Donald Trump Has Changed My Life

Because of Donald Trump, I must now re-think everything I teach about effective argument.

Old Lesson: Avoid ad hominem attacks. Insulting your opponents does not disprove their claims.

New Lesson: Insult, early and often, your opponents' appearance, gender, real or perceived disabilities, religion, and economic status. Ad hominem attacks effectively shift your audience's focus toward that aspect of your opponents' physical or social selves that are most vulnerable to prejudice or mockery, allowing you to draw your audience's attention away from the force of their argument.

Old Lesson: Be specific. Avoid generalizations and vague phrasing. Logical arguments are most effective when they're focused and coherent.

New Lesson: Specificity is your enemy. It exposes you to the difficult process of actually having to prove what you say. Vague generalizations permit your audience to hear what they want to hear in your speech, without the distractions of evidence, examples, or countervailing facts.

Old Lesson: Stick to the facts. Don't make obviously or easily debunked claims.

New Lesson: Lie whenever you'd like. Arguments built upon fabrications, distortions, and uninformed speculation save you the time you would otherwise spend researching your topic. More importantly, audiences find a willingness to baldly lie fascinating. They are likely to view an unapologetic liar as a courageous leader, practicing a kind of honesty that a person who is determined to be honest fails to comprehend.

Old Lesson: When proven wrong, acknowledge your error and correct it.

New Lesson: Never retreat from any position you've taken, regardless of its validity. Do no apologize for your error: embrace it, declaim it with even greater conviction. If your opponent continues to expose your error, revisit the earlier lesson on ad hominem attacks.

Old Lesson: Support your claims with evidence from credible sources.

New Lesson: Your claims should be, as far as you're concerned, self-evidently true. The need for evidence in support of a claim delegitimizes the claim. After all, you are making the claim, aren't you?

Obama's Second Term, Success or Failure?

Days after President Obama was re-elected, my dismayed cousin, a vocal conservative, posted a request—I've copied much of it here—on his Facebook Timeline.

Just an open letter to all my friends and family who voted for president O'Bama. From here on out I am asking just a little favor. I would like to know how I am suppose to measure his successes.... You create the criteria and then stick by it. YOU tell me what success is in O'Bama's presidency so that I can measure it.... How will you have me measure it? Starting ...NOW. Oh... and by the way...not opinions... source each "success" with an article that supports your statement that he has succeeded in the categories that you have previously defined.

Earlier this week, I remembered that I'd responded to his appeal. I couldn't recall what I'd written, however; so, out of curiosity, I looked up my response, to see if, in fact, the president, whom I have come to regard as an extraordinary success, had met my criteria for success as I'd set it forth on that particular day. A year remains in his presidency, of course, and history makes clear that anything can happen, just about. Nevertheless, below I've pasted what I wrote, formatted here as an organized checklist, with my evaluation of his performance. I have provided links for the sources in support of my evaluation, as my cousin requested.

Measurement 1

By the end of Obama's second term, I would like Romney's effective tax rate to be at least as high as mine. I don't think that millionaires should be paying lower effective tax rates than the middle class, as they often do now. I would like to see a simpler, more progressive tax code. Under Eisenhower, a Republican, the maximum marginal tax rate was a staggering 91% (yet Obama is called a socialist). Under Nixon it was 70%. Under Reagan it was 50%. Under Clinton it was 39%. Obama wants to return us to Clinton. That seems, at a minimum, eminently reasonable.

Outcome: Taxes are still lower than they should be for the wealthiest Americans, but they have gone up, and Romney's effective tax rate is now, in all likelihood, at least as high as mine. Therefore, Success.

Source: http://www.nytimes.com/2015/12/31/upshot/thanks-obama-highest-earners-tax-rates-rose-sharply-in-2013.html

Measurement 2

I would like human-driven climate change, which is a scientific fact, to be addressed with the seriousness it deserves in our national political conversation. I would like to see a carbon tax in order to fund renewable energy technologies going forward. It's nonsensical to base the future of one's civilization on a nonrenewable, rapidly deleting resource. (I'm not confident this will happen, I confess. About half the country thinks of science the way I think of Zeus.)

Outcome: The Paris Accord is an historic step forward. No carbon tax, however. Therefore, Partial Success.

Source: http://www.nytimes.com/2015/12/13/world/europe/climate-change-accord-paris.html

Measurement 3

I would like the private sector to continue to grow, as it did under Obama, and I would like the public sector to continue to shrink, as did under Obama—both trends representing a 180 degree change from trends under Bush. Obama-specific policies, after all, have increased the federal deficit less than any president's since Eisenhower—most of the spending under Obama first four years was driven by policies (like food stamps) put in place long before he arrived, in response to an economic crisis that he didn't create.

Outcome: Private sector jobs have grown dramatically under Obama, but public sector jobs have now begun to grow as well, very slightly. Therefore, Partial Success.

Source: http://www.calculatedriskblog.com/2016/01/public-and-private-sector-payroll-jobs.html

Measurement 4

I would like see my brother's right to marry the person of his choosing to be recognized as constitutional right.

Outcome: Success.

Source: http://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/27/us/supreme-court-same-sex-marriage.html

Measurement 5

I would like to see national incarceration rates decline.

Outcome: Success.

Source: http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2015/feb/23/eric-holder/federal-prison-population-drops-first-time-3-decad/

Measurement 6

At present 1% of the population owns 83% of all stocks. I would like to see that number go down. If it does, that would suggest that the middle class's economic power is expanding, which it hasn't done since Carter.

Outcome: The wealthiest Americans still own most stocks, but stock ownership has grown among middle-class Americans, slightly. Therefore, Partial Success.

Source: http://www.gallup.com/poll/182816/little-change-percentage-americans-invested-market.aspx

Measurement 7

I would like to see access to healthcare continue to expand. In this regard I follow Churchill, the 20th century's greatest conservative: healthcare is a national security issue and should be treated as such. The government is responsible for national security. Restricting that role to external enemies while disregarding internal enemies—which kill many more of us than external enemies—makes no sense. Your neighbor living or dying shouldn't be an opportunity for personal profit—it should be seen as a communal, moral responsibility.

Outcome: Success.

Source: https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/health-science/proportion-of-americans-without-health-insurance-dropped-in-2014/2015/09/16/60915d4c-5be5-11e5-9757-e49273f05f65_story.html

Measurement 8

I would like to see a fair, humane solution to immigration.

Outcome: Obama has used executive orders to mitigate the destructive effects of our inhumane immigration policies. But executive orders are not a long-term solution. Therefore, Partial Success.

Source: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2014/11/19/your-complete-guide-to-obamas-immigration-order/

Measurement 9

I would like to see us pull back from our role as global police force and continue to expand our commitment to diplomacy. I would like to see defense spending decline. I believe that Eisenhower's warning about the military-industrial complex representing a direct threat to the health of our democracy has, sadly, gone unheeded.

Outcome: Obama has favored diplomacy over occupation and global policing, he has declined to enter into a large-scale ground war in the Middle East, and he has cut defense spending. Therefore, Success.

Source: http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/article/2015/dec/14/politifact-sheet-our-guide-to-military-spending-/

Measurement 10

I would like to see us continue to cut our nuclear arsenal.

Outcome: Fewer warheads, but a commitment to modernize our nuclear arsenal rather than radically cut it. Therefore, Partial Success.

Source: http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/promises/obameter/subjects/nuclear/

Measurement 11

I would like to see Obama include conservatives in his cabinet. I expect that one of them will be John Huntsman.

Outcome: Not the person I had in mind, and ultimately something of a failure, but Obama gave me what I asked for. Therefore, Success.

Source: https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/officials-obama-to-nominate-hagel-for-defense-brennan-for-cia/2013/01/07/22db7d4e-58c2-11e2-beee-6e38f5215402_story.html

Measurement 12

I would like to see Obama continue to behave with dignity and decency in the face of hysterical and baseless claims about his politics, his personal history, and his love for this country. I suspect that some of this hysteria is the product of racism, frankly.

Outcome: Success.

Source: The last seven years.

Measurement 13

Which leads me to my last wish: that the views of Obama and his supporters be treated as the reasonable consequence of intelligent people who want to see this country prosper. We are not Fox News's idea of us. I'm pretty sure that Republicans aren't MSNBC's idea of them. So I hope Romney's supporters proceed from the premise that Obama and his supporters are people of goodwill, with an idea of America that is optimistic, patriotic, and pragmatic. It's true that many of us aren't taking orders from Romney's God. But we respect your right to do that, and we appreciate your point of view, insofar as it doesn't mischaracterize who we are and what we stand for.

Outcome: Despite all of the above, Abject Failure.

Source: My cousin's Facebook Timeline.

In summary: Obama has achieved either Success or Partial Success in all twelve measurements.

In other words, I have, like tens of millions of other Americans, gotten what I voted for. Well done, Mr. President.

Patrick Willis

After Sammy's Pop Warner football team won the West Coast Championship — this would have been 2010 — the 49ers invited his team to appear on the field before one of their home games. It's hard to miss Sam's white hair:

During the pregame warm-ups, the boys lined up along the sideline to watch. Players for both teams came and went. Eventually the boys were escorted onto the field and introduced. Someone sang the National Anthem. The boys then marched in single file to the sideline, to be escorted from the field. Prior to their exit, one player — only one — came over and gave every one of them a high-five: Patrick Willis.

I don't watch football much anymore. Given what what it does to the players, it has lost much of its charm. But I used to love watching the game and always loved watching Patrick Willis. Since the day he arrived in San Francisco, he has been — was — the best player on the team. He is, as far as I'm concerned, the greatest middle linebacker of his generation.

And I've come to believe that there is a connection, however small, between his gesture that day — his thoughtfulness — and his greatness. How ironic, I thought then, that the best player on the team is the one who thought to come over and congratulate those little boys. But perhaps it's not ironic at all. Perhaps it's all of a piece. The same character, the same attention to detail, that made Patrick Willis football's best linebacker for nearly decade also made him pause to come shake my son's hand.

Selma

Among Selma's achievements: to evoke the burden — more than that: the exhaustion — that Dr. King felt doing battle with America's theretofore unassailable myth of white innocence. He spends much of the movie exhausted and—we see this in his eyes—in flight from his calling. But on occasion, invigorated by the people around him (by a grieving 84-year-old grandfather, for instance, who has never cast a vote in his life) Dr. King drinks from his Fountain of Truth, known for centuries as Christ's Love, and summons the strength to change the world.

Which struck America then and strikes me now as some kind of stupefying miracle.

We haven't lived up to that miracle, needless to say, but it is part of our inheritance. It has made possible other miracles, including the one I witnessed at the Half Moon Bay Brewing Company on November 4, 2008. That miracle was earned, like Selma, by decades of suffering, and likely occurred—like Selma—in part so that white America could restore for itself the myth of its innocence. Regardless, it occurred, and I witnessed it and will never forget it.

I was raised to ask for miracles by praying. And it was nice to think that miracles could come from prayer. But prayer, when it plays any role whatsoever, is basically the singer warming her voice. In the end, miracles are earned by hard work and good thinking. Dr. King, to our great good fortune, knew how to think. He understood that to "lift white consciousness," it was necessary to deploy white America against itself. The myth of white innocence could not tolerate the sight of white cruelty. Innocence Lost mandated Innocence Restored. Fair enough, Dr. King said: If your myth is important you, it could use some defending in Selma.

When the march finally happens, after blood has run in the streets, the film rewards us with archival footage of the real-life marchers. One is struck by the joy in their faces. It is, dare I say, divine joy. Dr. King was tired and would soon be dead. But his marchers were not tired and perhaps—Hands Up, Don't Shoot!—still aren't.

Graceland

I should go back to my old Missionary's Journal to look up his name: I'm pretty sure it was Paul—not Pablo but actually Paul, the only child of two people who were old enough, I thought then, to be his grandparents. He played the guitar all the time, usually alone in his room, he said; but on Christmas Day 1986, which my companion and I spent with him and his family, he sat at the dining room table after a late lunch and played for us and sang.

After he was done, we went outside and lit off bottle rockets. He and my companion and I were basically kids, remember, so it should come as no surprise that we thought it was great to place the stems of the bottle rockets in a pile of wet sand and aim them at passing cars. The Argentinian bottle rockets seemed to me stronger than any I'd used in California, but that impression might of been a by-product of my general delight at setting off fireworks for Christmas.

That night, before leaving, having, in my bag, nothing else of use, I gave Paul my copy—a cassette tape—of Paul Simon's Graceland. I wasn't supposed to have it (The Missionary Handbook authorized nothing but classical music or anything by the Mormon Tabernacle Choir) but I thought it was a sensational album and believed he'd like it.

I wasn't wrong. A couple of months later he told me that he'd listened to it so much that he'd broken the tape. To prove it, he brought out his guitar and sang "Graceland," the title track, which we both agreed was as good as any song by the Beatles, even though neither he nor I were parents, of course, and I was not yet divorced, so the truth of the song must have seemed to us as distant (yet indisputable) as the the truth of Jesus' love had felt, when we'd read of it together before lighting the bottle rockets, in a short passage from the Gospel of John.

In Praise of Love, by Alain Badiou

People in love put their trust in difference rather than being suspicious of it. — Alain Badiou

When I read a contemporary meditation on love—fictional, poetic, philosophical—I often can't shake the impression that I'm reading a paraphrase of The Double Flame, by Octavio Paz, which I was lucky enough to read when it first came out 20 years ago and which immediately became for me a sacred text.

Badiou's little book is no exception.

In the first place, Badiou defines love as Paz did: it's exclusive; it's transgressive; it's a power struggle; it's a journey from fate to freedom; it requires the concept of the soul.

Secondly, he sees the same threats to love that Paz saw (or foresaw): in libertinism; in the disintegration of taboos; in self-obsession; in an excess of (mostly economic) freedom; and in the demise of the concept of the soul. These historical processes are largely a product of materialistic capitalism, which has obliterated love's earlier enemies—tribalism; the Church; feudalism; sexual puritanism; 20th-century political totalitarianism—and now constitutes the greatest threat to love in the West.

Also like Paz, Badiou beautifully describes love as an encounter with—and celebration of—otherness. That encounter makes possible an aesthetic and political transformation that is difficult, exhilarating, and redemptive—which is why love has been (and should be, once again) the central value in our public and private lives.

For anyone seeking a primer on love's peculiar nature and a meditation on its place in the modern world, this little book enjoys a couple of advantages over The Double Flame's vast erudition: Badiou's book is very short, and its format (as an interview with a journalist from Le Monde) makes for straightforward reading.

So In Praise of Love might have the ugliest cover in the history of publishing, but it elegantly re-articulates the principal insights of The Double Flame, which is reason enough for me to remember it as one of my books of the year.

Provo

Once, when I was very young — likely 23 — I went to a Mormon dance at a municipal park in Provo, Utah, and there watched a girl dance with a sensuality I hadn’t seen before and have not seen since, not in the flamenco bars of Madrid or Cádiz or in the strip clubs of North Beach — not even, it occurs to me, at the senior proms I have chaperoned for my two sons, where the girls were as playful and beautiful as they will ever be but, I suspect, too burdened by the extravagance of their dresses and by their awareness of themselves as spectacles to release themselves to sensuality, which a poet must once have called, perhaps redundantly, the “perilous sublime."

Uncharacteristically, after suffering for a couple of hours at the sight of her dancing, which made me ache and possibly broke my heart in some kind of permanent fashion, I managed to ask her if she would go with me for an ice cream sundae. She agreed. I remember nothing about our date, however, except that at one point she commented on how I enunciated the word really. “You have a funny way of saying it,” she said. “I do?” I asked. “The way you say the e,” she said. “I wouldn’t say it that way."

I never saw her again.

The Blogging Years, Volume II

A new blog, under a new name, begins.

Below I have archived The Bewildered Eye, which is no longer available as an independent blog but might be of casual interest. It spans November 2009 to March 2014. I don't anticipate tinkering with it anymore but no doubt will; today, at least, I think of it as Volume I of my life as a blogger, which I intend to continue, despite the impassioned advice of some very good friends.

So welcome to The Foggy Eye, which sounds to my ear like the name of a good coastside bar. I hope it offers similar pleasures.

Basketball, Physics, and the Pursuit of Beauty

Last night, the Half Moon Bay boys' basketball team lost its Northern California Championship semifinal playoff game, ending its season and effectively drawing to a close the basketball careers of most of its senior players.

Among those seniors: my second child, my heart's joy, Zach. Like his teammates, Zach was devastated after the loss, weeping openly and turning to his teammates and his parents for solace. Disbelief—one of grief's commonest manifestations—had reconfigured his face. His career could not be over! Yet it was.

When I got home from the game, I turned to the Internet for distraction. At some point I came across the following video, which, according to the The Atlantic, had gone viral over the last couple of days. It captures the moment when a physicist, Andrei Linde, learns that his life work on the origin of the universe has been finally proved correct:

One can imagine the long hours, the setbacks, the obstacles and discouraging days—years—that brought Linde to his moment of triumph. We don't see the daunting work in this clip but its reward. Only from his face—reconfigured, too, by disbelief—and from his wife's slumped joy can we infer those years of struggle.

But aside from their joy and relief, what most struck me about the video was a comment by Linde himself: "I always live with this feeling. What if I am tricked? What if I believe in this just because it is beautiful?"

It's good, I thought, to be reminded that scientists, too, are guided by beauty. The beauty of Linde's idea reassured him, over 30 long years, that he was not wrong.

Which returns me to Zach and last night's loss. Basketball has given those boys—they are now young men—a realm in which to do something beautiful. They have been a joy to watch; their pursuit of beauty—what their coaches would likely call excellence—has been relentless; and as spectators to their passion, our joy has increased as their skill improved, as their play became more beautiful.

Last night, the game over, the season done, we mourned what they—and we—mistook as defeat. After the game some of the boys probably wondered, as Linde did, if those long hours had been worth it—if beauty had tricked them. The season, after all—a season of their lives—had come to an end.

But watching Linde and imagining his journey, it occurred to me that in both science and athletics, properly understood, there are no defeats. Yesterday's failure prepares both the scientist and the athlete for future success.

So, yes, the season is over—but its lesson remains: guided by beauty, working hard to be excellent, we are fully alive; living beautifully, we bring those around us to life. We touch the world with our grace, our truth.

Last night, Zach, I did not mourn because you'd lost a basketball game. I mourned because I will never see you play with your team again. You guys—all of you, together—were beautiful. I will miss that beauty.

But I take comfort in the knowledge that you have learned, like Andrei Linde, to trust what you find beautiful. You were not wrong to see beauty in basketball and to pursue that beauty with passion and love. Now, a marvelous season behind you, go forward, my son, living as you played: gracefully, fiercely, with your whole heart. If you do that, more hard-earned triumphs await.

TFTD

Yo creo que un escritor qué merezca este nombre debe hacer todo lo que esté a su alcance para favorecer una 'mutación' del lector, luchar contra la pasividad del asimilador de novelas y cuentos, contra esa tendencia a preferir productos premasticados. La renovación formal de la novela — para emplear sus términos — debe apuntar a la creación de un lector tan activo y batallador como el novelista mismo, de un lector que le haga frente cuando sea necesario, que colabore en la tarea de estar cada vez más tremendamente vivo y descontento y maravillado y de cara al sol.

— Julio Cortazar, “El escarabajo de oro”

TFTD

Like a monk, sentencing himself to ascesis, tormented by erotic visions, I would take shelter in rhythm and the order of syntax, because I was afraid of my chaos.

— Czeslaw Milosz, Road-side Dog

The Infatuations, by Javier Marías

As with A Heart So White, The Infatuations is essentially a novel-length meditation on a single line from Macbeth—in this case: "She should have died hereafter," the opening line from Macbeth's famous "sound and fury" soliloquy.

And, as in A Heart So White, Marías continues to be too stylized for my taste—by which I mean: too repetitive; by which I mean: I grow weary listening to the same rhetorical mode, page after page, regardless of who's speaking, in which a word is offered to describe (let's say) an action, but that word is then immediately modified or revised or refined by the speaker—often the narrator—as if language at the moment of its utterance always fails or blunders or disappoints, and that failure can only be addressed or mitigated or contained by more words, relentlessly, or unrelentingly, and hopelessly, or despairingly, until the final page.

There's something to that, of course, epistemologically speaking. A verb is not its action.

Still, it's disconcerting to encounter a writer with so little confidence in language.

Or, better said, it's perturbing to always, only listen to characters for whom life's greatest drama is not what we can communicate but that we can't, and who experience that drama, both epistemologically and ontologically, in exactly the same way.

In other words: Javier Marías has made a career of repudiating Shakespeare's confidence in language, which is total, absolute, and—for good reason—besotted.

Put another way: Marías has made a career of writing about Shakespeare by enacting Hamlet's indecision, at the level of the sentence, over and over, for thousands of pages, in which language is not a creator of truth—of the creator of a truth—but its futile pursuit.

Perhaps Marías is trying to understand how all of us, Shakespeare's children, lost what should have been our best inheritance: the poet's confidence—and joy—in the vitality, primacy, and utility of words.

Or he's reminding us that it's all we have and not what we believe it to be, Shakespeare notwithstanding.

Anyway, The Infatuations might be the best book of 2013—it's brilliant, brimming with passages that you'll want to read to your lover—but I had more fun reading Glitz, which constructed more than one kind of consciousness.

TFTD

Life is motion, and motion is concerned with what makes man move—which is ambition, power, pleasure. What time a man can devote to morality, he must take by force from the motion of which he is a part. He is compelled to make choices between good and evil sooner or later, because moral conscience demands that from him in order that he can live with himself tomorrow. His moral conscience is the curse he had to accept from the gods in order to gain from them the right to dream.

— William Faulkner, "The Art of Fiction No. 12"

Waiting for the Barbarians, by J.M. Coetzee

In Coetzee one discovers that humility—an awareness of one's insignificance—liberates an artist far more than confidence. Coetzee writes as if it doesn't matter what he says: he is not, he seems to think, that important. So he tells the truth.

He also writes as if he doesn't entirely trust the novel as an art form. Which is interesting for someone commonly—and rightly—regarded as the greatest living English-language novelist.

Allegorist. Fablist. Novelist. Whatever. Writer: Waiting for the Barbarians is my lifetime's best dystopian novel.

Like Kafka and Beckett, Coetzee produces stories that glow with an aura of myth or scripture. He doesn't have Beckett's lyrical gifts or Kafka's knack for a single, acute metaphor. But he's more formally rigorous—at least as a novelist—than either of them: a bit more the Protestant, perhaps: less mystical, more lawful, neater, a better citizen, a more conscientious craftsman.

Coming myself from similar stock, I mean that as a compliment. I appreciate his attentiveness. There's nothing vainglorious or self-indulgent about his art. Unlike Kafka and Beckett, he chooses communication over innovation; and I find no writer of his generation, with the possible exception of his compatriot Nadine Gordimer, as profoundly ethical, as morally engaged. Like his narrator in Barbarians, J.M. Coetzee is our era's John the Baptist, a voice in the wilderness, describing not just the form but the content of our advancing doom.

As with Kafka, as with Beckett, we ignore him at our peril.

Bring Your Legs with You, by Darrell Spencer

America, in other words, is a very poor lens through which to view Las Vegas, while Las Vegas is a wonderful lens through which to view America.
— Dave Hickey, Air Guitar

Which might explain why Bring Your Legs with You, written by (full disclosure) a long-ago professor of mine, seems like the most American novel I've read since reading The Friends of Eddie Coyle, three years ago.

Some backstory: While escorting me through BYU's undergraduate English program, Darrell consistently argued for the value of provincial, hardboiled American fiction. He didn't want Tuscany or Paris; he wanted—as our common mentor, François Camoin once said said—a 7-eleven in Nebraska. Maybe impulsively (maybe not), Darrell declared Ray the greatest American novel of the last 25 years. You want American Lit.? Then read Hammett. Read Chandler. Read Wise Blood. Read early Carver. If you'd like, take a shot at Lot 49. And read Ray. You've got to read Ray.

And, as often as possible, go to Las Vegas.

So I'm with Hickey: I suspect that Bring Your Legs with You is a fantastic lens through which to view modern American life—with its scammers, its dreamers, its lovers, its killers—because it's a Las Vegas novel: provincial, hardboiled, desert-hot, sexy, tough-guy lyrical, and suspicious of hope (optimism just about always being a sign of deluded thinking).

Through a series of interconnected stories, we follow the possible-comeback of Tommy Rooke, one-time heavyweight contender, and his band of all-American merry-making schemers. Most of the stories are self-contained masterpieces; a couple of them felt like they served primarily to keep the narrative rolling. Regardless, they all reflect Spencer's extraordinary ear for the music of modern American English.

I haven't seen Darrell in many years. But I suppose an author's best company should be his books. Regardless, Bring your Legs with You is wonderful company. Ten years have passed since its publication—which is fine. After all, Roberto Bolaño, who knew a thing or two about literature, once said that the first requirement of a masterpiece is that it pass unnoticed. At least it's out there. And, like Spencer's toughs, it's ready when you are.

Speak, Assassin: In Defense of "Her"

"Her" is fantastic. Much of its dramatic power hinges on an exquisite scene that comes about 2/3s of the way through the film, when Theodore, played by Joaquin Phoenix, has lunch with Catherine, played by Rooney Mara, to hand over their divorce papers, for her to sign.

In a review called "Love Objects," Elaine Blair, writing for the New York Review of Books, attacks the scene for idealizing and objectifying Catherine.

But her critique misreads the scene, in my view. I posted the following comment to the review:

I took this scene to be shot in cinema's version of free indirect style: we aren't seeing Catherine as the world sees her but as Theodore sees her. Jonze's reliance on free indirect style, which he uses, I think, with extraordinary delicacy, applies to every moment that Catherine is on-screen. 

Throughout the film, Theodore embodies our tendency to idealize the past—particularly a past love. His professional life, his constant reminiscing, and, most poignantly, his relationship with Catherine all reflect this tendency. So it should come as no surprise that when Theodore actually comes face-to-face with his past, in the present, Jonze makes clear what Theodore is seeing: not the present but the past; the idealized object of his desire, flawless, eternally young—his Beatrice. 

The fact that Theodore can only see Catherine as a desired object, that he has lost the capacity to experience her as a desiring subject, is not a flaw in the film but its triumph: we contemplate together love's greatest loss, in which the beloved is now a memory – and, as a memory, no longer herself: an object, not a subject, forever.

Old Art, New World

Religion

At my age, no idea but "God is my neighbor" is of any use.

Now, the world on fire, God and I must strive together to save it, this Kingdom of Heaven: our home.

All That Is, by James Salter

It's not easy to get into the swing of a piece of deep mysticism when you just set out with a story. — D.H. Lawrence, Studies in Classic American Literature

Lawrence nails every novelist's first problem—the problem, really, of the novel: "You just set out with a story."

A great novel (by this means we recognize its greatness) transcends the embarrassment of its own gossip. We listen to it as we listen to a lover: entranced. Thinking, Luminous.

Story's importance diminishes to the degree that our love for the novel's voice—it's entrancing song, if you will—increases.

As with love, we look back on a great novel both humbled and further attuned to our connectedness to others. We find ourselves reminded that we always have been everyone.

We find ourselves. Re-minded.

James Salter has written two great novels: A Sport and a Pastime and Light Years. Both novels—still—open my chest and remove my battered heart and show it to me and say, "You see? No different. The universe. Listen."

To which I reply, without embarrassment: "Yes." 

All That Is, Salter's newest novel, is not a great novel. At the level of the sentence, it's better written than just about anything being published by an American novelist these days. For that reason alone I recommend it wholeheartedly. But unlike Salter's masterpieces, it does not exceed its story. And—but for a few scenes, which are, in a manner unique to Salter, luminous—that's all it is.

Fair Warning

I'm going to bring the Eye out of retirement—or, more accurately, out of its grave—shinier, happier—