For years I've been looking for an easy way to work on the same document on different computers. I've never been good at copying work I've revised from one computer to another; when I do, I often forget which computer I last used. This logistical dilemma has, on more than one occasion, discouraged me enough to stop me from writing.
Dropbox has ended my search for a solution—a perfectly executed, elegant little program that automatically updates any file I ask it to across computers, as I write. And it's free.
Sunday, December 27, 2009
Friday, December 25, 2009
Thursday, December 24, 2009
Ruining the Country
Last night at a local hotel bar I listened to a man explain to the people around him that Mexicans are ruining the country.
He was an older man, bald, pink-faced, probably in his late fifties, wearing an Amsterdam t-shirt with a marijuana leaf on it. He let us know that he'd served in the Army and had no interest in the opinions of anyone who hadn't.
Just before going to the bar, I'd read this.
I suggest following the link, but I'll quickly summarize what it says: employees of Goldman Sachs (and a few other banks) bought thousands of sub-prime loans, packaged them together, sold the packages to various investment groups, and then bet on their failure. (That's worth re-reading again as a one sentence summary of what's wrong with American capitalist culture.)
Within the article, one finds this quote:
He was an older man, bald, pink-faced, probably in his late fifties, wearing an Amsterdam t-shirt with a marijuana leaf on it. He let us know that he'd served in the Army and had no interest in the opinions of anyone who hadn't.
Just before going to the bar, I'd read this.
I suggest following the link, but I'll quickly summarize what it says: employees of Goldman Sachs (and a few other banks) bought thousands of sub-prime loans, packaged them together, sold the packages to various investment groups, and then bet on their failure. (That's worth re-reading again as a one sentence summary of what's wrong with American capitalist culture.)
Within the article, one finds this quote:
“The simultaneous selling of securities to customers and shorting them because they believed they were going to default is the most cynical use of credit information that I have ever seen,” said Sylvain R. Raynes, an expert in structured finance at R & R Consulting in New York. “When you buy protection against an event that you have a hand in causing, you are buying fire insurance on someone else’s house and then committing arson.”
The article suggests that in effect every home in the country was lit on fire by these arsons—every home, in any case, which lost value when the global financial system locked up because of their bets.
But in the United States we've always admired the ingenuity of criminals. So we do not blame them for stealing our money. Instead, we blame the man born into abject poverty who ventures thousands of miles from home in order to eat. And who succeeds in eating by getting on his bicycle at five in the morning and riding to work, where he grows, harvests, and prepares our food.
Tuesday, December 22, 2009
The Most Depressed Place in America
According to Mental Health America, which claims to be "the country’s leading nonprofit dedicated to helping ALL people live mentally healthier lives," the most depressed state in America is . . . Utah.
Living in Utah—I lived there for many years—one feels an extraordinary, almost surreal pressure to be good.
This pressure leads, I think, to profound unhappiness, in part because we're not made happy by being good.
We especially aren't made happy by being good as it's defined in Utah, where being good means being obedient. Consequently, in Utah culture, being good means ceasing to exist as an individual.
We learn very quickly—as toddlers, really—that the way we articulate our personality is through disobedience. Living begins when obedience ends. Happiness, curiously, begins with disobedience, too—that's been the great (happy) surprise of my adult life.
But in Utah, individuality—personality—is a mark of perversion. It's viewed with suspicion. It represents a kind of egomaniacal impulse to distinguish oneself, Eve-like, from God.
Anyway, here's the chart:
Living in Utah—I lived there for many years—one feels an extraordinary, almost surreal pressure to be good.
This pressure leads, I think, to profound unhappiness, in part because we're not made happy by being good.
We especially aren't made happy by being good as it's defined in Utah, where being good means being obedient. Consequently, in Utah culture, being good means ceasing to exist as an individual.
We learn very quickly—as toddlers, really—that the way we articulate our personality is through disobedience. Living begins when obedience ends. Happiness, curiously, begins with disobedience, too—that's been the great (happy) surprise of my adult life.
But in Utah, individuality—personality—is a mark of perversion. It's viewed with suspicion. It represents a kind of egomaniacal impulse to distinguish oneself, Eve-like, from God.
Anyway, here's the chart:
Sunday, December 20, 2009
Eric, Trendsetting Again
I am now an iPhoner.
An iPhonist? An iPhonee? An iPhonian? An iPhonabee? An iPhoneator? An iPhony?
Yes, that. An iPhony.
An iPhonist? An iPhonee? An iPhonian? An iPhonabee? An iPhoneator? An iPhony?
Yes, that. An iPhony.
The Happiest Place on Earth
Having spent two years in Costa Rica, I'm not surprised to read this.
It's a hell of a country and remembers things that Americans have forgotten, or never learned.
Costa Rica provides universal health care, free education, has no standing army, and has committed itself to some of the strictest environmental laws in the world.
I complained while I lived there that in comparison to the United States or Argentina and Chile, little Costa Rica lacked culture. I said, "Nothing is happening here." But that wasn't true. Costa Rica had developed its own culture, and a great deal was happening. And the people were living well and remained close to the essential pleasures of life.
New York City or Buenos Aires represents a narrow and frankly strange genre of culture. There's a time for that genre in a person's life, certainly. But there are other vital ways of living—ways that might be more important to human health and delight over time than what we find in Manhattan or Palermo.
It's a hell of a country and remembers things that Americans have forgotten, or never learned.
Costa Rica provides universal health care, free education, has no standing army, and has committed itself to some of the strictest environmental laws in the world.
I complained while I lived there that in comparison to the United States or Argentina and Chile, little Costa Rica lacked culture. I said, "Nothing is happening here." But that wasn't true. Costa Rica had developed its own culture, and a great deal was happening. And the people were living well and remained close to the essential pleasures of life.
New York City or Buenos Aires represents a narrow and frankly strange genre of culture. There's a time for that genre in a person's life, certainly. But there are other vital ways of living—ways that might be more important to human health and delight over time than what we find in Manhattan or Palermo.
Friday, December 18, 2009
The Discovery of the Year
Javier Marías is the most exciting author I've encountered since learning of Roberto Bolaño three years ago.
Of course I learned of Marías from Bolaño.
Reading Marías, I can hear his influence on Bolaño—particularly on Bolaño's pacing and dazzling effusiveness.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/video/2009/dec/15/javier-marias-your-face-tomorrow
Of course I learned of Marías from Bolaño.
Reading Marías, I can hear his influence on Bolaño—particularly on Bolaño's pacing and dazzling effusiveness.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/video/2009/dec/15/javier-marias-your-face-tomorrow
Wednesday, December 16, 2009
The Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call — New Orleans
Our civilization doesn’t have adequate images, and I think a civilization is doomed or is going to die out like dinosaurs if it does not develop an adequate language or adequate images. . . . That’s what I’m working on: a new grammar of images. — Werner Herzog, Werner Herzog Eats His Shoe
Is there a quality in art—in an artist—more important than delightedness?
The Bad Lieutenant, the new film by the great German filmmaker Werner Herzog, is delighted by the world. Unlike most films, it doesn't take delight in the world's demise but in its ongoing, omnivorous—Herzog might use the word "obscene"—beauty.
I suspect most great art, especially visual art, is born of delight: the fertile pleasure the artist, for reasons he or she often can't explain, takes in an image. With an image, the play begins.
The artist intuits that art's language of images forestalls our doom, as only art can, and yearns to speak of our ongoingness.
Herzog exuded this Shakespearean delight in images when I saw him at the University of Utah in—when? 1999? I hadn't heard of him and went with some friends to a lecture he was giving on campus.
The Bad Lieutenant, the new film by the great German filmmaker Werner Herzog, is delighted by the world. Unlike most films, it doesn't take delight in the world's demise but in its ongoing, omnivorous—Herzog might use the word "obscene"—beauty.
I suspect most great art, especially visual art, is born of delight: the fertile pleasure the artist, for reasons he or she often can't explain, takes in an image. With an image, the play begins.
The artist intuits that art's language of images forestalls our doom, as only art can, and yearns to speak of our ongoingness.
Herzog exuded this Shakespearean delight in images when I saw him at the University of Utah in—when? 1999? I hadn't heard of him and went with some friends to a lecture he was giving on campus.
During the lecture, he projected onto a screen behind him the image of a premature infant, just born, grasping the fingers of a doctor and being lifted up, naked, to hang, swinging, from the doctor's fingers. Seeing this image I gasped with just about everyone else in the audience, and wasn't alone, I think, to find myself abruptly in tears.
The great moments in The Bad Lieutenant—and there are many of them—arise from the world in the same fashion, naked infants swinging above the void. The plot stops, or at least slows (from its otherwise hurtling pace), and Herzog gives us: a water moccasin gliding through filthy post-Katrina flood waters into a prison cell that holds a drowning inmate; an alligator crushed on a Louisiana highway, its back leg twitching, and beyond it an overturned SUV; two iguanas on a coffee table beside surveilling city cops (the movie comes to a stop to allow the the camera to linger delightedly about the iguanas' heads, probing them, child-like); Nicolas Cage (brilliant again) hunched against the wall behind a rest-home door, working over his neck, his face with an electric shaver; the corpse of a mafia hit-man, and behind the corpse, the hit-man's soul, breakdancing.
During the film's most moving scene, Cage's character, Terence McDonagh, takes his lover to a shed behind his childhood home and describes to her the hours he spent there as a little boy, imagining. After talking, he stands behind her and they look out into the light, as if looking back on their innocence.
Their gazes are themselves a kind of innocence: the innocent delight of the once-upon-a-time artist, imagining.
Imagining: by which we mean: creating images.
During the film's most moving scene, Cage's character, Terence McDonagh, takes his lover to a shed behind his childhood home and describes to her the hours he spent there as a little boy, imagining. After talking, he stands behind her and they look out into the light, as if looking back on their innocence.
Their gazes are themselves a kind of innocence: the innocent delight of the once-upon-a-time artist, imagining.
Imagining: by which we mean: creating images.
This is an exuberant, brilliant movie, simultaneously joyous and grim. Herzog manages that seemingly impossible simultaneity better than anyone. I find most films—especially violent films—insulting, deadening, joyless. The Bad Lieutenant takes delight in the brutal strangeness of the world and communicates that delight in a language of images that's adequate to our time and enthralled by the beauty of our haplessness. It is the most best movie I've seen this year.
Tuesday, December 15, 2009
Tolstoy in the Kitchen
On the refrigerator there's a photograph of Tolstoy taken a few years, I guess, before his death. I don’t like the look of him. Cheerless. Prophetic. Actually: insane. Physically, psychologically unkempt, and self-certain. Although he does look generous, and unhappy to be sitting for a photograph, which might be sign enough of sanity. Very Russian—his presentation is more culturally determined than I'd expect. And he looks like he’s dying, which I find repulsive.
At the time of the photograph his great work is finished, although he'll still give us Hadji Murad, one of my favorite books—a splendid tale that begins as well as Absalom, Absalom, One Hundred Years of Solitude, even The Trial. “I was returning home by the fields.”
Now I set alongside the aged Tolstoy the cover of my Modern Library edition of War and Peace, which gives us a photograph of Tolstoy in his thirties, on the cusp of greatness.
I don't know why, but the young Tolstoy allows me to see the aged Tolstoy anew. He no longer looks ravaged but merely frail; he seems kind, even majestic, tired, yes, but no less intelligent than he was as a young man, and more plainly spiritual.
Now I set alongside the aged Tolstoy the cover of my Modern Library edition of War and Peace, which gives us a photograph of Tolstoy in his thirties, on the cusp of greatness.
I don't know why, but the young Tolstoy allows me to see the aged Tolstoy anew. He no longer looks ravaged but merely frail; he seems kind, even majestic, tired, yes, but no less intelligent than he was as a young man, and more plainly spiritual.
The young man is in that dying organism.
Because I've been reading War and Peace again (the relatively new, superb Pevear/Volokhonsky translation), it's hard to look at him as he neared the end of his life. I’m frightened of his—our—mortality and by the way his face acknowledges, even foretells his approaching death. It's an honest, doomed face.
Reading Tolstoy ruins my self-esteem.
Reading Tolstoy ruins my self-esteem.
Thursday, December 10, 2009
The Americans, by Robert Frank
Robert Frank's photographs are sometimes affectionately, sometimes bitterly witty. They are austere, lyrical, and post-romantic.
This last quality distinguishes his work from that of his greatest American predecessors (Alfred Stieglitz, Ansel Adams, and Man Ray), and from Walker Evans and Cartier-Bresson, his contemporaries and kindred spirits.
By spurning romanticism, Frank's art denies us romanticism's consolations. That denial is at the heart of his art's power. Frank's photographs, particularly in The Americans, add beauty to the world without reinforcing or adding to our fantasies of happiness.
While his art isn't itself romantic, he shows us that Americans, like all religious people, are fiercely romantic; and our romanticism—or, specifically, the peculiar manner by which we articulate it—is what he believes merits attention.
Here we arrive at the source of Frank's genius: his refusal to frame Americans romantically has the ironic effect of emphasizing our intensely romantic disposition.
Even at our most downtrodden, our most lonely, there's flair; there's extravagance. (Note, most obviously, the belt buckle. There would be no photograph without it. Beyond that: the tightness of the clothing, the intricate stitching of the boots, the elegant inward under-statedness of the man's stance, the floral curves of the hat, etc.) Our extravagance is embattled, apologetic; the subtle means by which we decorate our world and ourselves gives us a complex splendor and rescues us from pity and from self-pity. (We do not—or did not—have time for self-pity.)
Frank finds beauty where we least expect it: among our most bewildered and despised, among the old and broken, in failure, in what we forget, in inconsequence, and not—during the triumphant American century—in our triumphs.
We've received no greater gift from any photographer.
This slideshow, with its accompanying commentary, offers a wonderful introduction to this astonishing artist:
http://blogs.nybooks.com/post/298876613/slide-show-dominique-nabokov-on-robert-frank
This last quality distinguishes his work from that of his greatest American predecessors (Alfred Stieglitz, Ansel Adams, and Man Ray), and from Walker Evans and Cartier-Bresson, his contemporaries and kindred spirits.
By spurning romanticism, Frank's art denies us romanticism's consolations. That denial is at the heart of his art's power. Frank's photographs, particularly in The Americans, add beauty to the world without reinforcing or adding to our fantasies of happiness.
While his art isn't itself romantic, he shows us that Americans, like all religious people, are fiercely romantic; and our romanticism—or, specifically, the peculiar manner by which we articulate it—is what he believes merits attention.
Here we arrive at the source of Frank's genius: his refusal to frame Americans romantically has the ironic effect of emphasizing our intensely romantic disposition.
Even at our most downtrodden, our most lonely, there's flair; there's extravagance. (Note, most obviously, the belt buckle. There would be no photograph without it. Beyond that: the tightness of the clothing, the intricate stitching of the boots, the elegant inward under-statedness of the man's stance, the floral curves of the hat, etc.) Our extravagance is embattled, apologetic; the subtle means by which we decorate our world and ourselves gives us a complex splendor and rescues us from pity and from self-pity. (We do not—or did not—have time for self-pity.)
Frank finds beauty where we least expect it: among our most bewildered and despised, among the old and broken, in failure, in what we forget, in inconsequence, and not—during the triumphant American century—in our triumphs.
We've received no greater gift from any photographer.
This slideshow, with its accompanying commentary, offers a wonderful introduction to this astonishing artist:
http://blogs.nybooks.com/post/298876613/slide-show-dominique-nabokov-on-robert-frank
Avril Lavigne
Spring 2003. A warm morning in Costa Rica—I'm teaching at the European School in Heredia, 7th graders, and Marilia Campos is sitting on the counter by the window, listening to her CD player. Her classmates are arriving for the day. Marilia, shouting over the music in her ears, says: "Mr. Eric, do you like Avril Lavigne?"
"I don't think I do, Marilia," I say. I'm shuffling my books.
She waves me over. "Listen to this. She's so good."
I sit next to her on the counter and she gives me one of her earbuds. We sit for a while and listen, the earbuds' wires hanging between us.
The song is "I'm with You." It goes along nicely. Normally.
I glance at Marilia. Listening to the song, I can see that she feels like she's being spoken to honestly. And I can understand why. Sometimes honesty is cliché. The song is just what a boy wants to hear, too.
If the rising cry at 2:49 is not the essence—the raison d'etre—of the pop ballad, I don't know what is.
"I don't think I do, Marilia," I say. I'm shuffling my books.
She waves me over. "Listen to this. She's so good."
I sit next to her on the counter and she gives me one of her earbuds. We sit for a while and listen, the earbuds' wires hanging between us.
The song is "I'm with You." It goes along nicely. Normally.
I glance at Marilia. Listening to the song, I can see that she feels like she's being spoken to honestly. And I can understand why. Sometimes honesty is cliché. The song is just what a boy wants to hear, too.
If the rising cry at 2:49 is not the essence—the raison d'etre—of the pop ballad, I don't know what is.
An Episode in the Life of a Landscape Painter, by César Aira
Approving words by Roberto Bolaño led me to this strange, elegant writer. I was further encouraged by the fact that he's translated by Chris Andrews—there's no better translator bringing texts from Spanish into English—and when I saw that he's published by New Directions.
Aira continues Borges, which is, I suppose, inevitable, coming as he does from Coronel Pringles, a little town in la provincia de Buenos Aires. (I passed through it by bus, long ago.) In a brief preface, Bolaño also suggests the influence of Witold Gombrowicz, the enfant terrible of Polish/Argentinean literature. I don't hear Gombrowicz, frankly—but I don't hear much that Bolaño hears, and that's no fault of Bolaño's.
I do hear Dostoyevsky.
If a bastard child of Dostoyevsky and Borges doesn't trigger your interest, then you can't be helped.
Consider, for instance, this line—a brilliant summary of the dilemma of the artist in the modern age:
Aira continues Borges, which is, I suppose, inevitable, coming as he does from Coronel Pringles, a little town in la provincia de Buenos Aires. (I passed through it by bus, long ago.) In a brief preface, Bolaño also suggests the influence of Witold Gombrowicz, the enfant terrible of Polish/Argentinean literature. I don't hear Gombrowicz, frankly—but I don't hear much that Bolaño hears, and that's no fault of Bolaño's.
I do hear Dostoyevsky.
If a bastard child of Dostoyevsky and Borges doesn't trigger your interest, then you can't be helped.
Consider, for instance, this line—a brilliant summary of the dilemma of the artist in the modern age:
The variations revolved around a curious impossibility: how could he communicate the proposition “I am a monster”?The influences one hears are to Aira's credit. Bolaño claims Aira is "one of the three or four best writers working in Spanish today." After reading this little book, I don't doubt it.
Wednesday, December 9, 2009
Maternity Leave
A tweet from my brother this morning:
Fun fact of the day: Swaziland, New Guinea, Liberia & the USA are the only countries w/o paid maternity leave. Family values.Researched that briefly and found nothing to contradict it. Came across this graph at wikipedia:
Tuesday, December 8, 2009
Osama
I dropped off my 4Runner this afternoon for an oil change and decided to use the time at an AT&T store to shop for a new phone.
I was met at the door by the store manager; after a brief wait he led me to a sales consultant, who shook my hand and introduced himself as "Osama." His name tag confirmed that I hadn't misheard him.
He was a strikingly handsome young man, with large soft eyes, a beautiful mouth, dark hair (cut very short), and a fashionably trimmed beard. His face was oval; his skin fair and unblemished; his demeanor gentle and bemused. I felt after he introduced himself that he was waiting for me to gather myself. For a moment I couldn't look at him.
He invited me to browse the phones and told me he was available if I had any questions.
I thought to myself, Questions.
And I wondered most of all at my unwillingness to meet his gaze. That unwillingness passed quickly, but I was surprised by it.
Eventually he sought me out. Soon it became apparent that he was guiding me toward the purchase of an iPhone. He was another young American doing his job.
He might have been right that an iPhone best suits my needs, but I'd already decided—I still don't understand this—that I wasn't going to buy anything from him. I felt disoriented and therefore belligerent. Perhaps it was his beauty. Or his name. Or the conjunction of the two.
Maybe I'll return on Wednesday and allow him to sell me an iPhone. More likely I won't. But not because of him.
Regardless, I wonder: Is there another place in this country where he could continue to use that name? And could he continue to use it at all, even here, if he weren't handsome?
Monday, December 7, 2009
Not-Quite Paradise Not-Yet Lost
As he is no doubt aware (cough), Tony Judt, an eminent British historian, expands brilliantly upon the ideas I attempted to lay out in "Trust and Governance":
What Is Living and What Is Dead In Social Democracy?
Judt's superb essay reminds us what the West achieved for itself during the 20th century, and he warns that with the passage of time we're losing our appreciation for the scope of that achievement. Consequently, we now collaborate in its destruction.
An exemplary quote:
But raising taxes requires that we expand our idea of ourselves beyond the individual ego—an expansion that seems increasingly unlikely in a culture obsessed with money, celebrity, and race.
What Is Living and What Is Dead In Social Democracy?
Judt's superb essay reminds us what the West achieved for itself during the 20th century, and he warns that with the passage of time we're losing our appreciation for the scope of that achievement. Consequently, we now collaborate in its destruction.
An exemplary quote:
The common theme and universal accomplishment of the neo-Keynesian governments of the postwar era was their remarkable success in curbing inequality. If you compare the gap separating rich and poor, whether by income or assets, in all continental European countries along with Great Britain and the US, you will see that it shrinks dramatically in the generation following 1945.
With greater equality there came other benefits. Over time, the fear of a return to extremist politics—the politics of desperation, the politics of envy, the politics of insecurity—abated. The Western industrialized world entered a halcyon era of prosperous security: a bubble, perhaps, but a comforting bubble in which most people did far better than they could ever have hoped in the past and had good reason to anticipate the future with confidence.
The paradox of the welfare state, and indeed of all the social democratic (and Christian Democratic) states of Europe, was quite simply that their success would over time undermine their appeal. The generation that remembered the 1930s was understandably the most committed to preserving institutions and systems of taxation, social service, and public provision that they saw as bulwarks against a return to the horrors of the past. But their successors—even in Sweden—began to forget why they had sought such security in the first place.
It was social democracy that bound the middle classes to liberal institutions in the wake of World War II. . . . They received in many cases the same welfare assistance and services as the poor: free education, cheap or free medical treatment, public pensions, and the like. In consequence, the European middle class found itself by the 1960s with far greater disposable incomes than ever before, with so many of life's necessities prepaid in tax. And thus the very class that had been so exposed to fear and insecurity in the interwar years was now tightly woven into the postwar democratic consensus.During the 1950s, when the size of the middle class exploded in both Europe and North America, the top tax rate in the United States was 91%. (The history of US tax rates can be seen here.) I'm not suggesting a return to 91%. The tax rates during Reagan's first term seem like a reasonable target. But unless we're willing to tax our wealthiest citizens at a level commensurate with what society gives them, we will continue to dismantle the humane, stable, prosperous societies that we've built "as bulwarks against a return to the horrors of the past."
But raising taxes requires that we expand our idea of ourselves beyond the individual ego—an expansion that seems increasingly unlikely in a culture obsessed with money, celebrity, and race.
Saturday, December 5, 2009
Playing Pool
Of pool halls, David Mamet writes:
The name of our pool hall changed three times while I lived there. First it was called Pete's Pool. Then the name was changed to Spanky's—a great name, I thought, and the name that still comes to mind when I think of the place. Shortly before I left Utah, someone, a new owner, changed the name to Ya Buts.
I have no idea what it's called now, or if it still exists.
Because it was possible to drink liquor there, Spanky's required a yearly membership, which was something like $12. You could smoke, too, if you wanted to, and most people did.
The pool hall itself was the second floor of an old building humbled by adjacent, very ugly skyscrapers. Downstairs, some nights, there was live music, usually metal or punk.
Spanky's had eleven pool tables. Only one of them was full-sized; the rest were smaller six-foot tables, which had the formidable advantage of being much easier to play on. The pool hall's floor was warped wood, beer-stained, otherwise gray. During mid-afternoon, which was when we went, the hall got it's light from the floor-to-ceiling windows that made up its north wall. Looking through the windows to the west you could watch the sun set over the Great Salt Lake. In the summer, thunderstorms accumulated over the desert and we would take comfort in their swift approach.
Playing pool, I learned about friendship—about what it means to love a man who is your friend. I still remember looking across the table at my friends and feeling a surge of joy. There's real intimacy around a pool table, alternating between shooting and drinking, with music from the jukebox, some chalk on our hands, and each other's voices. I didn't know then how rare intimacy would be in my life, as I aged.
I never saw an unkind word exchanged in Spanky's, which is unusual for a bar but not, I've learned, for a pool hall. I guess pool's proximity and difficulty promotes civility. In a good pool hall the tables are too close for players at neighboring tables to shoot at the same time in the same area, so you learn to practice deference and to value patience. And one of the game's keenest pleasures is to compliment your opponent when he makes a difficult shot—to applaud, in other words, your opponent's triumphs. I felt greater happiness watching my friends make successful shots than I ever felt making my own. It was if we were collaborators working together to defeat pool's complex geometry.
I learned, too, about the pleasure of drinking. We bought pitchers of beer—mostly Guinness, which is not, I guess, supposed to be served in a pitcher—and drank into late evening. With each pitcher we played less and talked more. All my friends at that time were superb conversationalists. They were exquisitely funny. They were well-read and had traveled. Basically, they were all loving, happy men, in their early thirties, like me, and in love with their women, most days, and either artists or devoted to the arts, and good-looking, in their various ways, which, at the time, for some reason, mattered.
When I was with them, I was absolutely never bored; and they were at their most interesting when we were playing pool.
Sometimes, not often, there would be girls to watch play. There are few sights more erotic than a girl leaning over a pool table, gazing down her cue. Sometimes her shirt comes up off her jeans, exposing her lower back, or falls away from her neck so that looking down her shirt you can see her bra, her breasts, for a moment. The girls would smile while they shot, their hair falling to frame their faces, knowing how they looked. The games around them would stop.
I learned about the Rolling Stones—which is to say I finally came to understand rock&roll—in that pool hall. Spanky's had a great jukebox and we kept it playing the Stones, as much as we could, or Jimi Hendrix or Johnny Cash.
Eventually we started to bring a cigar or two to smoke while we played. Then Brad started bringing cigarettes, so we tried that, despite the fact that none of us, including Brad, were smokers. Brad would put his cigarette between his teeth and the smoke would burn his eyes while he shot. But he insisted on playing with the cigarette in his mouth. Brad was built like Mick Jagger, and he wore big Vasque hiking boots, which seemed while he was smoking to keep him grounded to the floor. He looked like Willem Dafoe or John Malkovich, with their same intelligence in the structure of his face. He was very hard-working at that time in his life, trying to build his own business, and you could see the scope of what he'd undertaken in his eyes while he played.
So I learned about friendship, civility, drinking, conversation, tobacco, and music in a pool hall. That's a hell of a list. I learned, very slowly, to be less religious. And I learned how the transition from afternoon to evening feels when you're happy.
I never really learned to play pool, but I didn't care then and don't care now. I don't play pool anymore; I don't know anyone I would want to play it with.
"People are supposed to gamble here, people are supposed to drink here, people are supposed to spend their days here in pursuit of skill, cunning, comradeship, and money. No one is supposed to be pompous here, or intrusive, or boring: no one will be held unaccountable for the bets they make, or the way that they comport themselves. But if they choose, they can choose to be left alone."I learned about playing pool when I was living in Salt Lake City. My instructors were fellow students from the University of Utah, especially Martin Corless-Smith, a poet from England, with whom I played every Thursday afternoon, just about, for two years. I also played with Brad Wahlquist, my dearest friend at that time, and, later, with David Hawkins, who is still in Utah, raising his family.
The name of our pool hall changed three times while I lived there. First it was called Pete's Pool. Then the name was changed to Spanky's—a great name, I thought, and the name that still comes to mind when I think of the place. Shortly before I left Utah, someone, a new owner, changed the name to Ya Buts.
I have no idea what it's called now, or if it still exists.
Because it was possible to drink liquor there, Spanky's required a yearly membership, which was something like $12. You could smoke, too, if you wanted to, and most people did.
The pool hall itself was the second floor of an old building humbled by adjacent, very ugly skyscrapers. Downstairs, some nights, there was live music, usually metal or punk.
Spanky's had eleven pool tables. Only one of them was full-sized; the rest were smaller six-foot tables, which had the formidable advantage of being much easier to play on. The pool hall's floor was warped wood, beer-stained, otherwise gray. During mid-afternoon, which was when we went, the hall got it's light from the floor-to-ceiling windows that made up its north wall. Looking through the windows to the west you could watch the sun set over the Great Salt Lake. In the summer, thunderstorms accumulated over the desert and we would take comfort in their swift approach.
Playing pool, I learned about friendship—about what it means to love a man who is your friend. I still remember looking across the table at my friends and feeling a surge of joy. There's real intimacy around a pool table, alternating between shooting and drinking, with music from the jukebox, some chalk on our hands, and each other's voices. I didn't know then how rare intimacy would be in my life, as I aged.
I never saw an unkind word exchanged in Spanky's, which is unusual for a bar but not, I've learned, for a pool hall. I guess pool's proximity and difficulty promotes civility. In a good pool hall the tables are too close for players at neighboring tables to shoot at the same time in the same area, so you learn to practice deference and to value patience. And one of the game's keenest pleasures is to compliment your opponent when he makes a difficult shot—to applaud, in other words, your opponent's triumphs. I felt greater happiness watching my friends make successful shots than I ever felt making my own. It was if we were collaborators working together to defeat pool's complex geometry.
I learned, too, about the pleasure of drinking. We bought pitchers of beer—mostly Guinness, which is not, I guess, supposed to be served in a pitcher—and drank into late evening. With each pitcher we played less and talked more. All my friends at that time were superb conversationalists. They were exquisitely funny. They were well-read and had traveled. Basically, they were all loving, happy men, in their early thirties, like me, and in love with their women, most days, and either artists or devoted to the arts, and good-looking, in their various ways, which, at the time, for some reason, mattered.
When I was with them, I was absolutely never bored; and they were at their most interesting when we were playing pool.
Sometimes, not often, there would be girls to watch play. There are few sights more erotic than a girl leaning over a pool table, gazing down her cue. Sometimes her shirt comes up off her jeans, exposing her lower back, or falls away from her neck so that looking down her shirt you can see her bra, her breasts, for a moment. The girls would smile while they shot, their hair falling to frame their faces, knowing how they looked. The games around them would stop.
I learned about the Rolling Stones—which is to say I finally came to understand rock&roll—in that pool hall. Spanky's had a great jukebox and we kept it playing the Stones, as much as we could, or Jimi Hendrix or Johnny Cash.
Eventually we started to bring a cigar or two to smoke while we played. Then Brad started bringing cigarettes, so we tried that, despite the fact that none of us, including Brad, were smokers. Brad would put his cigarette between his teeth and the smoke would burn his eyes while he shot. But he insisted on playing with the cigarette in his mouth. Brad was built like Mick Jagger, and he wore big Vasque hiking boots, which seemed while he was smoking to keep him grounded to the floor. He looked like Willem Dafoe or John Malkovich, with their same intelligence in the structure of his face. He was very hard-working at that time in his life, trying to build his own business, and you could see the scope of what he'd undertaken in his eyes while he played.
So I learned about friendship, civility, drinking, conversation, tobacco, and music in a pool hall. That's a hell of a list. I learned, very slowly, to be less religious. And I learned how the transition from afternoon to evening feels when you're happy.
I never really learned to play pool, but I didn't care then and don't care now. I don't play pool anymore; I don't know anyone I would want to play it with.
Louis Armstrong
“When I blow I think of times and things from outa the past that gives me an image of the tune. Like moving pictures passing in front of my eyes. A town, a chick somewhere back down the line, an old man with no name you seen once in a place you don’t remember.”A nice idea, but it doesn't explain this music:
If you haven't heard Armstrong's original Okey recording of "West End Blues" with his Hot Five, featuring Earl Hines on piano, you haven't heard the single greatest recording in the history of American music and the most influential work of art ever produced in this country. Listening to it this morning, I witnessed once again the invention of modern music, as it happened.
iTunes was on shuffle—when "West End Blues" finished, "Notion," by Kings of Leon, began, and I thought: "There he is. He's still in there." And he will always be, in every note we play, forever.
Wednesday, December 2, 2009
Spring Semester @ Chabot College
I'm to teach "Reading, Reasoning, and Writing" at Chabot College this spring.
Given Pres. Obama's decision, announced last night, to increase the number of US troops in Afghanistan, I've decided to focus the course readings on the psychological consequences of war for combat soldiers.
Our primary texts will be:
Shadow of the Sword: A Marine's Journey of War, Heroism, and Redemption, by Jeremiah Workman.
Achilles in Vietnam: Combat Trauma and the Undoing of Character, by Jonathan Shay.
Given Pres. Obama's decision, announced last night, to increase the number of US troops in Afghanistan, I've decided to focus the course readings on the psychological consequences of war for combat soldiers.
Our primary texts will be:
Shadow of the Sword: A Marine's Journey of War, Heroism, and Redemption, by Jeremiah Workman.
Achilles in Vietnam: Combat Trauma and the Undoing of Character, by Jonathan Shay.
Saturday, November 28, 2009
Albums of the Decade
If you want worthwhile opinions of popular music, it makes sense to begin with the British:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/series/albums-of-the-decade
I owned The Streets, years ago. How often one forgets music that once seemed essential.
In this regard, especially, music is like love—is a form of love.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/series/albums-of-the-decade
I owned The Streets, years ago. How often one forgets music that once seemed essential.
In this regard, especially, music is like love—is a form of love.
Saturday, November 21, 2009
The English 1B Book Club
For the curious, these are the books I'll be using in my English 1B class @ Foothill College this winter. The class, as you can see from the list, will examine artistic representations of erotic love.
The Symposium, by Plato, translated by Alexander Nehamas & Paul Woodruff
The Satyricon, by Petronius, translated by William Arrowsmith
Romeo and Juliet, the Arden edition
Love Poems: Everyman's Library Pocket Poets
Giovanni's Room, by James Baldwin
A Sport and a Pastime, by James Salter
Fool for Love, by Sam Shepard
The Unbearable Lightness of Being, by Milan Kundera
Break It Down: Stories, by Lydia Davis
Those are the assigned texts. I'll also ask the students to listen to Blood on the Tracks. I guess we'll watch a movie, too—perhaps the old Zeffirelli Romeo and Juliet, if only to gaze for a while upon the luminous beauty of Olivia Hussey.
Also, we'll read excerpts from The Double Flame: Love and Eroticism, by Octavio Paz, at least one essay by Cynthia Ozick ("The Din in the Head"), and passages from Literature and the Gods, by Roberto Calasso.
The Symposium, by Plato, translated by Alexander Nehamas & Paul Woodruff
The Satyricon, by Petronius, translated by William Arrowsmith
Romeo and Juliet, the Arden edition
Love Poems: Everyman's Library Pocket Poets
Giovanni's Room, by James Baldwin
A Sport and a Pastime, by James Salter
Fool for Love, by Sam Shepard
The Unbearable Lightness of Being, by Milan Kundera
Break It Down: Stories, by Lydia Davis
Those are the assigned texts. I'll also ask the students to listen to Blood on the Tracks. I guess we'll watch a movie, too—perhaps the old Zeffirelli Romeo and Juliet, if only to gaze for a while upon the luminous beauty of Olivia Hussey.
Also, we'll read excerpts from The Double Flame: Love and Eroticism, by Octavio Paz, at least one essay by Cynthia Ozick ("The Din in the Head"), and passages from Literature and the Gods, by Roberto Calasso.
The North American Chekhov
A worthwhile article about Mavis Gallant, North America's greatest living short story writer:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/culture/2009/nov/21/mavis-gallant-interview
http://www.guardian.co.uk/culture/2009/nov/21/mavis-gallant-interview
Gilead, by Marilynn Robinson
It's one of the great ironies of contemporary American life that a learned, moderate, resolutely decent Christian voice—the voice of John Ames, the narrator of Gilead—sounds like the voice of a heretic.
Robinson means for it to. Ames's voice is the essence of Gilead—its purpose, its theme, the locus of beauty in its world. Addressing us with meek sensitivity, it's an indictment of the menacing anti-intellectualism of modern Christian fundamentalism and, as fiercely, of the anodyne feel-good Christianity of liberal America's middle and upper-middle class.
John Ames's voice dominates the narrative to such a degree that Gilead borders on monologue.
To a certain extent I mean that as a criticism. Reading it I sometimes yearned for another force to take over the story for a while. If one understands art as a site of conflict and novels as inherently heteroglossic, Gilead might feel less like a novel than a theological meditation.
But the narrator's voice is also Gilead's triumph. It embodies an attitude toward thinking and speaking, toward being, that has either been lost or has never existed, but which feels as it proceeds like humanity's only hope for survival.
Having read Robinson's collection of essays, The Death of Adam, which I sought out after reading Gilead, I'm convinced she in fact believes that John Ames's sensibility—or something close to it—is our only hope for survival.
Robinson means for it to. Ames's voice is the essence of Gilead—its purpose, its theme, the locus of beauty in its world. Addressing us with meek sensitivity, it's an indictment of the menacing anti-intellectualism of modern Christian fundamentalism and, as fiercely, of the anodyne feel-good Christianity of liberal America's middle and upper-middle class.
John Ames's voice dominates the narrative to such a degree that Gilead borders on monologue.
To a certain extent I mean that as a criticism. Reading it I sometimes yearned for another force to take over the story for a while. If one understands art as a site of conflict and novels as inherently heteroglossic, Gilead might feel less like a novel than a theological meditation.
But the narrator's voice is also Gilead's triumph. It embodies an attitude toward thinking and speaking, toward being, that has either been lost or has never existed, but which feels as it proceeds like humanity's only hope for survival.
Having read Robinson's collection of essays, The Death of Adam, which I sought out after reading Gilead, I'm convinced she in fact believes that John Ames's sensibility—or something close to it—is our only hope for survival.
That might be another criticism of the book, if one is inclined, as I am, to resist didacticism in fiction.
But by its conclusion the book had made me forget my biases. Gilead is an extraordinary achievement, not least because it succeeds in giving us the story of a genuinely good person, which is notoriously difficult to do in art. More importantly, I felt reading it that with great urgency it was opening up—this will sound very Californian—new ways of being, new possibilities for how I might construct my life, today.
What more can we ask of a novel?
What more can we ask of a novel?
A parting note: I am additionally grateful to Gilead for introducing me to The Essence of Christianity, by Ludwig Feuerbach, an astonishing book. Also, I was struck by Gilead's riveting depiction of the helplessness of decency vis-à-vis sexual charisma.
Friday, November 20, 2009
Publisher's Weekly: Best Books of 2009
Since childhood I've loved lists like these:
http://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/print/20091102/26073-best-books-of-2009.html
Donald Revell, a friend and professor during my time at the University of Utah, has a new book out, The Bitter Withy, which is among the few books of poetry on the list.
(A withy—yes, I had to look it up—is the branch of a willow tree, often used for basketry due its remarkable flexibility.)
http://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/print/20091102/26073-best-books-of-2009.html
Donald Revell, a friend and professor during my time at the University of Utah, has a new book out, The Bitter Withy, which is among the few books of poetry on the list.
(A withy—yes, I had to look it up—is the branch of a willow tree, often used for basketry due its remarkable flexibility.)
Talk Radio, or This Blog
Examine the minds which manage to intrigue us: far from taking the way of the world into consideration, they defend indefensible positions.
— E. M. Cioran, "Some Blind Alleys: A Letter"
— E. M. Cioran, "Some Blind Alleys: A Letter"
Thursday, November 19, 2009
Trust and Governance
American political debate hinges on the definition of self-interest.
A brief story will clarify my point. It will also show, I think, that at their worst American conservatives define self-interest too narrowly and American liberals define it too broadly.
A couple of weeks ago I listened to a debate on KQED, my local public radio station, regarding a proposal for the care of California's state parks. A group of liberals wants to end fees at park entrances for California residents and pay for park care by adding an annual fee to California car registrations.
The debate can be found here:
Jonathan Coupal, president of the conservative Howard Jarvis Taxpayers Association, argues against the proposal. In effect, he argues that only those who actually enter the parks should pay for their care. Those who don't enter the parks shouldn't be compelled to pay taxes for, as he sees it, something they don't use.
The vice president of government affairs for the California State Parks Foundation, Traci Verardo-Torres, argues that all Californians benefit from the state parks, whether they actually enter them or not; consequently, all Californians should pay for their care through an $18 annual tax. Should they enter the parks, they enter without paying a fee. But it doesn't matter if they don't enter the parks: they'll benefit from this tax by living in a state with well-maintained parks.
These contrasting positions capture the on-going disconnect between conservatives and liberals. The disconnect always occurs at the point where one defines self-interest—and, by implication, how one defines the boundaries of the self.
Your idea of self-interest, for example, reflects how you define yourself. It determines how you answer this question: At what point do I end and others begin?
Your answer to that question is dictated by whom you do and do not trust.
A conservative trusts himself and distrust others. Consequently, his definition of community tends to be much more restricted than a liberal's.
Jonathan Coupal doesn't see himself as benefiting from another Californian's visit to a state park. So he's not willing to pay for it. In his view, the state park, in effect, doesn't exist unless he uses it. He bristles at any suggestion that his money should be spent for him by others; he trusts his own ability to spend his money when and where he sees fit.
A conservative trusts himself and distrust others. Consequently, his definition of community tends to be much more restricted than a liberal's.
Jonathan Coupal doesn't see himself as benefiting from another Californian's visit to a state park. So he's not willing to pay for it. In his view, the state park, in effect, doesn't exist unless he uses it. He bristles at any suggestion that his money should be spent for him by others; he trusts his own ability to spend his money when and where he sees fit.
Coupal concedes that he's willing to be taxed to pay for state prisons, despite the fact that he doesn't use them. In that regard, a willingness to pay for state prisons but not state parks seems like a contradiction. But one must recall that a conservative's relationship with the rest of humanity is one of distrust. Conservatives rarely complain about taxes as long as they are used to exclude others from the conservative's (narrow) idea of what constitutes a community.
Liberals invert the conservative attitude toward trust: a liberal distrusts himself and trusts others. Consequently, a liberal's definition of community tends to be highly inclusive—often extending, in the political sphere, to all humanity. Liberals rarely complain about taxes that are used to include others—to expand their community. And they resist taxes that will be used to exclude others, like military spending or spending on prisons.
A conservative can't make a liberal understand that a neighbor's happiness is of secondary importance to one's own happiness and that it's immoral to compel the conservative—as he sees it—to subsidize someone else's happiness. Indeed, the conservative believes that in order to maximize happiness throughout the world (which is itself a presumptuous goal, in the conservative's view), everyone should attend with utmost care to one's own happiness and be wary of the happiness of others.
A liberal can't make a conservative understand that the conservative's happiness is indistinguishable from his neighbor's happiness and that it's immoral to attempt to distinguish one from the other. Such a distinction draws a false boundary between the self and others, and the impulse to draw that boundary is responsible for all that's wrong in the world. The liberal believes that in order to maximize happiness everywhere (which is the purpose of one's life), everyone should attend with utmost care to one's neighbor's happiness and not focus on one's own—because, according to the liberal, there is, in fact, no such thing as one's own happiness.
Since we live in an era obsessed with money, this debate over the boundaries of self-interest always ends as a debate over taxes.
The conservative believes that, like his happiness, his money belongs to him. He earned it; he deserves to keep it; he's willing to part with it only when doing so will explicitly help him individually; and he believes that the world will be a better place if everyone has the same attitude toward their own money.
The conservative believes that, like his happiness, his money belongs to him. He earned it; he deserves to keep it; he's willing to part with it only when doing so will explicitly help him individually; and he believes that the world will be a better place if everyone has the same attitude toward their own money.
The liberal believes that, like our happiness, our money is not our own. Society creates wealth; society should distribute wealth; individual access to wealth is only possible with the collaboration (hard work) of the larger community. Parting with money helps a liberal only if it helps others; and the world will be a better place if everyone has the same attitude toward money, which is, in their view a social phenomenon.
I depict these two positions at their extremes. But your general orientation toward these two perspectives will determine your political and ethical worldview.
At this particular moment in history, American conservatives are especially distrustful of others—as a consequence, perhaps, of 9/11; also as a consequence of not being in power. As a result, they tend toward an extremely narrow definition of self-interest—narrower than what one will find during less turbulent times.
In the mind of a conservative, the turbulence of our time should be addressed by shrinking one's sphere of trust as much as possible. To do otherwise is to behave recklessly in an unsafe world.
Liberals, on the other hand, believe that the way to address our era's turbulence is by expanding one's definition of self-interest. This requires us to expand our sphere of trust—to incorporate as many people as possible into our lives.
It's my view that at the moment one finds greater moderation—and, therefore, a superior capacity to govern—among American liberals. President Obama is especially balanced in this regard, as manifested by the fact that he's distrusted by extreme factions on both the left and the right.
In the mind of a conservative, the turbulence of our time should be addressed by shrinking one's sphere of trust as much as possible. To do otherwise is to behave recklessly in an unsafe world.
Liberals, on the other hand, believe that the way to address our era's turbulence is by expanding one's definition of self-interest. This requires us to expand our sphere of trust—to incorporate as many people as possible into our lives.
It's my view that at the moment one finds greater moderation—and, therefore, a superior capacity to govern—among American liberals. President Obama is especially balanced in this regard, as manifested by the fact that he's distrusted by extreme factions on both the left and the right.
Wednesday, November 18, 2009
Solo Faces, by James Salter
All great novelists force us to reevaluate our definitions of sanity. That tradition began with the first modern novel, Don Quixote, and continues unabated. Indeed, the problem of sanity—what is it? who defines it? who is or is not sane?—is quite possibly the defining theme of the novel.
In this regard, the novel has always been subversive.
Of course all art is subversive. But the novel is particularly dangerous because of its ability to disguise its menace in the Biblical conventions of storytelling. Consequently, prior to the development of photography the novel has had no rival in the arts to match its ability to appear benevolent, edifying, and traditional while in fact working to provoke, transform, even revolutionize society.
Certainly novels have met with fierce resistance in the West—Madame Bovary, Ulysses, Tropic of Cancer, Lolita—but that resistance is usually in reaction to sexual content and is fairly reliably a mark of greatness (novelty). So it's rare.
Given, then, the novel's peculiar advantages for sedition, why has it opted to focus on the problem of sanity?
Because the surest way to examine power in any culture is to isolate that culture's boundaries between what's sane and what's insane. Those boundaries don't only distinguish one culture from another; they also clarify who runs the show.
James Salter has written two masterpieces—which is two more than most novelists—and both of them explore sanity. A Sport and a Pastime contemplates erotic love, which we both venerate as life's highest private experience and proscribe as a kind of irresponsible, obsessive madness. Light Years contemplates domestic family life, which we venerate as the central institution of responsible adult life, as the apotheosis of civilized happiness, yet often experience as a slow, inexorable descent into madness—as, in fact, a form of madness, and of cowardice.
Unlike those novels, Solo Faces concerns itself with the Western obsession with individual achievement. Salter has decided to explore that obsession through mountain climbing, perhaps the most mythical (cliché) metaphor for individual achievement imaginable.
For those who love to climb—who live to climb—his careful depiction of that life will be reason enough to read the book. I'd be surprised if there's a better account of climbing culture and its numerous idiosyncrasies.
For the rest of us, Solo Faces, unlike Salter's two great novels, is not especially noteworthy.
According to William Dowie (writing in his critical biography of Salter), Solo Faces began as a screenplay commissioned by Robert Redford. When Redford rejected the screenplay, Salter transformed it into a novel. As a consequence (I suspect), Solo Faces suffers from narrative awkwardness, especially in its earliest scenes. It lacks the organic coherence of Salter's enduring work.
I'll note two other disappointments: Salter's great strength as a novelist is his evocation of the inner life of women. But Solo Faces concerns itself with the overwhelmingly masculine world of mountain climbing, so reading it is a bit like watching a great hitter play defense. Secondly, the keenest pleasure this book offers is the pleasure of suspense. For this particular reader, suspense is a trivial, even annoying quality in a novel.
Nevertheless, one does find, as always, Salter's philosophical elegance—in this case, as it obtains to the heroism (insanity?) of obsessive individual achievement. That elegance is best captured in this exchange, which comes near the end of the book:
"I decided to see if I could shock her," Rand admitted. "So I told her the truth."
"Such as?"
"I told her I'd been climbing for fifteen years. For most of that, ten years anyway, it was the most important thing in my life. The only thing. I sacrificed everything to it. Do you know the one thing I learned from climbing? The single thing?"
"What?"
"It is of no importance whatsoever."
The novel's philosophical interest is plain to see when one applies observations like that to individual achievement generally—including, for example, the achievement of writing a novel.
In this regard, the novel has always been subversive.
Of course all art is subversive. But the novel is particularly dangerous because of its ability to disguise its menace in the Biblical conventions of storytelling. Consequently, prior to the development of photography the novel has had no rival in the arts to match its ability to appear benevolent, edifying, and traditional while in fact working to provoke, transform, even revolutionize society.
Certainly novels have met with fierce resistance in the West—Madame Bovary, Ulysses, Tropic of Cancer, Lolita—but that resistance is usually in reaction to sexual content and is fairly reliably a mark of greatness (novelty). So it's rare.
Given, then, the novel's peculiar advantages for sedition, why has it opted to focus on the problem of sanity?
Because the surest way to examine power in any culture is to isolate that culture's boundaries between what's sane and what's insane. Those boundaries don't only distinguish one culture from another; they also clarify who runs the show.
James Salter has written two masterpieces—which is two more than most novelists—and both of them explore sanity. A Sport and a Pastime contemplates erotic love, which we both venerate as life's highest private experience and proscribe as a kind of irresponsible, obsessive madness. Light Years contemplates domestic family life, which we venerate as the central institution of responsible adult life, as the apotheosis of civilized happiness, yet often experience as a slow, inexorable descent into madness—as, in fact, a form of madness, and of cowardice.
Unlike those novels, Solo Faces concerns itself with the Western obsession with individual achievement. Salter has decided to explore that obsession through mountain climbing, perhaps the most mythical (cliché) metaphor for individual achievement imaginable.
For those who love to climb—who live to climb—his careful depiction of that life will be reason enough to read the book. I'd be surprised if there's a better account of climbing culture and its numerous idiosyncrasies.
For the rest of us, Solo Faces, unlike Salter's two great novels, is not especially noteworthy.
According to William Dowie (writing in his critical biography of Salter), Solo Faces began as a screenplay commissioned by Robert Redford. When Redford rejected the screenplay, Salter transformed it into a novel. As a consequence (I suspect), Solo Faces suffers from narrative awkwardness, especially in its earliest scenes. It lacks the organic coherence of Salter's enduring work.
I'll note two other disappointments: Salter's great strength as a novelist is his evocation of the inner life of women. But Solo Faces concerns itself with the overwhelmingly masculine world of mountain climbing, so reading it is a bit like watching a great hitter play defense. Secondly, the keenest pleasure this book offers is the pleasure of suspense. For this particular reader, suspense is a trivial, even annoying quality in a novel.
Nevertheless, one does find, as always, Salter's philosophical elegance—in this case, as it obtains to the heroism (insanity?) of obsessive individual achievement. That elegance is best captured in this exchange, which comes near the end of the book:
"I decided to see if I could shock her," Rand admitted. "So I told her the truth."
"Such as?"
"I told her I'd been climbing for fifteen years. For most of that, ten years anyway, it was the most important thing in my life. The only thing. I sacrificed everything to it. Do you know the one thing I learned from climbing? The single thing?"
"What?"
"It is of no importance whatsoever."
The novel's philosophical interest is plain to see when one applies observations like that to individual achievement generally—including, for example, the achievement of writing a novel.
Tuesday, November 17, 2009
Mad Men, The Wire, and Satire as a Sign of the Times
Mad Men is excellent entertainment. It's third season, which just concluded, was uniformly satisfying. The final episode was especially good.
But I shake my head in disbelief when I hear it—or, more commonly, see it—compared to The Wire.
The Wire (aside from its final season, which was disappointing) is an American masterpiece. In my view it's the greatest show in the history of television.
Its superiority to Mad Men begins with a generic difference: Unlike Mad Men (and unlike Mad Men's artistic and spiritual precursor, The Sopranos), The Wire is epic. Mad Men and The Sopranos, on the other hand, are works of satire.
As an epic, The Wire is rigorously unreassuring. It absolutely refuses to condescend to either its characters or its audience. It never imagines its characters to be stupider than itself. Its ethos is not evaluative but comprehensive and loving (of the world, of existence). There's no hierarchy of truth in The Wire—a truth, for instance, to which we're privy but the characters are not, or a truth to which the world is privy but the show is not. The Wire strives for totality of vision—in this regard it carries on the artistic tradition of the epic. It's morality, to paraphrase an observation that Milan Kundera makes about the novel, is to be amoral. Aside from its final season, it's not didactic or self-congratulatory; instead, it asks questions of the world; its lens is curious and unblinking.
In short, The Wire isn't interested in judgment but in understanding. It says: "So this is the world"; and then it does its absolute damnedest to see clearly, to give freely; and its achievement is formidable, as near as American art has come to Tolstoy.
None of those observations apply to Mad Men.
Unlike The Wire, Mad Men is a work of satire. It's condescending toward its characters and patronizing of its audience. Its characters are stupider than we are and we are meant to take delight in our relative enlightenment. Its artistic vision is hierarchical, with Mad Men's makers above everyone and the show's audience above the characters. Mad Men makes no attempt at total truth but operates by selection, distillation, and suggestion. It's profoundly moral; it's didactic and self-congratulatory. It is—god save us—insightful and sophisticated and clever.
Given their generic difference—what's really a difference of essence—The Wire and Mad Men are not comparable artistic achievements and shouldn't be spoken of as if they are.
The Wire makes the best case in recent popular art for the artistic superiority of the epic over all other artistic forms. It's essential art, great art, because like all epics worthy of the name it is timeless.
The fact that it got made and that its artistic sensibility survived for four complete seasons defy explanation. Like all permanent works of art, it now glows with the light of the miraculous.
It's true that Mad Men—a well-argued, well-made history lesson—is great fun to look at. The sets are thrilling. The women are gorgeous catastrophes, except for Joan Harris, played by Christina Hendricks, who is a human being and is genuinely riveting. The men are stupid, elegant monsters, with the exception of Roger Sterling, played by John Slattery, who—along with Hendricks—offers a glimpse into what the show could be if it stopped concerning itself with teaching us about the world and instead tried to learn from it.
For a while I thought that Mad Men wanted to give us an updated take on The Great Gatsby, which contemplates fundamental American insecurities as profoundly as any work of art in our canon.
It's now clear that Mad Men has no such ambition. Instead, it has joined the parade of self-certain ideologues typical of this moment in American life and who occupy our attention at every turn, telling us who we are, how we think, and how we ought to think.
In this regard Mad Men is great television. Along with The Sopranos, it captures the spirit of our time—a time when the artist has rejected the role of the poet (who knows nothing) for the role of the saint (who knows everything) and has set out on a mission to save us from ourselves.
But I shake my head in disbelief when I hear it—or, more commonly, see it—compared to The Wire.
The Wire (aside from its final season, which was disappointing) is an American masterpiece. In my view it's the greatest show in the history of television.
Its superiority to Mad Men begins with a generic difference: Unlike Mad Men (and unlike Mad Men's artistic and spiritual precursor, The Sopranos), The Wire is epic. Mad Men and The Sopranos, on the other hand, are works of satire.
As an epic, The Wire is rigorously unreassuring. It absolutely refuses to condescend to either its characters or its audience. It never imagines its characters to be stupider than itself. Its ethos is not evaluative but comprehensive and loving (of the world, of existence). There's no hierarchy of truth in The Wire—a truth, for instance, to which we're privy but the characters are not, or a truth to which the world is privy but the show is not. The Wire strives for totality of vision—in this regard it carries on the artistic tradition of the epic. It's morality, to paraphrase an observation that Milan Kundera makes about the novel, is to be amoral. Aside from its final season, it's not didactic or self-congratulatory; instead, it asks questions of the world; its lens is curious and unblinking.
In short, The Wire isn't interested in judgment but in understanding. It says: "So this is the world"; and then it does its absolute damnedest to see clearly, to give freely; and its achievement is formidable, as near as American art has come to Tolstoy.
None of those observations apply to Mad Men.
Unlike The Wire, Mad Men is a work of satire. It's condescending toward its characters and patronizing of its audience. Its characters are stupider than we are and we are meant to take delight in our relative enlightenment. Its artistic vision is hierarchical, with Mad Men's makers above everyone and the show's audience above the characters. Mad Men makes no attempt at total truth but operates by selection, distillation, and suggestion. It's profoundly moral; it's didactic and self-congratulatory. It is—god save us—insightful and sophisticated and clever.
Given their generic difference—what's really a difference of essence—The Wire and Mad Men are not comparable artistic achievements and shouldn't be spoken of as if they are.
The Wire makes the best case in recent popular art for the artistic superiority of the epic over all other artistic forms. It's essential art, great art, because like all epics worthy of the name it is timeless.
The fact that it got made and that its artistic sensibility survived for four complete seasons defy explanation. Like all permanent works of art, it now glows with the light of the miraculous.
It's true that Mad Men—a well-argued, well-made history lesson—is great fun to look at. The sets are thrilling. The women are gorgeous catastrophes, except for Joan Harris, played by Christina Hendricks, who is a human being and is genuinely riveting. The men are stupid, elegant monsters, with the exception of Roger Sterling, played by John Slattery, who—along with Hendricks—offers a glimpse into what the show could be if it stopped concerning itself with teaching us about the world and instead tried to learn from it.
For a while I thought that Mad Men wanted to give us an updated take on The Great Gatsby, which contemplates fundamental American insecurities as profoundly as any work of art in our canon.
It's now clear that Mad Men has no such ambition. Instead, it has joined the parade of self-certain ideologues typical of this moment in American life and who occupy our attention at every turn, telling us who we are, how we think, and how we ought to think.
In this regard Mad Men is great television. Along with The Sopranos, it captures the spirit of our time—a time when the artist has rejected the role of the poet (who knows nothing) for the role of the saint (who knows everything) and has set out on a mission to save us from ourselves.
Monday, November 16, 2009
Day Two
I've tried to hit the ground running.
Most of the notes below I've robbed from the unmarked grave of an earlier blog. That blog was conceived in Costa Rica in 2003, only to be, like much else I've given birth to, stillborn.
My first note—on Light Years—can be held responsible for my decision to begin The Bewildered Eye. Upon finishing Salter's delicate masterpiece I felt such enthusiasm for it and such bewilderment at its relative obscurity that I decided to speak up, however inconsequentially.
That note, the first I posted after "Inicio," is now buried by the others—a peculiarity of the blog form, which buries its own history. Books seem to me far more intuitive (and intellectually healthy), building upon themselves instead of entombing the process of thought that made them possible and that makes them comprehensible.
I would like to see a blog that one scrolls through horizontally instead of vertically. Does such a thing exist? Is it possible here?
Laments of an amateur.
I suspect I'll be updating this too often in the short term, swept up by nonsensical glee.
Most of the notes below I've robbed from the unmarked grave of an earlier blog. That blog was conceived in Costa Rica in 2003, only to be, like much else I've given birth to, stillborn.
My first note—on Light Years—can be held responsible for my decision to begin The Bewildered Eye. Upon finishing Salter's delicate masterpiece I felt such enthusiasm for it and such bewilderment at its relative obscurity that I decided to speak up, however inconsequentially.
That note, the first I posted after "Inicio," is now buried by the others—a peculiarity of the blog form, which buries its own history. Books seem to me far more intuitive (and intellectually healthy), building upon themselves instead of entombing the process of thought that made them possible and that makes them comprehensible.
I would like to see a blog that one scrolls through horizontally instead of vertically. Does such a thing exist? Is it possible here?
Laments of an amateur.
I suspect I'll be updating this too often in the short term, swept up by nonsensical glee.
The Time of Our Singing, by Richard Powers
The Time of our Singing is a beautiful lesson. The book has tremendous scope. Powers is clearly a genius.
But he's not a novelistic genius. He's the type of genius you get during a Fundamentalist Era. Axes to grind. Proofs. The evidence arrayed.
I happen to agree with him more or less all the time. Perhaps that's why I find the book disappointing.
Well: Why I found the book disappointing. I confess I stopped reading it (reason enough to stop reading this note). The book is too long. It's ambitious and often gorgeously written, but the prose seems to strike, too often, the same key.
In this regard it's like Norman Rush's Mating: relentlessly, the same brilliant voice.
I guess we can't produce a Tolstoy. We are too stylistic, too egotistical. Maybe we don't trust our stories. We require applause. We would rather be marvelous than true.
I suppose there's something to being marvelous, actually—something important.
Another aspect of the book I found disconcerting: It's narrated by the brother of a musical genius, and the narrator is both envious of and awestruck by his brother's talent. Yet the narrator's philosphical range and poetic sensibility—his own artistic talent, in short—led me to think, as I read: As if a mind like this could be envious of anyone.
Momentarily envious, perhaps—but not as a way of being in the world.
But he's not a novelistic genius. He's the type of genius you get during a Fundamentalist Era. Axes to grind. Proofs. The evidence arrayed.
I happen to agree with him more or less all the time. Perhaps that's why I find the book disappointing.
Well: Why I found the book disappointing. I confess I stopped reading it (reason enough to stop reading this note). The book is too long. It's ambitious and often gorgeously written, but the prose seems to strike, too often, the same key.
In this regard it's like Norman Rush's Mating: relentlessly, the same brilliant voice.
I guess we can't produce a Tolstoy. We are too stylistic, too egotistical. Maybe we don't trust our stories. We require applause. We would rather be marvelous than true.
I suppose there's something to being marvelous, actually—something important.
Another aspect of the book I found disconcerting: It's narrated by the brother of a musical genius, and the narrator is both envious of and awestruck by his brother's talent. Yet the narrator's philosphical range and poetic sensibility—his own artistic talent, in short—led me to think, as I read: As if a mind like this could be envious of anyone.
Momentarily envious, perhaps—but not as a way of being in the world.
Anyway, I don't recommend the book as an exemplary novel but as a wonderfully written exposé of the American soul.
It's a shame exposés are dull, once we get the point.
It's a shame exposés are dull, once we get the point.
Liquidation, by Imre Kertész
Always difficult to know what's going on with a translation. But there's an awkwardness to this text that initially I found distracting. Over time it became poignant.
It's a work of genius, regardless—peculiar, wonderfully structured, sincere. It wonders at the big questions: We are a chaos, now, and all live in the shadow of Auschwitz—so what follows from that? And what's the relationship between love and self-destruction? Between love and sadism?
It is unapologetically, if clumsily, postmodern, but it's postmodernism functions in the service of an emotional verisimilitude that I find heroic.
That's a good word for this book. It's a word that its author would flee, rebuke, dismiss as yet another example of our contemporary stupidity.
Regardless, this is a heroic book.
It's a work of genius, regardless—peculiar, wonderfully structured, sincere. It wonders at the big questions: We are a chaos, now, and all live in the shadow of Auschwitz—so what follows from that? And what's the relationship between love and self-destruction? Between love and sadism?
It is unapologetically, if clumsily, postmodern, but it's postmodernism functions in the service of an emotional verisimilitude that I find heroic.
That's a good word for this book. It's a word that its author would flee, rebuke, dismiss as yet another example of our contemporary stupidity.
Regardless, this is a heroic book.
The Corrections, by Jonathan Franzen
Franzen has written an unpleasant novel, filled with unpleasant characters to whom nothing bad ever happens. At the book's end there's a death that was given at the outset—a death that has, in effect, already happened. The story’s other ostensibly tragic events are minor and pitiful.
The primary impression one gets from the book is that Franzen takes pleasure in eviscerating his characters. From the outset the stack is arranged against them.
But such arrangements constitute the fundamental difference between literature and propaganda. Most of Franzen's readers—well-educated, well-meaning liberals—will agree with the book's propaganda and so mistake its declamations for artistry.
The only lasting source of interest in the book is watching its author suddenly quit the game as his characters begin to take control of it. So the book ends abruptly and happily. In place of the venomous tone that characterized all but its final few pages, we suddenly get sympathy and admiration.
Curiously, though, Franzen's abrupt surrender is the most moving aspect of the book. And it is moving. As if all along the novel had been advancing towards its author’s unexpected and deeply painful confession of weakness vis-à-vis his hapless, stupid characters. Satire abruptly turns into love.
Aside from its viciousness, the book suffers from a problem common in modern fiction: there's no one in the book who is nearly as intelligent as its author.
How different they are, in their vapidity, from the protagonists in Tolstoy or Dickens! (Chip is no Pip!) Tolstoy, especially, filled his books with fiercely intelligent characters. Franzen can't. It would ruin his fun.
But Franzen is of his Age, mistaking cynicism for satire. Where Petronius is reckless, patient, generous—delighted!—and grand-spirited and perverse, where he's timeless as opposed to timely, where he's filled with affection for his characters, Franzen is a prosecutor. That’s what we get here: evidence, conviction, punishment. His targets are easy and all too familiar: name brands, fashion drugs, workaholics, a word like “workaholics,” suburban naïveté, political correctness, IPOs.
Yes, Franzen’s characters merit his mockery. It's another question whether or not they merit our time.
Always behind The Corrections, a deeply conservative temperament. Now and then the text plays, but always according to the clever conventions of DeLillo postmodernism. So the book's rare riskiness sticks out awkwardly from the dreary trunk of an otherwise skillful, intelligent, traditional novel.
Franzen wants to be right about us; and he is. Good for him. Dreary for us.
The primary impression one gets from the book is that Franzen takes pleasure in eviscerating his characters. From the outset the stack is arranged against them.
But such arrangements constitute the fundamental difference between literature and propaganda. Most of Franzen's readers—well-educated, well-meaning liberals—will agree with the book's propaganda and so mistake its declamations for artistry.
Of course Franzen is intelligent—painfully, mercilessly intelligent. His prose is swift, democratic, entertaining.
But novelistic insight is not his strength. In its place we get Stating the Obvious.
So The Corrections is a new addition to the Literature of Recognition. An old, venerable tradition: We're invited to read a book in which we'll recognize what we already know about ourselves. Consequently, The Corrections is as modest as its title, despite its many pages and the hopeful fanfare that accompanied its notorious anti-Oprah arrival. It congratulates us on collaborating in its excoriation of human stupidity; our collaboration, if the reader possesses any intelligence whatsoever—and, in a manner typical of our era, wants to be congratulated on his or her intelligence—is reassuring and gratifying. Like other, similar collaborations, it passes from the mind as quickly as a compliment from a stranger whose attention we didn't desire.
But novelistic insight is not his strength. In its place we get Stating the Obvious.
So The Corrections is a new addition to the Literature of Recognition. An old, venerable tradition: We're invited to read a book in which we'll recognize what we already know about ourselves. Consequently, The Corrections is as modest as its title, despite its many pages and the hopeful fanfare that accompanied its notorious anti-Oprah arrival. It congratulates us on collaborating in its excoriation of human stupidity; our collaboration, if the reader possesses any intelligence whatsoever—and, in a manner typical of our era, wants to be congratulated on his or her intelligence—is reassuring and gratifying. Like other, similar collaborations, it passes from the mind as quickly as a compliment from a stranger whose attention we didn't desire.
The only lasting source of interest in the book is watching its author suddenly quit the game as his characters begin to take control of it. So the book ends abruptly and happily. In place of the venomous tone that characterized all but its final few pages, we suddenly get sympathy and admiration.
Curiously, though, Franzen's abrupt surrender is the most moving aspect of the book. And it is moving. As if all along the novel had been advancing towards its author’s unexpected and deeply painful confession of weakness vis-à-vis his hapless, stupid characters. Satire abruptly turns into love.
Aside from its viciousness, the book suffers from a problem common in modern fiction: there's no one in the book who is nearly as intelligent as its author.
How different they are, in their vapidity, from the protagonists in Tolstoy or Dickens! (Chip is no Pip!) Tolstoy, especially, filled his books with fiercely intelligent characters. Franzen can't. It would ruin his fun.
But Franzen is of his Age, mistaking cynicism for satire. Where Petronius is reckless, patient, generous—delighted!—and grand-spirited and perverse, where he's timeless as opposed to timely, where he's filled with affection for his characters, Franzen is a prosecutor. That’s what we get here: evidence, conviction, punishment. His targets are easy and all too familiar: name brands, fashion drugs, workaholics, a word like “workaholics,” suburban naïveté, political correctness, IPOs.
Yes, Franzen’s characters merit his mockery. It's another question whether or not they merit our time.
Always behind The Corrections, a deeply conservative temperament. Now and then the text plays, but always according to the clever conventions of DeLillo postmodernism. So the book's rare riskiness sticks out awkwardly from the dreary trunk of an otherwise skillful, intelligent, traditional novel.
Franzen wants to be right about us; and he is. Good for him. Dreary for us.
War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning, by Chris Hedges
He's an eyewitness. That's the book's relevance.
I didn't like the end of the book. It's too easy to say that secretly, inherently, we all want to die, or that violence is addictive because we all want the rest of death. Of course we do want to rest, but that's not the sole—or even the primary—source of our violence.
I also don't like the dedication to his children. If it isn't disingenuous, it should be.
The story about the Muslim man who brings milk everyday for the Serbs' infant after the mother can no longer nurse is devastating. It's the book's secret.
A helpful way to approach a critique of this book might be to imagine an ideologue—from the right or the left—reading it. Because it's a confused book. It's broken. Brokenness is its rhetorical stance.
I didn't like the end of the book. It's too easy to say that secretly, inherently, we all want to die, or that violence is addictive because we all want the rest of death. Of course we do want to rest, but that's not the sole—or even the primary—source of our violence.
I also don't like the dedication to his children. If it isn't disingenuous, it should be.
The story about the Muslim man who brings milk everyday for the Serbs' infant after the mother can no longer nurse is devastating. It's the book's secret.
A helpful way to approach a critique of this book might be to imagine an ideologue—from the right or the left—reading it. Because it's a confused book. It's broken. Brokenness is its rhetorical stance.
Hedges' likely response to that observation is explicit in the book: Brokenness is the only reasonable stance to such horror, and so much of it.
There is something tiresome, however, about its dismay. Hedges posits an idea of humanity—a liberal humanist's idea, I guess, and in truth I can't think of another worldview worth defending—and then laments our inability to live up to that idea.
There is something tiresome, however, about its dismay. Hedges posits an idea of humanity—a liberal humanist's idea, I guess, and in truth I can't think of another worldview worth defending—and then laments our inability to live up to that idea.
But the idea, despite the fact that it's been our salvation, might need to be reevaluated. Could it be that the idea is now facilitating slaughter? Based upon the content of this book, it's an idea so easily refuted by the facts of the world that to read the book is to watch liberalism collapse.
Outside the book, of course, liberalism collapses at an anthem's first note.
I saw that last night, when I watched an NFL football game and saw the Indianapolis Colts unfurl an American flag the size of their football field. In such sights one foresees the end of the world.
In any case, I recommend the book. It's a good introduction to the problem of violence—specifically, to the problem of violence as it's perceived by modern liberalism. So it's a good introduction, too, to modern liberalism generally: to what to admire about it—the poetry, in the first place—and to its vulnerabilities.
They're the same vulnerabilities that Nietzsche addressed, futilely. Wrongly, Nietzsche called them weaknesses.
My god, how we love our tragic lives!
I saw that last night, when I watched an NFL football game and saw the Indianapolis Colts unfurl an American flag the size of their football field. In such sights one foresees the end of the world.
In any case, I recommend the book. It's a good introduction to the problem of violence—specifically, to the problem of violence as it's perceived by modern liberalism. So it's a good introduction, too, to modern liberalism generally: to what to admire about it—the poetry, in the first place—and to its vulnerabilities.
They're the same vulnerabilities that Nietzsche addressed, futilely. Wrongly, Nietzsche called them weaknesses.
My god, how we love our tragic lives!
Memorias de mis putas tristes, by Gabriel García Márquez
Lighter, less important than his great novels (if they can be called novels) this book is a delicate celebration of the torment of falling in love.
GM's gifts are two-fold: effortless storytelling—he's the master storyteller of his generation—and a seemingly limitless capacity to take delight in the vagaries of the world. He is abjectly optimistic, positive, life-affirming. Coming from him, "mierda" means "wonder."
A quick, comic read—this is comedy—and a useful reminder that regardless of the world's godlessness (or, worse yet, its godliness) it's filled with reasons to love it.
A follow-up: It's been some time since I recorded this note. As time passes the memory of this book fills me with a peculiar nausea. It might be dishonest. I'll read it in translation and see what I think of it in English.
GM's gifts are two-fold: effortless storytelling—he's the master storyteller of his generation—and a seemingly limitless capacity to take delight in the vagaries of the world. He is abjectly optimistic, positive, life-affirming. Coming from him, "mierda" means "wonder."
A quick, comic read—this is comedy—and a useful reminder that regardless of the world's godlessness (or, worse yet, its godliness) it's filled with reasons to love it.
A follow-up: It's been some time since I recorded this note. As time passes the memory of this book fills me with a peculiar nausea. It might be dishonest. I'll read it in translation and see what I think of it in English.
The Foundation Pit, by Andrei Platonov
Russians write the best novels.
As an aspiring novelist, I felt reading The Foundation Pit that I needed to study it. It's a novel of ideas, yet the ideas are inextricable from the movement of the story. And its movement is effortless. Shifting points of view, locations, discourses—satire, irony, outrage: all without, to this beginner's eye, a formal misstep.
The author has opened a space for himself that allows him to do whatever he'd like. His authorial credibility is boundless. Two-thirds of the way through the book a bear appears as its now-central character. The reader—this reader!—does not blink.
And the book's ideas are astonishing.
Why can't Americans write readable novels of ideas?
This is one of the most poetic and philosophically compelling evocations of despair that I've ever read.
Emphatically recommended. Essential.
As an aspiring novelist, I felt reading The Foundation Pit that I needed to study it. It's a novel of ideas, yet the ideas are inextricable from the movement of the story. And its movement is effortless. Shifting points of view, locations, discourses—satire, irony, outrage: all without, to this beginner's eye, a formal misstep.
The author has opened a space for himself that allows him to do whatever he'd like. His authorial credibility is boundless. Two-thirds of the way through the book a bear appears as its now-central character. The reader—this reader!—does not blink.
And the book's ideas are astonishing.
Why can't Americans write readable novels of ideas?
This is one of the most poetic and philosophically compelling evocations of despair that I've ever read.
Emphatically recommended. Essential.
Paris Stories, by Mavis Gallant
Gallant reminds me of Chekhov. She's funnier—or it's easier for me to catch her North American comic sensibility—and almost as chilling. These stories are extraordinarily well-crafted. As with Chekhov, the craft is in the service of story, not ideology and not the articulation—the self-aggrandizement—of an ego.
Gallant's art makes clear the difference between literature and propaganda, between fiction and philosophy, between life and death.
In her generous afterword, after her manner, she says that art should illuminate the difference between life and death. One would that that the differences should be obvious, yet reading her stories one realizes that they aren't, and to imagine that they are is laziness.
Her women, especially, are riveting. I've discovered only recently the extent to which women have an inner life. I was aware of it, vaguely hoped for it, but thought that women were primarily social, outward-flowing, and consequently I badly underestimated their private complexity.
Reading Gallant in conjunction with what's transpired in my life recently has transformed the way I see women. I don't know if this transformation will manifest itself in the way I live. I hope it does.
But this isn't about me—or shouldn't be.
Among the gifts Gallant gives her reader, this most of all: her artistic process is impossible to deduce. She says she begins with an image. It's fun to imagine what that image might be with each story; but imagine is all you can do. The stories are seamless. Her touch is too light to leave a trace of anything conclusively original or seminal, of the creative artist, the craftsperson, the technician, the necessity at the story's source.
Having read her I want to copy her. But that's not merely impossible; it is ludicrous.
She's as good as anyone writing short stories right now, perhaps ever. This is a superb collection. Michael Ondaatje edited the book and it includes an introduction he's authored. His introduction seems to implicitly acknowledge that she's the better writer. If it doesn't, it should.
Gallant's art makes clear the difference between literature and propaganda, between fiction and philosophy, between life and death.
In her generous afterword, after her manner, she says that art should illuminate the difference between life and death. One would that that the differences should be obvious, yet reading her stories one realizes that they aren't, and to imagine that they are is laziness.
Her women, especially, are riveting. I've discovered only recently the extent to which women have an inner life. I was aware of it, vaguely hoped for it, but thought that women were primarily social, outward-flowing, and consequently I badly underestimated their private complexity.
Reading Gallant in conjunction with what's transpired in my life recently has transformed the way I see women. I don't know if this transformation will manifest itself in the way I live. I hope it does.
But this isn't about me—or shouldn't be.
Among the gifts Gallant gives her reader, this most of all: her artistic process is impossible to deduce. She says she begins with an image. It's fun to imagine what that image might be with each story; but imagine is all you can do. The stories are seamless. Her touch is too light to leave a trace of anything conclusively original or seminal, of the creative artist, the craftsperson, the technician, the necessity at the story's source.
Having read her I want to copy her. But that's not merely impossible; it is ludicrous.
She's as good as anyone writing short stories right now, perhaps ever. This is a superb collection. Michael Ondaatje edited the book and it includes an introduction he's authored. His introduction seems to implicitly acknowledge that she's the better writer. If it doesn't, it should.
Sleepless Nights, by Elizabeth Hardwick
It took me a long time—months—to finish this little book. It might not necessarily invite intermittent reading, but clearly it's not preoccupied with the striptease of suspense and can be left for days, weeks, for as long as one wants, to be resumed when the mood suits its peculiar but indisputable beauty.
Anyway, it rewards sampling. A couple of passages tonight; more tomorrow night; more again in three weeks.
I always thought, proceeding: How nice to return to this.
In other words, it's not an expedient book. It's generous, leisurely, stylish—I think Hardwick is a topnotch stylist: her line is instantly recognizable, energetic, American, muscular, yet (here we go) feminine. Pre-occupied with minutiae, humane, not exactly gossipy but certainly concerned with social dynamics, long-suffering, efficient, and elegant.
While not a necessary book, it's emblematic of a kind of American writing that we must not lose. I speak of Thoreau, Whitman, Dickinson, Miller. The autobiographical, the personal, rendered, at its best, acutely, passionately—but without sentimentality; or with sentimentality conveyed with such lean self-assurance that it a acquires a kind of youthful indisputability—in the sense, I guess, that young love or American power is indisputable. The book is just about beyond logical critique due to its sheer gorgeous intensity.
This is a wonderful gift-book for someone who loves English prose. Hardwick stands with William Carlos Williams as one of the 20th century's master prose stylists.
Anyway, it rewards sampling. A couple of passages tonight; more tomorrow night; more again in three weeks.
I always thought, proceeding: How nice to return to this.
In other words, it's not an expedient book. It's generous, leisurely, stylish—I think Hardwick is a topnotch stylist: her line is instantly recognizable, energetic, American, muscular, yet (here we go) feminine. Pre-occupied with minutiae, humane, not exactly gossipy but certainly concerned with social dynamics, long-suffering, efficient, and elegant.
While not a necessary book, it's emblematic of a kind of American writing that we must not lose. I speak of Thoreau, Whitman, Dickinson, Miller. The autobiographical, the personal, rendered, at its best, acutely, passionately—but without sentimentality; or with sentimentality conveyed with such lean self-assurance that it a acquires a kind of youthful indisputability—in the sense, I guess, that young love or American power is indisputable. The book is just about beyond logical critique due to its sheer gorgeous intensity.
This is a wonderful gift-book for someone who loves English prose. Hardwick stands with William Carlos Williams as one of the 20th century's master prose stylists.
Light Years, by James Salter
I can still remember a time when drinking was an unmitigated delight. Rightly or wrongly, I felt freed by it of my worst qualities (which were all, I imagined, the product of a Mormon upbringing): humorlessness, abject obedience to authority, a fascination with passing judgment, morbid self-control.
Drinking, I became less narrow. I became, for myself, finally, unpredictable. At the age of twenty-nine, I had found a path into the open meadow, or the great teeming city, of life.
Let me put that another way: suddenly, for the first time, I was having fun being an adult.
It was around that time that I read Under the Volcano. I loved the book and I liked to read it aloud.
But I didn't understand it. In addition to its exotic locale, it described an exotic experience: alcohol as an act of suicide. Alcohol as a flight not to life but from it.
If I were to read Under the Volcano today, it wouldn't be the same book. (Re-read books are never the same, which is why there is no such thing as re-reading.) Lowry would now be describing an experience that has become a possibility, perhaps even an inevitability—an experience that, however faintly (or probably not very faintly) I now recognize.
So too does Light Years, by James Salter, a book I've just finished and which has shaken me as few works of art ever have.
Its account of the beauty of marriage, and of its pleasures, and of its terrible and insidious forms of loneliness, would once have been incomprehensible to me. I suppose I would have recognized—but without nostalgia, which makes recognition matter—its account of marriage as a form of refuge. And as a sight of sudden, permanent moments of beauty. But I wouldn't have recognized its account of marriage as catastrophically, terribly lonely, and as always, at some level, doomed.
So I wouldn't have understood the book, as I couldn't understand Under the Volcano.
I'm saying that I would have loved Light Years, as I loved Under the Volcano, but I would have experienced its primary theme, its motivating truth, as exotic, charming, and irrelevant.
I think that Light Years can't be wholly felt unless the reader has been married and a parent for a while—probably for years. That fact (and I believe it's a fact) might explain the book's otherwise inexcusable lack of fame.
(There is no corresponding excuse for the neglect of Salter's A Sport and a Pastime, which is one of very few post-war American masterpieces of erotica—are there any others?—and which, like all of Salter's work, continues to be suspiciously un-read.)
Light Years describes with unsurpassed delicacy the mysteries of domestic suburban married life. It gives a heartwrenching account of parenthood—as heartwrenching (by which I mean true) as any I know. This book could not have been written by a person who didn't love marriage and parenthood and who hadn't known great happiness as a husband and a father.
But also great unhappiness; and it's always in unhappiness, as Tolstoy famously noted, where the story lies.
I don't feel inclined to summarize the plot. Its basic elements are relatively predictable, as all plots are, or eventually become, for anyone who passes his or her life among novels.
Anyway, they don't matter—not in this book; not ever. What matters in literature are formal accomplishment, strangeness, and honesty.
Light Years possesses all three of those qualities in abundance. Reading it, I often had to stop after a few pages, as if to re-assemble myself. The novel seemed to be—it was—smashing me into pieces. It often left me breathless. I confess that as it drew to a close (although I didn't love its final pages) I wept bitterly, helplessly.
Salter has divided Light Years into five parts, each built around what he frames as discreet stages of adult married life. Passing through each stage, one recognizes their truthfulness. More generally, one recognizes that there is great cruelty in truth. That we recognize truth by its cruelty.
The book's celebration of the basic pleasures of life acquires as it a proceeds a kind of indisputable force. No American writer since Hemingway evokes the pleasures of food and drink, the experience of preparing food and eating it, as exquisitely as Salter. In fact, his evocations are better than Hemingway's. (It's no coincidence, I'm sure, that both men spent a great deal of time in France.)
Salter is equally gifted at using setting to construct the emotional content of his art. His eye for the nuance and significance of light is unparalleled in modern American literature, perhaps in all of American literature.
My copy of the book, on loan to me from the Chabot College library, was published by North Point Press and has on its cover a painting by Pierre Bonnard. This choice seems exactly right. Both Salter and Bonnard articulate the truth—the truth as I've experienced it, anyway—of domestic life: They see its colors, its light, its stillness, its sadness and joy, its tendency to dissolve into something which can't be thought about and so can't be contained.
One realizes reading Salter that of course all politics are local because all life is local. We can't feel beyond ourselves. And what causes us to feel? Landscape, weather, nearby bodies, other animals, physical activity, the voices and the words of those we love, human—especially female—beauty, wit, the intelligence and dignity of children. Food and drink. Now and then, too rarely, a work of art. And the sanctuaries of sleep and bedding and the bewilderment of beloved flesh in close proximity to our own. The bewilderment of touch and scent. The boundless province of sex and its indigenous despair.
It is a book about aging and the primary act of resistance we have against aging, which is falling in love.
We see, if we are ready, that beyond those things nothing else matters. The rest is not silence but noise.
Which might make it impossible for most men to read and probably explains why I found reading it so difficult and why it is generally, unjustly unknown.
I think Light Years is one of the great American novels of the 20th century and I'll read it again when I have the strength to face it.
Drinking, I became less narrow. I became, for myself, finally, unpredictable. At the age of twenty-nine, I had found a path into the open meadow, or the great teeming city, of life.
Let me put that another way: suddenly, for the first time, I was having fun being an adult.
It was around that time that I read Under the Volcano. I loved the book and I liked to read it aloud.
But I didn't understand it. In addition to its exotic locale, it described an exotic experience: alcohol as an act of suicide. Alcohol as a flight not to life but from it.
If I were to read Under the Volcano today, it wouldn't be the same book. (Re-read books are never the same, which is why there is no such thing as re-reading.) Lowry would now be describing an experience that has become a possibility, perhaps even an inevitability—an experience that, however faintly (or probably not very faintly) I now recognize.
So too does Light Years, by James Salter, a book I've just finished and which has shaken me as few works of art ever have.
Its account of the beauty of marriage, and of its pleasures, and of its terrible and insidious forms of loneliness, would once have been incomprehensible to me. I suppose I would have recognized—but without nostalgia, which makes recognition matter—its account of marriage as a form of refuge. And as a sight of sudden, permanent moments of beauty. But I wouldn't have recognized its account of marriage as catastrophically, terribly lonely, and as always, at some level, doomed.
So I wouldn't have understood the book, as I couldn't understand Under the Volcano.
I'm saying that I would have loved Light Years, as I loved Under the Volcano, but I would have experienced its primary theme, its motivating truth, as exotic, charming, and irrelevant.
I think that Light Years can't be wholly felt unless the reader has been married and a parent for a while—probably for years. That fact (and I believe it's a fact) might explain the book's otherwise inexcusable lack of fame.
(There is no corresponding excuse for the neglect of Salter's A Sport and a Pastime, which is one of very few post-war American masterpieces of erotica—are there any others?—and which, like all of Salter's work, continues to be suspiciously un-read.)
Light Years describes with unsurpassed delicacy the mysteries of domestic suburban married life. It gives a heartwrenching account of parenthood—as heartwrenching (by which I mean true) as any I know. This book could not have been written by a person who didn't love marriage and parenthood and who hadn't known great happiness as a husband and a father.
But also great unhappiness; and it's always in unhappiness, as Tolstoy famously noted, where the story lies.
I don't feel inclined to summarize the plot. Its basic elements are relatively predictable, as all plots are, or eventually become, for anyone who passes his or her life among novels.
Anyway, they don't matter—not in this book; not ever. What matters in literature are formal accomplishment, strangeness, and honesty.
Light Years possesses all three of those qualities in abundance. Reading it, I often had to stop after a few pages, as if to re-assemble myself. The novel seemed to be—it was—smashing me into pieces. It often left me breathless. I confess that as it drew to a close (although I didn't love its final pages) I wept bitterly, helplessly.
Salter has divided Light Years into five parts, each built around what he frames as discreet stages of adult married life. Passing through each stage, one recognizes their truthfulness. More generally, one recognizes that there is great cruelty in truth. That we recognize truth by its cruelty.
The book's celebration of the basic pleasures of life acquires as it a proceeds a kind of indisputable force. No American writer since Hemingway evokes the pleasures of food and drink, the experience of preparing food and eating it, as exquisitely as Salter. In fact, his evocations are better than Hemingway's. (It's no coincidence, I'm sure, that both men spent a great deal of time in France.)
Salter is equally gifted at using setting to construct the emotional content of his art. His eye for the nuance and significance of light is unparalleled in modern American literature, perhaps in all of American literature.
My copy of the book, on loan to me from the Chabot College library, was published by North Point Press and has on its cover a painting by Pierre Bonnard. This choice seems exactly right. Both Salter and Bonnard articulate the truth—the truth as I've experienced it, anyway—of domestic life: They see its colors, its light, its stillness, its sadness and joy, its tendency to dissolve into something which can't be thought about and so can't be contained.
One realizes reading Salter that of course all politics are local because all life is local. We can't feel beyond ourselves. And what causes us to feel? Landscape, weather, nearby bodies, other animals, physical activity, the voices and the words of those we love, human—especially female—beauty, wit, the intelligence and dignity of children. Food and drink. Now and then, too rarely, a work of art. And the sanctuaries of sleep and bedding and the bewilderment of beloved flesh in close proximity to our own. The bewilderment of touch and scent. The boundless province of sex and its indigenous despair.
It is a book about aging and the primary act of resistance we have against aging, which is falling in love.
I suspect this book will be impossible to read if you don't understand that women are real and have emotional lives that are completely, permanently their own.
Which might make it impossible for most men to read and probably explains why I found reading it so difficult and why it is generally, unjustly unknown.
I think Light Years is one of the great American novels of the 20th century and I'll read it again when I have the strength to face it.
Sunday, November 15, 2009
Inicio
So now this: an account, let's say (whimsically), of one man's battle with the gods.
The minor gods, of course, as those are the only ones left.
Notes on literature, culture, politics—on the experience of a self (various, bewildered, imperious) in time.
I've decided to begin a blog—a plodding word for one's literature—because I'm interested in the way that thinking is changing. I'm convinced that it is, and the changes must have something to do with the way we make our thoughts, and share them. So I want to try blog-thinking, in part to see what happens to my writing—or, more to the point, to me—when my thoughts take this form.
Also I'm frustrated by how little writing I actually do.
And by my solitude, far from many minds I miss. I want this to be seen as my attempt to continue conversations that were once essential to me and have now fallen silent.
Let's begin with those ambitions and justifications. They should be taken lightly, as I just made them up, distracted and feeling, this evening, unwell.
The minor gods, of course, as those are the only ones left.
Notes on literature, culture, politics—on the experience of a self (various, bewildered, imperious) in time.
I've decided to begin a blog—a plodding word for one's literature—because I'm interested in the way that thinking is changing. I'm convinced that it is, and the changes must have something to do with the way we make our thoughts, and share them. So I want to try blog-thinking, in part to see what happens to my writing—or, more to the point, to me—when my thoughts take this form.
Also I'm frustrated by how little writing I actually do.
And by my solitude, far from many minds I miss. I want this to be seen as my attempt to continue conversations that were once essential to me and have now fallen silent.
Let's begin with those ambitions and justifications. They should be taken lightly, as I just made them up, distracted and feeling, this evening, unwell.
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