comes to mind - but her most widely read and admired works, including "To the Lighthouse" and "Mrs. Dalloway," are read and admired for a reason. Briggs's subtitle pays tribute to Woolf's exploration of the inner life, her ability to capture the nebulousness of the human experience as it plays out second by second and translate it, in thrillingly nuanced ways, into words.

More here.

George W's nemesis

From The Guardian:

Ever found yourself between a rock and a hard place? You loathe George Bush, for example, yet feel queasy looking to Michael Moore or George Galloway as your lodestar. You want to demonstrate against the war, or just against the handling of its fallout, but aren't sure you want to march under the same banner as Bolsheviks for the Republic of Palestine.

If this strikes a chord, Al Franken is for you. As a hammer of Bush, Karl Rove and Co, the liberal comedian and nemesis of the right-wing shock-jocks has all of Moore's wit and audacity and perhaps a touch of his ego, but avoids sounding like a propagandist. His latest book, subtle, laugh-or-cry-out-loud and ultimately devastating, is Michael Moore without the exclamation marks.

More here.

Generation Rx

From The New York Times:

APOCALYPTIC literature naturally gravitates toward the maudlin, lamenting that the world is going to hell in a handbasket, usually courtesy of someone like Eminem orTom DeLay. This is what makes Greg Critser's "Generation Rx" such an unexpected delight. Although his message is unrelievedly depressing - drug companies, with the nation's physicians and the federal government already on the payroll, have transmogrified a self-reliant nation into a herd of functional drug addicts - there is something so congenial and non-self-righteous about the way he tells his story that few of the scoundrels singled out for public obloquy will take personal offense.

Thus, describing the evolution of Glaxo from a sleeping giant to a juggernaut, Critser says that "in the boggy pharma jungle," the company "swung on the vine of prior greatness while withering on stultifying British business practices." Marveling at the liver, he writes, "It is the only organ that can, with time, regenerate itself, a kind of Donald Trump of the human body." And he identifies Washington as "an unfathomable brothel to all but the Reverends Rove and Cheney."

More here.

Writer, publisher and tea-seller caters to a readership thirsting for Hindi

From The Guardian:

For two decades, evening commuters have come to sip coppery brown tea at Laxman Rao's roadside stall on a busy South Delhi main road, to the sound of the blaring horns of passing traffic. But in recent years, customers come not for sugary chai but for a taste of Rao's bittersweet words. Rao is the author of 18 novels, plays and political essays in Hindi, India's national language which is thought to vie with Spanish to be the world's third most-spoken mother tongue. Like most Hindi novelists he considers writing stories a calling, one he supports with the 4,000 rupees (£50) a month he makes from selling tea. "For 20 years I have made no money from my books."

In the last few years English, which bound together a nation of 800 tongues and dialects and connected India to the outside world, has faced a challenge from native languages. As literacy levels rise in India, there is a palpable shift to a more subcontinental lingua franca and Hindi's reach is lengthening. Although it is spoken by half of India's 1 billion people, its writing is absent in the literary canon of India, which is dominated by exiles such as Salman Rushdie and Vikram Seth. "I do not read these books. They do not talk about the India I know," says Rao. "The stories do not mean anything to me or people like me. India lives in villages, small towns, on streets. The authors do not."

More here.

Cast out of Eden

From The Guardian:

Nadine Gordimer presents a bleak portrait of present-day South Africa in Get a Life, says Jane Stevenson. Most of Nadine Gordimer's oeuvre has been shaped by the struggle against apartheid, in which she played an outstanding and honourable part. In this novel, she is once more bearing witness, but to other truths. Old South Africa was distorted by racism, but the new South Africa, she suggests, also has a potentially fatal flaw. The novel challenges the progressivism which brashly overrides the past and insists on starting from today, on grounds both human and ecological.

Genesis suggests that paradise will always be lost, that mistakes are irreparable and that the older brother, Cain, will always kill Abel. Similarly, the novel suggests that paradise will be destroyed - and regretted - that the past cannot be escaped, and that South African blacks will never catch up with the whites. Not for the first time, Nadine Gordimer is saying things which people are not going to want to hear.

More here.

'Are Men Necessary?': See the Girl With the Red Dress On

From The New York Times:

LET'S, for a moment, judge a book by its cover. One need not read Maureen Dowd's "Are Men Necessary?" to answer the question. The retro pulp-fiction jacket features a bombshell in a clingy red dress strap-hanging under the leering gaze of her fellow subway riders, all male. The title, "Are Men Necessary?," refers nominally to scientific speculation that the Y chromosome, which has been shedding genes over evolutionary time, may disappear entirely within the next ten million years, a hypothesis countered by newer studies showing that the Y of the human species has been stable for the past six million years. Her Cuisinart style of info processing and her embrace of popular culture invite all manner of unexpected applications, allowing, for example, a "Seinfeld" character to help us understand the relative simplicity of males, whose sex is determined by only one Y, as opposed to the female's two X's. "Maybe that 'Seinfeld' episode is right," she muses, "where George Costanza tries to prove that man's passions can all be fulfilled at the same time if he can watch a hand-held TV while 'pleasuring' a woman while eating a pastrami on rye with spicy mustard."

More here.

A chilling diagnosis of how the war on terrorism has been waged thus far

From The Washington Post:

"We are losing," warn Daniel Benjamin and Steven Simon on the opening page of The Next Attack . In this chilling new book, they argue that the United States has, in the years since 9/11, frittered away more time than it took to win World War II: The Bush administration has plunged into a war of choice in Iraq that played into Osama bin Laden's hands and produced "an extraordinary amount of wheel-spinning" instead of shoring up America's domestic defenses. Meanwhile, the public's attention has wandered, and the jihadist movement has weathered the loss of its Afghan haven and recast itself into new, more supple forms. "Even in his most feverish reveries," the authors write, bin Laden could not "have imagined that America would stumble so badly."This book's Iraq chapters come as a glum reminder that, all too often, the debate over whether to invade Iraq was hermetically sealed off from the wider question of how best to destroy al Qaeda -- as an organization, a network, a brand and an ideology. Even the administration's critics (and human-rights-minded liberal hawks like George Packer) rarely talked about a potential war's opportunity cost -- about the range of urgent, attainable counterterrorism tasks that would be left undone because Washington had chosen to make the Iraq gamble its top post-9/11 priority.

And there is plenty to do.

More here.

'The Chosen': Getting In

From The New York Times:

This is a large part of the story Jerome Karabel, a professor of sociology at the University of California, Berkeley, tells in "The Chosen: The Hidden History of Admission and Exclusion at Harvard, Yale, and Princeton." Karabel's tale begins in 1900, when young men like Franklin Delano Roosevelt graduated from academies like Groton, St. Paul's and Choate, moved easily and almost automatically to Cambridge, New Haven or Princeton and set the cultural tone at the country's prestigious universities. When they arrived on campus, these scions of the Protestant Establishment didn't concern themselves overly much with academics. Their main proving grounds were extracurricular activities and social life. Positioning themselves to edit the school paper or join the right secret society, they strove to establish their social worth and to prove how much they embodied the virtues of the Harvard Man, the Yale Man or the Princeton Man. That meant being effortlessly athletic, charismatic, fair, brave, modest and, above all, a leader of men.

In those days, most people who applied to schools like Harvard were admitted because people who weren't from the right social class didn't bother applying. But Jews, for reasons that are not clear, never got the message. They applied to Harvard, Yale and Princeton even though they weren't really wanted. And because many were so academically qualified, they increasingly got in.

More here.

'Team of Rivals': Friends of Abe

From The New York Times:

"Team of Rivals" (an apt but uninspiring title) opens in May 1860 with four men awaiting news from the national convention of the Republican Party in Chicago. Thousands of supporters were gathered in Auburn, N.Y., where a cannon was primed to fire a salute to the expected nomination of Senator William Henry Seward for president. In Columbus, Ohio, Gov. Salmon P. Chase hoped that if Seward faltered, the mantle would fall on his shoulders. In St. Louis, 66-year-old Edward Bates, a judge who still called himself a Whig, hoped the convention might turn to him as the only candidate who could carry the conservative free states, whose electoral votes were necessary for a Republican victory. In Springfield, Ill., a former one-term congressman who had been twice defeated for election to the Senate waited with resigned expectation that his long-shot candidacy would be flattened by the Seward steamroller.

Having set the stage for the nominating convention, Goodwin recounts the drama of Lincoln's surprising first-ballot strength (102 votes to Seward's 173½, Chase's 49, and Bates's 48). On the second ballot Lincoln pulled almost even with Seward, and amid rising excitement in a convention hall packed with a leather-lunged home-state cheering section, he won a stunning victory on the third ballot. All three of his shocked rivals believed the better man had lost. Lincoln's subsequent election as president did not change their minds.

The Republican victory without a single electoral vote (and scarcely any popular votes) from the 15 slave states provoked seven of them to secede and form the Confederate States of America. In this crisis, Lincoln took the unparalleled step of appointing to his cabinet all three of his rivals plus a fourth, Simon Cameron, Pennsylvania's favorite son. Seward got the top spot as secretary of state; Chase became secretary of the Treasury, Bates attorney general and Cameron secretary of war. Could this "team of rivals," each of them initially convinced of his superiority to the inexperienced president, work together in harmony? Joseph Medill, the editor of The Chicago Tribune and one of Lincoln's most loyal supporters, later asked the president why he had made these appointments. "We needed the strongest men of the party in the cabinet," Lincoln replied. "These were the very strongest men. Then I had no right to deprive the country of their services." They were indeed strong men, Goodwin notes. "But in the end, it was the prairie lawyer from Springfield who would emerge as the strongest of them all."

More here.

Margaret Atwood's The Penelopiad: 'A real virtuoso piece'

From The Guardian:

When children's novelist Adèle Geras found that she and Margaret Atwood had both chosen the same subject - Odysseus' wife, Penelope - for their latest books, she looked forward to the chance to talk to her about it.

"This is, as I absolutely knew it would be way back in March, a real virtuoso piece. A corker. Fantastic. Intelligent. Every bit as good as promised. I love it and will treasure the very beautiful volume that was sent to me.

I was particularly interested to see where Atwood's emphases and my own differed and converged. We both, for instance, broken up a prose narrative with poetry. The idea of turning The Odyssey around so that Penelope's story is foregrounded occurred to us both. In Atwood's book, Penelope speaks from the land of the dead in a voice that is laconic, humorous and clever. It's my feeling that this may be how the author herself speaks, but I've no way of knowing. Penelope's weaving is important in both our novels, but I've turned Odysseus' adventures into pictures appearing on his wife's loom - a notion that originates in Penelope Shuttle's (yes, really) poem, Penelope. Argos the dog plays a part in my story but not in Atwood's".

More here.

US Patent Office issues first storyline patent in history

From eMediaWire:

Further to a policy of publishing patent applications eighteen months after filing, the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office is scheduled to publish history’s first “storyline patent” application today. The publication will be based on a utility patent application filed by Andrew Knight in November, 2003, the first such application to claim a fictional storyline.

Knight, a rocket engine inventor, registered patent agent, and graduate of MIT and Georgetown Law, will assert publication-based provisional patent rights against anyone whose activities may fall within the scope of his published claims, including all major motion picture manufacturers and distributors, book publishers and distributors, television studios and broadcasters, and movie theaters. According to the official Patent Office website, provisional rights “provide a patentee with the opportunity to obtain a reasonable royalty from a third party that infringes a published application claim provided actual notice is given to the third party by [the] applicant, and a patent issues from the application with a substantially identical claim.”

More here. (And - I'm stepping out a bit here - the site of the insipid bastards trying to make money off of patenting plots.)

The greatest intellectual

Emma Brockes in The Guardian:

Despite his belief that most journalists are unwitting upholders of western imperialism, Noam Chomsky, the radical's radical, agrees to see me at his office in Boston. He works here as a professor of linguistics, a sort of Clark Kent alter ego to his activist Superman, in a nubbly old jumper, big white trainers and a grandad jacket with pockets designed to accomodate a Thermos. There is a half-finished packet of fig rolls on the desk. Such is the effect of an hour spent with Chomsky that, writing this, I wonder: is it wrong to mention the fig rolls when there is undocumented suffering going on in El Salvador?

Chomsky's activism has its roots in his childhood. He grew up in the depression of the 1930s, the son of William Chomsky and Elsie Simonofsky, Russian immigrants to Philadelphia. He describes the family as "working-class Jews", most of whom were unemployed, although his parents, both teachers, were lucky enough to work. There was no sense of America as the promised land: "It wasn't much of an opportunity-giver in my immediate family," he says, although it was an improvement on the pogroms of Russia, which none the less Chomsky can't help qualifying as "not very bad, by contemporary standards. In the worst of the major massacres, I think about 49 people were killed."

More here.

Guarding the bulldog

From The London Times:

Winston Churchill's bodyguard had his share of dangerous moments. But his job gave him a unique insight into the great man's strengths and flaws — as recently unearthed memoirs reveal. They were together, too, when the war was won. "Ah, the bloody beast is dead," Churchill said, "elated and with much emphasis", when he heard of Mussolini's fate. But when told Hitler was gone, he went to a window and looked out, remaining silent for some time. Thompson asked if he thought Hitler had committed suicide. "That is the way I should have expected him to have died," he said. "That is what I would have done under the same circumstances." On VE Day he sent Thompson back to get his cigars before greeting the crowds. "They expect it of me," he said, the showman to the fore. (Picture)

More here.

The Reporter's Arab Library

Robert Worth in The New York Times:

I FIRST saw the book more than two years ago while wandering down Mutanabi Street in Baghdad, where the booksellers gather on Friday mornings. It was a frayed paperback set among stacks of aging 1980's magazines and periodicals, the refuse of Iraq's long intellectual isolation. On the cover was a dim gold sun over sand dunes, and the title: "Arabian Sands" (1959), by Wilfred Thesiger.

"Their hands had been cut off simply because they had been circumcised in a manner which the king had forbidden. I could not forget the twitching face and pain-filled eyes of one gentle, delicate-looking youth. I had been told that when the Amir's slave hesitated to execute this savage punishment he held out his hand, saying, 'Cut. I am not afraid.' "

But it was not the exoticism of Thesiger's books that lured me. It was almost the opposite: he helped me understand the human roots of the Arab world's political violence. He had seen that world before it was changed forever by the discovery of oil, and he conveyed the pitilessness of the Arab tribesmen he traveled with, their fierce familial pride, their wild generosity. Above all, Thesiger made me see more in Iraq than a blasted slaughterhouse. If not for him, I might never have returned.

One of the strangest and most wonderful things about Iraq, to Western eyes, is that the ancient past is so interwoven with the present. It's not just the Babylonian ruins poking up among the housing projects. I have spoken to weeping pilgrims who seemed to make no distinction between the killing of the Shiite martyr Hussein in A.D. 680 and of friends and relatives who died last week. Politicians routinely impugn their rivals as Iranian stooges by calling them Safawees, as if the Safavid empire of Persia (1502-1736) still existed. Insurgents toting AK-47's openly say they want to bring the country back to the early seventh century.

More here.

Margaret Atwood makes her acting debut

From The Guardian:

Novelist Margaret Atwood and Phyllida Lloyd first met in 2002, at the premiere of the opera of Atwood's novel The Handmaid's Tale, directed by Lloyd. Now they have collaborated on a staged reading of Atwood's latest book, The Penelopiad, a reinterpretation of the Odyssey told by Odysseus's wife Penelope and her 12 maids (who were hanged by Odysseus on his return) from the underworld where they have languished for centuries. Atwood is to play the part of Penelope.

Margaret Atwood Phyllida and I first talked about staging The Penelopiad last fall, when she was in Toronto directing The Handmaid's Tale, the opera. I had just finished writing The Penelopiad and Phyllida said she'd like to read it. We agreed it had a theatrical dimension, and when I was next in England we got together to talk it over. Various schemes were suggested, and finally we decided to do this staged reading. It's not a fully fledged performance and it's been done on a shoestring. And I'm playing the part of Penelope because I'm cheap - in fact, I'm free.

More here.

Waiting for an Islamic Enlightenment

Tariq Ali on "No God But God" in the Guardian:

Reza Aslan is an Iranian-American writer, a Shia by persuasion, and informs us in the prologue to his book that he will be denounced as an apostate by some and an apologist by others, but that the latter does not bother him since "there is no higher calling than to defend one's faith", especially in times of ignorance and hate.

The Shia sects and some of their more esoteric beliefs have little to do with Islamic theology. An Iranian equivalent of Monty Python's Life of Brian will deconstruct all this one day. Shia mythology (some of it uncritically recycled here) transformed a crude bid for power by Ali's son, Hussain, and his defeat and death at the hands of the Caliph Yazid, into a sacred martyrdom commemorated to this day with an annual display of self-flagellation and blood-spilling. The reform solution is to ban the self-flagellation and instead encourage participants to donate their blood to hospitals. It's an amusing idea that misses the whole point about the processions, designed by the Shia clergy to encourage obedience, inculcate the idea of an eternal martyrdom and maintain their grip.

More here.

'Shakespeare'; 'A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare': Straight Out of Stratford

From The New York Times:

By now research and criticism have shed so much light on Shakespeare that anyone interested enough to read these books knows the broad outlines of his life: childhood and schooling in Stratford in a household probably hiding condemned Roman Catholicism under a Protestant facade; marriage at 18 to the 26-year-old Anne Hathaway and the births of three children; the so-called lost years, during which Will may have worked for a butcher (unlikely) or tutored in the homes of Lancashire nobility (more likely). The coming to London as actor, playwright and poet, involved in the rivalries among various acting companies and competition with fellow playwrights. Perhaps also something about the mainly good relations with two monarchs, Elizabeth and James, and with certain prominent noblemen. Finally, the retirement to Stratford and life as a wealthy landowner, only sporadically punctuated by collaboration with other dramatists.

Personally, I hail the anonymous student who stated, "Shakespeare's plays were written by William Shakespeare or another man of that name."

More here.

'Wake the people and make them think big'

From The Guardian:

Of the two greatest dramatists of the 19th century, Chekhov and Ibsen, it is the infinitely lovable Dr Chekhov who holds the highest place in our affections, both as man and as author. But Ibsen, the forbidding man of the north - accusatory eyes fiercely staring out at us from behind steel-rimmed spectacles, thin, severe lips tightly pursed amid the bizarre facial topiary - may be the one who speaks most urgently to us today. At the time of his death, almost 100 years ago, Henrik Ibsen's significance as a leader of thought was overwhelming. In 1900, the young James Joyce, still a student, wrote of him: "It must be questioned whether any man has held so firm an empire over the thinking world in modern times ... his genius as an artist faces all, shirks nothing ... the long roll of drama, ancient or modern, has few better things to show." Joyce (and later Wittgenstein) learned Norwegian specifically in order to read Ibsen's plays in the original.

More here.

A Passage to India: A Nobel Prize-winning economist explores his homeland's rich and quarrelsome heritage.

From The Washington Post:

If you laid all the economists in the world end to end, the old joke goes, you would never reach a conclusion. So it's all the more remarkable that it is as a practitioner of the "dismal science" that Amartya Sen won the Nobel Prize in 1998. Sen is a man of conclusions; he is also brilliant at marshalling, with both extensive research and empirical evidence, the arguments that justify his conclusions. The Argumentative Indian -- a collection of 16 essays, many reworked and expanded from lectures and previously published articles -- is an intellectual tour de force from an economist who can lay equal claim to the designations of sociologist, historian, political analyst and moral philosopher. It is a magisterial work, except that the adjective is not one of which Sen would approve.

That is because Sen uses it, along with "exoticist" and "curatorial," to describe the three perspectives from which the West has tended to view India (each of which he dissects and discredits with precision and finesse). He is particularly critical of the Western overemphasis on India's religiosity at the expense of any recognition of the country's equally impressive rationalist, scientific, mathematical and secular heritage, fields treated by Orientalists as "Western spheres of success."

More here.

'Saving Fish From Drowning': Bus of Fools

From The New York Times:

Amy Tan is among our great storytellers. In each of her previous novels, she has seduced readers with the intimate magic of her tale. In "The Joy Luck Club" and "The Bonesetter's Daughter," she enthralled us with the painful complexity of human relationships, especially between mothers and daughters. Obscure parts of history became as immediate as the reader's own experience; she made us breathe the air of other times and places.

Her newest novel, "Saving Fish From Drowning," half spoof and half fairy tale, is narrated by Bibi Chen, a San Francisco socialite and art dealer who was supposed to lead a group of high-powered friends on a trip down the Burma Road, starting in Lijiang in China and continuing across the border into Myanmar, appreciating cultural sites and natural beauty along the way. Bibi Chen has died under mysterious circumstances, but the group goes off on the trip anyway, and Bibi goes along as a spirit, invisible to the travelers, only sporadically able to influence what is going on, but very much involved with - and frequently rather annoyed by - her friends and their choices. A quirky narrator, alternately omniscient and helpless, she is enthusiastic, colorful and spirited, but also self-important, snobbish and didactic.

More here.

The Secret Story of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion

Eli Eshed writes for Haaretz.com about a unique comic book:

"This comic book is not about superheroes or zany adventures. It is a documentary about the most notorious anti-Semitic diatribe of all time, "The Protocols of the Elders of Zion." And it is the swan song of Will Eisner, arguably America's most famous and influential cartoonist...In 1999, Eisner learned the identity of the real author of "The Protocols" - Mathieu Golovinski, a Russian from an aristocratic family that had lost its fortune. His father had been a friend of Dostoyevsky. A Russian historian by the name of Mikhail Lepekhine was doing research in the archives of the Russian secret police when he found proof that "The Protocols" were written in 1898 by Golovinski, who was living in France at the time (ironically, this Golovinski ended up working for Trotsky, the man who so many anti-Semites regarded as the ringleader of the conspiracy described in "The Protocols"). Eisner decided to include this material in his book.

But what Eisner offers us here is neither a thriller, nor a "graphic" novel. Anyone merely looking for a story will be disappointed. In practice, it is a continuation of the educational work he did for the American army. The book articulates his credo that comics can convey complicated ideas in a simple manner, comprehensible to all. Eisner has put together a "graphic history," admittedly fascinating, which traces the route of "The Protocols" in words and pictures - from Joly, who was hoping to bring about the downfall of Napoleon III, to the petty forger, Golovinski, a corrupt nobleman who cooked up a fake conspiracy on the orders of the Russian secret police, and finally, a power-crazed priest by the name of Nilus who sincerely believed in their authenticity."

More here

Irish stylist springs Booker surprise

From The Guardian:

The veteran Irish stylist John Banville brought off one of the biggest literary coups last night when he took the £50,000 Booker Prize from under the noses of the bookies and the literary insiders. A 7-1 outsider in the betting odds and untipped by virtually any critic, his novel The Sea was declared victorious in a contest which the judges' chairman, John Sutherland, said had been "painful" in its closeness. Banville triumphed when Professor Sutherland cast his chairman's vote in his favour. Until then, the judges were tied, with two backing Banville and two, it is understood, supporting the runner-up, Kazuo Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go.

More here.

Critical Digressions: Literary Pugilists, Underground Men

Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls,

After being attacked for a number of years by a new generation of literary critics – indeed, sucker-punched, phantom-punched, even body-slammed – “contemporary” (or “postmodern”) prose has hit back: in this month’s Harper’s, one of our favorite publications (less than $10.99 for an annual subscription), one Ben Marcus has donned his fighting gloves – which seem a little big for his hands, his pasty, bony frame – climbed into the ring, earnestly, knocky-kneed, sweating from the hot lights, the camera flashes, the hoarse roar of the audience, the sense of anticipation, broken noses, blood...

Like Dostoevsky’s Underground Man, Ben announces, “I am writing this essay from…a hole...” He continues:

“…it’s my view that…the elitists are not supposedly demanding writers such as myself but rather those who caution the culture away from literary developments, who insist that the narrative achievements of the past be ossified, lacquered, and rehearsed by younger generations. In this climate…writers are encouraged to behave like cover bands, embellishing the oldies, maybe, while ensuring that buried in the song is an old familiar melody to make us smile in recognition, so that we may read more from memory than by active attention.”

Fighting words, ladies and gentlemen! We’d like to tell you that Ben fought a good fight; that he came out swinging; that he staged an upset; that an underdog took on the emerging consensus on contemporary prose, shaped by the likes of James Wood, Dale Peck and B.R. Meyers, and according to Ben, Jonathan Franzen, Tom Wolfe and Jonathan Yardley. But criticism is no fairy-tale world, and Ben is no hero. A welterweight in a heavyweight fight, he doesn’t have enough behind his punch.

The ambitiously titled Why Experimental Fiction Threatens to Destroy Publishing, Jonathan Franzen, and Life As We Know It begins with a peculiar digression on the anatomy of the brain including a quick explanation of the Heschl’s gyri, Boca’s area and the Wernicke’s area (“think of Wernicke’s area as the reader’s muscle”), which may be novel, experimental, but has no business in a literary critique. Perhaps had Ben fused literary theory with neuroscience in a more serious, symbiotic, technically rigorous way, he may have achieved something. But just as Ben gets us thinking about the sort of neural implications of literature, he gets wishy-washy, namby-pamby:  “If we [writers] are successful, we touch or break readers’ hearts. But the heart cannot be trained to understand language…”

This, introduction may have been overlooked had Ben knocked the reigning heavyweight champions down by the second or third round. But he doesn’t. He quarrels with the prevailing neo-realist sensibilities of critics – that is, “The notion that reality can be represented only through a certain kind of narrative attention – and with those who argue against “literature as an art form, against the entire concept of artistic ambition.” He then has beef with Franzen: “Even while popular writing has quietly glided into the realm of the culturally elite, doling out its sever judgment of fiction that has not sold well, we have entered a time when book sales and artistic meit can be neatly equated without much of a fuss, Franzen has argued that complex writing, as practiced by…Joyce…Beckett and their descendents, is being forced upon readers by powerful cultural institutions…and that this less approachable literature…is doing serious damage to the commercial prospects for the literature industry.” Fair enough but not hard enough.

But though we want to Ben to win this fight because we champion underdogs and such contrarian projects on principle, Ben is quite unable to summon the fierce intelligence and evangelical zeal of, say, James Wood or the flamboyance and shock value of Dale Peck. He may pretend to be the Underground Man but he’s not a “sick man...a spiteful man...” In 2001, however, B.R. Meyers, more non-entity than underdog, managed the sort of upset Ben aspires to. Writing in the Atlantic, his thorough, articulate attack began: 

“Nothing gives me the feeling of having been born several decades too late quite like the modern ‘literary’ best seller. Give me a time-tested masterpiece or what critics patronizingly call a fun read – Sister Carrie or just plain Carrie. Give me anything, in fact, as long as it doesn’t have a recent prize jury’s seal of approval on the front and a clutch of raves on the back. In the bookstore I’ll sometimes sample what all the fuss is about, but one glance at the affected prose – “furious dabs of tulips stuttering,” say, or “in the dark before the day yet was” – and I’m hightailing it to the friendly spines of the Penguin Classics.”

A Reader's Manifesto: An Attack on the Growing Pretentiousness in American Literary Prose caused commotion as the Wall Street Journal, New Yorker, Harper’s, NYT, Washington Post and New York Review of Books joined the fray, a real battle royale. And Meyers came out on top: presently, he’s a senior editor at the Atlantic. When you hit hard, it doesn’t really matter what you say. So what’s Meyer’s beef? “What we are getting today is a remarkably crude form of affectation: a prose so repetitive, so elementary in syntax, and so numbing in its overuse of wordplay that it often demands less concentration that the average ‘genre’ novel.” And what is his methodology? He proceeds to categorize contemporary prose in four broad groups – “evocative,” “muscular,” “edgy,” “spare” and “generic ‘literary prose,’” – citing weak passages from the writers who he finds representative of each group; Proulx (Shipping News), McCarthy (All the Pretty Horses), Delilo (White Noise), Auster (City of Glass) and Guterson (Snow Falling on Ceders). Manifestly, Meyers packs a formidable punch.

Of course, even back in 2001, Meyers may have been a non-entity but was no underdog. Literary fashion has been changing well before him with Wood in pages the Guardian, and consequently in the New Republic, where Wood was joined by Dale “The Hatchet Man” Peck. Peck, you may remember, famously proclaimed, “I will say it once and for all, straight out: it all went wrong with James Joyce…Ulysses is nothing but a hoax upon literature.” Like Tyson, Peck writes, “Sometimes even I am overwhelmed by the extent of the revaluation I'm calling for, the sheer f***ing presumptuousness of it.” In one critique, in one sentence in fact, Peck excises “most of Joyce, half of Faulkner and Nabokov, nearly all of Gaddis, Pynchon and DeLillo, not to mention the contemporary heirs.” This assertion makes for interesting if idle exercises: we mull, for example, which half of The Sound the Fury Peck would excise if given the opportunity – the first two books, of course, Benjy’s and Quentin’s – and what effect his reductive, retrograde editing would have on the novel as a whole. Peck, like Mike Tyson before him, bites ears off, and often punches below the belt, smack in the crotch. Tyson once said, “I wish that you guys had children so I could kick them in the f***ing head or stomp on their testicles so you could feel my pain because that’s the pain I have waking up every day.”

The New York Review of Books noted that “Like his colleague at the New Republic, the estimable and excellent James Wood, Peck seems to want more novels like the great [19th] century social novels: serious, impassioned, fat.” Were we to step into the ring, brandishing our shiny brown muscles, we would simply but forcefully argue that the world, that civilization, and literature with it, has moved a hundred years forward since the 19th century. Looking fondly back towards realism is quite literally retrograde, like those other Underground Men, Wahabi Islamists urging Muslims to return to the 7th century. The novel, like these critics and the critical canon (that includes the Russian Formalists, the New Critics, Structuralists, the Post-Structuralists, whatever), is grounded in a certain context. It’s is a palimpsest, distilling, processing the anxieties, sensibilities, the diction, the colloquial, news, popular culture, of a particular time and place and people.

Dreiser and Dos Passos, for example - two different writers, the former considered traditional, the latter experimental - were unable to write novels that are relevant today except as history, as part of evolution of the modern novel. On the other hand and off the top of our head, we just finished Roth’s Goodbye, Columbus – his first novel – which features a Jewish protagonist, a class divide, a sectarian divide, specific references and allusions to the fifties in America – including, incidentally, the title itself – but were charmed by the sweet, straightforward adolescent love story (and the voice). Unlike Manhattan Transfer, Goodbye, Columbus remains relevant. Some novels transcend their cultural and temporal trappings.

We dig Roth for different reasons than, say, Melville, Dostoevsky, Dickens. We dig 20th century writers for different reasons than their antecedents: the lyrical and frenetic Marquez and Rushdie, the postcolonial and serious Naipaul and Coetzee, the very contemporary, Franzen and Wallace.

Sure, from Dostoevsky to Wallace, the conventions of storytelling have changed and prose has become more self-conscious but don’t let the Underground Men lecture you that change is good or bad; change is. And we’ll tell you this much: anybody advocating cutting Nabokov down to size should be paraded naked in the ring, weak chest, hairy buttocks, spindly legs exposed, wearing his own novel as a fig leaf. Sure, some contemporary prose has become gimmicky, adjective laden, rife with metaphor (which in a way, is arguably Nabokov’s legacy); and sure, silly alliteration needs to be caught, condemned. Meyers will rightly beat you up for it. That’s his job, and Wood’s and Peck’s. Ben nobly got into the ring but he needs to train harder if he’s going to go twelve rounds with them. Somebody, however, needs to hit back, to keep it real.

As Eddie Scrap Iron Dupris once said (somewhat heavy-handedly), “Boxing is an unnatural act…everything in boxing is backwards: sometimes the best way to deliver a punch is step back…But step too far and you ain’t fighting at all.” We’re not entirely sure if this is relevant but it sure sounds good.

Other Critical Digressions:

Gangbanging and Notions of the Self

Dispatch from Cambridge (or Notes on Deconstructing Chicken)

The Three-Step Program for Historical Inquiry

The Naipaulian Imperative and the Phenomenon of the Post-National

The Media Generation and Nazia Hassan

Dispatch from Karachi

Turning the Pages™: 14 Great Books

From Slashdot:

The British Library has made available 14 great books on its website. One of them is a 1508 notebook by Leonardo Da Vinci containing short treatises, notes and drawings of a wide range of subjects from mechanics to the moon. The site allows you to view the original manuscript written in Leonardo's own handwriting.

Slashdot commentary:

Will I have to flip my display to read Leonardo Da Vinci's backwards handwriting?

...they actually have a "mirror" button to flip it over for you!

Among other works included on the site is Jane Austen's early work, and the original Alice In Wonderland manuscript, written and illustrated by Lewis Carrol.

More here.

The Mournful Giant

From The Washington Post:

President Buchanan is reported to have said to President-elect Lincoln as they rode down Pennsylvania Avenue on the latter's Inauguration Day: "My dear sir, if you are as happy on entering the White House as I shall feel on returning to Wheatland [Buchanan's Pennsylvania home], you are a happy man indeed." But Abraham Lincoln did not expect to attain "happiness" in the White House or, as this intellectually energetic book shows, anywhere else. Lincoln's Melancholy sounds again the half-forgotten, minor-key background music of his life. Joshua Wolf Shenk rejects the notion that Lincoln got over his melancholy under the demands of the presidency; his Lincoln is never too busy to be gloomy. And, drawing on modern studies of depression, Shenk even has a reference -- humorous, I think -- to "happiness" as a mental disorder.

More here.

The Lazy Gardener: Harold Bloom

From The New York Sun:

Mr. Bloom is an impatient and mannered writer, unwilling or unable to take trouble over his prose or to follow an argument from premise to conclusion. Like a lazy gardener, he lets the seeds of his insights fall where they may, never lingering to make sure they have sprouted into an actual thought.

I am willing to believe that the jacket of Mr. Bloom's latest book was not designed by a sly satirist, but whoever arranged for the cover to read "Jesus and Yahweh, Harold Bloom, The Names Divine," could not have found a better image of the eminent critic's self-esteem. Surely a writer so lordly and unaccountable does not mind seeing his own name coupled with that of God: Mr. Bloom, too, writes in the spirit of "I am that I am," take it or leave it. (Photo from NY Times).

More here.

Critical Digressions: The Three-Step Program for Historical Inquiry

Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls,

When we read, especially fiction, we are all aware that that power and perspective have an inverse correlation. First-person narration – “I” – although intimate, is generally said to be “unreliable” (as your grade school English teacher must have informed you when lecturing on Huckleberry Finn or My Antonia or The Catcher in the Rye) while third-person narration is thought to render reality (as you learned in your class on Russian Realism in college). Compare the following: “On Monday morning, I slid out of bed, dull, dead, and only after a cigarette, and after having surveyed 3Quarksdaily, I felt alive, connected in some way to the world around me”; “He woke on Monday morning, wearily slid out of bed, smoked a cigarette, and sat before his laptop, surveying the posts on 3Quarksdaily.” The former employs idioms suggesting subjectivity – dull, dead, alive – with the latter catalogues facts. In a way, reality is measured by the distance between narrator and subject: when narration pulls away, it exerts more control over the subject and the “world” of a novel or story. (Of course, there are exceptions: Lolita and Midnight’s Children come immediately to mind.) But this is just a matter of perception. Both are constructions, fictions (although the wild popularity of 3Quarksdaily is an undisputable fact).

Historically, the third-person has had a monopoly on reality. History, in fact, has been written in the third-person. But we know that history is also a construction, and has often been a fiction. (Napoleon apparently said, “What is history, but a fable agreed upon...”) We are all aware that in the US, creationists are presently lobbying for the reintroduction of Biblical myths in history textbooks. Indeed for many literal interpreters of religious texts – Christian, Muslim, Jew or Hindu – Darwin’s monkey business is tantamount to blasphemy. Many elementary-school textbooks in madrassas across the Muslim world preach obscurantist Islamism. Interestingly, Pervez Hoodbhoy, the Pakistani physicist and activist, notes that in 80’s Afghan “children’s textbooks designed by the University of Nebraska under a $50million USAID” posed the following types of questions: “One group of maujahidin attack 50 Russian soldiers. In that attack 20 Russians are killed. How many Russians fled?” In India, during the recent tenure of the Hindu fundamentalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) – textbooks were rewritten to include the fictional “Indus-Saraswati civilization” and exclude “many awkward facts, like the assassination of…Gandhi by a Hindu Nationalist in 1948.” But these are obvious instances of history as fiction. We have to be cognizant of subtler fictions.

In his book, Good Muslim, Bad Muslim, Mahmood Mamdani, director of the Institute of African Studies at Columbia, writes:

“When [a 16th] century Italian missionary…brought a European map of the world-showing the discoveries of America-to China, he was surprised to find that the Chinese were offended by it. The map put Europe in the center of the world and split the Pacific, which meant that China appeared on the right-hand edge of the map. But the Chinese had always thought of China as literally the ‘Middle Kingdom,’ which obviously should have been in the center of the map. To please his hosts, [he] produced another map, one that split the Atlantic, making China more central. In China, maps are still drawn that way, but Europe clung to the first type of map. The most commonly used map used in North America shows the [US] at the center, sometimes splitting the Asian continent in two.”

Manifestly, even east and west are entirely subjective locations. And of course, “East” and “West,” are constructions, perhaps even fictions. On the first page of Orientalism, the book (and idea) that shook the grand edifice of history and historicism to it’s core, Edward Said, writes, “The Orient was almost a European invention, and had been since antiquity a place of romance, exotic beings, haunted memories and landscapes, remarkable experiences.” He continues:

“Orientalism is a style of thought based upon an ontological and epistemological distinction made between the ‘the Orient’ and…‘the Occident.’ Thus a very large mass of writers…poets, novelists, philosophers, political theorists, economist, and imperial administrators, have accepted the basic distinction between East and West as the starting point for elaborate theories, epics, novels, social descriptions, and political accounts concerning the Orient, its people, customs, ‘mind’, destiny, and so on.”

You, in the know, may be cognizant of Orientalism’s implications theoretically, but may be unable to apply it to our understanding of other histories or, for that matter, to popular discourse. It takes considerable effort. Earlier in the summer, you may remember, after watching the Ridley Scott’s “Kingdom of Heaven,” we became interested the series of events that have come to be known as the Crusades, the classic, epic (indeed the first) confrontation between the East and the West. How do you go about approaching the Crusades, events so infused with competing agendas and colored by contemporary events? This is how: you read three different versions – Runciman’s comprehensive, old school, Orientalist trilogy; P.M. Holt’s spare catalogue of events and personalities; and Amin Malouf’s engaging, novel, novel-like The Crusades Through Arab Eyes.

You may justifiably ask: why go through the trouble? Because history, ladies and gentlemen, informs notions about ourselves – who we are as much as what has been. For instance, we denizens of the Subcontinent, have been weaned on the Two-Nation Theory, a theory stipulating that Muslims and Hindus have historically been two separate nations. This theory, in various incarnations, has informed the way we have thought about ourselves since about 1857. In the last two decades, however, this theory has been debunked by the likes of Ayesha Jalal, the MacArthur-winning historian at Tufts; Willam Dalrymple, who in White Mughals depicts the syncretistic culture of the Subcontinent; and by H.M. Seervai, the Indian constitutional expert who in Legend and Reality ascribes Partition not to Jinnah but to Nehru and Mountbatten, the last British viceroy.

The implications of these academic inquires permeate popular discourse: when L.K. Advani, the hardline leader of the BJP (a party that instigated pogroms killing close to ten thousand people in Bombay and Gujrat) was recently invited to Pakistan, he proclaimed in an inspired moment that M.A. Jinnah, the “founder of Pakistan,” was not only a “great man” but a secular one. Although the BJP has since dismissed Advani because of his remarks, debate on Jinnah’s worldview has been reignited in the Pakistani and Indian presses. The idea of Jinnah (or the paradigmatic personae of Akbar and Aurengzeb for that matter), who has been a construct of British historiography and of Indian and Pakistani nationalisms (and, not to mention, of Attenborough’s film, “Gandhi”), is changing. Moreover, our conception of ourselves, of our history, is also changing.

We all have our own, parochial agendas. We need to make them explicit: this is who we are and this is why we read and write. The pretense and conceit of the third-person needs to be reviewed.  And we have to ask: why do we ask the questions we ask?

In the effort to make revise history, we propose a three-step-program for historical inquiry. (1) Labeling system for academia: Like the FDA, which regulates labels on everything from cereal boxes to psychopharmaceuticals, a global agency, the HHA – the Human History Agency – should be orgainzed to checks for idiom, tone and trajectory of history textbooks as well as the author’s background. (For example, WARNING: AUTHOR WORE WIGS AND WAS A KNOWN ANTI-SEMITE. THIS READING OF HISTORY IN STRONG DOSES WILL DISTORT YOUR UNDERSTANDING OF THE WORLD. SIDE EFFECTS INCLUDE HEADACHE, CONSTIPATION.) The agency would also review history sociologically and anthropologically, addressing questions that may include: why did Dante shove Mohammed in Hell when he borrowed Arabi’s eschatological infrastructure? Or, why is Socrates deified in epistemology when Khaldun, the father of economics, sociology and anthropology, is relegated to the periphery? Or, why is Said being revised? And, why the obscrantist legacy of men with pubic beards - from the Kharijites, Naqshbandiya, Ibn Tamiyah to the Salifis, Whahabis, Bannah, Qutb and Mawdoodi, exerts so much influence on modern Muslim political thought? In a strage way, Wikepedia, the online encyclopedia, plays a role similar to that of the proposed HHA. (2) Due diligence for readers: As we have mentioned, this requires reading at least two different books with competing agendas (for example, Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States should complement any readings in US history and McCullough’s 1776). (3) Travel: By traveling, we get perspective, an outsider’s perspective, a sort of third-person perspective – like the bird-eye view from the airplane – as well as an on-the-ground, insider’s perspective. Note, than when fused, the third-person and first-person is the second-person: you, we.

The year of magical thinking

From The Guardian:

Joan Didion and her husband, John Gregory Dunne, lived and worked together for 40 years. When he died suddenly in their New York apartment, as their daughter lay gravely ill in a nearby hospital, nothing prepared her for the tumult of grief and its assault on her sanity.

"Life changes fast.
   Life changes in the instant.
   You sit down to dinner and life as you know it ends.
   The question of self-pity."

For a long time I wrote nothing else.

   "Life changes in the instant.
   The ordinary instant."

At some point, in the interest of remembering what seemed most striking about what had happened, I considered adding those words, "the ordinary instant". I recognise now that there was nothing unusual in this: confronted with sudden disaster we all focus on how unremarkable the circumstances were in which the unthinkable occurred, the clear blue sky from which the plane fell, the routine errand that ended on the hard shoulder with the car in flames, the swings where the children were playing as usual when the rattlesnake struck from the ivy.

More here.

The happiest days of your life? Come off it

From The Guardian:

Curtis Sittenfeld evokes the horror of being a teenager in her examination of the cruelty of cool, Prep, says Viv Groskop. Lee Fiora is a dorky 14-year-old from an embarrassingly ordinary family in South Bend, Indiana, who ends up at Ault, an exclusive Massachusetts boarding school. Prep is the story of her survival there. It is about how she learns to fit in somewhere she doesn't belong, only to suffer social death the moment she finally feels accepted. Rejected by 14 publishers before it found a home, Curtis Sittenfeld's debut is an addictive portrait of adolescence - The OC meets Donna Tartt's The Secret History with flashes of Clueless. After rave reviews and becoming a New York Times bestseller, it has also been optioned as a film by Paramount.

More here.

Lewis Lapham's collection of journalism, Theater of War, shows he was right about Bush

From The Guardian:

Being right isn't enough, says Peter Preston. Here, in 20 graceful, witty, prophetic essays, is everything that's good about American journalism ( and a rich slice of American society, too). The editor of Harper's magazine writes like a dream, researches like a punctilious professor of classical history and finds his lonely judgments vindicated time and again. The difficulty - and it is a difficulty - is that that good side comes with a greyer side that readers outside America can't ignore, a built-in impotence verging on tragic irrelevance. But let's hit the high spots first.

More here.

Zadie Smith's Culture Warriors

From The New York Times:

SOME fearless outside referee had to barge in and try to adjudicate the culture wars, so let us rejoice that it's Zadie Smith. She brings almost everything you want to the task: humor, brains, objectivity, equanimity, empathy, a pitch-perfect ear for smugness and cant, and then still more humor. Born in 1975 - safely past the 1960's, the birth of our blues - she's not much burdened by heavy dogmatic baggage of her own. Being from England, she is one wry remove from the ground zero of these battles, America. She can't reconcile the warring camps - no one can - but "On Beauty" is that rare comic novel about the divisive cultural politics of the new century likely to amuse readers on the right as much as those on the left. (Not that they'll necessarily be laughing in the same places.) Yet Smith is up to more as well: she wants to rise above the fray even as she wallows in it, to hit a high note of idealism rather than sink into the general despair. How radical can you be? Blame it on her youth.

More here, and see also this.

Togetherness, once removed

From The Guardian:

The 'two lives' of Vikram Seth's new book belonged to his great-uncle, Shanti, and his great-aunt, Henny. Seth went to live with them in Hendon, north London, when he came from India to boarding school at Tonbridge aged 17. The curiosity they inspired in him then grew over the years into the kind of obsession that fuels his writing.

Seth's uncle was a dentist who had left Delhi to train in Europe; he lost an arm at Monte Cassino having volunteered for the Medical Corps in the war, but continued to practise until his retirement. His aunt was a German Jew who escaped in 1939, before her mother and sister were sent on transports and killed in Auschwitz and Theriesenstadt. Seth has spent much of the past six years trying to reconstruct their remarkable marriage from letters and memories and interviews he conducted with his uncle before his death. Despite all his efforts, he is left with a sense of incompleteness. 'I'm not sure anyone can understand a whole life,' he says, 'even their own.'

More here.

Dangerous Characters

From The New York Times:

The destruction of the World Trade Center transformed the preceding dozen years, since the collapse of the Berlin Wall, immediately into a historical period. It was clear at once that American statecraft, domestic politics and popular consciousness would not go on as before. As for literature, it couldn't matter much at first, in the face of so much murder and alarm. Camus observed that extreme suffering deprives us of the taste for reading, and this may be the more true of extreme fear.

Once it became possible to think about books again, there was no doubting that the American novel was bound to be altered as well. But we would have to wait to see how. The novel registers historical change profoundly but not swiftly, for the simple reason that it usually takes several years to conceive, write, revise and publish a book. In terms of literary history, it's only now that the period before 9/11 is drawing to a close.

More here.

Fall Books

From The Washington Post:

Of making many books there is no end. So it was written in the Bible, and more than 2,000 years later it still is true. Like bread and brick, the book goes on, issuing from presses, outliving all notions of technological change. Perhaps it's as a Victorian do-gooder once said: "A good book is the best of friends, the same today as forever." Well, dear reader, get ready for a horde of friends to overrun your house this fall: The sheer volume of book production is breathtaking.

On Beauty: by Zadie Smith (Penguin, Sept.). As if life weren't chaotic enough for a British art professor and his African American activist wife, their son goes and falls in love with their nemesis.

Saving Fish From Drowning: by Amy Tan (Putnam, Oct.). Eleven American tourists in Burma wander into the jungle and meet a tribe that forever alters their perceptions of life.

Female of the Species: by Joyce Carol Oates (Harcourt, Jan.). More stories from the ever-fevered imagination of an American institution.

More here.

'Edmund Wilson': American Critic

From The New York Times:

One of the many anecdotes about the fraught relationship between Edmund Wilson and his third wife, Mary McCarthy, dramatizes beautifully the problem of Wilson's legacy. When Reuel, their son, was 9, he heard McCarthy, for once, praising her former husband. Reuel responded: ''Mommy, you mean my father is a great critic?'' He smiled, clearly remembering her previous invectives against his father, and added: ''I always thought he was just a two-bit book reviewer.''

Edmund Wilson was part of a brilliant generation at Princeton. They were too brilliant in some cases to have as much as a first act in their careers; among the rest was F. Scott Fitzgerald, whose final books, ''The Last Tycoon'' and ''The Crack-Up,'' would be assembled and edited by Wilson. An early essay on Fitzgerald gives some sense of his tone, the quality of his prose and the exacting nature of his judgment. Fitzgerald, he wrote, ''has been given imagination without intellectual control of it; he has been given a desire for beauty without an aesthetic ideal; and he has been given a gift for expression without very many ideas to express.'' '' 'This Side of Paradise,' '' Wilson wrote, ''does not commit the unpardonable sin: It does not fail to live. The whole preposterous farrago is animated with life.''

More here.

The spice of life

From The Guardian:

What this smart little book does is unpick some of the pathways by which various meats, fish, fruits and rice came together at particular moments in history to produce, say, a lamb pasanda or even our own particular favourite, chicken tikka masala ("curry", it turns out, is a generic term that Indians themselves would never use). In 17th-century Goa, for instance, it was the visiting Portuguese who taught the local Indians how to make the exquisite egg and milk-based sweets that have since become part of the fabric of eating on the western seaboard. There again, 300 years later, it comes as a shock to learn that Indians of all castes were indifferent to the pleasures of tea-drinking until the beginning of the 20th century. It was only when their British rulers insisted that they try it for themselves, sweetening the experience with the promise of all the money that was to be made from this new cash crop, that the subcontinent gave itself over to the cup that cheers.

More here.

A growing state of mind that needs a firm rebuttal

From The Guardian:

Conspiracies are profoundly satisfying. They solve every problem, explain everything difficult and give form and shape to things that are otherwise untidily complicated. They provide the easy answer. Why did something bad happen? Because bad people conspired against the good who would otherwise have conquered. Usually, the theory reverses an incontrovertible but (to the conspiracy theorist) inconvenient fact. It is a growing state of mind that, once it takes hold, spreads easily from small things to big beliefs. It needs a firm rebuttal, even when it invades relatively unimportant-seeming things - such as was Shakespeare really Shakespeare?

This week the latest sample arrives with great media fanfare. Viscountess Clare Asquith's book Shadowplay: the Hidden Beliefs and Coded Politics of William Shakespeare - featured on the Today programme, no less - promotes the conspiracy theory that Shakespeare used his plays secretly to promote the outlawed Catholic faith. If the Da Vinci Code strikes at Catholicism, here the Catholics strike back by laying claim to the greatest writer of them all.

More here.

Shalimar the Clown: Fall of the tightrope walker

From The London Times:

Salman Rushdie’s new novel tells the tale of Shalimar, whose romantic downfall turns to fury then destruction. Justine Hardy finds the Booker of Bookers winner in eloquent form. THE PUPPET MASTER IS BACK. He was absent for a while, busy with re-invention, polemic and courtship. The intervening years have perhaps softened him to the extent that he almost allows us to believe that we are independently able to grasp his art. But no, with a snap, he reminds us that he holds the strings. We just get to dance around beneath his elevated acrobatics, bragging to our friends that yes, indeed we understand how the tightrope tricks are done.

More here.

This is an important book, a wonderful reversing story with a cast of characters with names that are not their names, and ideals that have been thrust upon them, but this is not a real study of the anatomy of terrorist warfare or its perpetrators. Remember this as you read this vast story set in a splintering world reflected in lakes.

'The First Poets': Starting With Orpheus

Camille Paglia in The New York Times:

Ancient Greece is the fountainhead of Western culture and politics. As Michael Schmidt demonstrates in ''The First Poets,'' the evolution from aristocratic rule to democracy in Greece was accompanied by the emergence of a strongly individualistic lyric poetry. While the Hebrew Bible, the other major source of Western literature, expresses a God-centered view of the universe, Greek literature gradually freed itself from the sacred to focus on the uniquely human voice.

More here.