Tagged: essays

Grown ups and government

A recent exchange with a couple of YouTube trolls, and a pithy (if slightly snarky) quotation surfaced on Eleanor Arnason’s blog, has me wondering why the grown ups have been so silent about the nuttier anti-government statements coming out of the Tea Party fringe these days.

First, the quote (attributed to John Rogers at Kung Fu Monkey):

Two novels can change a bookish fourteen-year old’s life: The Lord of the Rings and Atlas Shrugged. One is a childish fantasy that often engenders a lifelong obsession with its unbelievable heroes, leading to an emotionally stunted, socially crippled adulthood, unable to deal with the real world. The other involves orcs.

I discovered the orcs first, and I’m very glad of it.

The YouTube exchange came via a 1942 tourism film about Minnesota. (It’s a lovely film, by the way.) A troll by the name of “clvanhove” commented that “this is before many people relied on the government to take care of them. Sad state of this country…. wish I was living back then. People actually knew responsibility and took care of things? themselves.” Despite my policy of not feeding trolls, I answered with a little history lesson about Minnesota’s tradition of good government, which enabled many of the things the film presents (clean lakes, good infrastructure, state parks), and noted that “[i]n a democracy, we ARE the government.”

Another troll responded that “Minnesota is great? due to individual efforts of men eking out a tough fought existence in [sic] less hospitable land” and that “[t]he difference between you and I, is that my beliefs do not ask anything of anybody with the exception that they not deprive me of freedom. Yours demands it. There is nothing more selfish than people who seek? government force to rob their neighbors.”

Goodness! I won’t respond in the comments thread on the film; it’s way off topic, and I feel bad about feeding the first troll. But I do wish that some grown ups would weigh in a little more forcefully about the wave of silly warmed-over Ayn Randianism that has been bubbling up into the mainstream these days.

The fringe Right’s anti-government screeds are a radical departure from almost four centuries of Enlightenment thinking about government and society. By positing an “us” vs. “them” dichotomy, with “them” being The Government, they abandon the democratic experiment and the principles of government “of the people, by the people, for the people.” And while there are a few on the Right who, I think, use this sentiment in a wholly rhetorical and deeply cynical way, I worry that there are far too many people who actually take this philosophy seriously.

The mainstream of political philosophy since Hobbes and Locke has been largely about how to strike a balance between liberty and the common good. The responsible libertarian side of the argument makes the case that increased liberty can do more for the common good than direct government intervention; the responsible socialist side of the argument makes the case that liberty for some distorts the liberty for all, and that true liberty is best achieved through policies that tend toward equality; and the responsible middle, where the United States has tended since the Progressive Era, tinkers around with the equation with a focus on pragmatic outcomes.

But none of the responsible participants in the debate have ever denied that there’s such a thing as the common good. They quibble about the definitions of both “common” and “good,” but never deny that both the collective and the private have a significant role to play in establishing a just society.

People of good will can disagree about a lot of things, so long as they do agree on a few foundational positions. Though I’m pretty far to the Left in the American political spectrum, I can find points of agreement with many on the Right. Indeed, the Right used to generate some useful ideas about how to use market forces for the common good (the current health care reforms, for example, have their origins in the Nixon administration, not in Das Kapital; the earned-income tax credit is a Republican idea proposed by Milton Friendman, and cap-and-trade is about as libertarian an approach to environmental concerns as I can think of). And some Leftist ideas–the five-day work week, OSHA, the EPA, Medicare, Social Security–have been thoroughly integrated into America’s capitalist economy.

But declaring that “[t]here is nothing more selfish than people who seek? government force to rob their neighbors” simply shuts down any rational debate. I can see the attraction in Randianism–it’s a very clean, clockwork view of the world, with room for a lot of dramatic heroics–but it falls apart pretty quickly into selfishness and fear. It represents a wholesale retreat from society, a desire to create a hermetic bubble around the heroic individual who owes nothing to the community out of which they arose. It is, in the end, a prescription for “the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short” against which Hobbes posited the first inklings of liberalism.

I’m not interested in “robbing” anyone, nor, I suspect, are most proponents of government (however limited or expansive their notions of government may be). Instead, I’m interested in finding the balance between liberty and equality that makes our society as good as it can be. If that means extending liberty in some areas, so be it; if it means restricting it in others, then that’s a valid prescription as well. And because this is an experiment, and we hold the levers of power through the vote, there’s room for debate and compromise and principled disagreement.

And I’m not interested in “depriving” anyone of freedom. Can government be tyrannical and heavy-handed? It certainly can; history is filled with examples. The United States, thankfully, has never been one of those examples, and so long as we have the vote and share a vision of a common purpose, it never will be. But tyranny can arise not only from the government: unchecked mobs, rapacious classes, and extreme atomization are paths to tyranny as well.

I don’t feel “deprived of freedom” when I use municipal roads to get around town, or state parks to enjoy the resources that Minnesotans have agreed to protect; I feel that my freedom has actually been enhanced by these and many other collective efforts. And I don’t feel “robbed” when I pay my taxes (well, except maybe when I pay sales tax in Hennepin County for a baseball stadium I never got to vote on, but that’s another issue…); I feel that I’m paying my fair share to enjoy a society that’s a little more fair, equal, and just than it would be without government.

I suspect that Elrond, Bilbo, and Gandalf would agree.

The Deepest Dive

What allows a person to hold his or her breath and dive to severe depths is an autonomic process called the mammalian diing reflex, which is activated when the nerves in the face come into contact with water, most eectively with cold water.

The Deepest Dive by Alec Wilkinson, August 24 2009

It’s not that I disliked Dave Eggers’ interpretation of “Where the Wild Things Are,” which was The New Yorkerest’s pick for this issue. Rather, I didn’t quite see the point of it. Maurice Sendak’s original picture book, which I’ve committed to memory since it was a favorite bedtime story in heavy rotation for a year or so, is like a poem, stripped down to simple archetypes of wildness and domesticity, longing for safety and adventure, a framework of dreams into which any child (or adult) can locate themselves. Making Max’s story specific, peopling it with a mean older sister, Mom’s creepy boyfriend, and an absent father, sacrifices the universality of the original. It’s as if “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” were retold as a tale about an accountant named Jerry who dreams of taking his boss’s beautiful and cultured wife to a seedy seafood restaurant on the docks; it might make for a good story, but it sacrifices the universality of poetry.

Alec Wilkinson’s piece on competitive free diving, though, profiling Sara Campbell’s quest to be the first woman to break the 100 meter barrier, is a fascinating glimpse into a world I never knew existed. It explores the physiology and psychology of deep diving, the culture of one of the most dangerous sports, and one woman’s quest for a record that carries with it more pride than fame. My own record is the seven feet at the deep end of the YWCA pool, so I’m very much in awe of the courage and strength required to make this sort of dive. A wild thing indeed!

Home Delivery

My last Sunday Star Tribune newspaper landed on my doorstep early yesterday morning; by the time I’d ventured out to collect it, I’d already read the New York Times headlines, the Washington Post book pages, and my favorite funnies (including Calvin & Hobbes and Bloom County, blessedly rebroadcast in this digital age). I’ve let my newspaper subscription lapse because most weeks I find myself hauling unread paper to the recycling bin, and tend to use the newspaper more as a firebuilding tool on camping trips than as a news source.

It will be a little odd not to have the newspaper around, because I’ve been an avid newspaper reader for about thirty years. I first started reading a newspaper regularly in 5th grade; we were living in West Germany, and had the Stars & Stripes (the military’s paper–surprisingly good and independent) delivered, along with a week-old Lewiston Sun-Journal, my father’s hometown paper. Once I was out on my own in college, subscribing to the local newspaper was one of the things that fell into the category of getting the electricity and telephone turned on when setting up a home. In addition to my subscription, I also made a habit on the weekends of venturing out for a regional or national paper, usually the New York Times or the Chicago Tribune.

Not take the newspaper? Unthinkable!

Two big changes have converged, though, to make taking the paper less important to me. The first is parenthood: I don’t have the time to sit down with a cup of coffee and the newspaper now that I’m also making breakfasts, distributing laundry, encouraging kids to get their coats and shoes, and making sure everyone gets out the door to school, swimming lessons, or Cub Scouts. The daily paper subscription was the first casualty to the compression of time; I’ve finally admitted that the weekend paper was a casualty, too, a long time ago.

The other big change is the Internet, which has made global news sources abundantly and ubiquitously available. Using Google Reader and Feedly (technical details here), I can assemble my own newspaper with headlines from not only the Star Tribune but also the New York Times, Manchester Guardian, Toronto Globe and Mail, and Lebanon Star. I can beef up my comics page with classics like Bloom County, new favorites like Cul de Sac, and web-only strips like xkcd, and leave Family Circus and Garfield out. I don’t read the sports pages, so I don’t need a sports section: I’ve got a section in my paper for bicycle commuting, though, and a great science page. My books pages draw from not only the New York Times, Washington Post, and Christian Science Monitor review pages, but from a wide range of book bloggers, writers, and poets. And since all of this content is stored “in the cloud,” I can read the funnies on my netbook while I’m making my coffee in the kitchen, read the headlines upstairs while checking my e-mail and bank balances, and even peruse the latest in books and poetry during the five-minute inter-pomodoro breaks at work. In the evening I catch up on the news from around the world and the neighborhood, read a little science and sociology, and exercise my righteous indignation on my opinion pages, which draw widely from a range that includes Andrew Sullivan and the Socialist Worker. I probably consume more news now, albeit in smaller chunks, than when I used to head back to my grad school apartment with an armload of papers and the Village Voice.

Newspaper home delivery, like so many other things we take for granted (highways, shopping malls, parking lots), is a product of post-war suburbanization, and its historical moment is probably coming to a close. Before the middle class fled the cities for the suburbs, newspapers were bought at the corner store, or the newspaper stand, or from a newsboy. Home delivery was the newspapers’ solution to maintaining readership in the less dense suburbs; that it coincided with a bicycle-riding baby boom of pre-teen surplus labor gave rise to the paperboy, one of the icons of mid-century Middle America. Paperboys have long since been replaced by adults in cars or vans, covering much larger routes than would have been possible for a kid on a bike.

Home delivery will likely become a premium service in coming years; subscriptions are falling, and it no longer makes sense to subsidize delivery (the logistical infrastructure of distributing newspapers is enormous and complex, and unlikely to survive the falling fortunes of many local and regional papers). I’m at the tail end of the home delivery demographic; the “digital natives” coming of age now have had their online news sources set up much longer than I have, and won’t see physical home delivery of one newspaper as much of a service when they already have virtual home delivery of hundreds.

The fly in the ointment of this brave new world is, of course, the free rider problem. Good journalism is expensive; advertising is a less and less reliable source of revenue (indeed, I see almost no ads at all when I look at my news through Feedly); as an online “subscriber,” I’m not shouldering my financial share of the burden. And I do feel a little guilty about that.

Newspapers need (as the jingle at On the Media goes) a “present and future business model for monetizing the newspaper industry.” Advertising isn’t working; subscriptions are dropping off; and news room jobs are being slashed, which only threatens to make newspapers even less valuable to their readers.

I’m a member of my local public radio and public television services: I get a lot of value from the public broadcast programming, and I’m glad to pay my share. If other news sources that I use had a similar model, I’d be happy to contribute.

Of course, public broadcasting can’t rely entirely on the good will of its users; there are also public funds and foundation grants involved in paying for their services. Surely other news sources, if operated as non-profits, could attract similar foundation support. The challenge would be converting papers to non-profit (rather than money-losing) operations after a decade of debt and unrealistic profit expectations fueled by speculative investors.

If my Internet subscription included a news fee (much like telephone service has those various “access fee” additions), and that fee were distributed either directly to the sources to which I subscribe, or to a foundation that would distribute the money to news gathering services, I’d be perfectly happy. I’d even be happy to participate in something like Kachingle proposes, letting me split a monthly subscription fee amongst the services I find most valuable. Some months might see more of my money going to the Star Tribune, other months to Bookslut, depending on who provides me with the information I use and enjoy most.

But putting all of my media money into one (relatively leaky) bucket? That no longer makes sense.

a year in reading, 2009

I didn’t do a lot of new-release reading this year: the budget didn’t allow for splurging on books, and the library hold queue for the season’s hot titles was often quite long. But the world of good books is timeless, and there’s no reason that an annual “best of” list should be confined to an arbitrary calendar year. Here are five books I read and loved in 2009.

Every Man Dies Alone by Hans Fallada


The best book I read this year was also the last one I read (indeed, it carried over a few days into the new year). Every Man Dies Alone was originally published in Germany in 1947, but only appeared in a U.S. edition, from Melville House Press, this year. It tells the story of a working-class Berlin couple who quietly risk their lives to resist the Third Reich by dropping anti-Nazi postcards around the city. It’s a grim and gritty book, full of brutal and nasty characters, but it’s also a story of great courage and decency, and highlights a chapter of World War II–life within the Nazi regime itself–about which precious little is told in the West.

Stoner by John Williams


Like Every Man Dies Alone, Stoner is a novel of resistance, decency, and dignity, but in a much quieter setting. It tells the story of a farm boy who becomes an English professor at a midwestern university; inspired by the love of language, he struggles with love, politics, and family, apparently accomplishing little of value to the world but much of value to the life of the mind.

The Music of Failure by Bill Holm


The Music of FailureWe lost Bill Holm, essayist, poet, and Prairie philosopher, in February, precisely at the time that we needed his particular perspective the most. His first collection of essays, The Music of Failure, sets the theme for much of his work; it approaches the American Dream from the experiences of Icelandic immigrants on the Minnesota prairie who have apparently failed in so many ways–they die poor, unsung, and forgotten–but turns the Dream on its head in celebrating their quiet strength. There’s a rootedness to Holm’s work, a there-ness and place-ness, that is a powerful antidote to blind ambition; if more people were strong and quiet failures, perhaps we wouldn’t be in the mess we’re in.

Four Stories by Sigrid Undset


These stories, published in Norwegian at the turn of the 20th century, are like a cool drink of water: graceful, clear, and spare. The subject matter is reminiscent of Henrik Ibsen, but is handled with a wit, tenderness, and generosity that is uniquely Undset’s.

The Great Perhaps by Joe Meno


The Great PerhapsJoe Meno deftly blends satire, fantasy, and realism in this story of clouds, squids, and an unraveling family; this was one of the most inventive novels I’ve read in a long time, peopled with believable, flawed, and compelling characters.

remember me, but forget my fate

Dead Letter Office's Sale of Christmas Bargains: Library of CongressWhile setting up my garage sale yesterday, I listened to Kerri Miller’s interview with Dr. Ronald Mallett, a physicist who is seriously working on the problem of time travel. Mallett’s proposal, involving a ring laser, is less about sending people or objects through time, but more about sending information. That his work was inspired by his father’s early death, and that Mallett’s ideal message from the future would be a warning to his father to take better care of his heart, makes the efforts that much more poignant.

I wondered, though, if a message from the future would be that effective. Even if we could be certain somehow that the message really is from the future, should we listen to it? Are the interests of the future self congruent with the interests of the present self? Can the future be trusted really to know what’s best for us? What if some further future self were giving the present future self good advice that the present future self is failing to pass on to us?

If I could send a message to one of my past selves, I wondered, what might it be? Helpful words of succor to my teenaged self–assurance that things will get better–would certainly be ignored out of hand; my 40-year-old self is, after all, a grown-up, and so not entirely trustworthy. A suggestion to my 30-year-old self to buy Yahoo stock? A nudge to my 25-year-old self to take some Java classes? For the most part, I’m pretty happy with the general course my life has taken while flying blind into the future; perhaps things could have turned out better, but I’m not sure that would have resulted in more happiness.

We are always, of course, sending messages to the future, whether we know it or not, and nothing makes that clearer than setting up a garage sale. Garage sales are all about reading the past’s missives, sometimes with puzzlement. A few items I can explain: the too-small snowshoes and life vests are the inevitable result of the boys getting bigger, and the bedroom dresser made sense in the last house, less sense in the current. But other items broadcast reminders of failed projects, harebrained schemes, and odd enthusiasms. The farther back the message came from, the stranger it seems.

The machine I used to pick up most of the messages from the past was my old stereo. It’s for sale, and includes a tuner/amplifier (probably close to 40 years old; it was a hand-me-down from my father when I turned 12 and he upgraded), a high-speed dual-deck dubbing cassette player (ideal for the lost art of the mix tape), a CD player (circa 1988, when CDs were a strange new curiosity), and an 8-track player/recorder (free with purchase of any other component). (I’m keeping the phonograph; I still have lots of records, and a miniature system I can pipe the turntable through.) The stereo has been in my basement for eight years this month, unplayed, and there was a big box of tapes and CDs next to it that came up to see daylight for the first time in almost a decade.

I sorted through the tapes, and identified quite a few that can go at bargain prices. Ziggy Marley, Echo and the Bunnymen, Rick Astley, London Beat: they haven’t aged well. And then there was a big stack of CDs that came from the BBC Music Magazine: mostly workmanlike renderings of Schubert and Holst, with a few keepers but a lot I could part with at 50 cents (5 for $2).

For two days of sitting in the alley with my junk, I haven’t had much success. The neighborhood kids picked up a few items (some old baseballs, an Indigo Girls tape, a giant pocket watch that was some sort of corporate gift, a brass shamrock that may have been a wedding gift), but the problem with selling to them is that there’s a good chance things will drift back into my yard before long. I unloaded two porcelain buddhas and some children’s books that I don’t expect to see again, but I still had my large furniture and Flintstone mugs to move back to the garage.

While closing up shop, I listened to some of the messages from the past that were still accessible to present ears. Nick Drake (dubbed from a friend’s LPs–you can hear the pop and hum of the needle in the groove) still sounded good, and I was surprised at how much I still liked the 10,000 Maniacs. “Verdi Cries” (a beautiful, delicate, and evocative song; Natalie Merchant really has one of the best voices in pop) sent me to the real thing and the BBC CDs, and I took out “Dido and Aeneas,” recorded by the Taverner Choir. “Dido’s Lament” is surprisingly appropriate garage sale music, and also a good counterpoint to the dream of sending messages backward in time:

When I am laid, am laid in earth,
May my wrongs create
No trouble, no trouble in thy breast;
Remember me, remember me, but ah! forget my fate.
Remember me, but ah! forget my fate,

Would that all of us–and our various accumulated objects–could be so lucky, our lives recalled for their happiness, and their more troubling messages to the future lost.

in defense of the short story

Malaria poster in small hotel, Puerto Rico ... San Juan (LOC)Crawford Kilian’s “About Writing” blog is one of my regular reads; he offers lots of good, no-nonsense, nuts-and-bolts advice about writing. A recent article, though, about the rather arbitrary demarcations based on length between short stories, novellas, and novels, contained a paragraph that raised my hackles a bit:

I don’t want to discourage anyone from writing at whatever length they like. Short stories can be great reading, and also great training for writers aiming at novels. Two or three novellas, published together, can be quite marketable (preferably, however, if the author’s already well known).

This touches on two misconceptions about the short story that overlook the fact that the story and the novel are two completely different creatures:

  1. Short stories are a training ground for the real work of fiction, the novel.
  2. Short stories are outside the marketable space that novels occupy.

These are commonly-held beliefs, and to a great extent self-fulfilling prophesies. And they are both far off the mark.

Short stories (and sometimes novellas, too, those odd ducks in the middle distance) are not miniature novels. They do not do the same things that novels do, and do not play by the novel’s rules. The pleasures to be found in writing and reading stories are completely different from those to be found in writing and reading novels; they are not mutually exclusive pleasures–a reader can be passionate about both forms, and a writer can be successful at both (though, I would argue, there are few who are supremely successful at both)–but they are very different.

The short story is an art of compression. It is in many ways closer to poetry than to the novel; though it’s written in prose, with paragraphs and often dialogue and frequently plot, it relies upon a succinct and careful choice of words to convey its effect. The story is about the art of excision: the story writer’s scalpel must be sharp and merciless.

Novels, by contrast, tend toward the inclusive. They are about finding and extending relations and connections across characters and settings, and often have a baroque architecture full of reflections and echoes. A novel need not be mercilessly efficient: it can be, as Henry James (one of those few who was a master of both forms) said, a “loose and baggy monster” and still be successful. Indeed, the looser and baggier the better in many cases.

Reading a novel is like relaxing into a comfortable chair. It invites the reader to become lost in its world, to spin out the million possibilities of its setting while reading; there’s a hypnotic effect to reading a novel, a loss of the sense of time and place. When I’m reading a good novel, I find that I slow down toward the end and try not to glance at the bottom of the page: I want the effect to go on, I don’t want to leave the novel’s world.

Stories, on the other hand, are more like a Shaker chair: carefully crafted, beautiful in their apparent simplicity, but a little uncomfortable for an extended sit. Most stories have few characters, one or two settings, and almost never subplots. Like a poem, every word in a story has to serve the story’s ultimate goal; there’s very little room for digression and diversion. Reading a story is a quick plunge into a bracing pool: its ultimate effect occurs more on reflection than while submerged.

What the stories offer to the reader and the writer, that the novel doesn’t, is a variety of experience and a diversity of voices. A story can be experimental in ways that a novel, or at least the traditional novel, cannot, because it doesn’t have to sustain a style or voice or device over hundreds of pages. Each story is its own world, swiftly brought to life in twenty or so pages and then just as quickly discarded. Though many writers of short fiction revisit the same places, themes, even characters, over the course of many stories, there’s no demand for unity across the stories as there would be in a novel: each story offers a new view of the familiar, a different perspective that may reinforce or contradict related stories.

When a writer has had a successful career at writing stories, the critics will often wonder aloud, “Why hasn’t she written a novel?” Raymond Carver, Andre Dubus, Alice Munro, Amy Hempel: incredibly gifted short story writers, but not a novel among them. Not, I think, because of a lack of ambition on their part: their ideas, concise and sparkling, are simply more suited to the story form.

We fans of the story often hear that “short story collections don’t sell,” “publishers never buy story collections,” “people would rather read novels.” When publishers do put out a collection of stories, they tend to disguise it: “a novel in stories,” they say, or they make clear in the marketing material that the stories are “linked” in some way. This does a great disservice to both the story and to the reader: it forces the stories into a relationship that may not be appropriate, and it tries to trick the reader into thinking they’re getting something that they aren’t. The publishing industry’s fear of the short story is a self-fulfilling prophecy. No one wants to read story collections because story collections aren’t offered to readers as what they are: a reading experience very different from a novel, but equally enjoyable and engrossing. Stories might be a little more work sometimes than novels–the reader is switching settings and characters every ten or twenty pages, which can sometimes feel like whiplash–but a well-sequenced story collection, like a good poetry collection, can leave space for reflection between pieces and help the cumulative effect of dissonant themes and voices build to a powerful crescendo.

Stories are also the appropriate form for the way we live now. They are interstitial by nature, able to be squeezed into small spaces (I love the little volumes of One Story and Duck and Herring, perfect for slipping into a pocket or purse), ideal for the few moments we can steal for ourselves. And their fractured narratives and small moments of insight feel more like a modern life than the carefully wrought, intricately plotted novel: this morning I felt like I was in a Faulkner story, by mid-day things had turned Kafkaesque, and perhaps tonight I’ll relax into a more genteel Mansfield mode. Our lives are a jangling buzz of voices, and stories help us make sense of that.

My library puts an orange label on the spines of story collections, perhaps as a warning to readers: this book is not quite like its neighbors, it may offer a reading experience completely different from what you expect. I find this to be useful not as a warning, but as a beacon: I know that inside each of these emblazoned books are a dozen different voices, clamoring against each other, and that some of them will whisper in my ears for weeks.

partisan reviews

Girl InspectorL’affaire de Botton, in which a bad review prompted some outrage on the part of Alain de Botton and some thinking about the ethics of the book review, led me to look again at John Updike’s rules for reviewers. And while I think Updike’s rules set the standard for the kind of book review done in the New York Times and most of the remaining newspaper book pages, they really only cover a particular genre of writing about books. There are other types of book essay, where these rules aren’t entirely applicable, and would in fact be an onerous strait jacket.

Book reviews are sort of like a “Consumer Reports” article: their purpose is to give an overview of a book, point out its most obvious features, and guide the reader in whether or not to select it. This is a pretty narrow contract, and as such most book reviews are ephemeral. Their usefulness is worn out once the reader has made that decision. In these short-form reviews, it makes sense for the reviewer to avoid books they are “predisposed to dislike” and not to be “warrior[s| in any ideological battle.”

But there are other genres where it makes sense for the writer to disregard these caveats; writing about literature would be no fun at all if one couldn’t occasionally skewer a book with which we disagree, or use a book as a missile in an ideological battle. I’m thinking of the long-form critical essays that are the meat of the offerings in journals like “The New York Review of Books,” “The Times Literary Supplement,” and “Commentary” (the “old guard”) or “Rain Taxi” and “The Complete Review” (the “young Turks”).

For these sorts of essays, Updike’s rules about fairness still apply, but not so much the rules about focus. “Review the book, not the reputation” wouldn’t be useful in Julian Barnes’ Updike overview, for example, or Sue Halpern’s roundup of books about success. This sort of essay uses the book as a jumping-off point, building an argument (whether in support of the book or opposed to it) that can pull in evidence from any source. A book review is bounded by the book under consideration, with little external context offered; the critical essay is all about context.

I’ve re-read Caleb Crain’s review of The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work, and I think I’ve solved the puzzle of de Botton’s outrage. While masquerading as a book review, Crain’s piece is really just the first half of a critical essay. Crain is engaging the ideas in the book, not the book itself, and he has some strong criticisms of them, and of how the ideas are executed. But because of the strictures of the book review form, the piece is weirdly truncated. Crain sets up his partisan take on the book, makes some hints at where it goes wrong, but cannot make his own counter-argument because he’s already out of space.

That makes the piece fundamentally unfair, both as a book review and as a critical essay. In a critical essay, Crain would be required to go further and build his own case, drawing on other sources than de Botton’s book and proposing an alternative understanding of work and meaning. Had Crain’s piece done that (and since it would almost certainly be much longer than the NYT Book Review would permit, he can’t), the reader could have fairly assessed Crain’s argument. This leaves de Botton with little recourse (though I still think “I will hate you till the day I die” is a bit much): Crain’s argument against the book might be good, or it might not; we can’t know from what is given in the review.

The market for the long-form critical essay is probably pretty small: certainly smaller than for the book review, which is already pretty rarefied. But they still have a place in the world of literary journalism; it would be nice if, in the larger space that online publishing permits, outlets like the NYT Book Review would augment its reviews with criticism: Crain’s essay deserves to be expanded, and de Botton deserves to have a better case made against his book.

The city winks a sleepless eye

I’m in the right age cohort for Michael Jackson’s music, but I was never a fan. When “Thriller” was a monster hit on pop radio, I was listening to pompous art rock–”Asia” was the first record I bought with my own money, followed in quick succession by items from the back catalog of Yes, Kansas, Jethro Tull, and Led Zeppelin. When making an album choice, I’d scan the track lengths, and if anything clocked in at under five minutes I’d dismiss it as insipid pop and move on.

By the time Michael Jackson had become weird, I was learning about jazz, and filling in the gaps in my knowledge of Miles Davis, Charlie Parker, and John Coltrane. And it was the delicate, breathy rendition of Jackson’s “Human Nature” on a Miles Davis record that made me take another look.

I had already come around on Prince, another ’80s star I hated at the time, when I discovered that there was more to His Purpleness than meets the eye; “The Black Album,” which I bought from a street vendor in London in 1989, is still the nastiest funk, with a touch of jazz, this side of Bootsy Collins. And when I took another look at Michael Jackson, I found that there were things to admire in him as well: a great range of emotion and styles, an angelic voice, a solid understanding of showmanship. If we take him only from the records–especially from “Off the Wall” and “Thriller”–Michael Jackson leaves behind a legacy of pop craftsmanship that is simply unparalleled.

Alas, the music is overshadowed by the train wreck of his life. He was as much a victim as a beneficiary of fame in the modern world, a soul strangled in infancy and deformed by the spotlight that gave him life. It’s no wonder that the rumor went around that Jackson coveted the bones of John Merrick; he was as much a sideshow monster as The Elephant Man, perhaps even more tragically so.

He left a wake of damage himself, with real lives–I think especially of his three young children–warped by his fantasies. That he died on the verge of returning to the spotlight makes his passing that much more tragic and pathetic in equal measure.

When I listen to his music now–especially “Human Nature,” his version of which is actually (I’m slightly chagrined to say) better than the one by Miles Davis–I hear optimism, hope, and longing. Maybe someday the aura of celebrity will fade, the disturbing strangeness of his life dissolve into simple quirkiness (it worked for Salvador Dali and Gerard de Nerval), and his music can be appreciated for its joys alone.

Until then, he makes a good argument for the value of enduring obscurity.

The Two Cultures vs. the Singularity

A lot of ink has been spilled (and pixels lit up) about the 50th anniversary of C.P. Snow’s Two Cultures lecture. The gist of Snow’s thesis is that the sciences and arts (represented in the lecture by literature) constitute two mutually-unintelligible, often hostile, cultures; in Snow’s examples, scientists don’t read Dickens and literature professors don’t understand the Second Law of Thermodynamics. This disconnection in the age of hydrogen bombs, Snow argued, is a fundamentally dangerous situation.

Snow’s thesis was very much a product of its time. The industrial economy of the post-war period demanded specialization and technical rigor of a kind never seen before; while a genius of the Renaissance like Francis Bacon or Leonardo da Vinci could know everything there was to know in science, politics, art, and literature, that simply was not possible in 1959: there was too much knowledge, both general and technical, and the path to genius became a very narrow and focused rail with no reward for meandering. Not only in the sciences, but also in the humanities, narrowness of focus became a virtue.

Fifty years on, in a putatively post-industrial world, I’m not convinced this is any longer the case. While there is still a great deal of specialization in both “cultures,” we have many more opportunities for the arts and sciences to overlap and intermingle in interesting and fruitful ways. The last two decades have seen an explosion in popular science–Hawkins, Pinker, Dawkins, et al–and in literature that grapples in smart and insightful ways with science (Rae Armantrout, Ian McEwan, and Vincent Lam come immediately to mind, without even touching some amazing work being done in science fiction). Scientists now routinely consider ethical questions in their work, and artists tackle themes of climate change, neuroscience, and genetics.

The technophobic artist and the philistine scientist are caricatures that belong to Snow’s era, not ours. One need look only at the ways in which the arts have embraced technology, particularly the Internet. Over the last decade, there has been a flowering of literary journals on the Internet; a glance at the Million Writers Award nominees will show a varied and lively collection of sites that publish fiction, essays, poetry, and artwork at least as good as, if not better than, what appears in the old guard print journals. Readers get more and more of their book news from places like Bookslut and The Literary Saloon, and share their finds at LibraryThing and Goodreads. Snow’s scientists may have felt “the future in their bones,” but now so do writers, readers, and artists, and few of them wish “the future did not exist.”

The increased adoption of technology by the arts world may not lead to the sort of amplification of human intelligence that Verner Vinge’s singularity predicts–a lot of human stupidity is greatly amplified by the Internet as well. But it does suggest a singularity of sorts, where Snow’s two cultures can share a conversational space. Ideas can flow between science and the arts, both informing each other in ways that enrich our experience of what it means to be human in this particular time and place. I would expect the next fifty years to be characterized by more blurring of the lines, more synthesis and cooperation, between the arts and sciences.

Indeed, if there are “two cultures” still, they’re not made up of warring physicists and poets, who are drifting toward a sort of shared culture. Instead, it’s a bifurcation of the curious and the incurious, the flexible and the rigid, the connected and the isolated. And that’s a divide as deeply disturbing and dangerous as the one Snow described a half century ago.

Jack Kemp, RIP

The only time I’ve been seriously tempted to vote for a Republican (aside from Barbara Carlson’s bizarre bid for mayor of Minneapolis, but that was during the Age of Ventura when any lunacy could be entertained) was when Jack Kemp was on the presidential ticket with Bob Dole. Kemp struck me as a smart and decent man, committed to a vision of the Republican party as part of the tradition of Abraham Lincoln. His policies at HUD seemed fresh and thoughtful, and aimed toward actually helping people.

Unfortunately, his performance in the Vice Presidential debate against Al Gore (Al Gore!) was disappointing; the eloquence of his thinking never came out in his speech. And the rest of the Dole package was distastefully unambitious; the Republican party had not quite started its flight from ideas, but it was clearly fearful of experimentation and not terribly interested in reaching past its traditional constituency.

“Bleeding heart conservatives” are now a rare bird indeed. The sort of decency that Kemp exuded–he argued strongly for his ideas, but avoided the ad hominem, at least in public debate–is hard to find on the Right, and his concern for helping people rise out of poverty has been replaced by noise about hot-button wedge issues. Kemp represented a pragmatic approach to social policy that aimed to fulfill the American promise. The Republicans would do well to take a cue from Kemp’s tone in The Inspiration of the Football Huddle:

We didn’t tolerate bigotry on the field, either. Any difference in race, creed and class immediately dissolved in the common aim of a team win. Divisiveness only weakens a team. It has no place in a huddle, on or off the field.

Something tells me they won’t.

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