James Schuyler's letters

Much to my surprise, Bookslut published (a month later) the other review I had submitted to them - and this time with my name. Here it is. I hope you enjoy it. I actually got rather interested in the subject of when people first got the idea of publishing private correspondence -- thinking that this might be a real psychological turning point of some sort -- but was never able to figure it out. Granted, my efforts consisted of sending off an e-mail to an old professor of mine (no response, sadly) but I wasn't sure how else to pursue the subject. I don't mean the oldest collection of letters that's even been published, but the year in which someone first thought that a collection of posthumous letters would, on its own, find an audience. Any help is appreciated.

Pennies from Heaven

There is a local library near our house that has very few books, and appears to be used primarily as a place to rent videos for free. In any case, it is full of completely forgotten movies on videocassette that no one rents, which my girlfriend occasionally picks up on a whim. Anyway, she picked up, as a joke, what appeared to be a kitschy musical called Pennies from Heaven, with Steve Martin and Bernadette Peters. The only indication that it was anything unusual or special was a bit of praise on the back from Pauline Kael.

In any case, we watched it, and it is extraordinary. It is one of the darkest movies I have ever seen - it's the kind of musical I could imagine Nathanael West writing. The movie deals with a song salesman in the great depression who dreams of opening up a record store. He is a stock figure from old movies: the big dreamer. His wife is frigid; he's sexually voracious. He falls in love (or appears to) with another woman, has an affair, gets her pregnant.

In most movies, the big dreamer's dreams are actually worthwhile, and his love is actually sincere. But everything about this person is incredibly second-rate. And his completely lack of consistency and sincerity ruins life for everyone around him. The songs, for the most part, instead of expressing any sort of exuberant emotion, just express the character's delusions. Throughout the movie -- which I can't say, incidentally, that I actually enjoyed -- there is this feeling of something like cognitive dissonance. You have no idea how to react to anything: a love song is sung with semi-obscene sexual gestures; sometimes songs run directly counter to what is actually happening, and occasionally express what the character is feeling.

Occasionally, I got the sense that this was because the filmmakers themselves didn't know what they were going for. The movie actually works a lot better when the songs work unironically -- as they do, for the most part, in the second half of the movie -- and just express what the character is feeling. Even then, the dissonance comes -- as in West's books -- with wondering how much sympathy we are supposed to give the characters, how seriously we are supposed to take their plight. Like that awful letter in Miss Lonelyhearts from the girl who was born without a nose. Her voice is captured too perfectly to not feel connected with her, but there's always this feeling that all of it might be a joke to the writer, who is just playing around with the conventions of what captures our sympathy.

I felt the same way here sometimes -- but too many of the scenes played too honestly, with too much compassion, to not have the hand of some sort of artist behind them. I read the biography of the writer at allmovie, and apparently he's a legend in Britain, where this was originally a seven-hour miniseries. Anyway, at first I recoiled a little bit with the usual line about movies like this -- why would anyone spend time and money on a movie just to get depressed? -- but it stayed with me for too long. It's worth seeing.

(Incidentally, I realize that DVDs are a superior technology, but in four or five years all of those discs in the library will be too scratched up to play at all, and get thrown away; old videocassettes may go fuzzy in places, but they will at least play - if our library is any indication - for about twenty years. It also struck me that, despite the greater cultural importance of movies, a pre-DVD/VHS movie that didn't immediately find an audience -- and isn't made by someone later acknowledged as a master -- is much more deeply lost and unlikely to be rediscovered than a book. Anyway, it turns out this movie has been released on DVD, so see it if you have the chance.)

M31: A Family Romance, by Stephen Wright

I wrote this to get the reviewer spot at Bookslut. I thought I'd post it before it was completely forgotten. It's all right - the voice is a little bland, and I sound a little bit like a bored professional, but I don't think I say anything too stupid. The only lie in it is that I made myself sound more enthusiastic about the book than I actually was.

Here the truth: the book is very good and still probably not worth reading. It's scary: Wright's clearly an imaginative writer, far above the usual run, but it took very little time for me to feel like I'd reached the borders of his talent, at least as expressed in this book. I could tell that M31 was good and I still got bored. If it was a movie of similar quality, I would have been perfectly content and entertained and recommended it to my friends. But for some reason as soon as I pick up a book and it doesn't stack up to Tolstoy and Proust I wonder why the hell I'm wasting my time.

There's this scary line I read once from Simone Weil about how the only function a second-rate writer serves is to help create an atmosphere out of which a man or woman of genius can emerge. It's an awful thing to consider for someone with literary aspirations, but when I read fiction I feel like I agree. Maybe this is why so many writers nowadays cram their books with information. Beauty is a roll of the dice, but people will always appreciate facts. Anyway, here's the review:

Since at least the 1950s, when city dwellers started escaping to the suburbs instead of out to the countryside, American novels and movies have capitalized on something that can be identified as rural dread. From Shirley Jackson to Deliverance, these works have always played to the suspicion that moving among all these placid, friendly farmers and small town folk were murderers, sodomites, and the insane. Ever motel had an owner with a knife behind his back, every basement a deformed child produced by incest and too much power line radiation. An urbanite driving across these vast flat spaces in the middle of the country might well feel that anyone could go crazy out here. Couldn’t looking out at miles and miles of corn be like staring at wallpaper? Eventually shapes would start moving around in there, and if you kept looking long enough they would probably become real.

Aliens, Elvis, the Virgin Mary: why are they never spotted in New York? Stephen Wright never answers this question directly, but he gives us enough information to figure it out for ourselves. M31: A Family Romance features a family that the locals call the “saucer people.” They live in what was once a church; a satellite dish next to the old steeple scans the sky for signals. They are surrounded by acres of corn, with the nearest neighbor visible only with binoculars. A single road goes by the house, and one day it brings a couple – one of them is a woman named Gwen who is sure she was contacted by aliens. They are here to see Dash and Dot, the patriarch and matriarch of the family, and celebrities on the UFO contactee circuit with multiple books under their belt explaining the ways of the Etherians to humans.

Alone in the house while the couple goes to the conferences are their five children: Maryse has a baby of her own whom she only feeds weight loss smoothies, which is all she drinks; Dallas, their teenage son, prefers beer; Edsel, their younger son, is convinced that he is adopted, for no apparent reason; and Zoe, the youngest, screams constantly and has seizures that her parents interpret as communications with the Occupants, the aliens. Trinity, the teenage daughter who seems like the sanest of the bunch, apologizes to their guests: “This family should be driven around in a van and displayed at pro-abortion rallies.”

For the first third of the book, however, the family appears to be no stranger than most: a lot of pointless sullenness and hostility, wisecracks, constant complaining, and showing off one’s wit in front of the guests. (The book features one of the most hilarious family dinners ever depicted in print.) The only sign that there is anything at all odd is the metallic spaceship, known only as The Object, that family members go in and out of when the mood strikes them; they are waiting for a sign from The Occupants to put it into use.

The family seems no more messed up than any other, but the undercurrent of dread remains. Gwen, the visitor, feels that something is wrong, and wants desperately to leave. A gun disappears. Dallas, the oldest son, seems to hover on the edge of violence out of sheer boredom. Something is strange about the way Dash acts around Gwen and his own daughters. And there is always the corn, stretching out for miles, with, as Dallas explains, American nuclear warheads buried just beneath them, pointed at the Soviet Union. And there is the immense sky, unpolluted by city lights, which the family looks up at with binoculars. They are searching for M31, the galaxy in Andromeda that Dash identifies as our home, where the informed will go when the Etherians come. Wright has done his research; UFO chaser jargon is scattered throughout the book. (The fascinated, the skeptical, and the crazy are welcome to find out about “deros” – or detrimental robots – at the Wikipedia entry for Robert Shaver.)

From here, things begin to happen – strange violent things – and revelation follows revelation, but none of them seem to clear anything up; this is one of the few books where things make less sense the more you find out. At the end, you are unsure about what happened, let alone why people acted the way they did. This appears to be the point; the characters are mysterious even to each other. The novel’s approach to its people can be summarized by how Dash looks at his wife: “He stood there until her eyes met his and in them were neither questions nor answers but sharp facets of light glimpsed for the first time, the deeps of a stranger.”

What holds the book together is Wright’s prose: his sure sense of metaphor; his precise, serpentine sentences; and his ability to capture strange floating states of being: “White veins of lightning stood up stark as winter trees on the far sky where he half expected to spot a grim finger or two reaching through the low racing clouds.” (Occasionally, my reaction was more “Wait, what?” but the passages can usually be deciphered.) By the end of the book, Wright is unable to keep the family together, and the book drives itself into the sort of hallucinatory tinfoil-wearing madness that I was glad it had avoided until then, since crazy people are never all that interesting. The ending strikes me as a failure, because the heart of the book was the family, not the obsession with aliens. The conclusion succeeds, however, even as it spins out of control, in evoking a combination of the various forms of dread that have filled the rest of this strange, beautiful novel: rural, domestic, cosmic, American.

Caleb Williams by William Godwin

I've finally found a book that I think could be enjoyed by every single person I know. And it was written in 1794! I've tried reading a few things that are identified as "page turners," and have usually found them so thinly conceived that the solution is either fairly obvious by the middle of the book, or so arbitrary as to be of no interest. Most modern mysteries annoy me for the latter reason. The only mystery writer I find consistently delightful is Chesterton, and this may partially be because they're short stories and consist almost entirely of problem and solution.

Anyway, it's been a long time since I've read a book this quickly just to find out what happens. I was unwilling to take out less than a hundred page chunk every day. The book is a sort of murder mystery, but the murderer is revealed about a third of the way into the novel; and the rest of it is just a cat and mouse game. But the relationship between the two men is so strange and interesting that I never got bored. There isn't a huge amount of subtlety in the novel, and most of the characters are painted in primary colors -- but the central situation is so genuinely fascinating that it carries the entire book.

I think I have a vivid image of pretty much every scene -- and, what is rarer, a completely clear idea of causality and chronology -- while also not remembering a single memorable sentence or interesting turn of phrase. In fact, the only places I noticed style was when a section was getting unusually melodramatic. Godwin doesn't bother describing much of anything beyond what is absolutely necessary, and has no real feeling for rhythm or music in words -- but I haven't come across another book that demonstrates how largely irrelevant this is to whether or not a novel is successful, as long as the author is not actually vague or imprecise. But the praise that you seem to see most commonly on the back of literary fiction, at least in my experience, relates to prose style.

This is, in fact, the thing that I tend to look for first in books -- college training, perhaps, or because it takes less time to make this judgement -- and I have occasionally maintained that I can tell whether a book's any good from the first page. (In my defense, this is almost always because of a pretentious style, not an undistinguished one.) And Godwin's prose was so blunt that in the beginning of the novel I was really wondering why this book was worth reading, but I couldn't have cared less when the plot started to move.

Anyway, a wonderful book. Everyone go out and read it and tell me what you think. There are, incredibly, four editions of it in print. If you have any sort of a long trip coming, pick it up. It is certainly the most rewarding and engrossing potboiler I've ever read. I was even thinking of turning it into a screenplay, set in some sort of semi-feudal landowner type society. Maybe the post-Reconstruction American South. But there a few time change difficulties that I haven't figured out how to get around.

A Musil review

A review I wrote of a collection of Robert Musil odds and ends is here. My name is nowhere to be found on the page, so you will have to take it on faith that I wrote it.

Garrison Keillor

There have been a flurry of articles about Garrison Keillor recently, but this one -- mentioned in Bookslut -- caught my attention for its unusually bitter tone. Everyone should read it, because it is a good example of the dangerous appeal of a vicious review.

First, I have not read Good Poems, nor do I have any particular attachment to Garrison Keillor, but it was still obvious to me that Kleinzahler never really scored any honest points. The only legitimate criticism of a book like this one is that the selection is lousy, but Kleinzahler never identifies a single poem that he wishes wasn't here; he appears to dislike Billy Collins, but doesn't give an example of how an included Collins poem is bad. He maintains that the poetry read on Keillor's shows "as a rule, isn't poetry at all but prose arbitrarily broken into lines masquerading as poetry" -- and doesn't provide a single example. A usual sample is "more often than not a middle-aged creative writing instructor catching a whiff of mortality in the countryside — watching the geese head south, getting lost in the woods, this sort of thing." I would bet a fair amount that there is not a single poem in the collection that could be identified by this description. It is a lot easier to be funny than accurate.

The only poets Kleinzahler does mention are Shakespeare, Dickinson, and Burns, along with Whitman and a few other modern poets that he likes; but all in all, on the basis of no evidence, he wants us to accept that this is a "rotten collection." When he does actually quote something, he identifies himself as a reader of extraordinary insensitivity. He quotes William Carlos Williams's "To Asphodel, That Greeny Flower" (the relevant line is this one: "It is difficult to get the news from poems / yet men die miserably every day / for lack / of what is found there" ) and then lays out this paragraph:

A pretty sentiment, to be sure, but simply untrue, as anyone who has been to the supermarket or ballpark recently will concede. Ninety percent of adult Americans can pass through this life tolerably well, if not content, eating, defecating, copulating, shopping, working, catching the latest Disney blockbuster, without having a poem read to them by Garrison Keillor or anyone else. Nor will their lives be diminished by not standing in front of a Cézanne at the art museum or listening to a Beethoven piano sonata. Most people have neither the sensitivity, inclination, or training to look or listen meaningfully, nor has the culture encouraged them to, except with the abstract suggestion that such things are good for you. Multivitamins are good for you. Exercise, fresh air, and sex are good for you. Fruit and vegetables are good for you. Poetry is not.

This is an incompetent reading of the Williams poem, which is a great deal more subtle than Kleinzahler can apparently handle. First of all, since he has decided to get news from this poem, it is worth pointing out that Williams does not specify a percentage of men who die miserably, so all those Americans at the ballpark are beside the point.

More importantly, there is a calculated ambiguity in the use of the word "miserably." The first meaning is that every day people die unhappy for lack of something that poetry can provide. But, in a sense that Kleinzahler misses completely, it can also mean that these deaths are miserable because of what they have missed, that these people's lives have been somehow wretched, pitiable, lacking in fulfillment, because they lived them with no sense of beauty or imagination. Their deaths are sad for the poet, not for the people themselves, who perhaps -- as Kleinzahler points out -- never knew or cared what they were missing. From his reading of this poem, though, I suspect Kleinzahler is missing quite a bit himself. Miserable bastard. If only he got as much out of poetry as I do.

Let me just point out one more incoherent paragraph in this thoroughly incoherent review.

Are we not yet adult enough as a culture to acknowledge that the arts are not for everyone, and that bad art is worse than no art at all; and that good or bad, art's exclusive function is to entertain, not to improve or nourish or console, simply entertain. And in this, Moby Dick or Bach's "Well-Tempered Clavier" are not different than the movie Cat in the Hat or Britney Spears wiggling her behind on stage; the former being more complexly entertaining and satisfying, but only for those who can appreciate the difference, and they are the minority.

I was thinking for a while about this phrase: "bad art is worse than no art at all." Is this really a choice that we get to make? Has there ever been a society where exclusively good art has been produced? Our only real options as a culture are a mixture of good and bad art, purely bad art, or no art at all, and the latter two scenarios are mainly created by totalitarian governments. And how in the world is reading a bad poem worse for someone than not reading one at all? They might be equivalent, but worse?

Kleinzahler is forced to make this clearly indefensible assertion because otherwise there would be no reason to get this pissed off about a collection of poems that he happens not to like, for reasons that he himself doesn't seem to be clear about -- especially when he also argues that art is merely entertainment that some people get and other people don't. It's true that for people of a certain sensitivity bad art really is offensive, but you can't defend unleashing that anger in print unless you think that it's honestly damaging people somehow. And that's the problem if you simultaneously argue that, objectively, it isn't all that important, while generating feelings of a strength that indicate that it might just be the most important thing in the world to you. Kleinzahler realizes this contradiction, I think, but to truly face it would require throwing out most of his review, so he slips out of the knot with a bad joke...

Poetry not only isn't good for you, bad poetry has been shown to cause lymphomas and, in extreme instances, pancreatic cancer, in laboratory experiments. (I'll have to dig around in my notes to find exactly what study that was....)

The only sense in which bad art can actually be bad for you, I think, is when it generates too many reviews like this, which I honestly believe stimulate malice and are bad for the character.

Haditha and Christopher Hitchens

Anytime you're looking for someone to say something either extremely obvious or thoroughly incoherent about the situation in Iraq, but with great vehemence, Christopher Hitchens is your man. He is at it again in Slate, arguing that Haditha is not like My Lai.

I hadn't heard much of this talk, so I was curious who was actually making this claim. Hitchens has his sources. He says there's been a lot of "glib talk about My Lai." This, in the style of Internet journalism, hyperlinks somewhere. And where does it hyperlink? Yes, to another Hitchens article about why Iraq isn't like Vietnam. Is Hitchens accusing himself of glib talk?

Well, no: My Lai is never mentioned in his article. Is it mentioned in the New York Times article that he links to, which compares Vietnam and Iraq? No: that article was written long before Haditha, and mentions no massacres. Anyway, before I analyze the rest of this argument, I would just like to make something absolutely clear about this: Christopher Hitchens is a liar. If you link to something that is supposed to corrobate your argument, and it leads here, then you are either being dishonest or are just an incompetent journalist. Why do people keep publishing this guy?

Here are some of Hitchens main points: My Lai took all day; more people were killed. The army now warns people not to do such things again. Indeed, all of this is true. I waited to see where this was headed, but then he switches gears, which I must say is one of his characteristic moves:

The other difference, one ought not need add, is that in My Lai the United States was fighting the Vietcong. A recent article about the captured diary of a slain female Vietnamese militant (now a best seller in Vietnam) makes it plain that we were vainly attempting to defeat a peoples' army with a high morale and exalted standards. I, for one, will not have them insulted by any comparison to the forces of Zarqawi, the Fedayeen Saddam, and the criminal underworld now arrayed against us.

Indeed, one ought not need add this, Mr. Hitchens; I will throughly concede that these massacres took place in two different countries. Two different enemies were involved. They even took place, yes, more than thirty years apart. Why has no one else thought to point this out?

Then he marches forward with his apparent argument: the Vietcong were a people's army and he won't have them compared -- simply won't -- to Zarqawi and the other monsters we are now fighting. What? But we were talking about the massacre of one group of women and children, and comparing it with the (alleged) massacre of another group of women and children. What in the world does this have to do with the nobility or savagery of the enemy we are fighting? Is it better to shoot down a village full of civilians in a just war or an unjust war? Hitchens doesn't care; he wants to get indignant about yet another straw man. (He wisely decides to link nowhere to prove this point; I have not heard anyone praising Zarqawi's methods or congratulating him as a freedom fighter.)

Then Hitchens goes forth to take a bold position. Apparently, some insurgent elements are actually trying to make American soldiers jittery about the civilian population by sending suicide bombers. So what does this mean? "As with the foul policy above, the awful thing about this charming policy is that it works. Which leads us to one very important conclusion: Any coalition soldier who relieves his rage by discharging a clip is by definition doing Zarqawi's work for him, and even in a way obeying his orders. If anything justifies a court-martial, then surely that does."

So here is the grand finale. A soldier who shoots a civilian should be court martialed, because it's bad for America's status in Iraq. Well said, Mr. Hitchens. I too believe that a soldier - no matter how rattled his nerves might be - who walks through a village and shoots women and children, and then proceeds to cover it up by filing a false report, should be punished. And I also think that My Lai and Haditha are two different things, and that both are awful. Can I get published in Slate for saying it, or in The Atlantic, which also continually publishes this guy's useless articles? I sure hope so, because I could use the money. Here's an idea for my first article: Iraq is in the Middle East. Now all I need is a suitably vehement first sentence, preferably a little orotund: "All across the media, you can see people arguing about the position of Iraq on the globe, first saying that it is located in South America, and others arguing that it is in fact in Asia. But this is absurdly false..."

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.

Paul Fussell's The Great War and Modern Memory

An incredible book.I never thought I would be this captivated by what is essentially just a study of the literature of the First World War. But unlike Patriotic Gore, which did the same thing for The Civil War (and is also incredible), Fussell's ambition goes beyond literary criticism; he wants to give the reader something of a sense for what modern warfare has become, and what impact it has on soldiers. It appears that he knows himself; the book is dedicated to Technical Sergeant Edward Keith Hudson, "killed beside me in France, March 15, 1945."

The book proceeds unchronologically from theme to theme and, while quoting from an astonishing number of letters, poems, and novels - often from other modern wars, especially WWII - it usually has a single author represent the most comprehensive example of Fussell's thesis for each chapter; the main four are Siegfried Sassoon, Robert Graves, David Jones, and Edmund Blunden. As in Patriotic Gore, each of these authors receives a true appreciation; there are few other books that make you want to go out and read so many other books. My library copy is already folded over every fifteen pages or so with a passage I want to write down and remember.

The Great War and Modern Memory is not perfect, but it almost seems ungrateful to mention it. Fussell's broader ambitions occasionally hurt the book, and lead him to draw conclusions that seem untenable to me; he sees the First World War as being a dividing line that it doesn't always appear to be - for example, he writes an entire chaper on the impulse in soldiers to demonize the enemy, and constantly establish Us and Them binaries. This depressing tendency struck me as having little to do with the First World War and much more to do with being human. The book also ends on an odd, unsatisfactory note, moving too far away from the reality of the battlefields.

But when Fussell stays with the soldiers, and focuses on telling their stories, and the way in which they started to realize, together, the horrible magnitude of what was happening to them, he is incredible; he has read so widely, and so sensitively, that he vanishes into their words, and at times seems to speak for all the soldiers in our awful 20th century. It is a cliche, but the world might really be a better place if everyone read this book.

Let me just quote one passage. Everyone will respond to different parts -- especially if they have experienced combat, or known people who have -- but the last sentence of Blunden's quote is what I remember whenever I think of this great, great book:

Whatever the main cause of failure, the attack on the Somme was the end of illusions about breaking the line and sending the cavalry through to end the war. Contemplating the new awareness brought to both sides by the first day of July, 1916, Blunden wrote eighteen years later: "By the end of the day both sides had seen, in a sad scrawl of broken earth and murdered men, the answer to the question. No road. No thoroughfare. Neither race had won, nor could win, the war. The War had won, and would go on winning."

Gore Vidal's Lincoln

I came to Vidal through his essays, which I read nonstop for an entire week before I started to feel like I was reading the same thing again and again. I also got the sense that the essays that I thought were really great, durable pieces - the end of his review of a Dos Passos novel, for example, or his essay on Suetonius - were all written in the mid-50s, before Vidal started producing the historical novels for which he's best known; his essays from this later period get more and more showy. He seems like a stand-up comedian repeatedly reworking the same material - I would enjoy the performance, but since the ideas were old there was nothing left but the style and maybe a phrase or two. Maybe there's some sort of rule that you can't be a great essayist and a great novelist at the same time.

By which I mean that Vidal is a great novelist, and Lincoln is an exceptionally good book. It starts a few days before Lincoln's inauguration and ends (I hope I'm giving nothing away) just after his assassination. I've lived in Washington for several years, and am constantly running into old buildings with historical information - I stumbled across Ford's Theater after seeing a movie on E Street - and the Surratt's boarding house, which has a plaque that is barely noticeable, is now a Chinese restaurant (it's called Wok n' Roll!) on H Street in Chinatown. Every time I walk by it now, though, I can imagine the chickens in the back, the staircase that led to the upstairs rooms with the piano.

The book, luckily, is not concerned exclusively with such details; Vidal has a sure instinct for exactly how much period color to include. He can't avoid some of the other common flaws of historical novels: characters who have only a couple of character traits and keep repeating them from scene to scene; and horrible expository dialogue meant to educate an ignorant audience about their country's history (I include myself) - here is an example from when Lincoln arrives at the White House early in the novel:

"Last time I was here it was 1848." Lincoln looked about with some curiosity.
"Your friend Mr. Polk was in residence then."
Lincoln nodded. "But never friendly to me, particularly after I attacked his Mexican War."
"Ah, the irrespressible speeches of one's youth!" Seward made a comical face.
"You'll be hearding a lot about that speech of yours before you're done."
Lincoln grimaced. "I know. I know. Words are hostages to forture. The only problem is we never know in advance just what the fortune is."

Luckily, such stilted sequences are fairly rare. (I can't wait for people to start writing historical novels about our times: "Ah, yes, I remember the crucial evidence revolved around a blue dress owned by the young lady in question, stained with President's own semen. Strange: rumor has it that the old boy always had a hard time finished using that method, but the woman was apparently rather gifted in this respect." "Isn't it ironic - as the old song goes - that his ejaculate, when finally released, proved to be his undoing?" "You can say that again, homeboy.") The flat characters appear to be a bigger problem. Almost everyone in the novel is a conglomeration of a few traits: for example, whenever Chase appears, he exhibits some combination of these factors: bad eyesight, a love for autographs, a strict desire to maintain his rectitude in all government matters, and presidential ambitions. That's pretty much all there is to him - and plenty of major characters have even less going on.

At first this struck me as a major flaw, but I eventually realized that Vidal was actually doing something very canny. With the exception of a few characters who are too stupid to merit his attention - McClennan, for example, and Sprague - Vidal enters into the minds of virtually all the major characters, and makes them seem like fairly basic, comprehensible people: their thoughts run without fail on only a few rails; Seward, for example, has imperial designs, and that's virtually all Vidal allows him to think about. There is only one exception: Lincoln. We never get to enter into his mind at all; we only see him as observed by these various flat characters, none of whom can really understand what he's up to - and by dividing up the perspective in this way, Lincoln starts to achieve a mysterious grandeur. It seems paradoxical that a novelist can make a character more psychologically interesting by dwelling only on what is observable, but that is exactly what happens here. This opacity also makes certain scenes - such as Lincoln on his son's deathbed - much more moving: first because we know that they actually happened, and second because, by refusing to provide any interior details, Vidal forces us to make the imaginative identification ourselves. He accomplishes something similar with Kate Chase, the second most interesting character in the novel and a sort of a female foil to Lincoln, who is the only other major nonstupid character whose thoughts are never revealed. (I think a great historical novel, incidentally, is waiting to be written about her marriage to Sprague and later life.)

The book is not flawless. It is far too long, with whole chapters that could have been cut with little loss: everything involving David Herrold, for example. The book's vitality depends entirely on its central character; as soon as it moves away from him, it loses momentum, and it is telling that once Lincoln dies Vidal barely has the energy to slap an ending on the novel. Also, on the level of individual sentences, it isn't very well-written. There are all sorts of knotty constructions and loopy double negatives (I would bet anything that the book was written by hand) which a careful writer would have caught: "Several imprudent answers occurred, as always, to Chase and, as always, were replaced with that habitual prudence for which he was never entirely not admired." I have never not entirely understood that last part myself - or have I?

Finally, though, prose is secondary. Vidal possesses a much more important talent for a novelist; he has a natural sense of structure and pacing, and he knows how to manage an immense canvas. He also has a wonderful wit, which is not the same thing as being funny. Here's a sample quote from Seward - "I believe that every young man should live for as long as possible in Paris, in order to perfect his French and strengthen his morals, which is more easily done in a capital where vice is not only everywhere but so repellent that no temptation is possible." This is not going to to make anyone laugh out loud, but it produces a little internal grin, and it's the sort of thing that sustains a reader through a long book. Too many comedic writers today - perhaps taking their cues from television - try to tell actual jokes, and there is something frantic and degrading about this, especially when the jokes fall flat, which some invariably will.

Finally, Lincoln is also a decent guide to the period's history, and a wonderful compendium of political wisdom. Here's one of my favorites, about responding to smear attacks:

Currently, the press was making much of the fact that while viewing the dead on a battlefield, Lincoln had asked Lamon to sing him some ribald songs. The story was curiously repellent; and so believed by many. But Lincoln would not ready any version of the story, much less answer it. "In politics," he had said to Seward, when the subject came up, "every man must skin his own skunk. These fellows are welcome to the hide of this one. Either I have established the sort of character that gives the lie to this sort of thing, or I haven't. If I haven't, that is the end."

Roy Fisher

I've never heard of this poet-- apparently he is better known in England, although not much. I read a review of his Collected Poems (I found out about it from here) and came across this beautiful prose poem -- I think this is just an excerpt, although it feels complete. It's called Metamorphoses.

She sleeps, in the day, in the silence. Where there is light, but little else: the white covers, the pillow, her head with its ordinary hair, her forearm dark over the sheet.

She sleeps and it is hardly a mark on the stillness; that she should have moved to be there, that she should be moving now across her sleep as the window where the light comes in passes across the day.

Her warmth is in the shadows of the bed, and the bed has few shadows, the sky is smoked with a little cloud, there are fish-trails high in the air. Her sleep rides on the silence, it is an open mouth travelling backward on moving waves.

Mouth open across the water, the knees loosened in sleep; dusks of the body shadowed around the room. In the light from the windows there is the thought of a beat, a flicker, an alternation of aspect from the outside to the inside of the glass. The light is going deep under her.

That line about the open mouth travelling backward -- it's uncanny how strange and accurate it feels, the mysterious way in which the words have their impact. Maybe it's just me.

Anyway, it is a nice thing to discover in the middle of a drab workday. And nice to think that there are still so many beautiful things being made, and that you can run into them just skimming across the Internet.

I was just thinking the same thing a few days ago, after I discovered this great music website that generates songs based on information that you supply - favorite songs and artists. I tend to be rather greedy and acquisitive about such things, so I was initially typing in search after search about every song and artist I liked, and pondering purchases, until I chilled out a little and decided to enjoy what I heard and leave it at that.

Père Goriot by Balzac - trans. Burton Raffel

I haven't read Balzac until now because I had gotten the impression that, while being an established classic, he was still somehow second rate - like Dvorak, Trollope, Chesterton. Maybe John Updike will be in the same boat eventually. Someone whose talent was undeniable, but who produced too much and with too much apparent ease for his work to be of the highest class.

I only picked up Père Goriot because a friend of mine is a Raffelite - that is, he is enamored with the translator, which I never thought was possible - and insisted that everything the guy touched was worth picking up. Well, I was incredibly glad I did. I haven't been this thrilled by the beginning of novel in ages.

Here's a sample of what was so gripping - a lengthy sample, since Balzac loses all of his charm in snippets:

Monsieur Poiret was more machine than man. Seeing him gliding along the pathways of the Botanical Gardens like a gray shadow, a limp old cap on his head, barely able to hold the knob of his yellowing ivory-headed walking stick in his hand, wind flapping his wilted coattails so loosely behind him that they barely hid trousers that seemed to have nothing in them, his blue-stockinged legs quivering like a drunk, flashing a dirty white vest and shriveled shirt-ruff of coarse muslin that seemed ready to part company from the tie knotted around his turkey-cock neck--seeing him thus, many people must have wondered whether this Chinese ghost truly belonged to the bold white race, said to be described from Japthet, flitting up and down the Boulevard Italien. What could have been the life's work that so shrunk him down? What passion could have darkened a face so bulbous that, had it been drawn by a cartoonist, no one would have believed it? What had he been? Maybe he had worked at the Ministry of Justice, in the office to which executioners report their expenses--how much they'd spent on black veils for the eyes of parricides; how much for straw and chaff, to line the basket where heads drop; how much for twine to tie the guillotine's blades. Maybe he had been the receptionist at a slaughterhouse door, or perhaps an assistant inspector of health or sanitation. In a word, this was a man who looked as if he'd been one of the mules who turn out great social mill wheel, one of those Parisian Rats who pull other people's chestnuts out of the fire but never ever know who eats them, a sort of spindle for public misery and filth to whirl around on--in short, one of those men of whom we say, the minute we see them: We can't do without fellows like that. Their cadaverous faces, stamped by pain--psychological or physical--are unknown to the Beautiful People of Paris. But Paris is as immense as an ocean. Drop in your sounding line and it will never reach the bottom. Have a look, try describing it! No matter how carefully you try to see and understand everything, to describe everything, no matter how many of you there are, trying hard, all of you exploring that great sea, there'll always be places you never get to, caverns you never uncover, blossoms, pearls, monsters, quite incredible things that every literary diver overlooks. And Maison Vauquer is one of those odd monstrosities.

There are a number of serious things wrong with this passage. First of all, it is totally unnecessary; Monsieur Poiret is a minor character who has only one real thing to do in the narrative, and we don't need much convincing to believe that he would do it. There is no real reason to learn so much about him, let alone hypothesize about what he might have done involving twine and guillotines. Second, there are sentences here that are obviously untrue - can anyone really imagine a nose on a human being that would seem unbelievable if a cartoonist drew it? But Balzac cannot stop to think about whether what he is saying makes exact sense - it sounds good, and he is writing as fast as the ideas come. And that, finally, is what is great about this sloppy passage. It gives off the impression of being written at white heat. This writing is alive, and that is more important than anything that might be wrong with it.

Apparently Balzac had the habit, like Proust, of getting back proofs from the typesetters and, when inspiration struck him, basically changing the manuscript - adding pages and pages to a single passage and getting rid of others. I do not get the impression that this is because he was a careful writer - he did not tweak sentence by sentence; something set off an idea, I think, and he followed it wherever it led. That is why this novel, at least, and I'm guessing most of his others, has absolutely no sense of proportion - the narrative is like a roll of dough that has been squished in various random places; there will be pages and pages devoted to minor characters, and what should be major developments in the plot are rushed through. The plot has clearly been planned out, but what should be major dramatic scenes do not come off at all, and scenes of pointless narrative padding - like a group of people eating at the inn - are as wonderful as any scenes in realistic literature. You read this novel and get the sense of a great artist who appears of have no control over his talent.

Another thing: I get the sense that Balzac's genius would have expressed itself best in short essayistic sketches. This is one of those books that starts to suck whenever it becomes concerned with advancing the plot - the basic thread is an ambitious middle-class law student named Rastignac, up from the provinces, with some distant aristocratic relations, who wants to make his way into Parisian society. An old man, Goriot, lives in the pension with him, and is driving himself to bankrupcy supporting his two daughters, who have both made bad marriages to wealthy but stingy and controlling men. There is also a schemer Vautrin who wants to help Eugene acquire a forture by less than moral means. How will all these conflicts be resolved? Balzac's prescription: melodrama.

That is, lots of long speeches, sequences of long, stagy dialogue, and - of course - secret, hidden pasts that get characters conveniently dragged off when they have performed their function in the plot. I noticed something about this book, and I get the feeling that it is representative of Balzac's work as a whole - it is at its absolute best in character sketches, generalization from the mouth of the author, and in large group scenes.

Any time a scene calls for real intimacy between two people, or a small group, it quickly starts to sound phony. But when you get a bunch of people together, engaging in the silly collective chatter that takes up so much of modern life, Balzac is your man - I have never felt a stronger sense of verisimilitude come off a book than in some of these scenes. And for anyone that thinks that, because of television or whatever, modern people speak a more degraded version of language, and are more prone to stupid fads, look no further for evidence that it has ever been so - although in Balzac's time I suspect it was an urban phenomenon and not, as it is now, universal.

The rest of lodgers appeared, one after the other, both those who lived in and those who did not, wishing each other good day and murmuring those empty phrases which, among certain sorts of Parisians, constitute a kind of droll good humor of which stupidity is the main component and whose principal virtue consists only in how the words are pronounced or what gestures accompany them. This sort of jargon is always changing. The jokes that underlie it never last a month: some political event, some lawsuit or trial, a street song, some actor's comic routine, all serve to keep this joke going, since more than anything else it involves snatching up words and ideas as they go flying past, and then hitting them back, as if with racquets.

In this case, the silly joke of the day consists of adding "-rama" to everything, as in "souporama" and "healtharama" (and I checked the French, it is "rama" in English, so apparently we English-speakers were dominating shit culture even in Balzac's time). It is hard to explain what makes these group scenes so pleasing - maybe just their energy, and how accurately they capture a bunch of people sitting around and shooting the breeze. It is easy to see why so many great writers have admired Balzac, despite his obvious flaws, because the flair and ease with which he brings off certain types of scenes is astonishing.

There was a lot in the novel, actually, that reminded me of Proust, although Proust is by far the greater artist. The main similarity, I think, is the impulse - alternately fascinating and maddening - to make every action and event stand for some sort of generalization about society. Nothing can just be what it is: there must be some sort of larger truth behind it. Even when the generalization is apt I'm annoyed to keep having the narrative broken by these essays (Balzac is much clumsier about it than Proust) especially since it seems to keep robbing the characters of their reality.

Both writers, too, despite their love of generalizations, have absolutely no talent for the epigram, because they refuse to ever turn away a clause that might pin down their meaning a little more clearly. I suppose this is a form of honestly, since an epigram always requires that a great deal be ignored. For example, the most famous line in Balzac is probably "Behind every forture lies a great crime." Well, I think it comes from this novel, and here is how it actually reads, with greater accuracy and a lot less punch: "The secret of all great fortures, when there's no obvious explanation for them, is always some forgotten crime--forgotten, mind you, because it's been properly handled." The only generalization I remember being presented with complete simplicity comes out of Goriot's mouth, and from what I have read it is the one thing that Balzac believed with no qualifications: "Money is life. It can do everything."

So: I finally understand why Balzac is usually seen as second-rate (he is) and also why he is still a classic and worth reading and learning from. Regarding Raffel, the translation reads well, although I glanced occasionally at the French and was confused by the odd liberties he took in translating colloquialisms. For example, in the French, Vautrin is talking about killing someone quickly, and says "Et, à l'ombre!" This literally means something like "into the shade/shadows." (See the second volume of the Recherche for a sample usage.) I'm guessing an equivalent English phrase would be "Lights out!" - or, in case this phrase only makes sense with the widespread use of electricity, something quick and brutal like "That's that!" since Vautrin is saying this as he demonstrates a fatal saber thurst. Here's what Raffel chooses: "And he'll do it without any fuss at all!" How he gets this out of "à l'ombre" is beyond me.

Anyway, these are quibbles. The book was thoroughly engrossing, and for all its flaws clearly had the mark of greatness on it.

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.

American Inventor

That so few now dare to be eccentric marks the chief danger of our time. -- John Stuart Mill

Last night, I sat and watched all two hours of American Inventor, the ABC reality show created by Simon Cowell and some other guy. It is exactly the same as American Idol except with inventors instead of adolescent singers -- and has gotten a number of severely negative reviews, accusing it of being derivative and manipulative. I believe the Orlando Sentinel called it a "queasy retread." What this means is unclear but I think they didn't like it.

Everything about these reviews is accurate. The show's judges are again either obnoxious, completely inarticulate, or gushing, although their personalities are not divided up as neatly as in American Idol, and their comments are not as predictable (dog, that was hot!). The inventors, like the singers, are again the subject of mocking or gauzy featurettes, with music to indicate whether you are supposed to find this person inspiring, ridiculous, or heartbreaking. Every moment that is at all dramatic is seen eight times in teasers before the show will agree to show it to you.

None of this keeps the show from being, for me, genuinely fascinating. Unlike American Idol, which features young people (within their genre of choice) trying to sound as much like other singers as possible, American Inventor focuses entirely on individual eccentrics, something Idol only does in the early qualifying rounds and the shows cobbled together with the express purpose of ridiculing people who can't sing. Also, you learn very little about a person singing a song badly; they might be slightly delusional for trying to attend the audition, but that's about all you can feel. The situation is pathetic but little more.

It is a different story when a person has poured tens of thousands of dollars and decades of his life into something that is a pure product of his imagination; the nearest Idol equivalent would be performing a song that you spent years writing yourself. This is a situation that has an element of tragedy. Not because the idea is bad, necessarily -- most of the inventors who have spent a great deal of money do have a decent idea. It is tragic because their devotion to it has become single-minded, and they have sacrificed too much. Or because their ambition has blinded them to some enormous flaw, like extremely restricted appeal; one man (who actually made it through to the next round) had spent $20,000 on a prototype for a shovel which did work, but whose only function was filling sandbags faster.

The show devoted far too much time to making fun of people who were clearly unstable or crackpots, or who have immense ambition and no real idea, but its concept is too powerful for the judges or producers to ruin. You could see an entire life in some of these people's faces - I mean the people who took what they had made seriously. Unlike Idol, it didn't seem to be just the money or fame they wanted, but validation for decisions they had made over years and years. And you couldn't laugh at them - not without looking at the plausibility of your ambitions, or wondering whether the laughter came out of some defensiveness about your own compromises.

As I watched the show I kept thinking that, no matter how much intelligence and creativity is lavished on scripted shows, this is what they have to compete with - and although the scripted comedies might be better at provoking laughter, I can't think of any that can match the humanity of this one show, built around this fairly brainless, derivative concept. Even when they are being belitted or cut into vignettes, these people are more interesting, more alive, than every fictional character on television.

At the end of the show, a fourteen-year-old with what I thought was a pretty good invention (a ventilator that fit into a car window, so dogs would be comfortable inside alone) was turned away. He was bitter, crying; a judge went outside and comforted him, told his mother she was doing a wonderful job. It looked like she was raising this kid and his little brother alone. At the end of the show, when the judge was gone, the boy thanked his mother for helping him so much on the project; he was still crying a little, and he told her she was the best mom in the world. She started tearing up and hugged him. And I didn't care that the producers of the show were trying to get me to be stirred or sad with their goddamn schmaltzy music; it was stirring, it was sad.

Rivers & Tides: Andy Goldsworthy Working With Time

My roommate recently rented Rivers and Tides, a documentary about Andy Goldsworthy. What a wonderful movie! Goldsworthy is an abstract sculptor who works with natural materials -- rocks, leaves, moss, ice. His art is generally installed in the areas where the materials come from (there is one indoor installation in the movie where he uses clay) and is also distinguished by its ephemerality. Except for some of the stone installations, most of what Goldsworthy creates -- like some beautiful arrangements of fall leaves -- is meant to be taken apart, either slowly or quickly, by the natural world. He documents them with photographs.

Anyway, the film is episodic, following him from one project to another. The main interest is the art itself, and my attention flagged a little any time the movie started to focus on Goldsworthy's life, conversation, or family. Goldsworthy seems like a nice guy, and he is very interesting when talking about the natural world -- about spores, bracken, and how to stabilize clay (hair, apparently) -- but vague and tedious when he talks about his art: he has to resort often to words like "energy," and then, much to his credit, realizes that he is not saying much and stops. One of the loveliest things about his art, in fact, is that it requires no analysis; I can't think of another modern artist whose work almost everyone would find beautiful.

Goldsworthy's art taps into some very universal sources of beauty -- fall leaves, the sun shining through ice; and the shapes he is obsessed with -- a line that winds back and forth like a river, a circle that, like the sun, appears to have been cut out of something -- all have something elemental about them. The art shows us how to notice the natural beauty that is overlooked because it both common and chaotic; by supplying an element of order that appears to have risen organically out of the material, he points out the beauty that is always there.

What I found inspiring about it is that this is not only art that anyone can appreciate; it is art that anyone can make, although Goldsworthy admittedly has incredible patience and a brlliant eye. In one scene, for example, he grinds iron-rich stones he finds in a stream and tosses the red powder into the water; the camera follows the color as it swirls and defuses through the current. It is lovely, but it is exactly the same beauty that exists in a cup of tea, if you bother watching the color seep out of the bag and spread like smoke through the cup. I remember spending hours digging channels in our yard as a kid, and using the hose to make the water run through them. There is something instinctual in the kinds of things that Goldsworthy does -- an instinct that seems to be getting increasingly foreign as we lose contact with the natural world.

It is true, there are plenty of beauties in the unnatural world as well, but I feel like the ability to sense them begins with an appreciation of the natural. I remember seeing a purple dragonfly in Madagascar and thinking that its wings looked like cellophane, and then noticing how odd it was that, when struck by a natural phenomenon, I always made analogies to the synthesized, as opposed to the other way around. But I immediately recognized that the dragonfly's wings were lovely, and I would probably never have thought that about cellophane. But cling wrap actually is rather beautiful, as amazing a sign of human capacity as the dragonfly is of evolution.

Anyway, just some thoughts as I sit in a typical office building, where vast resources have been used to create something that, taken as a whole, is so astonishingly ugly that one wonders how much longer it will take for our sense of anything but human beauty to be totally stamped out -- how else could we stand continually being in places like this? Since schools, modern office buildings, care facilities for the elderly, and hospitals are coming more and more to ressemble one another, we will soon spend most of lives with flourescent lighting, industrial carpet interspersed with stretches of linoleum, and the hum of the air conditioner. I also find it kind of funny that the the drab beige hallways at my office are distinguished from each other primarily by the works of high art on their walls -- Matisse is an especial favorite, specifically the cut-outs that he did towards the end of his life, when he was going blind.

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.