Reading, Writing, Thinking

A Free Press Isn't Free

2009-08-08T16:48:00.000-07:00

A newspaper is a vehicle for advertising.

That doesn't mean that the publisher of a newspaper or magazine can't have high moral standards or elevated goals; here at the Freep we are never told to write what an advertiser will like, and when I was with other magazines and newspapers that was also true. But only a select few journals survive on the receipts from newsstand sales and subscriptions (academic journals can cost hundreds of dollars a year for a subscription). Consider that we are not the only newspaper in Nashville that doesn't charge at all for copies. Where does the money come from?

Obviously, it comes from advertisers, or it is supposed to. (A very small amount of it comes from grants, and only for a vanishingly small number of journals.) This is the same model that works for radio and broadcast television--the content provider puts your eyes and ears within reach of the ads.

And we can see how well it's worked for commercial radio and television. They are providing cultural leadership in all areas (American Idol and Desperate Housewives are only two examples), and providing the public with the kind of in-depth journalism that we need. I, for one, am woefully ignorant about Lindsay Lohan's love life, because I get most of my news from The New York Times. (Online. For free.)

Investigative journalism is expensive. A reporter, or a team of reporters, can work on a story for months, drawing salary and running up expenses, and produce one or two lead stories. It's important, and it's prestigious, but it doesn't draw ads. As ad revenues fall and newspapers cut back expenses (did you notice the recent negotiations at the Boston Globe?), are they going to cut operations that produce revenue, or those that cost more than they produce? Fox News is the future of newspapers. Consider how Fox News would have covered Watergate.

But if people can get their news for free, why should they pay for it? And shouldn't news organizations be subject to the marketplace, just like other businesses? Not necessarily. Sen. Ben Cardin (D., Maryland) has introduced a bill under which newspapers could be considered educational institutions, similar to universities, organized similarly, as nonprofits. Their advertising revenue would be tax-free, and they could accept donations to support specific kinds of reporting, as PBS does now.

This might keep them alive for a while, but readership is still falling, and in-depth coverage of serious issues doesn't seem to be able to stem the tide. Even more news about Lindsay Lohan isn't enough.

It may be that newspapers have seen their day, and they will be curiosities in the history books of the next generation. Right now, though, I don't see blogs and web sites taking their place. Blogs often break interesting and important stories, but there is no way of knowing the truth of what you see on a blog; newspapers, or the best of them, have a tradition of fact-checking. Any bozo can start a blog. And news web sites don't generate enough income to support a real news-gathering operation.

Perhaps we will go through a period of chaos, and blog journalism will find an economic model that allows it to do real, trustworthy, investigative reporting. Perhaps this is the end of the news as we know it.

But that doesn't have to be the end of democracy. (It might be, but it doesn't have to be.) Trustworthy and relatively unbiased news is a recent development. If it turns out to have been a transitional phase, well, most of us never read the newspapers anyway.

Blog of Ages Redux

2009-07-20T14:26:00.000-07:00

I worked for a number of years in old media: books, magazines, and film. They all depended, and to some extent still do depend, on the concept of intellectual property. Simply put, it means that the person who creates a piece of writing or music or a work of art owns it just as much as the person who grows a tomato owns it. If the tomato grower works for a farmer, of course, the tomato might belong to the farmer, just as the articles written by a staff writer for a magazine might well belong to the magazine.
But what happens when the tomato is put on the Internet? First, it becomes an infinity of tomatoes. The power of intellectual property lies in two aspects of the work—the tomato. The second aspect is in what we call, appropriately enough, secondary or subsidiary rights. Your Star Wars toys and Living Words lunch boxes fall into this area. They exploit the idea of the tomato, and I've heard no one dispute that the creator of the tomato should control that idea.
The first right of the intellectual creator, though, is copyright, which is exactly what it appears to be—the right to make (or allow others to make) copies. This is a relatively recent idea. Only a little more than two hundred years ago, an author or composer would sell a work to a publisher for a flat fee. If it was hugely successful, the composer might have some additional leverage in negotiating the next sale, but would never see another pfennig on that work. Other publishers would be likely to put out their own editions, for which the creator would get nothing.
Copyright allowed creators to lease, rather than sell, the rights to their work. An author's contract now is for an advance against royalties, and if the book continues to sell, an author can keep getting checks for a lifetime (and beyond; current copyright law in the U.S. protects the rights for 75 years after the author's death). The publisher is compensated, of course, for the costs of editing and designing and manufacturing and distributing the book; all that comes out of the price you and I pay for a physical book.
But what happens when there is no physical book? If I buy an e-book or an audio book download, no physical object is transferred to me. The farmer sells me the tomato, but he can still sell you the very same tomato.
There are some people who believe that the low manufacturing cost (for a book, basically editing and design, both of which can really be omitted if you aren't obsessed with quality) should be reflected in the price. That is, they think that we should give away the right to copy intellectual property and control only who can sell it and the secondary rights. Some authors (the most famous is probably Cory Doctorow, the science fiction writer) now release their works for free on the Internet, assuming that readers will then be inspired to purchase physical copies--and Doctorow's books do have respectable sales ranks at Amazon, so people are buying them.
The other side of that is that many people believe that everything should be free if it is freely available on the Web, or if it can be made freely available. Writers' organizations spend a fair amount of time tracking down pirate sites that post scanned copies of books whose authors have not agreed to release their texts (Doctorow and others release some rights under Creative Commons licenses, which you can look up at creativecommons.org). The pirates, both those who scan and post and those who unknowingly download those texts, often claim that they have done nothing wrong, since “information wants to be free.” Well, it may want to be free; I want to be rich, but my writing is not making that happen—in part because I face competition from those who are willing to give their work away for free. If my work is better than theirs, they still have the advantage of price.
I have not really decided on the rights and wrongs of all this, but I keep thinking about Gresham's Law: Bad money drives out good. With complete freedom of information, will bad information drive out good? It's one more problem to worry about.

Blog of Ages

2009-07-20T14:25:00.000-07:00

I don't suppose that “blog” counts as a new word any more, even if it doesn't appear in Dr. Johnson's dictionary or the first edition of the Oxford English Dictionary. I am told that the first web log appeared in 1994, long enough ago that many of my students have never been conscious of a world without blogs.
The advantage of the blog over the old-fashioned diary, of course, is that you don't have to wait until you're famous and dead (or at least dead; the diary might make you famous) before your thoughts are available to millions of people. And most blogs are, like most diaries, the boring everyday thoughts of people who are fundamentally uninteresting.
A few blogs, perhaps several hundred out of the millions on the Internet, cover particular topics interestingly, and even fewer are the models of interesting minds at work.
This mode of journaling is not entirely new. The medium is new, but not the idea of recording for the public what you happen to think about various issues. A newspaper column is a form of blog, even when it is not (as this is) posted on the Web. Some newspaper bloggers have become famous and influential for their writings, from Walter Winchell to Grantland Rice to Walter Kerr, influencing how Americans thought about politics or sports, or what theater they saw.
Ultimately, all of us bloggers, in print or newer media, are the children of Samuel Johnson and The Rambler. It's true that Johnson himself considered himself the successor to Addison and Steele's Spectator, and he was correct in that The Rambler came out regularly (twice a week; The Spectator was a daily) and consisted of a single essay in each issue. But The Spectator was not the work of a single hand, was intended to provide material for polite conversation, and took on something of the form of a collection of short stories.
The Rambler, on the other hand, ran to more serious meditations on those issues that seized Johnson's imagination from day to day. The first few in the selection I'm currently reading include the realistic novel, marriage, stoicism, pastoral poetry, sorrow, and biography--not a bad summary of Johnson's interests and life in a few words, and he revisited some of those issues many times. (I know, it omits the dictionary, but I said “not bad,” not “perfect.”)
There are 208 essays in The Rambler, and another 104 in The Idler, written on deadline 1750-52 and 1758-60 (the Idler essays were weekly) in his spare time; he was working on the dictionary and his annotated edition of Shakespeare in those same years. Boswell describes (with some amazement) Johnson dashing off one of those essays in half an hour the day before it was to appear. This is how many blog posts are written today.
Of course, not many of us can dash off a blog post as elegant and well reasoned as most of Johnson's, and mine, at least, take considerably more than half an hour. But even though his have been collected and republished often in the last two and a half centuries, they had the same ephemeral intention as our blog posts and columns.
The difference now, really, is that anyone with an e-mail account can have a blog. Anyone with a web site can “publish” a book. The type of material isn't new (not even hypertext is new), only the medium, and the ability to spew our work out into the unfiltered universe. We've entered a new era in how we think about writing. Are all blogs created equal? How do we deal with the availability of so much information, other than by choosing to ignore whole continents of it?
But I'm out of space. I'll have to revisit this issue later.

Another column from the Freep -- Transported by Words

2009-06-13T12:43:00.000-07:00

I was drifting through the National Automobile Museum in Reno not long ago, and I came to a car that had a landau roof. Nearby, there was an inscription on the wall explaining why a roof that looks like it belongs on a convertible, but isn't, is called a landau, and it occurred to me that there are a lot of odd words in the world of automobiles.

The landau, in fact, was a carriage (first built in Landau, Germany) with a top that could be folded down, and the landau roof we know on cars has an ornamental doodad that looks very much like the hinge on the old landau.

The landaulet was a smaller carriage, a coupé, with the same type of roof. The coupe, as we now spell it (from the French for “cut”), is supposed to be a closed two-seater (unlike my MG, which is open most of the time), although it is commonly used for anything with an uncomfortable rear seat. The coupé de ville is a larger car, enclosed, with an open section for the driver. You've seen them in movies. (This isn't at all what we can now see in the Cadillac pre-owned lot. For Cadillac, “DeVille” was just a trim designation.) The Deuce coupe is a specific model: the 1932 (the “deuce” is for the year) Ford Model B, one of the first V-8's and the original hot rod.

That coupé de ville is one type of a limousine, whose name comes from a supposed similarity of its profile to a type of hood worn in the area of Limoges, France. The similarity to the Limousin hood vanishes when the driver moves into the main cabin of the car, even if he is separated by a window from the passengers. In any case, many of what we now call airport limos are not so luxurious (see “van” in a couple of paragraphs).

The sedan is what the British call a saloon, a car with room for at least two adults each in front and rear. The name has nothing to do with the French city, but comes from the sedan chair, which in turn gets its name from the Italian sede, “chair.” The sedan chair was also once known as a “go-cart.”

Sedans are pretty popular, but in the school parking lot they seem to be outnumbered by minivans. We understand the “mini” part there, but what is a van? Again we can go to the British terminology, where it is called a caravan; we have shortened it, but it is still the sort of vehicle (again, originally drawn by horses) that one might see in a caravan of traders.

Before minivans, of course, suburban moms drove station wagons. I actually saw one of the earliest station wagons in Reno, a wooden motorized coach custom-built for a hotel, so it could meet passengers at the railroad station and carry them up the mountain to the hotel.

A “truck” started as a small wheel, but the meaning got transferred to the small-wheeled cart used to carry heavy loads, and thence to what so many people in the South drive. The “pickup” part comes from the original purpose, to make deliveries and collections (pick-ups). But the “truck” has now made its full circle, in reference to the wheel sets for skateboards. (To be fair, it never lost that meaning on the railroads.)

And finally, when we all get on at once, the omnibus (Latin, “for all”) has shortened itself to bus, sharing a root, if not a route, with the busboy.

The Curse (?) of Cursive

2009-05-29T14:54:00.001-07:00

Grammar buffs—writers, teachers, editors, and copyeditors, all of which I have been—took delight from Kitty Burns Florey's slim volume about sentence diagramming, Sister Bernadette's Barking Dog. It was witty, anecdotal, and well-designed, even if it didn't quite explain how to diagram sentences (although there were examples and enough discussion of the principles to bring much of it back). But its goal was not to teach us how to; it was to remind us that, no matter how well or poorly diagramming works to teach us grammar, a solid knowledge of grammar is useful.

Florey's new book, Script & Scribble (190 pp., $22.95, Melville House) addresses the problem that penmanship seems to be going the same way as diagramming. She claims that many school districts are no longer teaching cursive, replacing it with “keyboarding” (what was billed as “typing” when I took the course in the summer of 1965). We don't write letters, college papers are typed (or keyboarded), and our handwriting gets worse and worse. Doctors are being sued for illegible prescriptions.

Like the last book, this one hangs from the framework of dual histories: that of the process and that of the author's connection to the process. Writing has a longer (and frankly more interesting) history than diagramming, and Florey's discursive approach gives us story and context together. The book's design also highlights her footnotes, which constitute a strong argument for more footnotes in popular writing (unfortunately, one of the numerous production glitches that diminish the pleasures of this book sets the notes and their reference numbers out of sync through most of the first chapter).

While these features are entertaining, they aren't necessary to get us interested in the meat. Most of us don't write well, and most of us don't feel good about it. Most of us (at least most of us of a certain age) were also trained in some variant of the Palmer method (Zaner-Bloser and D'Nealian cursive, popular in Tennessee, are both derived from Palmer). So is the problem with us, or with the people who taught us cursive, or with cursive itself? Should we give up trying to write with anything other than block letters?

Florey combines realism with optimism, so her answer to the last question is no. To the question before that, she says yes: all three factors share responsibility. She gives numerous examples of what even the notoriously difficult Spencerian script can do when taught well to students who apply themselves. But she also realizes that most of us won't put in that much work, since we already haven't. We prefer to think that our illegible handwriting is a sign of how unique we are.

The art of handwriting interpretation comes out of and supports that conclusion. As Florey points out, there is little science to say that graphology works, or how it might work, but that does not stop us from believing in it. However, many of the systems of graphology (and there are nearly as many as there are systems of cursive script) depend on elements that are not universal, such as looping ascenders and descenders. There may be something to it, but I'm afraid that it is, like Florey's discussion of it here, only an interesting diversion.

But many of us really do need to write legibly, and not only doctors and those of us who draft with fountain pens. Florey's entertaining little book cajoles us into a reasonable solution, one that has been tested in school systems and self-education programs. It isn't the latest idea, but it's clear and relatively easy to learn. I, for one, will be trotting off to teach myself how to write the “fine Italian hand” of 16th-century italic.

Assessing the Installation

2009-05-24T12:24:00.000-07:00

(Another column from the Nashville Free Press.)

Since my last column we have installed our new president, and in some circles there is still considerable discussion of the inaugural poem. I am inclined to rate it more highly than other poems that have been composed for the beginnings of administrations (Frost read “The Gift Outright,” a wonderful poem, but had composed for the occasion a poem called “Dedication,” which begins “Summoning artists to participate/In the august occasions of the state/Seems something artists ought to celebrate.” Maya Angelou's and Miller Williams's poems for the Clinton inaugurations are better than that, but not much.). I may think and write more about Elizabeth Alexander's poem later, when I have had time to think about it, but for the moment I am thinking about what we have just done to poor Mr. Obama.
   This is aside from the headline in The Onion, “Black Man Given Nation's Worst Job,” although I certainly agree with that. But what does it mean to be “installed?”
   Originally (the Oxford English Dictionary's first citation is from 1548), this was used strictly for bishops and other churchmen. One of the many advantages of being a bishop is that you don't have to sit in a regular pew with the peasants. You get a special seat, in a row of seats, slightly recessed so that you have walls and armrests at your sides. When you are officially invested with your authority as bishop, you get the right to the bishop's stall. You are placed in the stall (much as at an investment into office you are put in the specific clothing--vestments--of that position, robes and sashes and whatnot).
   Although we (sadly, perhaps) lack an official costume of the presidency (some countries do still have sashes), we do have an official seat. It is not the chair itself--presidents get to pick from an assortment of chairs--but its location in the Oval Office that makes it the boss's chair. The tradition of departing presidents leaving notes for their successors, even if they switch desks, lends this weight. So the new president, after taking the oath, is entitled to do business from the presidential chair in the presidential office.
   Of course, most of what we watched on January 20 was not part of the installation. There were only two elements of all the presentations that had binding value, and they were the administration of the two oaths, for vice president and president. (“Administer,” as you may have guessed, comes from an Anglo-Norman root meaning to officiate at a religious ceremony.) Those oaths constitute the actual inauguration.
   So what does that mean, “inaugurate?” Does it have anything to do with drilling a hole in the ground? No. (That's “auger.”) The Latin root is inaugurare, to read omens from the flight of birds. Before making any change in government, it would only make sense (to a pious Roman) to see what could be divined about the consequences of the change. We may have lost our faith in omens, but 68% of us (according to last year's Pew poll) believe we have guardian angels. Consulting or relying on the supernatural is second nature to us.
Bringing a new president in office is cloaked with words that tie it to a religious rite, a solemn obligation. The words try to remind us of the importance of the moment, of the words of the oath--words so important that they had to be administered twice, you will recall.
   This is all fitting for a man who chooses his words as well and as carefully as our new president. I expect the next four years to give us a lot of language worth thinking about.

How do you like your eggcorns?

2009-05-22T09:29:00.000-07:00

I've recently started writing a column for the Nashville Free Press. Here's the first one.

   The English language is wonderful. The best estimates of the available vocabulary range from about 600,000 to a million words. In the right hands it can make us weep or cry, sometimes simultaneously. And that's without even using all of it, not to mention the new words that are being added daily, such as “misunderestimate.”
    Like any good software, English (and most languages, in fact) has a lot of redundancy built in. We can raed a stencene lkie this one and usrdnenatd it. We can solve acrostic puzzles, using scattered letters and the lengths of missing words to reconstruct a sentence. We can usually guess what the word at the top of the next column or page will be. (Of course, a lot of this is thanks to our amazing brains as well, but this is a column about language.)
    Redundancy doesn't only catch errors and fill in gaps. It also gives us puns and all sorts of wordplay, and mondegreens and eggcorns.
    A mondegreen is the mishearing of a song so that we rearrange the sounds into different words, as with the classic hymn, “Gladly, the Cross-Eyed Bear,” or the Jimi Hendrix lyric, “'Scuse me while I kiss this guy.”
    An eggcorn is similar, but is based on some common word or phrase that we mis-hear and reinterpret in our own way. “Eggcorn” for “acorn” is the eponymous error, and you can see how it almost makes sense.
    Of course, in the modern world we now have machines that can create eggcorns for us. I have a collection of phrases, many from student phrases, and I'm fairly sure that some of them--”a girl fried” and “a calibration of life,” for example--come from excessive reliance on spelling checkers. (Let me interject a favorite peeve here: While I sometimes check my spelling, I rarely make a mistake with my spells, and never do them on the computer. I do not use a spell checker.)
    Many of the best eggcorns, though, come out of creative ignorance. George Orwell, in his classic essay “Politics and the English Language,” complains about some of the early sightings, such as “tow the line,” which appears to have something to do with barges rather than the orderly disposition of feet. The very best open up new lines of meaning for us to think about. The young man who complained about the “pre-Madonna” on his football team had a vague sense of what he meant to say, but the gaps in his knowledge let pop-culture and classical religious iconographies seep in. The student who was “knocked incautious” may well have been a poor speller, but has also introduced a new understanding of human behavior.
    At their finest, eggcorns approach poetry. They offer alternative interpretations, giving us a deck from which we can launch our own creativity. In fact, I've already written six poems based on my collection. (To be honest, the first wasn't based on an eggcorn, but on this line from a final exam: “Writing, for me, is a way of putting my thoughts on paper.” That's an idea that gives a writing teacher a warm glow of achievement.) I take them all literally, as though the original authors knew what they were saying. Literalism isn't often the best approach to poetry, but it's working for me.
    I do have an interesting sense of conflict about this. I'm getting good material from these mistakes, but one of my day jobs is to teach students not to make them any more. If my campaign ever succeeds, and I get people to think before they commit their words to paper, I'll run the risk of running out of ideas for this series of poems. On the other hand, I've already got dozens stockpiled. That should last me, at the very least, through my summer vocation.

Marina Pessl

2007-08-07T15:02:00.000-07:00

When Special Topics in Calamity Physics first came out, I read some of the reviews, and they made the book sound interesting. When I could get a copy from Audible.com, therefore, I invested a credit (and the very long time it takes to download a book on my dialup service.

As it happens, I was in Borders Books the other day (it's right next door to the Vanderbilt benefits office, and I'm a new Vanderbilt employee), and saw a copy on the rack, and took a look at the flap copy. It says the book is a satire. I like satire, so I went ahead and listened to it.

(All right, that's not exactly true. I had already started listening, and was wondering when the story was going to start developing. But I decided to think of it as a satire and give it the benefit of the doubt. After all, satire doesn't operate by the same rules as, say, Robertson Davies. We don't necessarily expect complexities of story and characterization from satire.)

So I kept on listening, while feeding the dogs and driving around in the MG (and it isn't so easy to listen to a book in the MG) and so on, and I tried to get involved in this young woman, Blue, and her tribulations. And it was all tribulations. Aside from possibly developing a crush on one of the teachers at her new school, everything was unpleasant for her. She had no friends, and the group at school into which she was drawn didn't seem to like her very much; well, she wasn't very likable, so who can blame them?

Blue is pretty sure she is smarter than everyone else she knows, except possibly her father, who is just as obnoxious and has raised her to be just what she is. She doesn't seem to hide this attitude, except amid the aforementioned group, when she is almost totally silent. So what's to like?

And of what is it supposed to be a satire? Wealthy, over-achieving high school students? They aren't important enough to me for me to be interested in a satire of them. Besides, I didn't get a laugh out of the first half of the book.

Which is about as far as I got.

But it did get me interested in the nature of satire. After all, one of the qualities of Jane Austen, whose Northanger Abbey I will be teaching this semester, is her satire on her own (small, defunct) society and its attitudes toward fiction. Those are hardly current concerns for me. But Austen makes them imminent for me, in large part because she makes me care about her people. (You can't worry too much about her plots; usually the resolutions have no surprises.)

Similarly, Wodehouse can be read as a satire of upper-class life (or a certain strain of it) in an England that was dead long before he stopped writing about it. (I'm currently listening to Jeeves and the Mating Season.) But Wodehouse is a hoot, and Bertie is so naive that we can't help a certain fondness for him. (This can be dangerous; I had to stifle a laugh in the dentist's chair today.)

Pessl, although her writing is lively (she's very good at verbing), never got me to care about anyone in the story. Now, I know people of about that age, if not of the same social class (I may meet some this semester at Vandy, but they don't come my way outside the classroom, and I didn't run into any at TSU). They don't seem to have the same problems as Pessl's characters, and they surely don't have the same flat personalities.

I think you can get away with flat characters if the satire is broad enough or funny enough or topical enough. But while "no one appreciates just how wonderful I am" is a pretty universal adolescent problem, and one that is fairly easy to make fun of, but it doesn't sustain a novel very well.

I get the feeling that I'm missing something, but it may just be that, like most television today, I'm just not supposed to get it. It's for younger people, and I can go suck eggs.

Polyp

2006-08-09T07:57:00.000-07:00

So, I went in for my semi-regular physical, and Doc Trilby (as we call her around our house; she's the Primary Medical Care Officer, or whatever they call it, for both adults in residence) asked, just in passing, "Have you ever had a colonoscopy?"

I don't care how you ease it into a conversation. This is not a casual question. In fact, a couple of decades ago I had a sigmoidoscopy, where they just look at the lower parts of your bowel, and it was one of the most uncomfortable experiences of my life. Not painful, just uncomfortable. Intensely uncomfortable.

But I can just barely still count myself as being in my mid-fifties, and I should have considered the possibility of colon cancer starting about seven years ago. I am happy enough in this marriage that I'd rather stay alive, so I need to have my insides checked out.

All right, I'm not the first person I know who has had this procedure, and by the time I make the appointment I know pretty much what is going to happen, but the prep is simply not a lot of fun. For those of you who have not had the pleasure, this involves making your lower intestines nice and clean for the camera. You don't eat anything the day before the procedure (which is why so many of them are scheduled for the morning), and starting at 3 in that afternoon you start taking laxatives -- in my case, one of them mixed with 64 ounces of Gatorade.

It worked very well, let's say. The pictures are nice and clear and clean.

I was scheduled to arrive at the hospital at 9 and be done by 11:30 or noon. Then we would go out to Monell's, a boarding-house style all-you-can-eat restaurant that is in any case a favorite of ours. When one of us is especially hungy, it is an even bigger favorite. But, even though the procedure only takes about twenty minutes, when 10:30 came around and I was still waiting in the prep room, we started to suspect we were not going to be eating at noon. At least the nurses let Judy and Hinda in to keep me company.

Finally, someone came by to say that they would wheel me in in about twenty minutes. Then she came back almost right away to say that there had been a change of plans, and I was going then. Fine. Let's get this thing over with.

As the orderly rolled me in, I heard the doctor talking to the escort of the woman whom he did just before me. Something about ten or so polyps, all of which were removed. Urgh. I hadn't actually counted on that.

So they wheeled me into the room, checked my name and procedure for the umpteenth time, rolled me onto my side, and put the sedative into the IV. After that I have a vague memory of seeing a TV screen with a picture of my bowels and the words, "large, but only one." Then I was waking up.

Yes, there was a polyp. Large (ten to twenty millimeters), but only the one. Pediculated, which I'm told is a good sign. The doctor snipped it off right there and hauled it out, which meant that I could not go to Monell's for lunch. I was allowed only soft and bland foods for the rest of the day (they can't put a Band-Aid on the wound, after all). There are worse fates: there is a good Middle Eastern restaurant not far from the hospital, so I had rice and baba ghanoush.

I'm still not allowed any alcohol until Friday or so, but I got a call from the doctor last night: the biopsy came back negative, with no signs of cancer. Another doctor, a friend of ours, mentioned that if you leave them alone, nearly all intestinal polyps will, in time, become cancerous, so you do want them taken out.

Peter Carey

2005-09-25T16:50:00.001-07:00

I had wanted to read My Life as a Fake for a while, and then it turned up as a discount audiobook at Daedalus Books (I heartily recommend the Daedalus catalogue; I've even been to their store in Maryland, as part of the preparatory work on my wedding. No, really, we made a point of getting to the store and inviting one of the people there to the wedding. We also bought a lot of books, of course.).

The idea is fascinating: a grumpy poet writes a pseudonymous parody of modern styles, which is acclaimed as genius, and then the poet shows up. It's based on a real literary hoax, well known in Australia (you can Google "Ern Malley," and Carey uses the Malley poems as those of his hoax poet, Bob McCorkle), and the story is framed by the narration of an editor, Sarah Wode-Douglass, who is also after the poems and has a few levels of fakery of her own.

Almost everyone here is lying about something. Wode-Douglass has managed to delude herself about her mother's death; John Slater (old family friend and the man she has blamed for said death) has kidded the world along about his own talents, and he insists on a couple of false truths about Christopher Chubb and Chubb's daughter; Chubb is the mediocre poet who created McCorkle and the original McCorkle poems, who has given up claims to the truth but still wants it to be told; Chubb's daughter, if she is his daughter, denies his parentage and claims she is pure McCorkle; and McCorkle, who is dead as the story is told and may never have existed at all, claims to have come into being without a childhood, at the moment of the creation of the original poems. Underneath all this is a new trove of McCorkle poems, always held just out of view but attested as brilliant by the two people who claim to have seen it.

I'll admit that the obvious Frankenstein connection didn't come to me at first, but it is obvious once it's pointed out. McCorkle is preternaturally tall, elementally strong, always out of his element, seeking a place -- and family -- that cannot be purely his own. He and his creator try to destroy each other and, arguably, both succeed. But while that is an interesting and perhaps important perception, it isn't, in my opinion, Carey's fundamental concern.

Creating a work of art is, at its bottom, lying. Art makes sense of the world, yet the world really doesn't make any sense. Christopher Chubb lies about his poetry, attributing it to someone else, and no one believes he wrote it because it's so much better than anything he's written. The truth doesn't matter, in one sense, as long as the art is good. Did Chubb write it? Did McCorkle? Has Wode-Douglass fabricated the whole episode? The answer to all questions is no, of course: Ern Malley (or his creators) wrote the poems, and Carey fabricated the rest. As an early critic asked, "What is truth?"

dmh

Updike, Run

2005-09-25T16:50:00.000-07:00

I'd managed to go a long time without reading Rabbit, Run. I hadn't been avoiding it, mind. I've enjoyed all of Updike's short fiction that I've read, and I've even taught "A&P," and I've enjoyed his poetry (although I don't think it's really first-rate), and I liked Memoirs of the Ford Administration more than I expected. But the book that put him on the map had fallen under my personal radar. Well, a lot of my current reading is aimed at filling in gaps like that.

The book is definitely an artifact of the Fifties. So much of the behavior and attitudes on which the story depends is tied to that post-Korea era, with memories of World War II still fresh, and the strains on and of family life being forced to the forefront of the American consciousness. But the heart of the book is in that strain, and the way it worked on some people not as freedom from the difficulties of the war years (two wars in rapid succession, after all; we think of WW II as long, but it was four and a half years, not long by current standards, and the time between the two wars was about as long as the war had been; one measure is that many men served in combat in both wars) but as a prison. For Rabbit Angstrom, family life and its expectations, and his own expectations, are a prison.

Of course, part of Rabbit's problem is that he hasn't yet grown up. He has no way of connecting with the world outside his own desires, no sense of what he wants for himself. He is, despite being a veteran and a father, unformed. Like so many American men then and since, he has no idea of how to be a grown-up on his own. All he knows is that the old rules no longer work. He has, pointedly, declined to join his father in the print shop. He's lighting out for the territories, but there is no frontier any more, and the unexplored lands are not in Pennsylvania -- they're in the unformed soul of Rabbit Angstrom.

It's hard to like Rabbit. He's a guy who twice runs out on women who are pregnant with his children, and though he does go back to one of them, he runs away from her twice more. He lacks ambition -- and I don't mean ambition in wanting to make a lot of money or to make a good career, but an ambition to define himself. Nonetheless, I did feel sorry for him, and felt the poignancy of his inability to commit to any kind of stability.

I suppose now I'll have to read the other books about him.

dmh

Wodehouse

2005-08-11T12:03:00.000-07:00

I suppose I've read Cocktail Time four or five times, now. When I was active on the Wodehouse newsgroup, I used the "nom de Plum" of Howard Saxby (many participants use the names of Wodehouse characters), the literary agent in this novel. I can't count how much of his other material I've read. In fact, I was (for about a year) his literary agent (although he was dead at the time).

While there is endless pleasure in reading Wodehouse, he doesn't get much attention in the academy. I have to admit that there isn't a lot of depth in most of his characters; not Uncle Fred (the Earl of Ickenham and central figure in the work at hand) nor Bertie Wooster nor any of the residents of Blandings Castle ever change much. Once we know them -- and we can know them pretty well in the first chapter or two in which they appear -- we know them forever. The plots are not based on serious human problems; Cocktail Time is based on the author of a best-selling trashy novel needing to keep his identity secret so he can still run as a Conservative candidate for Parliament, with Ickenham's godson's need for five hundred pounds, to buy off his old nanny so she will get married and leave his employ so he can marry his fiancee without her having to be bullied by the nanny, as a major subplot. These are not exactly universal themes.

Nor are they meant to be. But they limit how much there is to be said in the classroom about the motives of the characters and how this relates to our own lives and all that other stuff that
we teachers rely on to keep us going for a full period. Pleasure is just not sufficient for academic attention. (This doesn't mean that academics don't read Wodehouse. I was arriving on campus once and was accosted by the head of the writing program, who complimented me on my hat. I told him I had gotten it from James Lock, in London, which meant nothing to him until I explained that they were treated in Wodehouse as Bodmin's of Jermyn Street, and he knew exactly what I meant.)

But on this re-reading of my favorite Wodehouse novel (probably because it has to do with writing and publishing, as so few of his books do), and possibly because I was reading it aloud, I realized that there is, in fact, something to say about (and learn from) Wodehouse.

He really is a master of static characterization, which is not as useless a skill as you might think. Anyone writing a series, or a certain type of comedy, can make use of it. And his static characters can be thought of as moments in a changing character. Granted, he never gets very deeply into, for example, Lord Ickenham's need to interfere in the lives of those around him, but the collection of quirks and attitudes (and typical quotations) gives us a detailed picture of the surface. Each character has a voice, if we pay attention, and we can often tell who is speaking without tags (which is just as well, since Wodehouse doesn't use tags much; there are big chunks of text without any attribution at all, so that when you are reading aloud you must learn to do voices).

Plum was also a master of the construction of scenes. Each chapter of Cocktail Time is a coherent scene, much like a scene in a stage play (of which he wrote, after all, a great many). It does not always have unity of setting, but it always focuses on a single character's actions and thoughts. If the emphasis is transferred to another character, another scene (and another chapter) begins. With as many major characters as Wodehouse has (in this book we have Uncle Fred, Beefy Bastable, Beefy's sister Phoebe Wisdom, Phoebe's son Cosmo, Fred's godson Johnny Pearce, Beefy's butler Albert Peasemarch, and the American confidence trickster Oily Carlisle, all of whom are at least briefly viewpoint characters), this gives the book a reader-friendly organization. I haven't really analyzed the scene structure of the book, but I daresay it could be charted profitably.

Now, all this doesn't help us much in understanding the action and its deeper implications. Wodehouse seems to have lived in fear of deeper implications, and shunned them vigorously. But it does help us as writers in understanding how to handle complex plots (and even in his short stories, Wodehouse uses complex plots) with lots of important characters. Many of us don't really understand scenes, but he sure did.

So Wodehouse's place in academia is rather paradoxical: not of much interest for literature courses, but invaluable for creative writing courses. And I don't think he'd mind at all.

dmh

Eminent Victorian

2005-07-16T10:44:00.000-07:00

There aren't a lot of Victorian novels (at least among the ones I've read, not an extensive sampling) that treat working-class people as real. Dickens's workingmen are sympathetic, but I never quite believe them. They are standing in for principles more than they behave as real people. (I find that his upper-class people have the same failing.) Trollope's people are human to me, if slightly alien, but they are rarely working-class. There are a few clerks, and a risen workman in Dr. Thorne, but no one who works a farm other than the occasional farmer-earl. Eliot has Silas Marner, an artisan, but I've read only the one novel. And Becky Sharp can be considered a working girl of a sort, but her ancestry is genteel.

Thomas Hardy, on the other hand, isn't so interested in the gentry. The mayor of Casterbridge has ascended from, and returns to, manual labor. There are gentry in Tess of the D'urbervilles, but Tess is not really one of them. The "upper classes" in Far from the Madding Crowd, the book at hand, are tenant farmers. Gabriel Oak may be somewhat stylized by modern standards, but he has authentic human feelings and motives. His love for Bathsheba Everdene is a literary conceit, but so is most literary love. What is more important is that we never doubt that he is the kind of man who can see a woman, decide to marry her, and stand by that decision forever.

Of course, this being a Victorian novel, we know from about the second chapter how it is going to end. In sensation novels or gothics, there might be surprises, but not in Hardy. (There are some minor surprises here and there, as in The Mayor of Casterbridge when we find out about the daughter, but in general we know how things are going to work out from pretty early on. Trollope, in I forget which of his novels, apologizes for bringing in something that some readers might not have anticipated. We are there for the pleasure of the journey, not to find out what is at its end.) So we know that, somewhere in the last chapter or two, Gabriel will marry Bathsheba. The question is not whether her first husband will disappear, but how, and how permanently.

I suspect that for women readers the main character is Bathsheba, in fact. For me, and possibly for most men, it is Gabriel. Much of the story really does focus on her, but Gabriel's constant backgkround presence keeps us up to date on his story as well. Each has obstacles that must be dealt with before they can get together, but the challenges are very different (even though they are, in a sense, the same: Gabriel must overcome Bathsheba's romantic inclinations and entanglements through perseverance, and is on the verge more than once to give up and move out of the county). His presence, then, is mostly passive, on the fringes of her story. He is active in small ways while she makes the grand gestures: she gives up all for a grand passion, sacrifices herself for duty, and eventually grows into a recognition of the value of mature love (that is, love that is based on merits and something beyond physical attraction; the book is unusual among Victorian novels -- granted it is late Victorian -- in acknowledging the sometimes destructive role of physical passion in forming alliances in a world that lacks ready access to divorce). All right; I guess that means Bathsheba really is the main character. She grows and changes, and Gabriel works hard and perseveres. Not the same thing at all. Still, he's rather endearing.

dmh

Walker Percy

2005-07-13T09:40:00.000-07:00

What is it with Walker Percy? I get so much pleasure from reading his books -- I've just finished Lancelot and have read Love in the Ruins and The Second Coming -- but I come away from them vaguely dissatisfied.

Part of the problem, of course, is the strong theistic, even Christian, tenor of much of his concerns. As time goes on, I have less and less sympathy for these themes in fiction. Even Graham Greene's The Power and the Glory galled me somewhat, and a lot of people consider that a masterpiece.

But there's a lot more going on in Percy's fiction than people dealing with faith. In Lancelot it's a minor theme at most, at least on a surface reading. (Of course the novel is about redemption, but not in conventional religious terms, even though the book takes the form of a confession to a priest. And there's a sense in which he isn't redeemed, because he gets away with murder at the end.) I wouldn't go so far as to say that his people are real, but they are believable without being realistic. His main characters are exaggerated for comic and dramatic effect, yet they are still sensibly human. Even when I lose sympathy with them for their religiosity, I enjoy their company.

Living in the South may have something to do with this. As a transplanted Yankee, I appreciate the way Percy plays with Southern stereotypes (although I suppose native Southerners appreciate it, too), exploring their truths and falsehoods, strengths and weaknesses. He examines the relationships between various stereotypes as they play out between humans, without forgetting that they are humans, and that real human characteristics have contributed to the construction of the stereotypes. And if the characters' problems are not strictly realistic, Percy has earned our indulgence by giving us living stereotypes.

So there is, as I said, great pleasure in the reading. It's the endings that leave me cold. The Second Coming managed all right, resolving questions of faith and love and survival with gentle humor and the promise of a new start. Love in the Ruins, on the other hand, plays with science fictional tropes and builds up to what is supposed to be an apocalypse, but the disaster fizzles out. This works within the definitions of the main character and his story, but it leaves the reader with unfulfilled expectations. The world is changed at the end, and the hero is transformed through love, but none of the transformations have come about through the cataclysm that the whole book leads to. That proves to have been more or less an afterthought.

Likewise, in Lancelot, we expect some consequence when Lancelot finally gets around to describing how he murdered his wife, but there isn't any. He is released from the institution where he has been confined, apparently sane enough to function in the world. Yet from what he describes, he is guilty of murder and sane enough to stand trial. Yes, he is rejected by the other patient, with whom he has been having a fantasized romance, but otherwise he is a monster set loose on the world, preaching a repellent social doctrine (I don't know if Percy expected it to be sympathetic, but it certainly wasn't to me) and unrepentant over killing human beings.

I just hoped for more after all that charm.

dmh

Honest Abe

2005-07-06T12:47:00.000-07:00

For years, I've been using the Gettysburg Address as part of my unit on the persuasive essay. It's hard to top, and it works nicely with some of the other texts I use: the Declaration of Independence, "Self-Reliance," "Resistance to Civil Authority," and "Letter From Birmingham Jail." It's even short enough that I can read it to the class, removing all those problems about the students not having read the text.

It's a wonderful bit of writing, and I long ago stopped believing that nonsense about Lincoln having scribbled it out on the train on his way to the ceremony. This is a polished text by a master, not an improvised (or divinely inspired) first draft. I did, however, accept the myth that the newspapers, the next day, considered Lincoln's remarks as just an unmemorable footnote to Edward Everett's oration. I even mentioned it in class, along with a very brief precis of Gary Wills's argument, drawn from dimly remembered reviews of his Lincoln at Gettysburg.

But now I've read that book, and I'm going to have to change my approach. For one thing, a lot of newspapers got the text (or a text; there's some dispute over exactly what Lincoln said that day) from the Associated Press. For another, many of those newspapers recognized it immediately as a significant statement.

My basic premise, that Lincoln used the occasion to redefine both the war and the nature of the republic, still holds, although now I've got a better idea of what was really involved. I also now have a better idea of how the idea of the occasion came about (there was no previous national cemetery, after all). I also have a sense of the relationship between the two major speeches of the day, Everett's and Lincoln's, and what happened to our memory of Everett as an orator.

In fact, that style of oration was a way of recreating the historical moment. Everett specialized in battle stories, telling them on the spot (as at Gettysburg) as a way of making sense of the action and explaining their importance. (The record doesn't seem to show whether he really understood Gettysburg as the turning point in the war; he may have.) Lincoln explained the importance of the war (changing the importance of it; what does he say in the speech about slavery?) and of America. It was a masterful performance by both men, even if we only remember one of them.

The book is also a masterful performance by Wills. It isn't easy to write a book about less than a page, without overwhelming the original text. But Wills recognizes his job and does it well. He provides context as well as analysis, knowing that most of us don't really have the history at the tips of our fingers.

dmh

Roberston Davies

2005-07-06T07:35:00.000-07:00

I wrote a longish post yesterday about The Deptford Trilogy, very interesting and thoughtful, and then lost it before it saved. I won't bother trying to reconstruct it. The gist was that the concerns of faith and redefinition -- through the major characters in the trilogy, all of whom redefine themselves in some major way including new names -- mesh here, as both are ways of making a connection between the self and the general world; a connection, that is, that makes sense and that makes continued thinking existence possible. But since the point of these entries is to reach the conclusions, now that I've reached it, I have no interest in working out again how I got to it.

You'll just have to take my word that it was interesting. If you've read Davies, you won't have to take my word that the books were first-rate. If you haven't, you're missing something wonderful.

dmh

Anne Fadiman

2005-06-26T08:08:00.000-07:00

My, I have been away for a while. I've still been reading all the time, of course, but I haven't had time to update the blog. So let's pick up with Anne Fadiman.

She is, of course, the daughter of Clifton, and former editor of The American Scholar, and a nifty essayist in her own right. (Two of her essays appear in the Composition 1 textbook we use at TSU.) Listening to her book, Ex Libris, is (for me, at least) much like sitting down with a new friend and trading stories, except that she doesn't hear any of mine. One small part of this is that she mentions in passing one of her friends, a writer who did some work for me when I was in packaging. But there is much more than that.

Fadiman grew up wit books and with the love of books, and the love of writing and its tools. She explores that relationship, between reader (and sometimes writer) and text, in the essays in this book. These are not essays that challenge us; as I mentioned above, I listened to this book, and had no trouble (as I did with, say, Walden) having to stop the recording so I could think about the implications of what she had written. They are, however, enlightening in small, resonant ways.

Her essay about writing bad sonnets, for example, taught me that William Kunstler wrote bad (or mediocre) sonnets, but also helped express why those of us who don't have the gift for formal poetry still mangle the form sometimes. (And there's nothing wrong with that, as long as we don't try to impose our work on others.) And it also explores why anyone should bother with sonnets at all (quoting one that I have used in the classroom, Wordsworth's "Nuns Never Fret").

You don't come away from this with the feeling that she's brilliant (although she really is; writing of this ease and resonance and intellectual breadth is not easy) but with a sense that she is just a little luckier in her family and a little better read than the rest of us. And if some of the people she mentions talking to are not so much Peter Lerangis (our mutual acquaintance) as William Shawn, well, someone has to have those experiences we dreamed about. At least she is willing to share them with us as a peer.

dmh

Sophomore slump?

2005-06-15T11:32:00.000-07:00

It is rather a truism that some very fine authors, especially those who make a real impression with their first books (and it's interesting how many well-known authors didn't do that, or whose first books are now forgotten), don't do quite so well with their second. It sounds obvious, but it has been characterized as "sophomore slump," and it may, after all, be common enough to deserve a name. Some avoid it by publishing their second novel first (Pynchon, for example, wrote V after The Crying of Lot 49, even though they were published in the reverse order. Of course, no one would have accused him of slumping in his second book had they been published as written.)

Don DeLillo is now pretty well recognized as a genius, but you wouldn't really know it from his second book. (I admit that it's the only book of his that I've read so far.) It's a nice book, even a good book, but not a work of genius. I'd prefer to call it a work of attempted genius.

End Zone is an interesting read now, thirty or so years after it was first published. The hero, a college football player of limited commitment (he has been drifting down from Big Eight schools to a small college in West Texas), is obsessed with the doctrines of nuclear warfare and deterrence. Thirty years ago, this was part of public policy discourse. Thirty years ago, we assumed that nuclear weapons were the province of big powers (plus France, of course). Mutual Assured Destruction made some kind of sense. Not so much, now. North Korea's strategic nuclear goals are not to destroy the U.S. in case of an attack. (What those goals really are is open to debate, if not psychoanalysis.)

With our view and fears of nuclear war dramatically changed since the Seventies, the book seems almost quaint in that respect, and the connections between football and American militarism are either trite (seen from the left) or discredited (seen from the right). So perhaps it is not so much that DeLillo failed in this book as that time has passed it by. Certainly the issues he was looking at then (the global issues, that is; not the personal issues that form the heart and motivation of the book) seemed at the time to be lasting and universal.

(They are, of course, but the vocabulary of their discussion has shifted so much that this book seems quaint. I would not say that American militarism is no longer a matter of debate, or nuclear warfare; rather, we are using new metaphors for them. The underlying reality of nuclear warfare has also shifted from superpower-vs.-superpower to "asymmetric" conflict in which the destruction of all life, or at least the transformation of human civilization, is not a necessary result.)

So the great social and cultural hook from which much of the book hangs has been removed, and the protagonist-football player must stand on his own, outside his cultural context. But he is an exploration of his context. Without it, he is just a football player in a book that focuses more on training and practice than on games (there is really only one game in the book). He does complete the season (an accomplishment for this player), but the changes that come in part as a result of that seem metaphorically tied to the times, so his own story does not survive the metaphor shift in the global discourse.

dmh

Ethan Canin

2005-04-19T09:19:00.000-07:00

Ethan Canin has been getting some pretty good notice, so when Carry Me Across the Water became available at Audible.com I figured I would give it a shot. And now I'm not so sure I understand what all the excitement was about.

I'm not saying, mind, that it was a bad book. It's a good book, in fact. It just isn't a great book. By now it's a few weeks since I listened to it, and it isn't resonating in my head, which is one of the ways I can tell how good a book is. There have been a few in the last year or two that didn't leave a glorious first impression but that lingered in my imagination.

Canin tells a big story in this novel, and one with a lot of resonance within itself -- anti-Japanese racism, Jewish identity and anti-Semitism, the nature of love and committment, and more. The viewpoint character is an older man, born in Germany, who came to America as a teenager, served in the Pacific war, married a shicksa, and became a wealthy brewer in Pittsburgh. The backstory is pieced together in memories, more or less in chronological order, tying the reconstruction, in America, of his German life (where his family was also wealthy), with his troubled memories of the war. He is in the last stage of his life, past 75, and has not done badly with his life. He has, however, killed (probably) two men.

Morally, he is probably in the clear on both killings. One was during the war, the other a petty gangster who threatened him, his family, and his business. Of the two, the one that bothers him now is his work as a soldier. This is all nicely done. He has regrets, some of them not the usual, and he makes efforts both to conceal and resolve them. And yet, at the end, I was left unsatisfied.

Now, I don't need a neat resolution to enjoy a novel. I hope that my own novel doesn't have a pat ending. Nevertheless, when the protagonist (I read this long enough ago that I forget the name) finds his act of atonement and resolution, I felt a letdown. Was that all? What had troubled this man so much for so long should have required a more dramatic climax, and should have tied better to the many small problems that had been building through the book.

dmh

The Honourable Schoolboy

2005-04-12T08:42:00.000-07:00

Despite the disapproval of my favorite graduate school advisor, I have long admired John Le Carre for his imagination and craft. The opening of The Looking-Glass War, for example, is a master class on how to open a novel that is about, as so many of Le Carre's novels are, trying to understand the world from insufficient information. It introduces the subject by providing the reader with more information than the characters will have until the very end (when George Smiley shows up, in what is not a Smiley novel, to enforce reality on the others), thus emphasizing the importance of sufficient data.

The Honourable Schoolboy is, on the other hand, a Smiley novel, and not even Smiley has all the necessary information. It starts not long after Bill Haydon (Smiley's old comrade, Lady Anne Smiley's old lover) has been exposed as a Soviet mole, and the Circus (the otherwise nameless intelligence organization that is the matrix for most of Le Carre's books) is in disarray. Old operatives must be reactivated, including some who were chucked out by Haydon because they were effective and some who were chucked out because they were not. It's hard to tell which are which, sometimes. (Incidentally, I've never worked out a complete chronology of the Smiley books, but this site: http://www.robotwisdom.com/jorn/smiley.html claims to have it.)

That's the espionage background. But a LeCarre novel is never just about espionage. It is about character. First, there is the constant evolution of Smiley, from the wistful retired grass widower of Call For the Dead and A Murder of Quality to the semi-triumphs of the Karla novels, where he finally entraps Haydon, ruptures (apparently irrevocably) the relationship with Anne, and finally lands Karla himself, to the elegies of The Secret Pilgrim. Then there are the portraits of the other spies (and nearly everyone in these books is a spy of some sort). In this case the spy at the heart of the matter is one Jerry Westerby, retired by Haydon but never a full-time agent. He's a journalist becalmed in rural Italy when he gets the call, and he is thrust into the collapsing American war in Southeast Asia to untangle some of Smiley's always massively complex threads.

What Westerby learns in his espionage is fascinating, but what he fails to learn about himself (for he remains, in so many ways, just a schoolboy, despite his approach to middle age) is just as central to the story. It moves forward and back, in flashbacks that show us his entry into the business of espionage while the story is moving him toward his exit. Le Carre might almost have set himself the problem of keeping us interested in a character who doesn't learn much from his experiences. But he does it, and not only by giving us the spy plot. Even though Westerby doesn't change significantly, our perception of him can as we learn more about him. There's a sense, then, in which we become characters in the book, the characters who are changed by the action. Ursula LeGuin managed that in "The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas," but that's a short story. Doing it in a novel (even if this is only part of what the novel is doing) is pretty impressive.

dmh

A. S. Byatt

2005-04-12T08:40:00.000-07:00

For some reason it took me a long time to appreciate Matisse. I used to go to the Museum of Modern Art, in Manhattan, every Saturday, and I learned to love Monet and Picasso and Feininger and many others, but I never had a visceral connection with Matisse. I'm not an artist, of course (at least not a visual one, although I occasionally take a good photograph), and perhaps it takes an artist's eye to see without instruction just how interesting Matisse really is.

Now that I'm much older, I do see that, but it's a mature appreciation without that memory of excitement that I still get when I look at, say, a great Turner. I never had that moment that Gully Jimson had (in the novel; it didn't get into the film of The Horse's Mouth) where he looked at a Matisse and it "skinned [his] eyes." I suspect that A. S. Byatt did have that moment.

Matisse is not at the center of each of the three stories in The Matisse Stories -- his work is clearly near the focus of only one of them -- but the author's love of his work comes through, even where it does not inform.

In the first story, "Medusa's Ankles," Matisse is the painter of a nude, a print of which hangs (for much, but not all, of the story) in a beauty salon where the protagonist has her hair done every week. The story is really about the relationship between this middle-aged, donnish woman and her hair; no, between her and her self-image; no, between her and her hair stylist -- all right, all of those. Byatt never makes reductive analysis easy. She puts us in her characters' heads, and they are people, with the complexities of real and interesting people. The stylist has a complicated love life and ambivalent feelings toward the profession at which he is so good.

In that story, the protagonist has her moment of truth when she looks in the mirror at the redecorated salon and realizes that she looks like a middle-aged woman who has just had her hair done. Her reaction to that, and the events that follow, are satisfying without being pat.

This story also diverges from what I think of as Byatt's great theme (based on this book, The Game, and The Virgin in the Garden, all of her work that I've read): the thorny relationships between art, the artist, and the world. The other two stories come back to that. "Art Work" focuses on three people with very different relationships to their art. One of them, in fact, works in secret, her day job being to clean the home of the other two. That couple met in art school and followed different paths; he paints in the attic of the house, reworking the same subjects and solving different technical problems in each painting, and she has become a design editor for a slick magazine. It is perhaps unsubtle to have their Caribbean housekeeper (spoiler coming up) turn out to be the best artist of them all, but part of the story is about the difficulties of maintaining an artistic vision and commitment, and the commitment that is not a subject of discussion is certainly one that deserves respect and consideration. Not discussing it can be a way of preserving it.

The last story, "Chinese Lobster," puts Matisse and his work squarely at the center. A student accuses her advisor, a famous critic and scholar, of sexual harrassment. The dean in charge meets the advisor over dinner to learn his side of the story. (Nothing improper here; they just have dinner. It's an informal inquiry.) He's a Matisse expert, and her work is a reaction to Matisse and his ideas about women. The conversation ranges freely, but what the two participants have in common (until one of them discovers an additional commonality, which they share with the student, and which gives the story a sudden extra layer of depth) is love of Matisse and Chinese food and concern for balancing the encouragement of possibly revolutionary artists with maintaining some artistic standards. (Not all new ideas are good ones; the student's work consists mostly of smearing Matisse prints with her own feces.) It's an uncomfortable story, not least because we come away from it -- or I came away from it, at least -- with a clear sympathy for the accused professor. We don't want to dismiss the accuser as delusional, or as overreacting to an innocent word or gesture, because that generalizes to all such accusations. But this woman may actually be delusional. And, in fact, Byatt never made me lose my sympathy for the student, even though I ended by disbelieving her.

Well, that's a sign of good art. Now if only I can get to the point where Matisse makes me uncomfortable.

dmh

Life and dogs

2005-04-09T14:43:00.000-07:00

Another disclaimer: I've worked with Daniel Pinkwater, developing a series to be written by other authors, and I commissioned an article from him for a magazine (which is mentioned in passing in the book under consideration), and I bought from him the keyboard on which I'm writing this.

I don't think any of that affects my opinion of Uncle Boris in the Yukon, though. One of the reasons I worked with Daniel was because I admired his work. The flap copy of this book calls him one of the most influential of writers for children, and I suspect he's had a significant influence on writers for adults, as well. He's certainly influenced me.

I won't try to define his humor. If you have listened to All Things Considered long enough, you've heard his commentary. If not, you may have run into Blue Moose or The Wuggie Norple Story or The Snarkout Boys and the Avocado of Death or Young Adult Novel, and if you haven't seen those you should run out right now and rectify the lack.

Uncle Boris is not at the sublime level of those, but it's pretty good. It is a memoir, starting before the author's own birth, of a family's relationships with dogs (and a cat or two). I have heard some of these stories before, probably in one of Daniel's collections of his ATC commentaries, but he has told them anew here, and the context gives them new resonance. Daniel and Jill (his wife, and the illustrator of this slim, pocket-sized hardcover) are (among many other talents) dog trainers, and this book adheres to the premise that the training goes both ways. Daniel, and later Daniel and Jill, learn as much from their dogs as the dogs learn from them. Possibly more, since the Pinkwaters are smarter than most of the dogs. (The last dog profiled, Lulu, is scary-smart.)

But that isn't really the main feeling one takes away from the book. In part, you come away with some of that same feeling I get from Brother Cadfael, of having spent some time in the company of a particularly interesting and articulate (and funny -- never forget that) guy. You have gotten to know him, perhaps not in a Dostoevskian depth, but enough to know you like him. You've gotten to know some of his friends and family (and oy, what a family! Uncle Boris and his Yiddish-speaking sled dog are only the introduction to this family), including a variety of animals. And you've seen some of the ties that bind the family together, even when it's just the two humans and their cats, dogs, and horses.

And, of course, it's just tremendous fun.

dmh

William Gaddis

2005-04-09T13:17:00.000-07:00

William Gaddis is one of those writers I acknowledge as a genius but whom I haven't (or hadn't until recently) managed to read. I've dipped into The Recognitions and JR, but never made much headway; it was good stuff, but required a lot of concentration that I couldn't provide at that time.

Well, I have now finished Agape Agape, and it was not easy reading but it was worthwhile. In fact, I'll probably read it at least once more at some point. Although it's a novella (80-something pages), there is an awful lot going on, and reading it over dinner, interspersed with newspapers and other books, is not the way to keep a grip on it. There are direct references to Nietzche, Plato, Tolstoy, Huizinga, and perhaps a score of others, and indirect ones beyond counting. There is a hint of Lear in the ravings of an old man (and more than a hint in his having divided his property between his three daughters), a hint of Krapp in the grasping for memory, and plenty of stuff that I'm sure I didn't catch.

The appended essay tells us that this short fiction was forged from decades' worth of notes toward a social history of the player piano, and that theme is strong in the book. The links to the Jacquard loom and Walter Benjamin's "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction" are obvious, perhaps, but necessary. Gaddis goes beyond that, of course, to the questions of the authenticity of the artistic experience: if you are operating a player piano, are you making music? This extends to questions of authorship (the unnamed narrator, whose fevered single paragraph makes the whole story, worries that his ideas may be stolen before he can write them down, before he can even create them) as well as audience.

I'm not even sure I can say much more than that, since the text is so dense, so digressive, so difficult. It's not a text to read, but to study, and I haven't done that. (This was my dining room book, not that I have time to study any text that I am not teaching.) But I can tell that it's worth studying, at least.

dmh

The Earthbound Karamazov Brothers

2005-04-03T12:12:00.000-07:00

Some of you may be familiar with the Flying Karamazov Brothers, whose juggling performances are witty and astonishing. I have long wondered about their connection with the Dostoevsky novel, which I had not read until now.

I guess now that the connection is that there are three of them. (Technically, I suppose you could say there are four in the novel, if you count Smerdyakov, but he is never proven to be a son of Fyodor Pavlovitch.) For me, at any rate, The Brothers Karamazov never takes flight.

I suspect that I am just not the right audience for Russian novels. I liked Anna Karenina just fine, and at least a novel's worth of War and Peace (nearly half of the book), and even most of Crime and Punishment. As an undergraduate, I enjoyed a couple of Solzhenitzyns. But the Russian novel, as I am familiar with it, is not only interested in telling a story and making its point, philosophical or psychological or whatever, through the story. It is interested in expressing a philosophical viewpoint, whether the story will bear it or not. The story stops for a while, or makes a detour into irrelevant territory, while the author has the characters sit around and discuss salvation or military strategy or the necessity of God for human (i.e., Russian) civilization, and then we get on with it.

Granted, this means that I like the nice, economical, modern novel. But I do manage to appreciate the English Victorians (or, at least, some of them) as well as Elmore Leonard. I have managed to get to the end of a (short) book by William Gaddis (of whom more later), who is hardly an action novelist. I don't mind a certain amount of digressiveness, but I just can't quite sympathize with chunks that go beyond digression into dissociation. (This will be tested when I listen to Moby Dick sometime later this year. I loved the book when I read it at 16.)

But how digressive is all that stuff in The Brothers Karamazov? Does it tie in closely with the theme of the story, at least? Well, yes, it does. As far as the story is concerned, the whole first section involving Father Zosima is basically static. It introduces the characters and their relationships, of course, but what it mostly introduces is the idea of suffering. The modern version might start just before Father Zosima bows down to Dmitri in respect for the suffering he is about to endure. Except, of course, the modern version would probably cut Father Zosima altogether. His death and premature decomposition propel Alyosha into the secular world, but that is only necessary because he's been living in the monastery. Make him a university student and you don't need that.

But could Alyosha be a university student? He is not worldly, even at the end of the story, and could hardly survive without either his inheritance from his father or the kindness of strangers. Part of the point of the Grand Inquisitor "poem" is the difficulty of being Christlike in the world. Alyosha manages by not being deeply involved in most of what goes on around him, and this would be much less believable in a university student (especially with the contrast of Rakitin, the corrupt divinity student). So let's keep the whole bit with Father Zosima -- but we can cut it down drastically. Dostoevsky is trying to talk not just about suffering here, but about religious politics and the evolution of the orthodox faith, and to him these are intensely important and intensely related issues.

That's where he loses me, of course. Those issues (other than suffering) are not very important to me. The suffering is intense and intensely portrayed, but Dmitri's grief at having to leave Russia is just too Russian for me. (My ancestors were reasonably pleased to be able to leave Russia.) Now, if I were a real scholar I'd probably be a New Historicist, so I'm perfectly willing to look at Dostoevsky in his historical context and in terms of his own goals. And by those, the book is a masterpiece.

I just didn't enjoy it all that much.

dmh

Kenneth Grahame

2005-04-01T17:50:00.000-08:00

Not long ago we adopted the habit -- well, it may be too early to call it a habit -- of my reading to Judy for a while before we go to sleep. The first book was one of my all-time favorites, which she had not read: The Wind in the Willows.

Now, this is not a book that I fell in love with as a child. In fact, as a child I was only aware of the Disneyfied version. (This, along with a passing friendship with Daniel Pinkwater, has led me to teach my students that DisneyCorp. is The Great Satan.) Only as an adult, when I was asked to write a computer text adventure game (a genre now, sadly, dead) about a classic children's book, did I encounter the full text. Since I wound up doing the game on this book, I studied the text pretty closely at the time, and have since used it in a course (Major Literary Types: pick five books you want to talk about in class, and have the students read them). So I was hardly coming to this cold.

Still, the great pleasures of this book persist, no matter how many times I read it. Forget about trying to make sense of the world in which these animals live. Sometimes Toad is treated as a person (he gets service in a pub, and is large enough to drive an automobile), sometimes he is treated as an animal (the barge woman grabs him by one arm and one leg and flings him into the canal). The animals have animal senses and instincts, but Water Rat writes poetry and has a small arsenal in his home. There are no female animals (except, mentioned but not seen, Mrs. Otter). No one works for a living (except the rabbits and mice, who seem to be a peasantry). No, the world of the Riverbank simply doesn't hold together logically. And there's no real reason why it should; it's a fantasy of an ideal life in rural Edwardian England.

Perhaps my long bachelorhood helps me to relate to these animals living happy bachelor lives. (Sex, of course, is simply not an issue.) I immediately connected with Mole, breaking out of his secluded underground life to set the novel in motion, encountering the world with fresh eyes and growing into an accomplished and adventurous animal. (Not that that would be a fair summary of my life, or any part of it.) Mole is, in some ways, an ultimate outsider. He lives underground, for one thing, and is thereby isolated from all who cannot find his home (even he has trouble finding it after a few months away). He knows next to nothing of the Riverbank (where he is soon living) and less about the Wide World and the Wild Woods. He seems to be poorer than the other animals (among the gentry, that is: Rat and Toad and Badger and Otter). He is the outsider coming into the group of friends. And when he and Rat have their encounter with the divine (the central episode of the book), it is Rat who senses most acutely what is happening, and retains contact with it longer (although Mole retains his memory a bit longer). Mole is, until the last chapter, always a little off-balance.

But my ability to relate to a character doesn't make it a great book. The characters do that on their own. They are real people, as well as being real animals (remember, these are animals who are Edwardian gentlemen, not realistic animals). They speak differently, they think differently, and they are clearly individuals. And they behave consistently (well, except for Toad) within an ethical position that the book espouses. (Oh, yes, it's also beautifully written and hugely entertaining.) The book is, quite simply, a paean to pantheistic paganism. Even the carol that the mice sing in the forecourt of Mole's house is not Christian, although it relates to (even depends on, in some ways) Christmas.

And if there were any doubt about the paganism of the book, the great central chapter, "The Piper at the Gates of Dawn," would put it to rest. (One of my great regrets about the game version is that I was not allowed to include this chapter.) (Another is that it was never published, although the coding was completed.) For those who are unfamiliar, here is the rough outline: Rat comes home and tells Mole that Otter is worried about his son, young Portly Otter, who has wandered off. The two friends decide to go out in the boat to look for Portly, and spend a lovely night paying attention to the world as it appears under the stars. As dawn approaches, they are drawn by an indefinable impulse, later with music, to the island near the weir (the most dangerous spot on the river). On the island, they find Portly in the company and under the protection of the great god Pan. They gather the young otter and, in order not to blight the rest of their lives (since nothing can compare to the glory of the divine presence), they are granted the boon of forgetfulness.

And this is no odd quirk. According to a biography I read while preparing for the game version, Grahame was a leader in a paganist movement that had some influence in Edwardian England. (This should not be confused with modern paganism and Wicca. It's more a late Romantic efflorescence.) The whole book is about the essential goodness of one kind of life that is placed in opposition to human life with its jobs and banks and industry and change. The Badger points out that the tunnels to which his home is connected predate not only him, but the human city that once occupied the site. There were badgers there before there were humans, there are badgers now after the humans, and the humans may come and go again. Human history may have its cycles, but nature persists.

I suppose this connects, on a deep level, with my own belief that humanity is just a passing fancy, and that extinction is not too far off for us. Grahame, however, is more optimistic, believing that goodness will survive in the animals, even if we manage to remove it from our own characters.

dmh

Fowler redux

2005-04-01T17:31:00.000-08:00

I realized I wanted to say a bit more about The Jane Austen Book Club, specifically about the nature of the narrator.

The narration seems to be in first-person plural. That is, the narrator occasionally refers to the club as "we." Yet the narrator also seems to have information that is not generally known to the club, including big chunks of members' pasts. And the narrator does not seem to be any of the people named as members of the club. (The different sections of the book focus on, as well as the Austen novels under discussion, individual group members whose lives relate to the novels. This never seems to be the narrator.)

So does this narrator shift from one section to the other? Is it "the club" that is the narrator in some way? Was the book badly edited and copyedited? (That is, was this a goof that wasn't caught?) Or did I just miss something because I was listening rather than reading?

dmh

The Jane Austen Book Club

2005-03-15T08:23:00.000-08:00

I don't actually know Karen Joy Fowler, but we are members of the same organization (The Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America) and know some of the same people. If a disclaimer is necessary, there it is.

The Jane Austem Book Club isn't really about Jane Austen, or even about reading Jane Austen, although the club is at the center of the story and most of the episodes are modeled after the books that the club reads in them. Think of it as an homage to Austen. (A lot of Janeites call her by her first name, much as New Yorkers refer to Woody, but the ladies -- and one man -- in this club take offense at such familiarity.)

And the book has many of the characteristics of the Nineteenth Century novel. There is a series of romantic complications, with roughly predicable results (Trollope, for one, apologizes in one novel -- I think it is The Eustace Diamonds -- for introducing an element that might be a surprise.) No one behaves out of character, and character is the real focus of the story. (I know there are whole other genres of novels in the Nineteenth Century, such as gothic and sensational, but I'm talking about the main line of those books that are still read. No one really reads Mrs. Radcliffe -- besides one of the characters in The Jane Austen Book Club -- and hardly anyone reads Wilkie Collins.)

The book is also informed by the Austenian spirit. It is witty and closely observed, and each character is fully drawn, with a past and present and future all linked by motives public and private.

It does not reach the level of Austen, though. (This is hardly a criticism from someone who considers Austen one of the founding genuises of our craft.) Austen's characters are individuals, yes, but they are people of their time, and by investigating them Austen studies and analyzes her world. The members of the Jane Austen book club are carefully designed to be a cross-section of a particular world -- the woman who has never married, the woman going through a painful divorce, her lesbian daughter, the spinsterish (but married) teacher, the eligible male, the older woman who's had a wild life -- but they don't, for me at least, combine into a portrait of that world. Part of Fowler's problem is, of course, that our world is much bigger than Austen's ever was. She wrote of the rural gentry, and there simply is no such coherent class in modern Sacramento (where the book is set).

Still, I enjoyed the book, and I enjoyed spending time with those people. Fowler shares Austen's clear affection for even the most obnoxious of her characters, and shares that with us. She also enjoys Austen (I find it hard to imagine a serious novelist who doesn't, although I'm sure such must exist) and finding ways that she might fit into our world.

I suspect this may be a book that would reward a more careful reading (I listened to it); at the least, it would be a pleasant way to spend the time.

dmh

Anatole France

2005-03-05T07:51:00.000-08:00

Does anyone read Anatole France any more? Judging by how much of his work is available at Audible.com (where I get my audiobooks), no. There's exactly one title by this Nobel Prize winner, and I suspect it isn't his best.

Of course, there are a lot of Nobelists whom nobody reads today: Bunin, Lagerlof, Laxness, Maeterlinck, Tagore, Sholokhov, and Quasimodo all come to mind, and there are plenty more. (That's only the ones who are not read widely in America. I have no idea if they're in the canon in other countries.) Upstairs, in the anthology section, I have a book of short stories by the Nobelists, so I've read at least one story by a lot of the fiction writers (the book is thirty or forty years old, and could probably use an update), but that isn't the same as being familiar with their work. But at one time they were all considered pretty good, potentially timeless, so they ought to be worth a try.

That was what I was thinking when I picked up Penguin Island. Well, that and that it might have something to do with penguins. I like penguins, as some of you know.

The penguin connection is tenuous. A misguided and nearsighted saint, lost in the north (?), lands on an island inhabited by penguins and baptizes them. After a debate in heaven on the validity of the baptism, God settles the issue by making the penguins human, even though He knows nothing good will come of this. (The alternative is validating the baptism of animals, after all.) After that, it's a parody history of France.

And in that vein, it reminds me of Mark Twain, but with a clearer political leaning. (Twain, of course, is famous for saying, "I belong to no organized political party; I'm a Democrat," but Will Rogers actually said it.) France didn't have much sympathy for Socialists, but some for socialism, at least as far as it favored egalitarianism. He seems to have considered all politicians corrupt.

I suspect that the book would be funnier if I knew more about French history; it was probably even funnier if you read it within five or ten years of its composition. This is the problem with a lot of satire -- it doesn't stay topical over a long period. Even some of Twain's satire falls flat today. But some of Penguin Island is still funny, and the characters are interesting, if somewhat archetypal. I'd read some more France if the opportunity came up.

I'm still working on Phineas Finn and Agape Agape (that's pronounced a-GA-pay a-GAPE), and have now started listening to The Brothers Karamazov. My reading habits at home have gotten a bit stalled, but this is spring break, so maybe I'll get back on track.

dmh

An Excellent Mystery?

2005-02-28T09:09:00.001-08:00

How often does a book include its own review in the title? I can think of Philip Roth's The Great American Novel, and few others. So Ellis Peters sets up some high expectations when she calls one of the Brother Cadfael books An Excellent Mystery.

She does, in fact, violate some well-established rules, although they are the rules of her own books. For example, there is no suspect who is the more suitable but less favored suitor of the woman at the center, as there is in well more than half of the other books.

Unfortunately, the subterfuge is for naught, since I realized well before the deductive monk what had happened to the girl (supposed murdered, since she disappeared three years earlier, around the same time that the mysteriously mute and delicate monk showed up).

Well, I never read these books for the mysteries. I like the settings, I like Cadfael himself and the readers (I actually listen to the books), and I enjoy the details of life in a medieval cloister that reverberates with the civil war between Stephen and Matilda. All that is in place, and if the mystery is no mystery, that is no suprise. But is isn't exactly excellent, either.

dmh

Winter reading

2005-02-27T19:02:00.000-08:00

Apsley Cherry-Garrard was a member of Robert Falcon Scott's expedition to Antarctica. You know the one -- Scott got to the South Pole a month after Amundsen and died on the return trek. Cherry-Garrard (Cherry to everyone but his mother) obviously wasn't one of those who died, since he managed to write The Worst Journey in the World about the expedition. He was part of the support crew that staged Scott on the way out, and he was also part of the crew that found Scott's body -- and those of two of his companions -- the next spring.

And yet his title does not refer to Scott's trek. The worst journey was Cherry's own trek, during the Antarctic winter, to get emperor penguin eggs. It was a three-man trek, with no support depots or any chance of rescue, across unknown (and ultimately very difficult) terrain, under what were then the lowest temperatures anyone had ever recorded. They hauled all the supplies they would need for the six-week trip. No ponies, no dogs, and of course no snowmobiles or anything like that. They got frostbite, and blisters came up, and the liquid in the blisters froze. It took an hour, each night, to thaw out the sleeping bags enough to get into them. As he says, there are some experiences when you start to think of death as a friendly presence.

He does not make himself out a hero for having done this, though. There is ample praise for his companions, but Cherry is modest about everything but his own devotion to science. They really thought they would learn something valuable about embryology and evolution if they got those eggs, and so they went out for them. This is his justification for the whole expedition and the deaths of Scott and his four companions: that they were out there for science. Unlike Amundsen, who led a bare-bones chase to the pole, arriving with one other man, Scott collected geological samples along the way, and set up a base for two years to do research. And it's true that they brought back a great deal of new information, not only about how to survive in those conditions but about weather patterns and the formation of ice and geology and so on.

Yet the strongest memory one takes away from the book, aside from a persistent chill, is that of Cherry himself. He does not place himself at the center of the book, but he is its voice, and he is a young man of few accomplishments and a modesty consistent with that, struggling through godawful conditions with glasses constantly fogged or iced over (he was the only one on the expedition with glasses), full of praise for all the others, and thoroughly admirable and likeable.

dmh

Hiaasen and Pavic

2005-01-29T11:33:00.000-08:00

What do Milorad Pavic and Carl Hiaasen have in common?

Precious little, as it turns out, except that I finished novels by each of them a few days ago, and I found both rather disappointing. I came to both with high expectations -- The Dictionary of the Khazars got terrific reviews when it first came out, regarding both its interesting structure (about which more below) and its language and story. I don't recall reviews of Stormy Weather (the Hiaasen novel I read) in particular, but I've seen good mentions of his work all over, not least in Frazz, one of the comic strips I read.

And there was nothing particularly wrong with Stormy Weather, other than excessive expectations. It's a nice sort-of thriller, with a pleasantly complicated plot and some interesting (mostly quirky, but I can live with that) characters and reasonable twists and interesting language.

So what was there to be disappointed with? Well, the language kept reminding me of a sort of low-key Elmore Leonard, and one thing Leonard does fairly consistently is to challenge our ideas of what is good behavior. This is one of my bugs about fiction -- it is always about what constitutes good behavior or morality. And Leonard makes us think about it. Hiaasen, on the other hand, is pretty straight mainstream moralism. The farthest out he gets is having a major character who is opposed to the overdevelopment of Florida real estate and tourism. There's a touch of vigilantism, too, but the guy to whom it is applied is so ludicrously evil that it's hard to object to his demise (and it's only indirectly the responsibility of the good guys).

The Pavic was more of a disappointment, since I was led to expect a first-rate work of art. It's entirely possible that the book was beyond me, but I'm a fairly smart guy, and I've read a lot, even a fair amount of poetry. The poetry is relevant because Pavic is primarily a poet, and this was his first novel.

If you don't remember the reviews, The Dictionary of the Khazars is presented as not one but three encyclopedias, with entries arranges alphabetically. The conceit is that there is a mystery over the history of the Khazar people and whether they converted to Judaism, Islam, or Christianity. (Historically, there seems no real controversy; they adopted Judaism overwhelmingly but not unanimously, and adopted religious tolerance around the same time.) The three encyclopedias represent the fragmentary knowledge, and the search for further knowledge, among Christians, Muslims, and Jews, in particular about the participants in the supposed Khazar Polemic, where all three faiths were represented. The structure, in fact, is fascinating, and works reasonably well. All the information is there, and we can organize it however we like into whichever story we prefer. I did read the book straight through, but you could also start at any point and browse forward and back, much like hypertext, following associative connections. You might well come away with a different sense of what the story was and what it was about than I did.

So far, so good. But Pavic wants more from this book than amusing structure. He wants to talk about the nature of time and language, and he wants to talk about them in poetic terms. That is, he wants us to perceive them not through direct description but through metaphors. Many of the metaphors, perhaps nearly all of them, are lovely and evocative. But I got overwhelmed by them. Enough was enough, and eventually I was ploughing through them rather than savoring them. There was no solid ground where I could rest my feet while swimming through the poetry, and it lost its meaning for me. I'm glad I read it, but I won't read it again.

Now, on to The Worst Journey in the World and Agape Agape (William Gaddis).

dmh

Sick cat

2005-01-23T08:58:00.000-08:00

When I moved here to Nashville I brought one dog to join my then-fiancee's (now wife's) seven dogs and nine cats. My dog, Jake, moved into the house with me, but Judy's dogs lived in the yard, except on cold nights when we brought them in and put them in crates. The cats all lived upstairs in the very large bedroom with us, and I soon made friends with some of them.

Some, but not all. Bear and Annie curled up next to me in bed on the first night, and Furlough came inquiring and looking for attention the next morning, but the others took their time. One of them, Yoda, has only recently (after about a year and a half) started letting me pet him.

And for nearly a year, our household had a stable population.

Then one of the guinea pigs fell out of the cage when they were being moved. We found her body a week or so later, freshly dead, probably caught by one of the neighborhood dogs.

Then Bear died, and we buried him in the new back yard. Alley Oop joined him a month or so later. And now Guildenstern is sick.

There are two tortoiseshells, Rosenkrantz and Guildenstern (so called because it was so hard to tell them apart), littermates. Guildenstern was always the friendlier of the two. When I would get up to go to the bathroom she would come in with me for a head scratch. By the time I arrived, though, she was already thinner than Rosenkrantz, with a sensitive stomach that required prescription food. She is even thinner now, and the vet says that she is in full renal failure. She may be dead as I write, and hasn't long to go in any case. Last night we forced some fluids into her (subcutaneous injection), and she drank a little from the floor of the shower (her favorite drinking spot), but as soon as the ground thaws I need to dig another hole.

Is Michael Frayn Jewish?

2005-01-13T11:26:00.000-08:00

I ask because one of the issues in Spies, which I finished last night, is young Stephen's Jewish identity. (Stephen is the first-person protagonist.) There's certainly no reason why a non-Jew couldn't write a book involving a Jewish protagonist or inquiring into questions of Jewish identity -- but I can't think of such a book by a Gentile. I suspect that most non-Jews aren't even much aware that there are such questions.
And yet the question is certainly on the table in the literary world. It's one of the fundamental questions of Philip Roth's work (yes, even Portnoy's Complaint, although not The Great American Novel), for one example. Never mind that Jews are a tiny minority of Americans; we are a larger minority of American writers and artists.
Of course, Frayn is a Brit. I'm more familiar with Victorian literature than contemporary British work, and in Victorian novels one finds a casual, thoughtless anti-Semitism. (Not that it doesn't show up in American novels of the same period; Edith Wharton's House of Mirth comes to mind, in which the heroine, toward the end, abases herself to the point of being nice to the Jewish financier.) That doesn't mean it persists. After all, the head of the Conservative Party is Jewish. (That doesn't mean it doesn't persist, either.)
Making Stephen Jewish does make him much more of an outsider than he would otherwise be, and that suits Frayn's purposes (it's also one of the reasons Jews are overrepresented in the arts). I think that makes me even more curious to know whether it was a calculated or intuitive choice.
The book, incidentally, stays marvelous to the end. A final, short chapter adds layers of meaning that slip into place, into the places prepared for them.

Current reading

2005-01-12T11:47:00.000-08:00

I've fallen into the habit of reading three books at a time (not including whatever I'm reading in order to teach it; I teach freshman composition at Tennessee State University lately): one that I listen to in the car and at the gym, one in the dining room, and one in the bedroom. Right now, I'm listening to Carl Hiaasen's Stormy Weather, and reading Michael Frayn's Spies over meals and Anthony Trollope's Phineas Finn at bedtime.
I'm a great fan of Trollope, although I haven't read nearly as much of his stuff as I should. Right now I'm working through the Palliser novels, some of them for the second time. But this time I'm going through them all in order. Phineas Finn is the second in the sequence, for those of you who aren't fans.
Stormy Weather is so far interesting. It's my first Hiaasen except for a couple of his columns that I read when I was waiting for the new Dave Barry to be posted (they both used to write -- Barry has just started an indefinite hiatus -- for the Miami Herald). It reminds me rather of Elmore Leonard -- not a bad thing -- but a little cleaner and a little more surreal. We'll see how it develops.
The big pleasure at the moment, though, is Michael Frayn. I'd listened to his previous book, Headlong, and enjoyed it but was not knocked out. I liked the art history but didn't get caught up in the story so much. But this one, Spies, is a knockout. It's a thin book, maybe 250 pages, but it is about memory and identity and responsibility and is also somewhat of a mystery (only partially solved at the point I've got to). The narrator comes back to England after a long absence in order to discover the meanings of a specific memory, so he's walking around his old neighborhood in the narrative present while also remembering his younger (about 10 or so) self -- in third person -- and trying to reconstruct what that boy, Stephen, knew and when he knew it. We know more than Stephen does, of course, but that only fits with the mode of the narrative. A lot of questions are not yet answered, and may never be -- for example, is Stephen unaware of his Jewishness, or suppressing it? (Or is that something that I'm projecting onto him?)
At any rate, it's not at all the kind of book you'd expect from the author of Noises Off.