Tuesday, March 30, 2010

Half Moon Bay

The fog is rarer than it used to be. But even without it Half Moon Bay is never hot. The air is merely an extension of the ocean, which is a permanent, pacifying (yes) presence.

The breeze, damp but not humid—a trick of the salt in the air, I guess—smells like the sea, especially at night, when all is calm.
Our light, unlike the air, changes all the time. Just this afternoon it went from brilliant and glistening to diffuse to golden.

There are two seasons: the rainy season, which is about to end, and the dry season, which will be resplendent for a couple of months—as resplendent as anywhere—and then, at the peak of summer, bury us in fog. And then sometime in late August the sun will return, until the November rains.
Having now lived here for nearly seven years, I feel increasingly cyclical. And perhaps cooler—whatever that might mean. I think I sleep more than I used to. Apparently I'm more indecisive. (So maybe pacified by the sea into indecision.) But I've always been both suspicious and envious of decisive people: I interpret decisiveness as ambition—a quality I don't understand (it seems so naïve) and which I fear.

And, if such a thing is possible, I've been further attuned to beauty by this little town, which is as pretty as its name—but which is merely pretty, I'm happy to say, and not sublime, like Big Sur, down the road.

It's curious that a place like this is populated by coarse women. But the Coastside is rugged—not too rugged—and its women are rugged. In response to their ruggedness I'm becoming effeminate. And stupider. But that's common enough these days.

Unless you need New York City—I might, pretty soon—or the Montana sky, this town is about as good as it gets.

Monday, March 29, 2010

A Conservative's Thoughts on the Health Care Debate

Winston Churchill, 1948:
The discoveries of healing science must be the inheritance of all. That is clear: Disease must be attacked, whether it occurs in the poorest or the richest man or woman, simply on the ground that it is the enemy; and it must be attacked just in the same way as the fire brigade will give its full assistance to the humblest cottage as readily as to the most important mansion…. Our policy is to create a national health service in order to ensure that everybody in the country, irrespective of means, age, sex, or occupation, shall have equal opportunities to benefit from the best and most up-to-date medical and allied services available.

Saturday, March 27, 2010

Plot (Life) as Failure

David Mamet's advice—the CAPS are all his—to the writers of his (typically American-fascist) TV action-drama, The Unit:
EVERY SCENE MUST BE DRAMATIC. THAT MEANSTHE MAIN CHARACTER MUST HAVE SIMPLE, STRAIGHTFORWARD, PRESSING NEED WHICH IMPELS HIM OR HER TO SHOW UP IN THE SCENE.
THIS NEED IS WHY THEY CAME. IT IS WHAT THE SCENE IS ABOUT. THEIR ATTEMPT TO GET THIS NEED MET WILL LEAD, AT THE END OF THE SCENE, TO FAILURE - THIS IS HOW THE SCENE IS OVERIT, THIS FAILURE, WILL, THEN, OF NECESSITY, PROPEL US INTO THE NEXT SCENE.
ALL THESE ATTEMPTS, TAKEN TOGETHER, WILL, OVER THE COURSE OF THE EPISODE, CONSTITUTE THE PLOT.
Mamet was once a great playwright. (He's now an ideologue.) He knows drama—he knows how it works, structurally:

Need --> Action --> Failure --> Need --> Action --> Failure --> Need --> Action --> Failure -->

And so on, forever.

Art is ALWAYS about failure. It begins with failure; it ends in failure. Art teaches us that failure is the human condition. Any work that suggests otherwise is not art but propaganda.

If the work of art's last failure is terminal (Anna Karenina), the art is tragic.

If it's closing failure is merely the most recent of what we know to be a continuing series of failures (Tristram Shandy), or if it's but a brief reprieve in what will obviously be a life-long parade of subsequent failures (Twelfth Night), the art is comic.

The conviction that plot is structured upon failure points to the essential difference between the artistic temperament and the religious temperament.

The artistic temperament believes that life is failure. Depending upon circumstances beyond our individual control, the failure will be comic or tragic.

The religious temperament believes that life is salvation. What happens to us is entirely within our control. Since failure doesn't exist, comedy and tragedy don't exist. Only justice exists.

I leave it to you to consider which temperament you find more compelling. As for myself, you can can guess my view from a favorite quote:
Failure and failure alone remains the one single accomplishable experience. —Imre Kertesz, Kaddish for a Child Not Born
Here's the rest of Mamet's advice to his writers.

Friday, March 26, 2010

Confession

Springsteen sings: "I won't ask for forgiveness. My sins are all I have."

Of my sins (not my word for them, really): They must be in part the consequence of my decision to abandon my childhood faith, with nothing but art to replace it. I see now that art doesn't provide a moral center. Like all forms of beauty, art throws the world into disarray. My actions reflect that disarray. Usually when I act, I don't know why, and even when I do—rarely: those are the treasured moments of my life—in the end I lack the conviction, the faith in myself, that allow you to live bravely, despite all.

TFTD

No answer is too cruel but silence.

Wednesday, March 24, 2010

Notes Made at It's Italia, Spending Down the Balance on my Gift Card

I think that my theme—long intuited—will be alienation (to use the word that Czeslaw Milosz, himself troubled by it, uses). It's our dilemma: name it the American dilemma, or the white dilemma, or the California dilemma, or the modern dilemma, or the dilemma of the ages.

I don't think it's the dilemma of the ages—or even the dilemma of our age. I've lived long enough in Latin America to know that. My suffering is by no means universal but possesses its own history, and there are other histories, entirely misunderstood, not embodied by the metaphor of the dying animal, or the darkening room, or the idiot watching plump men play golf.

So alienation. Or aloneness—should that have been Milosz's translator's word?

I don't mean—let's be clear—alienation from others but alienation from oneself.

So oneself is the nation within which one is an alien.

Alienation not from her tumbling hair but from an honest response—so honest that it's not even a response—to her tumbling hair.

Alienation from the fact that the world—God—is not something to which one responds.

On TV, John Daly is being difficult.

My neighbor asks me what I'm writing. He's hopelessly drunk, again.

"The word of God," I say.

He says, "I could have done a lot of things. I chose not to."

He says, "I have no regrets."

Perhaps one day I'll no longer regret my regrets?

I hope not. Any man who has no regrets is either a liar or a coward.

A pretty girl on TV. As if keeping us company.

Tuesday, March 23, 2010

Miracle

The strange miracle of writing: that by forgetting the truth we tell it.

A cruel miracle, too, because by telling the truth you cannot. But by writing without trying to tell the truth you can't avoid it. I think I know the truth and so try to tell it. But it can't be told.

Sometimes I write and everything is mine, I'm saying everything, and I'm freed for a moment from scheming.

The Rest Is Noise, by Alex Ross

True enough: we live in a time, unlike Hamlet, when even our rest is noisy. The great challenge of modern music has been to turn our noise into music. The ways that composers and mucisians have addressed that challenge, skillfully evoked by Ross in The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century, reflect the turmoil, horror, and wonder of our age.

Reading Ross's book is like watching a good TV procedural: swiftly unfolding plots and sub-plots are peppered with moments of nearly incomprehensible—for this reader, anyway—jargonistic detail. But, as with those procedurals, the jargonistic detail is a pleasure. (One of the things I like best as a reader is to be made to feel a little bit stupid.) When Ross gives us a careful reading of Three Places in New England, for example, by Charles Ives, he says: "The chord fuses triads of A minor and D-sharp minor, and, as in Salome and the Rite, the tritone gap between them hints at unresolved and perhaps unresolvable conflict." Well, I don't quite follow that. But I follow it just enough. And, more to the point, I appreciate that I'm in the hands of an expert. We travel the world, from Stravinsky to Radiohead, and I'm always aware that despite my occasional confusion, Ross, like the artists he celebrates, is worth listening to.

He does his readers the additional favor of including recordings of the music he discusses at his blog, aptly named "The Rest is Noise." The blog is more than a favor, actually; it's a treasure trove of sonic delights. With or without the book, it merits your bookmark.

If you have any interest in modern music, from Mahler to Schoenberg to Messiaen to the Beatles to Bjork, you've found your map in The Rest Is Noise. And you'll learn a lot about 20th century world history along the way.


Update: Taking a moment once again to read some of Ross's blog, I came across this astonishing quote—from a letter in which Wagner (of all people!) says he hopes to be forgotten:
I have felt the pulse of modern art and know that it will die! This knowledge, however, fills me not with despondency but with joy, for I know at the same time that it is not art in general which will perish but only our own particular type of art—which stands remote from modern life—, whereas true—imperishable—constantly renewed art is still to be born. The monumental character of our art will disappear, we shall abandon our habit of clinging firmly to the past, our egotistical concern for permanence and immortality at any price: we shall let the past remain the past, the future—the future, and we shall live only in the present, in the here and now, and create works for the present age alone. Remember how fortunate I once considered you were in the practice of your own particular art, precisely because you were a performing artist, a real, actual artist whose every performance was clearly an act of giving: the fact that you could do so only upon a musical instrument was not your fault but the involuntary constraint of our age which compels the individual to depend entirely upon his own resources and renders impossible that sense of fellowship through which the individual artist, with the greatest possible deployment of his powers, might become part of a communal—immediate and actual—work of art. It was certainly not any wish to flatter you which made me say those things, rather was I—half-consciously—expressing my belief that only the performer is the real, true artist. All that we create as poets and composers expresses a wish but not an ability: only the performance itself reveals that ability or art. Believe me, I should be ten times happier if I were a dramatic performer instead of a dramatic poet and composer. — Now that I have come to hold this conviction, it can no longer be of interest to me to create works which I know in advance must be denied all life in the present in return for the flattering prospect of future immortality: what cannot be true today will remain untrue in the future as well. No longer do I abandon myself to the delusive idea of creating works for a future beyond the present: but if I am to create works for the present age, that age must offer me a less repellent aspect than is now the case. I renounce all fame, and more especially the insane specter of posthumous fame, because I love humankind far too dearly to condemn them, out of self-love, to the kind of poverty of ideas which alone sustains the fame of dead composers.

Monday, March 22, 2010

The Good Soldiers, by David Finkel

For every reader there's a shelf of the books you want to share with everyone.

Over the last couple of years, I've decided (life being short, and its course unforeseeable) to teach books from that shelf every time I step into a classroom. The books change with my obsessions—representing at any given time the sources in my life of beauty, love, outrage, hope, despair.

I just finished The Good Soldiers, by David Finkel, and now place it on that shelf, a devastating, almost unreadable book, yet impossible to put down, and impossible, I'm guessing, to forget. I just finished it sitting in the front seat of my car, outside the gym, in a race with the lowering sun.

I wish that everyone—every American, especially—would read this book. It will long be regarded one of the masterpieces, perhaps the masterpiece, of Iraq War literature.

I'm aware that this recommendation comes from someone whose politics are not difficult to discern from other posts in the blog. For what it's worth, I can tell you that the book's title isn't meant to be ironic. You'll finish the book convinced that the soldiers—for whom goodness has always been indistinguishable from honor—merit the adjective Finkel has given them.

TFTD

The singular discovery of adult life is that certain types of pain do not diminish, despite the passage of time.

Hope & Change

Perhaps now we've seen the end of this:

Cigna Ex-CEO Hanway's Retirement Payments Near $111 Million

And this:

Insurer Targeted HIV Patients to Drop Coverage

Perhaps now we've begun to dismantle an immoral and broken system that honors corporate profits above the survival of our fellow citizens.

Perhaps now we can begin again to see ourselves as a nation, as a community, working together to secure our common survival.

For most Americans, what happened today is without precedent—a new experience in our lives as citizens. I hope we have the sense to relish what we've achieved.

Saturday, March 20, 2010

English 1B Class Survey: Attitudes Toward Love, Sex, and Marriage

After a quarter spent reading literature about erotic love, I surveyed my English 1B class at Foothill College regarding their attitudes toward love, sex, and marriage. Twenty-six students took survey. The majority of the students were born in the US. About a third of them are from Hong Kong. None of the students are married. The survey was filled out and submitted anonymously.

I've given their answers, where applicable, as a class average. In some cases, despite the fact that 26 students took the survey, the total number of responses is lower, usually because a student failed to answer the question in a manner that permitted me to include the response in the total.

What is the ideal age at which to marry?

27.7 years old. (high: 33, low: 22)

What is the ideal age at which to begin having sex?

17.5 years old. (high: 25, low: 14. Five students said "after marriage"—that answer could not be included in the average.) 

How many times have you fallen in love?

1.6 times. (high: 4. Six students said they have not fallen in love. One person wrote "< 10")

In marriage, rank these in order of importance in your spouse: 
A) Similar cultural background
B) Physically attractive
C) Economically Stable
D) Well traveled, well read 

To score their rankings, I awarded 1 point for 1st, 2 for 2nd, etc. Consequently, the lowest point total = the highest ranking. Their ranking ended up as follows:

D) Well traveled, well read: 60 points. (Ranked 1st by ten students, 4th by six.)
A) Similar cultural background: 61 points. (Ranked 1st by twelve students, 4th by ten.)
B) Physically attractive: 63 points. (Rank 1st by two students, 4th by three.)
C) Economically stable: 76 points. (Ranked 1st by two students, 4th by seven.)

Are your parents still married?

Yes: 20
No: 5

What is the ideal number of lovers to have over the course of one’s life?

One student answered 200. Disregarding that answer, the class average was 3.7 lovers. (Two students: 1 lover.)

Do you believe the government should recognize the right of gay men and women to marry?

Yes: 22
No: 4

What should be the “age of consent” (the age at which one should have the legal right to decide when and with whom one has sex)?

17.4 years old. (high: 23, low: 14. One student wrote "In 20s”. The student who said "23" had earlier said that the ideal age to begin having sex is 18, suggesting that he or she didn't understand this question.)

What is more important to you in a boyfriend/girlfriend, an attractive face or an attractive body?

Face: 20
Body: 1
Various answers, including "equal": 5

What is the ideal number of lovers for a future spouse to have had prior to meeting you?

Again, one student answered 200. Disregarding that answer, the class average was 2.7, exactly one less than the average answer to the question I asked them about themselves. (Six students said they want their future spouse to have had 0 lovers.)

Ranking from 1-10, how important it is to you to have/raise a child? (10 = essential)

8.2. (Ten students: 10, one student: 1)

Do you believe in love at first sight?

Yes: 9
No: 17

Do you believe that the decisions you make in your sexual life affect your standing with God/ in the Afterlife?

Yes: 7
No: 19

Generally speaking, are men or are women more "romantic"?

Men: 5
Women: 15
Equal: 3

If you had to choose, would you prefer the experience of being loved or being in love? 

Being in love: 13
Being loved: 12

Is the United States too sexual, not sexual enough, or about right?

Too sexual: 16
Not sexual enough: 2
About right: 5

Saturday, March 13, 2010

Short Fiction Revisited

Thoughts of Barry Hannah—re-reading him, actually—have reminded me of the short story writers I've been able to tolerate, even like, even love: early Hannah, Leonard Michaels, Grace Paley, Lydia Davis, Chekhov & Mavis Gallant (those two, yes, I love), Harold Brodkey, some of both Barthelmes, a couple of stories by Lee K. Abbott, Richard Ford, Borges and his insane step-child Roberto Bolaño, Kafka, one or two stories by Robert Coover and Mary Robison, early Mark Richard, Denis Johnson, Cynthia Ozick, some James Baldwin, Francois Camoin and Darrell Spencer (two mentors), and Robert Walser. I also like Fitzgerald, some Updike (I lie; I can't read Updike), John Cheever (possibly another lie), Beckett, some William Gass, Raymond Carver (the Lish versions), and the guy—I can't remember his name—who writes all those stories about the Caribbean.

Alice Munro, no doubt wrongly, I find unreadable.

But most short fiction I find unreadable, including my own.

I invite my fearless readers to note some others—names I've forgotten or failed to find.

(Goodness. Will this blog—any blog—ever be anything other than an exercise in solipsism?)

Update: The Caribbean guy is Bob Shacochis.

Friday, March 12, 2010

The Modern Republican Party

I read with both amusement and sadness Jonathan Chiat's analysis of yet another Republican's roadmap for America. The roadmap was released by rising star Paul Ryan. Among much else, it proposes eviscerating all that's progressive in the federal tax code, dismantling federal programs like Medicare and Social Security, and ending employee-based health care programs.

In short, Ryan wants to remove anything that smacks of society from American society.

His hero? Ayn Rand.
"The reason I got involved in public service, by and large, if I had to credit one thinker, one person, it would be Ayn Rand," Ryan said at a D.C. gathering four years ago. . . .
At the Rand celebration he spoke at in 2005, Ryan invoked the central theme of Rand's writings when he told his audience that, "Almost every fight we are involved in here on Capitol Hill . . . is a fight that usually comes down to one conflict—individualism versus collectivism.
Let's set aside the sidesplitting irony of a member of Congress—a word derived from the Latin congradi meaning "walk together"—calling for an end to collectivism, and focus on the senselessness of anyone who says, "Almost every fight we are involved in . . . comes down to one conflict--individualism versus collectivism" (my emphasis).

In this contradiction we come face to face with the intellectual incoherence at the heart of the modern Republican Party: yearning to govern while dismissing the value of government. The GOP declines to acknowledge what absolutely all of us know: that nothing in life is achieved alone; that the great question in political life is not "Society or the individual?" but "Who are we and how do we survive?"

Not alone, that's for damn sure.

Prior to Reagan, Republicans knew this. They taxed the rich at 91% under Eisenhower and in one short decade we effectively funded the construction of our nation's modern infrastructure. Republicans taxed the rich at 70% under Nixon and with that money started Medicare, our nation's first meaningful step toward compassionate health care for its elderly. And even under Reagan, Republicans taxed the rich at 50%, giving them the revenues to consolidate our position as the world's dominant military power. Indeed, since Lincoln, Republicans have, for the most part, stood shoulder-to-shoulder with Democrats in defense of progressive taxes (almost always above 50% for our richest citizens) and fundamental social protections.

So the question arises: "What changed?"

Fundamentally, this: the demographics of "we, the people."

And an abject inability to embrace this change has destroyed the moral authority of the party of Lincoln.

To clarify what I mean, let me tell a brief story:

I lived in Utah during the early 90s, and one night I was going to Salt Lake City with my roommate at the time, Paul Marchant. Out of little more than curiosity, we decided to check out a gathering on a hill above the State Penitentiary—that night, the State of Utah was set to execute a man for being an accomplice to three murders.

Paul and I parked and walked up a path to the gathering. Upon arriving, we encountered a curious spectacle: two groups of people, only circumstantially divided, one group chanting for the convict's death, the other group holding candles and singing gospel hymns.

It didn't take long to figure out the dynamic: the louder the hymn, the louder the chants for the inmate's death. From the group of singers: sadness, even tears; from the group of chanters: laughter, applause, and self-congratulatory delight at the cleverness of their pro-death rhymes.

Standing among those people that night, disgusted by the meanness, racism, arrogance, and spiritual frigidity of the people in support of the inmate's execution, I contemplated my own political future, and I soon took my place among the candle-lit faces gazing down at the prison.

In short, that night I said goodbye to American conservatism. 

That's a melodramatic account of one of the epiphanies important in my political journey. But it's not false for being melodramatic. Until that night, I'd been a devoted Republican, a "dittohead," even, and an unblinking supporter of the death penalty. But listening to my fellow Americans—my fellow Mormons, at that time—chant for and applaud another man's death, I realized that what matters about our politics is not what it does to others. What matters about our politics is what it does to us.

And the consequences of our two predominant political attitudes were easy to see. On the one hand: rage; cynicism; arrogance; bitterness; racism; hatred; and not merely indifference but delight at the suffering of others. (In short, I saw embodied beside me the attitude of contemporary right-wing talk radio, Dick Cheney, and the moral philosophy implicit in Paul Ryan's roadmap.)

On the other hand: gentleness; humility; compassion; not merely sadness but determination in the face of suffering—the suffering, I add, of the least among us, including, on that night, a scoundrel thief who, at the age of nineteen, drove the getaway car for two brutal, odious murderers.

I'd been Republican long enough to know what was going on at that rally/protest. I knew the code words, the knowing looks, the self-satisfied dismissiveness of the carefully groomed white faces around me. I knew what the chanting, laughter, and applause were really about—

Because this is the deal: Post-Goldwater Republicans don't really object to collectivism; they object to the demographics of the modern American collective. They can't abide a community that includes people whom they see as unlike—and inferior to—themselves. The modern American conservative movement is racist—to its core. From its racism, all else follows. Pres. Carter was right: the Tea Party hysteria has one source: Obama is black. Were he white, there would be no Tea Party. He has cut their taxes, done all he can to save their jobs, rescued the country from an immoral and tragic war, ended torture by the American government, given hope to the justifiable goal of Afghan reconstruction, and fought heroically, against his own political allies, for a new direction in American education. He's a centrist pragmatist, by any reasonable political measure. (David Brooks, a conservative columnist for the New York Times, covers that here.) But Obama is black. So he represents yet another step in the diminution of white power in this country and is, therefore, unacceptable. Not merely unacceptable: he is inexplicable! So I must suffer through the tedious barrage of conspiracy-theory emails that attempts to explain Obama's rise to prominence as the work of secret elites and their parasite-welfare, liberal minions. 

Look at the faces at CPAC, at the Tea Party gatherings. Good, decent, bewildered people—white people, all of them, stunned by changes they can't hope to control. How many of them know that Eisenhower taxed the rich at 91%? Dare I say none of them? But they know this: a black man shouldn't be running the show.

The Republican Party must now harvest what it has sown. Let's hope that the harvest doesn't leave many dead. I was not in the least surprised to see a white, middle-class conservative American fly his airplane, al Qaeda-like, into a building in Texas. That's the inevitable consequence of a political philosophy that repudiates both politics and philosophy and bases itself on the loathsome, doomed dream of white superiority.

Monday, March 8, 2010

Sparklehorse, RIP

And now I learn that Mark Linkous of Sparklehorse, who provided the soundtrack to some of the sublime moments of my life, including a mystical exit, long ago, from Arches National Park, the sunroof open, the windows down, the headlights as darkness overtook us illuminating the narrow, electric highway, has committed suicide.

Yet again, here come the pain birds.

Friday, March 5, 2010

For the Taxonomists

I was putting together a Radiohead mix tonight and came across this:

Wednesday, March 3, 2010

Barry Hannah, RIP

The fantastic Barry Hannah—author of Airships and Rayis dead.

Ray has long been one of my favorite novels. There was a time when I could quote from it at length. In the middle of tedious college reading, that little novel was always a reliable lifeboat back to real writing, living writing. And it was—is—a great cure for writer's block, as sure a sign as any that one has come across something alive.

Insanity Revisited

This weekend, after a day of snowboarding, I was talking to my friend Johnny Cooke, a physical therapist/trainer at Precision Human Performance, about tightness in my back. At some point I said something about getting a massage.

Johnny shook his head. Most massage therapists, he said, make a fundamental mistake: they see the tightened muscle as the enemy, and the relaxed muscle as the hero. He said, It's the opposite. The tightened muscle is overworked, trying to compensate for the weakness of other muscles. The goal should not be to pound the tightened muscle into submission; it should be to strengthen other muscles so that they do their job.*

Many people, in other words, get hooked on a regular massage without ever addressing the problem that makes the massage a (temporary) relief: an imbalance in the body's muscular strength.

An obvious idea, once one hears it.

Perhaps because I'm from California, where the line between physical health and mental health is regularly dismissed as a false dichotomy, I later considered how this principle might apply to the life of the mind.

An obsession with cleanliness, for example, or an addiction to running, or a passion for rollercoasters, or a terror of home, or fanatical religious devotion, or the need to write—each of these impulses might be our private psychological hero, protecting us from something we cannot name: our feebler self, trembling, desperate, alone—or, as likely, already dead.


* I can only hope that my dear readers will take this language literally.

Tuesday, March 2, 2010

The English 1B Book Club, Spring 2010

Shifting directions for spring quarter, I've decided to focus on literary examinations of fascist violence.

It seems to me that we—the United States, I mean—persist in our desire to become what we profess to hate. (Example: Joseph Andrew Stack's 9/11-emulating airplane attack on an IRS building in Austin, Texas.) The seductions of violence are formidable. Perhaps it's a good time to think, yet again, about why.

After reading, too, about the slaughter of fifteen teenagers in Cuidad Juarez (yet recognizing that 2666 would be, for this quick class, an impossibility), I want to contemplate more closely the problem of  inconceivable violence—the allure of its various faces.

So these will be our required readings:

Slaughterhouse-Five, by Kurt Vonnegut
The Shawl, by Cynthia Ozick
Macbeth (the Arden Edition)
This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen, by Tadeusz Borowski
Nazi Literature in the Americas, by Roberto Bolaño
All Day Permanent Red, by Christopher Logue

We'll watch Night and Fog, if we can bear it, and read some poems by Paul CelanSimone Weil's famous essay about the Iliad will provide us with a theoretical framework for our opening discussions.

I wish that I'd thought to add Dirty Snow, by Georges Simenon, a riveting study of life in German-occupied France, particularly in its depiction of the ways that civilians mimic—and therefore further disseminate—various forms of State violence.