Fantasy Sports and the Destruction of Awe

Sports have been a big part of my life ever since I came to America. I spent afternoons playing basketball and football with my friends, of course, but there was an exponentially larger amount of time spent watching games, checking scores in the paper, and listening to chatter on the radio—the whole business of following professional sports. I have been thinking lately about how my personality was shaped by this investment, and what an enormous role sports continue to play in the lives of most Americans, particularly men. Also, I want to tell you about why I hate fantasy sports.

I was eight when I arrived here. Within a few years, I became devoted to following professional basketball, football, and baseball in a way that I had never followed cricket in India. In America, I watched as many games on TV as I could, and on most nights I tucked a radio beneath my pillow and struggled to stay awake until the end of the Orioles or Bullets game (they are the Wizards now, and as uncompetitive as ever).

The next morning, I would open the sports section and read almost all of it. Obsessions began to coalesce around certain teams, players, and races. One year, I became deeply invested in the duel between David Robinson and Shaquille O'Neal for the regular season scoring title. I was rooting for Robinson—the quiet and classy player—and I remember being elated when he scored 71 points on the last game of the season to secure the title.

I shunned the obvious stars like O'Neal and Michael Jordan. Instead, I followed second-tier notables who I decided were in some way morally superior to the stars. Tim Brown and the Raiders were one mysterious obsession. For several years, I desperately rooted for the Trailblazers to beat the Bulls in the Finals, which never happened. I fixated on Terry Porter, the Blazers' point guard, who had a strangely-shaped head and a fantastically accurate three-point shot. He hustled; he was a good ball distributor, calm and never showy; he never argued with refs or got into fights. He played the game, I decided, the right way. All of my favorites were finesse players, soft-spoken, who usually fell in the end to more determined and (I thought) ruthless teams.

Sometimes, when I think about the time and emotion I spent on sports, I feel like I must have wasted half of my childhood. Lately, though, it occurred to me that something valuable happened during those years, that I was building a personality and a place in the world using the tools at my disposal. Already, in my choice of idols, I was feeling out the kinds of success that, at my best, I would be capable of. Other children, of course, chose differently. Locked up in the bubble of modern childhood, we all found heroes to act for us—with us, it sometimes seemed—as a way of developing an identity and a sense of consequence.

“Recognize the natural power in the man, as men did in the past,” D.H. Lawrence writes in Apocalypse, “and give it homage, then there is a great joy, an uplifting, and a potency passes from the powerful to the less powerful.” On dozens of nights, this energy passed into me, both joy and despair, through a television or a crackly radio, with an intensity that has rarely been equaled in later life.

When Jordan pushed Bryon Russell at the end of Game 6 to get off his jumpshot, and no foul was called, I learned something about the privileges of the powerful. When Jeffrey Maier interfered with what should have been a long Yankees fly-out, I learned something too. The play was called a home run, and probably cost the Orioles the game. I was in a rage for days, but some knowledge started to move inside me about how nothing in the real world was going to live up to my theoretical ideals of purity. Obviously, these lessons were coming through the world as well, but in sports, as on stage, the inessential drops away, and how much more memorable the action becomes! Certain games and plays become talismans for a lifetime: instructive, illustrative, sometimes beautiful.


As I got older, my sports fixation weakened. I left my hometown; I became more able to influence the circumstances of my life; and I stopped forming as many profound relationships with players and teams. Increased free agent movement was maybe part of it. I also no longer had as much time to devote to following sports. With less information, the moral qualities I attributed to these players felt more like fantasies, unsupported by their behavior on the field or court. So I went in search of other heroes.

Sports were always there, though, in the background. I still like the sense of community they can create with very different kinds of people. A more authentic foundation for community would probably be better, but, well, as in childhood, you take what you can get. A regional identity based on sports is better than none at all. Now that I've been in Boston for a while, I even have the stability and information to form new identifications. Tim Wakefield is a hero of mine (recently forced into retirement by the increasingly soulless Red Sox); so is Ray Allen (still playing with the Celtics, also increasingly soulless, as demonstrated by the awful Kendrick Perkins trade).

Even though I still care about a few teams, I've never returned to the kind of attachments I had when I was a child. A few years go, though, at the request of friends, I joined some fantasy leagues and started to follow baseball and football more closely again. This is not uncommon; as far as I can tell fantasy sports are becoming an American obsession. Some people I know spend as large a portion of their free time following sports as I once did. The spirit, though, is very different.

I suppose most people know how fantasy works by now: you choose players from real teams to form an imaginary one. The complex network of interrelationships in every game is reduced, by league consent, to a handful of tracked categories. The players' performance in the real world then generates points for you, and you compete against other players in the league based on this statistical ground.

This is fun at first. People watch games with the computer in front of them; the stats update every few minutes. Very soon, though, as anyone who has participated in fantasy knows, it starts to change how you interact with the players and the sport. The game begins to appear through a lens of numbers. You start to root for meaningless things (late touchdowns, inconsequential yardage), watch games in which you have no interest, and weaken emotional attachments to players as you cut and bench them. There is no such thing as an honorable defeat or a shameful victory in fantasy football, only larger or smaller numerical margins. It is roughly analogous to reading a book to count how many times the word "the" appears, or counting the number of B flats in a symphony, and then comparing your total to an opponent. You destroy the point of the exercise for the sake of ending up with a number.

Why are so many people participating in something that works to drain the emotional significance out of sports? It took me some time to think of an explanation, and here it is. I think this is actually the whole point of the endeavor.

Spectators are devoting a great deal of their lives to following the ups and downs of a group of people who are, for the most part, stronger, more graceful, better paid, and more respected than they are. What relationship can one have with such idols? Well, you can bow before them. This is what children do. I think this is healthy, especially if the heroes are genuine. David Foster Wallace's beautiful essay, "Roger Federer as Religious Experience," is an example of how this can occur as an adult. The feeling of awe is more sophisticated, more analytical, but it is awe all the same—it is a species of what I felt as a child. And it is the only way you can justify spending any part of your life watching strangers play games. The same applies to being a spectator of an art form. If you aren't looking for gods, and willing to pay homage when you find them, you are wasting your time.

To love a hero requires humility, though—the willingness to kneel, the consciousness of one's own inferiority. In a paradoxical way, it requires strength. The problem is that most Americans, especially American men, find kneeling an impossible posture to maintain. They are drawn to the spectacle of power on a grand stage, but are uncomfortable with worship or even sincere admiration, which acknowledges that someone is, in a profound and genuine way, better than you. At the one football game I went to recently, I was amazed at how much abuse was heaped on the players the instant a few plays went wrong, only to change back to cheering when things went well (all of this noise blurs together on television).

This crowd, I realized, resented its own idols. They were uncomfortable with their own adulation. All across our society, you can observe people acting out this anxiety. Listen to sports radio and you will hear an endless parade of know-it-alls who put themselves in the position of the general manager, suggesting trades and line-up changes. On television, the commentary is increasingly devoted to ranking plays and players, which is not the same as acknowledging superiority. To arrange things in an order of merit is a way to assuage a sense of insecurity through control—to place yourself above the people under consideration and move them around like pieces on a board. I know this because I used to enjoy making such lists.

This is the appeal of fantasy sports: to become a listmaker. Then you can push around what were once heroes and reduce them to sets of numbers, which are then used to achieve meaningless victories over your peers. It is the epitome of what Stephen Harrod Buhner calls the statistical mentality, which of course invaded real sports before the virtual ones. The hero of Moneyball, for example, is a manager who makes moves and trades based on computer-based statistical analysis, although it is unclear why this is heroic rather than merely clever (the movie insists on the former).

The players on such a team become irrelevant; all of the prestige goes to the coordinator and his computer sidekick, which is exactly the appeal of fantasy football. This is part of a larger trend of withdrawing admiration from the people directly involved in an activity—those who actually do things and make things—and transferring it to their coordinators. The problem is that there can be no beauty or courage or grace in coordination. To focus on such activity is to distance yourself from everything that makes a performance meaningful.

You do achieve something by creating this distance, though; you abandon the possibility of awe and instead experience a sense of phony power. One of the scenarios I've seen in several new ads is an ordinary fan berating a player for his poor fantasy performance.

A quote from Goethe: “The only way in which we can come to terms with the great superiority of another person is love.” Randall Jarrell added a perceptive modification: “But we can also come to terms with superiority, with true Excellence, by denying that such a thing as Excellence can exist; and, in doing so, we help to destroy it and ourselves.”

Jarrell, as an American, knew that something needed to be added to the quote. It is the danger in our otherwise noble egalitarian rhetoric: because power flows in both directions, anything we refuse to revere eventually becomes less worthy of reverence, and finally not even worth paying attention to.

Maybe this seems like too much weight to put on sports. Certainly we should all spend less time sitting on our asses. Still, when I think back to the intensity of my childhood memories, I feel like there was something of value in the way I cared and followed and obsessed. Even today, I can still be stunned into admiration by what human beings are capable of. Some of the most inspiring tennis I have ever seen has been played in the last few years; the football playoffs from this past year were incredible too. These are some of our society's few collectively shared pleasures, and in the right spirit they are genuine ones. Shut off the computer; try not to ruin it.

The Sun: An Interview with Paul K Chappell

I have been a subscriber to The Sun for a few years now. It's a good magazine, although there can be a certain sameness to the issues. The interviews are usually with mystics, practitioners of alternative medicine, unconventional political crusaders, and back-to-nature types. Even when I'm on board with them, as I usually am, their worldview can get a little predictable, as can the "life is tough but ain't it beautiful" note struck by many of the stories and poems.

There can also be an annoying air of middle-class complacency about the magazine's radicalism, as if a few more meditation retreats and book clubs would be a real first step towards solving the world's problems.

Nonetheless, I am always glad when a new issue arrives. I feel like the editors are always trying to reach people, and don't pawn off anything that they weren't genuinely affected by on their readers. As anyone who reads literary magazines can attest, this is actually quite rare. Many of the photographs are beautiful, the Readers Write section is always worth reading, and there are often discoveries to be made in the Interviews.

This month's interview is with Paul K Chappell, an Iraq veteran who is now a peace activist. He gives some very thoughtful responses to many of the difficult questions that face pacifists, and also provides an interesting window into the training of officers in the army. I was surprised, for example, to discover the extent to which West Point encourages its students to face opposing viewpoints: apparently they invited Noam Chomsky to give a speech on the legality of the Iraq War, and many of Chappell's friends were already reading Chomsky, along with people like Howard Zinn, to decide what they thought of the war they would soon be joining.

One particularly interesting section was Chappell's distinction between violence and play (Leslee Goodman is the interviewer).

Goodman: As a parent of sons, I heard that if I didn't let my boys play with toy guns, they would just make guns out of sticks. Is this not an indication that violence is in our genes?

Chappell: We need to look at the difference between violence and play. In play as soon as someone gets hurt, the game stops. When two puppies are biting each other, and one puppy yelps in pain, the play stops. If two boys are playing swords with sticks and one boy gets hurt, the play stops. The intention of violence is to inflict pain: you want to hurt people. The intention of play is to have fun, practice hand-eye coordination, test your strength against your peers, bond socially, and so on. Play is crucial, not just for humans but for all mammals. Nearly all young mammals like to wrestle. It builds muscular strength and the connections in your brain that govern motor control and balance. But it has nothing to do with violence.

I remember reading an article in the Boston Globe recently about the illegal traffic in finches to be used in cage fighting matches. Male saffron finches are "naturally aggressive" -- they fight over mates -- but the interesting detail for me is that these confrontations are rarely fatal in the wild, because the finches have room to retreat. The fight stops as soon as one bird feels himself overmatched. It leads to death or serious injury only when the birds are primed to fight and then forcibly confined. I think there are definite analogies to be drawn.

Louis CK

I was thinking recently that it was unlikely that any work of art from the past couple of decades was going to rival the best seasons of the Simpsons. What books (in English at least) are definitely going to survive from the same time period? And I remembered something that Borges wrote about artists working in media that are not given literary respect. He was writing specifically about Shakespeare and why none of his contemporaries seem to have taken any notice of the magnitude of what he was producing: "Every era believes that there is a literary genre that has a kind of primacy. Today, for example, any writer who has not written a novel is asked when he is going to write one." And in Shakespeare's day the prestige genre was the epic poem - drama was throwaway popular entertainment.

And he goes on to mention that so much of the best art is produced, to some extent, under the artistic radar of its times. In his own era, he mentions how people were finally coming to see film as an art, but utterly ignoring the screenwriter. "Ben Hecht had to a die a few days ago," he writes, "in order for me to remember that he was the author of the screenplays of these films that I have so often watched and praised." The same is still true of all the people who wrote those Simpsons episodes: it is now common enough to praise that show to the skies, but how many people know who those writers are, search out more of their work, or rank them with the great artists of our time?

After reading this Borges essay (it is "The Enigma of Shakespeare," if anyone is interested, from the Selected Non-Fictions collection - a book that is absolutely wonderful) I started to think about what other works of art might now be hiding in popular but low prestige areas. Television writers, certainly, still get very little credit. Comic books and graphic novels as well, although I have been less impressed with some of the apparent classics of those genres (the only one that struck me as having the same merit as a great novel is Ghost World, although I admit I've only read about a dozen graphic novels).

There is another genre that reminded of what Borges said about drama in Shakespeare's time -- that it was considered primarily a performer's showcase instead of a literary art -- and that is stand-up comedy. People praise certain comics, but I don't think it has ever been really appreciated as literary art form, despite the fact that good comics seem just as hardworking and concerned with craft as the most diligent writer of fiction or poetry. I recently read a wonderful interview in the AV Club with Louis CK, and I started looking up some of his material on YouTube. And it's seriously brilliant. I do like the absurdist one-liner comics, but the ones that really stick with me are the storytellers - Cosby and Pryor and CK - that make you forget the obvious artifice behind a guy standing up and telling jokes. Anyway, here are some of my favorite clips, but there are plenty more - uneven of course but the good parts are really inspired.

The Weird Death of the Literary Allusion

In a very good essay called The Obscurity of the Poet, Randall Jarrell bemoaned the fact that America no longer had any shared literary reference points. Flipping through old poetry, he is amazed at how many allusions -- to mythology, history, the Bible -- our ancestors "were expected to recognize--and did recognize."

Well, we can question who exactly he meant by "our ancestors," but it is clear enough what he's trying to say, and also that the situation is only getting worse. Today, even in a room with people sporting all sorts of degrees, there is barely any literary allusion one can make in full confidence of being understood. Off the top of my head, I can think of a handful of Shakespearean characters, a few people in the Bible, Don Quixote, and maybe Robinson Crusoe; and, as far as actual language goes, a few American political documents and speeches. One can make no end of references to songs and celebrities and SNL sketches, but they have a shelf life of about a month. Some iconic movies are probably all that remain of a universal and lasting cultural tradition.

I have especially noticed this lack of shared American reference points because Indians (at least Hindus) very much still have a common culture. There are hundreds of stories that I would say pretty much every Indian, regardless of level of education or piety, knows by heart, because these stories are continually retold in every Indian art form from the television serial to classical dance. And they crop up continually in conversation to illustrate points. My father quite casually compared himself to Abhimanyu while negotiating a tricky merge on the highway.

What is the point of allusions? They rarely save much space on the page. My father could have said that he felt hemmed-in and made largely the same point. But there is a range of associations that comes with these old stories; they give your speech an emotional charge that a simple description wouldn't have -- I immediately pictured the swirl of threatening soldiers from the story, for example -- and they also connect you, even if ironically, to the history of the human race; you realize that you are acting out dramas that have appeared again and again over hundreds of years, that you a part of a tradition instead of an entirely free agent.

But then again, maybe you're just being pretentious. There's always that possibility. And this is the usual response one gets if one drops one of these nuggets. Stop showing off. I remember being floored when Sidney Blumenthal, during the Monica Lewinsky hearings, mentioned that Clinton had compared himself to Rubashov. Can you imagine him ever making such a reference in a public speech, despite the fact that he is obviously a man of rather astonishing erudition? How many votes would it have cost him?

Literary allusions are still occasionally sighted, but they have undergone a strange transformation that, I predict, is a sign of their imminent demise. I read two articles recently that demonstrated their new form. Here is a quote from the first one, from Salon:

Simply to acquire a working familiarity with the theories that have been advanced to explain the fall of the Roman empire -- Murphy notes that a German historian has listed 210 of them -- is a massive undertaking; to advance an original thesis is the work of decades; to compare Rome to America could occupy a Casaubon -- the pedant who searches in vain for a "Key to All Mythologies" in George Eliot's "Middlemarch" -- for several lifetimes.

And here is one from a New York Times review:

At times, he is rather reminiscent of Dickens’s Mrs. Jellyby in “Bleak House,” “a lady of very remarkable strength of character, who ... has devoted herself to an extensive variety of public subjects, at various times, and is at present (until something else attracts her) devoted to the subject of Africa; with a view to the general cultivation of the coffee berry — and the natives.”

One sees this again and again. Every time an allusion pops up in an American newspaper, it is followed immediately by an explanation for those not in the know, so as to avoid seeming pretentious. The interesting thing is that these explanations, in addition to being distracting, render the allusions entirely unnecessary. Instead of your mind opening up into the thing alluded to, it is shut into the thumbnail description provided; and people who did not spot the allusion in the first place get little out of the explanation.

After this little dance is completed, in fact, it becomes clear that the allusions are there for absolutely no reason other than to indicate that the author is familiar with them; one becomes entirely pretentious in trying to avoid being a little pretentious. For example, the first sentence could easily say "occupy a pedant for several lifetimes" and actually be more accurate; all Kamiya is trying to say is that that many connections can be made on the subject, not that the project is (like Casaubon's) fundamentally misguided. And in the New York Times review, the long quote, necessary to indicate who Mrs. Jellyby is, actually misrepresents Ferguson's point, which is that Sachs is occasionally unrealistic and messianic; the quote implies, instead, that Sachs is a dilettante ("until something else attracts her"), ready to move on to another cause at the first opportunity.

These attempts to explain take away the ambiguity that the simple references might have had (which would have forced the reader to think about them and make her own, potentially interesting connections) and instead lead both authors to mess up their own arguments. All of this has, at its root, the assumption that there is nothing a modern reader is more disgusted by than a second of incomprehension. Obviously, clarity is a fine thing, but I've always been thankful for the occasional moment of incomprehension, even from a pedant, since it's a useful spur to further education.

Reading for Character

Among the various reasons I stopped subscribing to The Atlantic—the continuous inclusion of Christopher Hitchens’s articles, that interminable travelogue by Bernard Henri-Lévy—was a little feature called “The Close Read.” Its subtitle was What Makes Good Writing Good. It could also have been called Unremarkable Samples from Books that No One Will Remember in Two Months, Including Me; or—and this is just an ungenerous hunch of mine—Passages from Books by People I Know.

Various people wrote it, and I don’t much blame them for failing to turn this misbegotten idea into a success. I can’t imagine what I would have done with it. When I copy down passages from fiction, they are usually essayistic, and contain ideas I want to remember, not (necessarily) great writing. And the bits that seem strangely beautiful almost always lose their magic when they’re taken out of context; I read them later and have no idea why I copied them down.

I recently got an idea, though, for a similar feature that I could actually write; it would be called Reading for Character, or maybe Reading for an Author’s Mood. Most people can get a sense of what a writer is like from reading a few pages of creative work, but it’s usually impossible to pinpoint what passages created this impression. They’re rarely the most memorable sections, or the ones worth copying down; a writer has his guard up at these points, or (if we’re lucky) inspiration has struck and he’s picking up a transmission from somewhere else.

Where you can get this sense is from sentences written with partial attention: narrative connective tissue, transitions, things that could as easily be written one way as another. Decisions made here are of so little importance to the quality of the final work that they are only attributable to character. I read a passage recently that provides a good example. It’s from a perfectly okay movie review by Stephen Holden in the New York Times of a documentary about Ingmar Bergman.

This intimate, compelling film, which opens today at the Film Forum in Manhattan, confirms what any astute viewer of his films has probably guessed: that they are intensely autobiographical.

I didn’t remember this sentence at all after I read the review, but at the end I got the impression that Stephen Holden was not someone I liked—that he was, at least when he wrote this review, a bit of an ass. I went back to read it again to figure out why I felt this way, since he didn’t say anything that actually offended me. And I settled on this sentence. Why would you write “any astute viewer”? That sentence could easily have been written “what viewers of his films have probably guessed” – or “what most viewers of his film have guessed.” Either would have been a much more generous sentiment, and probably more accurate.

I like the “probably” on top of it, too, because that implies that even some astute viewers have missed what Stephen Holden sees as elementary. He probably never meant to imply any of these things; he wrote the sentence without thinking, and he happened to be in a pompous mood, which may or may not be a permanent condition with him. Incidentally, I was reading some old work e-mails of mine and realized that I sounded like (and actually was) a jerk. Once I said that I “had no idea” what someone’s e-mail address was; it would have been just as simple, and more sensible, to say that I didn’t know what it was.

Why did I write that? It implied that my boss was being stupid for expecting me to know what this person’s e-mail address was, which I suppose was what I thought, completely unfairly, because I hated my job on that day and it crept into my language. Work e-mails are usually forgotten in an hour, and seen as utilitarian and characterless, but I bet you can trace someone’s outlook on life more easily and accurately there than in, for lack of a better word, expressive communications, which tend to put on more layers of artifice.

Textbook diversity

I recently stumbled across a website that provides stock images for textbook publishers and other media outlets. Unlike Reuters and similar services, however, this organization has a slightly narrower focus. Take a look at it, and make sure you move your cursor up to the scrolling bar of images at the top of the screen.

At first, I thought this service was hilarious just because it was such a tiny, bizarre niche. But part of the humor lies in the fact that the website is blatant about something which is usually handled quietly.

A related story that got me thinking about this question of creating images of a cheerful diversity that doesn't actually exist: Houghton Mifflin got in trouble recently for using healthy children from a modeling agency and having them sit in wheelchairs when shooting their textbook images. Apparently they did this so often that they had to start keeping careful track to make sure that someone who was handicapped in Chapter 2 was not jumping around in Chapter 5. (Incidentally, insisting on a vision of the world where children in wheelchairs are stuck there forever, in addition to being rather hopeless, is clearly discriminatory, since it disregards the claims of the large community of American faithhealers.) Naturally, there is something a little seedy about this sort of thing, and the author of the article where I read about these various practices, says that truth is being sacrificed to political correctness.

He makes some legitimate points. It is offensive for the CEO of PhotoEdit (and Hollywood, for that matter) to indicate that some races can be passed off as others, and clearly we can't pretend that the high points of American history and literature are more diverse than they actually are. And if a school can’t actually find a legitimate picture of black and white kids together, then perhaps something is going wrong at their university.

Some of his other points, however, indicate that he has a very particular version of the truth that he wants presented. He rails against the publisher for not wanting to use a picture of a barefoot African villager, indicating this ignores the grinding poverty that is the norm in Africa. Who exactly decides what is representative? And even if determining this were possible, why exactly are we required to depict the median? Shouldn't the pictures in certain types of books be of the world as we wish it to be, instead of the world as it is?

I'm sure that somewhere out there in an African village is a kid with shoes. In a French textbook introducing a student to francophone Africa, I don’t see why the picture can’t be of a healthy smiling kid, instead of someone dying of cholera. A complete education will inform a student what the actual proportion is, but indicating that the former image is somehow a lie is ridiculous.

I foresee an objection that the world as we want it to be would, perhaps, not contain anyone handicapped. But this would be a world in which no one ever had an accident, and medicine had reached a stage that it appears unlikely ever to reach. A world where kids in African villages have shoes, however, and different sorts of people enjoy hanging out with each other might require a little more generosity than we appear to currently possess, but it can at least be imagined.

Obviously, an image in a textbook doesn’t go very far towards creating this reality. But even if someone laughs at how unrepresentative a collection of images is, acknowledging the gap between reality and fantasy is at least the beginning of progress. I read a good essay recently by John Crowley that said that perhaps creating an awareness of this gap is one of the functions of art.

A Hypothesis About Dreams

I read an interesting article in The Sun about dreams; unfortunately the less interesting first half is all that's online. In any case, I was annoyed that I remember so few of my dreams, since apparently they are the ticket to psychological health; more dreams might also mean less money spent on movies.

My genuinely hallucinatory sequences -- the sort of things stereotypically associated with deep sleep -- happen in daydreams, or when I've just started to go to sleep, the periods during which I still have some level of control over what happens, and for whatever reason am no longer thinking about sex. So why do I remember nothing happening when my mind is left to its own devices? Am I completely lacking in imagination? To avoid reaching this conclusion, I've come up with a hypothesis to explain my sad dream life, as well as those of most people I know.

From reading old books, I have a real sense that, a century ago and farther back, people dreamed more - or rather, they remembered more; and that these memories had greater density and were therefore taken more seriously as a part of everyday life. So why do so many people today say they rarely remember dreams? Here's my theory: alarm clocks. The few dreams I do remember almost always come when I'm about to come out of sleep: when the sun is starting to shine on my face, when my bladder is just starting to make demands in the middle of the night; that is, at the stage when the conscious mind is just starting to rouse, and with it our capacity to remember what is going on. The slow wake is essential to remembering dreams.

And what completely destroys the slow wake? Yes, the alarm clock! Nothing is more destructive to the in-between stage between sleep and consciousness than the braying of the alarm; it immediately displaces whatever might have been going on in your head with its insistent reality of beeps or songs or people talking.

So why don't people always dream on weekends, you ask? Well, it's quite possible to internalize an alarm clock, and live by the habits it instills; even without the alarm going off, your conscious brain may lose the facility of gradually waking and sneaking up on those vaporous dream transmissions. Another possible explanation: more comfortable beds. I remember dreaming a great deal when camping, because the rocks poking into my back kept me continually floating in the in-between state, but I was tired enough from hiking to stay asleep instead of just tossing.

Nostalgia

Slate has an feature with various authors recommending their favorite beach reading. You get to watch a bunch of authors do a little dance as they try to avoid seeming pretentious without losing their credibility as literary intellectuals. The really sad display comes from the people that try to be funny (cf. George Saunders, whose early storiesI really love; he should have known better.)

Anyway, one author who contributed to this list was David Amsden, who has inspired violent hatred in me and a couple of my friends purely because he went to our high school and published a novelat the age of 21. I have no idea if it's any good. Publisher's Weekly called it "solid but unremarkable" - which sounds like something one might tell a gastroenterologist about recent bowel movements. (Seriously, could any review be more quietly vicious? I would rather be punched in the face than have someone call me "solid but unremarkable.") Here, in any case, is Amsden's entry:

The Rachel Papers by Martin Amis. My gut tells me that Amis would disapprove of being labeled a beach read, but I read this book at the beach when I (much like the protagonist Charles Highway) was a pretentious 19-year-old neophyte obsessed with a girl who didn't know I existed. I've reread this whenever I feel like recapturing that ignorance, which is exactly the point of beach reading: to zone out, to simultaneously forget and remember, to be misguidedly nostalgic about moments that didn't actually happen. Plus, the novel was made into a perfectly terrible film starring Ione Skye and Dexter Fletcher—the ultimate post-beach rental.

Nothing about this struck me as terribly bad other than its self-involvement and rather pretentious explanation of "the point of beach reading" (also, you have to be a neophyte in something; Amsden seems to just mean it as "a young man") -- but my friend dug through the passage and found something to hate. What, he asked me, could this possibly mean? "To be misguidedly nostalgic about moments that didn't actually happen."

This initially felt fine to me: lame writing, but nothing actually nonsensical. But something did seem off. I didn't think you could be nostalgic about things that didn't happen; you could only feel regret for them, mixed perhaps with nostalgia for a time when they might have happened. (Ah, college.) Even if your memories are somehow false, you still have to believe in them on some level for this emotion to exist at all.

I looked nostalgia up to confirm my suspicion, and here is the definition: "A bittersweet longing for things, persons, or situations of the past" - perhaps a false past that exists only in your imagination, but definitely nothing that you know not to have happened. Apparently the word comes from the Greek nostos (to return home) and algia (pain). The pain of returning home. Isn't that lovely? I think I remember reading somewhere that Nabokov thought it was the most beautiful word in English.

E.O Wilson and God

This interview with E.O. Wilson in Salon wasn't exceptionally interesting, but one passage got to me. For the most part, I agreed with everything Wilson said, and have since high school. I actually get the impression Wilson has lived with these ideas for a long time, too, and would rather have talked about something else (like, say, his book) if the interviewer had not focused so exclusively on whether or not he thought there was a god.

Wilson's answer, like Mill's, is who knows - but if gods are around, they're certainly not like the ones described in the world's major religions, and they either don't care what we do or are not particularly benevolent. Here's the section that stuck with me.

I think this is actually of great importance when we're talking about science and religion. There are a lot of people who discount the literal interpretation of the Bible because it does not square with modern science. And even God is such a loaded word. What if we put that word aside? Can we talk about energy or some sort of cosmic force?

That's why I say, I leave this to the astrophysicist.

Not the religious scholars?

Oh, of course not. They don't know enough. Literally. I hope I'm not being insulting. But you can't talk about these subjects now without knowing a great deal of theoretical physics, particularly astrophysics and developments in astronomy concerning the origins and evolution of the universe. But one thing we may very well be able to understand from start to finish -- we haven't done it yet -- is the origin of life on this planet. And that's what counts for human beings. Where we came from. And it's beginning to look -- it's looking pretty persuasively -- that we are in fact ultimately physical and chemical in nature, and that we evolved autonomously on this planet by ourselves. There's no evidence whatsoever that we're being overseen or directed in our evolution and actions by a supernatural force.

It's very strange, because I have never really had a strong faith in anything supernatural or divine, but this passage really disturbed me. Something about the way it was said. I think it was the phrase "ultimately physical and chemical in nature," as vague and obvious and accurate as that sounds -- something about it seemed horrible. Maybe I've never really forced myself to think about what logically follows from agnosticism.

I think previous generations had to fight their way through the fraudulence of their faiths; and they had to overcome the emptiness that comes with its loss on their own, by making some sort of meaning out of apparent pointlessness. But agnosticism seems to come ready made for my generation - most people I know didn't really start out with faiths to lose; religion struck them as either silly or beside the point pretty much from the time they began to think about things. If it's a given that there isn't a god - the reflection that previous generations, who had to make an active decision to renounce their faith, were forced to engage in, never really happens. Maybe this is why I see some people my age returning to church largely out of confusion; I've never seen anyone who has actually lost faith go back.

Michael Dirda on William Gass's A Temple of Texts

William Gass has published another book of essays. It is admiringly reviewed by Michael Dirda in the Washington Post. Here's the passage that caught my eye:

Like the grizzled gunfighter who straps on his Colt yet one more time, Gass draws on a lifetime's skill, for invective, wit and persuasion, to defend what matters -- "the sustaining of standards, the preservation of quality, the conservation of literacy's history, the education of the heart, eye, and mind." Meanwhile, our world has come to worship crud, and Gass fearlessly, fiercely tells us so.

Just to provide some context, the subtitle of the review is "William Gass celebrates high art and decries the crush of mediocrity." Specifically, William Gass dislikes crappy books, really likes great books, and is annoyed -- I am too -- by the fact that libraries seem to be spending the majority of their resources on things like Internet stations instead of more books. Gass is also upset that the world seems to honor trash a great deal more than art: "It is a fact of philistine life," he writes, "that amusement is where the money is."

I do not disagree with any of this -- what I am curious about is how Dirda decides to describe this critique; he says that Gass lays his smackdown on the world's worship of crud fearlessly. Now, I have read a couple of Gass's introductions (they were good) and I can believe that he is as good as writer as Dirda indicates -- but does anyone believe that it takes anything like courage for a tenured professor at Washington University to deride the mediocrity of American popular culture? Will he lose his job? Will the CEO of MTV and a couple of judges from American Idol come over to his house and beat the crap of him?

No, I doubt it. I doubt it because this is about as conventional an opinion as an aging literary author can hold. Maybe a few young culture studies professors at his school will call him an elitist, but I suspect he will rather relish this.

Dirda does not mention other professors, though. Here are the people he thinks Gass is daring to offend: "In some essays Gass can scarcely subdue his anger at the enemies of art and civilization. The cowboy jingoist and the fundamentally religious won't find his views to their taste, nor will those who worship at the altar of the Internet or sacrifice to the American idols of pop culture."

That's right, Gass doesn't care who he pisses off. Consequences be damned! Can you just imagine the look on Bush's face when he opens up his copy of A Temple of Texts? He is in for one rude awakening. As are all the other churchgoing cowboy jingoists interested in literary criticism, and possibly a few well-read ranchhands.

To be clear, I am not saying that authors must only put out books that they believe have a good chance of influencing the people they criticize; very few books would be published if this were true. (See preaching to the choir.) But it is delusional to call an author courageous for taking on people who will never read him, and who don't care what he writes -- when he is flying so far below the radar of his victims (or, in this case, I suppose, over it) that he is not even inviting a confrontation. Orhan Pamuk, on the other hand, could legitimately be characterized as fearless. So, for that matter, could David Irving, who was recently jailed for holocaust denial.

I am not arguing that any of these people are better thinkers or people than Gass. As Orwell pointed out in his great unfinished essay on Evelyn Waugh the courage that it takes to express a certain opinion is no gauge of its validity:

It is nonsense to pretend, for instance, that at this date there is something daring and original in proclaiming yourself an anarchist, an atheist, a pacifist, etc. The daring thing, or at any rate the unfashionable thing, is to believe in God or to approve of the capitalist system. In 1895, when Oscar Wilde was jailed, it must have needed very considerable moral courage to defend homosexuality. Today it would need no courage at all: today the equivalent action would be, perhaps, to defend antisemitism. But this example that I have chosen immediately reminds one of something else—namely, that one cannot judge the value of an opinion simply by the amount of courage that is required in holding it.

One of the passages that Dirda quotes provides a clue as to why a modern author might like to think of himself as taking on powerful enemies, and also why a smart reviewer might go along with it, despite the fact it is obvious that the usual response of today's powerful to high culture is total indifference. Here is William Gass on the great books of the past:

Classics are by popular accord quite old and therefore out of date; while by the resentful they are representative only of the errors of their age, their lines sewn always on the bias, their authors willing tools of power and unjust privilege. Odd, then, that the good books were usually poisons in their time, when those biased pages were burned, those compliant authors jailed, and their ideas deemed diseases of the worst kind -- corruptions of the spirit -- to be fought with propaganda first, followed by prison, fire and firing squad, the gallows and the stake, all at the behest of the powers in place...

This is demonstrably untrue. (That sentence goes on a while longer, by the way; it is always good to pay attention to when a writer gets really carried away, because he will frequently be lying.) Think of every great book you can name, every consensus classic: for every author who was persecuted, you will find a hundred who were greeted with either praise, censure (of the kind that doesn't draw actual blood), or complete indifference -- that is, they got exactly the same reception that writers get today. Gass's "usually" isn't even valid for the writers that he examines in this collection of essays. The powers that be did not bother to come after Rilke, Stein, Burton, Gaddis, Walser, Elkin, James, Ford, etc. -- maybe some pissy reviewers did, but that was it. The only person that I can see qualifying at all is Joyce, and all that happened was that his book got banned, which is much less painful (physically, I mean) than getting shot or burned.

What I noticed in that rhapsodic passage, in addition to its lack of accuracy, is a nostalgia for a time when it seemed like writing was of consequence -- when one could call a writer fearless and not be saying something ridiculous. Roth has a wonderful passage about this sort of envy in The Prague Orgy, when Zuckerman almost seems to wish that he lived under a repressive government: every sentence would be an act of defiance against the censor; manuscripts would have to be smuggled out of the country before they could be published.

But the sad fact, as far as I can tell, is that writing has rarely been of political consequence in the way that Gass implies, even in our own horrible 20th century. Plenty of people have been persecuted, it is true, but this has not always been correlated with the quality of their writing -- and there is nothing about great writing that is fundamentally inflammatory for the powerful. Most great writing, as Gass admits, is only consequential to the readers that it connects with.

This is why I never quite understand the despair over our culture that emerges every few years with a new book from Bloom or Gass. The majority of people who have any love of literature will admit that, at least since there has been a large reading public, shit culture has ruled the roost. Even the great writers who achieved a measure of popularity in their lifetimes now seem to have been appreciated for the wrong books or the wrong reasons. Most devotees of art also usually believe that greatness eventually finds or creates the audience that can appreciate it, and that mediocrity (no matter how much it is praised) will soon be buried under the avalanche of more recent mediocrity. Has anything really changed so fundamentally in our world that this will stop being true?

(I do get the impression that things have gotten worse in universities when it comes to teaching literature. But it is the habit of lifelong professors to mistake this for the declining intellectual and artistic health of the entire society. If they want to find passionate and serious readers - who do not go through books simply looking for evidence of something or another - I suggest they stop hanging around students and other professors. A love of reading will occasionally survive a university education, but it will rarely survive the decision to start teaching there.)

Anyway, I tend to believe that things are not as bad as he says. Our political and economic elites certainly seem much less literate than they have in years past, but I don't know what effect this has on the general state of literature. Randall Jarrell and Dwight Macdonald - writing mainly in the 50s - both made similar criticisms: the books they stomped on are now justly forgotten; the books they loved are appreciated, as usual, by a few; and despite every despairing assessment of this country's intellectual landscape, America -- as far as I can tell -- has not produced fewer works of art in the last fifty years compared to the fifty before that. It has produced a great deal more shit, I suppose, but that is not really relevant.

A Former Army Interrogator on Torture

I came across this editorial in the New York Times by Anthony Lagouranis. He doesn't say anything that most people do not already know about American interrogation practices overseas, but the candor with which he does it -- and the fact that he does no grandstanding about the superiority of his conscience -- has something genuinely inspiring about it.

I had always assumed that the soldiers that engaged in the sort of thing at Abu Ghraib were following -- if not orders -- then at least thinly veiled suggestions, and certainly did not bear sole responsibility for what happened. But I also had a feeling that the people chosen for prison duty, like most police officers, were naturally thugs, who had few qualms about what they were doing. I couldn't imagine myself, placed in the same situation, doing any of the things that are in those photographs.

I am not so sure any more; this is the first piece I've read from an army man whom I felt like I was reasonably similar to. There was a time, both after September 11th and on the eve of the war with Iraq, when I could really imagine myself serving in the reconstruction of Iraq or Afghanistan; I could separate it from my general lack of support for the invasions themselves, because it seemed like noble and necessary work -- both things that seem (probably falsely) like they are in short supply over here, away from the gunfire.

At this point, though, I could not imagine having anything to do with the American armed forces. Not because of fear, exactly -- I would have tried to serve in a non-combat capacity anyway, and I would be willing to stand the risk of simply being in Iraq -- but because I cannot imagine my peers being the sort of people at Abu Ghraib, and being commanded by people that either consciously ignored or encouraged such behavior.

Even the advertisements for the Army or Navy, which conscientiously avoid showing anything like an actual war -- or even a shot anywhere from the Middle East, where everyone who signs up will soon go -- seem designed to discourage people like me from even being interested in a military career. They present the life of a soldier as one non-stop rush, a sort of brainless live-action video game. I am not twelve any more; this is no longer my idea of paradise, and I am usually either scared or bored by people who still think it is.

The one or two commercials that imply that being a soldier might require intelligence usually present it as the opportunity to be around fancy gadgetry; the one that I remember has a soldier showing off his knowledge of computers to his starstruck high school buddies. There is not a single exhortation to join the army as a form of service, both to the country and the world, as there has been in every previous war this country has actually cared about. (To be fair, there was one where a boy in high school wrangles up some lunch for a homeless guy, and then grows up to be an army specialist in delivering food to places that need it -- but I have not seen that one in ages, while the others appear to be in heavy rotation.)

All of this made me wonder, why in the world did Lagouranis join? Because if there are really many men like him in the army -- both already there and who continue to join -- then there is hope yet. Maybe enough people will say something and things will start to get cleaned up; maybe they are already getting cleaned up. Things genuinely do seem to be getting better at Abu Ghraib, according to Lagouranis. The administration can keep holding people for no particular reason -- there is nothing a soldier can do about that -- but at least they won't be beaten and suffocated.

Anyway, I found the answer for why Lagouranis joined online, and it was more than a little dispiriting. He did an interview with Frontline about detainee interrogations. The entire interview is worth reading, but here is why he said he joined the army.

So give me a sense, if you can, of your own preparation. … How did you become an interrogator?

Well I joined because I wanted to learn Arabic. I had no interest in interrogation. And this was before 9/11, so I didn't even expect we would go to war. So yeah, after basic training they sent me to Ft. Huachuca, Ariz., where they do MI training. And I went through the interrogation classes and after that I went to Monterey to learn Arabic.

So the fact that this reasonably conscientious and intelligent young man is in the army is a complete accident. And after he voiced concerns about prisoner treatment, he was given an "honorable discharge." So, basically, while kicking out anyone who might run things in a reasonably humane fashion, the army is busy discouraging such men from joining at all. Now that America seems so much more willing to use its army when not actually attacked, on missions whose objectives are much more complicated than defeating an enemy on the battlefield, how exactly are we going to manage with an army run entirely by drones and bureaucrats?

The entire interview should be read, but here is an especially interesting section, on the nature of our military intelligence on the "Arab mind." This is the sort of advice that higher-ups give to interrogators, and this is the sort of obviously illogical information that is accepted without question when all you have, and want, are soldiers who are not expected/capable (it eventually amounts to the same thing) of thinking about anything.

I know that at Guantanamo, at the earliest stages there was this kind of urban myth -- maybe, maybe not -- that Arab men had an inordinate fear of dogs. Did you hear that?

I heard that all the time, but not from Arabs. I mean, that just seems silly. It's like everyone has a fear of a growling German Shepherd when you're tied up and helpless. And it's like when people were saying, "Arabs, they really hate being sexually humiliated." But who doesn't? I mean, who wants to be sexually humiliated? That's not a cultural thing, that's a human thing. So I attribute a lot of those comments to just pure racism. You hear a lot of comments like that, that really don't make sense.

Like what?

Soon as I got to Abu Ghraib, we were given a brief by a psychiatrist, an Army psychiatrist. He didn't know anything about Arabs or Arabic or Islam, but he'd read a few books and told us things like, "Don't expect to ever get a timeline out of an Arab. They can't think like that, they can't think linearly; they have to think associatively." You know, things like that. Or that "Arabs, it's part of their culture to lie," you know. "They just lie all the time and don't even know that they're doing it." It's like ridiculous, you know?

… What was the effect of that kind of information on [people]?

They believed it, and they continued throughout the whole year that we were there with that idea about Arabs, that they're liars and they don't make sense; they're not rational.

And so what happens in an environment … where that becomes the way you feel about the people in your control?

Well, partly that lends to the frustration. Because they're blaming their lack of ability to get intelligence on the fact that a logical argument presented to somebody, or whatever psychological way that you're going to back them into a corner isn't going to work on an Arab. You point out a contradiction to them and they don't care, then they just have a new story and that's it. But I think that's true for anybody who's a prisoner being interrogated. You know, they feel helpless, so their story's going to change. It's going to be very hard to back them into a corner. So yeah, I think it added to the frustration and probably contributed to this culture of abuse.

Alzheimer's and Mind Games

I read a story in the Washington Post about the link between mental and physical activity and Alzheimer's. The subtitle was "Can Exercise and Mind Games Help?" The article quoted various studies which encourage the elderly to engage in "mentally stimulating activities." Examples? "These may involve doing logic puzzles like Sudoku, reading an entire newspaper daily or going to a museum." I've read several articles like this, and whenever they prescribe mental activity for the elderly, the first items on the list are always games and reading: "Brain-stimulating activities such as newspaper-reading, card games, puzzles and draughts."

It's astonishing what casual contempt this betrays for the elderly, as well as how little we seem to expect from our own later years. The assumption is that, after retiring, older people have absolutely no purposeful activity that they might want to engage in. The mind, therefore, must be fooled into exerting itself, like a hamster running on a wheel. Further, the intellect is not supposed to be used in service of an engagement with life -- the articles never recommend using what one hopes is accumulated wisdom to interact with society, to create something, to work on any of the problems that a younger person might tackle; instead, the old are advised to manipulate numbers and letters with the sole purpose of warding off dementia.

In the second page of the Washington Post article, there is a passage about "hybrid" activities (a combination of the "mental and the social"), by which I gathered that the author meant actual living as opposed to doing the jumble. Apparently, actual living has a very positive impact on quality of life -- who knew? "Activities that seemed to confer more protection included political and cultural involvement, attending courses, going to the theater or concerts, traveling, being engaged in charity or church activities, and playing music with others." Intriguing. So they're saying that an elderly person who decides to act like her life might still be worth using -- to enjoy beauty, affect society, or learn something -- is conferring "more protection" on herself than someone nudging her brain with the daily Sudoku? Quite the bonus.

The mind game suggestion is all part of modern society's habit of addressing serious problems purely by treating the symptoms. The central problem is always ignored, or dismissed as unfixable. A lifestyle that includes virtually no purposeful physical exertion, with all of the attendant problems? Suggestion: go the gym, lift weights, play games, take vitamins.

The serious problem in this case is that our society, unlike most of its predecessors, has no real vital place for the old; we admit as much when we imply that a puzzle is the only mental activity they are likely to have on a daily basis. And although I'm sure there are plenty of complicated factors at work (some person, who has caused me a great deal of inconvenience, told me that Alzheimer's is caused mainly by aluminum pots and pans) I think it is basically true that when a person feels that he is pretty much done with life, his mind and body will follow. And I can't imagine that our society is doing anything but encouraging this capitulation in the elderly when its suggestions for better living focus largely on the diligent pursuit of the pointless.

Hillary Frey's review of The Best People in the World, by Justin Tussing

I have not actually read Justin Tussing's book. I did, however, read Hillary Frey's review of this book in Salon, and would like to quote a part of it, just to demonstrate the kind of writing that seems to impress reviewers nowadays. In a gushing review, Frey declares that the real reason to read this book is its prose:

It is very rare to find a novel so lovingly, deliberately and perfectly written that you want to read passages out loud to anyone who will listen, but this is that book. A raging fire "was like a beautiful television." As Thomas and Alice waste away, with little food, sex between them is "a collision of bones. The horns of our pelvises rasped." Describing Sonya, Thomas says, "her gaze was all boudoir, as if she believed that she would be forced to gift those minor fortunes of youth and prettiness to hungry, inexpressive men, for them to squander." On a cloudless day, "the sun was like a photograph of the sun." Even a grocery list is gorgeous: "A flour sack as big as a pillow ... A bucket of shortening ... Ricotta cheese. Cottage cheese. Cheddar from up the lake in Shelbourne."

There you have it. This is apparently prose that "glows." I would dismiss this as the work of an individual reviewer with bizarre taste, but there is just too much praise of this sort to be ignored.

These appear to be the rules for writing reviewer-friendly prose:

a) throw in figurative language when none is necessary (like a painter heaping layers of paint on a canvas, anxious to create depth)

b) compare things that have rarely, if ever, been compared

c) pile bold, dark, soft, rasping adjectives on top of each other until a lyrical effect is achieved

d) try to make some of these adjectives really surprising, and remember: don't worry about accuracy! A reader (or, at least, a reviewer) will be impressed that you even came up with such an off-the-wall word to use.

Let's look at some of these rules at work in Tussing's work. I am not sure how a fire looks like a beautiful television, but then again I am not sure which televisions are especially beautiful -- does he mean like a plasma screen? Maybe he's talking about beautiful images on a television. But usually those are just smaller versions of things in the real world. He also might be talking about those premium channels that are scrambled, like the porn channel that I could sort of decipher when I was in middle school. Scrambled channels sort of look like a fire, if there's a lot of yellow on the screen. That's the best I can do with that one.

Next: unusual words. "Collision of bones" is fine - it tells me everything I need to know about two really skinny, hungry people having sex. This isn't enough, though; Tussing wants to get the horns of their pelvises to rasp. Now, I am pretty skinny -- my pelvis horns jut right out there -- but I have never succeeded in getting them to rasp with anyone, no matter how hard I've tried. Have I just been with the wrong women? Maybe Tussing can tell me how it's done, but I doubt it.

Next: the borderline baffling. I know what "bedroom eyes" are -- but apparently that's too commonplace a phrase: her gaze has to be all boudoir, and this must be a very special kind of boudoir, because it's like "she believed that she would be forced to gift those minor fortunes of youth and prettiness to hungry, inexpressive men, for them to squander." Man, and I just thought she wanted to have sex! Now, much of this barely makes sense -- I'm really not sure why this girl believes that she is forced to gift something, since gifts are usually voluntary -- but I can appreciate "minor fortunes of youth and prettiness." The men are hungry -- which sounds fairly expressive to me -- but also inexpressive. And they're going to squander what she's giving them. This is some pair of eyes. Does anybody really believe that a human being can look into someone's eyes and see this? Just try to imagine that boudoir look for yourself. Maybe the narrator is a serial bullshitter, and Tussing is creating character, but Frey's certainly not presenting it that way.

Now, the actually good: "The sun was like a photograph of the sun." This does it for me. Everyone has seen pictures with the rays of a bright sun whiting out part of a picture, and it makes the idea of a sun on a cloudless day much more alive -- while also capturing the sense of nostalgia that the review made it seem was central to the story.

And finally, the completely mundane. This is more about Hillary Frey than all reviewers, but the inclusion of the "gorgeous" grocery list is truly bizarre. "A flour sack as big as a pillow ... A bucket of shortening ... Ricotta cheese. Cottage cheese. Cheddar from up the lake in Shelbourne." It is true that shortening does come in a bucket (sometimes in smaller "tubs" as well). Those are indeed two different kinds of cheese (I've actually eaten both!). And, yes, cheese does come from various places.

Let me try my hand at some gorgeous writing: "A sausage link as big as a baseball bat ... two cans of tuna ... a box of cereal ... fresh rye bread from a bakery down the street."

Is Tussing's book good? Maybe. Frey might have picked out the overwritten bits, because they are the only ones that can be quoted independently to impress an easily convinced reader. And there are great books that are badly written: Sister Carrie, for example. The difference is that I get the sense that Dreiser is caught up in his story, and can't be bothered with making his sentences pretty. So there are examples of incompetence in every paragraph, but the scenes still spring to life, and the whole book works.

Tussing, on the other hand, seems to be trying very hard to write well -- he probably spent ages on some of these sentences -- and with every strange comparison and contorted bit of syntax, he gets farther away from his story and whatever truth might be in it. If the book works, it will be in spite of this kind of writing, not because of it. And Frey says that the prose is the novel's "greatest draw" just before she starts quoting! God help a writer if lovely sentences are the main reason to read her book.

Anyway, it would not be worth going into this if the praise of bullshit was not so widespread, as B.R. Myers demonstrated pretty conclusively in "A Reader's Manifesto." This is the reason that even people who love to read will buy mediocre CDs and spend ten dollars on movies that they know in advance will be terrible before they will take a chance on a work of modern literary fiction. Well done, reviewers.