Literature

From chapter 6 of E.M Forster’s _Howard’s End_ (1910):

“Evening, Mr. Bast.”

“Good-evening, Mr. Bast.”

Two interesting pieces on the intersection between free speech and politics. Richard Byrne in the “Chronicle”:http://chronicle.com/free/v53/i08/08a01201.htm on how the writer of ‘Reading Lolita in Tehran’ is being accused of preparing the way for war.

Mr. Dabashi, a professor of Iranian studies and comparative literature at Columbia University who has been active in the antiwar movement since the attacks of September 11, 2001, heard a call to action. The article prompted him to dust off an essay that he had written a few years before and publish it in the June 1 edition of the Egyptian English-language newspaper Al-Ahram. His target? Not President Bush or the Pentagon, but Azar Nafisi, author of the best-selling memoir Reading Lolita in Tehran and a visiting fellow at the Johns Hopkins University’s School of Advanced International Studies, in Washington. … His blistering essay cast Ms. Nafisi as a collaborator in the Bush administration’s plans for regime change in Iran. … “By seeking to recycle a kaffeeklatsch version of English literature as the ideological foregrounding of American empire,” wrote Mr. Dabashi, “Reading Lolita in Tehran is reminiscent of the most pestiferous colonial projects of the British in India, when, for example, in 1835 a colonial officer like Thomas Macaulay decreed: ‘We must do our best to form a class who may be interpreters between us and the millions whom we govern, a class of persons Indian in blood and color, but English in taste, in opinions, words and intellect.’ Azar Nafisi is the personification of that native informer and colonial agent, polishing her services for an American version of the very same project.” In an interview published on the Web site of the left-wing publication Z Magazine on August 4, Mr. Dabashi went even further, comparing Ms. Nafisi to a U.S. Army reservist convicted of abusing Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib prison. “To me there is no difference between Lynndie England and Azar Nafisi”

And Martin Arnold and Vincent Boland in the “FT”:http://www.ft.com/cms/s/4dcb8dfa-5a04-11db-8f16-0000779e2340.html, on a bill passed by France’s National Assembly that will criminalize denial of the Armenian genocide if the Senate passes it too.

The French legislation, which could still be blocked by the senate, would make it a crime to deny that Armenians were the victims of genocide in the last years of the Ottoman Empire. The bill was read in Turkey as a sign that France was now permanently opposed to Ankara’s bid to join the EU. Bulent Arinc, the parliamentary speaker, criticised France’s “hostile attitude” towards Turkey. “This is a shameful decision. We are very sorry to see that this [bill] was passed only because of internal [French] politics.” Turkey itself denies genocide and the judicial authorities have prosecuted writers who have used the term to describe the killings of Armenians. One of the most prominent such figures is Orhan Pamuk, the Turkish novelist, who was awarded the Nobel prize for literature on Thursday minutes after the French vote.

I haven’t read _Reading Lolita in Tehran_ (would be interested to hear from anyone in comments who has), but it seems to me that the evidence against Nafisi is ridiculous as it’s presented here. It seems to consist of a reductive reading of Edward Said, and the facts that she’s critical of the Iranian regime (which is better than some others in the region, but still pretty nasty) and friends with people like Paul Wolfowitz and Bernard Lewis. This doesn’t in my book add up to proof that she supports, let alone is actively paving the way, for any sort of violent regime change from outside. On the other hand, I think that the evidence that France’s new proposed law _is_ intended as a slap in the face for Turkey is quite strong. I don’t have any principled objection to bans on speech by Holocaust deniers and their like, but the law seems almost designed to be counter-productive. Telling Turkey that it’s effectively not qualified to be an EU member state (which is how this law is being received, and, I suspect, how it was intended to be received) means that the real changes in Turkey’s internal censorship regime which were starting to take hold a year or two ago are almost certain to be rolled back, and that the more vicious nationalist elements (who were never happy with EU membership in the first place) will increasingly be in the ascendant in Turkey’s internal political debates.

In a “recent comments thread”:https://crookedtimber.org/2006/08/23/the-wealth-and-poverty-of-nations/ , I got into trouble for asserting that Christopher Hitchens had clearly never read Günter Grass’s ” _Crabwalk_ “:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0156029707/junius-20 since, in the course of “a polemic”:http://www.slate.com/id/2148094/nav/tap1/ that was nasty even by his standards, he described the book thus:

bq. suddenly there is Grass, publishing a large and cumbersome account of the sinking of a German civilian vessel in the Baltic in 1945 ….

By contrast, Dan Jacobson gives “an accurate and balanced account”:http://normblog.typepad.com/normblog/2006/09/writers_choice__1.html of the book (warning: plot spoilers), coupled with some reflections on Grass’s recent disclosures about his SS membership as part of the “Writer’s Choice” series at Geras’s site. (I wrote about _Crabwalk_ in “a post last year”:https://crookedtimber.org/2005/02/27/crabwalk/ , before the recent revelations.)

Update: Ian Buruma, in the New Yorker, has “an interesting piece”:http://www.newyorker.com/critics/atlarge/articles/060918crat_atlarge on l’affaire Grass.

By the time I got to Chicago yesterday my flight to Montreal had been cancelled and I got re-routed through Toronto. (One Canadian city is as good as another, eh?) My bag went on a mysterious and still-unfinished journey of their own. As a consequence, I did something I’m slightly ashamed to admit I rarely do these days: I read a novel. I picked up Jonathan Safran Foer’s Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close in Chicago and by the time I arrived in Montreal I had just finished it. The main protagonist is Oskar Schell, a nine-year-old boy whose father was killed in the World Trade Center, and the novel is told mostly from his point of view. When we’re not inside Oskar’s head, the voices of his grandmother and grandfather (who have complicated stories of their own) take over.

It’s a good novel. I was unconvinced by some aspects of each of the main characters, and I thought the central plot device could have been handled better. But at the same time, the book drew me in and I found parts of it quite moving. It is exceptionally difficult to write plausibly about the inner world of a child, if only because it’s so easy to forget what being a child is like. Foer’s strategy is to make Oskar irresistibly kinetic: high-energy, endlessly talkative, exceptionally smart, and independent to an almost absurd degree. It mostly works, except of course when the plot requires that Oscar not be as smart as all that. It would have been easy to have Oskar come off as a kind of miniature Woody Allen, neurotically roaming New York in search of something or other. But Foer manages to make you like him.

It strikes me that Roddy Doyle’s Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha would make for a good comparison with Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close. Paddy is ten and Oskar is nine. They are both quite talkative. In different ways, bad things happen to both. Yet Paddy is ordinary and Oskar is one of a kind. Paddy lives a routine existence in late 1960s Dublin. Oskar is on the Upper West Side. Paddy’s parents fight. Oskar’s father was killed in a terrorist attack. I read Paddy Clarke when it came out (ten or more years ago I think), and remember being astonished by how well Doyle got the reader inside Paddy’s world, especially the way he showed how awful even ordinary domestic problems can seem when you are ten and don’t fully understand what is happening. I may be biased because it’s easier for me to identify with Paddy’s life and mode of speech, but I think Doyle meets the challenge of writing from a child’s point of view better than Foer. Perhaps Foer’s problem is that the weight of 9/11 is just too much for Oskar as a character to bear, just as within the novel it is too much for him as a person to manage.

Le Blog Bérubé “last Friday”:http://www.michaelberube.com/index.php/weblog/abf_friday_bonus_edition/

bq. I will therefore postpone the next installment of Irish Blogging (Beckett’s _Murphy_ is on tap for Monday) and devote the day to promiscuous linkdumping and an installment of our ever-popular Arbitrary but Fun stuff.

Le Blog Bérubé “yesterday”:http://www.michaelberube.com/index.php/weblog/thanks_for_the_memories/

bq. Today was supposed to be Beckett Day on this blog, but we interrupt our brief foray into Irish Literature Blogging to bring you this important Lieberman Bulletin.

I think we’re beginning to get the joke …

Update: and “today”:http://www.michaelberube.com/index.php/weblog/blogging/

bq. One more thing while I’m working away on my Beckett post (which I will begin writing real soon, I promise).

Atrios used to have those fine bits of poetry, threadbare from overuse. "He draweth out the thread of his verbosity finer than the staple of his argument," etc. Now he just says ‘yeah, yeah, another stupid open thread.’ What with timezones, that’s all I ever see at the top of the page when I visit. Let’s see if memory and google can do better.

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Scott Kaufman has an interesting distributed intelligence project. He’s soliciting suggestions for ‘best introductions to’ various standard topics in literary studies. Feel free to contribute. It’s a nice project. Lots of subjects could do with good lists of this sort.

I finished Zadie Smith’s “On Beauty”:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1594200637/junius-20 at the weekend and very much enjoyed it. For those who don’t know it’s a novel about academia, loosely modelled on Forster’s “Howard’s End”:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/014118213X/junius-20 , and centred on the relations between the Belsey and Kipps families. Howard Belsey, an post-modern art historian from an English working-class background is bitterly antagonistic to Monty Kipps a black conservative critic/pundit who has made a career out of baiting liberals. They are forced to deal with one another thanks to the involvement of Belsey’s son with Kipps’s daughter. There are no plot spoilers so far (you’d know all that by about page 6) and I don’t want to post any — just to recommend it. I liked it more than her “White Teeth”:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0375703861/junius-20 , which she didn’t know how to end, but like that book it is witty and well-observed and has much to say about the lies people tell to themselves about themselves.

(I wrote something like the previous paragraph yesterday, but when I pressed “publish” WordPress sent me to a login screen and then eat my post. So I had to do it all again. In between I’ve read a few of the online reviews and reader reactions at places like Amazon. And I’m astonished by how many people seem to have just hated the book. Now like Smith, I’m British, and I’ve noticed that many of the complaints are from Americans who thinks she gets America wrong in various respects (most of the action is set in Cambridge/Boston) and has a poor ear for American dialogue. I’d be interested to hear if any commenters had that same reaction. Anyhow, I thought it was terrific.)

Until recently, I thought that famous quote about the king and the priests and the entrails and the running and the explosions and the monkeys was from Professor Frink Diderot. I learn now that the source of the quote was Jean Meslier, whose bloody aspirations ran as follows: “Je voudrais, et ce sera le dernier et le plus ardent de mes souhaits, je voudrais que le dernier des rois fût étranglé avec les boyaux du dernier prêtre.” Worse, the form of the Diderot quote I had in mind was wrong. Diderot actually had this to say, in Les Éleuthéromanes, “Et ses mains ourdiraient les entrailles du prêtre/Au défaut d’un cordon pour étrangler les rois.” In a move reminiscent of a young Ben Domenech, however, one dastardly Jean-François de La Harpe attributed to Diderot the following version in his Cours de Littérature Ancienne et Moderne: “Et des boyaux du dernier prêtre/Serrons le cou du dernier roi.” Due to a distinct lack of blogswarms in the 1840’s, the error was never uncovered. I hope that after a sufficient period of contrition, perhaps involving live-cam self-flagellation, you all will someday be able to give my judgments about wankery the respect they deserve. In the meantime, Hitchens is still a wanker.

Via “Patrick Nielsen Hayden”:http://nielsenhayden.com/makinglight/archives/007354.html#007354 I see that the Hugo nominees have been announced. They’re

Learning the World, Ken MacLeod (Orbit; Tor)
A Feast for Crows, George R.R. Martin (Voyager; Bantam Spectra)
Old Man’s War, John Scalzi (Tor)
Accelerando, Charles Stross (Ace; Orbit)
Spin, Robert Charles Wilson (Tor)

For once, I’ve read all of them, and liked each of them quite a bit – it’s a very good field this year. That said, if I had to pick, it would either be McLeod’s _Learning the World_ or Wilson’s _Spin_. Both of these books see their authors reaching a new level of achievement. The McLeod book combines the political edge of his earlier work with a real degree of human warmth; it’s a little reminiscent of Vinge’s _Deepness in the Sky_ in its setup, but more subtle in how its plot plays out. _Spin_ strikes me as even more subtle, albeit chillier – using a gonzo science-fictional conceit and a slightly unreliable narrator to explore how we construct fantasies about an uncaring universe. As for the others, _Accelerando_ is very impressive, but I couldn’t entirely warm to it – I found that I was reading it more for the infodumps than the plot development. I prefer his “Merchant Princes” series which has less bells and whistles, but does a better job in my opinion of combining plotline with sociological speculation. More on this series later. That said, _Accelerando_ has some very nice sardonic touches. Most libertarian Singularities see the geeks inheriting the earth, but Stross’s version of the Singularity is dominated by feral intelligent financial instruments; hedge funds with stratospheric IQs run amok. _A Feast for Crows_ is a not-entirely-wonderful installment in a mostly wonderful series of books – the next should be better (it’ll have Tyrion). _Old Man’s War_ is great entertainment – I suspect Scalzi is getting a little tired of being compared to a modern Heinlein but there’s good reason for the comparison; he resurrects the feeling of golden age SF, but somehow manages to make it feel fresh. All good books in my opinion – feel free to agree/disagree in comments.

“Whatte the swyve?” you say? “Anothere of myne servauntes hath just dyede of the blacke death.”:http://houseoffame.blogs.friendster.com/my_blog/2006/01/abbreviaciouns.html This and other useful acronyms from “Geoffrey Chaucer Hath a Blog”:http://houseoffame.blogs.friendster.com/my_blog/. (Via “Making Light”:http://www.nielsenhayden.com/makinglight/.)

“Patrick Nielsen Hayden”:http://nielsenhayden.com/makinglight/archives/006036.html#006036 touts Robert Charles Wilson’s _Spin_ (“Powells”:http://www.powells.com/partner/29956/s?kw=robert%20charles%20wilson%20spin, “Amazon”:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/redirect?link_code=ur2&tag=henryfarrell-20&camp=1789&creative=9325&path=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.amazon.com%2Fgp%2Fproduct%2F076534825X%2Fsr%3D8-1%2Fqid%3D1140750256%2Fref%3Dpd_bbs_1%3F%255Fencoding%3DUTF8 ) as “one of the finest science fiction novels of the last decade” and he’s right; I finished the book yesterday, and was enormously impressed. I’ve been a fan of Wilson’s work for a long time,¹ but as Patrick says, this is on a different level to his earlier work, good though it is. Its conceit is classic science fiction – the earth is suddenly and mysteriously enshrouded by a barrier which blocks off the stars. Inside the barrier, time passes far more slowly than in the outside universe; one year on earth is the equivalent of one hundred million years outside. A single generation is likely to see the death of the solar system. But Wilson doesn’t treat this set up as a classic SF problem to be “solved” (as in Poul Anderson’s somewhat similar but more conventional _Tau Zero_). Instead, he wants to examine how people react when they are forced to think in cosmological time,directly to confront the fact that just as they are mortal, so too is their species, their world, their sun and even the stars in the sky. It’s a wonderful, subtle book, a love-song to scientific curiosity, with some clever, canny things to say about the deep currents driving contemporary debates over science in the US (Wilson’s a Canadian, and comes at this from outside). Strongly, no _vehemently_ recommended.

¹ I’ve a particular fondness for Wilson’s _Darwinia_ which begins when Cork disappears to be replaced by an alien jungle inhabited by feral predators. Skeptics might fairly ask how anyone could tell the difference.

JAAIS is short for Jane-Austen-Adaptation-Inauthenticity-Syndrome. Sufferers can be of either sex, though most are female. The symptoms are a craving to see the latest TV or film adaptation of a Jane Austen novel, accompanied by anticipatory worries that “I bet it is going to be awful”. If the victim watches the adaptation at home, perhaps on a rented DVD, she feels the compulsion to keep up a commentary on the inauthenticity of the costumes, performances, location and on unwarranted departures from the original novel. “Mr Bennet was never at that ball!” or “They would never have done _that_ !” or “She’s far too old!” are standard remarks. There is no known cure.

I had to help someone suffering from a particularly bad case of JAAIS last night. When we then played the “alternate US ending” to “Pride and Prejudice”:http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0414387/ — the awful extra syrupy gooey ending that was demanded by test audiences in Des Moines — I thought I was going to witness a seizure! No doubt the special super-schlocky ending was inflicted all over North America, so that even unsuspecting Canadian JAAIS sufferers were caught.

Couple days ago I posted some fine metaphysical poetry and extremely witty self-criticism by Conrad Aiken at the Valve. I like Aiken very much. (One of our commenters mentioned that Eliot praised him as "il miglior fabbro", but someone else noted he also called Pound that. So maybe he just carried around a whole tray of that one at parties.) There’s also a family friendship on Belle’s side. Warings and Aikens have been friends for generations, apparently.

Anyway, I’ve been reading poems from Aiken’s second book, Turns and Movies (1916), long out of print. One couplet – and that’s pretty much it – from "All Lovely Things" sometimes gets quoted, from the end of this stanza.

All lovely things will have an ending,
All lovely things will fade and die,
And youth, that’s now so bravely spending,
Will beg a penny by and by.

Since the book’s public domain, I’m tempted to make a nice CC edition. Be a bit of work. But here’s a start: the title poem, which you won’t find intact elsewhere on the web, although you will find bits. It’s got a certain something. "In Turns and Movies he willfully sacrificed his ability to write in smooth involute curves for a dubious gain in matter-of-fact forcefulness." Of the title poem in particular: "although immature and uneven … at least a crude vitality." So writes Conrad Aiken. I agree the metaphysical stuff he wrote later is better. But if Art Spiegelman decided he wanted to illustrate something like The Wild Party again, he could do worse that this. (You could really do a Batman and Robin-inspired number on part xii, "Aerial Dodds".)

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