Friday, August 31, 2012

Bad Math?

Romney refuses to share his tax returns = if we knew what he did in his tax returns, we wouldn't elect him = we shouldn't elect him.

Tuesday, August 28, 2012

The Truck Was the Color of My Father's Porsche When I Was Eleven

The most disturbing thing about the dream wasn't the person who accelerated to prevent the man in the truck from passing, or the amount of debris coming off the truck as it rolled, or the number of times it rolled, or the sight of the destroyed truck in the grass beside the freeway, but the nonchalance with which everyone drove on.

Monday, August 27, 2012

TFTD

It is not permissible that the authors of devastation should also be innocent. It is the innocence which constitutes the crime.

— James Baldwin, "My Dungeon Shook"

Friday, August 24, 2012

TFTD

Certain people permanently change what we perceive as beautiful. Like a good writer they teach us to see beauty where we'd failed to see it. These are the people we come to love, sooner or later; they make the world richer, more expansive, and its beauty more abundant.

Lines of Sight

Hard-hatted workers have removed the small plum tree from the plazita by the Language Arts Office at Foothill. Apparently it blocked an architect's idea of a line of sight.

In all my life—all my travels—I've never seen anything more beautiful than that plum tree.

When it was in bloom I'd ask my students to draw it, or to go look at it for awhile. Sitting near it between classes, I liked to think about what it meant.

For a long time I allowed it to remind me of someone.

On occasion it brought to mind an anecdote about Faulkner. He once asked a woman if she wanted to see a bride in her wedding dress; she said yes; he drove with her at night, through fields, until turning his headlights upon an apple tree in bloom.

On melancholy mornings that little plum tree never failed to return to my life a sense of wonder and optimism. It reassured me of—let me phrase it this way—God's love, or of the love of the gods, and of life's ongoingness, and of the persistence of beauty. It's absence will now remind me of the persistence of folly.

Sunday, August 12, 2012

July's People, by Nadine Gordimer

Well into July's People I realized that all along I'd been hearing echoes of Faulkner. I rarely hear him in contemporary American fiction (in Cormac McCarthy, obviously; also in Toni Morrison, whom I no longer read); but I hear him all the time in Latin American and European writing, and I suppose it should come as no surprise to hear him in a novel by a South African.

Gordimer has written an apartheid book, a political book, a product, like all great literature, of its time and place; and it deserves to be read if only as a fictional analysis of the awful traumata, public and private, of racism. But more importantly July's People is an extraordinary stylistic achievement.

In Dark Star Safari, Gordimer tells Paul Theroux, "The American proofreaders often try to correct my English. . . . They follow the rules. I don't. I like my sentences."

Anyone who doesn't like her sentences is deaf to the supple muscularity of modern English prose:
She went out. Night was close to her face. Rain sifted from the dark. She knew only where the doorway was, to get back. She took off her shirt and got out of panties and jeans in one go, supporting herself against the streaming mud wall. Holding her clothing out of the mud, she let the rain pit her lightly, face, breasts and back, then stream over her. She turned as if she were under a shower faucet. Soon her body was the same temperature as the water. She became aware of being able to see; and what she saw was like the reflection of a candle-flame behind a window-pane flowing with water, far off. The reflection moved or the glassy ripples moved over it. But it existed—the proof was that there was a dimension between her and some element in the rain-hung darkness.
And:
There was the stillness of unregarded trees and ceaseless water. On the huge pale trunks wild figs bristled like bunches of hat-pins. The earth was sour with fallen fruit; between the giant trees a tan fly-catcher swooped, landing to hover on the invisible branches of a great tree of air.
Prose of this caliber insists on slow attention. (Good luck reading those passages online.) It reminds us what prose alone can do, and what the novel as an art-form continues, if barely, to give the world. For those reasons—beyond its usefulness as an historical document, as a study of human psychology under duress—July's People can't have enough readers.

Saturday, August 11, 2012

The Bourne Legacy and the Perils of Empire

I was likely fourteen when I read The Bourne Identity, and I loved it. I still remember a moment midway through the book when Bourne walks into a parking lot and perceives in his peripheral vision the glint of a rifle scope in the distance. Instantly, unthinkingly, he falls to the pavement and rolls behind a car; a bullet ricochets off the asphalt where he'd just stood. His primary response to what's happening is baffled awe. How did I know I was about to be shot at?

The book becomes a prolonged meditation on those types of questions. Why am I so good at  surviving, at fighting? How is it I'm a killing machine? Most fundamentally: Who on earth am I?

Jason Bourne reflected his time. Through the slog of the Cold War, the United States had become a globalized military power, efficient in the arts of killing. But after the Vietnam War, wounded, battered, it faced an identity crisis. The beginning of The Bourne Identity gives us an appropriate metaphor for the American condition at the the end of the 1970s: we are Jason Bourne, wounded and bleeding, wondering who we are, and in need of re-birth. America had become a bewildered killer, without an identity, in search of its past—or of a future worth living to see. In Ludlum's vision, Bourne's solution was simple: withdraw from battle. But the world wouldn't let him.

The Bourne Legacy reflects its Age every bit as succinctly as The Bourne Identity did. In the film, the United States has become an Orwellian, corporatist-scientific super-State, its citizens under constant surveillance. Our super-hero is no longer a reluctant, baffled Everyman but a wounded soldier now hyper-enhanced by genetic manipulation and paramilitary-survivalist training. He (read "we") is no longer in flight from his superpowers but dedicated to making them permanent. They aren't a bewildering curse but his reason for being.

The movie itself is ok. There's a chilling scene—basically unwatchable—in the middle of the film when a scientist hunts down his colleagues in their workplaces, calming killing them, one-by-one. I don't want to imagine a single American watching that scene with enthusiasm, entertained—but there are many things I don't want to imagine about my fellow Americans, and that has never stopped them from being true.

Ultimately the film acquires its force from the usefulness of its metaphor. We are no longer Jason Bourne, looking to understand—and escape—what we've become. We are now Aaron Cross; we know who we are and want to be nothing else. Cross's name, like Bourne's, is on point: we have arrogated to ourselves the role of global messiah.

One assumes that in the inevitable sequel Bourne and Cross will come face-to-face. Which vision of the American hero will triumph?

The Bourne Legacy's abrupt ending and its heroes' last words might offer a hint—and reason for hope.

Friday, August 10, 2012

Dark Star Safari, by Paul Theroux

Fitzgerald was wrong; the pilgrims weren't the last people to come "face to face for the last time in history with something commensurate to [our] capacity for wonder": Paul Theroux did it ten years ago during an overland trip across eastern Africa.

Dark Star Safari, the riveting account of his journey, made it clear to me that: 1) the same experience is available to me, right now; and 2) it's unlikely I'll have the courage to seek it.

Africa, after all, is a frightening ruin, according to Theroux—its cities, which best embody its politics, especially. But he also observes that the West is its own kind of ruin, alienating us from ourselves in manners so profound that to even discuss them puts one at risk of becoming a pariah. By evoking that alienation—by evoking the mystery of Africa's pervasive lawlessness (we have no other word)—Theroux's travelogue becomes less an exploration of Africa than a mediation on the limits of the Western imagination.

Theroux arrives at a second insight that is, in some respects, more provocative: the large-scale international aid that characterizes the developed world's primary relationship to Africa should end immediately. Theroux comes to believe that it's not just unproductive; it's dangerous—to Africans in particular.

Which begs the question: might it not be the case that we don't provide that aid for them, but for ourselves? And if so, what might be the cost—to us—of ending it?