Tuesday, December 7, 2010

Checkmate

Obama's recent tax deal was no compromise; it was an outright victory for liberals, for Obama, and for America.

We need to begin with the understanding that Republicans were right: it's a terrible time to raise taxes. Had Obama been less cagey, he would have openly admitted that he didn't want anyone to have a tax increase right now—including the rich. Absolutely the only way that he would have agreed to raise taxes on the rich would have been with the knowledge that he could then spend that money on economic stimuli. But that's impossible after Nov. 2.

So he was confronting a situation in which a) he needed to keep the tax cuts; yet b) the tax cuts were going to add hundreds of billions to the deficit.

His solution: get his tax cut extension, yet pass the blame for the deficit hit to the GOP.

The GOP has danced into his trap. And they now look awful: for liberals, Republicans held the government hostage to protect the rich from higher taxes. For conservatives, Republicans just added $900 billion to the deficit.

So this "compromise" is good for liberals, Obama, and America: the GOP has just given us a $900 billion dollar stimulus, in outright defiance of its own obsession with the deficit, and gleefully taken full responsibility for it. Astonishing. Obama has pulled off one of the most brilliant political maneuvers I've ever seen. It's so successful, in fact, that even his friends don't realize what he's done.

But they will. And when they do, he'll be re-elected.

Thursday, November 18, 2010

Término

One year ago, almost to the day, I started this blog. 134 posts later—most of them forgotten—I shut it down.

I haven't lost my affection for the soapbox; but this space belongs to a previous life. Anything I have to say right now will be—or will seem to be—about no one but myself. Soon enough, talking about oneself turns into nothing but self-pity, apology, resentment, or an exercise in self-delusion.

As a goodbye, I'll mark out the road I'm currently walking: Novalis, Cyril Connolly, Simone Weil, Bellow, James Baldwin. Dickinson, now and then, and Sebald and Montaigne.

It's a dark road, but not entirely without light. Yes, I'm more bewildered than ever. That will continue for some time, I guess. Long after this Eye is closed.

Wednesday, October 13, 2010

The Sanctuary of Sports

I was raised a Giants fan, listening to Dad tell stories about Willie Mays and Willie McCovey, Orlando Cepeda and Juan Marichal. The Giants owned Dad's heart—so of course they owned my heart; but we rarely attended their games, opting instead for the easy access of Oakland Coliseum, with its cheap bleacher seats and superior weather, where we'd watch the A's, who have been, for most of my life, the better team.

But now the Giants have moved from windy Candlestick to AT&T park, the most beautiful sports setting in North America. This season I've followed with my own sons the team's stunning journey into the postseason. I've been happy to pass on an affection that my dad gave to me, in the midst of our various preoccupations and, most recently, bewildering turmoil. Baseball is America's greatest game. Throughout 2010 together we've cheered for the Giants, who have now made our gentlest, most elegant city their home for more than 50 years.

Sunday, September 19, 2010

Freedom, by Jonathan Franzen

Many intelligent, well-meaning people will mistake—have mistakenFreedom for a good novel.

But many (perhaps most) intelligent, well-meaning people are masochists, who mistake pain for love and grief for insight. Children of the Old Testament, they worship a spiteful God, a disgusted God, and their attitude towards themselves and the rest of humanity can be succinctly summarized as: We get what we deserve (as long as what we get is bad).

We shouldn't be surprised, then, that those same people embrace a book whose primary ambition is the systematic annihilation of its characters. That ambition confirms a worldview that they've been trained since infancy to enjoy.

I know that most of the great characters in the history of the novel are annihilated by their authors. The reasons for that are complex and most certainly worth considering. But the novel's primary ambition has never been annihilation. Great novelists are not sadists. Tolstoy takes no pleasure in Anna Karenina's demise.

What, then, is a novel's primary ambition?

To re-concieve God. To displace the Sacred Texts in the moral and intellectual life of its audience.

Any novel attempting something else is not worth reading.

Novels attempt this re-conception very simply: they create a world, and by doing so propose a new idea of the Divine. We—the audience, humanity—experience this divinity (and, by extension, our own humanity) mostly through the novel's characters, feeling life through them, for them. What happens to Emma Bovary, to Raskolnikov, to Anna Karenina, to Herzog in fact only happens to us.

So to judge a book is to judge the theology of its creator, and particularly the creator's idea of humanity.

Which bring us to Freedom.

Like The Corrections, Freedom is the ambitious attempt to contemplate a particular moment in American life. It presents itself as a social novel. It follows the lives of some decent middle-class liberal Americans through the hideous years of the Bush Administration.

That sounds like a worthwhile project. Why, then, do I find the book objectionable?

Four reasons: 1) its sadistic attitude toward its characters (and therefore toward its readers); 2) its incompetent use of free indirect speech; 3) its gaudy symbolism; and 4) its theological conviction that we achieve redemption through suffering.

Let's consider each point individually:

1) Until the end of the book (see 4!), absolutely everything that happens to the book's characters is bad. Dully, sadistically, characteristically, insignificantly bad.

2) Without having the sense to specifically name the problem, B.R. Myers isolates Franzen's incompetent handling of free indirect speech in his scathing review of the book for The Atlantic. I'll merely note that the incoherence of the characters—the chasm between their situation and their language—cannot be excused as postmodern truthiness. (The rape quote that Myers criticizes in his article is characteristic of the entire book.) It's simply not possible that Franzen's characters think as they do when he permits them to narrate the book. And all novels have an obligation to remain possible. To abandon the possible is always artistic failure. 

3) When one of the main characters, who has fled his young bride, recognizes the errors of his ways when he's searching through his own excrement for his wedding ring, I conclude that the author doesn't trust his character's (which means his audience's) intelligence. It's incumbent upon all novelists to leave their sledgehammers at home.

4) The sentimentality of Freedom's final pages, when Franzen finally relents and permits his characters a modicum of happiness, serve to reinforce the tediously bourgeois (or, more specifically, Christian) notion that only by suffering do we find redemption. In this regard the novel is an intellectual disappointment, a return to the dreary safety of received, cliché ideas.

At some point one must take a stand. Freedom is not great literature. It is not even good literature. It is clumsy, misanthropic, bourgeois kitsch.

(My review of The Corrections can be found here.)

Thursday, September 16, 2010

Tuesday, September 14, 2010

On Disliking God

The reason the mass of men fear God, and at bottom dislike Him, is because they rather distrust His heart, and fancy Him all brain like a watch. —Herman Melville, "Letter to Nathaniel Hawthorne, June 1851"
I'm trying to decide when I began to dislike God.

Perhaps when I was forced to read about Him and wanted to read something else—most likely a Hardy Boys book. That would have been in Chalmers, Indiana, near the time of my baptism, at seven or eight years old.

Or when I was told to pray to Him before lunch in Mrs. Staley's first grade class, standing in line at the classroom door in Knoxville, Tennessee, surrounded by hungry classmates.

Or when I asked Him to stop my parents' fighting—that, too, would have been in Tennessee—and from my knees listened to the world (it's true) continue to crack.

Or much later, when He denied me Darlene Barrett's body (the first of many bodies to choose Him over me, despite my trembling, my gentleness, my self-evident innocence).

Or when I danced manically one afternoon to "Money for Nothing" and my father, speaking with God's voice, told me to get control of myself. And I did, and I never danced like that again.

Or when I saw a girl—why bother with the names, anymore?—climb out of a pool from night-swimming, and sit on its edge in her bra and panties, gleaming in the dim light.

Or, days later, when that same girl betrayed me with my best friend. And I decided that I'd been emasculated by my obedience.

Or when I allowed myself to admit that The Book of Mormon was a terrible bore, and chose instead to read Love in the Time of Cholera. That would have been in General Belgrano, in Argentina, during my Mormon mission. After finishing García Márquez I read A Tale of Two Cities, which my mother had been suggesting I read since my early adolescence, and I wept bitterly at its famous conclusion, undergoing, I think, my own decapitation.

Or when I sat on our family room's red shag carpet in our Austin, Texas, five-years-old, and watched Secretariat destroy Sham at the Belmont Stakes to win the Triple Crown.

Or when I read Othello for the first time.

Or, better yet, when Tom kissed Becky.

Or when I saw my grandmother dead in her coffin.

Or when I saw my mother weeping at the pulpit, trying to speak.

Whenever it was, I hope that I rebelled first against God's seriousness. Older now, it's possible to imagine—but only imagine—that He was laughing all along; that nothing is serious; that the truest religious journey is from seriousness to laughter. But that's a journey almost no one makes. I have made it only in my imagination—and perhaps not even there.

I do wonder, though, if Melville isn't right—if just about everyone dislikes God, especially those who most claim to love Him. Shakespeare, who was Melville's progenitor and can teach us everything, has already warned us about those who insist too much.

Friday, September 10, 2010

Something Worth Fighting For

This is the America I remember: 30 Mosques, 30 Days. A moving, amusing, delightful look into the America—let's call it the real America—our hysterical national media usually ignores.

Having said that: to its credit, I learned of this blog in an article at CNN.com, through my customized iGoogle feed.

I'm so freaking modern.

Thursday, September 9, 2010

How Would Jesus Shave?



By their mustaches ye shall know them.

Lost Call

I've had more than one person tell me that what's missing from these notes is my sense of humor.

This criticism—and they mean it as a criticism—might be the most acute commentary on my writing generally: every story, every email, every birthday card. Visions of Joanna, too, is a grim, sad book. It delights in the nuances of grief, in the easy lyricism of tragedy. Also, my new book: so terribly, poetically sad—

So the question presents itself: Why do I find comic writing so difficult these days? (There was a day when it come easily—when it was all I did.)

Because comedy, laughter, has always been one of the primary pleasures of my (relatively docile) life.

Professionally, for example: I love laughter in the classroom. I am a failure as teacher when we don't laugh.

(Although recently I've noticed that I'm embarrassed about making a class laugh. As if I've realized that at some point I embraced the role of the Dancing Bear, convinced that I'm good at little else, and now regret that embrace, as it seems to lack, like so much else in my life, ambition.)

Even now the note turns serious—

Better that God had said to Isaiah: "Come now, and let us laugh together."

Reason, you see—this I've learned—is lifeless. Very few people care about reason.

Instead of hearing someone say, "You are so reasonable!" I want to hear: "You make me laugh."

Saturday, September 4, 2010

Notes on Virginia Woolf

White ashes on my brown corduroys. The sun strikes my bare chest.

A bee on the white picnic table appears to be dying. Maybe it's drinking the paint. Its abdomen in the sunlight is the color of my Newcastle.

The bee falls, or flies, into the grass.

Behind me, my old neighbors attend to their garden. By way of its bounty they continue to live. Their hope resides in the vegetables' tenacity, in the general relentlessness of life, as certain after its fashion as death.

Tomorrow, I will transform. I will arrive at a new self by attempting a hopeless return to youth.

In the mean-time I release the top button of my corduroys, to give this man's belly some room.

The dog, Maggie, will be dead in a matter of weeks. Her eyes, looking up from her little face, which she rests on her paws, say: "I am dying." This expression I translate as: Help.

I pour her some water and for a while she drinks greedily. In the same action one can see hope and hopelessness.

Thursday, September 2, 2010

The Corrections, by Jonathan Franzen (Redux)

With Tuesday's release of Freedom (to much fanfare), I've decided to re-visit my review of Franzen's prior novel, The Corrections, which can be found here, mildly revised.

I haven't read much of Freedom, but so far it strikes me as a continuation of Franzen's ambition in The Corrections: the novelistic equivalent of shooting fish in a barrel.

Tuesday, August 31, 2010

The Complaisant Fog Wakes Me From My Slumber

One would think goodness matters, but it doesn't seem to, in the end. Perhaps because we're all about equally good, both with each other and with ourselves. The world has its saints—heaven help them—and its demons, but we shouldn't model our lives after aberrations. We should be true to what we require.

I've discovered that I don't require goodness but strangeness—strangeness and beauty.

By strangeness I don't mean eccentricity, which, like Montaigne, I find irritating. I mean unexpectedness in the movement of a mind, as when Zachary said: "I like fish because they are interesting." Zachary is not eccentric but he is strange, to my unending delight.




I also mean formal strangeness: the way a poem, for example, or a face is assembled. Beyond all other qualities strangeness is what we look for in art, and in love. It's what the French call je ne sais quoi—that certain I-don't-know-what that escapes, in both French and English, the scope of a single word.

As with beauty, we recognize strangeness immediately—so we always fall in love at first sight.

I remember that discovery: I was seven years old and sitting in Sunday School in Lafayette, Indiana. Just in front of me: a girl's long brown hair, its streams of curls, its luxurious resplendence. At a particular moment she glanced toward the back of the room—her name, I soon learned, was Denise—and her eyes caught mine, and I was finished.

Even now, remembering that moment, I feel her strangeness, her difference from anything else, anyone else I'd ever encountered. To my new mind she was indecipherable.

She proved to be a girl who took pleasure in kicking my shins, not unlike most girls at that time, but she was also possessed of a strange quietness, so long ago. She still had that quietness when I saw her twelve years later, in college. But our time, I knew immediately, had passed.

Great artists are like great loves: Homer, the swift-footed poet of friendship, grief, and life's on-goingness; Shakespeare, who is so strangely all-encompassing as to make everyone else seem narrow-minded; Dickinson and her dashes; Kafka; Billie Holliday; Radiohead. Borges, Bolaño, Cézanne, and Chagall. Ravenous Petronius. Cartier-Bresson, Vallejo, Gombrowicz, Bjork. The list is, thank goodness, long enough for a lifetime.

Occasionally the world itself summons us from our slumber. The fog this morning, butting up against a radiant sky to the east, enshrouds Half Moon Bay in strangeness. I'm a small animal pulsing inside the sky. And for the first time in a long time—these things can't be explained—anything seems possible.

That's the gift of strangeness: like beauty, it opens the world, transforming everything, if only for a moment, into real—not fantastical—mystery.

Friday, August 27, 2010

TFTD

Is a dream a lie if it don't come true?
Or is it something worse . . .

— Bruce Springsteen, "The River"

Wednesday, August 25, 2010

Cultural Amnesia, by Clive James

One of my life's treasures is a single Word file: Various Quotes.doc

A collection, begun about a decade ago, of quotes that have caught my eye, it's become a record of my intellectual life: my reading, my thinking, my enthusiasms, my obsessions, my laments, my solitude, my delight. I've assembled the quotes as I've encountered them, so it's order is chronological, and I've recorded their origin, including the page number, so I that I can easily locate them again, should I need to. What riches.

Fundamentally, Cultural Amnesia is Clive James's Various Quotes.doc, consolidated into a book, with commentary. The book is filled with astonishing quotes, taken from a life of reading—my goodness, what reading—and film-going, listening, traveling. James uses his various quotes to contemplate people whom in his view we should not forget, mostly for their grandeur, occasionally for their depravity. The quotes get him rolling, and his essays often turn in unexpected—and consistently marvelous—directions: a mediation on the anti-Nazi heroine and martyr Sophie Scholl, for example, turns into a celebration of Natalie Portman. James imagines Portman playing Scholl in a movie of Scholl's life—which takes him to a claim about the limitations of cinema:
If Natalie Portman plays the role, the girl won't die. Natalie will go on after the end of the movie with her career enhanced as a great actress, whereas Sophie Scholl's career as an obscure yet remarkable human being really did come to an end. The Fallbeil (even the name sounds remorseless—the falling axe) hit her in the neck, and that was the end of her. Her lovely parable of a life went as far as that cold moment and no further. It's a fault inherent in the movies that they can't show such a thing. The performer takes over from the real person, and walks away. For just that reason, popular, star-led movies, no matter how good they are, are a bad way of teaching history.
The essays in Cultural Amnesia wander like this, as essays should—orbiting elegantly, satellites crossing the firmament, around their brilliant quotes. The quotes are shining little planets upon which they gaze, and which give them the axis all orbits require.

The primary pleasures of this text, which as a whole constitutes the most compelling defense of Western liberal democracy that I've ever read, number three: 1) reading the quotes James has gathered; 2) becoming acquainted, or re-acquainted, with some of the essential figures of (mostly) 20th century cultural and political history; and 3) following the movement of the author's mind, which, in the end, is any essay's fundamental gift.

The good news here is that Clive James has a exceptional mind and he has given us an indispensable book.

Tuesday, August 24, 2010

What's Mine Is Mine, and God Bless America

David H. Koch in 1996. He and his brother Charles are lifelong libertarians and have quietly given more than a hundred million dollars to right-wing causes.

While God's light shines serenely upon him, David Koch spends a little bit of his $35,000,000,000 upgrading New York City concert halls.

Less publicly he spends a good chunk of his billions fighting popular efforts to protect the environment (bad for his business) and arguing for tax policies that will starve to death the social security programs that help those who are at risk of starving to death.

Monday, August 23, 2010

The Dead Parade

Astonishingly, the murder rate in Venezuela is 63% higher than the murder rate in Mexico. And it's nearly 4x higher than the murder rate in Baghdad. More than 90% of Venezuelan murders are never solved.

One out of every 500 Venezuelans will be murdered this year.

Another megalomaniac, another wrecked country, another example of "revolution" providing cover for depravity.

Friday, August 20, 2010

The English 1B Book Club, Fall 2010

Here are the books I'll be using for English 1B at Foothill College this fall.

Break It Down, by Lydia Davis
Fool for Love, by Sam Shepard
Giovanni's Room, by James Baldwin
The Foundation Pit, by Andrei Platonov (reviewed here)
The Blue Flower, by Penelope Fitzgerald
Dusk, by James Salter

I've never taught Platonov or Fitzgerald before, but those are favorite novels of mine and "Books I Love" is going to be the theme of the class.

Self-indulgent, perhaps—but sharing what you love seems like a decent way to spend an autumn morning.

And I'll supply a collection of poems for us to enjoy. I've decided—I now think foolishly—not to have the students purchase any poetry collections.

Thursday, August 19, 2010

Wednesday, August 18, 2010

Love's Labour's Lost Among the Redwoods

Empty wine bottles at our feet. The remnants of cold salads and sliced cheese. The picnic basket, as much as possible in the tight crowd, kicked aside.

Standing to pee I snapped the stem of a wine glass.

The stage among the trees; the stage lights lashed to the trees' trunks, high up. The actors running by.

Their eagerness a kind of joy. Our laughter, too.

The moon coming on, very late, turning the sky, the tops of the trees, vaguely silver.

The only line I remember being: "All ignorant that soul that sees thee without wonder."

Conundrums

Must all the good things in life do battle between themselves?
  • Love with Peace
  • Memory with Time
  • Abundance with Simplicity
  • Joy with Rest
  • Freedom with Stability
  • Youth with Innocence
  • Exuberance with Wisdom
  • Secrecy with Knowledge
  • Privacy with Integrity
  • Passion with Tranquility
  • Sophistication with Purity
  • Beauty with Reason
  • Desire with Contentedness
  • Inquiry with Faith
  • Curiosity with Tradition
  • Comedy with Elegance
  • Lust with Composure
  • Action with Idea
  • Strength with Compassion
  • Bravery with Humility
  • Decisiveness with Patience
And on and on, the irreconcilable dilemmas of life, which are not struggles between good and evil but, to paraphrase an idea from Isaiah Berlin, between two goods. That's where life is lived—or lost.

Tuesday, August 17, 2010

Lou Gehrig Didn't Die of Lou Gehrig's Disease?

This fascinating article suggests that multiple concussions—which Lou Gehrig was known to have suffered playing both football and baseball—can lead to exactly the same types of neurological disease that doctors normally associate with Lou Gehrig's Disease (amyotrophic lateral sclerosis).
The Yankee legend had a well-documented history of significant concussions on the baseball field, and perhaps others sustained as a battering-ram football halfback in high school and at Columbia University. Given that, it’s possible that Gehrig’s renowned commitment to playing through injuries like concussions, which resulted in his legendary streak of playing in 2,130 consecutive games over 14 years, could have led to his condition. 
“Here he is, the face of his disease, and he may have had a different disease as a result of his athletic experience,” said Dr. Ann McKee, the director of the neuropathology laboratory for the New England Veterans Administration Medical Centers, and the lead neuropathologist on the study.
In other words, it's possible that Lou Gehrig didn't actually die of Lou Gehrig's Disease.

Which is, at some level, impossible.

Monday, August 16, 2010

Burning the Days, by James Salter

You either burn the days or you're burned by them, I suppose—although at some point the wood becomes the fire, the fire the wood, and attempting a distinction is futile. That futility might be what we mean by aging, if we're lucky.

James Salter certainly has burned through his days, as this oddly structured, intensely lyrical memoir demonstrates. He's best known (properly) as the author of two of my favorite post-war novels—A Sport and a Pastime and Light Years (reviewed here). He wrote the screenplay for the icy, piercing Downhill Racer, one of Robert Redford's best films. Before becoming a writer, he graduated West Point and fought in the Korean War as an Air Force fighter pilot.

Also, to his credit, he embraced the post-war possibilities open to an American man: see the world; educate yourself as world citizen; help re-construct, if only by your love, Western Europe; and never cease to admire our country's incomparable landscapes and coincident opportunities.

By all appearances, Salter has known power—been close to it—but never allowed that closeness to ruin him as an artist. In Burning the Days, he evokes the circles of power, the famous faces, with their fantastic, distorted personalities, with intriguing delicacy. He's also had the good sense to fall in love a few times. Anyone who has picked up A Sport and a Pastime already knows how precisely, how lethally he records the flaming choreography of love.

I don't know if it's still possible for an American man to burn the days as Salter did. There are obstacles on all sides—foremost among them our post-Reagan isolationism and moralistic fervor, our proud Crawford TX stupidity, our decadent laziness. Reading this book, I couldn't help but lament what we're becoming (which is another way of saying, What I'm becoming). This book allows us the secondary pleasure of envying Salter—which is an important pleasure, as it means that something essential is not yet forgotten.

Ghosts, by César Aira

All fiction is allegorical—which might explain why I don't read much fiction anymore. One tires, after a certain age, of lessons.

Most contemporary novelists try to disguise their allegories in the centuries-old conventions of realism. They pretend to be wholly—not selectively—reporting the world. But César Aira can't be bothered. So my principle reaction to Ghosts was relief: at least this guy isn't pretending. He's an unapologetic child of Kafka—or, more to the point, he shows us we all are, fancy literary embellishments aside.

But I didn't only feel relief; I also felt like I'd been returned to fiction as it sounded when I was a child. We're trained early to look for the lessons—the moral—in stories. The history of my life as a reader can be summarized as a slow transition from explicit to implicit allegory. And now back. In this case, it's a happy return.

Aira's topics in Ghosts (which are really one topic) are the birth of desire, the end of innocence, the death in life that goes by the name eros. The book evokes that death with levity and precision. Like Kafka, Aria is never clever. He is compassionate, lucid, and funny. A girl in her mid-teens lives among ghosts, all of them men, naked phantasms covered in dust. She's lived among them for months, seen them floating about—but one day she actually sees them. And that's the difference, right? To really see a body. That's the moment when everything changes. This little book evokes that moment—when, to put it conventionally, a girl becomes a woman—exquisitely.

I read the book at a leisurely pace, in part because I was re-learning how to read like a kid. Sometimes I felt a kind of aching impatience to know what was going to happen, what the lesson would be. It might take me a while to once again experience that impatient ache as pleasure.

But among the book's many indisputable pleasures: a fantastic essay, dead in the middle of the book, on architecture; and its cast of characters, a family of immigrant Chileans living in Buenos Aires. Wonderful: people I love, a city I love, both evoked with generosity and intelligence.

Chris Andrews' translation is, as always, superb. Heartily recommended.

(I reviewed another book by César Aira—An Episode in the Life of a Landscape Painterhere.)

Sunday, August 15, 2010

Let Justice Ring

Frank Rich's column this weekend eloquently notes that on August 4 our astonishing Constitution, which subjects all our laws to judicial scrutiny, has once again rescued us from ourselves.

Equality under the law; freedom and justice for all: these are living ideas, defended and advanced by good people (Rich's "angels")—among them, my dear brother Nathan.

Saturday, August 14, 2010

Friday, August 13, 2010

Pale Blue Dot

My father sent this to me today. It's his kind of wisdom—of a genre that I've been inestimably lucky to have in my life.

Wednesday, August 11, 2010

The Knives Come Out

I confess that I have a weakness for this kind of thing:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/anis-shivani/the-15-most-overrated-con_b_672974.html

Of the fifteen writers browbeaten by Shivani's (rather crotchety) knife, I've attempted to read:

  • John Ashbery (increasingly over my head, but sometimes moving and clearly a careful, even masterful poet)
  • Mary Oliver (one of her poems meant the world to me once)
  • Helen Vendler (on Keats she is brilliant)
  • Sharon Olds (yeah, pretty dreadful)
  • Jorie Graham ("Did you want to remain completely unharmed?")
  • Junot Diaz (so loud I can't hear him)
  • Louise Glück (worth a look, if not a lifetime of study . . . and so perhaps not worth a look)
  • Michael Cunningham (unremarkable)
  • Billy Collins (embarrassing)

The rest of the writers I've either never heard of (Antonya Nelson?) or avoided for the same reason I avoid almost all contemporary American fiction and poetry: their artistic ambitions remind me too much of my own.

I wonder if Shivani is any good. . .

I must say, though, that anyone who calls Marilynne Robinson "unreadable" is either deaf to language or stupid.

Tuesday, August 10, 2010

War, by Sebastian Junger

On certain days I despair to think that our entire country—especially its youth—isn't reading this book and others like it.

Against that despair I imagine it secretly held under the desks of students across the country; I imagine them clustered in their cafeterias, discussing its somber evocation of life in Afghanistan for a handful of American soldiers. In short, I imagine young America seeing their destinies as indistinguishable from the destinies of the men and women in this book.

But then I remember that everything has changed. We're now a nation with a professional army. Our soldiers aren't us, really, but people who are merely doing their job. In a fashion that has transformed American political and moral life, our military now basically has nothing to do with our private ideas of citizenship and social responsibility.

So we don't read these books, most of us, and the war goes on, and some soldiers die, and it all seems about as important as Sarah Palin's latest tweet.

But for those who care, here it is: War, a book about a single platoon that's been asked to hold a section of the Korengal Valley, in eastern Afghanistan.

For reasons that belong to them, these guys have signed up for war's deadly work. They are extremely well trained and live in desolate conditions. We pay them accordingly. In part, we pay to keep their tragedies—which once belonged to all of us—to themselves.

Junger, who has made a career of writing about dangerous work, has given us an updated Perfect Storm. The men are at least as brave as deep-sea fisherman and by all appearances as economically—and perhaps psychologically—desperate. War, like most forms of hard labor, is tedious, dreary, often boring, occasionally lethal, addictive, sometimes thrilling, and usually hopelessly sad. (It's violence, of course, is uniquely grotesque.) The soldiers, we're told, really just fight for each other. They don't care much about politics; they aren't especially patriotic; their fraternal love might be the most intense love of their lives. And Afghanistan is an impenetrable mystery, as it should be to the 21st century mind.

The writing is excellent. It's not Orwell's Homage to Catalonia or Finkel's The Good Soldierswhich it echoes in its accounts of war's unromantic suffering and sudden, irreversible violence, but if you care about Afghanistan, as I do at the moment, not least because one of my life's closest friends, Brad Wahlquist, of whom I wrote in "Playing Pool," is currently fighting in Khost, I haven't read a better portrait of life there for the everyday soldier.

Thursday, August 5, 2010

Homo iPhonus

Clayton, CA: sunshine and swimming pools, bicycles and the Bookmobile. And an Atari 2600. And—that's what we called it—"smear the queer." And our Sport Court, and catamarans made of two skateboards, bound together by our interlocked legs, and the long Mt. Wilson Way descent, ending with a crash on my front yard grass.

All the clichés of boyhood. I lived them.

So unless I was mesmerized by a book, which happened often enough, the ambition of my life, just about every day, was to get out of the house and not return until sundown.

I'm talking about the experience of being told what time you had to be back, and saying Yep! and disappearing, unreachable, for a few hours. That's what it meant, I thought, to be a man—to be free. I was gone. I was what my parents wanted me to be, what I aspired to be: I was on my own. I knew they couldn't contact me, even if they wanted to, and that knowledge was glorious, not least because it allowed me to give myself completely to my adventures.

That boy is now dead.

Not because of kids and bills, work, all the standard excuses, but because seven years ago, I got myself a goddamn cellphone.

Now, worse yet, I have an iPhone.

As a result, I've ceased to exist. What remains is an identity that's been disseminated into countless machines, leashed to innumerable nodes, always obtainable, never alone (I mean that seriously: never alone), interconnected, spread out, scattered. The experience of my scattering is so intense and so fundamental to my sense of myself that I am no longer capable of solitude. I no longer live in the moment, present, complete. I always feel—even now, the iPhone silent beside me, poised—that some part of me is elsewhere. I am, to a certain extent, always already somewhere else, where I'm wanted, where I might be wanted, where I could call, where I might be emailed or dialed, texted or tweeted. I live in a continual state of anticipation.

That anticipation is not, as the saying goes, killing me. Instead, I have become my anticipation. I am an Anticipating Self. I am a little bit present everywhere; as a consequence, I am fully present nowhere.

I confess that I mourn my metamorphosis. I hate this connected self. I despair in the knowledge that I no longer cohere.

I yearn to be alone again—to be capable of being alone. Only by relearning the independence of solitude will I again be capable of being with someone else.

Monday, August 2, 2010

I've Seen the Light

After years without television, I've now been watching it for much of the summer. Among the many epiphanies it's given me:
  • Despise the poor. When they're not dirty, they're stupid. When they're not stupid, they're lazy. When they're not lazy, they're ugly. When they're not ugly—ah, but they're always ugly. And their primary purpose in society is to be laughed at, berated, or simply locked up. 
  • Distrust anyone with an accent unlike Jennifer Aniston's or George Clooney's.
  • Wealth is a sure sign of good character. The wealthy should be worshipped; the truest form of worship is imitation.
  • Anyone devoting his or her life to public service is a misguided, idealistic fool.
  • Anger is more effective than empathy.
  • Men are stupider than women.
  • If someone isn't listening, talk louder. If talking louder doesn't work, shout. If shouting doesn't work, resort to violence. After all, most serious problems are solved with violence. And the violent good—something you might think of as oxymoron—always win.
  • We envy those we pretend to mock.
  • We always get what we deserve.
  • Every American's ultimate ambition is to be talked about by four or five middle-aged women who are all speaking to each other at the same time.
  • Twelve is the new seventeen.
  • President Obama is shady. At best.
  • The music video is dead.
  • Turn to news sources owned by billionaires for an objective explanation of everything.
  • Most of what happens to us can be explained by our childhood.
  • Most white American families are happy and have little dirty laundry, both literally and figuratively.
  • The proper response to an opposing point of view is to treat it with contempt.
  • In our American democracy, the government is something other than ourselves.
  • All Asians are either gymnastic assassins or brilliant (but ultimately second-tier) scientists.
  • The longer the hair, the deeper the depravity.
  • Living on credit is the shortest route to happiness.
  • Despite that fact that they possess almost nothing, have no money and essentially no power, the poor—especially the foreign and the immigrant poor—are at the root of all the problems in the world.
  • All news is bad news. It's extremely important to be aware of all this bad news, especially the bad news you can do nothing about. Why? Because your sense of helplessness is a form of love—maybe the only kind of love we have left.

Monday, July 26, 2010

Inception

This messy film defines "inception" as the act of placing an idea in a person's mind. According to our heroes, the best way to do this is to enter that person's dreams. Leonardo DiCaprio and friends spend two and half hours trying to prove that they're right.

But the best way to create an idea in a person's mind is through art.

So if "Inception" aspires to artistry—and I assume that it does—then it's attempting to do to us what Leonardo DiCaprio is trying to do to his dreamer. In other words, the premise of the film is actually a metaphor of the relationship between a film—any film—and its audience.

The question then becomes: What idea is this film trying to plant in our heads?

Unlike literature, unlike the theater, movies communicate their ideas primarily through imagery. Film is not language-driven. Despite its conventions of plot, dialogue, and narrative voice-over, film is much closer to photography than to the novel. To apprehend its ideas, we must contemplate its images.

There are some fantastic images in "Inception." Many of them you can see in its trailers.

Aside from the scene when a Parisian street explodes around our reposed stars, the best image in the film is the moment when DiCaprio and his wife rest their heads on a railroad track and await an approaching train. The camera shows us a rusting steel rail trembling against its spikes. Marion Cotillard's hair blows in the wind driven in advance of the train.

In the end, however—as with "The Dark Knight"—the images in "Inception" never coalesce into a forceful idea. The thought we're left with is is not really an idea but a question: What the hell is going on? All the fancy imagery seem to exist for Christopher Nolan not as approaches to metaphor but as a way to play with cool toys. The images are curiosities. They are exercises, in the end, in cinematic vanity.

So perhaps that's the idea: We live in an age of explosive vanity. Better, in the end, to live in our dreams.

The End of the Middle Class

• 83 percent of all U.S. stocks are in the hands of 1 percent of the people.
• 61 percent of Americans "always or usually" live paycheck to paycheck, which was up from 49 percent in 2008 and 43 percent in 2007.
66 percent of the income growth between 2001 and 2007 went to the top 1% of all Americans.
• 36 percent of Americans say that they don't contribute anything to retirement savings.
• A staggering 43 percent of Americans have less than $10,000 saved up for retirement.
• 24 percent of American workers say that they have postponed their planned retirement age in the past year.
• Over 1.4 million Americans filed for personal bankruptcy in 2009, which represented a 32 percent increase over 2008.
Only the top 5 percent of U.S. households have earned enough additional income to match the rise in housing costs since 1975.
• For the first time in U.S. history, banks own a greater share of residential housing net worth in the United States than all individual Americans put together.
• In 1950, the ratio of the average executive's paycheck to the average worker's paycheck was about 30 to 1. Since the year 2000, that ratio has exploded to between 300 to 500 to one.
• As of 2007, the bottom 80 percent of American households held about 7% of the liquid financial assets.
The bottom 50 percent of income earners in the United States now collectively own less than 1 percent of the nation’s wealth.
• Average Wall Street bonuses for 2009 were up 17 percent when compared with 2008.
• The top 1 percent of U.S. households own nearly twice as much of America's corporate wealth as they did just 15 years ago.
• In America today, the average time needed to find a job has risen to a record 35.2 weeks.
• More than 40 percent of Americans who actually are employed are now working in service jobs, which are often very low paying.
• For the first time in U.S. history, more than 40 million Americans are on food stamps, and the U.S. Department of Agriculture projects that number will go up to 43 million Americans in 2011.
• Approximately 21 percent of all children in the United States are living below the poverty line in 2010 - the highest rate in 20 years.
• Despite the financial crisis, the number of millionaires in the United States rose a whopping 16 percent to 7.8 million in 2009.
• The top 10 percent of Americans now earn around 50 percent of our national income.

I put in bold the bullet-points that most astonished me.

All this from here.

The question, of course, is: Why this is happening?

According to conservatives, it's caused by too much regulation, over-taxation, illegal immigration, a crushing federal deficit, reckless globalization, and a culture of entitlement.

According to liberals it's caused by extremely low tax rates on the rich; inadequate regulation; two unfunded wars; reckless globalization; and a culture of greed and self-interest.

I'd guess that the truth is somewhere in the middle. Isn't it usually?

Given the fact, however, that the last time tax rates on the wealthy were so low was 1929, it doesn't seem unreasonable to conclude that extremely low tax rates on the rich are leading to the consolidation of our national wealth in the hands of only a few of us. When that happens, the economy locks up, and the once flourishing middle class, which exploded during Eisenhower's 1950s, ends up back in the bread lines.

Wednesday, July 14, 2010

Barack Obama, American Jew


The Iowa Tea Party compares Obama to Hitler, but in truth it sees Obama as Hitler saw Jews: a racially impure outsider who by conspiracy, over-learnedness, and economic exploitation seeks to destroy America.

Hence, this billboard's irony: by comparing Obama to Hitler, the Tea Party is actually behaving like Hitler, summoning us to the defense of our nation against the insidious outsider insurrectionist, Obama.

It must be said that Obama bears some blame for this. During his campaign he sometimes ended his speeches by saying, "Let's go change the world." Such language thrilled many of my fellow citizens, especially at the end of the Bush catastrophe. The world, it seemed, needed changing. But after the 20th century, reasonable men and women everywhere have great reason to be terrified of talk of change, not least because of Hitler and Lenin. You tell a decent, hardworking man like my stepfather that you're going to change the world, and he's going to reach for his gun. The status quo has been good to him. He's seen family, friends, and neighbors die to maintain it. He's not interested in an unknown, oddly named, odd-looking man from a Chicago university rising to power by calling for change.

Thankfully—and to the great outrage of many of those who voted for him—Obama (unlike Bush) has not tried to change the world. Campaign hyperbole aside, Obama knows that revolution is rarely more than a euphemism for murder, terror, and suicide.

Instead, Obama has tried to restore America to an earlier idea of itself. Healthcare reform was not a transformation of our society but an attempt to return us to what we used to be: New Deal America, Marshall Plan America, "ask not" America. This country, Obama argued, is not a place where we allow our sick to die because they are poor or unlucky. In America, he said, we take care of each other.

Of course he's wrong: America IS a place where we allow our sick to die if they are poor or unlucky. But he might be right that it didn't used to be, and he's certainly right that it shouldn't be.

In this regard Obama is the most conservative president of my lifetime, attempting to return us to our past, even if it's a past that never fully existed. Obama wants us to be what we should have been—what, I think he believes, the Bush aberration aside, we actually are.

It's not unreasonable to disagree with that ambition. But to compare Obama to Hitler and Lenin misunderstands both who he is and what he hopes to achieve. There are no Jews in Obama's worldview. As he sees it, we are all merely fellow Americans. He asks us to honor that good fortune by remembering our pre-"greed is good," pre-terrified selves.

All That Money

Today a neighbor told me that his two boys are going to summer school for the first time. Upon signing them up, he'd been shocked to learn that not only is summer school free, but the school district provides a free lunch for every registered child.

When he'd asked where the money to feed all the kids comes from (everyone in town knows our school district is broke) he was told that it came from a federal grant. The justification for the grant—or perhaps one of its justifications—was that for most of the kids, the school's lunch is their only square meal of the day, and hungry kids are hard to teach.

He said, "And out of all the kids going, my boys are two of maybe five who are white."

I waited for the punchline. I didn't have to wait long.

He said, "It just seems like they could think of a better way to spend all that money."

"On what, for instance?" I asked.

"I don't know," he said. "Something."

Friday, July 9, 2010

LeBron the Beautiful

"It's not about sharing. You know, it's about everybody having their own spotlight." — LeBron James
He's a beautiful man, clear gleaming eyes, an exuberant smile, electric with health. And still fresh-faced, despite the fact that he's now fully adult. On the entire planet there are, I would guess, only a few physical specimens to match him: towering, explosively powerful, a modern-day Ajax.

But perhaps too much an Ajax. He has betrayed on more than one occasion an inability—perhaps an unwillingness—to finish his enemy. I've always sensed that there's something broken in LeBron James—maybe because it's a kind of brokenness I recognize. In the end, he would rather be loved than respected. As a consequence, he will be neither.

In this regard he differs from the great players of my lifetime who preceded him: Magic and Bird, Michael Jordan (basketball history's Achilles), and now the seething, insufferable Kobe Bryant. Of those four athletes, I love only one of them (Magic); but I respect all of them, and in a man's life there's no greater achievement than universal respect.

I said earlier in this blog that sports are an art-form and, as such, are a metaphor of life. Each of these athletes represents some aspect of the American experience: urban black America (Magic), rural white America (Bird), coastal, internationalist America (Bryant). Each embodies some aspect of our national character. LeBron, being the most contemporary, offers us the clearest insight into our current disposition, our current obsessions and values.

It should come as no surprise, then, that King James, as he calls himself, has chosen the the pleasures and decadence of Miami over Cleveland's grim, working-class loyalty or New York's materialist artistry. (LA and Chicago were unthinkable options, having been marked already by greater heroes). He, like the rest of his generation, has been taught to take the easy road on the quest for immortality. He's learned that lesson well.

We live in an age of conspiracies. We shouldn't be surprised that our heroes now conspire together to achieve greatness. Watching "The Decision" last night, a nation of sports fans thought: We've met the enemy. As always, he is us.

Fair enough. Better that he be us—smiling, playful, pleasant, doomed; a child enjoying the fruits of earlier heroes's labors—than an unknown outsider, singleminded with ambition, plotting our Apocalypse.

Monday, June 14, 2010

This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen, by Tadeusz Borowski

I could not read this book.

For a while I tried, with a highlighting pen. But I was using the pen to defend myself. By marking it I hoped to turn it into an object of contemplation; I was keeping it at a distance. Eventually highlighting became intolerable—obscene.

So I tried to simply read it. The stories were slow going. I would read a few lines and put the book down and stare at the ceiling. I'd think about my breathing. I became convinced that the book wanted to destroy me.

In the end, in a technical sense, I read the book; but I don't call what I did reading. It felt—feels still—more like surviving. I finished the book and thought: I survived.

Or perhaps I didn't—shouldn't. I don't know if it's possible to make your way though this book without some part of you—perhaps your hope or innocence (which might be nice words for your delusions)—dying.

In The Captive Mind, Czeslaw Milosz calls Borowski "the disappointed lover." He says: "[Borowski's] nihilism results from an ethical passion, from disappointed love of the world and of humanity."

But I don't think Borowski is disappointed by the world. Near the end of the book Borowski writes:
I sit in someone else's room, among books that are not mine, and, as I write about the sky, and the men and women I have seen, I am troubled by one persistent thought—that I have never been able to look also at myself.
That's Borowski's disappointment: He survived the camps. Unable to accept that he'd survived, unable to look at himself because he survived, he put himself into an oven and did not survive.

But first he wrote this book. He used his writing to tell us why he had to die. So we shouldn't be surprised that This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen is unbearable, unreadable. The fact that it's unbearable makes clear that his suicide was justified, necessary.

Most of us are killed by the lies we tell ourselves. He, at least, was killed by the truth—a truth that he resolved to see, before it finally killed him.

Wednesday, June 9, 2010

I Will Never Understand

In class today we considered the value of art, and I suggested—hardly the first to do it—that art makes us aware that much of life, much of ourselves, we will never understand. As a follow-up to our conversation, I've asked this quarter's English 1B class to note a work of art that they value, for reasons they're free to keep to themselves.

I open the exchange with this song from Elliott Smith. It's sacred to me—so much so that I drew the title of my novel-in-progress from its lyrics. The fear and hope in Smith's voice give this song an honesty that anyone who has fallen in love will recognize.



I invite those who would like to join our exchange to add your contribution below. If you can provide a link to the work you recommend, that would be great—but it's not necessary.

Thursday, June 3, 2010

The (Im)Perfect Game

All sports are art-forms, and are subject to imperfection. That vulnerability gives art its sense of danger and its humanity. Baseball would lose much of its suspense if a wrong call were never possible.

The beauty of baseball is in its details as metaphor: you never know when it will end; it's extremely difficult to do well; when done well, it's beautiful; our differences are best resolved from a distance; excellence is often not rewarded.

The metaphor also applies to the way the game is umpired. We don't watch the game "because we value the idea that the umpire might screw up." We watch the game becomes it remains beautiful—complex—even when the umpires do screw up. Painful, frustrating, yes—but human, graceful, and worthy of our time.

If you don't believe me, look again at Armando Galarraga's smile when Joyce got the call wrong. Consider Joyce's tears acknowledging his error. Life, like art, is that way sometimes—a record of missed opportunities. What can you do?

Keep playing.

Wednesday, May 19, 2010

Six Months Later: A Goodbye

Blogging: a literary form that encourages many of my least appealing qualities: arrogance, know-it-allness, rage, laziness, egocentrism, dishonesty, evasion, impetuousness, worshipfulness, small-mindedness, conformism. Petty clamoring after an ultimately meaningless form of (self)-recognition.

The blog: written, like just about everything else these days, for the crowd. For the mob-mind. (See Cynthia Ozick, who says this best.)

If I were to write honestly, this would be nothing but a love letter. It would be addressed to a tiny audience: those I've loved, those I continue to love.

At its best, at its most intense, I've imagined it that way. As a kiss to the lost souls I required, require, and in some cases miss—so terribly. Including, I suppose, my own.

Listen to Ms. Ozick. Get thee to the novel.

This, if it's to exist, must now be something else.

Tuesday, May 11, 2010

The Last Pop Star

This morning I read a provocative article about Lady Gaga in The Atlantic. (It can be found here.) The article essentially argues that Lady Gaga represents the end of Pop.

I'm always drawn to essays like these, which examine an important cultural phenomenon and from it draw a radical conclusion. I happen to think that in this case the conclusion is wrong. I attached the following comment to the article to explain why:
Lady Gaga is not finishing off Pop; she's finishing off Pop for you. Various artists, some of whom you name, have done this for others in the past, and they did it using the same strategies: irony, satire, hyperbole, extravagance, excess, naughtiness—all graced with a note of genius. Welcome to our world. I've lived here since Nevermind.

Like most of my friends, I still venture over to Popland now and then. It's like playing Twister: not as fun as it once was, but fun enough. The pleasures of "Bad Romance" persist, even after all these years.

But your essay raises a serious question: What kind of art puts an end to an art form? Allow me to suggest that ironic art cannot do that. Irony signals an art form's decadence, but irony is not the arrival of something new. And only the new really puts an end to the old. You do not end an art form by replacing it with nothing.

How to spot the new? For one thing, it's earnest. It will absorb what went before it, but it won't merely put quotation marks around what it's absorbing: it will speak earnestly, unironically. Don Quixote comes to mind. Don Quixote possessed all the pleasures of the chivalric romance while adding to them a pleasure that was not merely satirical or self-aware. It saw the world in a new way—novelistically—and we have been seeing it that way ever since.

Lady Gaga is great, but she's no Cervantes.
Radiohead, on the other hand. . . .

Sunday, May 9, 2010

TFTD

If you will be your own Heaven you must last forever.

—Martin Corless-Smith, Nota

The Week in Review

* A superb article on the Tea Party Movement, written by Mark Lilla, a professor of political history at the University of Chicago and the highly regarded author of The Stillborn God: Religion, Politics, and the Modern West.

* A fascinating analysis of the relationship between illegal immigration and crime.

* My new favorite conservative blog.

* And the discovery that on March 22, 1989, we came within 422,000 miles of a very bad day.

Wednesday, May 5, 2010

Saturday, May 1, 2010

2666, by Roberto Bolaño

No one pays attention to these killings, but the secret of the world is hidden in them. —Oscar Fate, 2666
I'm aware of two authors who have made lasting formal innovations in the novel during my adult life: W.G. Sebald and Roberto Bolaño.

Both writers died—Sebald in a car accident; Bolaño, as predicted, of liver failure—precisely when they were becoming internationally recognized as major figures in world literature.

Not surprisingly, they were exploring the same phenomena: the decadence of civilization, organized evil, the transformation of beauty by science, an obsession with literature, the relationship between storytelling and love. Bolaño adds to this list an unapologetic fascination with the connection between sex and violence, suggesting that the two are not merely interrelated by indistinguishable.

The reader's great fortune, of course, is to see the difference in their formal approaches to those phenomena. They could hardly be more different. And yet like all great art both possess an aura of inevitability.

With each passing week, 2666 looks more and more like the great novel of our time. Like all great novels, it's prophetic—by which I mean: it announces, in advance of everyone else, where the seeds of our destruction lie buried. Dostoyevsky foresaw the destruction of Europe in the death of Christianity and the displacement of 19th century liberalism by totalitarianism aligned with science. In our case, Bolaño sees our doom sprouting in a dusty desert Mexican city named Ciudad Juárez.

Five years ago, to declare Ciudad Juárez the source of our doom would have seemed crazy. No longer. Mexico's descent into madness and our inability (political, moral, economic, aesthetic) to cope with that descent looks more and more like Yeats's rough beast. And the rise of the police state in Arizona demonstrates that we're placing our hopes for the future in armed conflict. History has given us plenty of lessons on what happens next.

I suppose it's a shame that Bolaño didn't quite finish his book. Like The Savage Detectives, it suffers from untidiness. On the other hand, untidiness is no doubt one of its ambitions, being a repudiation of the myths of control and perfection that Bolaño saw as dishonest and dangerous ugliness. He spent his youth, after all, in exile from Pinochet's Chile.

2666 can be exceedingly difficult to read. The long middle section, called "The Part About the Crimes," gives us an unblinking collage of the murders of hundreds of girls. I don't know how Bolaño intuited that the 1990s murders of girls in Ciudad Juárez foretold the dissolution of the Mexican state—and possibly the beginning of the end of liberalism in the Americas. Regardless, the question now is, What else does this novel foretell, that we're still failing to see?

Wednesday, April 28, 2010

True Religion

In my experience, most religious practice is self-idolatrous. By this I mean to say that most actively religious people don't worship God but themselves.

This self-idolatry takes many forms, not least among them the invention of a God who is a essentially a grandiose version of oneself: warm, loving eyes; a wise beard; a dulcet voice, etc.

But self-idolatry takes far more destructive forms than God as Wonderful Man. Its most awful consequence is that it turns a person away from others and toward the self. Self-idolatry encourages us to worry about our salvation, to focus on our progress along the narrow path to God. This self-involvement, sanctified and promoted by our esteemed religious leaders (case in point: Joel Osteen), leads us to think that we are, in effect, the source of our own salvation—that our religious destiny is not primarily the salvation of others but the perfection of ourselves.

The most obvious symptom of this anti-religious self-involvement is the link that American Christianity (in basically all its iterations) makes between one's material prosperity and one's status in the eyes of God. If one is self-idolatrous, it makes perfect sense to obsess about one's own perfection. And in America, there is no perfection—perhaps there's no person—without money. We've become convinced that the way to become more god-like is to be prosperous: riches are proof of personal excellence. Thus one's religious life becomes, in effect, an ongoing act of self-promotion. Most religion today, at least in America, is nothing more than a life of material and spiritual onanism.

I know the onanism well. I practiced it through my adolescence and well into adulthood. No doubt I continue to practice it. The greatest benefit I received for my years of practice is that I know how to spot it, if not avoid it.

So the question presents itself: What's the fix to this pervasive self-idolatry, which goes (wrongly) by the name of "religion"?

Since writing "The Religious Catastrophe," I've enjoyed an email exchange with some family members, and they've asked me about my current idea of a truly religious life. By responding to them here, as I've promised to do, I'll likely give the impression that I actually have an answer that's fixed, or fully reasoned, or by which I live. That impression would be false. I don't know what I think. At most I know just what I've said, that self-idolatry is not religion.

Nevertheless, I will suggest a few tentative principles that strike me as reasonable. They arise primarily from the problematic but transcendent ideas set forth in Matthew 25, when Jesus takes the first great commandant—to love God—and the second great commandment—to love one's neighbor—and says, in effect: They are the same commandment. The only way that we have to love God is to love each other. More succinctly: Your neighbor IS GOD.

That principle—and all that it implies ethically, politically, spiritually, materially—is my religion. Experiencing that principle as a true description of who God is and how God exists is my idea of true religion.

So understanding what Jesus means by our "neighbor" becomes our most pressing religious problem. In my view, one's neighbors would include, of course, the illegal residents of Arizona. I'll restrain myself from yet another diatribe against contemporary American right-wing hate-mongering. It's enough to note that the attitude toward those unlike oneself that permeates this country is absolutely a symptom of self-idolatry. If we take Jesus at his word in Matthew 25, our present treatment of illegal aliens is not just unconstitutional but unethical—particularly if one claims to be Christian.

I'd like to see the bumper sticker: Illegal Aliens Are Jesus.

I'll close by recommending a book. I recently finished reading Saving God: Religion after Idolatry, by Mark Johnson, having bought it because I thought by it's title that I detected a kindred spirit. I was proved right. Saving God is sometimes painfully dense—by which I mean overburdened by highly specialized jargon—but reading it is worth the work. It very nicely describes our ongoing struggle with self-idolatry, the ways that ritualized and dogmatic religious attitudes prevent us from approaching God, and the ultimate truth of all religious searching, which is: You live among God; be kind.

Here is but one of many worthwhile passages from the book:
Idolatry [meaning, for instance, the display and worship of idols, the rituals and demands of the priesthood, promises of an after-life, and the threat of the Apocalypse] is, then, invariably the attempt to evade or ignore the demanding core of true religion: radical self-abandonment to the Divine as manifested in the turn toward others and toward objective reality. (24, my emphasis)
I provide that quote as a hint of what's to be found in this fascinating and carefully argued book.

It's also a hint of where I am these days, at least intellectually, still a follower myself, I'm sorry to say, of the religion of self-idolatry. But I'm a follower who hopes to turn from his foolish ways. And hope, as Prometheus knew, is what keeps us going.

Tuesday, April 27, 2010

Art Pepper Meets the Rhythm Section

In Cultural Amnesia, one of my favorite late-night books, Clive James calls bebop "the post-war musical development which tried to ensure that jazz would no longer be the spontaneous sound of joy."

He develops this criticism at length in the book's superb essay on Duke Ellington. James's disdain for modern jazz — by which he seems to mean the primary developments in jazz after 1950 — can be summarized in five words: You can't dance to it.

There's truth to that criticism — but not enough to save it from being facile. In the first place, it was never jazz's ambition to be the "spontaneous sound of joy." The fact that jazz managed to be the sound of joy at all, ever, is one of its miracles, given its origins. But those origins ended with World War II, when black America decided — in large part, through its art — that if black people could be called upon to die for their country, their country could be called upon to regard them as human beings.

So James is being both facile and unjust by indicting John Coltrane, for instance, for not giving us dance music midst the dogs and deputies of Selma.

Coltrane was an artist to the extent that he told the truth, and he would have been a liar, at the heigh of his powers, had he merely played joy.

Nevertheless! One must concede that jazz lost its hold on the popular imagination after 1960, and it's not unreasonable to suggest that one of the reasons for that loss was that you couldn't dance to it. Charlie Parker and John Coltrane, the two giants of post-war jazz innovation, did not, for the most part, want to be danced to. They wanted to be heard.


But there was a fellow saxophone player out in sunny California who still played from a need to swing.

Art Pepper, like many of his jazz contemporaries — including Parker and Coltrane — led a broken, desperate life (chronicled in harrowing detail in his autobiography, Straight Life). As a consequence, Pepper left behind a body of work that's tragically fragmented. Yet it's a body of work that calls out to be danced to.

Pepper didn't possess Parker's technical virtuosity (no one did) or Coltrane's artistic audacity, but he had a better gift for melody than either of them and a generosity to his playing that shouldn't be mistaken as a need to please or as dishonest or dated. Pepper's music — often underrated, I suspect, because he was white — is a treasure, and Art Pepper Meets the Rhythm Section, which gives us Pepper in studio with Miles Davis' now-legendary rhythm section (Red Garland, Paul Chambers, Philly Joe Jones), is a breathtaking moment in the history of American art.

Sunday, April 25, 2010

Love Letters

My midnight response to the most recent column by David Brooks (found here) caught someone's eye at the NY Times. On Friday morning it was placed among other highlighted comments and so received more attention than it likely deserved.

But I was clever enough to note this blog's address at the end of my comment, which meant some new visitors. I saw on Friday night that four of them were kind enough to leave a complimentary note.

On Saturday, during my standard post-breakfast Internet surfing, I saw an article at The Atlantic called "Have Conservatives Gone Mad?" I didn't bother to read it. Instead, I clicked back to here and saw that the number of comments on my most recent blog post had jumped from four to eight. More applause! I thought.

Not quite:
Anonymous said...
Commie motherfucker Eric Treanor
Your comment in the NYT article is shit, like you.
If you support Obama and his Regime, you support a Statist authoritarian who is an empty suit who speaks in platitudes who is beholden to the oligarchical collectivists and banking cabals. You are against freedom, liberty and our constitutional republic and the notion that all of our rights are inborn and are given by our creator. Some autocrat in Washington does not grant rights - the constitution simply enumerates them for added protection. The constitution also limits the Powers of the Federal Government yet an expansionist authoritarian view is used in modern times contrary to what Madison had intended. If you support Obama you support the biggest threat to our free will in our history, and when the last bastion of freedom in the USA falls, there is nowhere else to go. 
I will go down HARD to keep fucking scum like you from getting my money and my kids money, fucker.
And:
Anonymous said...
Rat vermin. Unconstitutional. NO, you cant take my money and give it to someone else for a long list of things you say they need. This will never end. And IM busy taking care of my family This is absurd to assault the middle class and the bankrupt states with this aggressive unconstitutional scandalous WRONG legislation. This is meant to lower care standards, it will raise rates, and I will NEVER participate in this communist trash, I will get on a plane to whatever country the doctors are all going to leave for (costa rica) and the major stuff Ill get done there. Ill buy emergency insurance for local accidental stuff. I will never be subjugated by this. And the real kicked, NO OPT OUT, no opt out means its TRASH, congress OPTED ITSELF OUT, but everyone else, no choice? I have a choice, good luck trying to make me pay for this trash.
We are going to repeal it, and then we are going to start tearing down that FDR communist trash, , social security,medicare, etc. Its all going away, you went to far you progressive rat communists,.
Its either ALL ENTITLEMENTS go away or EVERYONE PAYS A FLAT TAX. Thats it, you rats want more, but you pay none of the taxes, check out perot charts for reality. Half the people in the USA pay NOTHING, yet the whine.
http://perotcharts.com/category/taxation-charts/page/11/
Im done. I am totally against ALL entitlements now, EVERYTHING. EVERYTHING. You pricks don't deserve it. All of it must go now. No more education subsidy, no more social security no more medicare or medicaid no more SCIP no more anything. You went to far and now you need to see what you already had, you rats!
You bankrupted the country with progressive trash, and now you are chasing all the work and businesses away. When FDR did this trash, there was no women laboring in the workforce, there was no India and China. Now every opportunity you drop due to progressive wealth redistribution will NEVER EVER COME BACK.
Already long ago, from when we sold our vote to no man, the People have abdicated our duties; for the People who once upon a time handed out military command, high civil office, legions — everything, now restrains itself and anxiously hopes for just two things:
bread and circuses
(Juvenal, Satire 10.77–81) (c. 150AD)
They are bribing the middle class by using identity politics and bribing us.... WITH OUR OWN MONEY!!!
WITH MY MONEY.
I'm done. You've crossed the line. I need to feed my family, learn to make your own way you rats.
And:
Anonymous said...
I pledge allegiance to Goldman Sachs, and to the conspiracy for which it stands, one racket under Obama, Fascist and indivisible, with slavery, debt, and poverty for all.
Of course one of the points of my comment to David Brooks was that Obama is actually doing less "taking away" from the middle class than Pres. Bush—a point lost on this particular fellow American. (My guess is that all of these comments were made by the same person.)

Anyway, I haven't forgotten my Proverbs: "Answer not a fool according to his folly, lest thou be like unto him."

I do like the Juvenal quote, though.

Friday, April 23, 2010

TFTD

Flight from a fault will lead us into crime.

—Horace

Thursday, April 22, 2010

Brief Theories of Male Behavior

Chewing Gum: I'm so full of sexual energy that I must find a way to dissipate it.

Wearing a Hat: I would be taller, but I've chosen this height by capping myself with this hat.

Spitting: If I could, I would kill you, as you are trespassing into my territory, but circumstances beyond my control force me to restrain myself.

Shaving One's Head: My baldness is a choice, and not, as you might imagine, a sign of my biological decline.

Gelled Hair: I have the purity of the just-baptized.

Baggy Clothes: Today I'm smaller than usual. Most days my clothing fits me.

Walking Slowly: The rest of you are so unspeakably boring that I can barely manage to function.

Walking Quickly: I'm in such high demand that I've neglected my own life.

Sitting with One's Legs Open: I have no where else to put it!

Sitting with One's Legs Crossed: You're all lucky I'm keeping this thing under control.

Obesity: The body must reflect the scale of one's soul.

Thinness: I forgo the pleasures of this world in pursuit of the divine.

Groomed/Stylized Facial Hair: My whiskers, like everything else about me, reflect my natural symmetry.

Ungroomed Facial Hair: My masculine sexuality sprouts out of me everywhere.

A Clean Shave: I'm innocent of all charges.

Groomed/Shaved Pubic Hair: A king controls the teeming masses.

Wearing Sunglasses Inside: If you'd had the night I had, you'd be wearing sunglasses too.

Wednesday, April 21, 2010

Ten Great Books I've Never Seen on a Ten Great Books List

Here are ten books that currently receive neither the applause nor the readership they deserve—at least in the United States:

1) Hadji Murad, by Leo Tolstoy. A perfect novella by the greatest novelist in history. Of particular interest because its central character is an Islamic terrorist. And yet it goes unread, it seems, by everyone. Perhaps its Shakespearean evocation of the life, mind, and humanity of a fundamentalist insurgent is too much for us to bear right now.

2) Ferdydurke, by Witold Gombrowicz. A comic masterpiece, finally translated, just years ago, directly from Polish to English. Ferdydurke, c'est moi!

3) Dom Casmurro, by Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis. Most sacred to me of all the books on this list, Dom Cassmuro is a heartbreaking look at our impulse to ruin what we love.

4) Light Years, by James Salter. Reviewed here.

5) Hope Against Hope, by Nadezhda Mandelstam. The definitive document of life under a totalitarian regime, written by the wife of Russia's greatest 20th century poet. Only by the total absence of privacy and normalcy in life under Stalin can one infer that privacy and normalcy are what this book most celebrates.

6) The Foundation Pit, by Andrei Platanov. Reviewed here.

7) The Blue Flower, by Penelope Fitzgerald. A book as delicate as its name—and as it's protagonist, the great German romantic philosopher, Novalis. The tenderest evocation of inexplicable love and of the exuberance of 18th century romantic thought that one can imagine from the pen of a contemporary novelist.

8) Straight Life, by Art Pepper. A musician's memoir that's as honest as his inimitable music, Straight Life is a searing portrait of artistic self-destruction and of the explosive collaborative genius of mid-century American jazz.

9) The Unquiet Grave, by Cyril Connelly. Written during World War II, this is a beautifully written meditation on the onset of middle-age, on the end of love, and—conceivably, at the time—on the end of Western Civilization.

10) Giovanni's Room, by James Baldwin. Better—because more honest—than anything by Hemingway, this tragic story captures the mystery and the grief of forbidden love with devastating precision.

Suggestions?