Anarchy is Hyperbole

Fading fish

2012-01-25T22:46:00.004-05:00

Jack mackerel are almost gone, joining the ranks of other species. The Times has a great article about the tragedy:

Mr. Pineda, like everyone here, grew up with the bony, bronze-hued fish they call jurel, which roams in schools in the southern Pacific.

“It’s going fast,” he said as he looked at the 57-foot boat. “We’ve got to fish harder before it’s all gone.” Asked what he would leave his son, he shrugged: “He’ll have to find something else.”

This fish will soon be gone, along with many others. I guess we'll move on to the next species - if there is one. Just one more resource being devoured within a generation, I suppose.

Friedersdorf on the ReNewtening

2012-01-23T23:27:00.001-05:00

Always-smart and occasionally-correct Atlantic columnist Conor Friedersdorf has a great discussion of the mystifying return of a viable Newt Gingrich candidacy in the Republican primary.

When a candidate wins a primary, there are typically some pundits making the case that he or she is in fact the superior choice on the merits. But that isn't really true after Newt Gingrich's win in South Carolina. Even on the right, it's hard to find many people who'll defend his candidacy on those grounds. ...

On the right, it is Fox News, talk radio, and sites like RedState that enjoy the most influence over primary voters. Ever since President Obama was elected, these "thought leaders" have insisted that the most important reality for citizens to grasp is that we're being led by an Alinskyite Kenyan anti-colonialist eager to radically transform America with the help of a sycophantic, untrustworthy mainstream media. Yes, these "thought leaders" admitted that he's an American citizen, but it isn't like they've personally seen his birth certificate, if you catch their drift -- they're too busy cataloging the "apology tour" he's been on and his efforts to bring about Israel's destruction. ...

So why this exaggerated narrative, wherein the establishment foists Mitt Romney on an unwilling Republican primary electorate? I'll tell you. GOP partisans are eager to persuade themselves that the base is engaged in a sympathetic protest against malign elites, because the alternative is accepting that they've been manipulated by a flip-flopping pol who offered red meat andressentiment in place of substance. In fact, it is Tea Partiers and "thought-leaders" from their wing of the Republican Party who are as much to blame as anyone for Romney's shot at the nomination, and the emergence of Gingrich as his last serious obstacle to running against Obama. Just ponder the pathetic alternatives that non-moderate Republicans and movement conservatives produced in 2012: Sarah Palin, Donald Trump, Michele Bachmann, Rick Perry, and Herman Cain. As GOP voters are well aware, this is a flawed bunch, and their respective failures cannot be blamed on academics or scientists or media elites or secularists or any other conservative bogeyman.

Take a look.

Writing Adrift

2012-01-20T03:56:00.000-05:00

There's a great essay on the NYRB blog by Tim Parks about the current emphasis on disparate great writers of the world than on any serious study of context - i.e. the universal over the specific.

One of the functions of a canon or a national tradition has been to provide a familiar group of texts, stretching from past to present, constitutive of one’s own community and within which a writer could establish his position, signalling his similarity and difference from authors around and before him. Nuance is more telling than absolute novelty; the more the similarities, the more what difference there is will count. Hence, it might be more useful for a young English writer to be building up a knowledge of, say, Evelyn Waugh, Elizabeth Bowen, Anthony Powell, Barbara Pym, along with the writers they drew on and the later generation they inspired, than to be mixing Chinua Achebe with Primo Levi. This is not of course a reflection on the stature of these writers—it’s simply an observation that many of my students have read so disparately that they have little awareness of a body of texts tackling their own culture and within which they can place their writing.

Worth a read.

Fiordland and the Catlins

2012-01-19T01:21:00.000-05:00

For the holidays, Lizzie and I went to Fiordland and the Catlins, areas in the west and south of the South Island of New Zealand. It was pretty amazing.

The drive was a relatively short one, for two Americans used to formidable road trips. It was only three or four hours from our home in Dunedin to the little Fiordland town of Manapouri. At the time, we thought that the scenery during the drive was spectacular: rolling green hills, enormous skies, and hawks gliding regally above. But while that was certainly beautiful, it would turn out to only be a prelude to one of the most shockingly gorgeous areas to which I have ever been.

Our motel in Manapouri was the Manapouri Motel and Holiday Park. It was recommended by the Lonely Planet guide, and the generic name made me expect a generic little motel: a few little rooms, concrete shower, etc.

It was not a generic motel. It was a weird mish-mash of different cabins, chalets, and one old converted bus. They had all been added at different times over the decades the owners had been there. A row of old cars, all Morris Minors, stood to the rear next to the hand-built playground (underground tunnel, huge half-buried tire, rope swing). In other places, strange relics were piled up or leaning against a shed: a pile of old bicycles as tall as me, an Israeli cab with papier-mâché driver, and so on. It was strange and delightful. Lizzie took some of these amazing images.

Our cabin was the first one they ever put in. It was tiny and green, about the size of a queen-sized bed with a foot of room on either side - which happened to be exactly how it was composed: inside was a bed and just enough room to shuffle around it. On a shelf beneath the big windows were a tiny counter area, with a hot plate and electric kettle for the winter months when you might not want to leave the room. It smelled of wood, and was the soul of charming.

Manapouri itself is just a single street along the edge of Lake Manapouri. It's not much to speak of - one restaurant, three motels, a few shops. Sneeze, and you could miss it. But the lake! It was gorgeous.

Fiordland had been having a drought for three weeks, and it was getting pretty bad for them. That area of the country relies on its heavy rains and high water, and it was getting so dry that the waterfalls over the lakes were dusty and still. But it also meant that there was no mud, and that the sandflies - the much-dreaded insects that bite holes in the crowds of tourists - were entirely absent. Good for us, even if it was bad for Fiordland.

The next day, we took a walk out to a local hill. It was part of a section of land that had been cleared for development (the roads already in place) but was mercifully still empty. It had an amazing view.

My brother gave us a pair of binoculars for Christmas, and we put them to good use, searching for hawks and watching sheep laconically chew. I have been in New Zealand for more than a year, and still haven't gotten to pet a sheep. It's ridiculous. There are more than 40 million sheep, ten for every person, but not enough to let me pet one?

The sunset was awe-inspiring, night after night. Really, every bit of the scenery was like something out of a painting. Big skies, long white clouds, flat plains, blue lake, and golden mountains. I took many pictures, but it was frustrating: the scope of things was beyond anything that could be captured on film. I felt like I was trying to retain Guernica on a postage stamp.

We went to the town of Te Anau later in the afternoon. It was just down the road, fifteen minutes or so, but it was a completely different experience. It's the favorite destination in those parts, and it's a full-fledged town. It had a gas station, supermarket, paved stroll next to its own lake, and all sorts of restaurants and shops. Tourists crowded around, licking barbecue sauce off their fingers and fingering their maps. It was very nice and very well-kept and completely inferior to Manapouri. We went back.

The next day, we were set for a hike. We were going on the Circle Track, a nine kilometer hike to the top of a nearby mountain and down. To get to the start of it, you need to cross a river. You can hire a taxi, but Lizzie really wanted to hire a rowboat. We did, and she rowed us across like a professional. It was sunny and beautiful on the water, and we didn't rush. The current was with us, so it wasn't hard.

The Circle Track wasn't too bad of a hike. It was surprisingly well-maintained. Worn places were reinforced with wooden steps, and fallen trees had been cut up into sections with a chainsaw some poor ranger must have hauled up on his back.

One strange thing we immediately noticed were the birds. They seemed to have no fear of us, and flitted around a handsbreadth away from us. What the hell was wrong with these birds? Hadn't they learned any lessons from their cousins the now-extinct moa birds?

They were fantails, mostly, and they would flutter and bob around our heads. They were, as Lizzie commented, exactly the sort of bird you'd see in a Disney cartoon. If we had wanted to, we could have just reached out and caught ourselves some fluttery little lunch.

There weren't any other animals that we could see, although the beginning of the trail had a placard warning us that poison bait had been put down for stoats (an invasive pest).

It was a hard hike up - we seemed to have taken the steepest part first. Still, it was worth it when we reached the plateau at the top. There was a cliff, overhung with trees that hadn't gotten the message about their crumbling home. I felt a little queasy as I looked over the edge. It was a straight drop down for hundreds of feet, broken by rocks below.

The cliff provided not just vertigo, but also an amazing view over the mountains and valleys of Fiordland. They filmed part of Lord of the Rings here, and it's immediately apparent why they chose it.

The hike down was easy, and we were cool in the shade of the trees. We ate udon noodles back at the motel, prepared in the shared kitchen. Nearby, a raucous pair of kiwis vacationing from Auckland argued about the future price of mutton and the benefits of exporting to China, and a visiting Dutch couple offered me some of their beer and talked about human trafficking. As it grew dark, rain began to fall, restoring parched Fiordland and turning the Circle Track into mud. We'd been fortunate.

The next day was a big deal, because it was the day we'd booked our trip to Doubtful Sound. It was the only official, paid tour we were doing, and it was expensive. It felt like a serious investment, because Lizzie and I are loathe to spend money on anything so touristy. But this was one time we couldn't forge our own path, and after getting out there, we didn't regret the expense.

It was a complicated trip. First of all, we took a small boat from Pearl Harbor at the junction of the river and Lake Manapouri. It dropped us at a small information center near a big hydroelectric power plant. The company that owned the plant was still eager to demonstrate everything they did to preserve the local wildlife, because during the 1960s the Save Manapouri campaign became the first major environmental movement in New Zealand, dedicated to preserving Lake Manapouri from a proposal to raise its level by a hundred feet. That would have destroyed much of the surrounding area, and even though the proposal was canceled and the lake saved, Meridian Power still seemed pretty nervous about seeming like the villains.

The tour guide loaded us onto a bus, and we descended three kilometers down a gently curving road, down into the earth and into the power plant. The most remarkable event of the day was the bus driver's ability to completely turn the bus around within the narrow tunnel - at one point, he had literally six inches of clearance at either end as he juttered the bus to and fro in the dark tunnel.

What we actually could see of the Manapouri Power Station was one big room, supplied with seven generators that hummed loudly. An educational display, covered in smeary plastic, informed us about the wonders of the technology and the many workers who died during its miraculous construction, fifty years ago. A majority of the produced power goes to an aluminum smelting plant in Winton. By coincidence, we happened to have at home a detailed topographical map of Winton, bought for decoration from a secondhand booksellers.

After we left the power plant, it was over a hill and onto another, bigger boat. And then: Doubtful Sound. It's so named because Captain Cook, on his exploratory voyage nearby, decided not to sail into it and examine the area. He judged that it was doubtful whether or not the tides would permit him to leave, if he did.

Strictly speaking, it's not a sound at all. Doubtful Sound is a fjord, carved out by the scraping action of a glacier. The water is opaque, strangely enough, because the surrounding mountains receive a great deal of rain that is strained through the trees and moss that cling tenaciously to their surface. Like a big bowl of tea, Doubtful Sound is darkened with tannin leeched from that plant-life.

The tour guide explained to us that this was just part of the unusual environment here. The dark waters encourage certain algae, seaweed, and creatures to thrive just below the surface, when ordinarily they'd require the deep depths of the ocean. They're fooled into thinking they're a fathom from the air.

The trees that grow on the sides of the mountains are mounted onto what is almost bare rock. First, a thin moss darkens the stone. After it has thickened for years, a few shrubs take up root in the moss itself. And after the passage of decades, trees begin to sprout in the moss and shrubs. Eventually, a bit of stone slides, or the rain falls too heavily, or the tree gets too big. Then it falls free, scraping clean a great swath of mountain, so the cycle can begin once more.

One might think that such a remote place would be teeming with wildlife - fish, at the least. But it's a very delicate system, and fishing has always been heavily restricted. It wouldn't take much to throw things out of whack and eradicate the ecosystem here forever. There are seals, however, and a small group of them bobbed in the water just off the boat's prow.

We were lucky that it had rained the night before, because the waterfalls, which had been dry for weeks, had erupted back into life. Streams of water tumbled from the mountaintops, where clouds swept in from the ocean had been caught and drained.

All of that beauty was a little draining. Once you've seen a dozen stunning panoramas of primeval beauty, you start to feel like you need a nap. So that's what we did on the trip back.

The boat/bus/boat combination was repeated, although there was an interesting novelty in the swarm of insects that had taken refuge in the bus during our absence.

Worn out, Lizzie and I got fish and kumara chips from the one restaurant in Manapouri. We took a short walk, and watched the sun set.

I think that everything we'd done so far was pretty much what we expected: hikes, sunsets, and boat trips. But one thing that was sort of a surprise event was that the rodeo was in town in Te Anau. It was the New Zealand Rodeo Finals, and everyone had their spurs on.

As it turns out, rodeos in New Zealand are a lot like rodeos in America. There's roping, steer wrestling, barrel racing, bronc riding, and bull riding. There were tents with refreshments, an inflatable bouncy castle, and drunk women who were a little too old to be wearing belly shirts.

As is usual, they scheduled the most exciting things for the end of the competition. Lizzie and I ate doughnuts and watched the roping competitions, team roping competitions, and steer wrestling. A pair of grizzled old cowboys rode the arena, tracking freed steers out to the pen, but even they couldn't ride down all of them quickly enough, and the crowd got a good scare every so often when a scared steer, nostrils snorting, would crash bodily into the fence in a bid to escape.

I was able to sneak out around the back and see the pens. They were filled with cattle, horses, and sheep. Most of them had been trucked down from the northern part of the island, and some of the young steers had never seen a human being until the day before. They stomped in the dust and butted up against each other for comfort.

One curious event that I hadn't seen before was the children's sheep-riding competition. It was about what you'd imagine: they plunk a child on top of a sheep and let it go, and time how long he can hold on. As it turns out, children are just terrible at this. Each time, they'd go tumbling off onto their heads, more often than not bursting into tears and getting hastily carried out by one of the wranglers. They probably had lamb chops that night, for revenge.

We sat on the grass to one side of the arena. Sitting in front of us were six or seven little kids, all dressed up in their cowboy gear. It was cute to hear them talk about how scary they thought the bulls, or how pretty the horses. A child with a New Zealand accent could threaten to kill me and I'd still think it adorable.

With the rodeo over, our time in Fiordland was done. We packed up, regretfully, and headed back east. We'd be taking a looping route, though, swooping down through the Catlins. After all, who knew if we'd ever get a chance to get out here again?

Curio Bay was a great place we popped in to see. It's home to a whole fossilized forest, visible when the tide recedes. It was almost eerie, with what seemed to be long trees half-sunken into the rock. But even better were the penguin duo we spotted, heading from the bay back out to the ocean.

I am not a scientist, so I can't vouch for the exact measurements, but I am fairly sure that penguins are the second-best animal, coming just behind monkeys (objectively the best, by general agreement). These ones toddled their way along the rocks, hopping over gaps, on their way to go feed.

Our last stop was Parakaunui Falls, one of the icons of the Catlins. A short walk through the woods brought us there. The air was cool and heavy with the smell of the falling meltwater.

And then we headed home, finally, dirty and tired and happy. We'd finally gone on a trip around New Zealand, and seen the wildest and richest parts of the South Island. It was beautiful and majestic. But as always, we were happy to be home. We snuggled up under the blanket and went to sleep.

"Thank You for Smoking" and "Tamerlane"

2012-01-18T06:58:00.000-05:00

Thank You for Smoking, Christopher Buckley
Tamerlane, Jason Marozzi

Thank You for Smoking, Christopher Buckley

The word is "cute." This is a cute little book. It's mostly about politics, with a little morality and comedy thrown in. The protagonist, Nick Naylor, is the chief lobbyist for the tobacco industry at some uncertain but past time - late 80s, early 90s. He's charming, observant, and clever - and because of this, he somehow manages to be likable despite his job.

You may have seen the movie. It was also a cute production, mostly about politics with a little morality and comedy. The differences between the two are interesting and important.

The plot is mostly the same. The movie plays up the love interest, of course. But here the real change is that it curves up the dramatic arc. The scenes of Nick doing his job are shifted around, to fit neatly into open slots of the overall plot. The audience can't be cranked up on high all the time, so the insertion of some Lovable Roguery allows some relief for a few minutes while also characterizing the fact that Nick is actually good at his evil career. The events of the book, in contrast, are spread out evenly and sedately, with a dramatic arc that only slumps up a bit.

Another interesting change is that the movie has a moral, whereas the book decidedly does not. The latter is more of an amoral story - the protagonist is fully aware that he is aiding and abetting villains, but doesn't care very much: his mantra is, "I do it to pay the mortgage," and he means it. The movie amends this proposition, which is probably accurate but is certainly uninteresting, and gins up an actual intelligent moral. One might expect renunciation and reformation, but instead Nick Naylor conceives of the ancient defense of the lawyer: everyone deserves a voice.

I very rarely say this, but you would be better off watching the movie. It takes everything that is good about the book, tightens it, and sharpens it. The writing, serviceable but unremarkable, does nothing to redeem it. Skip it.

Tamerlane, Jason Marozzi

It's never a good sign when an author's excerpts make you want to drop his book and pick up another. Yet that is exactly what happened when I was reading Tamerlane, Jason Marozzi's biography of the Tartar conqueror. Marozzi's tepid, poorly-organized account is enlivened only by his lengthy excerpts of the 15th-century Syrian historian Ahmad Muhammad ibn Arabshah. I strongly recommend you pick up the latter, and leave Marozzi on the shelf.

It's not that Marozzi lacks material. Timur, also known as Tamerlane or Tamburlaine (a corruption of "Timur the Lame"), lived a very interesting life. It was sensationalized in Christopher Marlowe's 1587 play, but the real thing was even more provocative. Timur was a nobody in his youth, just a member of a hill tribe in a remote Uzbeki valley. He rose to warlord on the power of his own sword and bow, and then led his tribe to war against all rivals. By the end of his life, he ruled most of Central Asia, having sacked such glorious cities as Sarai, Baghdad, Delhi, and Damascus. He never lost, personally led his army in every campaign, and at the time of his death was marching on China. More interested in conquest than rule, he repeatedly reconquered certain cities (the kingdom of Georgia rebelled a half-dozen times) and the resulting punishments defy belief. When the city of Istafan rose against him, he slaughtered almost everyone within the gates, departing with 28 towers of 1,500 heads left outside the city gates. And in Isfizan, Timur demonstrated his vengeance by building a living tower in the center of the city, constructing it of cement and the living bodies of thousands of screaming rebels. This is lively stuff.

Timur favored the nickname, Lord of the Fortunate Conjunction. According to legend, all of the signs of the skies were perfectly aligned at the moment of his birth, presaging his future greatness. But in reality, he seems to have completely ignored superstition and religion in his quest for martial supremacy. He was nominally a Muslim, and left the mosques and minarets in Samarkand to prove it, but his creed figured in his life mostly as an excuse for war: he attack infidels for denying the faith, and Muslims for being insufficiently pure, as suited his immediate needs. The ancient beliefs of the Mongols and the new faith of Islam joined such notions as mercy, governance, and the solemnity of an oath in the dustbin when Timur took up his sword.

Indeed, Timur seems to have lived for war. He won his battles because he adhered to the timeless principles of successful combat. He knew that speed was essential, and so he maneuvered his armies by forced marches over incredible distances, surprising and overtaking his enemies. And he used social power to as great effect as martial might, intimidating armies into submission as frequently as he engaged with them and wooing away enemy allies into his camp. Alexander, Caesar, and Napoleon all acted according to these same principles, and it makes for extremely interesting and exciting material. There's no reason for it to be tedious.

Neither Marozzi's expertise nor his grasp of the larger perspective is in question. He clearly knows what he's talking about, and his mastery of the complicated world of the medieval steppes-tribes is impressive. Timur arrived on the scene a century and a half after Genghis Khan trampled the world under his army's hooves, and the splintered Mongol Empire yielded dozens of nuanced peoples entangled in a massy knot of political nonsense. Marozzi never hesitates, clearly describing the byzantine relations of these tribes without muddying the scene.

The problem is that Marozzi is not a very good organizer. He writes from formula, following the recipe most modern biographers adopt. He opens with an exciting scene from the middle of his subject's life: in this case, Timur's brilliant battle against the Ottomans. Having baited the hook, he then describes a little history that preceded his subject's birth, before starting the biography in earnest. As he discusses the life of Timur, he regularly flashes forward to his own travels and descriptions of the ancient battlegrounds - now dusty and desolate towns of Iran, Afghanistan, and Pakistan. Slapping his book together by rote, Marozzi should be on safe ground. But the execution of the recipe is poor.

Timur's life was perfectly linear. Almost every year, he would wait out the winter, then march on an enemy in spring. He struck out at his main opponent, pausing to crush some rebels and build some head-pyramids, and after smashing their biggest army and most glorious city, he'd sack it thoroughly and send back all their artisans and poets to his own capital of Samarkand. This pattern is continuous from the time he assumes command of his first army until the moment he dies, en route to the Middle Kingdom. It should not be hard to tell this story clearly, even while doing that hackneyed back-and-forth to the present. Yet time and time again Marozzi bungles the transition and mucks up the story. Our perspective zips from country to country and from time to time - in telling of the sacking of Herat, Timur is old, then young, then dead, then young again - and it is done so badly that it is difficult to follow.

The writing itself is also problematic. His prose is correct and clear. But it's also uninteresting, especially when set next to the words of Achmad ibn Arabshah, a contemporary of Timur who saw the conqueror sack his home of Damascus, and whose text is alive with hate and awe. A reader can't help but compare the lukewarm porridge of Marozzi to Arabshah's fiery broth, and Marozzi comes out the worse for it.

My copy of Timur by Achmad Muhammad ibn Arabshah has been ordered from a library on the North Island, and I'm looking forward to it. I'll also be glad to return Marozzi's Tamerlane, which you should avoid.

Schoolin'

2012-01-15T21:13:00.000-05:00

A few months ago, I finished and submitted my dissertation for my postgraduate diploma at Otago. I wrote about Nabokov's Pale Fire and how the oft-overlooked index to the text was central to reconciling the conflicting elements of the book. I got an "A" on my dissertation. If you'd like, you can even read it, although it might be too academic to be interesting. A sample:

My approach to the text comes thorough an appreciation of its structure, as suggested by Nabokov's translation and commentary on Pushkin's Eugene Onegin, which acknowledges the unique information provided in the Index to Pale Fire, and offers a new synthesis. I build on the spiral pattern found by Brian Boyd in the process of re-reading, but - setting aside the question of the “real” author - my synthetic reading focuses on resolving the tension between the differing voices of Shade and Kinbote.

I'm pretty happy with it, and it helped me graduate. But it's over and done with, and I'm moving on to new work. Last week I was officially accepted into the one-year thesis program for an M.A., and a whole new pile of research awaits.

For my thesis, the topic will be a study and comparison of the different versions of Ernest Hemingway's A Moveable Feast, his wonderful account of his early life in the Paris of the twenties. No such study of the different editions exists, and the background behind the editions is complicated.

The original version, published in 1964, was assembled from the author's drafts after his death by his fourth wife, Mary Walsh Hemingway. However, the critic Gerry Brenner's 1982 paper, "Are We Going to Hemingway's Feast?", pointed out numerous editorial decisions that were questionable and that seemed to deviate significantly from what the author seems to have intended in his manuscripts. For example, Mary Walsh removed several favorable references to Hadley Richardson Hemingway, the author's first wife. Brenner suggested a reordering of the chapters in the text, for a more coherent narrative arc, as well as some other changes.

This edition of the text was followed in 2009 by a new edition, edited by Hemingway's grandson Sean Hemingway (whose grandmother was Hemingway's second wife, Pauline Pfeiffer). Sean Hemingway made numerous changes to the text, including some of the same reordering recommended by Brenner as well as stylistic shifts, changing the narration to second person - and adding more material about his grandmother.These changes have resulted in at least three versions of A Moveable Feast, which all differ significantly from each other!

While there have been some published responses to Brenner and some reviews of the 2009 edition, however, there has not been a serious critical analysis of the impact and import of the changes. The most in-depth examination has been a review published that year that used a computer to produce a list of the changes between editions, chunked up like in a list but without serious discussion.

Like much of Hemingway's later, unfinished work, A Moveable Feast represents a raw text that touches deeply on some of his most important qualities: his pettiness towards rivals, his deeply-held issue with andogyny and sexuality, and his philosophy of art. I feel that an analysis of the different ways in which these traits are portrayed in the editions of one of his most famous works would be valuable. And because I have loved Hemingway for some years, devouring all of his work and returning to it repeatedly, as well as examining much of the critical research (I have been a member of the Hemingway Society and subscriber to The Hemingway Review for years), it's also going to be fun.

Away I go!

"Preface to Shakespeare," "William Morris by Himself," "Quicksilver," "The Confusion, "The System of the World," "The Ten Pleasures of Marriage," and "The Big Short."

2012-01-11T00:37:00.000-05:00

Preface to Shakespeare, Samuel Johnson
William Morris by Himself, Gillian Naylor
Quicksilver, The Confusion, and The System of the World, Neal Stephenson
The Ten Pleasures of Marriage, A. Marsh
The Big Short, Michael Lewis

Preface to Shakespeare, Samuel Johnson

Samuel Johnson has always seemed to me to strike an interesting balance between the common wisdom and uncommon insight, both rendered in language with the clean and smooth lines of a yacht. His essays and the word-for-word recounting by biographer James Boswell are all a pleasure to read, if only to see his craft. The same skill is evident in his Preface to Shakespeare.

In this lengthy essay on the Bard, Johnson spends much time in criticism and general commentary. And he has a great deal of criticism! Here's a brief selection:

[Shakespeare] sacrifices virtue to convenience, and is so much more careful to please than to instruct, that he seems to write without any moral purpose. ... The plots are often so loosely formed, that a very slight consideration may improve them, and so carelessly pursued, that he seems not always fully to comprehend his own design. ... It may be observed, that in many of his plays the latter part is evidently neglected. ... He had no regard to distinction of time or place, but gives to one age or nation, without scruple, the customs, institutions, and opinions of another, at the expence not only of likelihood, but of possibility.

There's a deal more, and it's surprisingly harsh.

Johnson reflects on what he considers to be the nature of a play and the goals of a playwright, and measures Shakespeare against his own definition. This leads to his consideration and dismissal of the classical unities - the ancient notion that a play should take place in one place, within one day, and describe one plotline. Johnson explains that the unities exist for the sake of the audience's suspension of disbelief, so that they wouldn't have to try to believe that they had just witnessed one scene in Athens and the next in Corinth, all on one stage. But this is silly, we are told, for no audience ever really believed they were watching Athens in the first place.

Such [criticism] is the triumphant language with which a critick exults over the misery of an irregular poet, and exults commonly without resistance or reply. It is time therefore to tell him, by the authority of Shakespeare, that he assumes, as an unquestionable principle, a position, which, while his breath is forming it into words, his understanding pronounces to be false. It is false, that any representation is mistaken for reality; that any dramatick fable in its materiality was ever credible, or, for a single moment, was ever credited.

The essay soon shifts into praise, constituting another well-conceived list of virtues. Interestingly, Johnson includes a frank admission that the tradition of veneration has yielded a fair share of our adulation for Shakespeare.

Yet it must be at last confessed, that as we owe every thing to him, he owes something to us; that, if much of his praise is paid by perception and judgement, much is likewise given by custom and veneration. We fix our eyes upon his graces, and turn them from his deformities, and endure in him what we should in another loath or despise. If we endured without praising, respect for the father of our drama might excuse us; but I have seen, in the book of some modern critick, a collection of anomalies which shew that he has corrupted language by every mode of depravation, but which his admirer has accumulated as a monument of honour.

The essay is followed by some very brief notes on a handful of plays. They are interesting but not spectacular, and surpassed by any modern critical edition's most casual comment. No, the focus should be on the general preface. It's a magnificent essay, and I was tempted to include even more excerpts to illustrate Johnson's turn of phrase and clarity of thought. If you are interesting in Shakespeare, then you absolutely must read this fair and shrewd general assessment that holds its own even today.

William Morris by Himself, Gillian Naylor

In my ongoing quest to better my understanding of art, I returned to a favorite: William Morris, renaissance man of the 19th century. Morris was the first translator for volumes of Norse poetry, the rediscoverer of ancient English weaving techniques, one of the first authors of what we now know as fantasy, the preeminent socialist thinker of his day, and an influential printer and designer of wallpaper (many of his patterns remain popular). And somewhere in amongst all that, he found time to help be a leading member of the Pre-Raphaelite art movement.

The Pre-Raphaelites sought for truth in art and a return to the subtle depictions of reality that they thought had dominated before the reign of Raphael's sculptured ideals (thus their name). While not actually a prolific painter or artist, Morris was pivotal in conceiving and arguing for their goals. Author Gillian Naylor uses a combination of descriptive biography, excerpts from Morris' writing and correspondence, and images from his oeuvre to construct a rich picture of a man whose productivity, idealism, and influence make him an underappreciated legend. There are adorable little sketches of himself in Iceland, with the rotund artist soberly riding a donkey, looking for all the world like an unhappy beach ball. There are descriptions and illustrations of the houses he designed. And Naylor's well-referenced and intelligent commentary fills in any gaps in Morris' own account - like his wife's flagrant infidelity with fellow Pre-Raphaelite Dante Gabriel Rosetti. And the oversized book's reproductions of Morris' iconic wallpaper patterns and his elaborate needlework do them every service. Check it out.

Quicksilver, The Confusion, and The System of the World, Neal Stephenson

A couple of years ago, I read Neal Stephenson's The Diamond Age. I had been hearing a lot about Stephenson, and so I wanted to check out his work. The Diamond Age, a tale in a future dominated by nanotechnology and a splintered world of political-cultural pseudostates. It was a remarkable story in many ways, not least in Stephenson's laserlike focus on the consequences of his futuristic world and a plot that was both intricate and yet easy to follow. Unfortunately, it seemed heartless and left me untouched. It was a great book, but rather like a vision of finely-meshed gears and levers, ticking and spinning fluidly: impressive, but it didn't mean anything to me.

Stephenson's The Baroque Cycle, a trilogy published in 2003 and 2004, is one of the best examples I have ever seen of the evolution of an author. It retains all of the precision and intricacy, but with the addition of a wonderful cast of characters that seized me and pulled me in. I was chuckling and cheering as I read. It was as if Stephenson had set his spinning gears and fine machinery into a watch: it was just as impressive and perfect, but now it was also meaningful.

Rather than the future, Stephenson has set this trilogy in the Age of Enlightenment, during the reigns of the Stuarts and the Sun King. Soldiers bearing swords and muskets wage war all over Europe, and the new world of science has erupted in glory with men such as Christopher Wren, Isaac Newton, Robert Hooke and Gottfried Leibnitz. These historical figures join a handful of fictional characters to tell a story that is a scientific history, picaresque adventure, and mystery. They are truly amazing books.

I should here insert a warning: The Baroque Trilogy is not going to appeal to everyone. There are long discussions of philosophy and antiquated scientific theories, and the swashbuckling pirate scenes are mingled with economic intrigues, where the triumphant battle is fought in a stock exchange with scraps of paper. I happen to be fascinated with all of these things, but many people will find the pages of alchemical speculation or political conflict to be tedious.

However, even someone who doesn't care for the drier content will still admire the extraordinary way in which the books are constructed. Throughout each book are little mysteries, clever conundrums and riddles that an attentive reader can discover. They aid the natural arcs, which climax in each volume but build towards a seamless overall story. It was a pleasure just to appreciate Stephenson's craft.

I am probably going overboard here, but I was just fascinated by these books. They fit my tastes like a glove, even if another might find them a bit uncomfortable with their esoteric topics. If you enjoy antique science, economic and courtly intrigue, or - above all- rollicking picaresque stories, you couldn't do better than to pick The Baroque Trilogy up.

The Ten Pleasures of Marriage, A. Marsh

This 1682 satire is a prolonged mockery of perceived feminine foibles and the unhappiness of the married man. Clever for its time and interesting for historical reasons, now its humor rings hollow and its jests seem embittered and unpleasant.

The Nuptial estate trailing along with it so many cares, troubles & calamities, it is one of the greatest admirations, that people should be so earnest and desirous to enter themselves into it. In the younger sort who by their sulphurous instinct, are subject to the tickling desires of nature, and look upon that thing called Love through a multiplying glass, it is somewhat pardonable: But that those who are once come to the years of knowledge and true understanding should be drawn into it, methinks is most vilely foolish, and morrice fooles caps were much fitter for them, then wreaths of Lawrel. Yet stranger it is, that those who have been for the first time in that horrible estate, do, by a decease, cast themselves in again to a second and third time. ...
And tho not only the real truth of this, but ten times more, is as well known to every one, as the Sun shine at noon day; nevertheless we see them run into it with such an earnestness, that they are not to be counselled, or kept back from it, with the strength of Hercules; despising their golden liberty, for chains of horrid slavery.

The book is constructed with a set of ten pleasures of the married state, such as "The Woman goes to buy houshold-stuf" or "Care is taken for the Child and Child-bed linnen." Each chapter is followed with a satirical description and screed about how these purported delights are actually terrible toil.

To go forward then. See how serious your dearest is, with Jane the Semstress, contriving how much linnen she must buy to make all her Child-bed linnen as it ought to be! how diligently she measures the Beds, Bellibands, Navel clouts, shirts, and all other trincom, trancoms! and she keeps as exact an account of the ells, half ells, quarters, and lesser measures, as if she had gone seven years to school to learn casting of an account.

Four centuries have not been kind to the material. The jokes follow a few standard formulas. They are long lists of extravagances that cost a lot, as above (oh ho women spend so much money!); jokes about how women are actually really unpleasant (always hitting you, amiright fellas?); or dated name-jokes about women named Goody Dirty-buttocks or Lord Drinkfirst.

O thrice happy new Father that have gotten such a prudent diligent and carefull Nurse for your Child-bed wife! what great Pleasure is this! And behold, by this delicate eating and drinking, your Dearest begins from day to day to grow stronger and stronger; insomuch that she begins to throw the Pillow at you, to spur you up to be desirous of coming to bed to her: Yea, she promiseth you, that before she is out of Child-bed, she will make you possessor of another principal and main Pleasure.

Skip it, unless you are curious about how much times have changed and humor has improved.

The Big Short, Michael Lewis

The Big Short is Michael Lewis' exploration of the story of the subprime mortgage crisis, the financial disaster that helped explode the world economy during the 2000s. When it was published in 2010, it caused a lot of discussion because Lewis goes to great pains to root out the deceit and naked greed that led to the problem, revealing the crimes hidden behind the dense financial legerdemain. The subprime crisis was very complicated by design: the more opaque the criminals and idiots involved made it, the more money they were able to create (in the short term). It is a testament to Lewis' considerable skill that he renders the whole mess into an intelligible story without losing detail.

The text follows a few investors and salespeople, laying out their backgrounds with an interesting effort to humanize them. They're characters just as much as they're real people, and Lewis takes pains to describe their personal evolution alongside the evolution of the housing bubble. As they slowly realize that housing is drastically overvalued all over the nation, some of them decide to try to short the housing market as a whole - i.e. they decide to play a bet with insurance companies that the the price of housing will decline nationwide. Since no mechanism existed to place this bet, they looked into shorting the debt of mortgage holders specifically, and stumbled upon a new market that had just sprung up in credit default swaps.

Credit default swaps were curious inventions, a product of arcane rules from the rating agencies and the deliberate deceit of the financial agencies. They took a few mortgages of people with good credit, which are worth a lot and get an excellent rating, because such people are likely to pay their mortgage. They added in a huge stack of mortgages of people with very poor credit ("subprime"), which ordinarily a worth much less to buyers of debt because the mortgage-holders are unlikely to actually make their payments. Ordinarily, such a combination would be rightly judged as an overall poor investment and so it wouldn't be worth much: why pay full price for a big stack of debt when you know only a small percentage of the debtors will make good their portion? But thanks to the complicated shenanigans of the financial agencies - Goldman Sachs being the major villain at work here, though everyone else followed along like vampire-lemmings - the ratings agencies like Standard & Poors, stocked full of people too stupid to work at Goldman, were tricked into giving that big bundle of mixed debt a good rating.

The hero-investors of Lewis' book were among a very small number of people who learned some of what was happening. Shocking and disgusted, they immediately sold short (bet against) these stacks of confused debt, even as the deceived buyers blithely kept on buying them from Goldman and the associated villains. Eventually, of course, it all came tumbling down. The good guys made money, the bad guys got bailed out under cover of the obfuscations that had made their deception possible, and everyone else was screwed as the markets came crashing down under the weight of bad debt that had been sold as good debt.

The weakness of Lewis' book is in the third act, when the reader is waiting for that crash. By the middle of The Big Short, the stage is set for the crisis. But it doesn't arrive. Things keep getting worse: more sour debt is sold, more people are fooled, more money is stuffed into the pockets of vile men. The tension just gets too high, and a hundred pages pass before the climax. The dominoes are lined up for far too long before they get toppled.

This weakness might have been dictated by actual events - things really did just keep getting worse for an astonishingly long time. But I suspect that Lewis could have compressed the middle of his story and improved the structure of his book, without losing much or any of the true history. The art of nonfiction is the art of selection.

Still, this is a minor flaw in what is otherwise a masterful exposition of the very muddled subprime swindle. It's not only an important thing to understand - it essentially started the recession - but Lewis' recounting of the staggering greed at work is interesting to read. You'll walk away informed and infuriated. Take a look.

"Republicans for Revolution" by Mark Lilla in NYRB

2011-12-22T19:36:00.001-05:00

Mark Lilla of Columbia has a great essay in the current New York Review of Books, eviscerating Corey Robin's history of conservatism in The Reactionary Mind and laying out a more clear-eyed view of the history and current state of the dichotomy of "liberal" and "conservative."

“Liberal” and “conservative” first became labels for political tendencies in the aftermath of the French Revolution. Like all polemical terms their meaning and usage shifted around in partisan debate, but the philosophical distinction between them was settled by the mid-nineteenth century, thanks in large part to Edmund Burke. After the Revolution, Burke argued that what really separated its partisans and opponents were not atheism and faith, or democracy and aristocracy, or even equality and hierarchy, but instead two very different understandings of human nature. Burke believed that, since human beings are born into a functioning world populated by others, society is—to use a large word he wouldn’t—metaphysically prior to the individuals in it. The unit of political life is society, not individuals, who need to be seen as instances of the societies they inhabit.

Check out the whole thing.

Foers

2011-12-22T17:30:00.000-05:00

I've known for a while that the Foer family is ridiculously cool. Franklin Foer was the editor of The New Republic for six years and one of their best writers, and remains an editor-at-large. He has also written some great pieces for New York and Slate. His brother is Jonathan Safran Foer, author of Eating Animals, the book that finished for me what Peter Singer's Animal Liberation started, and whose Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close is being made into a new movie after the success of the adaptation of his Everything Is Illuminated. Another brother is Joshua Foer, author of Moonwalking with Einstein, an account of his experiences as a "Memory Champion" of competitive memorization.

But if that's not enough, there's now a new profile out in the NYT about their father, Albert A. Foer, a crusading anti-trust lawyer who has spent his life fighting monopolies and who recently managed to stymie AT&T's acquisition of T-Mobile.

Goddamnit it, Foers! Give some of the rest of us a chance!

Sex and the City: Retrospective from a Latecomer

2011-12-17T07:07:00.000-05:00

It's been impossible to be unaware of Sex and the City. Even if you didn't watch the show on HBO, you inevitably heard about the surges of popularity for things like the nameplate necklaces (modeled after the protagonist's "Carrie" necklace). But even more than that, Sex and the City was the show discussed around the water cooler, neatly arriving in 1998 just as Seinfeld ended its reign. Even after the actual television program ended - after seven years of critical acclaim - two movies sustained the franchise's cultural relevance with great success.

But I'd never really watched it.

I was aware of the basics, of course, and I had seen a few episodes. A New York columnist and her three friends try to balance love and their lives, etc. It didn't seem so remarkable, and the segments I had watched were tedious. I admit that I just chalked it up as a "chick thing," a short-sighted and stupid judgment. Virtually every other television show is created and marketed for men, yet women look past that to see the real value behind the idiotic window-dressing. Why should I think that Sex and the City, ostensibly designed to appeal to women, would be magically opaque? Did I think that Carrie Bradshaw emitted testicle-destroying radiation or something?

Over the past few months, my wife and I have watched the entire series. And it is good.

I'll start with the obvious: the theme of female empowerment. Carrie, Charlotte, Miranda, and Samantha each approach modern feminism in their own way. The artificial nature of their distinct paths is a little silly (they each have their own shtick), but only in the manner of all "wacky bunch of friends" shows. Miranda is a vocal and sardonic working woman, Samantha is sexually liberated, Charlotte pursues traditional goals with a clear sense of her own worth and stature, and Carrie pursues a protagonist's muddled blend of the three extremes.

The less obvious is even more interesting. Consider the fact that the girls have no apparent family and few other close friends. Their closest bonds are with each other, a fact driven home partway through the series when they worry about ever finding a soulmate. "We will be each other's soulmates," Carrie assures the others in the second season, as they hold hands. The strength of their friendship, as performed for the audience, is derived in part from the lack of other social webs. No parents, no siblings, and not even any friends from work. They have each other, and the show emphasizes that by removing any competition. It's intentional and clever.

Sex and the City has other carefully-designed elements, as well. The first season's plots are all reflective of the larger growth experienced by the characters later in the series: Carrie first becomes involved with Mr. Big but struggles over trying to resolve long-term happiness from short-term passion; Miranda dates sad-sack Scooter, a pleasant but unremarkable fellow whose steadiness appeals to her (a carbon copy of husband Steve); Samantha tries to work around her focus on sex to forge a real relationship, as with Smith later in the show; and Charlotte dates a commitment-minded man whose own ideals about the future don't mesh with her own, despite expectations. The show's creator and writers had a plan with where they wanted to go, writ small during those first episodes in a way that's almost funny (Scooter and Steve are indistinguishable).

The satisfying nature of the show comes from striking a balance between meeting audience expectations and confounding them. It's not fun to watch something completely predictable. A character's development, the future of the plot, the setting - something has to be different. Yet at the same time, it's uncomfortable to always be surprised and never get an anticipated pay-off. In large part this is where Lost went wrong: when everything changes all the time and there don't seem to be any real rules, then it's hard to keep yourself oriented and know what is meaningful. Sex and the City balanced these two needs of the audience. For example, Charlotte does eventually find marital bliss and gives us that warm satisfaction, but in a way that is novel enough to be interesting.

There are flaws, of course. The character of Carrie is the most prominent one. It's hard to tell how deliberate is her appalling nature - did the writers intend for me to hate her? (I doubt it.)

She is terribly, surprisingly self-centered. If a conversation stops focusing on her, drifting to some other topic, she inevitably makes a rude comment or simply demands to be the center of attention again. My wife began mocking this halfway through the second season, chanting "Me me me me me!" whenever Carrie interrupted another character or steered discussion back to her needs.
Carrie is not a very good friend, and is just a bad person in general. Of course there are big things, like when she cheats on Aidan with a married man. But every episode is also like a display of her essential thoughtlessness. For example, near the end of the last season she invites her friends to meet her beau, and gay buddy Stanford is just delighted - until she tells him that he can't come. So why invite the girls in front of him? Just to rub it in the face of a guy she consistently treats more like an accessory than a friend?
Given what we hear and see, she cannot possibly be a very good columnist. This is hard to forget when a large part of the fifth season is devoted to her great success as a writer. Nearly every column pivots on the phrase, "I had to wonder...", followed by the metaphor du jour ("...are all the good men taken?", "...can any woman have it all?"). That is not a formula for literary success.

The problematic protagonist aside, it's a great show both because of its importance and on its own merits. If you haven't seen it, perhaps for the same reason as me, you are doing yourself a disservice. I have seen it all, and I regret that it took me so long. Luckily, I'm still not done: I still have two movies to get through.

BTT: Character or Plot?

2011-12-15T03:40:00.003-05:00

This week's Booking Through Thursday asks:

What’s more important to you? Real, three-dimensional, fleshed-out fascinating characters? Or an amazing, page-turning plot?(Yes, I know, they are both important. But if you had to pick one as being more important than the other?

My brief reply is that when I think about some of the books I enjoy the most, such as A Confederacy of Dunces or Les Miserables, I realize that the attribute that I enjoy the most is not their plot (though it may be intricate or magnificent) but the amazing and full characters. This is not to say that plot is unimportant, but characters are vital.

Symbols in Literature

2011-12-15T03:40:00.001-05:00

It has been common in many school classrooms for teachers to direct children to look through a story and find the symbols, selecting out colors or objects or expressions that are supposed to have greater meaning. And when it is time for composition, it sometimes occurs that teachers direct children to insert some symbolism into their writing. They might say, "But what is the meaning of the bowl of fruit on the table? Fertility?"

This is not a good practice, and badly misunderstands the role and genesis of good symbolism.

Mary McCarthy, a sage of literature and an author in her own right, once found great offense in a student's attempt to cram symbols into an already-completed short story. The student thought that her message had to be encoded into the thing, along the lines of "green curtains indicate envy." McCarthy was astonished to realize that this view of symbolism was becoming increasingly common at the time (1954) and wrote an essay for Harper's that remains one of the best set of ideas on the subject. An excerpt from her "Settling the Colonel's Hash":

In any work that is truly creative, I believe, the writer cannot be omniscient in advance about the effects that he proposes to produce. The suspense in a novel is not only in the reader, but in the novelist himself, who is intensely curious too about what will happen to the hero. Jane Austen may know in a general way that Emma will marry Mr. Knightley in the end (the reader knows this too, as a matter of fact); the suspense for the author lies in the how, in the twists and turns of circumstance, waiting but as yet unknown, that will bring the consummation about. Hence, I would say to the student of writing that outlines, patterns, arrangements of symbols may have a certain usefulness at the outset for some kinds of minds, but in the end they will have to be scrapped. If the story does not contradict the outline, overrun the pattern, break the symbols, like an insurrection against authority, it is surely a still birth. The natural symbolism of reality has more messages to communicate than the dry Morse code of the disengaged mind.

The rest of the essay is very much worth your time. McCarthy expertly picks apart the faulty approach that sees reading and writing symbolism as a procedure divorced from actual reading and writing, and proceeds to give a brilliant exegesis for a better way of thinking. Symbolism is recognition and implementation of a pattern in a work that highlights, contradicts, or complements a theme of the text - not a special secret code, like the Victorian Language of Flowers.

McCarthy was not alone in thinking this way. In 1963, a boy in San Diego, Bruce McAllister, got into an argument with his English teacher over her advocacy of the crude notions excoriated by McCarthy. After publishing his first short story, he decided to settle the disagreement and began mailing off a questionnaire about symbolism to numerous famous writers, with such questions as "Do you consciously, intentionally plan and place symbolism in your writing?" Some big names wrote back, including John Updike, Jack Kerouac, Ray Bradbury, and Norman Mailer. Almost universally, they avowed that they did not willfully insert symbols. Only Ayn Rand differed, refusing to answer the questions at all and instead replying with a terse admonishment about terminology ("This is not a definition, it is not true - and, therefore, your questions do not make sense.")

Ernest Hemingway famously scorned deliberate symbolism, declaring about The Old Man and the Sea:

No good book has ever been written that has in it symbols arrived at beforehand and stuck in. ... I tried to make a real old man, a real boy, a real sea and a real fish and real sharks. But if I made them good and true enough they would mean many things.

There are exceptions to these sorts of codes. In her essay, McCarthy rightly notes the deliberate and obvious symbolism in Ulysses. But this is an advanced and unusual thing, and no more suited for everyday use than the blank and unpunctuated verse of E.E. Cummings (not that such difficulty ever stopped a grade-school poet from abandoning rhyme at the earliest opportunity). Hemingway, for example, did sometimes engage in acts of premeditated symbolism, as when Santiago (the titular Old Man) sees the sharks in the water:

"Ay," he said aloud. There is no translation for this word and perhaps it is just a noise such as a man might make, involuntarily, feeling the nail go through his hands and into the wood.

But I believe that the reason why all authors, Hemingway especially, decried the practice is not that they did not find it occasionally useful, but that it was part of a runaway trend that they couldn't help but find distasteful and offensive. They didn't want to encourage a view of literature that reduced it to a game of hide-and-seek or an elaborate code.

That leads me to my conclusion: the literary technique of symbolism is like most other literary techniques. Anyone can do them, but they are very difficult to do well, and are better achieved through an organic effort to just write the best you can. Nor should a reader be trying to decrypt a story by identifying the meanings of colors or the bowl of fruit on the protagonist's table: instead, read the text and find the meaning and themes, and only afterwards try to work out the techniques that got you there. That's symbolism done right.

BTT: Mystery or Love Story?

2011-12-09T05:53:00.001-05:00

This week's Booking Through Thursday asks:

All things being equal, which would you prefer–a mystery? Or a love story?

"All things being equal" means an equally well-written book, so we're talking something like Love in the Time of Cholera, not The Vicar's Wife and Gordon the Stable-Boy's Rippling Stomach. And on that basis, I have no preference. And this is not the false elevation of the aloof, but just a raw lack of affection for either genre in and of themselves. I am fond of very bad ideological books and high-concept science fiction, but I have simply no feelings about mysteries or romance.

BTT: Mood Reading

2011-12-01T03:48:00.001-05:00

This week's Booking Through Thursday asks:

Do you find that your mood affects the things you read? Like, if you’re in a bad mood, do you tend to indulge in reading that will support it or do you try to read things that will cheer you up? Do you pick different types of books on dreary, rainy days than you do on bright sunny ones?
For that matter, does your mood color what you’re reading, so that a funny book isn’t so funny or a serious one not so deep?

My book selection seldom depends on my mood. Instead, I seek variety. I like to alternate fiction and nonfiction, fluff and epic, Russian and American, and so on. If I decide not to read the latest celebrity biography or a dense history, it's almost inevitably because I have read something similar recently and I just want to switch up. There's probably some element of guilt involved... if I spend all Saturday giddily plowing through several volumes of pablum, I feel as though I've actively wasted my time. Plus, bad books are like television: seductive and brain-destroying.

Naturally, my choices do affect my mood, but not very often. I might put down something like The Life and Times of Michael K. or A Stolen Life, heave a heavy sigh, and comment, "Well, that was depressing"... but usually I'm smiling and humming again ten minutes later.

Caruba, Mythmonger

2011-11-25T17:11:00.001-05:00

Alan Caruba's latest column is too terrible to let pass unnoticed.

The 2012 national elections will be held on November 6 and I naturally want to get out ahead of all the other pundits and their predictions about its outcome. I cannot tell you who the Republican winner will be, but I can tell you that Barack Hussein Obama will be known as a former President.

He has most certainly turned out to be the biggest loser—a turkey—to hold the office of president. I can look back over my writings in 2008 and say “I told you so!” to anyone who voted for Obama.

Let's remember that this same guy who is looking forward to gloating over Obama's loss is the same guy who also confidently predicted that Obama would resign before the end of his first term, and before that predicted that Obama would be "toast" in the 2008 election ("In the end, I don’t think he likes white people very much. Not even his grandmother."). At this point, any reader should be wary of trusting his pronouncements.

It was surreal to watch how the mainstream media went out of its way to ignore the fact that there were virtually NO FACTS to cite regarding Obama-the-candidate. Any candidate who had gone to the extent of hiding the ordinary “paper trail” that all of us leave when we attend school, college, serve in the military, acquire a Social Security card, travel, or simply acquire friends and acquaintances, surely had something to hide.

To this day, no one seems to recall being in college with Obama, though he attended Occidental, Columbia, and Harvard. Surely you would think someone would pen a word or two of their memories of him. No student in the classes he taught on the Constitution at the University of Chicago has shared those days. If he dated anyone prior to Michelle, they remain incognito.

One of the keys to a good column is making sure that a good debunking would at least require longer than thirty seconds. Alan Caruba does not write good columns. This page points out an article Obama wrote as a student at Columbia, some memories from a roommate there, and the account of a professor who remembers him from class. And literally the second result on Google for "Obama student University of Chicago" turns up comments and memories from his former students. Caruba's wide-eyed ravings here are so easily proven false, it's kind of amazing he put this print. But hey, this is Caruba we're talking about.

There’s a term in boxing when a boxer has been hit hard enough to make him groggy, “stepping in post holes”, as he staggers around the ring. It seems an apt term for Obama who is finding fewer supporters and defenders beyond the hard core of liberal Democrats.

From promises to close Gitmo to efforts to try Islamic terrorists held there in civil courts, Obama was rebuffed.

Obama’s promises regarding jobs to be created by his “Stimulus” have proved baseless and costly.

It's definitely true that Obama tried and failed to find a way to close Gitmo. With NIMBY protests in every region that was proposed and ardent opposition from members of both parties, he never pushed this one too hard. But Caruba's claims about the stimulus are another joke of an assertion, particularly since just a few days ago the authoritative Congressional Budget Office released a report on the stimulus's effect (headline: "Stimulus added up to 3.3M jobs.")

Obama’s aggressive anti-energy policies are costing jobs from the Gulf of Mexico to the now delayed Keystone XL pipeline and all points in between. Scandals involving the bankrupt Solyndra, a solar panel company and other “green energy” investments and loans are costing him support. This is true as well wherever coal is mined and where they drill for natural gas and oil.

Oil drilling is at a record high. Oil production is at a record high. Reliance on foreign oil has dropped by 7% in the past two years. Coal and natural gas aren't hurting, either. And subsidies of renewable energy remain at a tiny fraction of the subsidies for oil, natural gas, and nuclear power.

In 2010, voters returned power in the House of Representatives to the Republican Party. Does anyone at this point seriously think that these and other factors point to an Obama victory in 2012?

He will be defeated and by a margin that will astound everyone.

Alan Caruba's confidence in his preferred outcome makes me feel better about Obama's chances; he's like a compass that always points south.

BTT: Thankful

2011-11-24T01:21:00.001-05:00

This week's Booking Through Thursday:

What book or author are you most thankful to have discovered?
Have you read everything they’ve written? Reread them?
Why do you appreciate them so much?

The answer is unquestionably Ernest Hemingway. While I read a few short stories during high school, it was in college that I first really began appreciating his work. For Whom the Bell Tolls, A Farewell to Arms, The Sun Also Rises, The Old Man and the Sea, A Moveable Feast, "Big Two-Hearted River," "A Clean Well-Lighted Place," "Hills Like White Elephants," "The Undefeated," "The Snows of Kilimanjaro," and "The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber" are among the best he wrote and part of my first voracious charge into his writings, followed by lesser-known material and the clunky bits of poorly-written nonsense (Torrents of Spring, Across the River and Through the Trees, Islands in the Stream, "A Very Short Story," "Soldier's Home"). It was a revelation, and his writing still seems to be almost magical. It's perfectly written and clear, bright threads of silver with every ounce of dross melted out by Hemingway's relentless editing. On a simple surface reading, it's marvelous, but it also offers great depth and hidden design. Without stretching into inanity or spinning theory, you can unpack an enormous amount from between the lines, unfolding naturally like the uncurling of a leaf.

I have read virtually everything Hemingway ever wrote, and most of his work I have read at least twice. I have read my favorites a dozen times or more. It's the power of his iceberg approach to writing, where he cut and cut until only the stark necessaries remained. As he described it:

If a writer of prose knows enough of what he is writing about he may omit things that he knows and the reader, if the writer is writing truly enough, will have a feeling of those things as strongly as though the writer had stated them. The dignity of movement of an ice-berg is due to only one-eighth of it being above water. A writer who omits things because he does not know them only makes hollow places in his writing.

It makes me want to pick up The First Forty-Nine Stories right now.

Highlights from the National Security Debate

2011-11-23T05:22:00.001-05:00

This was a great debate, only exceeded by the Bloomberg debate. The latter excelled thanks to the superlative moderation, while the factor that made this CNN/think-tank debate interesting was the subject material. The candidates actually had substantive disagreements, and the questions were only ridiculous in the well-calculated manner of conservative think tanks. Moderator Wolf Blitzer was only mildly annoying, although he still has the amazing quality of always sounding like he is shouting.

Ron Paul, remarkably, shone as a beacon of sanity. This is probably just my ideology at work, but his views were well-reasoned and rational when set against the pugnacious hostility of his reactionary rivals. He also managed to avoid going to far into his "whiny old man" mode, and was a force to be taken seriously. Take, for example, his answer on Israel. It was so well-put that the candidate to follow, Herman Cain, just changed the subject.

BLITZER: Congressman Paul, would you support Israel and help Israel in such an attack?

PAUL: No, I wouldn't do that. ... And if it did -- you're supposing that if it did, why does Israel need our help? We need to get out of their way. I mean, we interfere with them. We interfere with them when they deal with their borders. When they want to have peace treaties, we tell them what they can do because we buy their allegiance and they sacrifice their sovereignty to us. And then they decide they want to bomb something, that's their business, but they should, you know, suffer the consequences. ... Why should we commit -- we don't even have a treaty with Israel. Why do we have this automatic commitment that we're going to send our kids and send our money endlessly to Israel? So I think they're quite capable of taking care of themselves.

I think we do detriment -- just think of all the money we gave to Egypt over 30 or 40 years. Now, look, we were buying friendship. Now there's a civil war, they're less friendly to Israel. The whole thing is going to backfire once we go bankrupt and we remove our troops, so I think we should be very cautious in our willingness to go to war and send troops without a proper declaration by the U.S. Congress.

So for once, Ron Paul gets to be the completed reasonable guy on stage and not the crazy uncle. It's a shame that his domestic policies are so insane, or else he'd be a better choice than Obama.

Also on show was the astonishing sophistry of Newt Gingrich, who is the same cunning kind of villain as Karl Rove: you know he's smart enough not to believe his own deception. The exchange about Iran is a good example. Rick Perry was asked about what sanctions he would impose to pressure Iran into giving up their nuclear program. He predictably replied that he would sanction their central bank, as he has said before. Wolf Blitzer turned instantly to Newt with a follow-up question, cleverly but transparently designed to elicit disagreement and discussion.

BLITZER: The argument, Speaker Gingrich -- and I know you've studied this, and I want you to weigh in -- on the sanctioning of the Iranian Central Bank, because if you do that, for all practical purposes, it cuts off Iranian oil exports, 4 million barrels a day.

The Europeans get a lot of that oil. They think their economy, if the price of gasoline skyrocketed, which it would, would be disastrous. That's why the pressure is on the U.S. to not impose those sanctions. What say you?

GINGRICH: Well, I say you -- the question you just asked is perfect, because the fact is we ought to have a massive all-sources energy program in the United States designed to, once again, create a surplus of energy here, so we could say to the Europeans pretty cheerfully, that all the various sources of oil we have in the United States, we could literally replace the Iranian oil.

Newt has to know this is an insane plan, but he doesn't care. It sounds plausible: cut off Iran's primary source of wealth and start a booming new business replacing them. But developing new oil resources takes years, and that's assuming that our record-breaking level of drilling could be safely increased. Meanwhile, Iran's nuclear program is on track to finish in only a few years according to last report. Newt's proposing a long-term solution to a short-term problem. So either (a) he is suggesting that Europe is just going to have to crash and burn for a few years until America can nearly triple its oil production and achieve a surplus to export, or (b) he isn't making a useful suggestion but just something that sounds plausible and intelligent.

His later reiteration of this point makes me think the latter, as he said "If we were serious, we would open up enough oil fields in the next year that the price of oil worldwide would collapse." America consumes 18.7 million barrels of oil a day, and produces 7.8 million barrels per day. To reach parity, and then to add a surplus equal to that of Iran's 4 million barrels, would require increasing our production by 290%. Gingrich isn't stupid enough to think that the only problem is that we're not "serious" about it, which somehow makes him so much worse than his fellows.

Herman Cain was a sad figure, of course. No one needed to hear his answers, which were uniformly some variant of, "I don't know, I'll ask someone who does."

BLITZER: All right, here's the question. Can the United States afford to continue that kind of foreign assistance to Africa for AIDS, malaria -- could run into the billions of dollars?

CAIN: It depends upon priorities. Secondly, it depends upon looking at the program and asking the question, has that aid been successful. In other words, let's look at the whole problem. It may be worthwhile to continue. It may not. I would like to see the results. Just like every program we have here domestically, what have the results been. Then we make a decision about how we prioritize.

There were other interesting tidbits in the debate, again from Gingrich and Paul, such as Gingrich's accidental endorsement of the DREAM Act and Paul's coherent and intelligent attacks on the "war on terror" and "war on drugs." Perry, Bachmann, Santorum, Huntsman, and Romney all gave rote variants of the standard conservative canon in standard debatespeke. Of this crew, Romney delivered pablum the best, in keeping with his role as the Unstoppable Robotic Frontrunner.

All in all, very entertaining, certainly more so than last week's Thanksgiving Family Forum, a Christian-themed round-table where no fewer than four of the candidates broke down in tears. I look forward to the next clown show.

"The Bedwetter," "Health," "Where Men Win Glory," "A Complete Guide to Heralrdy," and "Fast Food Nation."

2011-11-20T20:22:00.000-05:00

The Bedwetter: Stories of Courage, Redemption, and Pee, Sarah Silverman
Health: Five Lay Sermons for Working-People, John Brown
Where Men Win Glory, Jon Krakauer
A Complete Guide to Heraldry, A.C. Fox-Davies
Fast Food Nation, Eric Schlosser

The Bedwetter: Stories of Courage, Redemption, and Pee, Sarah Silverman

Modern autobiographies tend to be pretty bad, let's face it. The days of Burton's Piligrimage and Nabokov's Speak, Memory are in the past, and most autobiographies are written by celebrities like Tucker Max, Chelsea Handler, Bear Grylls, or one of the other famous autobiographers I've slammed lately. This is not the fault of the genre per se, as Frank Abagnale's Catch Me If You Can and other decent books demonstrate, but rather a reflection of celebrity's corrosive effects: publishers will churn out any old crap as long as they can put a famous name on it. Big names sell books.

Thankfully, while her celebrity as a comedian might have gotten her the deal, Silverman's book is not too terrible. (It's not too great, either.)

You might be familiar with Silverman's work, either from her special Jesus Is Magic, her three-season television series The Sarah Silverman Program, or her appearances on MTV awards shows or Jimmy Kimmel Live. She's famous for her level of offensiveness; the character she plays will say wildly inappropriate things, completely oblivious to her own racism or sexism.

Everybody blames the Jews for killing Christ, and then the Jews try to pass it off on the Romans. I'm one of the few people that believe it was the blacks.

The Bedwetter's central revelation is that Silverman wet the bed regularly until her late teens, and in fact still occasionally does so. And that revelation comprises the entirety of this book's soul. Once Silverman has told all of the interesting stories about it from her childhood, and moved into her time as a comedian and her difficulties working on her television show, her account loses most of its appeal and becomes a tepid series of justifications and hit-and-miss anecdotes. The whole spine of the text is in her childhood difficulties and her struggles to adapt - they give her story pathos and humor and heart, and when she squirms out of moist sheets and onto her stage career, the book flops bonelessly.

It's not often you can look at a book and understand how to completely fix it, but The Bedwetter is that rare text that can be transformed from mediocre to amazing in a single stroke. Take the first half of the book and edit it down slightly. Instantly, you have a superb essay. It would be funny, interesting, and full of passion. Instead, The Bedwetter reads like... well, like a superb essay spun out too long.

The latter half gives tributes to comedians who influenced her, discusses her time on Saturday Night Live, and describes working on her own show. There are still some interesting stories, but they are few and far between. Perhaps the best is her account of how she lost her job as a writer on SNL:

From thought to action, what happened was that, seemingly out of nowhere, I just turned and, boom, stabbed Al Franken square in the temple. He responded with a horrifying scream--his eyes wide in angry, mystified shock (like, say, a man who'd just been stabbed in the head by the person sitting next to him). I wanted so much to account for my actions but I couldn't. Besides it being a sort of challenging scenario to explain, I also couldn't explain, as I was literally breathless from laughing--like, hysterically laughing. I was a mad-woman crazy-person with tears pouring down my face. I can imagine how it must have looked. Even the explanation, had I had the breath to clarify, let's face it, was weirdo weird.

I'll never know for sure the exact reason, but that August my agent got a fax asking me not to return for a second season.

There was one thing that was inexplicable about the book: she makes a great deal of fuss in the last few chapters about how dedicated she was to producing her show at the peak of quality, and how they refused to compromise to budget cuts. She and her staff take a bold stand and won't bow to pressure to rush out the episodes, half-assing it and churning out sub-par work. But here's the thing: The Sarah Silverman Program was terrible. It seemed like all three seasons of the show, now mercifully canceled, were rushed out over a long weekend. Inexplicable, although it does call into question what the show would have been like if they hadn't been doing their best.

While The Bedwetter is a short book, and won't consume much of your time, I can't really recommend it. It is not challenging and somewhat entertaining, though, and so I won't condemn it, either. It has some good parts, and might serve to fill a few lazy hours.

Health: Five Lay Sermons to Working-People, John Brown

This little 1877 book, written by a Scottish physician, is a set of five lectures to the common man on health. Brown advises his audience on the role of a doctor, how they should behave with one, how to raise children, and a set of general medical tips. Much of the advice is still sage, like his advice to mothers not to drink whiskey while nursing and not to give laudanum to a child to make it sleep. But I have to say that time has taken its toll on some of the medical knowledge. Dr. Brown doesn't much go in for dentistry, for example.

I can't say I am a great advocate for the common people going in for tooth-brushes. No, they are necessary in full health. The healthy man's teeth clean themselves.

The book is thick with religious imagery and the tone of a preacher, as indicated by the subtitle (Five Sermons on Health). It is also pleasant in its admonitions, and communicates with humble metaphors some of his excellent advice.

Short, quaint, and interesting, this little book is worth a glance out of curiosity, if only to read the final few pages, which include warm thanks to the author's neighbors and friends.

And good night to you all, you women-folks. Marion Graham the milkwoman; Tibbie Meek the single servant; Jenny Muir the sempstress; Mother Johnston the howdie, thou consequential Mrs. Gamp, presiding at the gates of life; and you in the corner there, Nancy Cairns, gray-haired, meek and old, with your crimped mutch as white as snow; the shepherd's widow, the now childless mother, you are stepping home to your bein and lonely room, where your cat is now ravelling a' her thrums, wondering where "she" is.

Where Men Win Glory, Jon Krakauer

Pat Tillman, a star safety in the NFL, left his comfortable life and prosperous future in order to enlist in the Army. He was shot and killed during deployment in Afganistan, the victim of friendly fire. Jon Krakauer (Into the Wild, Under the Banner of Heaven) describes Tillman's life, death, the war, and the ideology at work in this marvelous book. Let me say, right off the bat, that you should read this.

The writing is good, broken up into chunks by rapid shifts in place and time as Krakauer relates how Tillman grew up, his football career at college and in the NFL, cutting back and forth at the same time to the history of Afghanistan, the scene of his death. Tillman's personal history and the construction of his character is undertaken with consummate care and an objective eye: Krakauer avoids the twin traps of adulation and cynicism, telling a well-rounded story of a happy, hearty wunderkind who puts his ideals before his interests. Tillman was shaped by a cultural heritage that revered the noble warrior. His aspiration to embody that ideal carried him into a foreign land, and into tragedy.

Where Men Win Glory is a work of superb journalism, like Krakauer's other books: vivid descriptions and little imagery. Of all of his books that I have read, this is the best. The subject material is compelling, especially when crimes of such scope - the theft of the presidency in 2000 and the deceitful incompetence of the wars - are related in terse summary. The real-life hero who plunges into the resultant mess, Tillman, is given whole life and real character. The climax of the book is masterfully done, relating Tillman's betrayal by the system and by the evil actions of malicious men.

This is a marvelous book, if not an artful one, and you should read it immediately.

A Complete Guide to Heraldry, A.C. Fox-Davies

I was about halfway through this book when I recognized some of the specific turns of phrase in the chapter on charges and realized I'd already read excerpts. Not surprising, I suppose, since Fox-Davies' book is legendary. The whole thing was deserving of a second look, so I don't consider my time wasted.

Heraldry, the study of coats of arms, is a fascinating subject. It arose from the needs of combat, when it was necessary to separate friend from foe for reasons both practical and glorious. Accordingly, the rudiments of the art came from the ancient world, as with the late Roman legions that had individualized standards. But true heraldry, Fox-Davies tells us, began with the Crusades. The kings of the First Crusade adopted different versions of the Cross, and they and their men tied on armbands of red-and-white or the like. This articulated a slowly developing articulation of emblemization, and when the kings and their lords returned from the Holy Land, the process began in earnest.

A coat of arms - more properly called an achievement, can have many components. At its simplest, it is a simple shield with a distinctive design, meant to identify the bearer. This design is codified in a specific way in a descriptive sentence called a blazon, using language that is both archaic and heavily French. For my own arms, depicted to the left, the blazon is "vert, upon a saltire argent a chessknight sable" ("on a green field, a white cross with a black chessknight.")

There are a lot of rules for creating these designs. I am not a master of them all, so my arms were created with help from the Kingdom of Talossa's College of Arms. Additional help has always been necessary, which is why there were once professional heralds to develop and interpret achievements. A few professional heralds remain in countries that still practice grants of arms, such as the U.K.'s College of Arms. But the field is also swamped with simple enthusiasts, especially in America, a country without armigerous nobility.

While dated by the century since its publication, A Complete Guide to Heraldry is a decent book on the subject. A newcomer to the art should probably look elsewhere, to something more readable and contemporary. But for a refresher to those already familiar with heraldry, there isn't a better book.

Fast Food Nation, Eric Schlosser

It is absolutely clear that no one should eat fast food. From first to last, this is the powerful message of Schlosser's Fast Food Nation. The author explores all of the impacts of a fast food culture on our life, revealing a powerful institution whose ever-grasping tentacles are strangling some of America's most important values. The fast food world's commitment to cranking out cheap and delicious food is not inherently wrong. After all, that's what many restaurants try to do. But the soulless, factory-based approach and sheer size of the fast food industry has made a McDonald's little more than a family-friendly drug dealer. The poor and disadvantaged are cranked in and out of its ranks, reduced as near to slavery as possible. They serve up food that has been processed out of all recognition, churning out trays of raw material that's been mashed and treated and reflavored with chemicals into wads of fat and sugar that only superficially resemble a real meal. That raw material is obtained by a feudal system of high science and extraordinary corporate manipulation.

The fast food culture is crushing the working poor, the health of the nation, and a living food culture that's drowning under a flood of 99¢ lumps of beef tallow. Schlosser relates the story of this world of degradation in an interesting and well-paced manner. I almost dreaded to begin this book, since I assumed it would be a slog through an acre of depressing and dense facts. But instead it deeply engages with its material, lightening the procession of woeful destruction with brief looks into the lives of the people involved. The resulting book is well-written, informative, and shocking. And whether or not you read it (and you should), please stop eating fast food!

Booking Through Thursday: Which Genre?

2011-11-17T03:31:00.001-05:00

Booking Through Thursday is a little blog that posts a question each Thursday, for readers to answer on their blogs. Here's the question for this week:

Of the books you own, what’s the biggest category/genre?
Is this also the category that you actually read the most?

This was a tough one to figure out. Not only am I not sure off the top of my head about the biggest genre in my collection, but I also am not sure how I'd categorize a lot of them. I can roughly estimate, however.

About a third of my books are nonfiction. This third is about evenly split among memoirs (celebrity and serious), pop nonfiction (Oliver Sacks, Michael Pollan), and serious histories. There is also a small smattering of advocacy books on ethics or the like.

Of fiction, it seems to go pretty much like this:

30% are trashy in some way: fluffy supernatural Charlaine Harris books, Christian fiction like Piercing the Darkness, young adult lit, and crappy fantasy.
40% are fiction by the big names. Most prominent are Margaret Atwood, Charles Dickens, Shakespeare, Cormac McCarthy, William Morris, Ernest Hemingway, Vladimir Nabokov, Herman Melville, John Updike, Kurt Vonnegut, Virginia Woolf, and Edgar Rice Burroughs. These authors have all published a great deal, and so their work represents almost half this category.
The remaining 30% is a grab-bag of Tom Clancy, Henry James, Chinua Achebe, Haruki Murakami, Jane Austen, Michael Chabon, and so on. No rhyme or reason to it.

The second part of the question - what do I actually read? - is pretty easy: all of them.

Bookblogging

2011-11-06T03:32:00.001-05:00

So while I post about politics, journalism, and a few other topics (and occasionally even my life), the most frequent topic by far on my blog is literature. Recently I've taken an interest in other "bookbloggers," as the community is called, and I've been seeing what they do differently.

I've noticed a few common traits among bookbloggers. The first is that they all have a review directory, something I noted on Literary Omnivore and which I immediately adopted for myself. It makes sense for a lot of reasons. I also noticed that virtually everyone includes an image of the reviewed books, something I had just been too lazy to do until now. But these changes made, there are a few other choices to make.

Single-book reviews seem to be the rule. Almost every other blogger writes about one book at a time, in contrast to my own style, which has been to read anywhere from three to eight or more books, reviewing them in a compilation post. My wife tells me she prefers my current method, and I think ultimately I'm going to stick with it. It makes sense for me - I usually read an average of a book every other day, but only blog once or twice a week.

Ratings also seem to be a consistent habit among bookbloggers. This still seems a little strange to me, since until recently the only reviews I read were in the NYRB, the NYT's Sunday reviews, L.A. Review of Books, and the London Review of Books - none of which try to give a book an objective three and a half stars (or whatever). I suppose that a rating system makes good sense when writing within a specific genre - like the bookblog Fantasy Cafe - but outside of a defined literary conversation, I'm not sure how I'd do it. I'm reminded of Roger Ebert's words when he said, "When you ask a friend if Hellboy is any good, you're not asking if it's any good compared to Mystic River, you're asking if it's any good compared to The Punisher." Different books are speaking to different groups and have different expectations.

Details on a book vary in their specifics, but are also common among bookbloggers. Some list page count, some list format (ebook, softcover, hardcover), and nearly all have an elaborate systems of tags for genre and plot elements. Here, again, I guess I'm too set in my ways. With most books, page count and format just don't seem that important to me - I only mention it when it seems pertinent, like with a short book, long book, or poorly formatted edition. And the compilation style of posting makes genre tagging an impossibility.

It helps, I suppose, that I'm not too concerned about readership. I very much enjoy writing about books. It improves my ability and provides an outlet for my theories and criticisms. But my sole effort to promote my blog is to put links on Facebook and G+. This is either because I'm lazy, because I'm afraid of failure if I try to gain a readership, or both. Still, I'd welcome suggestions about things I should change, things you like, or general comments. Give me some input, folks.

"Cleopatra: A Life," "Contested Will," and "The Coffee Trader,"

2011-11-05T04:39:00.000-04:00

Cleopatra: A Life, Stacy Schiff
Contested Will, James Shapiro
The Coffee Trader, David Liss

Cleopatra: A Life, Stacy Schiff

The two major lessons of Schiff's book are these:

Despite her legendary stature in history, we know very little about the last queen of Egypt.
What we do know is uncertain, since it was written by enemies and misogynists eager to diminish her.

Despite these limitations, this detailed biography of the last of the Ptolemies is fairly good. Like all historians with limited direct testimony, Schiff fills in the gaps with background information and educated guesses. She can't tell us about Cleopatra's upbringing specifically, for example, since her sources - Suetonius, Plutarch, Lucan, and a few others - don't mention her childhood at all. But by researching the upbringings of the other Ptolemies and the wealthy families of Egypt's capital at the time, Alexandria, Schiff can piece together a fairly good picture of how Cleopatra must have grown up. It's a time-tested and effective strategy for supplementing the sources, and it works particularly well in Cleopatra: A Life, because Schiff's descriptions are interesting and rich.

It would be downright difficult to write a bad book about Cleopatra's life and death. The major players in her story are titans: Pompey the Great, Julius Caesar, Mark Anthony, Caesar Augustus, Cicero. Schiff comes into her own in telling of the grand betrayals, great passions, and endless scheming. She has just the right mixture of clinical abstraction and veiled opinion. It's something like, "Based on the evidence, this is likely, that is not, and oh hey by the way Mark Anthony was kind of a jackass."

Schiff's harping on the injustice of historians towards her subject eventually begins to grate, as does her clear partiality to the Egyptian queen. There are frequent moments in Cleopatra's story where we cannot know her motives or her goals, and can only guess - does she stay with Anthony in Greece out of love or fear of losing control? Without fail, Schiff's favored guess is the one that glorifies her heroine as a clever and comparably decent ruler. It's the flaw that has claimed many a biographer. Long months or years spent in research, steeped in the life and thoughts of another, eventually sways many chroniclers to the opinion that their subject is either a hero or a villain. To Schiff, Cleopatra may not have been Isis reborn, but she was nonetheless a sort of deity: a goddess of proud and shrewd womanhood. It's an understandable flaw, but it does detract from the book.

This is a good book, but not a great one. If you are interested in the epic world of Cleopatra and Caesar, then you will love the high drama of the central stories as well as the amusing anecdotes clipped from classical accounts (Anthony once instructed a servant to swim under his Nile barge and attach fish to the end of his line, to disguise his poor fishing ability, only to have Cleopatra learn of the ruse and arrange to have him reel in a dried and salted Greek fish). But get it out of the library - you won't be rereading it.

Contested Will: Who Wrote Shakespeare?, James Shapiro

To many people, the question of this book's title is a surprising one, although that will become rather less true with the debut of Anonymous, the just-debuted movie that dramatizes the theory that Edward de Vere, the 17th Earl of Oxford, was the secret author of the poems and plays attributed to Shakespeare. The movie was called a "brutal insult to the human imagination" that "burnishes meretricious nonsense" by the New York Times, and at least one Shakespearean scholar, Ron Rosenbaum (whose Shakespeare Wars I enjoyed very much) has said it is "laughably incoherent botch of a movie." But what about the question behind the movie, covered in detail last year in Shapiro's book? Who wrote Shakespeare?

Over the past couple of weeks, I've read four books on the subject: Thomas Looney's 1920 Shakespeare Identified, which launched the Oxfordian movement seen in Anonymous, John Mitchell's 1996 Who Wrote Shakespeare?, Brenda James's and William Rubenstein's recent The Truth Will Out, and this last 2010 work by noted critic James Shapiro, Contested Will. Each book had different conclusions.

Looney's Shakespeare Identified asserts boldly and with great certainty that Oxford wrote Shakespeare. His book is filled with dated information and outright mistakes, like his claim that The Tempest didn't belong in the canon of Shakespeare's works, but was the work of some unknown. But it is interesting for its historical value. Looney was single-handedly responsible for identifying Oxford as the "real" Shakespeare and building the core of the case for the theory. Wealthy, educated, well-traveled Oxford, Looney asserts, was far more likely to have been the real author of plays and sonnets that trafficked with royalty and distant lands. How could the son of an illiterate glover, whose surviving documents show an inglorious obsession with money, possibly have been the greatest artist in the language? No, there was a conspiracy at work, where Oxford commented in secret on politics and Shakespeare took credit. The son of a glover!

Mitchell's book, an overview of all the different theories, is gutless. It offers a "pox on all their houses" indecisive approach, while still clearly inclining towards Sir Francis Bacon's authorship. The larger problem seems to be Mitchell's overall credulousness - most claims and ideas seem plausible to him, even when they're clearly outlandish.

James and Rubenstein offer a new candidate, Sir Henry Neville, using the same methods as all other theorists: circumstantial evidence and biographical similarity. As a modern, text-focused, and erudite argument, it still harbors the essential problems of all Anti-Stratfordians: the mistaken assumption that the poems and plays of Shakespeare are autobiographical, and heavy dependence on the negative evidence about Shakespeare of Stratford. The former mistake is one of too little imagination - it took a genius to write Shakespeare's work, and they underestimate the power of genius to transcend place and education. The latter mistake is a common one and an old one. We have no drafts of Shakespeare's plays, but that doesn't mean they didn't exist. Negative evidence is suggestive, not at all conclusive.

Shapiro, I was relieved to find, feels the same way that I do. I am a harsh skeptic in literary matters: high-flung criticism and unfounded assumptions find no pleasant berth in my harbor. To make the extraordinary suggestion that there was a hidden conspiracy to hide the works of another behind Shakespeare's name requires equally extraordinary evidence.

Contested Will recounts the whole history of the authorship controversy with an equitable eye and fair pen. Shapiro explores the early fervor in favor of Bacon, when his fame was already at its height in Victorian Europe. The Bacon theory still has its adherents, but it had fallen away almost into extinction even by the turn to the twentieth century, leaving in its wake only well-established sneering about Shakespeare of Stratford's inadequate background. Oxfordianism took its place, and has now been established as the near-certain alternate candidate, a position a major Hollywood movie like Anonymous will solidify. Shapiro explores the evolution and motivations behind the authorship controversy from first to last, and very kindly limits his harsher words until his conclusion. The final chapter lists fierce rebuttals for each attack on Shakespeare of Stratford, and then all the evidence in his favor - it piles up before the reader, crushing the preceding chapter's various doubts with a conclusive and substantive dismissal.

One of the problems with the conspiracy is that it cannot be disproved - there is virtually no mechanism for disproof, short of a miraculous new discovery of a cache of Shakespeare's handwritten papers. Given the span of five centuries, the gap in our knowledge of a quiet-living actor and playwright is not actually so surprising, especially since he seems to have had little interest in posterity. But that gap is negative evidence, an appeal to ignorance, and dozens of critics have leaped to try to cram that gap with their homespun theories. Any fact can serve their ends. Literally dozens of contemporaries mention Shakespeare as a writer, and we have hard evidence of his hire? That's okay, they were all fooled by the conspiracy, or else were a part of it (depending on the needs of the moment). The chosen replacement, such as Oxford, died years before some of the collaborative plays were written? That's okay, three playwrights (Fletcher, Middleton, and Wilkins) somehow found the plays and finished them. But when everything is evidence, then nothing is evidence.

If you are interested in the controversy, Shapiro's book is the best and most authoritative one. But even if you are not, it is written engagingly and will interest you in the subject as it explores the famous Anti-Stratfordians, Delia Bacon, Mark Twain, and so on. No great knowledge of the Bard is necessary, and even a neophyte will find the twisting story intriguing. You would do well to check it out.

The Coffee Trader, David Liss

The Coffee Trader is a worthy novel, but falls short of greatness despite early promise. This is not for lack of a good story, at least. David Liss tells a wonderful story of Miguel Lienzo, a Portuguese Jewish merchant who is living and trying to make his fortune in 17th-century Amsterdam. The world he paints is exotic, although it is less defined by its Dutch setting than by the insular community of Portuguese Jews in which Miguel lives and moves, ruled by the clerical Ma'ada. Lienzo, down on his luck after poor luck in the sugar market, is introduced to a novel new commodity trickling into Europe: coffee.

Much of the book is focused on the mechanisms of the emerging stock market, particularly the futures market. The traders don't just buy a share of a stock, they buy future shares at a predicted price. If the actual shares are worth more then the buyer paid when he purchased them (when he made his gamble) then the buyer profits. This new kink in the financial word, just recently developed in the era in which The Coffee Trader is set, combines with other techniques like monopolies, selling short, and good old-fashioned usury to create an atmosphere of drama in the book. There's nothing like buying on margin - buying stock with more money than you actually possess - to generate tension, and by the conclusion of the book the schemes and trickery has grown so thick, the possibilities of treachery so numerous, and the stakes so high, that you'll be on the edge of your seat.

Unfortunately, the book falls shy of meeting expectations in the latter half. It's not a bad ending. It makes sense, wraps up all the threads of the plot, and feels satisfying. It just doesn't provide the necessary catharsis. Rather than a scene of triumph and a huge climax, the end slumps out. It's satisfying, but not spicy.

This book is well-written, with excellent characterization and imagery. The very first paragraph grabbed me, made me want to read more, and made me want a steaming cup of coffee.

It rippled thickly in the bowl, dark and hot and uninviting. Miguel Lienzo picked it up and pulled it so close he almost dipped his nose into the tarry liquid. Holding the vessel still for an instant, he breathed it in, pulling the scent deep into his lungs. The sharp odor of earth and rank leaves surprised him; it was like something an apothecary might keep in a chipped porcelain jar.

Still, despite my slight disappointment, The Coffee Trader is worth reading, especially if you're interested in the rudiments of finance or historical fiction. At bottom, it's a well-crafted and interesting story. Check it out.

Gary Kent and the "Signs of Prophecy"

2011-11-02T00:23:00.000-04:00

On Sunday, I went to the first two sessions of a series on Biblical interpretation and prophecy. The speaker, Gary Kent, spoke for several hours about the nature of prophecy, why we should trust the Bible's vision of the future, and how he interpreted that vision. It was, from first to last, a perfect iteration of mainstream Christian thinking. Kent and his lectures were intelligent, pleasant, funny, and deeply flawed. This is my (lengthy) exposition of what I saw and heard.

The lecture series was Gary Kent's "Secrets of Prophecy," produced in partnership with It Is Written Oceania television, where Kent is a presenter, and Signs of the Times Magazine, a Christian magazine to which he contributes. Touring through three cities, Kent delivers the first two lectures in the series, while local affiliates meet to discuss the ten successive other lectures. These first two lectures that I saw were called "2012: Countdown to Armageddon" and "Signs That Jesus Is Coming Soon."

The venue for the Dunedin lectures was an auditorium at Otago University's College of Education. What looked to be nearly sixty people showed up for the talks - a smiling and polite mix of all sorts of folks. Volunteers handed out pamphlets at the front and provided cool jugs of lemon water for refreshment. And after a few screeching moments of technical difficulty with the wireless microphone, things got underway shortly after 2:30.

Malcom Eastwick, the pastor of Dunedin's Seventh Day Adventist church, introduced Gary Kent to the crowd. Kent shook Eastwick's hand with one hand and fiddled with the knobs on his microphone with the other, smiling broadly.

A neat and charismatic preacher, Kent looks and sounds like a man accustomed to crowds and instruction. As he would explain, he had an unusual background: born in Wellington, Kent moved with his parents at the age of seven to South Africa, and when he was just out of his teens went back to his parents' native Australia. As he pleasantly joked, he had plenty of teams to root for in the Rugby World Cup. These days he is based in Sydney, where he lives with his wife Robin and their four children.

Kent's expertise would soon become apparent. He has a broad knowledge of history, and - more importantly for his purposes - was clever at finding narratives within the scattering of past events. He was not angry or hateful at the elements of the world to which his faith opposes him. I want to emphasize this: while I believe he is wrong, I also believe he is motivated only by the best intentions. But he is wrong.

2012: Countdown to Armageddon

The first lecture, "2012: Countdown to Armageddon," was focused on the validity of the Bible prophecies. He began by talking about the benefits of prophecy itself, and a few items of recent history (such as Harold Camping's much-publicized predictions of doomsday).

A lot of people are talking about what's going on? What's happening? What does this mean? ...
Imagine how different life would be if you were able to know the future. ... Right down through history, ancient civilizations have endeavored to... discover what the future holds in store, in an effort to gain an edge over fate.

As Kent spoke, a slide presentation played behind him, prompted along by a clicker in his hand. He paced and turned and gestured - a dynamic speaker. While the slides were mostly unremarkable, a few of them were surprisingly misspelled. One example I noted was, "in n iffort ot gain an edge."

After a few examples of recent prophecies that had failed to come true, Kent began a long series of other amusingly poor predictions. There was a pattern: he'd present a contemporary quote that was obviously wrong, and then he'd quote a huge number to illustrate just how wrong the quote was. For instance, his first example was a bank manager's skepticism of Henry Ford's efforts with the automobile, which the banker called "just a fad." Then Kent told us with glee that there were now 600 million cars in the world. The point, Kent said, was that "[p]redicting the future can be risky, even for experts." Other examples were Lord Kelvin's disbelief in the possibility of flight, the president of IBM's conception of the future of computers, and so on with television, the Beatles, the iPod, and Twitter.

His point was well-taken, if a little lengthy. His slow speech, repetition, and a preacher's emphatic pauses turned a five-minute assertion into a half-hour repetition. But it made sense, and was correct. It is very difficult to accurately and clearly tell the future. Modern prognosticators are either spectacularly wrong, like Harold Camping, or spectacularly vague, like "trend forecaster" Gerald Celente.

After speaking about the Maya for a time, and their prediction about the end of the world in the Dresden Codex, Kent got to the point.

If you made a prediction, I'd check your credibility - what are your credentials?
I'd want evidence - proof - that you can accurately predict the future.
I'd want to see your track record. ...

What if we could find a string of prophecies that do have a track record? What if we could examine predictions that go back through centuries of history?

Now we'd get the real meat of his argument. Gary Kent was going to prove to us that the Bible had made prophecies of the future, and those prophecies had come true.

There are over 1000 predictions or prophecies in the Bible, and they were right every time.

According to Kent, Ezekiel 30:13 ("Thus says the Lord GOD: "I will destroy the idols and put an end to the images in Memphis; there shall no longer be a prince from the land of Egypt; so I will put fear in the land of Egypt.") makes two predictions about the future that came true: that there would be no more Egyptian sovereigns and that all the idols of Memphis would be smashed. These predictions, he says, did come true. The Ptolemies, a Greek dynasty, took power in Egypt after Ezekiel made this prediction, and Egypt has not had an Egyptian prince since then. Further, the idols of Memphis are all smashed and their gods are overthrown. Ezekiel's predictions, Kent said, wagging an emphatic finger, were correct.

Let's give credit where it is due: Kent is perfectly correct. The Egyptian line of the pharaohs ended, and Macedonian Greeks ruled it as the last dynasty until its annexation by Rome. Further, Memphis is very much a ruin these days - the idols are all smashed.

It's important, however, to have perspective. Ezekiel was written around 600 B.C.E. The rule of the pharaohs didn't end for three hundred years after Ezekiel's prediction, and the temple-city of Memphis didn't even begin to decline until that time. Ezekiel 30:3 says that the time is "soon" and the "day is near" - can the eventual decline of a civilization, hundreds of years later, really be said to be a fulfillment of prophecy? If this is the case, then am I not just as good of a prophet when I now declare that Beijing will be burnt to a cinder - given sufficient time, something's going to happen to Beijing, even if takes billions of years for our planet to be swallowed up by the sun.

It's even more important to read Ezekiel! That chapter doesn't just make these two predictions, it makes dozens of very specific predictions, many of which were completely wrong. For example, Ezekiel 30:10-11 says "I will put an end to the wealth of Egypt, by the hand of Nebuchadnezzar king of Babylon. He and his people with him, the most ruthless of nations, shall be brought in to destroy the land." And while it's true that Nebuchadnezzar went on a rampage across the ancient world in Ezekiel's time, his attack on Egypt was repulsed by the Pharaoh Amasis II. The repeated promises that Babylon will conquer Egypt turned out to be completely wrong - it was Persia that would conquer Egypt.

This should not give us confidence in the Bible's prophetic powers. By Gary Kent's own standards, we can look at Ezekiel's track record and conclude that it is not much more reliable than faulty predictions about the future of automobiles.

His next bit of evidence was Isaiah 19:7 ("The bulrushes by the Nile, by the edge of the Nile and all the sown fields by the Nile will become dry, be driven away, and be no more."), which Kent claims is a prophecy about the extinction of the papyrus reed from the banks of the Nile. Here we run into immediate problems: the bulrushes and reeds of the Nile are still very much in evidence. Kent didn't quote the part about the fields next to the Nile becoming dry - need I mention that's not the case, either?

At this point, Kent was 0 for 2. Nonetheless, he was very persuasive in his selections and arguments.

He would go on to argue that Ezekiel 26:3-16 predicts the fall of Tyre. This did occur, of course, but again it was not at Nebuchadnezzar's hands, as predicted in Ezekiel. After a thirteen-year siege, Nebuchadnezzar accepted a truce and left Tyre, which would only fall when Alexander the Great attacked it, later.

It was at this point that the lecture ended, with Kent making a final grand summation of the evidence he had presented, and concluding with a pleasant smile that the Bible had made many such predictions that came true, and so we could trust it as a reliable guide to the future.

During the twenty-minute break, I waited until Pastor Kent had a moment. We spoke briefly about Florida, where I'm from. I wanted to push back against some of what he had been saying, but without being rude, so I phrased my question as an attempt to clarify, politely asking about the Tyre example and pointing out that the Biblical prediction seems to have clearly stated something different than what eventually occurred. Kent listened and nodded, and said that he had limited time in which to make his argument, so he couldn't get too detailed on things like that. "I'm just here to show people that this evidence exists and is out there," he said. In response to my question, though, he pointed me to Evidence That Demands a Verdict by Josh McDowell.

Signs That Jesus Is Coming Soon

Having established - in the eyes of many of the audience, anyway - that the Bible is an accurate source of prophecy, Gary Kent turned now to the New Testament. He began this second session by describing some of the problems in the world.

7 billion people on Earth now. ... and each person has an impact on the planet's environment. ... To provide land and food for all of these people we are clearing our forests at the rate of one and a half football fields per second. ... The results [of this population growth]: widespread disease, the emergence of new strains of disease, food and water shortages, poor harvests, violent and destructive storms caused by climate change.

Again, he begins from a solid foundation. Things are pretty screwed up.

In His Word the Bible, He clearly reveals that the world will not end in fire or ice, in a bang or a whimper, nor in terrorism or an asteroid collision.
If you really want to know about the future and the destiny of the world, look at what God says. The Bible contains a lot of information about the final destiny of our world. The Bible indicates that it will conclude with the return of Jesus Christ to this earth, and that His coming will bring an end to our world as we know it.

Whenever I hear a prediction like this, my immediate thought is, "Jesus is coming to kill us all! We have to stop him before he destroys the world!"

Anyway, according to Kent, Jesus gave a list of signs to expect that would signal the end of the world. These signs are found in Matthew 24. Kent calls this chapter a "schedule of events," and proceeds to break it down.

Matthew 24:2 is the first sign. Jesus, looking at all the temple buildings, tells the apostles, “Do you not see all these things? Assuredly, I say to you, not one stone shall be left here upon another, that shall not be thrown down.” This occurrence would begin a time of tribulation and great sorrow on the earth.

Excitedly, Kent waved at the screen, where a painting of the sacking of Jerusalem by the Romans was displayed. "Not a stone," he declared. "Not one stone!"

I have to admit, I was surprised by this. It beggared belief that Pastor Kent was not aware of the Wailing Wall, the original western wall of the Temple and its last remnant after the Romans. Yet here he was, claiming that no stone remained on another of the Temple. If you think Jesus was speaking literally, then aren't you forced to conclude he was wrong, since there's a wall still standing?

Regardless, in Kent's view, the "time of tribulation" began with the destruction of the Temple, ending only a few hundred years ago with another series of signs. I won't get into those signs, except to note that they are all natural disasters, and Kent appears to have arbitrarily selected a few disasters that suit him. The great earthquake, for example, that he says is predicted in Jesus' words in this chapter (it isn't; Jesus speaks of "earthquakes in various places") was the 1755 Lisbon earthquake. It's arbitrary and silly.

Kent was starting to go off the rails. But here's where it got weird.

Next, Kent, his thick mane of hair bobbing as he nodded at the crowd, explained that the "false Christs" that Jesus warns his apostles about indicate cult groups, the new age movement, and the occult. He doesn't offer any real evidence or reasoning for this claim, but far more interesting was his selection of "occult" phenomena in our world today.

Kent clicked forward in his presentation, and the slide declared the list of "occult" television shows and movies: Charmed, Ghost Whisperer, Smallville, Vampire Diaries, Supernatural, Bones, X-Files, Harry Potter, Twilight, Ghost, City of Angels, The Sixth Sense, Meet Joe Black, I Am Legend, Avatar, and Super 8. All of these, the audience was told, "promote the occult and spiritualism."

A lot of these make sense, if you're thinking that way. But Smallville? That's about Superman! Is any fantasy an example of the occult? And Super 8? I haven't seen it, but I'm pretty sure it's about a giant monster. And the inclusion of Bones just plain does not make sense. What does Jesus have against forensics?

Anyway, these are all evidence of the end times, because of the prevalence of the occult. Additional evidence comes in the form of the numerous natural disasters and wars plaguing the world. This last is not something that's arguable, because it's a fairly subjective argument: the world is worse than it was in ancient days. That's hard to prove or disprove. Does the existence of machine guns outweigh the existence of antibiotics? Does global warming counterbalance a doubled life expectancy?

All of nature seems out of control. The earthquakes, storms, floods, cyclones, tsunamis, unusual weather patterns shout at us that something out of the ordinary is going on. ... Friends, we are living in the end times.

With time running out on this presentation, Gary Kent grew quiet, and finally mentioned the social evils of our sinful world. Divorce, "devaluation of marriage" (a dog whistle for gay marriage), and homosexuality are all further evidence of the end times, and our urgent need for salvation.

Kent's final point was one of the most interesting. He said that the spread of the Bible and the Gospel all around the world - to all the peoples of the planet - was to allow everyone to make their own choice before Jesus arrives. No one, Kent explained, would be left uninformed.

I won't go into the problems posed by this statement (it seems to neglect the pagan dead) but I would note that this final assertion argues for action. Christian evangelists, it seems, are trying to destroy the world by spreading the Gospel to all peoples. They must be stopped.

Gary Kent, at least, wound down with another few jokes and chuckles. They collected comment cards and distributed more pamphlets. The pamphlets were standard fare - a fake health warning sponsored by the Seventh Day Adventists, who have their own dietary regime; a letter asking for money; a notice for a home study course on prayer.

My friends and I left the seminar feeling a little cheated - there was a lot of chaff for precious little wheat. Gary Kent and his message was not offensive or crazy, it was just wrong. The evidence was selective, flimsy, and nonsensical. And yet, Kent was a great speaker with a slick set of arguments, and I don't doubt that many people walked out of there completely convinced and ready to come to the next set of lectures. I am only comforted by the fact that Kent is not profiting by his message - he might be misleading the gullible, but it's not for personal gain.

So there you have it. Gary Kent's "Secrets of Prophecy" is intelligent, pleasant, and funny. And deeply flawed.

Labels, Literature, and Linnaeus

2011-10-30T19:07:00.001-04:00

Recently, the Literary Omnivore* and I were having a discussion about the term "genre fiction," as used to describe things like fantasy and science fiction. She has argued that the use of the label to segregate and denigrate whole categories of works is unfair, and prejudices readers against those works - they're not "real literature" if they're "genre fiction." She has a good point, and her latest post is about a similar distinction between "comic" and "graphic novel."

The term is being used to separate “worthy” works from “unworthy”, which is not the work the label for a medium is supposed to be doing! ... It’s easy for me to go in circles—on one hand, I loathe the practice of privileging certain works out of a much maligned genre or medium, but on the other hand, there is a difference between a volume of The Unwritten and Fun Home.

This touches at the heart of a problem with such labels themselves, as I will demonstrate. And I think the reason she goes in circles on this - as I do myself - is a recognition of the necessity for distinguishing labels as well as their limitations.

A "graphic novel" is not just a bound collection of a run of comics, to most people. That's called a "trade paperback." Rather, "graphic novel" is a nebulous, privileged sort of label for bound comics that are considered particularly good. It's hard to say what exactly deserves the label... does Astonishing X-Men Volume 1: Gifted deserve to be called a graphic novel? It's clever and interesting, written by Joss Whedon - why shouldn't it receive that name? Isn't refusing to call it a graphic novel just a way to prejudice an audience against it, out of a view that "superhero comics" are lowbrow?

On the other hand, as noted by the Omnivore, it is very difficult to put such collections in the same class as Maus, Watchmen, V for Vendetta, or 300 - all graphic novels with a cohesive storyline and much higher production values. There does seem to be some difference there; Alan Moore, one of the greatest names in comics, once described his view of the distinction thus:

I've no objection to the term 'graphic novel,' as long as what it is talking about is actually some sort of graphic work that could conceivably be described as a novel. My main objection to the term is that usually it means a collection of six issues of Spider-Man, or something that does not have the structure or any of the qualities of a novel, but is perhaps roughly the same size.

Although Moore would later change his position, I think this is one of the best statements of the view: a graphic novel is a serious story with many qualities of a novel, told in a graphical format like a comic strip. It is a term of convenience, just like any label: because readers need an easy way to discuss a certain group of work that shares this common quality, they need a short label for that group. This classification and labeling impulse has been around essentially forever. Aristotle's Poetics is one of the first and best examples, using a detailed set of criteria and principles to break down all literature into a select set of categories, and then discussing what should be the goal of each. That's the purpose of any Linnaean system for art: to make those sorts of discussions possible.

There are many critics of the practice. Neil Gaiman (another legend of the industry) often tells a story about what he sees as the imaginary difference between "comic" and "graphic novel":

When I was in England four years ago I was at a literary party. It was one of these Christmas parties that magazines throw. I was invited and I went along and I got talking to a guy who turned out to be the literary editor of the Sunday Telegraph. He asked what I did. When I answered that I write comic books, he looked at me as if I had confessed to shoplifting or something. So we're standing there having a drink and he's looking uncomfortable, but before I can walk away he asked what kind of comic books I write. When I answered they were the Sandman series, he looks at me, says, "Hang on, I know you, you're Neil Gaiman. My dear fellow, you don't write comics, you write graphic novels."
So as far as I can tell, it's just a difference between being a hooker and a lady of the evening. Basically. The nice thing about calling them graphic novels is that people who can't quite cope with comic books can cope with them under the term "graphic novels." And in the case of something like the Sandman series, it's more or less a marketing term. You've got an epic sort of story with Sandman. All ten volumes I tend to think of as a graphic novel. It's 2,000 pages long. It's one huge, great, wonderful, gigantic story.

Unfortunately, if we were to discard the distinction between "comic" and "graphic novel," by the next day someone would have coined a new way to distinguish between Astonishing X-Men and V for Vendetta. It wouldn't arise with any malice, but probably in some review of a new comic. It would look something like this:

"This new collection of the run of Limited Comic Line is a masterpiece. It's a bound storyline, by which I mean the sort of self-contained and excellent story that you see with Art Spiegelman's Maus.

And then this term of "bound storyline" would catch on, or maybe a similar term from a different review, as people compared and discussed. I would argue that these labels are not malicious, just useful and necessary.

Return to the "genre fiction" label, which has a similar controversy. It is my belief that it is both reasonable and necessary to categorize fantasy, science fiction, and romance as genre fiction. In the last thirty or forty years, each of these genres has come to have their own community, standards, and language. Recognizing these classifications is a very necessary thing when discussing any book from these genres: literature is a conversation, and unless you recognize the speakers, you're not going to be able to keep up with the dialog.

Take the fantasy genre as an example. Strictly as a genre, fantasy comprises stories about magic or other supernatural elements, usually in a created world. But when considered as a form of "genre fiction," (a frustrating term, but the one in use), fantasy has further differences. The fantasy community is differentiated from a general audience in what it expects and how it receives any given book. Some of the most important qualities are the fantasy world-building (the invented histories, cultures, attributes, etc.), the degree and drama of the heroism in the book, and the innovation of the supernatural elements. Often, these aspects are more important than the actual quality of the writing and traditional aspects like dramatic pacing, full characterization, or the like.

So when I consider a fantasy book, I usually try to consider it both as a general work of fiction, as well as a work of fantasy genre fiction. When I think of The Lord of the Rings, I judge it to be excellent as fantasy (indeed, the apex of the genre) while also excellent as a work of literature. But because fantasy values has different values and goals, and speaks mostly to its own community, this is very rare. Often, the best of fantasy is only a middling work of literature. I think it is thus, for example, with such blockbusters as George R.R. Martin's A Game of Thrones or Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman's Dragons of Autumn Twilight. As works of fantasy, they're superb, but I would only hesitantly recommend the former and never recommend the latter to someone who wasn't a part of that fantasy community.

This is not to say that the problems recognized and articulated by Gaiman and the Omnivore do not exist. There is a ghettoization that occurs with the terms of "genre fiction," "fantasy," and "graphic novel." A truly excellent comic series, like Alan Moore's run on Swamp Thing, might be overlooked or denigrated if it isn't deemed a graphic novel. Or an amazing fantasy series like Stephen R. Donaldson's The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant could be largely ignored, because it is seen as belonging to that insular fantasy community and probably catering to their desires. Further, the very label itself implies certain assumptions and limits about the books. Readers approach a work of fantasy differently when it's labeled such - they expect dragons and damsels. That's often unhelpful.

Thomas King, a First Nations writer, has come up with a good articulation of this problem of labels, and one way to sidestep it. In his essay "Godzilla vs. Post-Colonial," he has mentioned how the labeling of his works about aboriginal peoples are often labeled as "post-colonial," which he resents.

While post-colonialism purports to be a method by which we can begin to look at those literatures which are formed out of the struggle of the oppressed against the oppressor, the colonized and the colonizer, the term itself assumes that the starting point for that discussion is the advent of Europeans in North America. At the same time, the term organizes the literature progressively suggesting that there is both progress and improvement . No less distressing, it also assumes that the struggle between guardian and ward is the catalyst for contemporary Native literature, providing those of us who write with method and topic. And, worst of all, the idea of post-colonial writing effectively cuts us off from our traditions, traditions that were in place before colonialism ever became a question, traditions which have come down to us through our cultures in spite of colonization, and it supposes that contemporary Native writing is largely a construct of oppression. Ironically, while the term itself - post-colonial - strives to escape to find new centres, it remains, till the end, a hostage to nationalism.

As a contemporary Native writer, I am quite unwilling to make these assumptions, and I am quite unwilling to use these terms.

King's solution is an alternate set of labels: "tribal, interfusional, polemical, and associational" to describe Native writing. In his view, these labels avoid the worst aspects of the "post-colonial" label and more accurately describe Native works and their goals. I won't get into the finer distinctions and definitions of each (read the essay if you're interested, it's pretty good) but the point is that a new set of labels can avoid the problems of the old.

The immediate and unfortunate result, of course, is that new labels will swiftly introduce an identical and new set of problems. Such a complicated parsing as King proposes is difficult to use in everyday discussion. While more accurate, they accordingly are more selective: "interfusional fiction" describes a very small group of books that only a few people are likely to want to discuss. They also have the flaw of being relatively counterintuitive - "post-colonial" gives at least some idea of what it means, whereas "associational" will inevitably require a supplied definition. And finally, even though they discard the idea of colonialism as the center of any discussion of Tribal works, they introduce their own inherent limitations from their terms. Should these classifications catch on, in twenty years another writer would complain about them and propose his own new set.

This is the fate and inherent limitation of any set of labels. By distinguishing and selecting, they also prejudice and segregate. They are useful and necessary, and we can only strive for an accuracy of terms and fairness of definition that will do the least harm. Ultimately, then, while I have sympathy for complaints about "graphic novel" and "genre fiction," I can only stick to those labels - until I hear better ones.

---

*The Literary Omnivore is my current role model when it comes to bookblogging, and reading her site is what prompted me to put up a directory of my reviews.

NEW! Book review directory

2011-10-26T09:05:00.002-04:00

Now at the link at the top of the page you can access this list of books I've reviewed, alphabetized by author name and linked. Someday, I will also go through and give each book a rating, but that's a project for another day.

"World War Z," "The Life and Times of Michael K.," "Mud, Sweat, and Tears," "Reading Lolita in Tehran," "Mezzanine," and "Daisy Miller."

2011-10-26T03:01:00.001-04:00

World War Z, Max Brooks
The Life and Times of Michael K., J.M. Coetzee
Mud, Sweat, and Tears, Bear Grylls
Reading Lolita in Tehran, Azar Nafisi
Mezzanine, Nicholson Baker
Daisy Miller, Henry James

World War Z, Max Brooks

It's interesting to think of books as food. This allegory forces you to consider the traits of a specific book, its overall "flavor" and "ingredients," and try to conceive of an appropriate analogue. For example, Cormac McCarthy's The Road is an overpowering draught of bitterness, with its unwavering central theme of hope-despite-doom (a nuclear Gotterdammerung), and so it seems to me to be like a tall and strong iced coffee: powerful, cold, and lingering. It's a fun game to play. And in the terms of that analogy, World War Z is Quaker™ White Cheddar Rice Cakes® - fluffy, synthetic, and probably a little bad for you.

When Brooks wrote this, he was riding the crest of the zombie craze that struck popular media from 2004 and is only now slowly subsiding. He had helped start the fad with his Zombie Survival Guide, a fake manual for survivors of a zombie plague. That book made some positive statements about zombies, endorsing the "fast zombie" approach (as opposed to the slow staggerers of yore). World War Z builds on this hesitant initial attempt at actual writing, telling a story about zombie apocalypse and gradual human recovery through a series of short essays from different viewpoints. The different speakers all tell fragments of the larger story, building up a particular mythology in the voices of an American transport pilot, South African scientist, Israeli mother, and so on.

The story is interesting and fun, and the characterization is passable. There is a distinct hint of Wikipedia at work in the details behind the lives of each of the characters - the details that flesh them out are wide but nonspecific, in the manner of research done over the course of an afternoon on the Internet. Brooks is always just on the right side of plausible, like a child's fantastic lies about where he found a five-dollar-bill that most certainly wasn't stolen from your wallet.

There are frequent false notes in the overall narration, clumsy little mysteries solved in a later chapter, that rattle the reader with leaden obtrusiveness. But on the whole, World War Z is written fairly well. It's light and silly and not too bad, so check it out if you're in need of some meaningless entertainment.

The Life and Times of Michael K., J.M. Coetzee

Nobel-prize winner J.M. Coetzee has been recommended to me many times. I get a lot of recommendations, though, because I know many readers and I am interesting in reading all genres, all periods, and all qualities of books. But after hearing Coetzee praised to high heaven again last month, I had to start on him.

The Life and Times of Michael K. was an extremely interesting book. It's the best kind of deep fiction - interesting and well-written on the surface, with deep allusions and themes that ripple far in the depths unobtrusively. The protagonist, Michael, is harelipped and slow, and lives a very small life. In the text, he and his mother try to take a journey from their home of Capetown, to seek a better life in a mythic countryside farm. Sad and strange, the book follows Michael's life. He doesn't have "adventures," but instead a few things just happen to him. He lives long periods in silence, without contemplation.

I believe in many ways Coetzee's book is about the qualities of a person, and how they are lived. In the text, there is depicted loyalty, endurance, asceticism, wisdom, intelligence, bravery, and other traits - all normally laudable and good. Yet here, we see them blunt and pointless, like a fine knife in a ditch scummed with mud. They're not twisted or mocked or treated nastily, but they just seem misdirected and quite beside the point. It's a story about how a man's life can fit untidily into his world.

It is definitely worth reading. While not a happy story, it's a not a sad one, either. Take a look.

Mud, Sweat, and Tears, Bear Grylls

Edward "Bear" Grylls has lived a hell of a life. He went to Eton, joined the elite SAS, broke his back with a faulty parachute, climbed Everest, was elected Chief Scout, and starred in several television shows. Without a doubt, he is bold, brave, and tough. But he is not a writer.

His autobiography is not a disaster. But with such dynamite material, it's a study of missed opportunities. It's plagued with structural problems caused by lazy organization, as well as some genuine moments of opaque prose, where the arranged words convey no meaning.

The book begins in media res. This is becoming nearly mandatory these days, and is getting more and more irritating. At some point, authors (particularly of autobiographies) realized that writing an actual introduction to set the mood and catch the reader's attention required some degree of skill, and that they could do without that difficult work if they just plunked the most exciting part of the book at the beginning. No need for context, transitions, or that difficult first sentence: you start off right in the action. This isn't necessarily a bad thing, as the Iliad demonstrates, but I'm starting to see it as a crutch. Writers like Bear Grylls and Elizabeth Gilbert (Eat Pray Love, Committed) do it because it's easy.

There are other problems with laziness. Mud, Sweat, and Tears has 110 chapters, despite being only 350 pages. These short chapters, ranging from one to seven pages in length, exist for the express purpose of artificially jacking up the sense of drama. You probably recognize the technique from Dan Brown's nonsense (The Da Vinci Code, Angels and Demons) where each paragraph would be set off by a section break, chapter break, and a small illustration of Dan Brown bathing in money.

The way it works is by taking advantage of the reader's natural rhythm. Certain moments in any text are heightening in importance by their placement: the first sentence, the last sentence, and any sentences set off in their own paragraph. These sentences are contiguous to a moment of mental pause, induced in a reader by transitions. It's a stepped-up version of the pause introduced by a period, as the reader's attention is held up for a moment. Thus.

The technique is effective in small doses or when it naturally occurs, but it's also a tempting way for a bad writer to artificially crank up the potency of their sentiments. And because Grylls is a bad writer, he does this all the time.

It gets old.

Worse than this, though, are the times when Grylls offers up something that looks like a coherent expression, but isn't quite intelligible.

In truth it was probably luck, but I learnt another valuable lesson that night: listen to the quiet voice inside. Intuition is the noise of the mind.

What does that mean, that intuition is the noise of the mind? It's not just an uncommon aphorism (I googled it), and it seems to contradict what Grylls is trying to say. It's bad writing, and not uncommon in Mud, Sweat, and Tears.

There are some brief moments of interesting phrasing. When Grylls writes about his ascent of Everest, his fashionable staccato prose almost becomes decent:

Breathe. Pause. Move. Pause. Breathe. Pause. Move. Pause. It is unending. I heave myself over the final lip, and strain to pull myself clear of the edge. I clear the deep powder snow from in front of my face. I lie there hyperventilating. Then I clear my mask of the ice that my breath has formed in the freezing air. I unclip off the rope whilst still crouching. The line is now clear for Neil to follow up. I get to my feet and start staggering onwards. I can see this distant cluster of prayer flags, semi-submerged in the snow. Gently flapping in the wind, I know that these flags mark the true summit – the place of dreams.

But bits like this only remind us of the wasted potential, of a life of adventure told in such an incompetent way. This book is not worth reading, and you should skip it.

Reading Lolita in Tehran, Azar Nafisi

Azar Nafisi was the daughter of a mayor of Tehran, raised during the time when Iran was a liberal beacon of progress under the oppressive tyranny of the Shah. She went to school abroad, and returned to teach English literature at the University of Tehran. Her memoir, Reading Lolita in Tehran, relates the story of her time teaching in her homeland. Her first semester coincided with the peak of the uprisings, and within a few years the country would be completely transformed into the Islamic Republic, crushed under a new sort of tyranny. Unwilling to teach under the new theocratic viciousness, Nafisi abandoned the university. Some years later, she took on a small group of select students, to meet in her home and study the work of Vladimir Nabokov, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Henry James, and Jane Austen. The episodic story flashes back and forth in time between this small class of students, sipping tea and discussing Gatsby, and the early years of the revolution.

Nafisi is a professor, and writes like one. Curiously, she seems to be unpublished when it comes to criticism, but her understanding of the discussed texts is more than adequate as relates their themes to her life and the changing atmosphere of Iran. She is also, unfortunately, unable to prevent herself from reading symbolism into everything, and one of the flaws of her book is a tendency to break off into navel-gazing, losing the central dramatic thrust of the moment. Despite this problem and an occasional self-indulgence that has left many sentences uncut that would have been better eliminated, her writing is decent enough. It helps a great deal that she is telling a compelling story, of young men roaming the streets to enforce morality with guns in their hands and of the dawning horror that her blind radicalism, unexamined and reactionary, had helped lead to the growing horror of Islamic oppression that crushed out the light from the most advanced country in the Middle East.

It is a very good book and sparked a lot of controversy when it was published, when an Iranian professor at Columbia accused Nafisi of being a sort of elitist fifth column within the Islamic world for Western imperialism (I won't address that here, because his criticism is almost entirely unconnected with the actual book and is tediously venomous). Read it, and see what you think.

Mezzanine, Nicholson Baker

My wife got me Mezzanine for a present. It took a dozen pages before I said to her with happy gratitude, "This is really good!" I was delighted once I realized its nature: Mezzanine is a book about our fractal lives. Baker's story - if it can be called that - is scarcely a narrative: the protagonist spends the entire book engaged in a scant handful of unimpressive actions. For example, one chapter is about the moment he spends exchanging greetings with a maintenance man and a subsequent trip up the escalator. And yet, as impossible as it sounds, this is not boring.

The protagonist's seemingly trivial actions are each the subject of beautiful, insightful thoughts - what Baker later calls "philosophy." Each facet is discussed and its interesting points are revealed, before he fluidly moves into the next point. It's careful, wonderful, and very well-written.

And this was when I realized abruptly that as of that minute (impossible to say exactly which minute), I had finished with whatever large-scale growth I was going to have as a human being, and that I was now permanently arrested at an intermediate stage of personal development. I did not move or flinch or make any outward sign. Actually, once the first shock of raw surprise had passed, the feeling was not unpleasant. I was set: I was the sort of person who said “actually” too much. I was the sort of person who stood in a subway car and thought about buttering toast—buttering raisin toast, even: when the high, crisp scrape of the butter knife is muted by occasional contact with the soft, heat-blimped forms of the raisins, and when if you cut across a raisin, it will sometimes fall right out, still intact though dented, as you lift the slice. I was the sort of person whose biggest discoveries were likely to be tricks to applying toiletries while fully dressed. I was a man, but I was not nearly the magnitude of man I had hoped I might be.

Baker also presents further digressions in footnotes. Footnotes have been particularly fascinating for me since I have read some Borges and David Foster Wallace, and Baker's cogent defense of the very practice (within one of his own footnotes, naturally) hits the nail on the head with why they can be such a necessary thing.

Boswell, like Lecky (to get back to the point of this footnote), and Gibbon before him, loved footnotes. They knew that the outer surface of truth is not smooth, welling and gathering from paragraph to shapely paragraph, but is encrusted with a rough protective bark of citations, quotation marks, italics, and foreign languages, a whole variorum crust of “ibid.’s” and “compare’s” and “see’s” that are the shield for the pure flow of argument as it lives for a moment in one mind. They knew the anticipatory pleasure of sensing with peripheral vision, as they turned the page, a gray silt of further example and qualification waiting in tiny type at the bottom.

The examination of our lives and the objects in them and the history that has gone before is endlessly intriguing, as Baker demonstrates, and there is no bad time to indulge in contemplation of that mystery. The conclusion of the text is a paean to that contemplation, done with a perfect enthusiasm. I recommend this book very much, and you should check it out.

Daisy Miller, Henry James

Daisy Miller is one of the most feminist books I have ever read. It feels strange to say that, and I'm not sure if that's a common take, but it is definitely true.

The book is brief and astoundingly simple in scope. A young man, an American residing in Europe, meets beautiful Daisy Miller, also from America and traveling on a tour of the Continent with her nervous mother and rambunctious younger brother. Daisy is gorgeous and intriguing, but also troubles the young man, who thinks she must be uncultivated. She doesn't make a fuss about spending time with him alone, even though it's improper, nor does she seem to be bothered by other social niceties. This is not to say she is impolite - she is quite pleasant and not at all rude.

In time, they part ways, only to encounter each other again in Rome. Daisy causes a scandal in Rome by spending a great deal of time in her friendship with a local bravo, stirring up a chilly reception from other Americans in town who don't want her giving them a bad reputation. The story ends quietly and unhappily, and everyone moves on. There are no great scenes of high drama - life continues, and the book ends.

I call the book feminist because the whole of the action is driven by the young American gentleman's inability to comfortably categorize the free-spirited Daisy. Is she a simple tramp, sleeping around town with her gentlemen friends? Is she a foolish ingenue, unaware of how she appears to others and in need of rescue? She is none of these things, but the others around her cannot understand this.

It was, frankly, astonishing to read the book and find that it had such a marvelous and direct moral, yet was written with such natural expression and beautiful prose that it was still a great pleasure to read. The theme isn't forced down the reader's throat, which is especially curious because it is the sole conflict in the text and single focus of the action. This one has exquisite prose, unforgettable characters, and a sparse discipline you only see in masters of the craft. Definitely read Daisy Miller.

Nevada GOP Debate

2011-10-19T06:41:00.000-04:00

Rick Perry appears to have gotten dramatically different coaching for this debate; he has moved away from his continual refrain of "energy, energy, energy" and gone on the attack against Romney. This was smart, because what he had been doing has not been working and has lost him his substantial enthusiasm bump with two disastrous debate performances. Unfortunately, his new attacks were heavy-handed attempts at bullying, as he repeatedly interrupted Romney, talked over him, and made bold accusations that Romney had once hired illegal immigrants. He got out of control, and the audience indulged itself with a rare chorus of boos as a response to his assault on poor Mitt (who has really mastered his inoffensive look of long-suffering). Perry's new strategy might have pulled him out of his death spiral, but he's still headed for the ground fast.

Newt Gingrich remains in an attitude of all-embracing condescension, leaning back and spreading his hands with a sneer in his oft-repeated podium gesture. In past debates he has paused mid-question to browbeat the moderators, accusing them of sowing dissension, and in this debate he rejected Anderson Cooper's prompt to move on from healthcare to economics with a condescending, "I want to stay on healthcare. Let's just focus." This may be a reflection of his years of worship as the Republican "ideas man." Lost in that reverence for him, that seems to have swelled his already-large potato-shaped-head, is that a lot of his ideas are radical and cruel, such as his recent statement about how he would eliminate constitutional review by the Supreme Court, overturning centuries of precedent right back to Marbury vs. Madison. An abhorrent man.

Rick Santorum somehow always looks unhappy, with a bitter twist to his mouth. Wisely, he is seldom ever asked questions in debate - except when the moderators want to unleash his anger on another candidate. This is a good thing: he has no more chance of victory than Ron Paul, and so any question asked of him is a wasted one. Cain and Bachmann might have no chance either, but they are at least part of the contemporary Republican conversation. Santorum, like Paul, is an outsider. And maybe that's why he's so unhappy.

Michele Bachmann is sheer bluster and the most prominent example of rhetoric without action. She has never done anything of note and hasn't even bothered with any feasible bills. Instead, she spams out ridiculous showboating bills repealing Obamacare, defunding the EPA, and so on. Her claims in the debate were consistent with this, making wild promises like her vow to build a double fence along the entire Mexico border with a "zone of neutrality" in between. Her crazed rhetoric, wide-eyed and insubstantial, is getting worse.

Herman Cain showcases the enduring power of ignorance and denial. The 9-9-9 plan will lower all taxes and replace them with unicorns. It will get passed through Congress because elves will convince them to vote for it. And so on. Any questions or challenges are met with consistent stonewalling denial, not supporting evidence or argument. It's a stuttering, smiling, "No, you're wrong." And what's worse, he doesn't appear to even understand the objections. Any question that's beyond him, he answers with the vaguest and most hackneyed platitudes imaginable ("boots on the ground," "no apologies for America," etc).

Ron Paul is mostly as irrelevant as Santorum. He leads his own constituency that's only loosely within the GOP, and he stands no chance. One answer he gave is worth examination: his idea that the free markets would take care of nuclear waste storage. This is a good example of where libertarians and I part ways: I don't think that there exists a sufficient market incentive to force nuclear power plants to find a geologically stable place and ensure hundreds of years of safety. The environment is a good example of a sector where perverse incentives work towards the wrong goal: it's almost always far more profitable to just slosh crap into a hole, knowing you're going to retire decades before it becomes a serious problem.

Mitt Romney excelled. He was adroit and clever with his arguments, reflecting his long years of experience on the campaign trail. The ample time he's given in debates means he doesn't have to force his talking points, but can afford to let them flow naturally. Further, his attitude is perfectly-pitched. When lashing out, he's reasonable and personable. When under attack, he's calm and pleasant. He remains far in the lead and the anointed candidate, and this debate didn't threaten that very much. He continues to be the only possible candidate that could win against Obama (a 50/50 proposition at this point).

"Squirrel Meets Chipmunk," "Your Call Is Important to Us," "Room," "Animals Make Us Human," "John Everett Millais," "The Romantic Manifesto," "A Study of Vermeer," and "Piercing the Darkness."

2011-10-15T01:56:00.000-04:00

Squirrel Meets Chipmunk, David Sedaris

Usually you have a pretty good idea of what you're going to get when you pick up a book by David Sedaris. It'll be a collection of stories - usually focused on his childhood and his wacky family - presented in a whimsical and poignant way. And there's always enough bite to the criticism to make the book edgy, and enough fondness to give it heart.

Sedaris took Squirrel Meets Chipmunk in a different direction. It's a collection of short, sneering fables with discernible but cruel morals, starring a varying crew of animals of a distinctly yuppie flavor. They are written very well, if a bit sloppily, with the strong characterization that has long been Sedaris' strong suit and which is especially essential for short-form work. They are also generally unpleasant.

It's not that I lack appreciation for what he's trying to do. The fables are clever and they effectively and humorously satirize their targets. But they left me feeling vaguely unclean with the overall message that everyone, everywhere, is kind of a jerk.

I feel like there are some sorts of people out there who would really like this book. Well-educated middle-class people with a healthy degree of self-loathing, perhaps? Everyone else should skip it.

Your Call Is Important to Us, Laura Penny

Laura Penny's exploration of the vast array of doubletalk in our lives is a melange of Naomi Klein's No Logo, Harry Frankfurt's On Bullshit, and a big handful of the current articles on alternative journalism site Alternet. It is filled with contempt for our commercialized world, and with the greater and lesser degrees of nonsense that has taken the place of clear communication.

The music, the dancing, the lighting, the huge celebratory hullabaloo over absolutely nothing; pure Cola, millions of dollars visibly and gleefully spent to produce a sixty-second ditty about cheap brown sugar water.

Unfortunately, Penny's book is not as good as Klein's or Frankfurt's, and only marginally better than Alternet. The unfortunate thing about any sort of principled attack on bullshit is that, as Penny accurately discovers, it is absolutely ubiquitous. Every day and in every place and from every person. That's because it elides too closely with the white lie - a fact that Penny admits but tries to make a clumsy distinction from. The titular bullshit, "Your call is important to us," is a good example. It's a piece of silly pablum used to pacify the listener, because the radical truth would be grating, unpleasant, and unnecessary: "Your call is exactly as important to us as is required to shut you up before you cause enough ruckus to cost us money."

Penny's rapid loss of perspective and consistent tone, full of bile, are the negatives. On the plus side, the writing is good and her detailed exploration through our culture of bullshit does turn up a lot of amusingly outrageous examples and inspires several entertaining rants. With Your Call Is Important to Us, it's take it or leave it - it's not bad and it's not good.

Room, Emma Donoghue

After reading Kaycee Dugard's A Stolen Life, I was hesitant to read a fictional account of the same sort of captivity. I assumed that fiction would only sensationalize the worst aspects of such an experience - the violence, the shame, etc. How could such a book be anything other than crude button-pushing, the literary equivalent of torture porn movies like Hostel?

My wife's enthusiastic endorsement, however, finally won me over. And I was surprised to find a subtle and well-designed book that I enjoyed a great deal. Room is told from the perspective of five-year-old Jack, who has lived his entire life in a single room, captive with his mother at the mercy of a man he calls "Old Nick" (out of a twisted understanding of Santa). The limited understanding of a child is exacerbated by his extreme upbringing - he has trouble understanding that there is a world beyond the boundaries of Room, and doesn't understand the purpose of some of the games they play (like the one where they scream as loud as they can to try to attract a neighbor's attention.)

While it is a novel based on a gimmick, it doesn't lean on that gimmick. Room is very well-written, paced and plotted with an extremely tight attention to detail and mood, and with an extraordinary level of characterization. It is a very good book, and you should read it.

I have a theory about Room, actually, that no one else seems to agree with. There might be some limited spoilers ahead, so be aware.

So anyway, Room is (I think) a fairly clear allegory for the mortal world and an afterlife - sort of a modern-day version of Plato's cave. Jack doesn't understand the unfairness of the world around him. He can't possibly grasp the reason why his mother flicks Lamp on and off at night, signaling for help, because his understanding has been curtailed by the cramped confines of his limited world. I believe Donoghue is drawing a parallel with mankind, similarly trapped in a world whose rules make internal sense but are much more meaningful when viewed from outside, with full context and a greater awareness. Jack knows that Sundaytreat happens every Sunday, but can't understand the real reason why: he just understands that things are the way they are.

Similarly, Jack doesn't really grasp the idea of Outside, or the reality of their plight. While told about it, it doesn't quite seem believable and he can't do much more than muddle through some of the implications. The idea that his world is just a creation, prelude to something much larger and more wonderful than he could imagine, is just not within his capabilities. It's a concept too huge to really grasp with his limited mind.

There are strong Biblical allusions throughout the text that pointed me in this direction, even beyond the above parallels. For example, at one point Jack muses, "When I was a little kid I thought like a little kid, but now I'm five I know everything." This is a reference to 1 Corinthians 13:11, gently mocking self-assured child/mankind. Further evidence might be found in Old Nick, a onetime nickname for Satan, who visits regularly and torments Jack's mother.

I'm not sure if Donoghue is engaging in any sort of apologetics with this allegory - we're not talking about evangelism here, especially since I can't even convince anyone of this theory. Nor do I think it detracts from the book, but rather just adds a wonderful dimension to an already wonderful story. If you haven't read Room, then do so and tell me what you think (it's a great book). If you have read it, let me know if you agree.

Animals Make Us Human, Temple Grandin

I'm not sure what I was expecting from this book. I knew it was a book about the treatment of animals by Temple Grandin, which says a lot. Grandin's an autistic animal science researcher who made an appearance in Oliver Sack's An Anthropologist on Mars, famous for her description of the "squeeze machine" she made to give her calming hugs, and since then has been an advocate for the autistic and animals. So this book would certainly be some sort of discussion of how animals could be treated better in factory farms, right? Or maybe it would talk about the behaviors animals and humans have in common, and what that means for us?

Instead, I found what is essentially a handbook for animal owners. Working from what modern science has discovered about natural animal behavior and how animal minds work, Grandin breaks down how they think and how you should accordingly treat them. Working with her own analyses and the work of other researchers, Grandin suggests that all animals operate based on certain patterns of interaction, called SEEKING, PLAY, RAGE, LUST, PANIC, and FEAR (always capitalized in the text). Simply put, owners should stimulate SEEKING and PLAY, and avoid PANIC, FEAR, and RAGE. From these principles, she moves through various animals and discusses how to actually do that: dogs, cats, pigs, cows, etc.

While this is good, and if I ever have a pet I will certainly consult this book again, ultimately it became very repetitive. Combined with surprisingly poor writing, it is not anything for a casual reader. Check out the relevant chapters if you have a pet, and otherwise skip it.

John Everett Millais, Christine Riding

This slim glossy book was a serviceable exploration of Millais' life and work. I have been fond of Millais for years, and so I was glad to take a closer look. Riding's explanations are sufficient, although her writing is only average; the book is not well-organized, but Riding's prose is clear and intelligent. Millais was an early prominent member of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood (his Christ in the House of His Parents was the target for much early criticism of the movement), and much of his work strikes something deep within me. Of particular note is his early work, such as Mariana or (my favorite) Ophelia, but a few of his later paintings like Dew-Drenched Furze were also exquisite, and new to me in Riding's book. It's a good enough book, and if you enjoy the linked images, then you will enjoy this text.

The Romantic Manifesto, Ayn Rand

The Romantic Manifesto is a broad view of art and literature collected in a series of Rand's essays from her magazine. In Rand's view, art's purpose is to set forth the author's personal philosophy. Art that fails to do that is poorly executed. According to this view, she praises the 18th century Romantic movement (especially authors like Victor Hugo and painters like Joseph Turner) for what she sees as its commitment to representing ideals in art, and condemns Naturalism for a short-sighted attempt to depict the world without making any statements about it. She also attacks modernism and post-modernism for similar "problems."

Rand's view of art is a strange one. Some of the problems are flagrant: she doesn't consider photography to be art, because it can't carry any philosophical message. But the ignorance that prompts such an opinion is only a surface one, while the larger problem lurks behind in her basic understanding of art's purpose.

Art always does carry a philosophy. Rand is quite right when she points out that the choice of what to show in a character or what elements of a plot to tell constitute a philosophical choice that's communicated to the reader. Her accuracy in this perception makes it all the more curious that she fails to perceive that Naturalism, modernism, and postmodernism all do carry a message - it's impossible to create art of any kind that is not a message, because that is what art is: it's a message. That message ranges from the simplest, "look at the beauty here," to the most complex of narrations that sets out a whole worldview. The latter portion of the book implicitly admits this, as she attacks the central message of Naturalism and other movements. The book turns into a subjective savaging of artists she dislikes, skewing away from her promised rational and objective valuation.

Rand's central mistake on the purpose of art is a pretty common bit of ignorance, so maybe I shouldn't be so harsh on Rand. And of course, many people might disagree with me. But for someone who was so proudly independent, it's sad that her conclusions are so misfounded and provincial. Her book's sneering denunciation of modern art is indistinguishable from the heckling of a morning show radio hyena.

So we have news out of the Whacko Zone this morning, B-Rad! [sound of toilet flushing] We have this artist whose latest work is just a sentence! Not even a good sentence, it's just "put some canvas on the floor!" I bet she's making thousands of dollars from this, probably our tax dollars, right? [stock sound of woman screaming] This isn't art! You can maybe hang it on the wall when you're done, but that doesn't make it art! There's no work involved, no skill... anyone could do that! It's like all those idiots who put up a frame on a wall and call that art! Did they make the wall? No. It's not pretty! Not art! [sound of toilet flushing].

That's about the flavor of Rand's book, only with less philosophical consistency and a little more pompousness. Skip it.

A Study of Vermeer, Edward Snow

I don't guess I know much about art. I mean, I have ideas about what art is (see last review) and I know what I like, but I never learned a lot of the basic principles. My high school art classes were very practical - how to draw, how to paint - and my college art classes were very informational - Indian steles, Renaissance revivals - and so I never learned about the essentials of theory. It's a sad gap in my basic knowledge. This book has helped a little, although my (more knowledgeable) wife read some of it and rolled her eyes hard enough to crack a windowpane.

Vermeer is amazing, of course, and if you're not familiar with his work you should immediately check it out. This series of videos from the National Museum is reportedly pretty good.

But while I had loved his work, much of the structure behind it had been a mystery to me. I suppose it's fairly elemental that a solid vertical line through a painting will help anchor the eye, but lessons like that (and increasingly more obscure and doubtful extrapolations) were revelations to me in Snow's book. He goes through a wide selection of Vermeer's work, early to late, and discusses their common themes and construction. I was surprised not to find anything about the camera obscura, which I had thought was a major part of Vermeer's process, but it's not even mentioned. Sadly, I lack the competence to determine if this is an outrageous oversight or not.

Snow may indeed have gone a step too far in his analyses, which often examine each detail and fit it into an overall theory of vast complexity - every included element has a complicated meaning, in his view. But for all that was lost on me, I do feel that when I look on something like The Milkmaid, my appreciation is a little deeper. These are things I really should have noticed before, I suppose, like the pattern of pairs of open and closed items (whole loaf, broken loaf; open jar, closed jar; empty basket, full basket), the use of empty space on the right to provide balance and relief to the denseness of the left side of the painting, and the carefully ambiguous expression on the milkmaid's face.

Check it out, if you're inclined.

Piercing the Darkness, Frank Peretti

Ah, back with Frank again. The important thing to realize about Frank Peretti's world is that it has nothing to do with Jesus Christ, the church his followers founded, or anything else Christian - the nominal labels of "Jesus" and "God" aside, what Peretti's talking about is magic.

Piercing the Darkness is a sequel to This Present Darkness. When I reviewed that book, I came to the conclusion that Peretti was a deist - I thought he believed in a nonexistent God, since angels are scared of the demons, are in risk of losing the conflict, and there's no apparent intervention from the deity (aside from some vague feelings). But after this second book, I finally realized that it's not that God is just absent - there is no God to begin with! There's just wizards and rituals and magic.

The mechanics of the world are the same as the first book - no changes there. There is a human conflict, poorly-conceived and hard to believe. And in the shadows of the spirit world there is a supernatural conflict, as angels and demons engage in physical combat and interfere in people's minds and (occasionally) with physical objects. The supernatural creatures fight with swords and fists, and are empowered according to the strength of nearby believers - the demon Insanity would be particularly powerful in an insane asylum, for example. The angels benefit from the special strength of "prayer cover," provided when Christians regularly and sincerely pray to God. If there aren't many Christians or they're divided and distracted, then angels are weak and easily defeated.

The human conflict is a silly story that reads like a parody of a fundamentalist Christian's fears. The ACFA (American Citizens Freedom Association) has helped a cabal of Satanists and humanists to bring a lawsuit against a Christian school for spanking a child and casting out a possessing demon. The cabal, which controls all levels of government and the media, is also trying to cover up their persecution and murder of a young woman, Sally Roe, who flees the country, investigating her past and confronting her own sins.

It's not too hard to decode this. The ACFA is a thinly-veiled version of the ACLU, the bogeyman of the religious right that stops them from erecting monuments to the Ten Commandments in the town square and forcing your child to pray to Jesus. They receive a loving description.

The ACFA, that infamous association - one could say conspiracy - of professional, idealistic legal technicians, whitewashed, virtuous, and all-for-freedom on the exterior, but viciously liberal and anti-Christian in its motives and agenda. Nowadays it was getting hard to find any legal action taken against Christians, churches, or parachurch organizations that did not have the ACFA and its numerous, nationwide affiliates behind it.

The ACFA teams up with the overwhelming power of secular forces in the country to try to crush out the impoverished Christian movement, which barely manages to scrape by as it is.

The little people - the Christians - get into legal tangles because the state, or the ACFA, or some other rabid, Christian-eating secularist organization decides to pick on them, and those people always have all the power, connections, and finances they need to win any battle they want in a court of law. Not so with the Christians. They have to put on spaghetti dinners and car washes and jogathons just to hire some poor, minor-league attorney like me who supposedly has such a love for righteous causes that he doesn’t care about the money.

The cabal that is teamed up with the ACFA is a handy combination of everything that isn't Christian. Other religions, spiritual movements, etc. all get lumped in with the Satanists and secular humanists and whatnot. There's actually a cabal of cabals, since the spiritual retreat center, the teacher's college, and the pseudo-Masonic "Order of the Nation" are all associated - but essentially every possible thing that fundamentalist Christianity finds even vaguely threatening is explicitly given an evil overlord and representation at the Big Evil Meeting. The Evil Meetingplace includes a variety of buildings:

Taoist Retreat Center. Valley Tibetan Project and Monastery. Temple of Ananta. Library and Archives of Ancient Wisdom. Native American School of Traditional Medicine. Karma Triyana Dharmachakra. The Temple of Imbetu Agobo. Babaji Ashram. Mother’s Temple Shrine of Shiva. The Children of Diana. Temple to the Divine Universal Mother. The House of Bel. The Sacred and Royal Order of the Nation.

But they've all gotten together to bring charges against the school. It's supposed to be a test case: once they can get a judge to rule against casting out demons, then they can go after all the other Christian schools in the country, and eventually Christianity itself.

“Well, just look at the complaint here against… uh … the pastor, the headmaster, the church, and the church board: ‘Outrageous Religious Behavior Against a Child’- casting out the demon, of course, ‘Physical Abuse by Spanking, Excessive Religious Instruction Harmful to the Child, Harassment, Discrimination, and Religious Indoctrination Using Federal Funds.’

The Christians know what's going on, of course. They've been struggling for a long time, trying to make it in a world where everything's stacked against them. They've always known that the forces of Satan were just lying in wait to attack them.

“The first domino,” Brent said quietly, and then shook his head at the thought. “Looks like the persecution’s started, folks.”

The enemy has magic, of course. All that transcendental meditation and psychic study isn't just sinister Satan-worship - it's also a way to build power. They summon in demons that give them magical powers and can aid them. When the assassins are closing in on Sally Roe near the end of the book, they're powered up the mountain and given strength by their spiritual assistants, and it's not until enough prayer is said that the angels can show up and dispel them, letting Sally escape. They gain their powers through long years of study and ritual, working with spirit guides:

It all seemed so utopian eighteen years ago. I can recall the classes in Eastern philosophy and the long sessions in the meadows, sitting for hours in meditation, feeling such a unity with all life, with all that is. What bliss that was. I can remember the special spirit-guides who came to me during my last summer. They opened my consciousness to realize my own divinity, and revealed worlds of experience and awareness I’d never known before. It was like an endless carnival ride through a world of enticing secrets, and my guides promised to remain with me forever.

The Christians have their own rituals, and they pray their counter-spells.

They prayed for a place they’d never heard of before: Bacon’s Corner. They sought the Lord on behalf of the believers there, and asked for a real victory in their time of siege and struggle. They bound the demonic spirits in the name of Jesus and by His authority, forbidding them to do any more mischief among those people.

Of course, the interesting thing is that one prayer isn't enough. It's not sufficient that just one guy prays - that's not enough "prayer cover." Scores and hundreds of people have to really be praying and doing their ritual in order to cause magical effects. The angels won't make things happen and won't fight on the side of the Christians, without those rituals. Near the end of the book, Sally Roe gets slapped around and badly injured even after she's born again, because the angels don't yet have enough prayer cover. They just watch her get hurt and wait to spring their trap, instead.

Tal turned to the courier. “Tell Mota and Signa that they have the prayer cover and can proceed closing the trap. After that, have them wait for the signal from Nathan and Armoth.”

Aside from raising metaphysical questions, the nature of the book has another effect: it allows Peretti to paper over his plot holes. For example, at one point it is vital for Sally Roe to discover the identity of a murdered man who belonged to the Order of the Nation, the evil brotherhood that strongly resembles a Masonic organization. She doesn't know anything about him, but she gets a hunch he might be a lawyer, because the Order is a very white-collar group. She looks in the journal for the local bar association and finds his name! What would be a ridiculously unbelievable leap is fixed, because she must have been divinely guided.

Just like before, this book is poorly written. This time, though, it became much more amusing to read because I just imagined that "Jesus" wasn't the Jesus of Christianity like I'd ordinarily assume, but instead a Mexican spirit-lord that was providing his worshippers with power. As a story about conflicting groups of magicians, it was far more enjoyable. Still, you'd best skip it.

"A Stolen Life," "My Horizontal Life," "The Year of Living Biblically," "Maxims," "90 Minutes in Heaven," "Ficciones," "A Manual of Buddhism," and "Committed"

2011-10-02T04:26:00.002-04:00

A Stolen Life, Jaycee Dugard

Starting off right at brass tacks: this book is written terribly, and as a memoir it has little value It is good in its own way, though, as a look at therapy in progress.

The horrible facts are these: Jaycee Lee Dugard was kidnapped from the street when she was eleven years old, stunned with a cattle prod and dragged into the van of convicted rapist Phillip Garrido and his enabling wife Nancy. Jaycee was kept in captivity for eighteen years, bearing two daughters during that time after repeated rapes. Initially confined to a single-room shack in Garrido's backyard, she was eventually permitted to move to a two-room building, and finally was permitted access to the backyard itself after six years. When more than a dozen years had passed and her young mind had been thoroughly warped by her captor - who had convinced her that he knew everything and had all the answers - she was even going on regular trips to the outside world. So crushed was her psyche, that even when Garrido was arrested after his parole officer noticed Dugard's daughters at the sex offender's house, she still told the lies she had been instructed to tell. Phillip Garrido took a fifth-grade girl and broke her, as fundamentally as a person can be broken. He defined for her a warped world.

Dugard's memoir is a present-tense recreation of her kidnapping and captivity, interspersed with regular moments of reflection on her experiences. It is disjointed and confused, and long sections are devoted to remembering various cats, present-day therapy with horses, and jumbled speculations about emotion. It is difficult to read, and I cannot imagine how difficult it must have been to write. It is this latter quality that gives it what worth it has - through the whole of the book, Dugard expresses herself with the muddled purity of true honesty. She has some bitterness for what happened, but some affection as well - unbelievable as it may seem, she speculates that she may have been better off never having had to experience the fear of a first day at high school.

Studded among her uncertain feelings are moments of therapeutic affirmation - these are the rare times when she expresses herself directly and confidently: I know this was wrong. I know this was taken from me. It is not hard to imagine Kaycee Dugard sitting in front of her computer, jaw tight and eyes red, and taking control of her past and her mind itself; setting straight the snarled skeins of affection and manipulation that linger from almost two decades of abuse with these direct statements of what she knows should feel true to her. Her process of recovery, faltering and ongoing, is present between the lines of her memoir.

Do not read this book for lurid details about her captivity, or why she didn't escape. There are some stories about such things, but they are unsettling and confused. Read it only if you want to see a mind during the slow and painful process of recovery, with all the muddling that brings.

My Horizontal Life, Chelsea Handler

I'm not going to say this is the worst book. I've read Tucker Max's books, so I know for a fact that's not true. This isn't even that bad of an effort by the famous Ms. Handler. It's not too badly written, its message is not too abhorrent, and the structure is sensible. Unfortunately, however, it is supposed to be a work of comedy. And it is surprisingly unfunny. Like the proverbial stopped clock, you would have expected it to stumble into a joke by sheer accident once or twice. Not so.

My Horizontal Life is a series of anecdotes by Handler about her various sexual experiences. Ostensibly she's speaking about one-night-stands, but numerically far more of her stories are about near-misses and relationships: the very attractive but stupid guy she dated, the period in which she only went out with black men, the guy she dated who had a very small penis, etc. There are scatological elements, but little gross-out humor; the funny parts are supposed to be the outrageousness of her behavior and her forthright pride in sexuality. In both ways, this book fails. It is astoundingly unfunny yet completely oblivious of its tedium, like the drunk girl at a party who wants to tell you this hilarious story about how her dog likes to sniff people's butts and she once pretended to be a dog and sniff a guy's butt at a party when she was wasted and he thought she was so weird and it was so embarrassing but you know she's just gotta be herself, am I right?

There is an undercurrent of pride in Handler's telling of how she goes up to the hottest guy in the bar and asks them out, or how she cleverly manages to avoid sex with a guy she has decided against sleeping with because he shaves his chest hair. It's a dog whistle to women's lib - she's being assertive and taking control of her sexual destiny. In that sense, it's sort of admirable, and it's certainly hard to criticize her for objectifying men in some instances - I guess some of that sort of medicine needs to be dished out. But aside from that single trait, mildly redemptive, and the overall serviceable writing, this book is a complete failure. It is a crashing disaster of unfunny that barely coaxed a smile. Avoid it like the plague.

The Year of Living Biblically, A.J. Jacobs

This book is for gawking. A.J. Jacobs knows this. It's a gimmicky book, an account of a year-long stunt where he followed all the Biblical rules (no shellfish, no touching a menstruating woman, etc.) No one will or should read it looking for serious analysis or spiritual insight. This book is a circus, not a synagogue.

That said, it's a moderately entertaining circus, and somewhat better than its boring predecessor, The Know-It-All, which was about a year spent reading the whole encyclopedia (reviewed here). Jacobs carries around a special stool so he's not in danger of sitting on an unclean seat that a woman might have touched, he grows an enormous beard and side-locks, and he even goes to Israel and herds some sheep. His insight is generally shallow, and he actually seems surprised when his year of immersion in the Bible yields some genuine religious feeling by its end, which is perhaps the equivalent of spending a year in a pool and being surprised that you learned to swim.

Also interesting are the commandments that he doesn't follow. He gets a pass on animal sacrifice, since it is generally believed that the destruction of the Temple let the Jews off the hook on that one (convenient!) but his attempt at "stoning a blasphemer" involved dropping a pebble on the man's foot. I'm not saying that he should have actually stoned someone, but it would have been better to simply make a rule that he wouldn't break any laws in his Biblical life, and then frankly acknowledge that no aspect of that barbarism was even desirable. Or to put it another way, he should have admitted that no one can literally obey the Bible without being a monster. Throughout the text, he avoids stating this simple truth, despite the lengths he has to go to pretend to have a "slave" (his intern). There is one near bit, though, in a discussion of how to reconcile the bloody wars of the Bible with modern ethics:

One of my spiritual advisers, Julie Galambush, a professor of religion at the College of William and Mary, explained this tactic to me: You simply act as if the Bible doesn't say what it says. There's a passage in Deuteronomy that says the Israelites should offer peace before attacking a city outside the land of Israel. If the city accepts, you take the residents as your slaves. If the city rejects your offer, you kill all the males and make everyone else slaves. For cities inside the land, you don't even offer peace. You just kill everyone: men, women, children, cattle--"save alive nothing that breathes." Pretty shocking stuff. But when talking about this in themidrash, the rabbis completely ignore the bloodletting. Instead, they focus on the part in which the Israelites offer peace. They say, See! The passage is all about compassion (I'm paraphrasing). "It's clear the rabbis have moral objections to this passage," professor Galambush says. "So they pretend it says something they do believe in--peace-- rather than something they object to. You can't underestimate the radicalness of the rabbis."

Overall, the book is about as interesting as its gimmick. If the idea of a year of near-adhesion to the Bible's guidelines seems interesting, then this will interest you. If you roll your eyes and say, "That's stupid"... well, you won't find any surprises.

Maxims, François de La Rochefoucauld (trans. J.W. Bund)

There is a deception inherent in many proverbs, a sort of politician's trick: the writer lays out the climax of a thought or lesson, and we assume they arrived at this destination by our own path. The fourth maxim by Rochefoucauld in this 1678 book, for example, is this: "Self love is more cunning than the most cunning man in the world."

To me, this is saying both that are high regard for ourselves inclines us to be more deceptive towards our real intentions and virtues than any other degree of deception we might credit; we are willing to believe the absolute best of ourselves on scanty or even contrary evidence, even if we treat other's identical assertions with a curled lip and skepticism. No man's deceit could ever equal our own deceit towards ourselves.

That's a hell of a lot packed into that little maxim! And what's even better, because I did much of the work of interpreting it, blazing out a trail towards the conclusion set afar, I am very pleased to regard it as genius. Not that Rochefoucauld is wrong or banal, but so much of the delight in maxims comes from a belief that the poet is in an illusory agreement birthed from our own effort. As the translator to this edition says, "truths expressed in condensed sentences must always have a peculiar charm."

As in all books of maxims, this one is filled with broad categorical claims and absolute statements, and constant parallelisms. If A is something to B, then B is probably the opposite something to C ("89. Everyone blames his memory, no one blames his judgment.") The central theme is that vice and virtue are always entwined - we are good only because of our evil. While this approach turns out some worthy thoughts, it often turns out the obvious ("103. Those who know their minds do not necessarily know their hearts."). And even worse, sometimes it verges into downright bitterness, declaring that, "113. There may be good but there are no pleasant marriages." - a sentiment that requires a great deal of work to assume any aspect of wisdom. And of course, there are notions that are simply wrong: "204. The coldness of women is a balance and burden they add to their beauty."

There are about five hundred maxims in this book. If we ignore the thirty or forty about women (invariably poor), we find that perhaps half of what remains is worthwhile. The rest is repetition or simply wrong. This is surprising - most revered books of proverbs are crammed full of wisdom. Not so with Rochefoucauld - it's a rarity.

There are some excellent sentiments to take away, though. Among them are these:

38. We promise according to our hopes, we perform according to our fears.
134. We are never so ridiculous from the habits we have as from those we pretend to have.
197. There are men of whom we can never believe evil without having seen it. Yet there are very few in whom we should be surprised to see it.
216. Perfect valour is to do without witnesses what one would do before all the world.
245. There is great ability in knowing how to conceal one's ability.
269. No man is clever enough to know all the evil he does.
320. To praise princes for virtues they do not possess is but to reproach them with impunity.
413. A man cannot please long who has only one kind of wit.
423. Few know how to be old.

Take these gleanings, and go read Voltaire instead.

90 Minutes in Heaven, Don Piper

This book was a major disappointment after Todd Burpo's Heaven Is for Real. Burpo's kid Colton had a near-death experience, and could describe how Jesus looked, could recite some theology about how you must accept Jesus as savior, and was able to witness everything that had happened on Earth while he was in Heaven. But Don Piper... well, it seems like Don Piper got completely screwed.

Only a handful of pages in this book are about his trip to Heaven, because he never got past the gate. He was in a terrible car accident that tore his limbs - ripping two of them off - but he had to sit outside their "pearlescent" beauty the entire hour-and-a-half he was "dead." His friends and family came out to speak with him (they looked like he remembered them, but perfected), he heard a chorus of beautiful music, and that's pretty much it. He never even got Moses' autograph.

The rest of the book - 95% of it - is devoted to his arduous physical therapy, and his therapy-related witnessing. To replace the large portions of his limbs that had been pulverized (they never even found the pieces of four inches of his femur) he had the Ilizarov procedure, which screws a metal frame into the broken parts of the bone and gradually extends them over the course of years. By his report and all other reports, it is shatteringly painful. Piper communicates his experiences adequately, if not well.

There are, of course, the usual philosophical problems that go unresolved.

“I’ll tell you this,” I said. “I know I had internal injuries, but somewhere between that bridge and this hospital I don’t anymore.” Tears ran down Dick’s face, and he said, “I know. I wish I could pray like that all the time.”

Thank goodness Dick was in top praying form! If he hadn't been so good at praying that night, God would have let Don Piper die. Totally reasonable.

When the State of Texas was found at fault for the accident, the law limited their liability to $250,000. All the money went to hospital bills, and a quarter of a million dollars didn’t make much of a dent.

Thank the Republicans, Piper.

Anyway, Piper's actual Heavenly experience was so minimal, it's no wonder he wrote so much about his recovery and his ministering to others - otherwise he would have had a rather brief essay, rather than a rather brief memoir. But as a result, the book absolutely and unavoidably ends up being a disappointment. I can unhesitatingly recommend that you skip it.

Ficciones, Jorge Luis Borges

Goddamn. Read this.

Okay, wait, I better elaborate. I'll try to contain my elation - I haven't been so delighted with an author since Nabokov (and before that, Hemingway).

Borges writes short works that are a blend of short story and essay, swinging between narration and scholarly discussion of pure ideas. He was always brief, remarking in his prologue in Ficciones that the "composition of vast books is a laborious and impoverishing exercise. To go on for five hundred pages developing an idea whose perfect oral exposition is possible in a few minutes!" Thus this slender volume - with lengthy critical preface, still not topping 140 pages.

An Argentinian, he was very well-read, with a particular fascination with a few authors of unusually broad styles: Chesterton, Schopenhauer, Kafka. In no small part, he appears to have loved these authors because they wrote about the themes that interested him, rather than their particular genres or approaches. Borges was predominantly and above all interested in the infinite. He explored the infinite in the world, writing about a hidden order to a country that was so all-encompassing its very existence was in question. He wrote about the infinite in morality, positing a Judas whose sacrifice was beyond measure. He talked about the infinite in man, imagining a person whose identity extended beyond the bounds of reality.

I have tried not to spoil any of the stories in this book, many (most) of which hinge on a surprise conclusion or a hidden metaphor. Some of them, though, I can safely discuss without ruining too much. For example, his story "Pierre Menard, the Author of Don Quixote," is a scholarly discussion of a fictional writer, Pierre Menard, whose specialty was a sort of metacriticism that culminated with a complete "rewrite" of Cervantes that copied the epic word-for-word. The scholar discusses with awe Menard's lengthy efforts and his drafts (never shown to anyone and later burned) as he labored towards his rewrite, and praises the result. It was one thing for Cervantes to compose a lengthy tale with all the connotations and resonance of Don Quixote, says the scholar - easy enough for that writer to handle seventeenth-century Spanish and all its archaic phrases, when he was native to the tongue and born to it! But for Pierre Menard to turn out the same brilliant result... well, that was brilliance, says the scholar farcically. It is an absolutely brilliant and hilarious essay/story, and a great example of Borges' skill.

Read one story a day, and think about it. You will be rewarded beyond measure and fall in love. Go read this!

A Manual of Buddhism, Narada Maha Thera

I have read Herman Hesse's Siddhartha, a variety of other Buddhist texts (mostly Zen), and have spent the weekend in a Buddhist monastery. But it was good to really get at the nuts and bolts of Buddhism on a basic level, which I guess I've never done before.

There's a lot of wisdom in the old words, such as the Buddha's admonition to skepticism.

Do not accept anything on hearsay. Do not accept anything on mere tradition. Do not accept anything on account of rumors. Do not accept anything just because it accords with your scriptures. Do not accept anything by mere supposition. Do not accept anything by merely considering the reasons. Do not accept anything merely because it agrees with your preconceived notions. Do not accept anything merely because it seems acceptable. Do not accept anything because it is respected by us.

But there's also some ugliness like you find in any ancient book. The treatment of women, for example. The Venerable Narada Maha Thera, the Malaysian Buddhist who wrote/translated the Manual of Buddhism, makes sure to hedge the more outdated parts of doctrine. All modern theologians do. He says

The Buddha raised the status of women and brought them to a realization of their importance to society. He did not humiliate women, but only regarded them as weak by nature. He saw the innate good of both men and women and assigned to them their due place in His Teaching.

This is (presumably) a defense of the Buddha's progressiveness: women aren't bad, just weak. That's why the first rule for the order of nuns instituted by the Buddha recognizes the inherent superiority of all male monks (Bhikkhu): "A nun, even of a hundred years’ standing by Upasampada, should salute a Bhikkhu and rise before him, though he had received the Higher Ordination that very day."

Still, Buddhism's core beliefs are interesting and unobjectionable: life is suffering, suffering comes from desire, and you can eliminate that desire and suffering by following the Eightfold Path. The rules for life demand no stealing, no killing, no lying, and so on. The Buddha speaks out against slavery, class stratification, and other things. There are also psychic powers, magical karma reincarnation, and flying deities - but hey, nothing's perfect.

This text is a workhorse, carrying the reader by measured paces through the essentials. There's no eye to beauty or cleverness: it just get the job done. Check it out, if you're interested in Buddhism.

Committed, Elizabeth Gilbert

If you are going to read this book, be prepared to read a lot about what Elizabeth Gilbert is thinking and feeling. Unlike its predecessor, Eat, Pray, Love, there is no framework of travel or action - she barely goes anywhere or does anything in the whole of the book. It begins in media res (of course) but there's hardly any res to be in media: Gilbert's fiance is held up at immigration, they speak to the DHS officer who tells them they should get married if he wants to enter the country again, they travel to Southeast Asia for a while, and then they come back to the States and get married. That's the whole of what happens.

This scant series of events must bear the weight of a huge amount of neurotic contemplation (Gilbert had a bad first marriage) and contradictory family characterization (her father is both a chauvinist monster who forced her mother to give up her dreams, and a miserably henpecked victim whose life is dominated "95%). There are some amusing factoids and anecdotes scattered in but for pages and pages Gilbert is talking about her last marriage and worrying about whether she needs to have babies and worrying about whether marriage means her career might be over and so on. It is terrible.

Typically, it goes something like this (fabricated example):

Throughout history, women have always had to clean the floors. When Queen Victoria was married, she said this sort-of-relevant quote about floors: "Fuck do I hate cleaning this floor." The ancient people of the KlingWrap even have a custom about the household floor and women's role with it: on the bride's wedding day, they strap her to the floor and then they sing a long song about floors. But I found myself wondering if that was really a vital part of marriage: do women always have to clean the floor? Would I have to clean the floor? Would my darling Juan, the man who solved all of my problems in my previous book, make me clean the floor? I didn't want to clean the floor. I talked to my mother, and she said that she hated cleaning the floor. But she did it anyway. Because marriage isn't neat or simple, but it's complicated. In the end, though, Juan told me that he didn't care if I cleaned the floor, because he is so amazing and nontraditional and beats the shit out of your husband bitches!

And that's pretty much how it goes. Skip it.

Memorial for the Parihaka ploughmen at the Northern Cementary in Dunedin, by Tom Ngatai

2011-10-01T04:58:00.000-04:00

He kawai rangatira i puta mai i a maunga Turanaki
He Kakano i ruia mai i Ragiatea
Ka Hinga atu ki te mura o te ahi, i riro atu te iwi hereherei
kawea mai ke te hauaitu o te Wai Pounamu, he taurekareka o te Pakeha
wehea i te ukaipo.
Kia kuru pereki.
Enei hipi hiroki.
i hingahinga atu, i hungahinga mai, i ngaro whakaterunga, i ngaro whakateraro ki te po
Kua huna taurekareka, te hoki atu ai.
Watea kau anate mata o te whenua, takahia e ratou nona nga ture
Tera te raukura tikapa i titia hai tohu whakateitei i te whenua, te warewaretia

They grew under the protective mantle of the mountain Taranaki
They were firmly connected to their Turangawaewae
Then arrived the colonial wars, that uprooted their lives, and resulted in their captivity
They were brought as prisoners to the deep south, to the colder climes, to this strange land
They were separated from their whanau.
They were put to work building roads.
Sickness and death befell them.
One by one many died, and they were buried in the Northern and Southern cemeteries.
Buried in unmarked paupers' graves.
Lonely graves, in the midst of those who were their captors and also those who enjoyed the rights and dignity of free people.
We will not forget them, the suffering and their loss can only be imagined, their sacrifice will be remembered.

e Kare au e mate
Ka mate Ko te mate
Na ora tonu aau

I shall not die
When death itself is dead
I shall still be alive

"Perseus," by Robert Hayden

2011-09-25T07:15:00.000-04:00

Her sleeping head with its great gelid mass
of serpents torpidly astir
burned into the mirroring shield--
a scathing image dire
as hated truth the mind accepts at last
and festers on.
I struck. The shield flashed bare.

Yet even as I lifted up the head
and started from that place
of gazing silences and terrored stone,
I thirsted to destroy.
None could have passed me then--
no garland-bearing girl, no priest
or staring boy--and lived.

"The Help", "A Dance with Dragons", "On the Nature of Things", "Stuff White People Like", and "Melville: His World and Work."

2011-09-21T09:30:00.000-04:00

The Help, Kathryn Stockett

Quoth Lizzie: "You better read The Help, because it's all anyone is talking about." And true enough, it's been the hot topic for conversation ever since the movie came out and prompted people to ask, "Is it true that white people are the real heroes? Sweet!"

But seriously, The Help is the story of three women in 1960s Jackson, Mississippi: two black maids, and the privileged white woman who writes their stories. Stockett's text is written with a straightforward chronology, blessedly not starting in media res. The first-person narration shifts among the three characters as they engage in their various challenges. Those challenges are different, but generally the maids are worried about losing their jobs and the starvation of themselves and their children, while the white woman is worried about her hair.

Okay, I'm being a little unfairly glib. But there is a controversy along those lines: people are wondering if this is a diminishment of the accomplishments of the civil rights era. It's not that people deny that some white people did help the struggle - thousands of whites marched with Martin Luther King Jr., as The Help mentions at one point - but there is a widespread discomfort with any depiction of that struggle that focuses on them.

Let's start by acknowledging that this discomfort is valid. Apologist history has had a long and consistent presence in America. The kindly Pilgrims brought freedom to the warlike savages, remember? And the idea that white people led the fight for civil rights is a seductive one that absolves a lot of guilt, even if it just isn't very true. And lastly, any depiction of a segment of a struggle will necessarily be considered representative of its larger trend - if you see a book about a brave Swedish liberator of WW2 Jews, you're going to assume that Sweden was overall pretty good on that issue unless told otherwise.

However, I don't think the attacks on this book are very just. The idea that books on the civil rights era must follow a specific formula - no heroic whities allowed - is ridiculous. If we say that The Help is a bad book because it doesn't depict the civil rights era in a way that perfectly represents the actual events, then we're (a) going to be condemning a hell of a lot of other books, like To Kill a Mockingbird, and (b) we're going to be putting a freeze on a hell of a lot of other stories. It would be one thing if the book claimed that John McCaucasian personally led poor Benighted Negro out into the light of freedom - a blatant misrepresentation would be something to complain about. But not this. Books should be permitted to have white characters involved in civil rights, especially when the message overall is so clear otherwise.

No, there's a very good reason you should not read this book, and it has nothing to do with the justice of its depiction of civil rights. The reason is because it is not very well-written.

Stockett tries to instill dramatic tension through a specific plot device that is extremely artificial: she withholds information. It is the simplest and most annoying way to keep the reader's interest heightened. She has a character do something that is a "Terrible Thing" but then refuses to tell us until the end of the book - not because that ignorance is necessary for later dramatic impact or for character development, but just to piss us off. What is the Terrible Thing? Why does Miss Celia stay in bed all day? What happened to Constantine? I can forgive this on occasion, particularly when the discovery of this missing information forms the motivation for a character or is withheld for revelation at a moment of high drama to unleash catharsis in the reader. But that's not the case here. It's just artificial and bad writing, the clumsy string-pulling of an author who doesn't know what she's doing.

The characters are not entirely boring, but they are mostly flat. Gawky White Ingenue, Sassy Black Momma, Sad Older Negress, Controlling Ignorant Mother... you know these people. On the basis of those three-word labels, you could write up a description of them that would probably meet or exceed Stockett's characterization. They even interact just about how you'd expect.

That may be the biggest flaw here: there are no surprises or anything interesting and new. The characters who are ignorant and sinful in the book all exhibit textbook prejudice that seems like a simple inversion of today's accepted truths, with little subtlety about it. The main villain is seldom humanized, instead residing in a sort of cartoonish place until she receives her appropriately cartoonish comeuppance. Most everyone else is secretly Not Really Racist - there are no sympathetic minor villains or realistic characters whose prejudice is a flaw of judgment or weakness, rather than a moral failure. It's boring and Playmobil-fake.

Read this only if you're interested in the conversation. Don't read it if you're interested in a good book.

A Dance with Dragons, George R. R. Martin

There is literally almost nothing to say about this. It's a fantasy book, continuing the series begun by A Game of Thrones. It is almost indistinguishable from its predecessors - another enormous story set in a beautiful fantasy world and populated by well-drawn characters. The story is interesting and exciting, with a ruthless willingness to kill pleasant characters and a plot that's drawn from a variety of classical sources.

This is a great work of fantasy, and it's even a pretty good work of fiction even if considered beyond its genre. It's not quite at the level of The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant, and it is definitely not The Lord of the Rings (I actually heard such a claim, and I felt queasy) but it is worth reading if you like fantasy.

Check it out.

On the Nature of Things, Lucretius

Sometimes it's frustrating living in the modern age. It's great we have toilet paper, but too frequently you discover that every original sentiment or philosophy was already written by someone in Ancient Greece or Rome.

On the Nature of Things is the best remaining example of the ancient philosophy of Epicureanism, a secular approach to the world that disdained superstition and endorsed the idea that natural forces dictated the shape of the universe. While not explicitly atheist, per se, this long poem does seek to prove that much of the stress of life came from worry about the unseen. Drawing on the best examples of scientific thought from his time in a way that is either remarkably lucky or remarkably intelligent, he advocates "atomism" (the tiny-particle theory of matter that preceded the similar modern science) and sets out to prove various theories such as the existence of pressure and vacuums, many of which were later proven as true at least in principle. Some of his ideas are mildly strange, but overall the whole set of descriptions of the universe are remarkably true even with what we know now, two thousand years later.

There are other delights, such as his assessment of the human mind which would later be used as the underpinning and labeling for Freud's theories, but the real treat are his ideas about the soul and the poetry about metaphysical implications. Don't stress about the afterlife; do no wrong not because of fear of divine punishment (the gods concern themselves not with us!) but because it will make your life unpleasant.

O humankind unhappy!--when it ascribed
Unto divinities such awesome deeds,
And coupled thereto rigours of fierce wrath!
What groans did men on that sad day beget
Even for themselves, and O what wounds for us,
What tears for our children's children! Nor, O man,
Is thy true piety in this: with head
Under the veil, still to be seen to turn
Fronting a stone, and ever to approach
Unto all altars; nor so prone on earth
Forward to fall, to spread upturned palms
Before the shrines of gods, nor yet to dew
Altars with profuse blood of four-foot beasts,
Nor vows with vows to link. But rather this:
To look on all things with a master eye
And mind at peace.

This is the truth, Lucretius says, and it should set your mind at ease. He tells his story of particles and souls and morals with honeyed words, to make it more palatable - and it is sweet indeed! Definitely read this, particularly if you consider yourself in any measure a scientist, a philosopher, a liberal, or an atheist.

Stuff White People Like, Christian Lander

Over the past decade, bloggers have steadily begun to recognize that they are already writing words. And books are made of words. So they just take those words they already wrote, edit them briefly, and pack them into a book with the same title as their blog (or Twitter account). Thus I Hope They Serve Beer in Hell (from Tucker Max's reprehensible website), Shit My Dad Says (of the titular Twitter account), Badass (Badass of the Week), Passive Aggressive Notes (blog of the same name), and a large number of similar things.

This isn't a new thing - cartoonists, for example, have long recognized that collecting and republishing their work gets them more money for little extra effort. Nor is it a bad thing, because folks are entitled to all the profit they can get from their writing, and there's a broader audience and more cachet in being published.

But there is one plain, irrefutable downside: sometimes blogs just don't translate into books very well. This is the case with Stuff White People Like.

If you're not already familiar with the blog, it's essentially a faux-guide to "white people" or rather to liberal middle-class white people, specifically. Hipster and environmentalist sensibilities - basically any form of elitism, real or perceived - is skewered. Here's an example:

Since all white people consider themselves to be “creative,” they are constantly in need of products and accessories that will allow them to capture their thoughts. One of the more popular products in recent years has been the Moleskine notebook.

This particular type of notebook is very expensive and was quite popular with writers and artists in the olden days. Needless to say, these are two properties that are highly coveted in the white community. In fact, it’s a good rule of thumb to know that white people like anything that old writers and artists liked: typewriters, journals, suicide, heroin, and trains are just a few examples.

It's often low-hanging fruit, but it's still funny. Not infrequently, I have recognized myself in the book. The entry about bottled water perfectly described my evolution from bottled water, to specific bottled water, to plastic reusable bottles, to metal reusable bottles.

The methodology at work here is to flatly and accurately describe certain aspects of life, highlighting hypocrisies and groupthink with a dry tone and a hidden giggle. It's a clever way to go about humor - it once powered the funnier bits of Seinfeld, and in a slightly more complex form it's now at work in The Big Bang Theory (with a special extra cloak of jargon).

Unfortunately, it wears thin. Very quickly. If you're going to mock the earnestness of a silly elite, it's best to do so with some sort of narrative arc working in the background and some emotional involvement for the audience, like with the Christopher Guest films Best in Show or A Mighty Wind. Beyond that, small doses are preferable - perhaps in a blog updated once or twice a week, say. To cram together so much sneering superiority into a book is like wadding up a dozen sticks of Fruit Stripe - it tastes great for ten minutes, then you're left gnawing on a flavorless wad that you can't wait to spit out.

Skip it, read the blog.

Melville: His World and Work, Andrew Delbanco

Melville was as American as hell, which is probably why he wrote a book that is in the running for Great American Novel. His grandparents fought in the Revolutionary War, and before his death he saw the Civil War and enormous technological changes in the burgeoning Industrial Revolution - all central events on the American character that touched him personally. He was a traveler of frontiers and a man of many cultures

Even more to the point, his masterwork, Moby-Dick, is of a scope and nature as to be suitable for endless re-reading. Simple in theme, ornate in implementation, and gorgeous all the way through, it has had a history like that of America itself: a sleeping giant that shook itself awake in the early twentieth century, and whose powerful roar still is ringing despite the intervening decades.

One of the best aspects of Delbanco's work here is the way in which he connects Melville and his work to the larger picture, without gushing quite as badly as I do. His well-measured prose traces Melville's wanderings, brief literary career, and dwindling end. Special sections of analysis are devoted to his works, and from my passing familiarity with the field they seem to be excellent summaries of background and theme. Most importantly for a literary biography, he doesn't fool himself with the polar sins of hero-worship or villainization. He sees the juvenalia for what it is, but has reverence for the power of Billy Budd and the other great products of the man.

Delbanco's biography of Melville opens with an amusing homage to Moby-Dick, with a dozen different quotes from over the years testifying to the influence and power of the author on literature and our daily parlance. And fittingly, it closes with an image of his obituary in Harper's: amidst notifications of the passing of Belgian generals and a former Superintendent of Public Schools, there is the simple line: "September 27th. - In New York city, Herman Melville, aged seventy-three years."

Check out this biography - it will delight newcomers to Melville and his hardcore fans in equal measure.

Blatant Baby Boomer Bribery Bullshit

2011-09-13T08:48:00.002-04:00

I can only express my anger through sufficient alliteration.

Watching the recent Double-Republican debate ("Tea Party GOP" is redundant) in Tampa, I saw that much of the discussion was occupied with the rhetoric of entitlement reform. This issue of rhetoric has increasingly dominated the conflicts between the Republican candidates, largely because they're in lockstep on most issues.

Oh, sure, some of them want to lower the corporate tax rate to 9% and some want to entirely eliminate corporate taxation and some want to just sign over a few states to Enron and call it a day, but because those are rhetorical distinctions, without merit in any real political discussion (and they know it), these various candidates are essentially arguing towards the same ideal - as little taxation as possible for corporations. In the American discussion about where to drive the national car, the Republicans are just arguing over how fast we should be going when we ram the brick wall.

But throughout all of the back-and-forth on Social Security, driven by Texas Governor Rick Perry's recent statement that the program was a "Ponzi scheme" and a "monstrous lie," one constant holds forth. It's a promise that's been present for the past eight years, ever since President George W. Bush made the first sally. It goes something like this: Social Security is broken, and we have to end the program as you know it... but only for the young.

Here's an example from Mike Pence (R-IN):

Well, I don't know if they're saying don't touch [entitlements]... I think they're saying for people on Medicare or in Social Security..., let's keep the promises we've made to seniors. Let's keep the promises we've made to people near the age of retirement. I've said many times that I believe personally that we ought to draw the line at the age of 40, and say anyone over the age of 40, we'll keep you in the same deal that you've been promised in Social Security and Medicare all of your life.

Let's first of all, let's explode the myth of "broken Social Security" that I heard a lot of in the debate. In a world of complex problems, Social Security is a simple one. Unlike Medicare, it's not the future trend that's the problem - we're not in danger of rampaging growth in expenditures, but rather we're simply at too low a level of funding. Add in a big chunk of money to the pot (a not insignificant hurdle, I'll grant) and the problem is pretty much gone. This is not a broken program, it's just a program that need recapitalization (MSNBC Business analysis). It's a different story from Medicare: try it there, and you only stave off disaster for five years.

There's a sort of problem, which is that since 1972 a subtle math error ("double indexing") unintentionally increased the rate at which benefits accrue. It goes faster than the rate the payroll tax can match it; this was given a temporary fix in the early 80s, but that fix expired. Social Security ain't broke. But really, my focus isn't on this generally-accepted bit of wrongness among the GOP, but rather with their proposed "solution."

For all the rhetoric and the debate over the rhetoric going on, basically most of the GOP agrees with this "solution": some form of privatization of Social Security. It comes in different flavors in Gingrich's plans or the Ryan plan, but essentially the government would no longer be managing Social Security's funds. Right now, it takes in money from everyone who's working, and feeds some of it to current retirees and some of it into investments. We pay for current retirees. Current retirees paid for it when they were working, for their elders. And that generation paid for the generation before them. For seventy years, it's worked remarkably well, because it's fairly simple in its basics.

Privatization would still take the money from everyone who's working, but would feed it all into individual funds. You'd have your own retirement account. You could manage it to some extent, which presumably means investing it in different ways or at different rates. It is a dramatic change from Social Security, and would mean the end of the program.

I should pause here to point out what happened to 401(k) accounts in the recent market crashes. Just think of the horror of the destruction of a generation's Social Security in that way. Of course, the government would step in - it'd just get piled on the debt. Over and over.

While I think this "solution" is a bad idea, that wouldn't be the end of it. It doesn't take a genius to see where it would go from there. After ten years (or less) of privatization, conservatives would demand to know why the government was forcing anyone to save, or why there were such-and-such restrictions on investing with that fund, or whatever. Making the government the clunky middleman rather than the manager just begs for the middleman's elimination. You can hear the soundbites already: "The government shouldn't be forcing anyone to put money under their pillow - we need to let people invest how they want to invest! Set America's money free from the shackles of Washington!"

And just like that, the safety net for the old would be gone.

I'm not sure how many people are fooling themselves about how privatization is still somehow magically "Social Security" just because they kept the name, or how many people have failed to think through and see that privatization would be a stepping stone to outright elimination. But I think a lot of people actually do know those uncomfortable truths. I think this because of that ever-present promise... we'll change it, but only for the young.

Moving the money to individual accounts won't perform any loaves-and-fishes multiplication - we're still going to have a bit too little money coming in, and a big chunk needed to make up the shortfall. If you're not going to put more money in through taxes (heaven forbid!) then you need to reduce the payout. Everyone realizes that - most Republicans just also sorta think the money would work harder in private hands rather than public. They just don't quite believe it, and know they can't quite sell it to the baby boomers who are coming up on retirement benefits.

But there is an idea they can sell to the baby boomers. Simply: fuck you, we got ours.

It's not so outright, of course. These boomers have kids and grandkids they're worried about. They have to keep thinking of themselves as fiscally responsible and honest. They need something to tell themselves, at night in the dark.

With Social Security, it's the idea that privatization isn't really an elimination of the program, and it's the idea that the kids will be better off if we change it. They're not willing to do this for themselves, because the baby boomers have been expecting their full benefits. You'll actually hear that word, "expect," as if it's a magical justification that only applies to their expectations! The idea that their grandparents, parents, and their children might have had expectations - might have expected them not to destroy Social Security! - isn't as important as their expectations.

It's also why the Medicare prescription drug program, Part D, was passed a few years ago. The baby boomers didn't want to pay for a program that would benefit them by providing cheap prescription drugs, so they just tacked the whole damn thing onto the deficit. It was quiet enough so that they can ignore that their children have to pay the resulting debt.

It's also why they seize any possible strands against the proof for climate change. The science isn't proven, it's not certain, so they can keep cramming coal into our air - better to err on the side of disaster, am I right? If we do need to take action, it will only be after more study and some serious results... maybe in twenty years. Maybe when the kids can deal with it.

If I was wrong, you'd see them calling for an immediate transition to privatization - say, within the decade. It's perfectly possible, and just as plausible and easy to do. It's also immensely more fair. But it'd result in a shared sacrifice, rather than one they can pile on top of the young. And on a gut level, they know it.

I'm not saying that baby boomers are stupid or evil - my parents are boomers, and they're neither of those things. But far too often that generation has let itself be convinced that the best thing for them is also the "right" thing to do. As soon as they got the knife, their slice of cake just happened to turn out the biggest. Not all of them agree with it (my parents included), and not all of them have gone along with it. Just like always in life, no individual is at fault for the actions of a group - except where they had a hand in it. But when a book was written about the generation before the boomers, it was called The Greatest Generation. What could we call the Baby Boomers, short of the Selfish Generation?

Fuck us, they got theirs.

Palmetto Freedom Forum and MSNBC/Politico Debate

2011-09-08T23:09:00.001-04:00

There have been two different events recently in the 2012 GOP race. The first was the Palmetto Freedom Forum down in South Carolina, and the second was the big debate sponsored by MSNBC and Politico.

Palmetto Freedom Forum
This has been called "kissing the ring" of DeMint, and it very much was that. Jim DeMint (R-SC) - one of the biggest avatars of the Tea Party - and his cronies worked up a very intelligent list of questions designed to force the candidates into making direct pledges in response, getting them on the record on those things. The candidates were sequestered and presented individually, so that each one made their responses to the questions without hearing their opponents. This was actually a very good way to do things, and revealed far more about the candidates than a traditional debate.

DeMint and the other host got the candidates on the record about the Constitution, tried to push them into the position that the 14th Amendment prohibits abortion, and tried to nail them down on conservative economic orthodoxy. All of the candidates who attended (Bachmann, Romney, Paul, Gingrich, and Cain) performed strongly, but particularly Gingrich and Romney. The former displayed his incredible ease and familiarity with this sort of thing, and his breadth of knowledge allowed him to toss around enough ideas so that he could out-flank the outright demands of the hosts for agreement. Ask Gingrich about why taxes are bad and you get a lecture on the principles of Lean Six Sigma as revealed in the Federalist. Romney, on the other hand, succeeded once again by just not screwing up. He was intelligent, articulate, and aggressively reasonable.

MSNBC/Politico Debate
This was the first event with Rick Perry in it, and so the focus was all there. Most specifically, the focus is on his doubling-down on the "Social Security is a Ponzi scheme" declaration first revealed in his book earlier this year.

Anyway, with Perry in the race, there's someone unafraid to take a swing at Romney. They both knew this was coming, and they brought some zingers with them. I won't go into the numbers, because they mostly just reveal the difficulty of attributing job growth to any executive. The more important element was that as the actual races draw closer and with the injection of a strong new front-runner, the near-anointed Romney was able to demonstrate that he is serious and even-tempered. He was able to display his moderation, which is important: his strategy has long been (and now has to be) that he is the electable Republican.

The debate was not run very well. There were stuttering questions, technical problems, and a serious lack of transitions from one topic to another. It wasn't helped by Gingrich's old trick of accusing the hosts of bias, as though he wasn't perfectly aware that the point of a debate is to highlight differences and not similarities. Voters already know that all the GOP candidates oppose the Affordable Care Act - they want new information about why they oppose it and how their opposition variously squares with things like the existence of Romneycare or the like.

The big news will be Perry's attack on Social Security, as I said. His book Fed Up! introduced that criticism, saying it was unsustainable (not even close to true, by the way). He had the option to back off of that criticism when he first entered the race, and even here in the debate he had that opportunity to soften his rhetoric (Gingrich obviously and kindly set him up for a potential repudiation). But Perry chose not to, instead going at it with both barrels. This radicalizes him and makes Romney seem more moderate.

It's hard to declare a winner. In some sense Perry won, just by performing sufficiently well. If he had flubbed this in a major way, his chances would crash just as hard as they rose. By doing okay, he's cemented this race into a two-man sprint. But by revealing himself to be seriously radical in comparison to Romney, he's also made Romney seem far more electable. This perception was increased by his attacks on climate science and biology - positions also held by Romney (this week, anyway) but which look particularly bad with Perry's chicken-fried contempt. So this debate was probably a win for both of them in different ways, and it relegated the rest of the candidates "to the bleachers," as Rachel Maddow put it.

What is a liberal American to do?

2011-09-07T02:36:00.002-04:00

Liberals are in a tough spot these days. Obama has been a disappointment in general: he has governed as a moderate conservative. First, I'll illustrate some of the problems. Then, I'll discuss what to do.

Myth: Liberal Obama is trying to appease our enemies and is weakening our national security.

Fact: Troop levels and military spending are at record highs. Iraq troops are barely reduced, Afghanistan troops are much higher, and we went in and attacked Libya by air and provided material support for the rebels. This is a highly interventionist administration, pursuing an aggressively conservative foreign policy - Obama is just actually successful at it. Whistle-blowers and other threats to the expanding executive have been cracked down on with enormous strength. Guantanamo is still open.

Myth: That Kenyan anti-colonialist won't let us use all of our energy resources.

Fact: Oil drilling and production are at record highs. I'll say that again: the number of drilling rigs and the amount of oil being produced is at a record high. So are, incidentally, the profits of oil companies.

Myth: The job-killing EPA is crushing out all small businesses.
Fact: The EPA has failed to pass basically any decent new rules, and now won't regulate emissions damaging the ozone. They have taken the smallest of baby steps forward on regulation.

Myth: Obamacare is a monstrous extension of hyper-liberal policies that will come into your house and get your children drunk.
Fact: The Affordable Care Act is composed purely of elements proposed by conservatives ten years ago (or even more recently).

Myth: He refuses to secure our borders, and he is going to give amnesty to dirty foreigners.
Fact: Deportations are at a record high, as well, and the DREAM Act is dead.

So what is a liberal to do, admitting that Obama has not governed anywhere near as far left as we'd like?

First, we should acknowledge the context. The opposition has become, let's face it, just plain crazy. You won't hear any acknowledgement of these facts from Republicans, after all. The GOP is poisoned with ludicrous exaggerations, and completely out of touch with reality in its criticisms. Part of it is a power play: they have to shriek at the top of their lungs and put their organization into action to come smashing into Obama at every opportunity, because otherwise they're not going to get any votes. Their hysteria and paranoia are necessary, because it demands their presence in leadership.

So to some extent, these realities of the Obama administration are a reflection of the success of the highly-organized scream machine of the Republicans, that has successfully controlled the debate and shifted the Overton window far to the right. For all that Obama has been excellent in putting policies into practice - even objectionable ones like Libya - they've been terrible at messaging. Obama has in many ways simply been the extraordinarily capable administrator of Republican policies, though they could never admit that.

But the eternal question arises, forced on us by a dichotomous political system: what the hell can a liberal do? It's not like John McCain would have been better. It's not like any of the GOP candidates would be any better. Universally, they would be nightmares, because they are victims of the hard shift to the right of American politics as well. If liberals fail to vote for the moderate conservative Obama, they'd just be contributing to the victory of the extremist conservative Republican candidate. And that's not what we want.

Neither, though, do we want to be taken for granted.

The Republicans have been getting this one right for years: the Republican base demands adherence. They primary politicians they consider insufficiently conservative, every single year. They do this based on a coherent conservative orthodoxy, and in deference to the wealthy entities (the rich and corporations) whose interests are served by the GOP.

Democrats doesn't do this very well. The Democratic Party represents the poor, the vanishing union base, specific interest groups, as well as (to a lesser extent) some of those same corporations. There's no single liberal philosophy, and no agreement on goals. And that needs to change.

There's no inherent reason that the Republican coalition (Christians, fiscal conservatives, neocons) is inherently more cohesive than the Democratic coalition. The Democrats need to recognize two things:

The old base is vanishing. Consensus has swung against unions in a big way, just as it once swung for them in a big way. And just like how one hundred years ago, the Democrats aligned themselves with the unions as representatives of the working poor, now they need to align themselves with a different way to represent those working poor. Further, there is a new strain of "values voter" that prizes the environment and essential liberties, and that strain is badly represented in several aspects and could be consolidated into one solid interest group. The Democrats need to forge a new base.
Principles are important. They allow for easy measurements of politicians against their promises, and even if they are ultimately simplified or dumbed-down versions of bigger truths, they're a reflection of how people just naturally think. "No taxation without representation" was the first example in American politics of the power of the slogan.

How can a liberal help effect this change?

First of all, don't just donate to Barack Obama or any individual politician. Donate to MoveOn.org or Greenpeace or Americans for Democratic Action, instead. The ADA, for example, is honoring Nancy Pelosi, which is the right thing to do because she has been one of the greatest liberal leaders in the past decade. Empower these agencies to act as kingmakers and broker deals on policy with Democratic candidates.

Secondly, read and get involved with the modern liberal movement. Subscribe to the RSS feeds of those organizations, and maybe go check out DailyKos. Read The Nation, The New Republic, and other purveyors of moderate liberal thought. Listen to liberal leaders like Nancy Pelosi, Russ Feingold, and Al Franken.

Third and most importantly, keep on the backs of Democrats. Obama's press secretary, Robert Gibbs, once expressed frustration with the "professional left." Well, forgive my language when I say, "Boo fucking hoo." Yes, liberals have goals and demands that Obama has not and probably will not meet. And yes, we will and should continue to still demand them. Loudly, persistently, and passionately. Advocacy for the environment, for the working poor, for true liberty - it doesn't end. Democratic leaders should feel as badgered as Republican leaders to cater to their base. If they don't like it, they can go work as lobbyists like every other retired politician.

There is opportunity in this crisis of the party system. We can't let the two parties be conservative and extremist conservative. Fight for the future, liberals of America.

My Problem: Atheism, Liberalism, and Muslim Extremists

2011-09-01T01:56:00.001-04:00

I'm a fairly liberal guy. So when I see the rampant islamaphobia on the part of many conservatives, I am disgusted. The First Amendment protects the right to freedom of religion, but for many conservatives there seems to be a quiet addendum - "except for Muslims." Now, I'm not saying that the whole conservative movement wants to ban Islam, only that a vocal minority (e.g. Pamela Gellar) and a vicious echo chamber conspire to turn a common and mild fear of the "other" into hyped-up worries about the imposition of sharia law on Americans and other nonsense. It perpetuates the climate of paranoia that has proven so harmful to America lately.

But on the other hand, I'm also an atheist, who believe that religion in general has tended to do more harm than good in the world. At one time, Christianity was the channel for a wave of misogyny, racism, and class oppression throughout Europe, not to mention thousands of pointless sectarian conflicts. Today, Christians are diverse enough and have managed to begin ignoring the Old Testament to a sufficient degree that it is much less harmful, although I still think convincing people to dedicate their lives to a delusion and have sex without condoms is a fairly sad thing.

As a result of these two positions, I occasionally run into the tricky matter when it comes to modern Islam. I am in the difficult position of believing that everyone should have absolute free expression of their religion, while simultaneously thinking everyone should also probably just knock it off. This isn't ordinarily a problem, because there are many things that I think are silly or wrong even though I also think they should be legal. For example, I think it's creepy for a 70-year-old guy to marry a 20-year-old girl - but it should still be legal.Then there are days like today, when I read through the news and the old familiar pattern leaps out at me.

From the AP:

A Kosovo Albanian man confessed Wednesday to killing two U.S. airmen at the Frankfurt airport, saying in emotional testimony at the opening of his trial that he had been influenced by radical Islamic propaganda online.

From CNN:

The Nigerian Islamic militant group Boko Haram says it bombed U.N. offices in Abuja last week because the world body is a partner "in the oppression of believers," a spokesman for the group said Wednesday.

From the NYT:

At least 10 people were killed Wednesday in Quetta, in southwestern Pakistan, when an explosion struck a crowd in a parking lot near a Shiite mosque, police officials said.

Day after day, Muslim extremists around the world are killing people.

Now, I'm aware that there is some bias here. Many of the power centers of Christianity are in affluent and stable first-world countries, while many of the power centers of Islam are in poor and conflicted second-world and third-world countries; children of war are radicalized. Additionally, the Anglophone community tends to like news that reinforces their worldview, and so media organizations tend to report such items more prominently. To some extent, this governs the frequency of these news reports. I know that the trend I see is not necessarily representative of the full facts.

But I am equally aware that, particularly as the tenth anniversary of 9/11 approaches, it would be asinine of me to try to pretend that there aren't more Muslim extremists in the world than any other kind of extremist. And they are killing people.So what do I do?

Do I condemn Islam itself for having a tendency to spawn violent extremists? Because while I think that's true, I also think that Christianity has a tendency to spawn violent extremists - the difference is just that Christians as a group are wealthier and empowered at the moment.

It's a problem.

If I join in the chorus, I'm helping in some small way to contribute to a climate of hate that's just making things worse by building ignorant opposition to foreign nations, blindly supporting Israel no matter their actions, and segregating and stigmatizing a harmless American minority whose rights deserve protection.

But on the other hand, extremist Islam deserves to be opposed with as much rhetoric as I can muster, because it is convincing a legion of Muslims around the world to kill and die in the name of an absurd ideology. I can't honestly say that I don't think Islam is a threat - even if I immediately add, "And so is Christianity."

Frequently, I just stay quiet. I don't want to defend a xenophobic culture of prejudice, and I don't want to defend an institution whose suras demand violence in the same backwards way that Leviticus does. But my silence is becoming increasingly uncomfortable. I am starting to feel like I should be defending neither, and attacking both. Is there a contradiction in that? It's something to work out.

"Look-and-Tell Hamlet," from Time-Life 7/20/1962

2011-08-31T07:30:00.001-04:00

See Hamlet run. Run, Hamlet, Run.
He is going to his mother's room.
‘I have something to tell you mother,’
says Hamlet. ‘Uncle Claudius is bad. He gave my father poison.
Poison is not good. I do not like poison. Do you like poison?’
‘Oh, no, indeed!’ says his mother. ‘I do not like poison.’
‘Oh, there is Uncle Claudius,’ says Hamlet. ‘He is hiding behind the curtain.
Why is he hiding behind the curtain?
Shall I stab him? What fun it would be to stab him through the curtain.’
See Hamlet draw his sword. See Hamlet stab. Stab, Hamlet, stab.
See Uncle Claudius' blood.
See Uncle Claudius' blood gushing.
Gush, blood, gush.
See Uncle Claudius fall. How funny he looks, stabbed.
Ha, ha, ha.
But it is not Uncle Claudius. It is Polonius. Polonius is Ophelia's father.
‘You are naughty, Hamlet,’ says Hamlet's mother. ‘You have stabbed Polonius.’
But Hamlet's mother is not cross. She is a good mother.
Hamlet loves his mother very much. Hamlet loves his mother very, very much.
Does Hamlet love his mother a little too much?
Perhaps.
See Hamlet run. Run, Hamlet, Run.
‘I am on my way to find Uncle Claudius,’ Hamlet says.
On the way he meets a man. ‘I am Laertes,’ says the man.
‘Let us draw our swords. Let us duel.’
See Hamlet and Laertes duel. See Laertes stab Hamlet. See
Hamlet stab Laertes. See Hamlet's mother drink poison. See
Hamlet stab King Claudius.
See everybody wounded and bleeding and dying and dead.
What fun they are having!
Wouldn't you like to have fun like that?

Alan Caruba: Irresponsible and Dishonest

2011-08-26T23:19:00.001-04:00

Alan Caruba, syndicated columnist and really old guy, had a column last week that was about how Obama was banning vitamins. Seriously.

Millions of Americans benefit from a daily regimen of vitamins, minerals, and herbal supplements. Athletes use whey protein powders. Body builders take amino acids. Others augment food products that lack sufficient nutritional value. Their health and wellness is now threatened by the Obama administration’s Food and Drug Administration (FDA).

On the Friday before the Fourth of July weekend, the FDA published a 47-page document that would ban all nutritional and supplemental ingredients by requiring them to file documentation involving multi-million-dollar testing and the regulations would be retroactive to 1994!

This will destroy the manufacturers of these products because most are small companies that could not afford such costs. It’s not like there is a vast body of information that demonstrates any threat to health from vitamins and minerals. Quite the contrary. There is ample information on their benefits. There are libraries filled with books devoted to this.

Who would benefit from such regulation of the natural supplement industry? Big Pharma. The same pharmaceutical companies that have a long record of putting forth FDA-approved medications that later prove to be lethal are looking to use the regulatory powers of FDA to literally increase levels of illness.

Needless to say, I was highly skeptical. Caruba generally is wrong at least 50% of the time in his columns whenever he makes a declaration of fact, but there didn't seem any way that this could be even half right. The original version of the column declared that the new FDA regulation was called the "Codex Alimentarius," which I happen to know is actually the name of international FAO/WHO food guidelines, so right from the start I knew there was a serious problem with Caruba's ideas in this one. I started off a comment pointing out the Codex Alimentarius mistake to him, and requesting a link to the report or at least its name.

He edited the column to remove the Codex Alimentarius mistake (without admitting his mistake or putting a notice of alteration, of course) but ignored my other request. So I went looking. The FDA newsroom didn't have anything from the stated period in early July. In fact, none of the releases seemed to announce any new guidelines that had anything to do with what Caruba described. What the hell was he referring to?

Caruba was alleging that the Obama administration was going to ban "vitamins, minerals, and herbal supplements on which millions depend for wellness" in order to "literally increase levels of illness." That is a huge and outrageous claim, and it would be completely irresponsible if he didn't have something specific in mind. He's even urging citizens to "[w]rite, email, and fax your Representative and Senator to ensure that Congress intervenes with the FDA in the same fashion it is struggling to protect us against an out-of-control Environmental Protection Agency. In particular, contact the members of the House Oversight and Government Reform committee."

Was he really so irresponsible as to not have any evidence at all?

As it turns out, yes. Alan Caruba really is that irresponsible.

After some searching, I did eventually find an FDA document from July. It's a non-binding draft resolution published asking for commentary, establishing the guidelines for proving the safety of new dietary supplements introduced since 1994, as required by Congress in the Dietary Supplement Health and Education Act of 1994 (DSHEA). It doesn't ban vitamins or minerals. It doesn't actually do anything, since it's a non-binding draft, but if it did go into effect it would just be establishing new documentation formats for requirements mandated by a Republican Congress in 1994 - the way that supplement makers who introduced a new ingredient (i.e. acacia berries) must submit health and study information to the FDA, to show that their new product was safe.

In other words, everything that Alan Caruba said was wrong and irresponsible (I'd say "shockingly irresponsible," but it's hard to be shocked by him these days). He is accusing the government of trying to ban vitamins to make American citizens sick for the benefit of the pharmaceutical industry, and he has no basis at all for it.

I tried to point this out to Caruba in another comment, but he has comment moderation on, and simply censored it and ignored me.

Alan Caruba: irresponsible and dishonest.

Iowa Debate and Straw Poll

2011-08-21T03:37:00.000-04:00

Ah, the smell of politics is seriously in the air. With the debate and Ames straw poll in Iowa both going down last week, we saw some sparks start to fly.

The debate was excellent, far better than the joke South Carolina debate (that included few serious candidates) or the CNN debate in New Hampshire (that swung wildly between gimmicky softballs and crotchballs). A lot of credit has to go to the moderators from Fox News and the Washington Examiner: they asked some serious and deeply-thought questions, they followed up intelligently but without badgering, and they maintained a great tenor throughout. They were even, astonishingly, able to give fair time to all the candidates. Performances varied.

Tim Pawlenty was one to watch. His performance in debates to date had been terrible. Just like last time, he seemed ill at ease, but this time he was determined to eliminate the impression that he was gutless by going after Michele Bachmann hard. He was still pretty afraid to hit Mitt Romney, probably because he rightly knows that Romney has a serious future and Bachmann doesn't. But he spared nothing in his attacks on Bachmann, pointing out her complete lack of legislative accomplishment and keeping at it. He must have known he needed a spectacular showing here if he wanted to stay in the race, and so he deployed some brilliant thrusts of rhetoric that were carefully-crafted but well-delivered ("You fought Obamacare but we got Obamacare. If this is your idea of helping, please stop, because you're killing us.") He must have been practicing for hours.

Michele Bachmann took the attacks without a flinch: she had clearly been anticipating them, and had a practiced counter-attack ready to go ("He supported cap-and-trade, and he sounds more like Obama to me.") Over the past few months, she has become a relentless talking-point machine, and is starting to shed the mantle of crazy firebomber that she once had. She's the farthest right of any of the candidates, so much so that she's actually had to swing a little towards moderation.

Mitt Romney just stood there, smiled, and looked handsome. He wanted to seem presidential, to cultivate the air of inevitability that's already hanging around him. And since none of the other candidates dare go after him (there's the future possibility of running mate to think about!) his job was easy. His questions were ones he had anticipated and had answers prepared, such as criticism about his time at Bain Capital. He made no mistakes, didn't take any bait, and was probably the top winner of the thing.

Newt Gingrich was at the top of his game, and showed that he was probably the smartest person on the stage. He has been talking and thinking about ideas for things for decades, and so on almost any topic he has a great if obscure answer crammed with things that sound true. He took each question he was given, considered it carefully in that instant, and then either returned a coherent and natural-sounding answer or slickly slid past it to give the answer he wanted. His reference to "Lean Six Sigma" management techniques was a new idea to the GOP field for the most part, but in the days since the debate it's now become a new topic and everyone else is lining up behind him.

Rick Santorum was a flaccid joke.

John Huntsman continued to run for election in 2016, fooling no one.

Ron Paul was consistent and outspoken, and showed why he has been the standard-bearer for libertarians for years. For all Bachmann's crap about being the "tip of the spear," it's Paul who had the only unique ideas on the stage. Unfortunately, while he sways the debate a little, the establishment is united against him. Not even his star performance at the debates will change that. It has to be said that he sounded more like a voice of reason and less like a crazy old man, this time around.

Herman Cain demonstrated how out of his depth he is - he followed everyone else's lead, parroted back things in an obvious manner, and generally just seemed like a bad copy of the other people on the stage.

After the excitement of the debate, the poll a few days later was boring. Bachmann bought the most votes and won, and Ron Paul came in a close second thanks to his fantastic organization - only to be ignored completely, as Jon Stewart would later point out. The only interesting things were twofold:

Pawlenty had to drop out after coming in third, having effectively run out of money. His "reasonable guy in the room" schtick just wasn't working out, since Romney already seems pretty reasonable to the GOP electorate. There was no money for it.
Rick Perry got in the race. He's the Governor of Texas and he stands little chance of winning.

More and more, it just seems like Romney is steadily ironing out his ascendancy. It's still his to lose, by a wide margin.

Bachelorhood Again

2011-08-20T07:49:00.001-04:00

So my wife, Lizzie, has been gone for weeks now back in the States, visiting her family (and meeting my mother and brother for the first time). It's been a weird time for me - a sort of pseudo-bachelorhood has taken hold.

I love my wife and miss her, don't get me wrong - I can't wait for her to come back! - but in her absence, I've had to sort out an entirely new routine to my life, and I had anticipated some things about that. I was looking forward to keeping my whatever hours I pleased, leaving my research scattered about in big heaps of space-occupying papers, and buying the good mouthwash with the savings from eating the $3 Hare Krishna lunches. But it's worked out strangely.

I remembered a time when I was living the idyllic free life. I did whatever I wanted, whenever I wanted. It was a time of great invention, like when I discovered that I didn't have to clean off the plate to lunch on a baguette but could use a sheet of plain paper to hold the smear of butter and catch the crumbs. And while I have never regretted choosing to share my life with Lizzie, I looked back at that time of bachelorhood as a great phase - in retrospect, it seemed so free.

Now I have that chance to seize that spirit again... but as it turns out, I just want her to come home.

It's weird. Let me elaborate with a metaphor.

It seems kind of like a house. There was a time when I was happy living in a scrubby hut, with ramshackle walls that let the wind in. And it was nice to bang the door as I came in carelessly, flop into a hammock, and play the ukulele all night while a trained monkey brought me grapefruit juice (it's my metaphor, so I can make it how I want). There's a time when that's what you want - a little hut and some grapefruit juice from your monkey.

But then I met Lizzie, and we started building a life together. And we pulled down my ramshackle walls of nonsense and put up solid planks. And we put up nice curtains that she'd made and a sturdy roof that kept out the rain and wind. And we got a big bed for the two of us. It's different, sure, and maybe I might occasionally miss monkey-juice. But my house - my life - is also bigger and better. And the idea of tearing down those new sturdy walls makes me sad, and at night I no longer want a carefree hammock. I just want my wife.

I do so love that woman.

Some blogs

2011-08-18T00:20:00.000-04:00

I read a lot of blogs. Here are some of my favorites, that I think others might enjoy.

Alyssa - Alyssa Rosenberg is ThinkProgress' culture blogger. Well-educated and thoughtful, she thinks and writes about pop culture with a careful consideration of the material, both by itself and in context. She spends a lot of time on items of importance in geek culture and highbrow television, lavishing long paragraphs of contemplation on the major shows like Six Feet Under or The Sopranos and how one adaptation of a comic book compares with another, but her interests are sufficiently diverse that she hits that sweet spot where I am familiar with the topics of discussion but get introduced to new things that might interest me. She's at the nexus of familiar and novel, and very well-spoken. She also spends some time on funding for the arts, which is important and often overlooked. She doesn't really have any big opus-style essays, since she's part of a larger running cultural conversation, but a good taste of her style can be found in her recent discussion of criticism of True Blood's character Tara or in the first installment of Alyssa's review of Deadwood.

Ask a Korean - My wife pointed me towards this one. It's of special interest to people of Korean descent or who have lived in Korea, but even beyond that I think many people will enjoy it. The eponymous Korean was raised in Korea but is currently in America, and is both articulate and clever about the country of his birth and the issues facing Korea and Koreans today. You might enjoy his lengthy explanation of "fan death" and its origins or the particularly Korean phenomenon of eating dog.

Letters of Note - This is an amazing collection of letters from or about famous people and events. It's frequently updated thanks to its growing popularity, and includes telegrams, handwritten letters, or other forms of correspondence - each with a brief historical setup, a scanned copy of the original, and a transcription. Some of my particular favorites are Hunter S. Thompson writing a movie studio exec ("Okay, you lazy bitch, I'm getting tired of this waterhead fuckaround that you're doing with The Rum Diary.") and Albert Einstein corresponding about religion ("The word God is for me nothing more than the expression and product of human weakness, the Bible a collection of honorable, but still purely primitive, legends which are nevertheless pretty childish.")

Language Log - A product of the University of Pennsylvania's Linguistics group, this blog is a collaborative one dominated by Geoff Pullum and Mark Liberman. They examine popular manifestations and fallacies of linguistics, such as the bizarre idea that the use of passive tense implies personal passivity or the ways in which our language is evolving even as we speak it. They are, like most linguists nowadays, more descriptivist than proscriptivist - they prefer to describe rather than command, and so they often mock such titans as Strunk and White (to my considerable discomfort). A good example of Language Log is their discussion of eggcorns (the peculiar result of slight misunderstandings of common terms) or their amusement at journalist attempts to pronounce the name of Icelandic volcano "Eyjafjallajokull."

"Feed Ma Lamz", by Tom Leonard

2011-08-11T21:58:00.000-04:00

A Scottish-dialect retelling of the Ten Commandments, this poem by Tom Leonard is from Intimate Voices, his collection.

Amyir gaffirz Gaffir. Hark.

nay fornirz ur communists
nay langwij
nay lip
nay laffin ina Sunday
nay g.b.h. (septina war)
nay nooky huntin
nay tea-leaven
nay chanty rasslin
nay nooky huntin nix doar
nur kuvtin their ox

Oaky doaky. Stick way it
- rahl burn thi lohta yiz.

Blame

2011-08-08T18:45:00.000-04:00

I've stopped doing political posts for the most part, because while I love following politics, writing about it tends to make me angry. But here's something I just can't pass up.

Like most people, you too are probably aware that Standard & Poor's recently downgraded U.S. credit from AAA+ to AA+. Nate Silver has a great column about why S&P is actually terrible, but it's neither here nor there: this is a bad thing that happened, and there is clear blame.

This isn't like a lot of things in Washington. It's not a long time between events, where other factors could have gotten involved. There was a very clear sequence: the GOP refused to raise the debt ceiling and honor our obligations unless they received concessions, and they refused to compromise on the concessions. Their refusal to compromise was so absolute that they took the country to the very brink of default - it was a matter of days, even by the most generous measure, before the government was going to have to stop full payment on some bills.

Even more explicitly, there is a group of people who made this decision and can tell us about it. This isn't the failure to spur job creation, where the causes and results are obscure and varied. No, a group of people actually made a statement about why this happened, explicitly stating the causes.

So there's little wiggle room here when we assign blame.

When the debt ceiling vote was approaching, various leaders warned that it was vital that we raise it - that the consequences would be disastrous if we failed to do so. Even looking like we might fail to do so was a bad thing. People warned of exactly this sort of thing: that the world might start to think that America was unwilling to meet its obligations.

Now, many members of the Tea Party wanted people to refuse to raise the debt ceiling. This view was corresponded with some GOP members of Congress, who actually thought it might be a good thing. In their view, it would mean that the administration would be forced to make spending cuts rather than default - they didn't realize that Congress had already voted to spend this money.

So the GOP held America hostage, and extracted their demands. They'd only raise the debt ceiling if they got what they wanted. And they got almost every single thing they wanted. They succeeded in not only getting equal spending cuts to new revenues, they then demanded a huge majority be spending cuts. And then they demanded all spending cuts and no new revenues at all. Each time, the President was forced to assent. Because he knew that some of these people actually thought it would be okay to shoot the hostage.

As a result, the world was shocked to find that there was some question of whether or not America would agree to pay the bills on the things it had bought. America had gone into Rent-a-Center with a truck and hauled out the dining set and the big television, but when the bill came America decided that they didn't want to pay Rent-a-Center. The world, starting with S&P, decided that they would be more careful about allowing America to buy on layaway.

So the fact that the S&P downgraded our credit is indisputably and directly because of the recent actions of the Republican Party.

Prominent conservatives, somehow, disagree. Witness conservative star Erick Erickson of Redstate.com (emphasis mine):

The issue here, however, is that while present law presumed the GOP tax cuts would go away, the policy presumption is that they would get extended. Likewise, this is not blaming the GOP. This is a statement of reality that the GOP wasn’t going to raise taxes.

Consequently, because the GOP refused to raise taxes, the alternative needed to be more cuts.

And S&P clearly believes that the cuts the debt deal made were not enough. And who opposed big cuts? Why yes, a guy named Barack Obama and the Democrats.

I don't throw this word around lightly, but this is just plain delusional. In what other context could this logic possibly work?

Imagine ordering some fried rice and wontons from Happy Wok down the street. They deliver it, and you're ready to hand it out to the family. Your family really wants their wontons, and you know you can't refuse them. But you also know that you've run up your credit card and your family is also pissed about that and don't want to pay for the food. So you say to the delivery guy, "Listen, I know this food is $25, but my family just can't afford these record-breaking debts. So I don't think I'm going to pay you unless you agree to bring down your prices."

The delivery guy, of course, is just baffled. If you didn't want the food, the time to make that decision was when you wrote your family budget and ordered the food. But eventually and after several hours and huge hassle, he agrees grudgingly to forgo his tip. You in turn pay him, although you're not happy about it and neither is your family. Still, you have the food and it didn't cost as much and it seems like everything is okay.

Then, of course, the phone rings. It's Happy Wok. They will not be delivering to your residence again in the future.

So what kind of deluded person would you be if you declared that the problem was the delivery boy? How crazy would you have to be to say, "This isn't about blaming me or my family. This is a statement of reality that we weren't going to pay full price plus tip. And because we weren't willing to do that, that means that they should have charged us less. And who refused to charge less? Happy Wok's delivery boy."

It's completely out of touch with reality.

Weekly Book Review: "An Object of Beauty", "Ocean Roads", and "Season of Migrations to the North"

2011-08-08T06:59:00.003-04:00

Short this time - not much pleasure reading, since I am deep in some year-long projects in three of my classes.

An Object of Beauty, Steve Martin

Yes, it's that Steve Martin. It's pretty surprising that he has found a reserve of talent in himself even beyond his considerable skills as a comedian and actor, but this is a pretty good book.

It tells a very simple story about Lacey, an ambitious young woman who enters the art world by working at Christie's auction house. She eventually moves from seeing the paintings as "objects of beauty" to seeing them as "objects of value." She's a very simple character, not written very complexly, but with a quality of Gatsby about her.

The novel was less interesting for its actual story than for the intriguing look into the world of art collection. The more sallow elements are explored, such as the goofy eagerness of collectors who want to impress everyone - friends, visitors, and even the people selling them the paintings. The grungy workhouse of Christie's basement is contrasted with its glamorous upper floors; in the one, they crank through B-list work as quickly as possible and try to offload it onto various rubes throughout the world, while in the latter they strut with unbearable pretension but just as much avarice.

The writing is well-done, though we don't connect very emotionally with Lacey or the narrator. They're both just guides - the narrator guides us around Lacey and does a lot of telling to make up for the lack of showing, and Lacey guides us around the dysfunctional world of art as she takes her predictable course towards degradation.

It's a good book; check it out.

Ocean Roads, James George

Sometimes it's interesting to see the process a writer took to reach their final product. That's why scholars and critics spend a lot of time picking things apart: it's not just what you can take from a book that can be fascinating. It's also how it was made.

At the best of times, you can cut to the heart of some drivel and pull out the unwitting hidden thoughts of a bad writer, or you can trace the delicate stitches that a great writer used to pull together his final shining work. These best of times let you glimpse into another mind and see the lows and highs of which writers are capable.

At the worst of times, you just see a factory. Machines humming, inserting themes at regular intervals, re-arranging chronology mechanically, and clamping things down with literary devices like lumps of slag.

Reading Ocean Roads was the worst of times.

Did you see what I just did there? I took that last sentence, which would ordinarily have been the conclusion of the previous paragraph, and set it carefully aside in its own paragraph. This makes the reader unconsciously absorb what he just read and then move on to the next thought, which is actually a counter-punch that uses the full weight of an extended metaphor.

Ocean Roads does this.

A lot.

This isn't a bad technique. I use it a lot myself and there's nothing wrong with it. But in the hands of James George, it becomes a thick thudding metal-stamp, slamming down to leave an imprint: *stamp* THIS IS IMPORTANT. *stamp* THIS CHARACTER IS SAD. *stamp* PROFOUND REALIZATION JUST OCCURRED.

This wouldn't even be worth mentioning, except that the rest of the book is written with the same sort of mechanical assembly. Set predominantly in Auckland, it tells the story of three generations of a family touched by the nuclear age. The grandfather worked at Los Alamos, the son gets cancer from radiation exposure, and the mother was a child of Nagasaki. Possibly the most glaringly obvious choices that could have been made to emphasize a nuclear theme.

You will be familiar with many elements of this book way before you read it. You know the story of the war-scarred Vietnam veteran, the remorseful scientist, the survivor of a bombing. They're old stories and heavily-used. You know, without me even telling you, that the Vietnam veteran saw innocent children being killed - he tried to stop them and save the kids, but he couldn't!

These parts came off a shelf somewhere, ready-made, and are slotted into place by the author. A buzzing yellow mechanical arm comes down and stamps down the seams.

Stamps them down.

And then it's on to the next part. The book leaps around chronologically, of course, probably because there's a checklist somewhere that includes that instruction. And the themes! Holes are drilled and themes are inserted all over the place!

Light is a theme. One character is always shooting pictures, another is looking through a scope, another is a physicist talking about the properties of light, and so on. Someone regains their sanity when they see a scrap of dust suspended in a beam of light. There's a discussion about how radiation is actually just light. It's endless, and it thunders down like a jackhammer.

Ocean Roads is painfully mediocre. Competently but mechanically written, it offers the reader no story they haven't heard, no thoughts they haven't had, and it's presented in a way that's the same as a thousand others. Skip it.

Season of Migrations to the North, Tayeb Salih (trans. Denys Johnson-Davies)

Before launching into my review of this book - which ranks as a serious masterpiece - let me pause for a note on translation.

Translation is seriously under-appreciated. Taking a book and putting it into a new language is a hugely creative act that requires judgment, aesthetic sense, and an intimate understanding of the source. For most readers, your translation will be the only exposure they will ever get to the original text, and that is a great burden when it comes to a great work. And the end of this labor seldom yields much money or fame. So Deny Johnson-Davies, one of the most lauded translators of Arabic, deserves some part of the praise herein. It's impossible how much, but I want to acknowledge that there is an oft-overlooked collaboration at work here.

So Season of Migration to the North is pretty famous in western criticism as one of the most notable works to come out of Africa, and within the Arabic community Sudanese Tayeb Salih is probably one of the most famous writers of the past century. His stuff is in many collections of Arabic short stories, and when he wrote his novel Season of Migration to the North, it was immediately and widely hailed as a great work.

Unfortunately, many critics seem to place it as just a response to Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness, and little more. And it is definitely a rewriting of Conrad, but to leave it at that would miss a lot. There are numerous other preceding narratives that Salih is referencing, as well as building a strong story of his own. And there are some singular images that are superb and that will stick in your soul.

That's not to say that Conrad isn't a big part of the conversation that Salih want to have. Salih doesn't have quite the beef with Conrad that Chinua Achebe famously expressed ("offensive and deplorable") but Salih definitely wants to build his tower from Conrad's stone. It's important to recognize that. But it's not the only quarry in town.

I don't often do this, but I would like to urge you to pause here and read this book, before the rest of the review. It is truly a great work, and I wouldn't want to diminish it for anyone with foreknowledge.

Season is the story of a man who comes back to his hometown in the Sudan after seven years in Europe. The narrator - we never learn his name - is smug and proud of his accomplishments, having earned a doctorate and seen the world. But soon he discovers that a newcomer to his hometown has also been to the west. Mustafa Said is the newcomer, and in an intriguing visit Said tells a part of his own story: how he too had earned a doctorate and in fact become a famous instructor and teacher of poetry at the London School of Economics, and how he had stood on trial for driving enraptured white Englishwomen to suicide, and how he had returned to try to find a new life.

Said's story lasts until dawn, though he tells only a short part of it. The narrator and he will never meet again, because Said dies during another one of the narrator's absences in the first third of the book. And so begins a growing obsession, one that will eventually threaten to consume the narrator.

This is a planned trap by Mustafa Said, a man whose fierce intelligence and manipulation were matched only by his deep-seated anger. Said designates the narrator as guardian of his two sons to draw the man in. And it isn't long before the narrator becomes snared. He becomes eager to learn the rest of Said's story, and he falls in love with Said's widow.

At the end, there is a confrontation of the narrator with himself, and he makes a choice. He swims into the river.

Halfway across, he finds he can go no further, and yet does not call out for help. He is stuck halfway between the south and north banks, unable to go forward or go back. He feels himself being drawn under. He cannot find the answer to the horrors forced on him by Said. Without an answer, he is unwilling to live.

This is the primary plot of the novel. It's a strong story, and it is written with a sparse delicacy that is marvelous to behold. The characterization is flawless and uncompromising, unafraid to face cliche and overcome its limitations. In another book, the rebellious white women could be too obvious and clunky, caricatures of the shallow liberal eager to prove their own virtue by loving a black man. Or they might be slightly more complex, brassily renouncing that caricature and confounding expectations in a better but inadequate way. Said's women embody the cliche and consume it whole, using it to build characters that both embrace the stereotype and exalt it into reality.

It is here we can also begin to talk about Conrad. Heart of Darkness leaves a lot unsaid. It's a very short book about a company man who journeys into the center of Africa to find Kurtz, another employee of the company who has "gone native." Though he finds the maddened Kurtz, who is worshipped as a god by his followers, the sickened Kurtz dies on the way home. At the end, he has a seeming epiphany, murmuring as his last words, "The horror! the horror!"

There are many similarities. In Season the narrator is unnamed, and just as in Heart of Darkness he is telling his tale to an audience of some kind (never shown, known addressed only as "Gentlemen"). Both Said and Kurtz are compelling and brilliant men, able to seduce followers and inspire the impression that they have grasped some hidden truths. And the narrators of both novels become trapped by those truths.

Conrad's book is a short one, though, and Salih goes on to tell us a further story. He asks the question, "What happens next?"

The key to much of the novel is found in a brief passage on page 108, when the narrator encounters a Bedouin in the desert. The account is tossed out like it is meaningless, but it unlocks the end of Season.

From beneath a hill there came into view a bedouin, who hurried towards us, crossing the car's path. We drew up. His body and clothes were the colour of the earth. The driver asked him what he wanted.

He said, "Give me a cigarette or some tobacco for the sake of Allah - for two days I haven't tasted tobacco." As we had no tobacco I have him a cigarette. We thought we might as well stop a while and give ourselves a rest from sitting.

Never in my life have I seen a man smoke a cigarette with such gusto. Squatting down on his backside, the bedouin began gulping in the smoke with indescribable avidity. After a couple of minutes he put out his hand and I gave him another cigarette, which he devoured as he had done the first. Then he began writhing on the ground as though in an epileptic fit, after which he stretched himself out, encircled his head with his hands, and went stiff and lifeless as though dead. All the time we were there, around twenty minutes, he stayed like this, until the engine started up, when he jumped to his feet - a man brought back to life - and began thanking me ans asking Allah to grant me long life, so I threw him the packet with the rest of the cigarettes. Dust rose up behind us, and I watched the bedouin running towards some tattered tents by some bushes southwards of us, where there were diminutive sheep and naked children. Where, O God, is the shade? Such land brings forth nothing but prophets. This drought can be cured only by the sky.

This is the meaning that Salih brings to answer the unvoiced accusations of Kurtz. It's why, even as the narrator of Season treads water in the middle of the river and feels himself slowly sink, he feels a "violent desire for a cigarette. It wasn't merely a desire; it was a hunger, a thirst." It's why he jerks himself back to life and screams for help.

I shall live because there are a few people I want to stay with for the longest possible time and because I have duties to discharge. It is not my concern whether or not life has meaning. If I am unable to forgive, then I shall try to forget. I shall live by force and cunning.

Junkies and dealers are our witches

2011-07-31T03:54:00.001-04:00

Of late, my Shakespeare class has been spending some time on the collaborative The Witch of Edmonton, Shakespeare's The Tempest, Robert Greene's Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay (pdf), and Marlowe's Doctor Faustus. These plays all include magical characters - Mother Sawyer from Edmonton, Prospero and Ariel from The Tempest, the two Friars and the German magician from Greene's work, and the lamentable Faustus. And amid discussion of allegories and stagecraft, it occurred to me that the medieval idea of magic existed in a state almost identical to that of the drug trade in the modern world.

Illegal drugs are our magic, and junkies and dealers are our witches.

My thoughts on the matter began with some comments about The Witch of Edmonton by a guest lecturer, doctoral student Hannah August. A great deal of the focus was on how magic worked in the play and how witchcraft was viewed at the time, and we spent a couple of hours reviewing the Malleus Maleficarum (a medieval "guide" to witchcraft), a history of witchcraft in England, and some secondary criticism by Anthony Dawson. Dawson brought to light the class conflict in the play.

For those not familiar with this lesser-known work: at the start of The Witch of Edmonton, we see a Mother Sawyer who is on the fringe of society. She's an old widow, poor and bent, and persecuted by her neighbors. The local lord has even refused her the traditional village charity of allowing her to gather sticks on his land (to make and sell brooms), cursing and beating her. She is innocent, but still called a witch - so she reasons that she might as well have a witch's power. She curses God and makes a pact with a devil.

Naturally, it doesn't turn out well for Mother Sawyer. Her devil doesn't actually do her bidding, and she is imprisoned and executed for crimes she may not even have committed. In the play, her fate is contrasted with the spoiled child of a local landowner, who secretly marries a chambermaid when he thinks she's pregnant, but to please his father and keep his inheritance later marries a second woman - and then murders her once his succession is assured. While Mother Sawyer dies in spite and hated by all, this scion of wealth is forgiven and dies beloved. It was probably not an intentional contrast, but to the modern reader it's startlingly obvious just how unfair are the results of this system.

Dawson's pertinent article, "Witchcraft/Bigamy: Cultural Conflict in the Witch of Edmonton," points out that Mother Sawyer is just like all "witches" of the time - she's a woman and she's at the bottom of the class system. Because witchcraft is a crime that has a moral taint about it, and cannot be disproved to anyone's satisfaction, this means that those people at the very limits of society, poor women, were essentially in an extralegal position.

Witches were a social safety valve. On the one hand, they provided for a traditional need for hedge magic, allowing people to get their love potions and their abortofacients. A villager in need of a tea to relieve cramps or a hex to attack a neighbor had to have somewhere to go, after all, even if the letter of the law and official teachings make any sort of magic illegal.

But on the other hand, the system allowed them to be safely and easily eliminated in time of need. If the village needed a scapegoat or if someone important just decided they didn't like a poor old woman, then she could be accused of witchcraft and gotten rid of. You can't disprove witchcraft when you're of the "type" seen as a witch. Being poor and old and alone meant you were already guilty.

In The Witch of Edmonton, Mother Sawyer goes to her execution unlamented. Why should anyone care, after all? She was already guilty of being what she was, and contemporary audiences would have found only a little poignancy in her early declaration that "Tis all one / To be a witch as to be counted one": a frank admission that since she is already being treated as a witch, as a woman beyond the protection of the law or assumption of innocence, she might as well call up the devils.

By now, with my earlier thesis in mind, you probably have already made the same connection I did.

While the sexism has dimmed slightly, those people involved with the drug trade have assumed the same role that those involved with magic once held. They're liminal figures, safely accused and in many ways beyond the protection of the law. They meet the needs of society as a pressure valve, providing goods and services that the majority want to be available, but their position is carefully maintained to keep them in the position to be discarded at need.

I don't want to be alarmist here. I don't want to lose sight of the fact that witchcraft does not in fact exist and that the "witches" of history were condemned for something they did not do, whereas drug-runners and the like often did do what they are accused of. Nor am I saying this is the only analogous situation, since other things like prostitution or illegal immigration might also suit - they're also liminal elements that are made available but extralegal. It just seems to me that the drug trade is the best match, and the most compelling. And there's a lot of evidence.

The various magical figures in the list I gave at the beginning (Prospero, Mother Sawyer, the Friars, Faustus, etc.) all break up into a few categories, and these correspond with segments of the drug trade today.

High Magicians

These figures, like Friar Bacon, Faustus, and Prospero, are all educated and wealthy men. They work their magic by summoning imps and demons, creatures wholly belonging to the magical realm. And in the end, they either abandon their ill-deeds ("Now my charms are all o'erthrown, / And what strength I have's mine own")- or else they are cursed into Hell.

These magicians tend to have distance from the magic. They engage in complicated rituals of summoning, but their creatures do the vast majority of actual action. Ariel flits around and puts people to sleep and whatnot, Briar Bacon's spirits transport people back and forth, and Faustus has the obliging Mephastophilis to do all kinds of nonsense. This keeps the magicians' hands relatively clean; while they are still "doing magic" in some legal sense, the distance between themselves and the action makes them white-collar magicians. At times, this is particularly evident, like when Mephastophilis gives Faustus a magical book that can perform all manner of enchantments - a book that he never uses, preferring to let his demon familiar do all the summoning of chariots and raising of Helens.

These characters are notable for the fact that they can escape from the dangers of magic, even after benefiting from it. Prospero breaks his rod and drowns his books well after the point where he's used his magic to solve all of his problems. Bacon decries his dark arts and returns to Christ after coming to the attention of kings and raising his status considerably. Faustus is the exception that proves the rule: he came very close to getting twenty years' of awesome pleasures and still welching on his deal, but in the end lacks the moral fortitude to repent. He could have gotten free, but he refused.

It is not a hard task to see these men as the upscale drug users and pushers: the actors who snort a few lines after a show and the Howard Markses of the world who move briefcases of hashish. They're distant from the crime and it doesn't consume their lives, and so they are generally privileged enough to be able to escape from most consequences if they're caught. It's not unless some of them get too pulled in that they seriously crash to earth.

I'm no expert on drugs or drug dealers, of course, but even if this doesn't exactly reflect the reality of the matter (maybe way more big-time dealers go to prison than I think?) then the perception remains, and in this case the perception is the important thing. In Blow and Scarface and so many other films, downfall only comes from getting too involved with the sin of drugs. If you stay respectable and stay dignified and stay upper-class... well, then you're fine. You do five years and write a bestseller.

Low Magicians

Faustus' servant steals his magic book. A clown who's near Mother Sawyer makes a deal with her devil-dog. Friar Bungay hopelessly bumbles through his cantrips. They're dabblers.

It's important to note that they're not the upper class. They're lower-class and uneducated and usually some sort of low entertainment for the groundlings - the Elizabethan equivalent of the Three Stooges. They appear in interludes that are usually beside the main action, and often in secondary plotlines. They're of low virtue and we have low expectations of them, and so they provide good fodder for comedy. Often their scenes were varied by the actors, who would ad-lib lines or perform tricks to spice up a dull performance. They were not serious, above all.

Because they were not serious, it didn't much matter what trouble they got into. It was mischief, not sin. Oh, sure, they met with unfortunate consequences or had hilarious mishaps, like ending up with donkey's ears or getting their bottoms burnt with fire or being humiliated before the king. But even when one of them goes to Hell, as in Edmonton, it's to go operate a tavern for devils, roaring with laughter all the while. They might be sinning, but it was winked at because they were seen as harmless.

It isn't too far of a leap to see most drug users in this same instance. If you just smoke a little pot or roll at a rave, then for the most part it's not going to be a big deal. That's why we get movies like Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle or Half-Baked, where the clowns have the stage the entire time - they suffer a few problems from their drug use, but it's winked at. No one wants to see a guy endure permanent consequences from a joint, after all.

No, the real people we scorn are...

Witches

To some extent, it seems like we've made some progress. Even though the drug culture still tends to be harder on women, male junkies are often even more reviled. So to some extent, the gender bias has retreated when it comes to the liminal elements of our society. More and more, it's an equal-opportunity problem.

Both witches and junkies are on the fringe, and their status as "witch" or "junkie" is a fluid one - in many cases, it's enough to just be accused to have that social stain. Society tolerated magic among the high class, but expected it of a certain sector of the populace. If you were a poor lonely woman, then you were beyond the bounds of innocence, in that extralegal place where the assumption of "witch" status was a convenient way to eliminate a threat in time of need.

As the manor system of feudalism began to break down in the seventeenth century, the traditional values of charity that had maintained communities came under strain. The feudal lords were no longer seeing serious returns on their land as reforms took hold, and so they increasingly began to slack in their duties - which in turn encouraged more reforms. So Mother Sawyer is beaten by her lord at the beginning of The Witch of Edmonton, because he is both a brute and sees no reason to provide charity when his own coffers are dry, and she finds herself without recourse. Mother Sawyer is locked out of all possibilities, pigeonholed as a witch because of who she is, beaten and bent. It's only natural that she turns to real witchcraft and calls up a devil.

The poorest of our people are in much the same position. Social programs wax and wane, but they tend to vanish during hard times and only partially return during economic booms - the net results are crumbling projects, schismatic school districts, and pennies' worth of food stamps. Drugs are perceived as one of the few ways to escape, either by dealing or by recreational use. And too often the poor endure suspicion of such wrongdoing, no matter what they've actually done. Is it any more surprising that they indulge?

What Does This Mean?

I'm not saying that junkies are always the victims of unjust accusations, like witches were. There is no such thing as witchcraft, but there definitely is such a thing as heroin addiction. But I am saying that just as witchcraft served a function to eliminate the liminal at convenience, so too can the imposition of witchcraft status. Just like magic, it's a social safety valve. And it's one we should be careful with.

If we're not careful, then a behavior we condemn taints an entire class of people with a label that can be applied or dismissed at will. It puts them outside the law, beyond the succor or true condemnation of justice. They're just poor and ragged and available. It's a slippery slope, and one to watch.

Weekly Book Review: "Consider the Lobster and Other Essays", "Lady Oracle", "The Life of Samuel Johnson", "Freedom", and "Heaven Is for Real"

2011-07-16T05:48:00.002-04:00

Consider the Lobster and Other Essays, David Foster Wallace

Reading anything by David Foster Wallace demands the occasional pause and low, interior whistle of awe: how did he does this? How does he manage this wondrous complexity that still works so smoothly, with its myriad spinning parts all sliding past each other like watchsprings to push the greater narrative?

The writing is dense, of course, as dense as Christmas fruitcake in July. Wallace takes us from the A of any line of thought right down to the final Z, but insists on providing every letter in between. And all of these intermediate steps are written with the same wondrous grasp of language. Wallace's learning was immense, and he shows it with words like "sedulous," "perspicacity," and "dysphemism."

Many people might know what a "dysphemism" is ("NOUN; The use of a derogatory, offensive or vulgar word or phrase to replace a more neutral original"). Many more can work out the meaning after sorting through the roots. But only a few people would ever use the term in their writing. Why would they? There are perfectly acceptable substitutes that would work just as well, and "dysphemism" is uncommon enough to trouble some readers. To use it would seem to be deliberately difficult. But Wallace was dedicated to using the exact right word. The good-enough substitute of "negative label" didn't mean what he wanted to say, and so he refused to use it.

This is not to say (and this is important) that he always uses the ten-cent word when the nickle will do. When he sneers at John Updike's book Toward the End of Time, he doesn't conclude with calling the author an egotistical cad or a masturbatory scoundrel; he calls Updike an asshole.

Wallace's writing isn't difficult for the sake of being difficult: it's difficult because Wallace says things that are extremely complicated, and he doesn't dilute.

I don't think I always understood this. I read Infinite Jest last year, and it was a punishing grind that took weeks to finish. But even when I grumbled and chafed, complaining that Wallace just wanted to show off his erudition and his encyclopedic command of trivia, I still had to admit that it was wonderful writing. Even under the lash, you have to appreciate the skill of the whipping.

Here's an example, from the first in this wonderful collection of essays:

But Las Vegas as most of us see it, Vegas qua Vegas, comprises the dozen or so hotels that flank the Strip’s middle. Vegas Populi: the opulent, intricate, garish, ecstatically decadent hotels, cathedra to gambling, partying, and live entertainment of the most microphone- swinging sort. The Sands. The Sahara. The Stardust. MGM Grand, Maxim. All within a small radius. Yearly utility expenditures on neon well into seven figures. Harrah’s, Casino Royale (with its big 24-hour Denny’s attached), Flamingo Hilton, Imperial Palace. The Mirage, with its huge laddered waterfall always lit up. Circus Circus. Treasure Island, with its intricate facade of decks and rigging and mizzens and vang. The Luxor, shaped like a ziggurat from Babylon of yore. Barbary Coast, whose sign out front says CASH YOUR PAYCHECK—WIN UP TO $25,000. These hotels are the Vegas we know. The land of Lola and Wayne. Of Siegfried and Roy, Copperfield. Showgirls in towering headdress. Sinatra’s sandbox. Most of them built in the ’50s and ’60s, the era of mob chic and entertainment-cum-industry. Half-hour lines for taxis. Smoking not just allowed but encouraged. Toupees and convention nametags and women in furs of all hue. A museum that features the World’s Biggest Coke Bottle. The Harley-Davidson Cafe, with its tympanum of huge protruding hawg; Bally’s H&C, with its row of phallic pillars all electrified and blinking in grand mal sync. A city that pretends to be nothing but what it is, an enormous machine of exchange—of spectacle for money, of sensation for money, of money for more money, of pleasure for whatever be tomorrow’s abstract cost.

Consider the Lobster and Other Essays has no theme, really. Its topics are entirely unrelated:

The Adult Video News annual awards ceremony.
John Updike's Towards the End of Time.
Kafka.
Dictionaries and the management of modern grammar.
September 11th.
The autobiography of tennis star Tracey Austin.
The John McCain campaign of 2000.
The Maine Lobster Festival.
Joseph Frank's biographies of Dostoevsky.

Wallace writes with humor, erudition, precision, and a terrible melancholy that sits behind the words with wide, concerned eyes. Read it.

Lady Oracle, Margaret Atwood

Straight from the beginning, we are given the major themes of this book: controlling women and distant men; double lives; and the mismatch of fantasy and real life. These themes run like chords through the book, a rising and falling refrain that is on pitch from first to last. It's consistent and clear - in fact, it's almost heavy-handed. The saving grace is that this stark enunciation of themes does not end up distracting, but rather just helps keep the overall tune clear.

In all other matters, things aren't so clear. We're thrown into the middle of things, in media res. The heroine starts off in Italy, on the run from something or someone. What happened to her? She has a mysterious book. What is its import? People are mentioned without explanation. Who are they?

Atwood keeps this confusion from unmooring her readers through strong characterization. The voice of the protagonist is fully-developed, and carries us through the story without letting us stumble for a moment.

While not spectacular, it's still a great book and worthy of its author. Check it out.

The Life of Samuel Johnson, James Boswell

This is probably the most famous biography ever written, and justly so. It was written by a talented and intelligent young man who never wrote anything else of note, because he poured himself into the effort of chronicling his acquaintance with the singular Samuel Johnson. He knew Johnson for decades, and was scrupulous in recording their daily interactions and the anecdotes from others, collecting them with religious care and inquiring about anything Johnsonian that he didn't already know. It is very seldom that a person is blessed with a biographer so singularly dedicated and so perfectly matched.

Boswell's study is exceeded only by its subject. Johnson wrote the first decent English language dictionary, essentially single-handed (though he had some lesser writers doing grunt work). For a century and a half, it was the best dictionary of the language. And as if this wasn't enough, he published commentaries on Shakespeare and the Latin poets as well as clever original compositions (often in the style of Juvenal), and encouraged the work of others.

What made Johnson singularly well-suited to biography, though, was his wit. Often abrasive and sometimes cruel, it was nonetheless undeniably pithy. It makes for wonderful reading.

Next day, Sunday, July 31, I told him I had been that morning at a meeting of the people called Quakers, where I had heard a woman preach.
JOHNSON. 'Sir, a woman's preaching is like a dog's walking on his hinder legs. It is not done well; but you are surprized to find it done at all.'

As time has passed and the legend of Boswell's biography has grown, its actual worth as a plain biography has decreased. At some point I will have to pick up an annotated version to fill in the gaps, because for all its brilliance, Boswell simply lacked many of the modern tools and possibilities that exist for a chronicler today. His early life of Johnson is sketchy, and on consideration it would seem that there are factual errors in other places. But that's just not the sort of biography this is. Boswell might have missed out on the color of Johnson's lampshades, but what he did capture was the man himself - live and in person, and ready to speak to you. Johnson lashes and roars and laughs, and at times you can almost smell the tavern air and feel the sting of a Johnsonian sneer.

On Friday, August 5, we set out early in the morning in the Harwich stage coach. A fat elderly gentlewoman, and a young Dutchman, seemed the most inclined among us to conversation. At the inn where we dined, the gentlewoman said that she had done her best to educate her children; and particularly, that she had never suffered them to be a moment idle.
JOHNSON. 'I wish, madam, you would educate me too; for I have been an idle fellow all my life.'
'I am sure, Sir, (said she) you have not been idle.'
JOHNSON. 'Nay, Madam, it is very true; and that gentleman there (pointing to me,) has been idle. He was idle at Edinburgh. His father sent him to Glasgow, where he continued to be idle. He then came to London, where he has been very idle; and now he is going to Utrecht, where he will be as idle as ever.'
I asked him privately how he could expose me so.
JOHNSON. 'Poh, poh! (said he) they knew nothing about you, and will think of it no more.'

You could do far worse than to treat yourself to a read of one of the best biographies ever written.

Freedom, Jonathan Franzen

Franzen is one of the big names of the modern American literature scene - he's been on Oprah and The Simpsons. His first big success, The Corrections was remarkable for its clever writing and insight. I liked it very much. Freedom his follow-up, and I like it exactly as much as I liked its predecessor.

The two books have a lot of similarities. They're both written very well, of course: Franzen has amazing technical competence, although his style has a looseness that might have benefited from a harsher editing. The two novels swap around among a variety of perspectives, and both focus are of the popular Troubled American Family genre: a normal-seeming family is exposed, with all of its warts and hidden beauty held up for a close inspection.

They both also have their flaws. The Corrections was gut-wrenchingly pessimistic, and I came away from it with a sense of disquiet equal to my enjoyment. Freedom, on the other hand, began to drag in the middle as some of the characters became too exaggerated. For example, Walter Berglund, the pathologically pleasant and conscience-stricken left-liberal, verges dangerously close to caricature.

Despite this minor snag, Freedom is absolutely one you should check out. It's not earth-shaking, and it will be forgotten in twenty years, but its smattering of insight and its reminder that no one is ugly on the inside is worth your time.

Heaven Is for Real, Todd Burpo

After about ten pages of this ridiculous book, I started coming up with possible alternate titles.

Confirmation Bias Is for Real
My Four-Year-Old Son Agrees with Me So I Must Be Right
Heaven Is Exactly Like Sunday-School Illustrations

And of course:

How to Profit from Your Child

Pastor Todd Burpo once was having a pretty rough time. He had gone through a string of illnesses, and was coming up short for the medical bills. And just as things were starting to get better, his son Colton came down with a burst appendix. While he didn't die on the table, he was in severe danger as the surgeons removed the ruined flesh from his belly and cleaned out the ichor, and only got better by a seeming miracle.

It wasn't until months later that Colton began dropping casual references to Jesus and Heaven. But once he did, it wasn't too long before his pastor father started pulling details out of him, and discovering that Colton had a message for the world.

But hey, let's back up.

The story of Pastor Burpo's problems is boring. He breaks his leg playing softball, he has kidney stones, he gets breast cancer, and he can't work at his garage-door side business. It was enough to have his fellow pastors calling him "Pastor Job." It's exactly like hearing anyone else tell their tale of illness-related woe: it's kind of sad, but since it's written tediously (though competently) it's also hard to care. If someone corralled you at a party and told you this story, it's the kind of thing to which you'd listen patiently and reply with a heartfelt, "Oh, that's too bad. Um."

It isn't until about a third of the way into the text that we get an almost-dead young Colton, and the book becomes interesting. We get to watch the apparently earnest father and his young son work in tandem to create a story. They give us all the clues to how they accidentally fabricate an experience in their sincere and detailed story, and never realize it... it's like a reverse detective story, where everyone but the author can figure out the mystery. It is fascinating.

We learn early on that Todd Burpo is susceptible to all of the stranger ideas of an interventionist God. No blame for the bad things, just credit for the good things.

One morning in the beginning of December, Dr. O’Holleran called me at home with strange news: not only was the tissue [from the mastectomy] benign; it was entirely normal. Normal breast tissue. “I can’t explain why,” he said. “The biopsy definitely showed hyperplasia, so we would expect to see the same thing in the breast tissue removed during the mastectomy. But the tissue was completely normal. I don’t know what to say. I don’t know how that happened.” I knew: God had loved me with a little miracle.

God could probably have saved time and suffering if he hadn't given Burpo a false positive on a biopsy in the first place. But God knows his stuff: he has the whole system rigged so that everything good is his doing and nothing bad is his fault. As Mr. Deity puts it:

"So you never answer prayers?"
"Well, there's just no incentive."

Burpo is committed to his faith. Absolutely and admirably committed. Even the weirdest elements of the Bible, like the gruesomely cruel parts of the Old Testament, don't faze Pastor Burpo. Most preachers like to skim over them - hit some Genesis, some Exodus, and some of the wisdom books, and then straight on to the New Testament and that good easy Jesus stuff. Not Burpo. When Colton is sick, they speed to the hospital. Amidst Burpo's anxiety, one of the most terrible stories of the Good Book occurs to him.

Behind me, Colton slumped lifelessly in his car seat, and his silence was louder than any sound I had ever heard. There is a story in the Bible about King David of Israel. David had committed adultery with Bathsheba, the wife of Uriah, one of David’s trusted soldiers. Then, in an effort to cover up his sin, David sent Uriah to the front lines, where David knew he would be killed. Later, the prophet Nathan came to David and said, basically, “Look, God knows what you did, and here are the consequences of your sin: the child that you and Bathsheba have conceived will not live.”

Burpo doesn't sugar-coat the story, and his summation is the harsh truth that many pastors might try to skip around: God kills a man's child in retribution for sin. That is straight-up old-school Yahweh in action: a sickening bully who murders children as a punishment to their fathers. Just ask the children of the Egyptians, or the children of Jericho and Ai and Hittites and Canaanites and Perizzites and Hivites and Jebusites and Amalekites. The very fact that he is even contemplating that his son might be dying as a penalty for his sin shows that the man faces the Bible straight-on. He knows this stuff.

One weird thing is that as his son is dying, the Biblical analogy that occurs to Burpo is that of David and Bathsheba. It would seem more appropriate to return to Job. Just like Job, Burpo had suffered a string of illnesses and disasters. And now - again, just like Job - his child is being taken from him.

Perhaps it did occur to him to continue the analogy, but he decided not to do so. Because Burpo, unlike Job, dramatically fails this test. He commits one of the famously foolish mistakes of the Bible: he dares to question the actions of the Lord Almighty, an entity who is infamous for not putting up with that.

“Where are you? Is this how you treat your pastors?! Is it even worth it to serve you?” Back and forth, I paced the room, which seemed to close in on me, shrinking as surely as Colton’s options were shrinking. Over and over a single image assaulted me: Colton being wheeled away, his arms stretched out, screaming for me to save him. That’s when it hit me. We waited too long. I might never see my son alive again. Tears of rage flooded my eyes, spilled onto my cheeks. “After the leg, the kidney stones, the mastectomy, this is how you’re going to let me celebrate the end of my time of testing?” I yelled at God. “You’re going to take my son?”

His son gets better, of course. Don't worry. And Burpo repents of questioning God, even taking the dramatic step of later confessing his sin to a group of other pastors. He credits a prayer chain with saving his son's life, which naturally implies that if he hadn't gotten a bunch of people praying to his deity on behalf of Colton, then God might have killed the child. Curious.

A few months later, Colton starts dropping hints. He saw Jesus, he says. He was in Heaven. Just little things like that. It's not really much to pay attention to, Burpo thinks. That's until his son freaks out at a funeral. And that's when we really get into it. The reverse detective story, where we solve the crime that the author never even sees.

Suddenly, Colton’s face gathered into that same knot of intense concern. He slammed his fists on his thighs, then pointed one finger at the casket and said in a near shout, “Did that man have Jesus?!” Sonja’s eyes popped wide, and we both glanced at the sanctuary doorway, terrified the family inside could hear our son. “He had to! He had to!” Colton went on. “He can’t get into heaven if he didn’t have Jesus in his heart!” Sonja grabbed Colton by the shoulders and tried to shush him. But he was not shushable. Now nearly in tears, Colton twisted in her arms and yelled at me, “He had to know Jesus, Dad!” ... Where was this sudden concern over whether a stranger was saved, whether he “had Jesus in his heart,” as Colton put it, coming from?

So, where could the son of Pastor Burpo have heard that it's important to die with Jesus in your heart?

You might think I'm making too much of this. But these little things are presented as evidence for Colton's divine experience. It is presented to us as impossible that a young boy could have such fervent and inexplicable knowledge of the necessity of accepting Jesus before death - unless he'd heard it from Jesus himself!

We of course, as a legion of skeptical Hercule Poirots, can see the immediate answer, even if Burpo doesn't see it himself. The child of a dedicated pastor, we hear that Colton is read Bible stories and religious messages every night and goes to Sunday School every week. The family's close friends are all in the church or pastors themselves. It would be surprising if young Colton hadn't gotten this core message of evangelical faith somewhere along the line.

But this isn't the real kicker. Burpo isn't fully convinced until he asks Colton about what the boy saw from Heaven. What were his parents doing while he was on the operating table and in the afterlife?

“You were in a little room by yourself praying, and Mommy was in a different room and she was praying and talking on the phone.” Not even Sonja had seen me in that little room, having my meltdown with God.

The boy says, "You were praying." But Burpo hears a reference to an explicit and angry outburst towards his deity. It is a classic case of confirmation bias: Burpo hears a very vague answer, and interprets it into a specific description of an incident.

As for how Colton might have known that his father was praying, let's not forget that daddy is a pastor and probably prays several times a day with his son. And that's only if Colton hadn't already met the inevitable phrase: "We were praying for you."

I'm not saying that Colton was lying. But the boy was four. You can help a four-year-old convince himself of anything.

Anyway, from here on out, we're off to the races.

Just as I was processing the implications of my son’s statement — that he had met John the Baptist — Colton spied a plastic horse among his toys and held it up for me to look at. “Hey, Dad, did you know Jesus has a horse?” “A horse?” “Yeah, a rainbow horse. I got to pet him. There’s lots of colors.”

That's a direct quote. I did not make it up. Burpo, at some point, remembered that conversation and what was going on. He thought about it and wrote it out in a rough draft, then later went back and edited. Maybe he edited it several times. Eventually, he sent it to the publisher.

At no point during this process did he notice the obvious: his son saw a toy in front of him and incorporated it into his idea of what had happened to him.

To us, it seems really blatant, especially the way it's phrased. The kid is playing around with his toys and talking to his daddy about going to Heaven, something that daddy has been really interested in. It was a weird thing that happened when the kid's tummy hurt and he was in that weird sleep. What else happened... there was a horsie, maybe, like this one here. Yes, there was definitely a horse. And... and it had a rainbow tail!

But to Burpo, his son was just reminded about the horse by the toy.

There's a chance, at one point, that Burpo will discover the reverse crime that's happening. He finds the equivalent of bloody fingerprints on the staircase. Big, stark fingerprints with every whorl and curve outlined in bright red:

Colton nodded. “Jesus gave me work to do, and that was my favorite part of heaven. There were lots of kids, Dad.” This statement marked the beginning of a period that I wished we had written down. During this conversation and for the next year or so, Colton could name a lot of the kids he said were in heaven with him. He doesn’t remember their names now, though, and neither do Sonja nor I.

So close! Guess those prints were just a red stain.

Nothing else verifiable ever occurs, either. When the kid claims to have seen his dead grandfather in the afterlife - a man he's never met - there's another opportunity.

“Colton, what did Pop look like?” He broke into a big grin. “Oh, Dad, Pop has really big wings!”

Ah, that's a shame.

There are a few other little things like that. For example, they show Colton lots of pictures of Jesus but none of them look quite right: until he sees a picture painted by another kid who "went to Heaven." Let it be known that Jesus is Caucasian with a full beard and big brown eyes, basically just the way all popular painters of the West have always painted him.

Only once does our bumbling hero Burpo look like he might start investigating. The butler's fingering a butcher knife, the balcony railing's been sawed halfway through, and there's a smoking revolver sitting on the hallway table... will Burpo notice?

[F]or the first time since he started talking about heaven, I intentionally tried to trip him up. “I remember you saying you stayed with Pop,” I said. “So when it got dark and you went home with Pop, what did you two do?” Suddenly serious, Colton scowled at me. “It doesn’t get dark in heaven, Dad! Who told you that?” I held my ground. “What do you mean it doesn’t get dark?” “God and Jesus light up heaven. It never gets dark. It’s always bright.” The joke was on me. Not only had Colton not fallen for the “when it gets dark in heaven” trick, but he could tell me why it didn’t get dark: “The city does not need the sun or the moon to shine on it, for the glory of God gives it light, and the Lamb is its lamp.”

As far as tricky questions go, or attempts to verify an account, this is the worst example I have ever seen.

You could ask what the problem with the whole thing might be: what harm does it do this boy or his father to believe that the child had a near-death experience of Heaven? If it makes him happy and lets him go through life with a little bit brighter of an experience, who am I to say that he has to try to destroy the illusion?

Helpfully, there's an excerpt that illustrates the problem.

“That’s a bunny who was trying to cross the street and didn’t make it,” I said. “That’s what can happen if you run out and a car doesn’t see you! You could not only get hurt; you could die!” Colton looked up at me and grinned over his cone. “Oh, good!” he said. “That means I get to go back to heaven!”

If you help a child convince himself that dying is desirable, you're not doing him any favors.

Colton's fantasy of Heaven, after all, sounds like a pretty fun one. It's a lot like the popular TV he watches. When he sees the Holy Spirit helping his father, he describes it as "shooting power down" - sort of like how Zolton would help send power to the Power Rangers. Everyone's flying around with wings and halos, and they're all young. He meets his sister, who was miscarried, and who looks just like his other sister, only smaller (golly).

Colton's Heaven often seems to be created from whatever happens to be in front of him. At one point, the family gets together and watches The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe on DVD. They all love it, of course. And a few pages later, we see the movie show up when Colton and his father make up a little more fantasy in the unwitting child's memory. It's mashed together with the apocalypse the boy must have often heard described by his evangelical parents.

“There’s going to be a war, and it’s going to destroy this world. Jesus and the angels and the good people are going to fight against Satan and the monsters and the bad people. I saw it.” I thought of the battle described in the book of Revelation, and my heartbeat stepped up a notch. “How did you see that?” “In heaven, the women and the children got to stand back and watch. So I stood back and watched.” Strangely, his voice was sort of cheerful, as though he were talking about a good movie he’d seen. “But the men, they had to fight. And Dad, I watched you. You have to fight too.”

This book took me maybe an hour to read, even with the breaks to laugh or highlight a favorite passage. It is worth checking out, if only to see just how remarkably someone can fool themselves.