Phil Christman

A Little More Than 85 Lines About 85 Books

February 4, 2010 · Leave a Comment

Thoughts about the year in reading, 2009:

The Dawn of the Reformation, Heiko Oberman
More information about nominalism than I required.

An Exorcist Tells His Story, Gabriele Amorth
Chiefly, in this book, I was surprised at the amount of paperwork it takes to be an exorcist.

Essay on the Principles of Population, Thomas Malthus
One of those books—like Atlas Shrugged or Left Behind—that you read to verify that it’s really as vile as you think it is. It is. They are. 

A Reply to Mr. Malthus’s Essay, William Hazlitt
Had me laughing and cheering out loud and wondering why one hears so little about this once-canonical Romantic-era essayist.

Marx and Engels on Malthus
I noticed something here that I intend to test in future readings of this venerable German-English law firm: the sections attributed solely to Engels seemed more humane, less abstract, and less anti-religious than those attributed to Marx. Hmmm.

Henry VI Tetralogy, Shakespeare
No, I hadn’t read any of these plays before. No, I wasn’t especially enthralled; these characters are all far too easily read as sketches for Macbeth and Iago, et. al.

Luther: Man Between God and the Devil, Heiko Oberman
Really a rich and fascinating biography, painstakingly sensitive to Luther’s theology, and plainly intended for a more popular audience than Item 1 above.

The Politics of the Reformation in Germany, Thomas A. Brady
Obviously, this was for a class, and I can’t remember a damn thing about it except something like “There used to be these things called Imperial Cities, and they were, like, really important for the Reformation and stuff,” which is no memory at all.

Man in the Dark, Paul Auster
Oracle Night, Paul Auster
I keep reading Auster novels and thinking “Well, that was almost as good as The Book of Illusions…”

The Descent of Man, Charles Darwin
This’ll never catch on.

Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand, Samuel Delany
Surprisingly boring, for Delany, until the final third, which contains a moving and involving portrayal of sudden bereavement. (Also, space-dragon hunting.)

The World of Catholic Renewal, 1530-1770, R. Po-Chia Hsia
Again: All I remember is something like “There was a lot more to Reformation-era Catholics than hot irons and Counter-Reforming, y’know.”

Trent and All That, John O’Malley
Same as Item 12 above, although O’Malley’s a much more engaging writer than most of the historians I sampled this semester.

Pale Fire, Vladimir Nabokov
So, so great.

The Flight of Icarus, Raymond Queneau
This is a novel about a writer whose characters keep up-and-quitting his novel and going to live off generous Parisian prostitutes and getting virtuous jobs as mechanics. The execution is approximately as awesome as the conception.

The Blue Guide To Indiana, Michael Martone
And this is a novel-in-the-form-of-fake-travel-guide, wherein we learn of such Midwestern landmarks as The Site of Wendell Wilkie’s Ascension Into Heaven and The Transcontinental Mayonnaise Pipline. Martone is more than a humorist; his books begin in parody but end someplace richer altogether.

Pensees: The Thoughts of Dan Quayle, Michael Martone
Wonderful for all the same reasons as The Blue Guide. Martone evokes the slackjawed idiocy of a Dan Quayle so hilariously that you wouldn’t have blamed him if he’d stuck to that for the duration of this (very short) book. Had he done so we’d have ended up with something like those funny, angry pastiches that George Saunders does so well for The New Yorker. But instead he gives Dan Quayle, of all people, a consciousness that is not less interesting for being Dan Quayle’s, and he deepens and enriches the reader’s sense of what goes on in any human head when its mind wanders. That is both more aesthetically satisfying and, on a deep level, liberal than satire could ever be.

Evolution as a Religion, Mary Midgley
A fascinating argument that links fundamentalist Darwinism to, of all things, Rawlsian accounts of justice, and argues that both are based on a too-narrow conception of ethical responsibility.

A Homemade World: The American Modernist Writers, Hugh Kenner
I almost understood Zukofsky for about two minutes after reading this book. Kenner’s writing is always wonderfully epigrammatic, and his take on The Great Gatsby was especially fascinating.

The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, Max Weber
Weber writes well, for a sociologist (he’s good at evocative noun phrases like “iron cages” or, well, “spirit of capitalism” that seem to explain a lot while actually existing nowhere except in the realm of poetry). That may explain some of his influence. But proving a case about Calvinism (which was an international movement, like Modernism) by quoting a bunch of English Puritans, most of them 50-100 years after Calvin and raised in a culture that had been blaming, monitoring and hating the poor with pathological vigor for centuries before Luther … well, that’s not exactly airtight reasoning.

L’Assommoir, Emile Zola
Boring. But if I just read one more Zola novel I bet I’ll see why he’s so important.

Isle of the Dead, Roger Zelazny
I tried Zelazny because people kept insisting that he is a science fiction writer who can also craft a memorable sentence. This book didn’t blow me away, but it more or less lived up to that promise. 

La Curee, Emile Zola
Still boring, but I just know there’s got to be something here. We can’t cut and run. The next four to six months are crucial.

Lowboy, John Wray
I was impressed with this novel’s ability to give emotional heft to the problem of global warming (the full scope of which is so far outside the traditional timescale of novels). James Wood makes some fair points, though, about Wray’s addiction to detective-novel clichés.

The Age of Reagan, Sean Wilentz
Seemed like a defensible thesis to me: Reagan’s importance to the Right came from his ability to phrase essentially grasping, me-first ideas as if they were utopian.

La Terre, Emile Zola
Still boring. But we cannot lose face. Our national resolve will not waver. We will conquer Mt. Naturalism! We will … aw, fuck it.

As an interesting side note, the translations of L’Assommoir and La Terre that I read were by the once-noted fin-de-siecle poets Arthur Symons and Ernest “I Was Faithful To Thee, Cynara, In My Fashion” Dowson, respectively (and Dowson’s translation gets incredibly lazy toward the end, he starts taking the very frequent French epithet “En effet” as “In effect” even in sentences where that construal makes no sense whatsoever, and you can just hear him thinking “No one will ever finish this Godawful novel anyway. Let’s get these last 300 pages done so I can cash my paycheck and get messed up on cheap read wine!”). Both were part of a specially-printed series that was aimed at rich book collectors—as this was, in the 1890s, the only way to publish Zola in English without getting busted on porn charges. The other English Zola translator of the era had gone to jail on precisely such charges, because his books had been marketed to a mass audience—he translated Pot-Bouille as Piping-Hot!, which makes it sound like one of those showgirl revues Bertie Wooster is always backing. The whole story is told here, and it’s rather more fascinating than Zola’s novels tend to be.

Hearing God, Dallas Willard
Willard is a bit close to fundamentalism for my taste, but this was an incredibly helpful book. No lie.

Stories in the Worst Way, Gary Lutz
My thoughts, such as they are, are here.

Ideas of Good and Evil, W. B. Yeats
The Cutting of an Agate, W. B. Yeats
Every five pages, some totally arresting and brilliant idea. Then pages of silly and dangerous proto-Fascist mumbo-jumbo. A mixed experience.

The Story of the Stone, Volume I: The Golden Days, Cao Xueqin
The Story of the Stone, Volume II: The Crab-Flower Club, Cao Xueqin
The Story of the Stone, last part, Cao Xuexin
An extraordinary book (supposedly one of the five great classics of the Chinese novel) that takes an extraordinarily long time to read. I finally wimped out after the second volume and finished the story in the form of an abridgment, but I promised myself that, sometime in retirement, I’d get around to the whole thing.

The Amalgamation Polka, Stephen Wright
The first half of this book satisfied and impressed me in ways that the second half didn’t even seem to be trying to do. After a totally destabilizing Civil War battle scene the book seems to lose its focus up to its brilliantly Gothic ending, in a ruined Southern mansion where a maniac is trying to come up with the chemical solution that will turn black people white.

Short Eyes, Miguel Pinero
Tough to read but extremely well-constructed play about a child molester’s experiences in jail. (Except, as we later learn, he may not even be guilty …?)

The Secret Rose, W.B. Yeats
Irish mythology just doesn’t do it for me, I guess.

Going Native, Stephen Wright
Wright seems to have a thing for episodically-constructed journey novels. In this case a man leaves his wife to become a sort of amoral, Natural Born Killers­-like figure. The writing is disturbing and exact.

Memoirs of Hadrian, Marguerite Yourcenar
Question: When a European writer achieves “contrarianism” by depicting Jews as foolish and backward people who can’t accept a little polytheism among friends, why exactly isn’t that anti-Semitic?

Contemporary Writers, Virginia Woolf
This book is made up of essays that Woolf’s executors thought weren’t good enough for her “Collected Essays.” To the person who has read Contemporary Writers, that is a terrifying thought indeed. 

Eternal Enemies, Adam Zagajewski
I remember liking these poems but not why I liked them. Something about reading Zagajewski reminded me of listening to the Go-Betweens.

Negative Blue, Charles Wright
I seem to have a terrible memory for poetry this year.

The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold, Evelyn Waugh
I had always heard what a sexist, chain-smoking, snobby old drunk Evelyn Waugh was supposed to be. In this novel, the only one of his that I’ve read, he seems to turn all his satirical irritation against himself, for being the dyspeptic person he was. The effect is oddly moving.

Earthly Powers, Anthony Burgess
I was impressed at the time by the way Burgess managed to hook so much twentieth-century experience into a single character’s life, but this book began fading from my memory the instant I finished it: always a bad sign.

Hooking Up, Tom Wolfe
Tom Wolfe: The stick with which upper-middle-class liberals beat themselves. I enjoyed one or two of the essays on science in this book, but the novella, Ambush at Fort Bragg, was absolutely Ayn Randian in its overdeterminedness, its cartoonish characterizations, and its affection for thuggish behavior. Wolfe’s thesis seems to be that journalists don’t understand what a hardship it was for America’s military to go and protect us from the Great Vietnamese/Nicarguan/Iraqi/Somalian Menace—whether such protection is necessary never troubles Wolfe’s dandified little head—and, thus, we should be sympathetic and patient when a soldier has to murder a homosexual or two in order to blow off a little steam. What’re those people trying to do in the Army, anyway? It’s a sick little book.

The Blue Flower, Penelope Fitzgerald
Made me curious about Fitzgerald’s other novels but more so about Novalis, the German Romantic poet who is the subject of this one.

Loving, Henry Green
Good enough to make me want to read more Green.

White Noise, Don DeLillo
As a series of essays and setpieces, this was impressive. As a novel I didn’t think it held together as well as did Libra, which is the other DeLillo I’ve read.

Selected Stories, Checkhov
You can tell that through these months I was preparing for MFA Comps; I read a lot of amazing writers for the first time, people I should’ve gotten to a decade ago, and wasn’t able to give any of them the attention they deserved.

Loitering With Intent, Muriel Spark
See previous entry, but this book was totally hilarious.

Excitability, Diane Williams
I did not figure out what Williams was up to in these stories. I’ll try again, sooner or later, but this book defeated me.

Life on the Mississippi, Mark Twain
The best way to read this book is in bits and pieces, as if it were a magazine, not straight through; either way it’s one of the greatest pieces of travel writing I’ve ever read.

Short Stories of Gogol, Gogol
Death in Venice, Thomas Mann
Heart of Darkness, Joseph Conrad
See Item 50 above, but I have to say: Conrad’s prose is a little purple sometimes for my taste, and this book seemed to be so indebted to colonialist thought-habits that I’m not sure it can even exist, for readers, in the same way that it once did. That is to say, any classic is going to be full of social-philosophical assumptions that a modern audience will find repugnant; for most of these we can make silent corrections, adjustments, reservations. (Don Quixote is brave in the context of his society; it’s actually not a good thing to go around killing people who don’t admit your lady is the prettiest, though. Still, the bravery is left over.) I’m not sure how much of Heart of Darkness remains once we make those reservations. He doesn’t seem to question the essential premise of colonialism, that there are these dark silly people who won’t get anywhere till they’re subjugated; as with Apocalypse Now, which I found to be a shallowly racist movie, the only question is whether We Civilized People can truly accomplish our Civilizing Mission without Sinking To Their Level.

The Devil’s Delusion, David Berlinski
Infinite Ascent, David Berlinski
David Berlinski writes better about modern mathematics for a popular audience than anyone I’ve encountered. Unfortunately, as a snobbish Paris-dwelling Commentary contributor, he always attempts to spice up his material with little “jokes” that are almost always at the expense of women, and which make him sound, in a few cases, like someone you’d rather your sister not have to work for. It’s kind of like discovering the greatest cookbook in the world, but every twenty pages or so, the author writes, “… At this point you will have a small pool of reusable olive oil. And by the way, I really hate n*gg*rs. And f*gg*ts. And women who think they have the capacity for abstract thought required to become mathematicians. Why should they worry their curvy little bottoms over such things? Decant the leftover oil into a frying pan …”

Gilgamesh, David Ferry
I’ve read a couple Gilgameshes; this was the one that got me emotionally involved.

Against the Day, Thomas Pynchon
Finally a Thomas Pynchon novel that I was completely sold on, from very early on. The things that he showed he could do in Gravity’s Rainbow are done here, but a) based on better ideas (GR seemed entirely built on Max Weber’s thesis, and see Item 20 above for my problems with that), and b) more importantly, I could actually imagine caring about the adventures and fates of these characters.

Atlantis: Three Tales, Samuel Delany
My admiration for this book was beyond expression.

The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2007

A Study in Scarlet, A. Conan Doyle
Things I Did Not Know About Sir Arthur Conan Doyle: 1) Mormons really freaked him out. 2) He was prone to stuffing his novels with 80-page-long flashbacks right at the point where they start to get good.

The Bible and the Ancient Near East, Gordon and Rendsburg
Why do I so often end up finding the work of biblical archeologists more helpful in actually making sense out of the Hebrew Bible than I do the work of Biblical Studies scholar?

The Color Purple, Alice Walker
Sanctimonious, didactic, melodramatic, and ending on a sour note of counter-prejudice-as-cultural-homeopathy. Yes, it was emotionally involving (I was gratified when Celie and the narrator finally got down to it); there were sentences that showed a truly skilled writer at work (“… two veterans of love”). Still, I’ve got better things to do than be told, as punishment for centuries of white straight male hegemony, to hate myself.

The Nine Commandments, David Noel Freedman
Another reading of the Bible that makes a lot of sense if you ignore a bunch of stuff.

Reckless Eyeballing, Ishmael Reed
Writin’ is Fightin’, Ishmael Reed
Mumbo Jumbo, Ishmael Reed
Ishmael Reed represents one of those limit cases: how fundamentally and articulately can I disagree with an author’s basic assumptions and still enjoy him or her? In Reed’s case, quite a lot. His whole take on monotheism as “Atonism” strikes me as brilliant-but-dumb—sort of like how one feels about Freud or Wilhelm Reich, or conspiracy theorists—but the books he gets out of it are fascinatingly playful and ingenious. (Reckless Eyeballing is the weakest of these three books; its satirical attacks on Alice Walker are hilarious—one character writes a famous play called Wrong-Headed Man which is then adapted into an Oscar-winning tearjerker by a famously racist white liberal director—but there’s not much to the book beyond them.)

Moby-Dick, Herman Melville
I have nothing to say (about this book at least) that hasn’t been better said by Marilynne Robinson.

Corregidora, Gayl Jones
Not a pleasant book, but an extremely accomplished one. (“She looked fifteen and older than fifteen” is a memorably dead-on sentence.) Both this and The Color Purple forced me to confront my own male privilege in an uncomfortable way, but because the portrayal of men in this book is so much more nuanced—Walker’s men are extraordinarily bad, then good after a conversion experience; or they stay bad; or (in one instance) they are good ab initio, while Jones’s men cross and recross those borders constantly—I was infinitely more unsettled and impressed by Jones.

What Are Intellectuals Good For, George Scialabba
My thoughts will soon be posted here.

Elbow Room, James Alan MacPherson
This guy doesn’t get read enough. I thought the title story was especially impressive.

The World of Biblical Literature, Robert Alter
The Five Books of Moses, Robert Alter
The David Story, Robert Alter
I used to hate reading the Bible, especially the Hebrew Bible. This is a strange way for a devout Christian to feel, but there it is—and I think it has something to do with the fundamentalist habit of treating the Bible as a lease agreement between humans and God, made up not of chapters or poems or stories but verses, with the main purpose of verses being to police oneself and other people. (“No, it says here in Colossians 2:3 that you can’t think that!”) It never occurred to me that the authors of the Bible might have felt human and emotional interest in the authoritative stories they were trying to communicate. Robert Alter fixed all that for me. He is the best English translator the Hebrew Bible has ever seen.

This time through it struck me that, for all that Saul is the villain I-II Samuel, there are few sadder moments in the Ancient Near Eastern or Classical literature I’ve read sadder than when he sinks to his knees before Samuel, accidentally tearing the latter’s garments. All the pathos of Shakespeare’s Richard II was clearly stolen from the Samuel author’s portraiture.

Indispensable Enemies, Walter Karp
An interesting thesis that Karp drives into the ground: that the best explanation of both Republican- and Democratic-party behavior is not the need to win elections (which is always what the fecklessness of, say, a Harry Reid is blamed on), but the need to establish and consolidate the fundraising power and, well, financial stability of party operatives. I learned some fascinating history from this book, took away some sad premonitions about how the Obama presidency might play out, and heard—for the first time ever—a left-wing case against the power of labor unions. Definitely worth reading, with a grain of salt.

Details of a Sunset and Other Stories, Vladimir Nabokov
A Russian Beauty and Other Stories, Vladimir Nabokov
Tyrants Destroyed and Other Stories, Vladimir Nabokov
King, Queen, Knave, Vladimir Nabokov
It’s heartening to know that, even if he perfected the smoothness of his prose style very early on (as some of these stories show), early Nabokov can be pretty bad. King, Queen, Knave is shallow and predictable. Some of the stories are fantastic, but a good number are fairly pedestrian. It gives one hope.   

If You See an Adjective, Kill It, Ben Yagoda
Yagoda’s books are good bedtime reading for people interested in language. They’re superficial, quote-ridden, and fun. 

Whores for Gloria, William T. Vollmann
There is much more to this book than Vollmann’s obsession with prostitutes. That said, you really have to dig for it, and I didn’t find the experience pleasant.

The Moviegoer, Walker Percy
I found this not to be overrated at all. Even the best Southern white novelists, though (and Percy is one of the best), seem to buy into the idea of a fine-old-traditional-culture-that-modernity-eats-away-at, and I keep wanting to scream, “Slavery, you shitheads! What about slavery?!” This reaction has only intensified as a result of living in South Carolina, where the racist, I mean “confederate”, flag still flies over the statehouse and the most popular restaurant in town dispenses white supremacist propaganda.

The Sign of Four, A. Conan Doyle
Better than A Study in Scarlet, but I’d say Doyle discovers his true voice in the first sentence of “A Scandal in Bohemia” (“To Sherlock Holmes she is always the woman”), and not an instant before.

Paradise, Toni Morrison
I don’t know why I found this book richer than some of Morrison’s better-known novels, including Beloved, but I was obsessively involved from the first few pages on.

→ Leave a CommentCategories: God Help Me I'm "Litblogging" · Reading A to Z

New essay…

February 3, 2010 · Leave a Comment

… which basically recapitulates Monday’s post, but I’m still proud of it because it does that thing Hugh Kenner, Gore Vidal, and a few of my other favorite essayists do, and which I’ve been trying to do for several months with no success: It more or less saves topic sentences and thesis statements for the end, and lets storytelling carry the argument.

In just over 350 words, it does a fair amount of work, perhaps at the cost of clarity. We’ll see. The Banner is publishing it in April with some changes (all the cyborg stuff is gone), so here’s the original:

Farewell, Amazon

I first heard of Amazon.com from a crush object, library-science student and sometime correspondent in 1997. At the bottom of her emails ran an automatic signature: “AMAZON.COM: World’s Largest Bookstore.” This was, I soon learned, a bit of cheekiness, as Amazon wasn’t a “bookstore” at all, in the received sense of the word. Rather—and rather revolutionarily—it was a cyber-hub from which books could be ordered anywhere, sent anywhere.

Like every book lover I know, I came for the convenience—and stayed for the prices, the customer reviews, the “So You’d Like To …” guides. Amazon combined the coolness of a great bookstore with the ghost-convenience of Internet shopping. One knew (quaint fact!) that they were headquartered in Seattle, but they seemed to represent an era whose buzzwords were “multinational,” “network,” “globalize.” And if this new era had its dangers—maquiladoras in Juarez, plant closings in the Midwest—hadn’t it also given activists the tools to plan, against those very evils, uprisings like 1999’s in (of all places) Seattle? Cyborgs were a trendy metaphor back then—Marxist academics used them to show how the word “natural” underwrites oppressive gender and class roles, and futurists used them to talk about the “enhancements” that will soon allow us to sidestep bodily limitation entirely—and Amazon was a big, smiley-faced cyborg company.

Time passed.The world, Amazon, and I all grew more complicated. There were whispers of monopoly, of George Orwell e-books deleted from the Kindles of people who’d paid for them. Then in January, as part of a spat over e-book pricing, Amazon stopped offering new copies of all Macmillan titles. If you want to buy Marilynne Robinson’s next novel, you’ll have to do it from a brick-and-mortar store—if you can find one—or buy a used copy, to neither publisher’s nor author’s profit, from, yes, Amazon.

In a “networked” era, boycotts seem naïve. But those fears about monopoly no longer do. So I’m saying farewell to Amazon. The world’s largest bookstore will do fine without me, and for the sake of my blood pressure, I will learn to do fine without them.

→ Leave a CommentCategories: God Help Me I'm "Litblogging" · Politics · Self-Promotion

I’ll Just Let Someone Else Have the Privilege of Hosting My Impossibly-Long Want List, Thanks

February 1, 2010 · Leave a Comment

As of right now, because Jeff Bezos wants a monopoly and will do what he has to do to get it, you can’t buy new books by America’s greatest writer from America’s biggest bookstore.

I’m sure that by the time I get around to really writing about the Amazon-Macmillan dustup, these two conditions will obtain:

1. It’ll be over;

2. Everything I’d have said will have been said by someone else to no damn effect whatsoever.

Still, just for what it’s worth, I’m so sickened by them right now that I don’t even want to look at their homepage. And though I already wasn’t buying a Kindle—the whole Orwell-erasure thing seemed so hilariously ominous I decided I shouldn’t require the universe to be so ham-fisted twice—I’m now done with the whole site for the time being. (Hopefully Ashley will let me delete our Amazon gift registry; for some reason she’s only excited about that pot-and-pan-bullshit registry from Williams-Sonoma anyway.)

There are important ethical/practical questions as to whether boycotts are effective, when they’re justified, etc. But this isn’t a boycott—this is me being angry. It makes no difference to the world, but it does make a difference to my blood pressure, whether Amazon’s noxious homepage ever appears on my laptop screen again. And maybe, on second thought, the blood-pressure test is the most practical way of deciding whether and when an institution ought to be boycotted. If so, Amazon has failed. Period.

→ Leave a CommentCategories: God Help Me I'm "Litblogging"

SCARY LOGIC MACHINE SCARINESS!!!

January 31, 2010 · Leave a Comment

A friend of mine says the following prayer every time she watches “Mad Men”: Lord, thank you for feminism.

By this, of course, she doesn’t mean all feminisms. Like most revolutions in human understanding, that one brought along its own characteristic errors of overemphasis, of overcorrection. (I used to know an absolutely lovely person who referred to herself as a “former separatist dyke” and who for many years of her life would have refused any sort of friendship with me because I was a man. I once heard a feminist argue that all men accused of rape should be attacked and murdered by roving gangs of radical wymynist vigilantes. There are some lame varieties of feminism kicking around out there, just as there are some lame varieties of Christianity, science, cantaloupe, and everything else.) But feminism, good and bad varieties both, helped create a situation in which the Don Drapers, however numerous, are a tiny bit more scared to show themselves, and in which women have at least a micron of recourse when they do.

No one who spends much time around English departments can help having some position on the Age of High Theory which took place concurrently among humanities intellectuals. That’s not because Theory is as hot as it was twenty or even ten years ago—indeed, like feminism, it’s entered that thankless phase of its life when even people who couldn’t exist without it can afford a few chuckles at its expense. Of course, Theory on the whole is probably even more problematic than feminism (though less problematic than speaking about Theory, as I’m doing here, as if it were all one thing!). As far as I can tell, it has tended toward relativism, bad prose, sloppiness, and self-defenses of the “You’re-just-resistant-because-you-don’t-have-the-balls-to-take-Foucault’s-reordering-of-your-little-world” variety. Still, one thing that Theory has made it very hard to do is to talk about “rationality” as if it were a freestanding building somewhere in Xenia, Ohio. Unless your name is Richard Dawkins, that is, you’re not very likely to be running around these days talking as if Rationality were a clear and simple set of mental steps that can operate in a propositional vacuum, leading folks to the Truth—rather than, as it is, something that can only operate within some particular goalfield of prior assumptions, which must be taken on faith. Logic, Theory (broadly speaking) insisted, is a vehicle, not a map.  

Lately I’ve been looking back through the vast archives of the BBC’s “Dr. Who,” a show that began broadcast in 1963—in other words, on the other side of the historical gap separating us from Don Draper. Every so often the Doctor finds himself in conflict with some villain or other who claims to be operating on something called Purely Logical Grounds. In “The War Machines,” a lovable little curio from 1966, he fights a monstrous computer that represents Pure Logic run amuck. (You find the same sorts of, well, logical mishmash on “Star Trek,” as Spock runs around making ethical decisions left and right, claiming to do so on the basis of Pure Logic when actually his decisions always begin with essentially trans-logical assumptions about the value of individual lives, of Starfleet’s mission, etc.) It’s always a little shocking: one gets the impression that at least some people, in the mid-‘60s, thought that “Pure Logic” was something besides an oxymoron. Apparently enough people felt so, even, that the plots of the only two TV shows worth watching from the period absolutely depend on “Pure Logic.” Apparently somebody back then really thought you could have rationality in a vacuum. How utterly quaint.

I never thought I’d say it, but: Lord, thank you for Theory.

→ Leave a CommentCategories: Who Blogs There

One more thing

December 24, 2009 · Leave a Comment

All too rare: an excellent story from the Odessa American on “Christmas behind bars.”

Stories like this should remind us of our obligations to the imprisoned. The Book of Common Prayer offers the following prayer for prisoners, which is pretty good, though it insufficiently acknowledges the deep hypocrisy and class violence in which our (and others’) penal systems are implicated: Lord Jesus, for our sake you were condemned as a criminal: Visit our jails and prisons with your pity and judgment. Remember all prisoners, and bring the guilty to repentance and amendment of life according to your will, and give them hope for their future. When any are held unjustly, bring them release; forgive us, and teach us to improve our justice. Remember those who work in these institutions; keep them humane and compassionate; and save them from becoming brutal or callous. And since what we do for those in prison, O Lord, we do for you, constrain us to improve their lot. All this we ask for your mercy’s sake. Amen.

Maybe we can supplement that with the BOC prayer for the oppressed: Look with pity, O heavenly Father, upon the people in this land who live with injustice, terror, disease, and death as their constant companions. Have mercy upon us. Help us to eliminate our cruelty to these our neighbors. Strengthen those who spend their lives establishing equal protection of the law and equal opportunities for all. And grant that every one of us may enjoy a fair portion of the riches of this land; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

I also like what St. Karl wrote in Deliverance to the Captives, his brilliant book of sermons for prisoners: Believe me, there is a captivity much worse than the captivity in this house. There are walls much thicker and doors much heavier than those closed upon you. All of us, the people without and you within, are prisoners of our own obstinancy, of our many greeds, of our various anxieties, of our mistrust and in the last analysis of our unbelief. We are all sufferers. Most of all we suffer from ourselves. We each make life difficult for ourselves and in so doing for our fellowmen. We suffer from life’s lack of meaning. We suffer in the shadow of death and of eternal judgment toward which we are moving.

→ Leave a CommentCategories: Uncategorized

New Essay: “The Truth About Fiction”

December 24, 2009 · 1 Comment

I hesitated over whether to post a link to this or not, frankly, because when I saw it in its published form it seemed choppy as hell. (I could complain about the difficulty of cutting a 1000-word draft to 300, but that would be bad form. It’s still choppy, and that’s still my fault.) But why not? As I learned from some beloved friends the other night, my article got somebody to write an angry letter to The Banner that wasn’t about any of these three things: President Obama (pure evil), Harry Potter (gateway drug), or hommashekuals (just guess).

I love writing for this magazine. My continued byline in it is one of those little incongruencies that arises from being a politically liberal, artsy, and foul-mouthed fellow who believes.

Merry Christmas, Happy Hannukah, Klassy Kwanzaa, Blessed Boxing Day to any and all. May you enjoy better health care in 2010. (Well, or 2014, if the Democrats don’t smarten up enough to change the implementation dates.)

→ 1 CommentCategories: Self-Promotion

Some Thoughts on Patience, Political Nihilism, and Health Care

December 17, 2009 · 1 Comment

When I hear people like Keith Olbermann or Howard Dean say that liberals and leftists should withdraw their support from the watered-down Senate health care legislation, or when I read “That’s It, I’m Done With the Democrats” comments on left-wing blogs (Josh Marshall notes some examples, and responds thoughtfully), I’m reminded of my now-embarrassing support for Ralph Nader during the 2000 election. The emotional reaction is the same in both cases: Our political system tends toward compromise. But the parties to that compromise are powerful, self-interested, and bad. Withdrawal from the system, whether by refusing to vote, abandoning only-a-bit-better-than-nothing bills, or voting for a doomed protest candidate, is thus the only ethical option.

The premises are still dead right. (Here’s an example of the corruption of the stakeholders, for example, that just came to my attention today.) And for my Republican friends and loved ones (Hi, Dad!), whose arguments seem to begin and end with “The government should stay out of healthcare,” I have no new defence to offer, nor do I think one is necessary. (This guy does a nice job with some of the basics.) The whole idea of a “free market” depends on a social framework, including fraud protection, transparency guarantees, etc., which is why I’m baffled by the extremely selective anarchism of “free-marketers.” They disapprove of government when it prevents insurers from practicing deceit on their customers (“Your 1982 toothache is a pre-existing condition”), or when it stops rich people from dumping poisonous chemicals near the properties of poor people. But they like government intervention just fine when it, for example, stops smart young capitalists from selling cocaine near their childrens’ private schools, or hampers consumers’ efforts to learn something about the content of the food they buy.

But enough of that; I’m speaking as a liberal to liberals. It’s almost excusable that, as a twenty-two-year-old, I was so bored and irritated by the very notion of compromise that I didn’t want to vote for Al Gore (who appears almost radical now! Retirement was so good for him!). Almost excusable. And it is excusable that people who, prior to Obama, knew nothing about politics and remain low-information voters have lost some of their enthusiasm for him.

But that Howard Dean, whose fifty-state strategy is surely one reason for the Democrats’ current majority, wants to scrap a bill that “brings down insurance rates, expands Medicaid, offers the prospect of moderately priced insurance to tens of millions of the uninsured, forces insurers to take you on even if you have a chronic pre-existing condition, mandates minimum levels of coverage”: Well, that’s kind of embarrassing. This is the Howard Dean who screamed, not the Howard Dean who saved the DLC from irrelevance. Olbermann I don’t expect any better from, because he’s on commercial TV and thus saying stupid (“contrarian”/”controversial”) things is his mandate. But come on, Howard. Cowardly Senate Democrats are not going to suddenly nerve up during the 2010 (i.e., election-year) legislative season. In 2011 we’ll have lost seats. We get incremental improvement now or nothing.

Compromise is part of adulthood. Political movements that promise to save us from compromise are, well, they go by names like Leninism, Fascism, or Teabaggery. They live in a constant state of either fantasy elation (“Sarah Palin will take the country by storm!”) or hissy-fittery. They may blow up a few empty (Weathermen) or full (Tim McVeigh) buildings (at least the Weathermen left the nurseries alone!), but they end up having little impact on the larger society, except for mass revulsion. At their most innocuous, they’re disastrously stupid (Naderism in 2000) or amusingly trivial (performance artists who invite you to inspect their privates with a mirror). They’re too concerned with personal purity, and not concerned enough with what, given limited possibilities, is most likely to improve the lot of the several billion or so poor suckers they share this globe with. God, preserve me from ever lapsing into such “purity” again.

→ 1 CommentCategories: Politics

This Kind of Thinking Reminds Me More of the Real Dan Quayle, Actually

December 15, 2009 · Leave a Comment

I should be working on my novel right now, but one of my favorite writers, Michael Martone, said something the other day that just irritated the piss out of me, and I feel like I’ll be itchy until I respond to it.

Asked whether he reads blogs, Martone replies, “Are you kidding? This, this what is happening now, is revolutionary, profoundly revolutionary. The whole electronic apparatus is simply redefining who and what an `author’ is. … The author is dead, all right, but long live writing. This is the end of the Johnsonian Age, the end of the Romantic, Modernist Individual Genius. I think that blogs actually are retrograde—the last attempt of the old-fashioned author to hold on to old-fashioned authorship. I think very soon blogs might evolve to the point where most will be unsigned or the same blog will be written by several people together or separately and also posted without a name of a shared name. The blog lives but the idea that it is written by any one person or consciousness will be so over. It is nothing but net, baby. Out of many one. Resistance is futile. Prepare to be assimilated.”

This is chronological snobbery in its usual disguise as liberation. Because Wikipedia and anonymous flame wars postdate Clarissa, they represent a mode of authorship “realer” or “nower” or in some other way ontologically superior to … to whatever “traditional authorship” was. (Apparently it was a chimera that involved being somehow Johnsonian, Romantic and Modernist at once.) In fact, me picking up novels written by An Author, variously conceived, is just as much a part of my contemporary experience, and thus of “contemporary experience” in the abstract, as is me reading Wikipedia.

But this kind of “What’s happening now!!!” discourse isn’t just sloppy and overly selective in the way it defines key concepts; it’s also implicitly coercive. In this case, not even implicitly: “Out of many one. Resistance is futile. Prepare to be assimilated.” Why do we often hear the crudest and most bullying “We used to do that; now we must do this” sorts of schemata from the critics of linearity?

In any case, Martone’s work, thank God, is more interesting than his pronouncements would ever have led me to suspect. It’s also distinctive, consciousness-evoking, and disquietingly like something a genius would write.

→ Leave a CommentCategories: God Help Me I'm "Litblogging"

Four for Wednesday: Driving Songs

December 9, 2009 · Leave a Comment

In about an hour I’m headed to Durham, thence to Michigan. In honor of the traveling season, here are four songs best heard in cars.

This video for Yo La Tengo’s classic buzzsaw jam “Sugarcube” is justly well-regarded for its cutely self-deprecating indie-kids-sent-to-rawk-star-school motif. (Nostalgia, faux-childishness, self-mockery, commentary on consumerism: that’s four indie tropes neatly conflated.) Still, it doesn’t do justice to the happy mania of the original track, which once got me yelled at by an ex-girlfriend because I was paying more attention to the divine noise it made, coming out of the car speakers, than to whatever she was saying.

This bouncy Blackalicious bit gives rise to my favorite YouTube comment of all time: “i found this record in an abandoned crack house ..unopened 2002 ben harper jarassic 5 freakn awsm the cops boarded it up shortly after but there are still 100s of records in the house”

Ben Harper albums aside (how I loathe being told how to vote by a pair of adenoids), that’s some seriously tasteful crack smokers right there. I love this song, and this album, to pieces.

Good road songs tend to have place names in them. Great road songs have place names of places I’ve never been. Really great road songs have Emmylou Harris. Best of all, there’s this clip of a song Harris performs on her epochal Wrecking Ball cover album (1995), written (and here co-performed) by a gaggle of McGarrigles.

To hell with Kerouac, and to hell with rock music. This is the ultimate road song. It’s easy to sing, has a nice banjo part, and involves punishingly terrible visual puns (“fork in the road?”).

→ Leave a CommentCategories: Music · Wednesday Four

Questions for the Narrator of the Pentateuch, #1

December 9, 2009 · Leave a Comment

I’m continuing to work my way very slowly through the Hebrew Bible, and continuing to be amazed by the compression, subtlety, and overall strangeness of it. Searching for the mind and personality of this narrator, parsing his or her intentions, gives me the same feeling you have in one of those noir thrillers where a certain influential person seems to be everywhere and nowhere at the same time.

(The struggle becomes a lot easier, I suppose, if you assume that every apparent change in metaphysics, or style, or morals, can be put down to a switch from J to E or from D to P. I’m not wasting my time with that shit. If the Hebrew Bible was redacted, that doesn’t have to mean it was sloppily or thoughtlessly redacted.)

Anyhoo, one device that literary critics of the Bible constantly refer to is parallelism of various kinds: at the verbal level (as in the Psalms), or at the event level, as in those “type-scenes” where the same set of incidents will recur in a new context, giving us a chance to notice how different characters handle the same basic set of incidents. (So, like, the betrothal of Rebekah as compared with that of Moses’ wife, etc.) So, throughout the story of Noah’s Flood, there are little parallels with the creation and fall stories: the earth, for example, reverts to its primordial “without-form-and-void” state of being. My first question for the elusive Biblical narrator is: immediately after creation, we get the first story of buck-passing. (Adam blames Eve who blames the snake.) When Noah, having been blessed by God (like Adam), gets drunk (a new-made world’s first sin?), and when he famously lashes out at his son, Ham, afterward, thus giving ammo to generations of racists, is this actually supposed to parallel Adam’s passing of the buck to Eve? Is the Curse of Ham actually supposed to reflect badly on Noah, rather than, as both racist bible scholars and anti-Christian race scholars have always assumed, on Ham?

→ Leave a CommentCategories: Reading A to Z