Literature

I was kind of surprised to see that the wonderful Tom Russell has a long essay on some new blog called The Rumpus, all about Juarez, El Paso, drug wars, borderlands, corruption, et cetera. I love his music, and I like his writing too, so I’m always pleased to see some more of it. The content, though, the content is shocking.

bq. I turned that page in section B where there was a short item about two El Pasoans slain yesterday in a Juarez bar shooting. Back page stuff. Hidden near the end of the story was the astounding body count: _nearly 2900 people, including more than 160 this month alone, have been killed in Juarez since a war between drug traffickers erupted January 2008_ . John Wesley Hardin wouldn’t stand a chance.

Jesus. You’re probably safer in Kandahar.

Now why did my previous post garner scarcely a comment?

The Plain People of the Internet: It hadn’t any McArdle in it!

I: Surely, my good man, we have not come to such a pretty pass as that.

The Plain People of the Internet: But here we are, and here you are.

I: I prefer to think it was due to modesty. False modesty, perhaps. But if it weren’t for false modesty, some people would have no modesty at all. Or so I like to flatter myself.

The Plain People of the Internet: What are you babbling about, you great baby, and bottomless bag of blog posts!

I: In my post, I quoted John Kricfalusi on the baneful influence of cool. “Why do young artists say they like UPA? Because it makes ‘em cool. Hipster Emo time. (It’s also easy to fake) It’s like when teenagers discover communism. They think it’s real cool to go against common sense and experience. But then when they meet the real world head on later, they realize it was youthful folly. You’re supposed to grow out of it. I too fell under the UPA spell for the 3 weeks I wanted to be cool.” But what is it, of which he speaks? A contrarian herd instinct, thus a bleating contradition in terms? An emo knee-jerk? What is the common denominator of Gerald McBoingBoing and the dream of One World Government? In short, what’s cool? Or if you prefer, what does ‘cool’ mean? Compared to this question, the trouble with McArdle’s opposition to health care is but a bagatelle.

The Plain People of the Internet: Blast your eyes!

I: I have been doing some research on the subject. Here is a passage from Charles Dickens, Great Expectations. Joe Gargery – honest soul, who wears his heart on his rolled up sleeve, as he works an honest day at the open flame of the forge – reports on what has become of Miss Havisham’s fortune: [click to continue…]

Following Michael’s pointer, I read William Deresiewicz’s “piece”:http://www.thenation.com/doc/20090608/deresiewicz with some interest – while I’m as happy as the next person to read good take-downs of dodgy ev-psych arguments, I found some of the claims a little … sweeping. Take, for example, the suggestion that:

Having colonized the social sciences–where it has begun to displace the view, predominant throughout the twentieth century, that the mind is a highly malleable product of culture–[Darwinian evolutionary thinking] has now set its sights on the humanities, the last area of resistance.

I’m sure that ev-psych types would _like_ this to be true¹, but as a card-carrying social scientist, I have yet to be informed of the successful colonization of sociology, political science, economics and anthropology by explanations based on Darwinian theory. Nor, for that matter, did I know that economists _ever_ believed the mind to be a highly malleable product of culture.
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I guess Anthem is finally in public beta, under the guise of Microsoft SongSmith.

Fans of Dorothy L Sayers might be interested that BBC7 is repeating the 1975 version of The Man Born To Be King. It started on Christmas Day. I can’t exactly recommend it (except that Gabriel Woolf is in it, so it has to be good) because I’m taping every part before listening to them all in a row. (It occurs to me, writing this, that it is possible that I listened to the 1975 version in 1975, but I’ve no memory of it). Sayers regarded it as the pinnacle of her literary achievement; if she is even half right it is brilliant. The BBC appears to have lost the original recording (bloody typical) but the 1970s really were the heyday of radio drama, and it’s hard to believe that the 1940s version was as good.

And if Christianity is not to your taste, here are dramatisations of Northern Lights and The Subtle Knife (next week), which I can recommend from having heard them. They made me wish, as the best dramatisations do, that I’d not already read the books.

I just finished Gregory Gibson’s “Hubert’s Freaks”:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0151012334/junius-20 (subtitle “the rare book dealer, the Times Square talker and the lost photos of Diane Arbus”). It was one of those strange books which sounds interesting but then has you thinking you made a mistake in starting, but suddenly hooks you and has you reading to the end. Gibson tells three intertwined stories: first, that of Bob Langmuir, a neurotic Philadelphia-based antiquarian book-and-miscallaneous-stuff; second, more briefly, that of Diane Arbus, her career, her photographs, suicide and posthumous rise to cult status; and, uniting the other two, Hubert’s Museum, a Times Square freak show (complete with bogus African tribespeople, amputees, tattooed men &c.). Arbus had become involved with the people at Hubert’s in the 1960, and especially with the black couple known as Charlie and Woogie who ran the place, and had taken a whole bunch of pictures there. It is these pictures that Langmuir discovers chez another dealer, amid a pile of other paraphenalia. Part of Gibson’s story is Langmuir coming to terms with what he has, and then struggling to get the difficult (to understate the case considerably) Arbus estate to authenticate the material so that he can bring the pictures to market. But Langmuir is also an archivist of African-American history and he is fascinated by the people at Hubert’s and by the comprehensive phonetically-spelled diaries that Charlie kept for most of his life. Gibson does an excellent job of stitching the various narratives together and using them to evoke a strange and marginal side of America. In passing he gives us some interesting insights into how the market for art photography got started (a combination of scarcity of other art objects giving rise to a need for new outlets for the connoiseur’s passion and institutional hype from curators like John Szarkowski at MoMa and critics like Sontag).

(When I bought the book on a recommendation, I hadn’t realised that it had only recently come out. In fact the story is still short of a denoument as Okie, the Nigerian dealer from whom Langmuir bought the trunk, is suing on the grounds that he was somehow illicitly deprived of valuable items. Since _caveat vendor_ would seem to be to relevant principle for trades between dealers, and since Langmuir did the work of recognising the Arbus material and then establishing authenticity, it is hard to believe the Okie has a case. But where (possibly) millions of dollars are at stake, it is probably worth him trying it on. Pending resolution, the Hubert’s archive can’t be sold.)

John’s post below reminds me that I haven’t yet noted Margaret Drabble’s well-deserved elevation to Dame of the British Empire. I read The Waterfall in my late teens, just because it was on my parents’ bookshelves, and didn’t like it at all, presumably because I didn’t understand a word of it (my parents’ bookshelves provided a lot of my teen reading, including every single on of Shaw’s plays, and the very weighty Auld report on the William Tyndale affair – I was not very discriminating and even read The Concrete Boot which is, if I remember correctly, truly dreadful). I started reading Drabble’s novels as an adult only after hearing her talk about The Witch of Exmoor on Radio 4 and heard her talk about its foray into political philosophy (I assign chapter 1 in my upper division political philosophy class to be read after we play the original position game). But I liked them so much that I stopped about half way into her ouevre, on the principle that I want to have more available to read for the first time later in my life (the same reason that I stopped reading Trollope and Dostoevsky, and stopped watching the new series of Doctor Who half way through the second season; from which you can tell that have an iron will). Anyway, John’s post reminded me of Lady Drabble’s elevation because she is the author of one of my favourite passages from the whole of literature. It brilliantly the evokes the personality of a middle-aged man whom life has (so far) defeated. It’s on page 11 of The Needle’s Eye which is, I think, my favourite of her books so far. Dour and depressed Simon Camish, enduring an unsuccessful marriage, is about to go to a dinner party hosted by his friends Nick and Diana:

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“Scott”:http://www.insidehighered.com/views/2008/02/27/mclemee had a delightful column over at _IHE_ last week, demonstrating to tyroes like “Matt Seligman”:http://time-blog.com/nerd_world/2008/02/matt_selmans_unabridged_rules.html and “Ezra Klein”:http://www.prospect.org/csnc/blogs/ezraklein_archive?month=02&year=2008&base_name=bookshelves how you _really_ show off your bookish erudition to the world (by affecting, of course not to be at all interested in what the world thinks of your erudition; see further “Chris”:https://crookedtimber.org/2005/07/11/the-ironic-gnome-rule/ on the cultural politics of ironic gnomes) .
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A bit of random surfing just took me over to “Ken Worpole’s site”:http://www.worpole.net/ , where I was very pleased to learn that his wonderful book of essays “Dockers and Detectives”:http://www.inpressbooks.co.uk/dockers_and_detectives_warpole_ken_i019459.aspx has been republished by Five Leaves Publications (Verso did the first edition, back in 1983). _Dockers and Detectives_ is one of those rare books that not only entertains and informs you, but also opens up new paths of literary discovery. I think that I’d probably have got round to Dashiell Hammett and James M. Cain without Worpole, but not as quickly and without seeing their influence on French existentialism. I’m not so sure I would have discovered Alexander Baron’s _From the City, From the Plough_ or Stuart Hood’s wartime memoir _Pebbles From My Skull_, though. Worpole discusses both in his chapter on the popular literature of the Second World War, along with other works such as Rex Warner’s dystopian _The Aerodrome_. Recommended.

I’m just back from Arizona (big thanks to Kieran and Laurie btw), where I had a great time. My purpose in going there was to deliver a paper on “public reason and immigration” and a couple of conversations I had on the trip concerned how some Americans see the European issue. In both of them (one with a grad student, one with the guy next to me on a plane) my interlocutor referred, in almost identical terms, to Europe’s problem with immigration by “fundamentalist Muslims”, and seemed to believe that this was an accurate depiction of the Islamic population of Europe. Meanwhile, back home, my partner had arranged for a Muslim colleague to accompany her to watch Bristol thump Stade Francais in the Heineken cup. Needless to say, the woman in question is about as distant as it is possible to be from the Muslims who feature in the imagination of my two conversation partners. At Heathrow, I bought a copy of the Guardian to read on the bus, and was reminded by Ronan Bennett’s excellent article, that such blanket stereotyping is also practised by many people here in the UK, who don’t have the excuse of lack of familiarity. When the stereotyping is done by a major British cultural and literary figure and is mixed with a strong dose of sadistic revenge fantasty, it is all the more deplorable. But as Bennett points out, Martin Amis has largely got away with it and a lot of the commentary has been more critical of Terry Eagleton for calling him the bigot that he is. (Chris Brooke at the Virtual Stoa also linked the other day to some more on-the-money kicking of Amis, in which the great writer’s grasp of the history of technology is examined.)

Josh Glenn, who I interviewed last week about his book Taking Things Seriously, may have solved the puzzle of what “little nameless object” is produced by the factories that secured the family fortune of a wastrel in Henry James’s novel The Ambassadors.

Normally this would merit a short item in Notes and Queries or The Explicator. But in this case, the proposed solution to “the Woollett Question” appears as an article at Slate.

Next challenge: Figure out what the stolen “little object” was in Norman Mailer’s Barbary Shore.

Well, it’s been months and months since my last contribution to this fine blog, but this time, folks, I have a real excuse: the dog ate my August, and it’s all Janet’s fault. Janet, you may recall from months and months ago, is married to me. We learned in mid-July that Janet would need surgery to keep a couple of bones in her neck from pressin’ on her spinal cord. Those bones have now been put back in their proper places, and Janet’s recovering the way people do when they’re told that their surgery has been a “complete success.” (That’s how the neurosurgeon felt about it; now we gradually find out what the patient thinks.) As for me, the minute I learned the surgery would take place on August 28 and that Jamie would have no summer camp in August, I realized that I would very likely have to spend every spare waking second of my summer trying to finish a draft of the book I’ve been talking about for the past couple of years, <i>The Left At War: The Totalitarian Temptation from Hume to Human League</i>. So I made my apologies to my fellow CTers via “electronic” mail, and let them know that I probably wouldn’t be posting again for quite some time. And though I know this will mortify Janet no end, I thought I’d offer CT readers a closeup of the X-ray that started the whole thing:

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I have very little time for blogging at the moment, so I’m going to abandon a plan I had to write an extended post about Byron Rogers’s “The Man who Went into the West: The Life of R.S. Thomas”:http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/1845132505?ie=UTF8&tag=junius-21&link_code=as3&camp=2506&creative=9298&creativeASIN=1845132505 . Thomas, referred to by Larkin as “Arsewipe Thomas” was, as most of you probably know, one of the very best poets in the English language in the twentieth century. He was also an Anglican vicar in a Wales where most of the population was chapel and a fierce advocate for the Welsh language despite speaking a variant so academic that his parishioners struggled to understand him. He sometimes refused to speak English at all (except through an interpreter), yet he wouldn’t let his own family learn Welsh and couldn’t write a decent poem in his adopted language. His son tells of being packed off to boarding school in the hated England and of listening to sermons in which Thomas denounced fridges and vacuum cleaners as the paraphenalia of modernity. He barely showed any affection for his talented artist wife but after he death composed supremely tender love poems. With her he lived a life of dour austerity in sub-arctic temperatures, but then he remarried a fox-hunting reactionary and was seen queuing for lottery tickets at Tescos. He was a priest with distinctly unorthodox views about the nature of the deity (of whom he had an almost Newtonian conception). He carried out the duties of a vicar with conventional conscientiousness, but felt awkward talking to parishioners and once vaulted over the churchyard wall after a funeral service to avoid conversation with the bereaved. He had a reputation for grim humourlessness with some, but at least one person compared him to Lenny Bruce and Ken Dodd. And then there’s his feeling for nature and landscape … I could go on and on about this extraordinary man with many many personas and a capacity for repeated personal reinvention. But you should buy the book, you really should.

Kip Manley directs us to a very worthwhile discussion of the ‘intentional fallacy’ and ‘bad readers’, Helen Vendler and Plato’s “Euthyphro”. I’ll just dunk you in the middle: [click to continue…]