Wednesday, May 30, 2007

Remembering Susan Sontag (by David Rieff, The Virginia Quarterly Review)

Home > Issues > Winter 2007 > pp.303-305 > Essay
by David Rieff

In thinking of my mother now, more than a year after her death, I often find myself dwelling on that startling phrase in Auden’s great memorial poem for Yeats—words that both sum up what small immortality artistic accomplishment sometimes can confer and are, simultaneously, such an extraordinary euphemism for extinction. Once dead, Yeats, Auden writes, “became his admirers.”



Loved ones, admirers, detractors, works, work. Beyond soon-to-be-distorted or at least edited memories, beyond the possessions soon to be dispersed or distributed, beyond libraries, archives, voice recordings, videotape, and photographs, that is surely the most that can ever remain of a life, no matter how well and kindly lived, no matter how accomplished.



I have known many writers who assuaged themselves about mortality, to the extent they could, with at least the fantasy that their work would outlive them and also the lives of those of their loved ones who would keep faith with memory for whatever time remained to them. My mother was one such writer, working with one eye imaginatively cocked toward posterity. I should add that, given her unalloyed fear of extinction—in no part of her, even in the last agonized days of her ending, was there the slightest ambivalence, the slightest acceptance—the thought was not just scant consolation, it was no consolation. I do not pretend to know much about what she felt as she lay dying, three months in two successive beds in two successive hospital rooms, as her body became almost one huge sore, but this at least I can assert confidently: She did not want to leave.



She wanted to experience everything, taste everything, go everywhere, do everything. Indeed, if I had only one word with which to evoke her, it would be avidity. Even travel, she once wrote, she conceived of as accumulation. And her apartment, which was a kind of reification of the contents of her head, was filled almost to bursting with an amazingly disparate collection of objects, prints, photographs, and, of course, books, endless books. If anything, the gamut of her interests was what was hard (for me at least) to fathom, impossible to keep up with. In her story “Debriefing,” she wrote: “We know more than we can use. Look at all this stuff I’ve got in my head: rockets and Venetian churches, David Bowie and Diderot, nuoc mam and Big Macs, sunglasses and orgasms.” And then she added, “And we don’t know nearly enough.” I think that, for her, the joy of living and the joy of knowing really were one and the same.



I used to tease my mother by saying to her that though she had largely kept her own biography out of her work, her essays of appreciation—on Roland Barthes, on Walter Benjamin, on Elias Canetti, to name three of the best of them—were more self-revealing than she perhaps imagined. At the very least, they were idealizations. At the time, she laughed, lightly assenting. But I was never sure whether she agreed or not, nor am I now. I was taken back to such conversations when, in the essay “An Argument about Beauty,” I came upon the sentence that reads: “Beauty is part of the history of idealizing, which is itself part of the history of consolation.”



Did she write in order to console herself? I believe so, though this is more intuition than grounded judgment. Beauty, I know, was a consolation for her, whether she found it on the walls of museums to which she was such an ardent and inveterate visitor, in the temples of Japan that she so adored, in serious music, which was the virtually nonstop accompaniment to her evenings at home while working, or in the eighteenth-century prints on the walls of her apartment. “The capacity to be overwhelmed by the beautiful,” she writes in the same essay, “is astonishingly sturdy and survives amidst the harshest distractions.” I would speculate that here she is thinking of that harshest of all the distractions that claimed her in life, her illnesses, the two bouts of cancer that wracked her but that she survived (before she developed cancer for the third and last time).



It is sometimes said of my mother’s work that she was torn between aestheticism and moralism, beauty and ethics. Any intelligent reader of hers will see the force of this, but I think a shrewder account would emphasize their inseparability in her work. “The wisdom that becomes available over a profound, lifelong engagement with the aesthetic,” she wrote, “cannot, I venture to say, be duplicated by any other kind of seriousness.” I do not know if this is true. I do know that she believed this with every fiber of herself, and it led her to a kind of “devotee-ship.”



She excelled in admiration. In another late essay, “1926 . . . ,” a meditation on Pasternak, Tsvetayeva, and Rilke, she describes the three poets as participants in the sacred delirium of art, of a god (Rilke), and of his two Russian worshippers whom, she writes, “we, the readers of their letters, know to be future gods.” The appropriateness of such worship was, for my mother, self-evident, and she practiced it until she could no longer practice anything at all, so much was it second nature to her. This is what her essays of admiration are all about. It is also why, though she valued her work as a fiction writer far more than anything else she did, she could not stop writing them.



In the run-up to the stem cell transplant that was her last, thin chance for survival, she would speak of her failure to write the novels and stories she had wanted to, some of which are mapped out in her diaries and workbooks. Fiction writing alone had brought her pleasure as a writer. But she was never able to think of herself as a writer alone, and it was what she called the would-be “world-improver,” I believe, who wrote most of the essays, while the fiction languished. She knew it, of course. On her seventieth birthday, she told me that what she most yearned for was time, time to do the work that essay writing had distracted her from so often and so lengthily. And as she grew sicker, she spoke with leaden sadness of time wasted.



What she did not know how to do was wall herself off from her own extraliterary commitments, above all her political involvements, from Vietnam to Iraq. Much as I admire her piece on the torture photographs from Abu Ghraib, I wish it had not been the last major piece of work she undertook. I wish . . . Well, I wish she had written a short story. She herself was the first to insist that she did not hold her political opinions “as a writer,” adding that “the influence a writer can exert is purely adventitious,” that it was now “an aspect of the culture of celebrity.”



But it was not only the activist in herself that my mother viewed with misgiving. She returned again and again not to her life as a writer but to her life as a reader. In her essay on translation, “The World as India,” she notes, “A writer is first of all a reader. It is from reading that I derive the standards by which I measure my own work and according to which I fall lamentably short. It is from reading, even before writing, that I became part of a community—the community of literature—which includes more dead than living writers.” Now she has joined them. Now she has become her admirers.



Tuesday, May 22, 2007

Writers Take Out Their Knives (Motoko Rich)


May 20, 2007
Ideas & Trends
Writers Take Out Their Knives
By MOTOKO RICH

FOR all those who believe that “Moby Dick” would be great except for the parts about the whale, the British publisher Orion Books will publish this month a set of pared-down classics, cutting about 40 percent of what it calls “padding” from works like “Anna Karenina,” “David Copperfield” and yes, “Moby Dick.”


It’s a well-trodden path, from Reader’s Digest to CliffsNotes to “Shrink Lit,” and has sparked the inevitable tsk-tsk-ing in literary circles.


But surely, there are some books that could use some trimming. We asked seven authors, all of whom know a thing or two about the judicious use of words, what books they would put on the chopping block.



Their answers, not entirely serious, roamed from classics to modern literature, and even some works that might not qualify for either term. Not surprisingly, Norman Mailer took on an old target, Tom Wolfe, with whom he famously tangled after the publication of “A Man in Full,” Mr. Wolfe’s 742-page doorstop of a book about the Atlanta real estate and social scene. Mr. Mailer included other contemporary giants like Toni Morrison and John Irving. Then again, Mr. Mailer also suggested that some of his own work could use another go-round with an editor; Neal Pollack and Joyce Carol Oates offered themselves up, as well.


Length in and of itself was not a criterion for cutting: Ann Patchett suggested George Orwell’s “Animal Farm,” which in the edition Ms. Patchett wrote an introduction for runs only 128 pages. And Ms. Patchett is a passionate advocate for “Moby Dick” — including all the stuff about the whale.






Might I dare to suggest that L. Ron Hubbard’s book
“Mission Earth,” which clocks in at 1.2 million words, might just
be a teensy bit more accessible if it were say, just a million words?


The pre-eminent examples of books that could probably do
with a slightly better body mass index would be the works of Ayn Rand. They,
nonetheless, stay resplendently in print, but having tried to read “Atlas
Shrugged” about four times and “The Fountainhead”

about, maybe, twice, these would be definite candidates for the literary liposuction
machine and would probably be just as good — or just as bad.




Writers shouldn’t necessarily just pick on the long
books. There are plenty of short books that are too long as well. I wrote
an introduction to a new edition of “Animal Farm,” and I hadn’t
read it since I was 12 and it was awful. Then I reread “1984” and
it was beyond awful. Definitely cut that one down.



Suffering is often good for us in literature. I just read
“The Wings of the Dove,” and it has about 400 of the most excruciatingly
boring pages and then 150 pages that are transcendent beyond imagination.
When I was saying this to people, they said, “Couldn’t you just
skip the first 400 pages?”


But it’s the suffering that makes reading transcendent.
It’s like cutting out Good Friday and going straight to Easter. Easter
doesn’t have the resonance without Good Friday. Sometimes we have to
suffer. But then I’m Catholic.





Certainly the Bible could use cutting; think of all those
begats, not to mention minor-league prophets such as Habbakuk (there isn’t
even a car dealership named after him).


What about “Ulysses”? All that tiresome stream
of consciousness could go.


And there is “Gone With the Wind,” which I would
shorten to this:


“Civil War?” said Scarlett.



“Fiddle-de-dee!”


But Atlanta burned! Rhett left!


“I will think about it tomorrow,” said Scarlett,
“for tomorrow is another day.”


That’s so good you could probably fit “Dombey and
Son” in the same edition. Or shorten “Tess of the D’Urbervilles”

to a National Enquirer headline:


UNFORTUNATE GIRL SLEEPS THROUGH RAPE, IS LATER HUNG.




I would cut say 80 percent of “The Notebook” by
Nicholas Sparks and turn it into the greeting card that it was meant to be.
Given that I’m a basketball fan, and given the recent controversy, I
would cut the NBA rulebook by about 40 percent because some of these rules
have got to go. I think I shouldn’t have added the extra 60 pages to
“The Neal Pollack Anthology of American Literature” paperback edition.


Let’s cut 40 percent of “The Satanic Verses,”
not necessarily the stuff about Muhammad, but just because I thought it was
too long.




Mr. Mailer sent in a list without commentary, which he
requested be printed in full.


Ernest Hemingway: “For Whom the Bell Tolls”


John Dos Passos: “U.S.A.”

William Faulkner: “Absalom, Absalom!”

John Steinbeck: “The Grapes of Wrath”

Thomas Wolfe: “Look Homeward, Angel,” “Of Time and the River,”
“The Web and the Rock,” “You Can’t Go Home Again”


James Jones: “Some Came Running”

Norman Mailer: “Harlot’s Ghost,” “Ancient Evenings,”
“The Executioner’s Song”

Tom Wolfe: “Bonfire of the Vanities,” “A Man in Full”


Toni Morrison: “Beloved”

John Irving: “The World According to Garp”




I can suggest Ernest Hemingway. There’s much too much
smoking, drinking, fishing and hunting in Hemingway, and it could all be cut
out. If that is cut out about 70 percent of Hemingway would go.


And let’s say Jane Austen: too many descriptions of
furniture and balls and ballroom gowns. I’m sure I could think of many
other titles that would benefit from being cut, including some of my own.





Mr. Franzen said he can’t think of any great work
that he would like to see slashed, but tinkered with some book titles, should
they be chopped.


“The Pretty Good Gatsby”

“Alyosha Karamazov”

“The Adventure of Augie March”

“Paler Fire”


“Lite in August”

“Shortmarch”

Writers Take Out Their Knives (Motoko Rich)

May 20, 2007
Ideas & Trends
Writers Take Out Their Knives
By MOTOKO RICH

FOR all those who believe that “Moby Dick” would be great except for the parts about the whale, the British publisher Orion Books will publish this month a set of pared-down classics, cutting about 40 percent of what it calls “padding” from works like “Anna Karenina,” “David Copperfield” and yes, “Moby Dick.”


It’s a well-trodden path, from Reader’s Digest to CliffsNotes to “Shrink Lit,” and has sparked the inevitable tsk-tsk-ing in literary circles.


But surely, there are some books that could use some trimming. We asked seven authors, all of whom know a thing or two about the judicious use of words, what books they would put on the chopping block.



Their answers, not entirely serious, roamed from classics to modern literature, and even some works that might not qualify for either term. Not surprisingly, Norman Mailer took on an old target, Tom Wolfe, with whom he famously tangled after the publication of “A Man in Full,” Mr. Wolfe’s 742-page doorstop of a book about the Atlanta real estate and social scene. Mr. Mailer included other contemporary giants like Toni Morrison and John Irving. Then again, Mr. Mailer also suggested that some of his own work could use another go-round with an editor; Neal Pollack and Joyce Carol Oates offered themselves up, as well.


Length in and of itself was not a criterion for cutting: Ann Patchett suggested George Orwell’s “Animal Farm,” which in the edition Ms. Patchett wrote an introduction for runs only 128 pages. And Ms. Patchett is a passionate advocate for “Moby Dick” — including all the stuff about the whale.






Might I dare to suggest that L. Ron Hubbard’s book
“Mission Earth,” which clocks in at 1.2 million words, might just
be a teensy bit more accessible if it were say, just a million words?


The pre-eminent examples of books that could probably do
with a slightly better body mass index would be the works of Ayn Rand. They,
nonetheless, stay resplendently in print, but having tried to read “Atlas
Shrugged” about four times and “The Fountainhead”

about, maybe, twice, these would be definite candidates for the literary liposuction
machine and would probably be just as good — or just as bad.




Writers shouldn’t necessarily just pick on the long
books. There are plenty of short books that are too long as well. I wrote
an introduction to a new edition of “Animal Farm,” and I hadn’t
read it since I was 12 and it was awful. Then I reread “1984” and
it was beyond awful. Definitely cut that one down.



Suffering is often good for us in literature. I just read
“The Wings of the Dove,” and it has about 400 of the most excruciatingly
boring pages and then 150 pages that are transcendent beyond imagination.
When I was saying this to people, they said, “Couldn’t you just
skip the first 400 pages?”


But it’s the suffering that makes reading transcendent.
It’s like cutting out Good Friday and going straight to Easter. Easter
doesn’t have the resonance without Good Friday. Sometimes we have to
suffer. But then I’m Catholic.





Certainly the Bible could use cutting; think of all those
begats, not to mention minor-league prophets such as Habbakuk (there isn’t
even a car dealership named after him).


What about “Ulysses”? All that tiresome stream
of consciousness could go.


And there is “Gone With the Wind,” which I would
shorten to this:


“Civil War?” said Scarlett.



“Fiddle-de-dee!”


But Atlanta burned! Rhett left!


“I will think about it tomorrow,” said Scarlett,
“for tomorrow is another day.”


That’s so good you could probably fit “Dombey and
Son” in the same edition. Or shorten “Tess of the D’Urbervilles”

to a National Enquirer headline:


UNFORTUNATE GIRL SLEEPS THROUGH RAPE, IS LATER HUNG.




I would cut say 80 percent of “The Notebook” by
Nicholas Sparks and turn it into the greeting card that it was meant to be.
Given that I’m a basketball fan, and given the recent controversy, I
would cut the NBA rulebook by about 40 percent because some of these rules
have got to go. I think I shouldn’t have added the extra 60 pages to
“The Neal Pollack Anthology of American Literature” paperback edition.


Let’s cut 40 percent of “The Satanic Verses,”
not necessarily the stuff about Muhammad, but just because I thought it was
too long.




Mr. Mailer sent in a list without commentary, which he
requested be printed in full.


Ernest Hemingway: “For Whom the Bell Tolls”


John Dos Passos: “U.S.A.”

William Faulkner: “Absalom, Absalom!”

John Steinbeck: “The Grapes of Wrath”

Thomas Wolfe: “Look Homeward, Angel,” “Of Time and the River,”
“The Web and the Rock,” “You Can’t Go Home Again”


James Jones: “Some Came Running”

Norman Mailer: “Harlot’s Ghost,” “Ancient Evenings,”
“The Executioner’s Song”

Tom Wolfe: “Bonfire of the Vanities,” “A Man in Full”


Toni Morrison: “Beloved”

John Irving: “The World According to Garp”




I can suggest Ernest Hemingway. There’s much too much
smoking, drinking, fishing and hunting in Hemingway, and it could all be cut
out. If that is cut out about 70 percent of Hemingway would go.


And let’s say Jane Austen: too many descriptions of
furniture and balls and ballroom gowns. I’m sure I could think of many
other titles that would benefit from being cut, including some of my own.





Mr. Franzen said he can’t think of any great work
that he would like to see slashed, but tinkered with some book titles, should
they be chopped.


“The Pretty Good Gatsby”

“Alyosha Karamazov”

“The Adventure of Augie March”

“Paler Fire”


“Lite in August”

“Shortmarch”

Monday, May 21, 2007

Divine Comedy (by Julian Gough, Prospect)




The Greeks understood that comedy (the gods' view of life) is superior to tragedy (the merely human). But since the middle ages, western culture has overvalued the tragic and undervalued the comic. This is why fiction today is so full of anxiety and suffering. It's time writers got back to the serious business of making us laugh

May 2007 | 134 » Essays » Divine comedy
by Julian Gough

What is wrong with the modern literary novel? Why is it so worthy and dull? Why is it so anxious? Why is it so bloody boring?


Well, let's go back a bit first. Two and a half thousand years ago, at the time of Aristophanes, the Greeks believed that comedy was superior to tragedy: tragedy was the merely human view of life (we sicken, we die). But comedy was the gods' view, from on high: our endless and repetitive cycle of suffering, our horror of it, our inability to escape it. The big, drunk, flawed, horny Greek gods watched us for entertainment, like a dirty, funny, violent, repetitive cartoon. And the best of the old Greek comedy tried to give us that relaxed, amused perspective on our flawed selves. We became as gods, laughing at our own follies.

Many of the finest novels—and certainly the novels I love most—are in the Greek comic tradition, rather than the tragic: Rabelais, Cervantes, Swift, Voltaire, and on through to Joseph Heller's Catch-22 and the late Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse 5.

Yet western culture since the middle ages has overvalued the tragic and undervalued the comic. We think of tragedy as major, and comedy as minor. Brilliant comedies never win the best film Oscar. The Booker prize leans toward the tragic. In 1984, Martin Amis reinvented Rabelais in his comic masterpiece Money. The best English novel of the 1980s, it didn't even make the shortlist. Anita Brookner won that year, for Hotel du Lac, written, as the Observer put it, "with a beautiful grave formality."

The fault is in the culture. But it is also internalised in the writers, who self-limit and self-censor. If the subject is big, difficult and serious, the writer tends to believe the treatment must be in the tragic mode. When Amis addressed the Holocaust in his minor novel Time's Arrow (1991), he switched off the jokes, and the energy, and was rewarded with his only Booker shortlisting.

But why this pressure, from within and without? There are two good reasons. The first is the west's unexamined cultural cringe before the Greeks. For most of the last 500 years, Homer and Sophocles have been held to be the supreme exponents of their arts. (Even Homer's constant repetition of stock phrases like "rosy-fingered dawn" and "wine-dark sea" are praised, rather than recognised as tiresome clichés.)

The second reason is that our classical inheritance is lop-sided. We have a rich range of tragedies—Sophocles, Aeschylus and Euripides (18 by Euripides alone). Of the comic writers, only Aristophanes survived. In an age of kings, time is a filter that works against comedy. Plays that say, "Boy, it's a tough job, leading a nation" tend to survive; plays that say, "Our leaders are dumb arseholes, just like us" tend not to.

More importantly, Aristotle's work on tragedy survived; his work on comedy did not. We have the classical rules for the one but not the other, and this has biased the development of all western literature. We've been off-centre ever since.

But of course Europe in the middle ages was peculiarly primed to rediscover tragedy: the one church spoke in one voice, drawn from one book, and that book was at heart tragic. All of human history, from the creation, was a story that climaxed with the sadistic murder of a man by those he was trying to save, whose fatal flaw was that he was perfect in an imperfect world. The nicest man ever, he is murdered by everybody. Not only is this tragedy; it is kitsch tragedy, overegged, a joke. It cannot survive laughter, it is too vulnerable to it. And the Bible, from apple to Armageddon, does not contain a single joke.

The church spoke with one voice because it was on such shaky foundations. The largest and richest property empire of all time had somehow been built on the gospel of the poor. All other voices had to be suppressed, even dissenting gospels. Only once a year, in carnival, on the feast of fools, could the unsayable be said. A fool was crowned king, and gave a fool's sermon from the altar that reversed the usual pieties. But these speeches could not be written down or circulated. They existed in the air, for a day, and were gone. By the late middle ages, the paralysis was almost total. If you change one word of the old Vulgate Bible, the whole thing comes under suspicion. All you could hear was a single voice reading a single book, the Vulgate, a Latin translation from a Greek original. When Erasmus finally retranslated the Bible, threw it open to interpretation, he caused a crisis that ultimately tore the church apart.

The problem is not specific to Christianity. Islam has always had a problem with comedy at its expense, as Salman Rushdie showed in The Satanic Verses. In Medina, in year two of the Hijra migration, with Mecca not yet fallen, the Prophet asked the faithful to kill the Jewish-Arab poet Ka'b ibn al-Ashraf for reciting his poems satirising the Prophet (and joking about Muslim women). The faithful obliged.

It is interesting, but unsurprising, that all the satirists murdered and allegedly murdered on Muhammad's orders were, among other things, Jewish. With its vigorous tradition of Talmudic debate, and with no Jewish state to stifle or control that debate, Judaism never fell into the paralysis of the younger monotheisms. It was, to put it mildly, never state-approved. Judaism, excluded from the establishment in so many Christian and Muslim nations, has consequently produced a high proportion of the world's great satirists, comedians and novelists. And, in Yiddish, it produced perhaps the world's first compulsively comic, anti-authoritarian language, with its structural mockery of high German.

In Christian Europe, the Renaissance rediscovery of the classical texts occurred when the habit of submission to authority was at its most extreme. When printing was invented, no one thought to use it for anything other than the Christian Bible, for that was the myth of Europe, the one true myth.

As writers began moving cautiously away from the theological shore, they still felt the need for a holy book to guide them, to tell them how to write. Aristotle's Poetics provided that. If you wanted to write tragedy or epic, here were the rules. You need not think for yourself. It's particularly sad to see the narrowness of subject matter and style in the pictorial art of the era—Madonna after pink-cheeked Madonna, saint after martyred saint. So much talent, all wasted doing the Renaissance equivalent of Soviet realist art.

And then something astonishing happened: the invention of the novel privatised myth, because the novel, invented after Aristotle, did not have a holy book. The novelist was on his own. Sometimes he's even a she. There were no rules. The chaos of carnival had found its form. The fool's sermon could be published, could live on. All you learned from Rabelais or Cervantes was to mock everything sacred, all that went before. Including them.

And the reaction was fierce. Rabelais was jailed for his wild comedies. Voltaire, praised for his early tragedies, was jailed for his satires. Cervantes apparently started Don Quixote in a debtors' prison. All had to flee town on occasion for fear of worse. Printing had to be done abroad, in secret, and the books smuggled to their destinations. The early years of the novel look remarkably like a guerrilla war, as pro-Bible forces try to put down the insurgency of the novel across Europe. Both were fighting for the same piece of territory: the territory inside your head.

Now a man could invent his own myth and spread it across the world. And the reader, head bowed over the novel, could have a vision without religion: a full vision, transmitted through space and time by marks on paper, using the novelist's arts.

The novel, when done right—when done to the best of the novelist's abilities, talent at full stretch—is always greater than the novelist. It is more intelligent. It is more vast. It can change your entire internal world. Of course, so can a scientific truth. So can a religious experience. So can some drugs. So can a sublime event in nature. But the novel operates on that high level. Sitting there, alone, quite still, you laugh, you murmur, you cry, and you can come out of it with a new worldview, in a new reality. It's a controlled breakdown, or breakthrough. It's dangerous.

The resistance of the monotheisms to comedy has another, more subtle, cause. The comic point of view—the gods'-eye view—is much more uncomfortable for a believer in one all-powerful God than it was for the polytheistic Greeks. To have the gods laughing at us through our fictions is acceptable if the gods are multiple, and flawed like us, laughing in recognition and sympathy: if they are Greek gods. But to have the single omnipotent, omniscient God who made us laughing at us is a very different thing: sadistic, and almost unbearable. We do not wish to hear the sound of one God laughing. The western comic novel has often had a harsh, judgemental edge. Swift has a hint of Yahweh about him. But the recent death of God has freed a lot of space for the comic novel. Science has given us a high, impersonal, non-judgemental perspective from which to regard ourselves (brilliantly used by Vonnegut in books like Breakfast of Champions). The various eastern philosophies give us other high vantage points. Indeed, both physics and Zen can handle laughter, and are superb tools for writing the western comic novel because they do not require absolute faith and they do not claim absolute certainty. With freedom from a death-obsessed monotheism and new tools, new places from which to view humanity, we should have entered a golden age of comedy.

Some writers seized the chance. Evelyn Waugh became perhaps the greatest English novelist of the 20th century by applying a flawless, deadpan, comic technique to everything from modern manners to modern warfare. PG Wodehouse developed the purest comic style of his age but, unlike Waugh, felt no need to apply it to real life. The great comic writers do survive, but are seldom seen as great till much later. The tragic bias remains deep in the industry. And the more original the comic masterpiece, the harder it is to get it through the filters of western commercial publishing. Flann O'Brien's The Third Policeman, one of Ireland's three greatest novels, could not find a publisher in the author's lifetime. John Kennedy Toole's A Confederacy of Dunces was rejected by 36 publishers, and Toole eventually killed himself. Only a decade after his death was it published. Publishing is a form of authority too.

No, the novel has not, in general, been able to seize its freedom—it has not gone comic. This has consequences. An unnecessary tragic bias, in something so powerful, will cause a great deal of avoidable suffering. Goethe's The Sorrows of Young Werther, with its revoltingly sentimental suicide note, depressed a generation and caused a wave of fashionable suicides across Europe. (They even dressed in the same blue frock coat and yellow waistcoat.) Autobiographical novels are particularly revealing of the bias in the culture: in real life Goethe felt no need to kill himself after his heart was broken, but when he wrote a book about it, it had to be a tragedy and the hero had to die. A comedy would have been far more suitable. It might even have led to a cheerful late 18th-century Europe. But no, he gave us the furrow-browed Romantics.

Tragically (or comically, depending on your temperament), the bias caused by Aristotle, Sophocles, Euripides, Aeschylus and the church continues today. The youthful brow remains furrowed.

It would be useful to look at a representative cross-section of the finest young novelists of the US, the largest and most diverse of the English-speaking nations. A big job, but luckily Granta has just carried out the task for me, and announced its Best of Young American Novelists 2, a list of 21 talents. In his summing up, the chair of the judges, Granta editor Ian Jack, mentions death, sorrow, uncertainty and anxiety. "All I know is that we read many books infused by loss and a feeling that present things would not go on forever." (These writers are mostly in their twenties and early thirties!) At the end, Jack regrets the absence from the list of Joshua Ferris, "whose first novel… had the singular distinction among all these writers of making me laugh aloud quite often."

No loud laughter in the whole top 21. Twenty-one Apollos, and not one Dionysus.

"Why so sad, people?" as Zadie Smith asks.

Well, it's just a habit by now. It's so ingrained in our culture that it has become an unexamined default position. What makes it much worse is that it is now being coached, reinforced. All of the writers on the Granta list attended university creative writing programmes. All, in other words, have submitted to authority. This is a catastrophe for them as novelists.

The novel cannot submit to authority. It is written against official language, against officialdom, and against whatever fixed form the novel has begun to take—it is always dying, and always being born.

If the literary novel has calcified into genre, the new novelists need to break its underlying, often unspoken rules. To not just question, but to overthrow authority. The novel, at its best, cannot even submit to the authority of the novelist: Gogol burnt his follow-up to Dead Souls because, on reading the book he had just written, he was shocked to find that he profoundly disagreed with it.

But the universities are authority or they are nothing. As the west has grown secular, the university has, quite organically, taken over from the church as a cross-border entity claiming universality, claiming to influence the powerful but not to wield power. "Education" is the excuse for a self-perpetuating power structure now, just as "religion" was the excuse then. The modern universities could claim to have no single ideology, but the same could be said of the Vatican under the Medicis, or the Borgias.

The problem is not that the universities are malevolent; they are not. They have no sinister intent in taking over the novel, professionalising it, academicising it. Like most of those who colonise territories that were getting on fine without them, they believe they do no great damage, they believe it's for the novel's good, they believe they are benign, idealistic and quite a bit cleverer than the natives. As ever, none of these beliefs is entirely true.

The literary novel, by accepting the embrace of the universities, has moved inside the establishment and lost contact with what made it vital. It has, as a result, also lost the mass audience enjoyed by Twain and Dickens. The literary novel—born in Cervantes's prison cell, continued in cellars, bars and rented rooms by Dostoevsky, Joyce and Beckett—is now being written from on high. Not the useful height of the gods, with its sharp, gods'-eye view of all human classes, all human folly, but the distancing, merely human height of the ruling elite, just too high up to see what's happening on the street below.

Luckily this situation is self-satirising. Campus authority generates campus comedy. The senior academic novelist is trapped in the small world of the university, cut off from the big world, embodying authority yet still driven to write. In this situation the novel, if it is to live, must turn against the novelist. Malcolm Bradbury and David Lodge, writing novels at night, attacked their day-selves, their academic selves, as absurd buffoons whose work was meaningless. And the novelist in them was right.

The university model, any teaching model, of necessity implies that there is a Platonic ideal novel in some other dimension, which has all the characteristics that make for novelness and that the more of these attributes a novel has, the more like a perfect novel it is. This concept works for the tragic, it works for the epic, it works (less well, but it works) for the lyric, it does not work for the novel because, as Mikhail Bakhtin has pointed out, the novel is the only post-Aristotelian literary form. It is not bound by classical rules. It is not bound by any rules. The novel is not a genre. The novel is always novel. The novel is always coming into being. The novel cannot be taught, because the novel does not yet exist.

This professionalisation will make poor writers adequate. And will make potentially great writers adequate. Great novelists write for their peers. Poor novelists write for their teachers. If you must please the older generation to pass (a student writing for an older teacher, a teacher writing to secure tenure), you end up with cautious, old-fashioned novels. Worse, the system turns peers into teachers. Destroyed as writers, many are immediately re-employed, teaching creative writing. This is a Ponzi scheme.





During their second year, students are offered teaching appointments to teach introductory undergraduate creative writing workshops (ENL 5F or ENL 5P) in their genre or are hired as literature TAs or GSRs.
(From the website of the English department at the University of California, Davis)


The damage this is causing to novel, writer and audience is particularly advanced in America. The last 30 years have seen the effects of turning novel writing into an academic profession with a career path. As they became professional, writers began to write about writers. As they became academicised, writers began to write about writing.

And the language of the American literary novel began to drift away from anything used by human beings anywhere on earth. Thirty years of the feedback loop have led to a kind of generic American literary prose, instantly recognisable, but not as instantly comprehensible. Professions generate private languages designed to keep others out. This is irritating when done by architects. But it is a catastrophe for novelists, and the novel.




Lastly, a series of thesis units, which is your writing time guided by your thesis committee members, will fulfil the required 36 units.
(From the website of the English department at the University of California, Davis)

Much of their fiction contains not so much tragedy as mere anxiety. Pushed to look for tragedy in lives that contain none, to generate suffering in order to be proper writers, they force themselves to frown rather than smile; and their work fills with a self-indulgent anxiety that could perhaps best be called "wangst."

To teach is to imply that one would not otherwise learn. Do we teach children to breathe? The illusion that there is a solution comes from the illusion that there is a problem. There is not. The forest is open. Strike out.


The novelist's ambition is not to do something better than his predecessors but to see what they did not see, say what they did not say. Flaubert's poetics does not devalue Balzac's, anymore than the discovery of the North Pole renders obsolete the discovery of America.
(Milan Kundera, "The Curtain")

If I don't like what the novel is doing, do I have any suggestions as to what it should do? Perhaps.

The novel grows by theft and observation, both of real life and of other "newer," yet often more conservative art forms. (Cinema was a tremendous influence on Joyce.) The problem with the novels of, say, John Banville is that, although brilliantly written, they steal only from other novels (and a few oil paintings). His is a universe in which the internet does not exist, and television scarcely exists. Yet new art forms, and their delivery systems, change the way we read the novel, and therefore must change the way we write it. This is not a catastrophe; it is an opportunity. We are free to do new things with the novel, which could not have been understood before now.

My generation, and those younger, spend a lot of time taking in information not in long, linear, structured, coherent, self-contained units (a film, a novel), but in short bursts, with wildly different tones. A youth spent channel-hopping and surfing the internet rewires the brain. (So does a youth spent reading critical theory: be careful.) See 10,000 Hollywood movies and the journey of the hero becomes utterly predictable: you can see the plot twists and ending coming from the start. Traditional story may have been broken by this overload: certainly it suffers from repetitive strain injury. Television has responded to this crisis. The novel has not.

A comparison between The Simpsons and a soap opera is instructive. A soap opera is trapped inside the rules of the format; all soaps resemble each other (like psychologically plausible realist novels). What the makers of The Simpsons did was take a soap opera and put a frame around it: "this is a cartoon about a soap opera." This freed them from the need to map its event-rate on to real life: they could map its event-rate on to cartoon life. A fast event-rate is inherently comic, so the tone is, of necessity, comic. But that is not to say it isn't serious. The Simpsons is profoundly serious. And profoundly comic. Like Aristophanes, debating the war between Athens and Sparta by writing about a sex strike by the women of Athens and beyond.

With its cartoon event-rate, a classic series of The Simpsons has more ideas over a broader cultural range than any novel written the same year. The speed, the density of information, the range of reference; the quantity, quality and rich humanity of the jokes—they make almost all contemporary novels seem slow, dour, monotonous and almost empty of ideas.

The Sopranos took a more subtle approach to the problem of the broken hero, the broken heroic saga, by deconstructing the hero through psychoanalysis, inside the frame. Twin Peaks and Lost have taken a more ostentatiously radical, metafictive approach to the breakdown of story.

Meanwhile, the internet is rapidly becoming Borges's library of Babel, Rushdie's sea of stories: everything is turning up there, in potential promiscuous intercourse with everything else. Everything is happening all at once, in the same place, with no hierarchy. It's as though space and time have collapsed. It's exhilarating, and frightening. Who's capturing that in the novel? Because the novel is the place to capture it. The novel has freedoms which television has not. It can shape and structure multiplicity and chaos in ways the internet cannot.

Novelists can take from these new art forms new structures and techniques for telling stories, as Joyce did from cinema. But who has? Weirdly, the modernists have a more accurate take on now than the most recent Booker winners. Finnegans Wake reads like a mash-up of a Google translation of everything ever. But John Banville and Anita Desai read like nostalgia (for Nabokov, for Dickens, for traditional virtues, for the canon). They feel far less contemporary than The Waste Land—which is what Bakhtin would call a novelised poem: a poem that escapes Aristotle's Poetics and hitches a ride on the energy of the novel. As Baudrillard should have said: postmodernism never happened. Since Joyce and Woolf (and Eliot), the novel's wheels have spun in the sand.

So steal from The Simpsons, not Henry James.

Realistic texture and a cartoon event-rate with a broad range of reference: is this a revolutionary new way of writing the novel? Of course not. It's ancient. Voltaire, for example, did it in Candide. But we keep forgetting. The novel is constantly pushed by the culture towards worthiness, towards Aristotle's Poetics, towards tragedy. The next great novel will do to the contemporary literary novel what Cervantes did to the chivalric romance. It's not that contemporary literary novels are bad. Line by line, book by book, they're often wonderful. But in the same few ways. Who needs more of that?

You may think that to praise The Simpsons at the expense of Henry James makes me a barbarian. Well, it does, but I'm a very cultured barbarian. The literary novel has gone late Roman. It needs the barbarians. It secretly yearns for them. It's leading them on. How many novels influenced by Henry James very politely fought it out for the Booker in 2004?

GS Frazer, writing about Henry James in 1964, said: "The novelist must recognise that the foundations of the world he walks are dangerously shifting, that we are living in a world of rapid and disturbing change, so that we can neither say with certainty when some new pattern of relative stability will emerge, nor what sort of pattern it might be. Yet the task of the novelist also, since the human heart hungers after permanence, is to project some image of permanence and to give the novel a coherence that life at large does not… possess."

This is completely wrong. The task of the novelist is precisely the opposite: not to fake a coherence that does not exist, but to capture the chaos that does. And in so doing, perhaps we shall discover that chaos and permanence are not, in fact, opposed. The novel, self-renewing, self-destroying, always the same, always new, always… novel… is the art of permanent chaos.

And to clarify: I don't want everybody to write comedies. I just don't want everybody to write minor, anxious, banal tragedies, without thinking about why they've chosen such a crowded mode. Why all cluster under the one tree when there's a forest to explore? We do not live in tragic times. We do not live in comic times. We live in novel times.

Ah well, this praising of comedy at the expense of tragedy has gone on forever. Let us go back to Greece, before Muhammad, before Christ, and let someone else have the last word. In Plato's Symposium, Aristodemus, a bit pissed, has just woken up to find "… there remained awake only Aristophanes, Agathon and Socrates, who were drinking out of a large goblet that was passed around, while Socrates was discoursing to them. Aristodemus did not hear all the discourse, for he was only half awake; but he remembered Socrates insisting to the other two that the genius of comedy was the same as that of tragedy, and that the writer of the one should also be a writer of the other. To this they were compelled to assent, being sleepy, and not quite understanding what he meant. And first Aristophanes fell asleep, and then, when the day was dawning, Agathon."

Thursday, May 17, 2007

Collect-Me-Nots (by Christoph Niemann, the New York Times)


Op-Ed Contributor
Collect-Me-Nots
by Christoph Niemann


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By JUDITH PASCOE
Published: May 17, 2007

Iowa City


THE owner of Napoleon’s penis died last Thursday in Englewood, N.J. John K. Lattimer, who’d been a Columbia University professor and a collector of military (and some macabre) relics, also possessed Lincoln’s blood-stained collar and Hermann Göring’s cyanide ampoule. But the penis, which supposedly had been severed by a priest who administered last rites to Napoleon and overstepped clerical boundaries, stood out (sorry) from the professor’s collection of medieval armor, Civil War rifles and Hitler drawings.

The chances that Napoleon’s penis would be excised so that it could become a souvenir were improved by his having lived and died at a moment when the physical remains of celebrities held a strong attraction. Shakespeare didn’t become Shakespeare until the dawn of the romantic period, when his biography was written, his plays annotated and his belongings sought out and preserved. Trees that stood outside the bard’s former homes were felled to provide Shakespearean lumber for tea chests and tobacco stoppers.

After Napoleon’s defeat at Waterloo, his possessions toured England. His carriage, filled with enticing contents like a gold tongue scraper, a flesh brush, “Cashimeer small-clothes” and a chocolate pot, drew crowds and inspired the poet Byron to covet a replica. When Napoleon died, the trees that lined his grave site at St. Helena were slivered into souvenirs.

The belief that objects are imbued with a lasting essence of their owners, taken to its logical extreme, led to the mind-set that caused Mary Shelley to keep her husband’s heart, dried to a powder, in her desk drawer. Of course, relic collecting long predates the romantic period; medieval pilgrims sought out fragments of the True Cross. In the aftermath of the Reformation, religious relics that had been ejected from monasteries joined secular collections that freely intermingled belemnites with saints’ finger bones. When Keats died, his hair took on the numinous appeal of a religious artifact.

Napoleon’s penis was not the only Napoleonic body part that became grist for the relic mill. Two pieces of Napoleon’s intestine, acquired by the Museum of the Royal College of Surgeons of England in 1841, provoked a long-simmering debate beginning in 1883. That year, Sir James Paget called the specimens’ authenticity into question, contrasting their seemingly cancerous protrusions to the sound tissue Napoleon’s doctor had earlier described. In 1960, the dispute continued in The Annals of the Royal College of Surgeons of England, long after the intestine pieces had been destroyed during a World War II air raid.

Dr. Lattimer, a urologist, could claim a professional interest in Napoleon’s genitalia. Not so its previous owner, the Philadelphia bookseller and collector A. S. W. Rosenbach, who took a “Rabelaisian delight” in the relic, according to his biographer, Edwin Wolf. When Rosenbach put the penis on display at the Museum of French Art in New York, visitors peered into a vitrine to see something that looked like a maltreated shoelace, or a shriveled eel.

Whether the object prized by Dr. Lattimer was actually once attached to Napoleon may never be resolved. Some historians doubt that the priest could have managed the organ heist when so many people were passing in and out of the emperor’s death chamber. Others suggest he may have removed only a partial sample. If enough people believe in a possibly spurious penis, does it become real?

The pathos of Napoleon’s penis — bandied about over the decades, barely recognizable as a human body part — conjures up the seamier side of the collecting impulse. If, as Freud suggested, the collector is a sexually maladjusted misanthrope, then the emperor’s phallus is a collector’s object nonpareil, the epitome of male potency and dominance. The ranks of Napoleon enthusiasts, it should be noted, include many alpha males: Bill Gates, Newt Gingrich, Stanley Kubrick, Winston Churchill, Augusto Pinochet. Nevertheless, the Freudian paradigm has never accounted for women collectors, nor does it explain the appeal of collections for artists like Lisa Milroy, whose paintings of cabinet handles or shoes, arrayed in series, animate these common objects.

It’s time to let Napoleon’s penis rest in peace. Museums are quietly de-accessioning the human remains of indigenous peoples so that body parts can be given proper burial rites. Napoleon’s penis, too, should be allowed to go home and rejoin the rest of his captivating body.

Judith Pascoe, a professor of English at the University of Iowa, is the author of “The Hummingbird Cabinet: A Rare and Curious History of Romantic Collectors.”

Thursday, May 10, 2007

God grief (By Giles Harvey, Salon.com)


God grief
Christopher Hitchens has attacked modern-day saints like Mother Teresa and Princess Di, but his new book takes aim at the most sacred cow of all: The Almighty.

By Giles Harvey

May. 10, 2007 | For a while back there it seemed as though we had God on the ropes. Copernicanism. The Enlightenment. The theory of evolution. These, surely, must have stung. As early as 1887, impatient to call the victory for secularism, Nietzsche proclaimed: "Belief in God has been overturned, belief in the Christian-ascetic ideal is even now fighting its last fight." It was Nietzsche who performed the definitive intellectual castration, generously conceding: "It is true, there could be a metaphysical world; the absolute possibility of it is hardly to be disputed ... but one can do absolutely nothing with it, not to speak of letting happiness, salvation and life depend on the gossamer of such a possibility."



How is it, then, that at the dawn of the third millennium, this maligned and disenfranchised neuter soldiers on, ordering his followers to murder abortionists, block stem-cell research, and fly planes into buildings? As atheists the nation over will inform you, 91 percent of American adults believe in God. (A vertiginously high 79 percent believe in angels.) Like Michael Myers in "Halloween," the tenacious old codger simply refuses to die, thereby condemning us to an infinity of blandly gruesome sequels.



In response to this interminable saga, Christopher Hitchens has done what he does best: He has written a book. Some commentators will automatically bemoan the appearance of yet another populist critique of organized religion, as though the recent profusion of such works -- "The God Delusion" by Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris' "Letter to a Christian Nation," "Atheist Universe" by David Mills, to name just a few of this legion -- was something other than a sincere response to the faith-based atrocities currently raging in the Middle East and to the ever growing, unconstitutional proximity, in our own country, of church and state.



According to the Hitch -- as he is known to his many, many famous friends, who are always turning up, like colorful minor characters, in the endlessly serialized picaresque novel of his life -- "God Is Not Great" not only because He does not exist but also because belief in Him is dangerous and destructive. Oscar Wilde charitably noted that "An idea should not be held responsible for those who believe in it." Hitchens, however, is less forgiving and, along with many other famous polemical atheists before him, believes that the safest way to ensure that no more wars get started in His name is to do away with the oldest and most persistent casus belli of them all.



Like a greedy man at the buffet overfilling his plate, Hitchens spends "God Is Not Great" heaping iniquity after iniquity on the three central monotheistic faiths for the role they have played in history. At times this can lead to indiscriminate censure. Is religion simply used to justify the unpleasant things that humans would be doing anyway? Or is it the cause of these unpleasant things that we would not have been tempted to do otherwise? The book seems to want to have it both ways. For example, Hitchens understands perfectly well that the Ten Commandments, whose preamble contains "a stern reminder of omnipotence and limitless revenge, of the sort with which a Babylonian or Assyrian emperor might have ordered the scribes to begin a proclamation," are man-made and man-serving. A few pages later, however, he writes that "Israeli rabbis solemnly debate to this very day whether the demand to exterminate the Amalekites is a coded message to do away with the Palestinians" -- and it is religious purism, not a pragmatic power struggle, at the reins.



Of course, it is not so difficult to see the two ideas (religion as excuse, religion as motive) as historical bedfellows. Hitchens might have done well to spell out this poisonous dialectic early on: the way that religion, whatever else it does, codifies and perpetuates as divine writ that which is merely historical (slavery, sexism, fear of pigs). This sorry process leaves followers clinging to what would most likely be recognized as harmful and retrograde were it not enshrined in scripture.



Although the book is largely accurate in its indictment of religion's poor historical record and generously equips the reader with an abundance of fun facts that can then be used to stone the pious -- the Vatican did not formally withdraw the charge of "deicide" against the Jewish people until the 1960s; the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception was "announced or discovered" by Rome in 1852 -- it adds almost nothing new to the case against God. This is the undoing of most recent atheistic tracts, which frequently descend to a tone of scandalized and helpless incredulity ("so pathetic as to defy description," etc.) at what they take to be the obdurate and titanic backwardness of the faithful: No matter how many people are killed and oppressed and persecuted in His name, people will not let go of God.



Clearly, the facts are not enough. What is required, if we are to be brought around to Hitchens' view of things, is a direct engagement with the nature of personal faith. It is precisely here, however, that his campaign falters. In an especially unsatisfying chapter, "The Metaphysical Claims of Religion Are False," Hitchens recalls reading about "some ecumenical conference of Christians who desire to show their broad-mindedness and invite some physicists along," and then goes on to scoff, "But I am compelled to remember what I know -- which is that there would be no such churches in the first place if humanity had not been afraid of the weather, the dark, the plague, the eclipse, and all manner of other things now easily explicable." The champion of disinterested secular inquiry impatiently reduces the origin of religious feeling to a primitive dread at nature's apparently brutal indifference to our small lives.



Hitchens, who at the start of the book writes that "Literature, not scripture, sustains the mind and -- since there is no other metaphor -- the soul," would surely reject any crude psychoanalytic quackery that somehow explained "Hamlet" or "Anna Karenina" as merely neurotic defenses against astringent reality. But he is guilty of exactly the same analytical crudity in his attenuation of religion.



Although I am an unbeliever, this doesn't prevent me from recognizing that what led humans to create gods was not simply fear but a desire to harness and account for those sustaining moments when we receive our lives most abundantly. Iris Murdoch gives a far more persuasive and imaginatively generous account of religion when she writes, "God does not and cannot exist. But what led us to conceive of him does exist and is constantly pictured. That is, it is real as an Idea, and also incarnate in knowledge and work and love."



Furthermore, Hitchens seems to think that, for any sensible modern person, reason must inevitably usurp the place religion once held at the center of life. Such a position assumes that simply because we understand what is going on during an earthquake or when a person is dying of cancer, these events cease to be terrifying. The quality of terror is different, certainly, for we no longer see the destruction of a city or the death of a friend as the work of supernatural disgruntlement -- or if we do, we understand, at least, the precedence of scientific explanation. But fear and helplessness in the face of nature, the torture and indignity of continuing to feel love for an object that has disappeared from the world -- "That nothing cures," to quote Philip Larkin. Man cannot live on reason alone, and for those who are unable to find in literature the sustenance for mind and soul of which Hitchens speaks, religion will continue to give existence purpose and meaning.



It's this radical inability to comprehend or even take an interest in the nature of religious experience with anything resembling imaginative sympathy -- a rather patronizing analogy with his own loss of faith in Marxism notwithstanding -- that makes "God Is Not Great" such a disappointing book. Watching a man of his intellect and learning go to work on the indefensible crassness of religious fundamentalism is rather like watching a vainglorious father running rings around his young son in a game of soccer. Hitchens might have engaged with the nuanced, less easily ridiculed faith of William Blake or Simone Weil, thinkers in whom he would have found worthy opponents. But instead he confines himself to picking apart fundamentalism, and we are the less enlightened for it.



link


You may find God Is Not Great here.

Note: Following is a short article on Esquire.com about Hitchens.

"Thank God for Christopher Hitchens"

Thank God for Christopher Hitchens



For he has written the finest of the down-with-God books.

By Mark Warren

4/25/2007, 12:04 PM

In creating Christopher Hitchens, God took special care and did a hell of a job. A writer touched by greatness, following his own broken compass all over the map, servile to no one, insulter of many, drinker and smoker nonpareil. A man of consequence. A writer. Thank you, God.

Hooey to that, Hitchens would say. Bullshit. If I am great or if I live under a bridge, no divinity made it so. He would reject the smug obeisance to the Unseen embedded in the compliment as just so much Sunday-morning claptrap, the kind that drives him around the bend and compelled him to write God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything (Warner Twelve, $25). In it, the nine-year-old Hitchens asks the jaundiced question, "With all this continual prayer, why no result?" before chronicling the in fact horrible results of predicating one's idea of existence on make-believe: Belief in one's personal god makes people want to kill people who don't believe in Him, for one. And this fact cannot be denied: God has achieved a mighty body count.

And speaking of violence, did anybody read The God Delusion, by that guy Richard Dawkins, who says that all the atheists should designate themselves as "brights" to differentiate them from all the knuckle-dragging morons who believe? What an asshole. Or how about the wishfully thinking The End of Faith, by Sam Harris? Harris is a neuroscientist, you know, and that's quite a credential.

But what have we done to deserve this ungodly publishing trend? Well, seeing as how He has had all of time to make His case to a captive humanity, and seeing as how He is accountable for several great and many not-so-great religions, and seeing as how some of the top stars of those religions are maniacs, and seeing as how He Himself is responsible for a few of the best-selling books ever, it is only right and proper that we now face the season of the down-with-God books. This is a healthy development, for the religious have not been well behaved lately.

One need not say any more about the ridiculous Osama bin Laden and the crazy violent fundamentalists worldwide, but what on earth have we done to deserve the Catholic League, for instance, with its public face, the dashing Bill Donohue, who said the accusers of child-raping priests were guilty of "sexual McCarthyism"? (Bill, if you're listening, I offer this advice, one obnoxious former altar boy to another: Shut your trap. You're killing the Church in America. On second thought, carry on.) It is all enough to make one want to banish God. Hence all these books. But do yourself a favor and skip the Dawkins and Harris; they're smug, turgid, and boring, with all the human feeling of a tax return. Read Hitchens instead. Test your faith severely or find a champion for your feelings, but read Hitchens. It's a tendentious delight, a caustic and even brilliant book. And with the title alone, he takes his life in his hands, which right there has got to be some proof of his thesis.

But yet, there's something all these utterly rational missalettes miss. The hunger. The need. And for all the bad things it has wrought, the profound and revolutionary social force that religion has been in the life of man. Because we need Him, He persists. No matter how big the book thrown at Him, His book is always bigger. No matter how much closer we get to finding God's face through a telescope, many more of us will still be baying, or praying, at the moon.

And so, thank God for Christopher Hitchens.

Tuesday, May 01, 2007

Are Book Reviewers Out of Print? (by Motoko Rich, the New York Times)



Caption: The Los Angeles Times recently merged its book review into a new section combining the review with the Sunday opinion pages.



Books
Are Book Reviewers Out of Print?



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By MOTOKO RICH
Published: May 2, 2007


Last year Dan Wickett, a former quality-control manager for a car-parts maker, wrote 95 book reviews on his blog, Emerging Writers Network (emergingwriters.typepad.com/), singlehandedly compiling almost half as many reviews as appeared in all of the book pages of The Atlanta Journal-Constitution.


Mr. Wickett has now quit the automotive industry and started a nonprofit organization that supports literary journals and writers-in-residence programs, giving him more time to devote to his literary blog. The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, meanwhile, has recently eliminated the job of its book editor, leading many fans to worry that book coverage will soon be provided mostly by wire services and reprints from national papers.



The decision in Atlanta — in which book reviews will now be overseen by one editor responsible for virtually all arts coverage — comes after a string of changes at book reviews across the country. The Los Angeles Times recently merged its once stand-alone book review into a new section combining the review with the paper’s Sunday opinion pages, effectively cutting the number of pages devoted to books to 10 from 12. Last year The San Francisco Chronicle’s book review went from six pages to four. All across the country, newspapers are cutting book sections or running more reprints of reviews from wire services or larger papers.


To some authors and critics, these moves amount to yet one more nail in the coffin of literary culture. But some publishers and literary bloggers — not surprisingly — see it as an inevitable transition toward a new, more democratic literary landscape where anyone can comment on books. In recent years, dozens of sites, including Bookslut.com, The Elegant Variation (marksarvas.blogs.com/elegvar/), maudnewton .com, Beatrice.com and the Syntax of Things (syntaxofthings.typepad.com), have been offering a mix of book news, debates, interviews and reviews, often on subjects not generally covered by newspaper book sections.


For those who are used to the old way, it’s a tough evolution. “Like anything new, it’s difficult for authors and agents to understand when we say, ‘I’m sorry, you’re not going to be in The New York Times or The Chicago Tribune, but you are going to be at curledup.com,’ ” said Trish Todd, publisher of Touchstone Fireside, an imprint of Simon & Schuster. “But we think that’s the wave of the future.”



Obviously, the changes at newspaper book reviews reflect the broader challenges faced by newspapers in general, as advertisement revenues decline, and readers decamp to the Internet. But some writers (and readers) question whether economics should be the only driving factor. Newspapers like The Atlanta Journal-Constitution could run book reviews “as a public service, and the fact of the matter is that they are unwilling to,” said Richard Ford, the Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist.


“I think the reviewing function as it is thoroughly taken up by newspapers is vital,” he continued, “in the same way that literature itself is vital.”


Mr. Ford is one of more than 120 writers who have signed a petition to save the job of Teresa Weaver, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution’s book editor. The petition, sponsored by the National Book Critics Circle, comes as part of the organization’s effort to save imperiled book coverage generally. “We will continue to use freelancers, established news services and our staff to provide stories about books of interest to our readers and the local literary community,” said Mary Dugenske, a spokeswoman for the newspaper, in an e-mail message.


Coming as it does at a time when newspaper book reviews are endangered, many writers, publishers and critics worry that the spread of literary blogs will be seen as compensation for more traditional coverage. “We have a lot of opinions in our world,” said John Freeman, president of the National Book Critics Circle. “What we need is more mediation and reflection, which is why newspapers and literary journals are so important.”


Edward Champion, who writes about books on his blog, Return of the Reluctant (edrants.com), said that literary blogs responded to the “often stodgy and pretentious tone” of traditional reviews.


The brute fact is that while authors and publishers may want long and considered responses to their work, sometimes what they most need is attention. Last year, when Random House published “This Is Not Chick Lit,” a story collection with contributions from authors like Jennifer Egan and Curtis Sittenfeld, it generated a lot of online chatter as various bloggers debated whether the book was pretentious or a welcome correction to an oversubscribed genre. “All the slow but steady online exposure helped build a grass-roots thing,” said Julia Cheiffetz, the book’s editor at Random House, who noted that “This Is Not Chick Lit” is now in its sixth printing with 45,000 copies in print.


But while online buzz can help some books, newspapers can pique the interest of a general reader, said Oscar Villalon, books editor at The San Francisco Chronicle. Blogs, he said, are “not mass media.” The Chronicle, for example, he said, has a circulation of nearly 500,000, a number not many blogs can achieve.



On the other hand, committed readers who take the time to find a literary blog may be more likely than a casual reader of the Sunday newspaper to buy a book. “I know that everyone who comes to my site is interested in books,” said Mark Sarvas, editor of The Elegant Variation, a literary blog that publishes lengthy reviews.


And newspaper book reviews, which are often accused of hewing too closely to “safe choices,” could learn something from the more freewheeling approach of some of the book blogs, said David L. Ulin, who edits the book review at The Los Angeles Times.


“One of the troubles with mainstream print criticism is that people can be too polite,” Mr. Ulin said. “I feel like an aspect of the gloves-off nature of blogs is something that we could all learn from, not in an irresponsible way, but in a wear-your-likes-and-dislikes-on-your-sleeves kind of way.”


Maud Newton, who has been writing a literary blog since 2002, said she has the freedom to follow obsessions like, say, Mark Twain in a way that a newspaper book review could not, unless there was a current book on the subject. But she would never consider what she does a replacement for more traditional book reviews.


“I find it kind of naïve and misguided to be a triumphalist blogger,” Ms. Newton said. “But I also find it kind of silly when people in the print media bash blogs as a general category, because I think the people are doing very, very different things.”


One thing that regional newspapers in particular can do is highlight local authors. “While I’m all for the literary bloggers, and I think the more people that write about books the better, they’re not necessarily as regionally focused as knowledgeable, experienced long-term editors in the South or Midwest or anywhere where the most important writers come from,” said Sam Tanenhaus, the editor of The New York Times Book Review.


Many local authors view the decision at The Atlanta Journal-Constitution as a betrayal of important local coverage.



“With the removal of its cultural critics, Atlanta is surrendering again,” wrote Melissa Fay Greene, author of “Praying for Sheetrock” in an e-mail message. “We all lose, you know, not just Atlantans, with the disappearance from the scene of a literate intelligence.”


Of course literary bloggers argue that they do provide a multiplicity of voices. But some authors distrust those voices. Mr. Ford, who has never looked at a literary blog, said he wanted the judgment and filter that he believed a newspaper book editor could provide. “Newspapers, by having institutional backing, have a responsible relationship not only to their publisher but to their readership,” Mr. Ford said, “in a way that some guy sitting in his basement in Terre Haute maybe doesn’t.”






Che: Okay, here I attached Dan Wickett's response in his own blog.


link

When the New York Times Calls ...

... I call back.  Turns out when the bit of back and forth about print reviewers and bloggers was going on last week, the New York Times was paying attention.  I was asked to answer some questions by Motoko Rich Monday and it has led to some information about the EWN being included in an article in Wednesday's paper.



I really cannot complain as Motoko has made me look pretty good in the deal, noting I personally read and reviewed nearly half as many books as the Atlanta Journal-Constitution did during 2006.  Granted, the bulk of last year's reviews were mini-reviews, especially compared to those written the previous five years, and those written so far this year, but the total number makes things sound good.  She was also kind enough to note that I've moved on from my former position into my current job of running Dzanc Books, though without mentioning the name Dzanc Books, so I'll do so again here, Dzanc Books



I think the article comes across pretty even-minded, especially when one considers it's appearing in a newspaper, and while it's one that still has a stand-alone, Sunday Books section, it's still a newspaper.  And what appears to be the consensus among print reviewers, bloggers, and readers of both, is that the newspaper business is in trouble, which is leading to the book review sections being in trouble.



Not surprisingly, I found the comments of Maud Newton to come across as the most rational, saying she'd never consider what she does a replacement for a traditional book review and “I find it kind of naïve and misguided to be a triumphalist blogger,” Ms. Newton said. “But I also find it kind of silly when people in the print media bash blogs as a general category, because I think the people are doing very, very different things.”



Some things I said that were not able to be squeezed into the article:



- I absolutely do not want to see print reviews disappear.  The first thing I do every Sunday morning is grab the Detroit Free Press and turn to the book page (yes, page).  I follow that up by going online and looking at the new book pages/sections of 8-15 papers from across the country.  Yes, I'm doing this online, but really only because I don't have access to the printed copies of these papers. 



-  The loss of any of the voices that have developed over the course of the last 30 years in various editors, freelance reviewers, etc. is just a waste of what I'm interested - coverage of books and the literary world.



-  That I had in fact signed the petition for the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, and sincerely hope that the editor there be put back in her original position.



I thank Motoko for finding some interest in this site, as part of the story, and sincerely hope that those of you bouncing over here for the first time because of the link she provided have a chance to look around and hopefully like things enough to come back every so often.




Che: and, I found this published slightly before the NYT.

link

OUTSIDE THE TENT


The folly of downsizing book reviews


Newspapers that cut back on book coverage may be cutting their own throats.




By Michael Connelly

MICHAEL CONNELLY is the author of 17 mysteries, most of them featuring LAPD Det. Harry Bosch. His next book, "The Overlook," will be out next month.


April 29, 2007





FIFTEEN YEARS AGO, my first book was published in near obscurity. Only 15,000 copies of "The Black Echo" were printed, and the publisher didn't place a single ad for it in any newspaper in the country. It could easily have been ignored or forgotten or simply missed among the thousands of books published to little fanfare every year.

But even without an advertising push, the book got reviewed in newspapers big and small, far and wide. Across the country, newspapers had strong book sections and critics were always on the lookout for a new voice. The Washington Post's Book World devoted half a page to a review of my novel, predicting a bright future for both its protagonist and its author.

That review and others like it stimulated interest in what I had to say. They got the momentum going in the bookstores. Those reviews helped establish the voice of the protagonist, Los Angeles Police Department Det. Harry Bosch, and now, 12 books later, Bosch has led a full and adventurous (albeit tortured) life in Los Angeles. He has explored places and seen things in this city that most people who live here don't even know about. All the while he has tried to understand and make sense of his city and his place in it — just like everybody else who lives here.

I can't help but wonder, though, how long Harry would have lasted had he been born in today's newspaper environment. Across the country, papers are cutting back on the space, attention and care they devote to books. Recently, for instance, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution announced that the position of book editor would be eliminated in a cost-cutting move. Without a specific editor directing book coverage, the paper will rely more heavily on reviews from wire services.

But that's just the latest in an ongoing crisis. The Chicago Tribune announced last week that it was moving its books section from Sunday to the less-read Saturday paper — an edition that becomes almost obsolete by noon, when the early Sunday edition hits the stands. At the Raleigh News & Observer, the book editor's position was recently cut. At the Dallas Morning News, the book critic quit rather than face significant space reductions. Books coverage has also been cut at the Orlando Sentinel, the Cleveland Plain Dealer and other papers.

Even at the Los Angeles Times, the fine newspaper at which I am proud to have once worked as a reporter, the attention devoted to books is changing. Gone is the stand-alone Book Review. Two weeks ago, Book Review was merged with Sunday Opinion as part of a plan to save pages and save money.

There are many sound business reasons for these moves, and perhaps The Times is going about it in the best way possible — attempting to make sure that between the Sunday newspaper, the daily paper and its website, the Book Review content is still there for those readers willing to chase it down.

To be sure, a newspaper is a business, and book reviews have always been a loss-leader of sorts. Book sections have never generated much advertising, and no doubt publishing houses ought to bear some of the responsibility for the straits we're now in. Unlike films or automobiles or even food products, few books enter the marketplace with a budget for newspaper ads. This has become even more pronounced as more and more of the money that is set aside for promoting books is shifted into "co-op" — paying for position on the front tables in chain stores.

So I understand why newspaper executives think that space dedicated to books is space that loses money.

But maybe not in the long run.

The truth is that the book and newspaper businesses share the same dreadful fear: that people will stop reading. And the fear may be well-founded. Across the country, newspaper circulations are down — and this is clearly part of the reason for the cuts to book sections. At the same time, the book business increasingly relies on an aging customer base that may not be refueling itself with enough new readers.

In the past, newspaper executives understood the symbiotic relationship between their product and books. People who read books also read newspapers. From that basic tenet came a philosophy: If you foster books, you foster reading. If you foster reading, you foster newspapers. That loss-leader ends up helping you build and keep your base.

What I fear is that this philosophy is disappearing from the boardrooms of our newspapers; that efforts to cut costs now will damage both books and newspapers in the future. Short-term gains will become long-term losses.

I hope that will not be the case here. I am not a businessman or a newspaper executive, but I believe that the symbiosis between newspapers and books could still work and hold true. I see it happening in my own home. My 10-year-old daughter's love of reading books is slowly leading her toward the newspaper sections that are spread every morning across the breakfast table.

What is at stake is something more than the financial health of the newspaper and book businesses. The publishing industry has always relied on reviews and on the commentary of great critics in newspapers to champion the new voices of literature as well as regional and genre writing. The reading public has gone to these venues to make discoveries. Now where will new voices be discovered?

It reminds me of something detectives have often told me while I've researched my crime novels. They say that when they trace events backward from a crime, they often find that the victims made mistakes that put themselves in harm's way.

I fear that newspapers are doing the same thing, making mistakes that will ultimately hasten their own downfall.