Further comments on John Barth’s Further Fridays

December 22, 2008 By in Books, Critics, Reviews Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment

(See my initial laudatory post here.)

John Barth’s Further Fridays continued to delight till the end, and it hovers ceaselessly around literary questions about form, character, ways of telling, and meaning. Do those sound boring? Maybe when I list them, but when they become part of Barth’s stories—and the Further Friday pieces feel more like stories than essays—they come alive like a Maryland Blue Crab. Consider this great big chunk of quote—appropriate, maybe, for someone who often delivers great big chunks of novel—but it also shows some of Barth’s gift at the level of sentence and idea:

I confess to having gotten increasingly this way [as in, insisting for just facts, whatever those are] myself over the years—an occupational side effect, I believe, in the case of those of us for whom the experience of fiction can never be innocent entertainment. We’re forever sizing it up, measuring ourselves against its author, watching to see how the effects are managed and whether all the dramaturgical pistols that were hung on the wall in act one get duly fired in act three. We’re like those musicians who can’t abide background music: They can’t listen except professionally, and if they’re not in the mood to do that, they prefer conversation, street noise, silence—anything but music.

Right: notice the quick metaphor of the dramaturgical pistols—alluding to the idea that a gun seen in an early chapter should be fired in a later one—and the slightly more developed metaphor of the musician. The musician idea is particularly relevant to Barth, who played as a young man—more on that later—but it also expresses one of the central themes in his work: that innocence prolonged is detrimental to the person holding it and that naive readings eventually give way to sophisticated and experienced readings. They show the growth of not just the critic, writer, or reader, but also of the individual, whose early actions and impressions should be tempered by experience. But some attempt to prolong naiveté foolishly, while others forget to try and see the perspective of the innocent or the childlike joy that can lead to great art. So what is one to do? Muddle along as best one can, Barth seems to argue, and learn as much as you can about that imperfect state we call life and the reactions of other smart or wise people to it.

I realize that the above paragraph sounds almost like self-help lite, but it would be a mistake to see Barth that way, and he discusses far more than just the nature of a particular story. Elsewhere, he deals with literary categorization, which has never been among my favorite subjects because it often seems to generate vastly more noise than music, and its combatants often mistaken that cacophony for a symphony. Barth does a reasonably good job—which is to say, as good a job as one can, given the subject matter and persnickety pedants likely to be interested—of not being caught in its brambles. Adding sufficient qualification makes for fewer explosions but greater harmony; as Barth says of Roland Barthes’ Writing Degree Zero

“the whole of literature,” [as Barth quotes Barthes] “from Flaubert to the present day, becomes the problematics of language.” If only he had been content to say that “the problematics of language”—indeed, the problematics of every aspect of the medium of literature, not language alone—becomes one of several prominent field-identification marks of our literature after “Flaubert.” But that kind of reasonable modification, I suppose, de-zings such zingers.

Given the choice of being mostly right and demure or mostly wrong and provocative, Barth takes the mostly right path. Still, he’s not “demure” as in boring, and his essays are filled with unusual zest. Sometimes the footnotes are the best parts; the blockquote above is one, and he sneaks another comment into a footnote, though it’s reiterated elsewhere in the body text: “As for twentieth-century literary Postmodernism, I date it from when many of us stopped worrying about the death of the novel (a Modernist worry) and began worrying about the death of the reader—and of the planet—instead.” The sentiment has its tongue-in-cheek enough not to be taken completely seriously, and yet it’s accurate enough to consider further consideration. Maybe in jokes we tell the greatest truths that could never slide by as bald assertions.

The piece the modernist definition comes from was published in the 1980s, although it reprises arguments from 1968 and 1979, about which one can read more in The Friday Book. But its concerns are still germane: global climate change fears fuel cataclysmic scenarios that aren’t implausible, as do those involving the death of reading. Reading’s demise seems to be greatly exaggerated—what do most of us do online and via e-mail if not read, as Steven Berlin Johnson argues in Dawn of the Digital Natives—but the quality of reading seems to diminish apace online. Still, websites with global reach and many visitors seem fairly literate, and the only well-known, sub-literate blog I can think of is Mark Cuban’s, which I won’t dignify with a link. Then again, Cuban is also sitting on such a giant pile of cash that I doubt he cares about literacy, or Postmodernism.

Like Barth, I seem to have wandered a bit, and also like him, I’d like to circle back round to the main point of this post, which is to emphasize how good Further Fridays is. Sections repeat and reiterate earlier ideas, but I think of the repetitions more as variations in different keys than as irritants, and I think Barth would like that metaphor: he played jazz as a teenager and writes of going to Julliard to discover he had no or too little talent for music (my own musical talent, if I had any to begin with, has probably become undetectable thanks to lack of exercise). Milan Kundera also took up writing after music, and I wonder if other good example of musicians-turned-writers exist aside from Alex Ross, who turned from music to write about music. Barth is as self-referentially modest about his musical abilities as his other points, almost cloaking himself in faux humility when he writes, for instance: “My modest point is that the story of your life might be told as a series of career moves, or love affairs, or intellectual friendships, or houses lived in, or ideologies subscribed to (even magazines subscribed to), or physical afflictions suffered, or what have you, and that every one of those series might be recounted from very different perspectives, to very different effect.” Indeed: and we appreciate that, and the way it implicitly makes the case for reading. He preaches like the native to a religion he nonetheless realizes fewer practice:

If you happen to be a refugee from the Dorchester County tide marshes… as I was and remain, and particularly if you aspire to keep one foot at least ankle deep in your native bog while the other foot traipses through the wider world, it is well to have such an off-the-cart smorgasbord [of reading] under your belt, for ballast.

Incidentally, I’m fascinated with the catastrophic view of reading and its discontents: consider Jonathan Franzen’s introduction to How to Be Alone:

I used to consider it apocalyptically [there’s that end-times terminology again] worrisome that Americans watch a lot of TV and don’t read much Henry James. I used to be the kind of religious nut who convinces himself that, because the world doesn’t share his faith (for me, a faith in literature), we must be living in End Times.

I wonder too, as this blog probably demonstrates. Still, I’d argue that you can’t avoid keeping one foot in your native bog, regardless of whether that metaphorical bog is the boring suburbs of Bellevue, Washington, as it was for me, or the foothills of the Himalayas, or New York City, so you might as well do so in a way that makes you part of the wider rather than narrower world, so you can reconcile the two as best you can. The most efficient way to do so, it seems to me, is the way Barth recommends: promiscuous and wild reading, and ideally of books as interesting as Further Fridays.

Late December links: Holiday guide edition

December 18, 2008 By in Books Tags: , , , , Leave a comment

* From James Fallows, excellent holiday shopping advice for you to ignore. I’ve followed it, but like a person of religious persuasion who pats himself on the back from not fornicating, I can’t help but think that I’m not much going to change the composition of the cultural ocean around me. Still, giving books for me is only half about the book itself: the other half is gauging the book someone else would want.

In large part, I’m not just giving the physical manifestation, but the fruit of whatever meager knowledge I have about book and recipient. Sometimes this works better and sometimes not, but I think it worth trying, since the gift of expertise is perhaps the best one of all.

Fallows has a second post on the subject here. And Random House’s Modern Library imprint gets in on the action here. And Mark Sarvas does here. And I do in the post you’re reading.

* Although not directly related to the above, this is pretty interesting:

There is a Catalan custom of men giving women and girls red roses on St. George’s Day (April 23), while women traditionally give men and boys a book on that day.

My guide mentioned that the books are always sold to the (female) buyer at a 10 percent discount below the regular price […]

But why the book discount?

Answer: no one knows.

* As if to reinforce some of the points I made in my post on Beer and Circus, the Financial Times reports:

But students at Manchester University, where he is paid £3,000 an hour as professor of creative writing, barely recognise him.

A survey by Student Direct, the company that offers undergraduate loans and banking services, asked students to put names to faces of the university’s prominent figures. Only 12 per cent knew who Mr Amis was.

Then again, maybe 12% is pretty good for an author.

(Hap tip TEV.)

* According to a Wall Street Journal analysis

Your parents might have worried when you chose Philosophy or International Relations as a major. But a year-long survey of 1.2 million people with only a bachelor’s degree by PayScale Inc. shows that graduates in these subjects earned 103.5% and 97.8% more, respectively, about 10 years post-commencement.

After 10 years, Philosophy majors earn more than Business Management majors, but still less than Math and many engineering majors. Consider this in light of the second bullet point in this earlier post from me. Consider too “The Management Myth” in The Atlantic, which argues that

Most of management theory is inane, writes our correspondent, the founder of a consulting firm. If you want to succeed in business, don’t get an M.B.A. Study philosophy instead.

As so often happens with such arguments, I don’t know whether I like it because it’s true or if I like it because it flatters the values I hold.

(But maybe the smartest people of all discard philosophy, as Paul Graham argues at the link.)

Into Thin Air — Jon Krakauer

December 17, 2008 By in Books, Reviews Tags: , , , , , , , , , , 2 Comments

This article and some of the commentary around it inspired me to get Jon Krakauer’s Into Thin Air, which was a blessing and curse; I read the first page, then another, and then found myself still reading six hours later, to the detriment of other responsibilities. It was one of these addictive, incredible books.

Was it worth it shirking the rest of my life? Maybe: but once I began, it was hard to stop. Into Thin Air is probably the kind of book people mean when they say “page-turner,” although that term is usually applied to badly written slop. Qualifying exactly what that means on an individual level eludes me: I look for a place, a word, a sentence, a paragraph that I can reproduce and say, “There! That’s a perfect example of what I’m describing.” But Into Thin Air resists such a reading; the sentences are good but seldom noteworthy. At times there are cliches: “Neal Beidleman […] remains haunted by a death he was unable to prevent,” as we’ve heard from a million melodramatic, sentimental cop books. In the context, however, Krakauer both transcends and reaffirms the cliche: we see that Beidleman, with his heroism and impotence on the face of the mountain, is haunted, perhaps most of all because the death could have been prevented by not climbing the mountain in the first place. But it’s a price for the chance at transcendence, the moment when you’re at 29,028 feet and have achieved a quixotic goal that means nothing and everything. After Into Thin Air, I have a new appreciation for the descriptions of Caradhras and Moria in The Lord of the Rings, where the mountains gain an ominous, almost palpable malevolent darkness.

Krakauer was a journalist and (mostly former) climber who wanted to try Everest, and when he found that Outside magazine would send him, he went. Climbing Everest isn’t a simple task, even for those experienced with high altitudes; it takes at least six weeks of time acclimating as well as north of $50,000 to go. As of 1996, about one of four people who reached the top of Everest died on the way down. Judging from this, the percentage hasn’t changed much, since 881 people died on Everest in the 1990s and 327 did in 2000 and 2001. He went with a “commercial” expedition and was assigned to write about commerce and the mountain.

Instead, he wrote about disaster and the mountain.

At such extreme limits of what the body can accomplish, Krakauer experienced the mind-body problem in what might be its purest form, when he sought the shelter of Camp 4 after summitting. Camp 4 is the last human refuge before the peak, and Krakauer had been fighting Everest for almost two months. In this state he describes himself:

I was so far beyond ordinary exhaustion that I experienced a queer detachment from my body, as if I were observing my descent from a few feet overhead. I imagined that I was dressed in a green cardigan and wingtips. And although the gale was generating a wind-chill in excess of seventy below zero Fahrenheit, I felt strangely, disturbingly warm (193).

I know the sensation from running cross country, but the difference between a half marathon and a near-death experience on Everest gives me only the faintest ability to imagine his circumstance, like comparing a toe stub to cutting off one’s foot. Some of the others are familiar too, but not from climbing; Krakauer writes that the rubber oxygen mask he wore made him “[feel] drugged, disengaged, thoroughly insulated from external stimuli.” Morphine has, in my limited experience, the same effect.

But the greatest lessons from Into Thin Air come from the group mistakes that so often mark human foibles: vanity, competition, status, and monetary incentives combine to push everyone just past the point of safety in a place where the margin is almost non-existence. Bad communication hampers the effort: radios are not where they should be; firm plans for where ropes should be placed aren’t created and follow. I can’t help but think of Groupthink: Psychological Studies of Policy Decisions and Fiascoes, Why Buildings Fall Down: How Structures Fail and Richard Feynman’s What Do You Care What Other People Think?: Further Adventures of a Curious Character. The last deals with the Challenger disaster, while the other two deal with disaster in other circumstances.

What the three have in common with Into Thin Air is a general algorithm for how disasters tend to happen among well-meaning, otherwise cautious people: signs are missed and safety precautions ignored; communication breaks down; other goals slowly supersede the goal of making sure everyone is safe; and numerous, relatively small problems combine to create a situation that shouldn’t but does become disaster. With Into Thin Air, no one noticed the thunderstorm clouds building below Everest’s peak; the firm turnaround time of 1:00 p.m. (or 2:00 at the latest) was ignored; few of the teams on the mountain knew what others were doing; the rivalry between guided groups grew; one guide made a decision to go up and down the various camps too many times; and all this was exacerbated by the altitude and the way a lack of oxygen impairs cognition. One Sherpa, Lopsang, decides to “tow” a client, which essentially means hauling the client up by rope, like a human boat traveling vertically. To Krakauer, this “didn’t seem like a particularly serious mistake at the time. But it would end up being one of many little things—a slow accrual, compounding steadily and imperceptibly toward critical mass.”

The above paragraph is relatively dry, almost scholarly or lawyerly, and it lacks the visceral impact of some of the book’s telling details: passing bodies on the way up, left or forgotten because they’re so difficult to carry down; the sensation of looming ice towers; the terrible realization that some people won’t make it; the fact that virtually every person going up that mountain was, on some level, implicated in the deaths that occurred. Krakauer has a disarming way of reminding us of climbing’s sacrifices, great and small. On April 29, 2006, the group makes it so high that “for the first time on the expedition the vista was primarily sky rather than earth. Herds of puffy cumulus raced beneath the sun, imprinting the landscape with a shifting matrix of shadow and blinding light.” That’s one of the smaller: the greater have already been mentioned.

This talk of sacrifice raises an obvious question: why climb? The answer is elusive, like asking the meaning of life or what the wind feels like as it caresses your face: you can give an absurdly simple answer or an equally absurdly detailed answer and still never answer. George Mallory’s famous answer concerning why he wanted to climb Everest—because it’s there—is as good as any and as good as anyone is likely to get. Nonetheless, I would speculate that maybe there is something to being utterly, inalienably alone; Krakauer writes about in this book and Into the Wild, while others—ranging from Thoreau in Self-Reliance to innumerable adventure stories preach the virtues of being cut from the societal network that envelops most of the world, and envelops us with particular force in the West. If this aloneness comes at a cost, it’s the cost of knowing that, out there, you’re not five minutes from a hospital and chinese takeout, and that if things turn ill you’ll die. I mentioned Lord of the Rings before and will mention it again here because in that book, the wilderness has the sense of loneliness and danger that few others can impart: the wild truly feels wild and dangerous—and free. I’m tempted to make grandiose generalizations about how “a society where coddling is the norm,” but I can’t, not and stick to the truth, as the way we think of society says as much if not more about us than it does about the society we comment on.

Regardless of the lessons imparted, what stays with me about Into Thin Air is the sense of foreboding and of empathetic terror at impending death. Those things are beyond the ability of words to describe, but Krakauer gets as close as anyone, and that is why, whatever the sins of Into Thin Air‘s writing style, I kept reading.

Beer and Circus: How Big-Time Sports Is Crippling Undergraduate Education — Murray Sperber

December 16, 2008 By in Books, Culture Tags: , , , , , , , , 8 Comments

Federal Requests for Proposals (RFPs) like the Grant Competition To Prevent High-Risk Drinking or Violent Behavior Among College Students are like sheets of paper held up as protection against the hurricane of larger social forces. The program aims to “develop or enhance, implement, and evaluate campus-and/or community-based strategies to prevent high-risk drinking or violent behavior among college students,” but it’s facing a campus culture that, as Murray Sperber describes in Beer and Circus: How Big Time College Sports is Crippling Undergraduate Education, has shifted to drinking and fanatical attention to sports in lieu of learning (I couldn’t help but think of a classic piece from The Onoin, “You Will Suffer Humiliation When The Sports Team From My Area Defeats The Sports Team From Your Area,” which sums my feelings about sports I’m not actually playing).

The “How Big Time College Sports is Crippling Undergraduate Education” subtitle is slightly misleading: big-time college aren’t themselves crippling education, though they are a contributing facto. Rather, they combine with shifts in university priorities toward research, curriculums, graduate departments, and star professors that, combined with a negative feedback loop thanks to big-time sports and decreased state and federal funding support, leads to inferior undergraduate education at many big schools and big public schools in particular. Hence the “beer and circus” formulation that alludes to bread and circus, with beer deadening thought and circus in the form of sports. Sperber’s argument is not a bad argument, although it’s overstated—universities are not as callow as he makes them out to be. Furthermore, if students in the aggregate didn’t want beer and circus, they would vote with their feet and wallets, as many of the financially able and academically inclined do.

That last designation, “academically inclined,” is an important one: Sperber discusses the four loose categories students tend to fall into, with the collegiate wanting parties, Greek life, and sports, the academic wanting knowledge, the vocational wanting a better job, and the rebels looking for life fulfillment. I might add the “lost” group, or those who wandered into college as an extension of high school and don’t really know why they’re there except that their parents told them to go. These categories aren’t rigid, and students can shift from one to the other and carry traits from more than one, but they’re useful nonetheless. Sperber cites research efforts to explore the composition of schools based on those categories, and it appears that, at many big public schools, the collegiate and vocational students compose the vast majority and have at least since World War II. Schools in turn began shifting their priorities, which accelerated in the 60s and early 70s, and appears to have reached its apotheosis sometime around there.

There’s some danger of propagating a myth of the golden age, but Sperber does seem to have found a genuine shift, especially when he’s discussing funding priorities. The most useful section might be devoted to the culture gap between many of those who control university departments and their undergraduate students. In this respect, the academic outsiders of undergrad eventually become the professors. Here’s where I wonder if the mythological aspect is rising, since, as a percentage basis, the academically inclined might not have dropped any or much, but the sheer number of them simply hasn’t kept up with the collegiate or vocational, and consequently, their influence might have waned. Academic-types also probably can’t connect with professors as easily as they once might have and are more likely to be left adrift in vast classrooms Sperber analogizes to mass transit stations, with all the charming behavior that implies. At the same time, the gulf between undergrads and professors grows: most professors came from the academic culture, while their students don’t. Conflict naturally arises, and I’ve now experienced it—most often indirectly but occasionally directly; the instructors will snicker when they (we?) hear excuses like, “I couldn’t come to class because my sorority kidnapped me…” Such excuses can be especially galling when they come back to back with students who have real problems, like family medical emergencies. How should one respond, I can’t help but asking? There doesn’t seem to be an ideal way, in part because of different values—and I can’t help believing mine are superior. And it’s not easy to inculcate those kinds of values regarding critical thinking, writing, and the like on an industrial scale to people who chiefly want to party. The question becomes, “What should be done?” and the answers—discussed briefly below—seem likely to remain in the ethereal realm of ideas rather than the practical realm of implementation.

Obviously I’ve spent some time considering Sperber’s conclusions and reasoning. But, alas, a book like Beer and Circus reminds me of Harold Bloom’s How to Read and Why in that both are unlikely to reach the people who need them most—in Bloom’s case, people who don’t or seldom read, and in Sperber’s case, people in positions of power at colleges or who are choosing colleges. The kinds of people most likely to read Beer and Circus are the academics, who are already opposed to the beer and circus mentality and don’t need to be convinced. We find a paradox: someone insightful enough to read this book and who knows something about large universities in the United States will probably already understand the problems it describes, while those who don’t see the problems or like beer and circus aren’t likely to read it.

So how could you decrease campus drinking and such? By now, the game-day culture is sufficiently entrenched that you probably can’t, but one could allocate more money to universities with the stipulation that the money a) not supplant existing teaching funds and—here’s the critical part—b) go entirely to support teaching, rather than research, athletic centers, administrators, and the like. It’s likely to be more effective than approaches like trying to prevent high-risk drinking or violent behavior through band-aids that don’t fix the fundamental problems underlying the behavior: a persistent focus among faculty on research, among undergraduates on each other, and with almost no one but grad students (like me) minding the undergrads. Small schools and honors programs help somewhat, but Sperber justifiably calls them “lifeboats.” Real change would cost more, take more time and effort, and require more full-time teachers and professors who are actually rewarded, socially and otherwise, for teaching. All that seems improbable: what’s more probable is business-as-usual, with books like Sperber’s marking time in unused libraries while most of the student body spends time on the field and in the stadium.

(Oh, and for more Onion-related mockery: see Shitload Of Math Due Monday, which is not unlike many comments I overhear at the gym.)

John Barth’s Further Fridays is Recommended

December 11, 2008 By in Books, Critics Tags: , , , , , , , Leave a comment

I’m about halfway through Further Fridays, John Barth’s second “essay, lecture, and other nonfiction” collection and find it as pleasurable and intelligent as The Friday Book, his first. Perhaps my favorite essay thus far is “A Few Words About Minimalism,” which is anything but minimalist and contains this gem:

But at least among those of our aspiring writers promising enough to be admitted into good graduate writing programs… the general decline in basic language skills over the past two decades is inarguable enough to make me worry in some instances about their teaching undergraduates. Rarely in their own writing, whatever its considerable other merits, will one find a sentence of any syntactic complexity, for example, inasmuch as a language’s repertoire of other-than-basic syntactical devices permits its users to articulate other-than-basic thoughts and feelings, Dick-and-Jane prose tends to be emotionally and intellectually poorer than Henry James prose.

(Link (obviously) added by me.)

That second sentence is delicious: perhaps Barth overindulges on other-than-basic syntax to make a point, but the way the structure of the sentence helps make the point that the sentence’s content conveys makes it so impressive. Not only that, but it makes a case without over-making it: that key word “tends” gives Barth enough wiggle room to concede that one can find emotionally and intellectually powerful writing in relative simple prose, and he never states that complex prose must be more emotionally and intellectual more powerful.

That virtue of statement and qualification is present throughout; Further Fridays is the rare collection that doesn’t overstate its claims (I’m still thinking of you, John Armstrong, although it does so at the cost of necessary complexity. You can’t make nuanced arguments about the nature of literary categorization, or movements, or literature, in soundbites and slogans, and it’s also hard to do so from a dogmatic political or philosophical position. Fortunately, Barth seems to occupy none—or, as he might say, his lack of position is his position—and the result is a feeling, no doubt illusory, that I read from the perspective of someone who simply likes to read and likes stories. And I learn from him: I can throw in that “no doubt illusory” comment to protect myself from obvious criticisms while still making the overall point about the nature of criticism.

Expect more on Barth shortly.

How to Read and Why — Harold Bloom

December 10, 2008 By in Books, Critics, Culture Tags: , , , , , , , , Leave a comment

Harold Bloom’s How to Read and Why is mostly an exercise close reading that tries to show how to learn by doing. The particular works Bloom chooses, ranging from Shakespeare to Borges to Proust, seem less important than the mere act of criticism; unlike most criticism, however, this one makes explicit the moral and other lessons it wants you to take. In some ways, How to Read and Why is a cheerleader for the personal critic inside all of us, like a book about eating that’s really for amateur restaurant reviewers for Yelp.com. How to Read and Why could also be a broader version of Shakepeare: The Invention of the Human, with short essays on a variety of authors instead of one.

Bloom passes judgment—in a very “judicious” sense of the word—on authors and works, as when he says that “Absorbing as Crime and Punishment is, it cannot be absolved of tendentiousness, which is Dostoevsky’s invariable flaw.” That Bloom didn’t say “crime” in lieu of “flaw,” shows his seriousness as a writer, and maybe also his lack of fun in seizing a terrible but obvious pun. Elsewhere, some of Bloom’s analysis manages the difficult trifecta of being subtle, meaningful, and non-obvious, as when he writes that “Turgenev, like Henry James, learned something subtler from Shakespeare: the mystery of the seemingly commonplace, the rendering of a reality that is perpetually augmenting.” The word “augmenting” is perhaps off-key, but we understand what Bloom meant. Although I don’t know whether she learned it from Shakespeare, Virgina Woolf might have accomplished the same thing.

These insights or descriptions or banal commentary, depending on perspective, are sprinkled throughout the book. In each section—”chapter” is too large a word for them—Bloom goes through essentially the same formula, relating to short stories, poems, novels, plays, and then novels again: he gives a close reading of the work, states what he thinks is unusual about its style or content, then gives a lesson or lessons. Some “lessons” are negative, in that they show what not to aspire to, while others are positive; others toe the nebulous middle, like this passage about Chekhov’s “The Student:”

Nothing in ‘The Student,’ except what happens in the protagonist’s mind, is anything but dreadfully dismal. It is the irrational rise of impersonal joy and personal hope out of cold and misery, and the tears of betrayal, that appears to have moved Chekhov himself.

In weaker hands, such a comment might be merely sentimental and, worse, fatuous. But here it feels supported—organic—although to show how would require pages and pages of quote. It show the acknowledgment of cold and misery and the reality of those things through a single word: “irrational.” With it, Bloom nods at reality and then transcends it, as “The Student” does.

Nonetheless, not everything in How to Read and Why is flawless. Bloom writes that “[…] short stories, whether of the Chekhovian or Borgesian kind, constitute an essential ” Essential form? What the hell does that mean? What’s a non-essential form? Regardless of their essentiality or lack thereof, I still don’t care much for them because, as I’ve often explained to friends amused at this reasoning, by the time I’m into one, it ends. It takes novels to really hold me and to make me want to invest in them. He makes, however, as strong an intellectual and academic case for short stories as one is likely to find, although Francine Prose, James Wood, and others argue in their favor. Regardless of their defenses, I still don’t like them.

Bloom also doesn’t and perhaps can’t explain the pleasures of reading except in terms of themselves, and perhaps that’s for the best: such sensations are difficult if not impossible to convey, but to his credit they are implied. It’s pleasure mingled with duty to Bloom, one becoming the other in the mature mind; as he writes, “I want to contrast Shakespeare’s abandonment of the work [toward ceaselessly reinventing consciousness] with Tarphon’s [a Rabbi of the same generation as the more famous Akiva] insistence that we are not free to abandon it.” The two are different perhaps for religious reasons; of Shakespeare’s inclinations we know little, but it seems that he probably had no God looking over his shoulder, while Tarphon had the possibility of disappointing God with him at every moment. The contrast between the two men is hardly surprising; it’s been claimed that the novel arose to take the place of God, meaning that a specialized form of imaginative narrative art overtook the belief in literal manifestations of a deity beyond time and space, and there is even a book with the very deliberate and appropriate title The Secular Scriptures, which studies Romance.

I’ve focused primarily on the short story section of How to Read and Why, and it’s emblematic of the strengths and weaknesses of the book as a whole. The major problem with Bloom’s approach is that sophisticated readers already do this, and they might even read critics who help them to do it better. People who don’t or seldom read probably won’t be interested. That leaves naive readers who would like to learn more, but I can’t imagine that a vast number of them are waiting for Harold Bloom’s instruction in the art of reading. It’s possible some exist, to be sure, but it seems more likely that someone interested in becoming a sophisticated reader will have already done so, and someone uninterested is unlikely to read a book to learn more about reading. How many people are there in the marginal space devoted to seekers who haven’t found much yet? Some, perhaps—the cover proclaims that How to Read and Why was a New York Times bestseller, for whatever that’s worth. Still, I could see How to Read and Why being an excellent gift book, or an excellent reference to attackers who say “why bother reading?”

Life: Snarky comment edition

December 8, 2008 By in Books, Life Tags: , Leave a comment

“Salman Rushdie, who discusses the infamous fatwa at interminable length, cites the importance in his fiction of going to the movies. Somehow one is not surprised.”

(Link added by me.)

—Their Way With Words in the Wall Street Journal.

Links: Freedom, humanity, universal empathy, and other such small topics

December 6, 2008 By in Books, Critics, Culture, Links Tags: , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment

* MercatorNet’s John Armstrong argues that “Economic freedom has turned toxic because we lack the cultural maturity that the humanities used to provide” (hat tip NYT Ideas Blog). Although I’m naturally susceptible to arguments like this:

The long-term health of the economy depends on the flourishing of the humanities: an important factor in our present troubles is their self-imposed weakness.

The dependency is hard to see because the standard ways in which we think about capitalism and the humanities are misleading.

I also find them difficult to believe. Armstrong’s historical view implies that the humanities once had a much stronger influence on public life, which is possible, but even if they did, boom/bust cycles far worse than this one were common in the 19th Century, as this list indicates (the panic of 1893 was particularly grim). Humanities or no, panics and boom/bust cycles might be part of human psychology and behavior, as Henry Blodget argues in “Why Wall Street Always Blows It:”

But most bubbles are the product of more than just bad faith, or incompetence, or rank stupidity; the interaction of human psychology with a market economy practically ensures that they will form. In this sense, bubbles are perfectly rational—or at least they’re a rational and unavoidable by-product of capitalism (which, as Winston Churchill might have said, is the worst economic system on the planet except for all the others). Technology and circumstances change, but the human animal doesn’t. And markets are ultimately about people.

He gives numerous examples of bubble behavior in action, along with small-scale studies that seem to demonstrate bubble behavior even in controlled environments. The humanities might offer many benefits, pleasure chief among them, even if doing so is unlikely to prevent bubbles or take the rough edges off capitalism. Or maybe not: Paul Graham asks “Is It Worth Being Wise?” and basically answers “yes, but not as important as intelligence.” He defines “wise” and “intelligent” throughout the essay, for those of you wondering why he’d set near synonyms as opposites. Graham, however, probably has the culture maturity Armstrong writes about and thus probably takes it for granted in a way that allows him to disparage the humanities more than he probably should. That disparagement occurs throughout his essay, and although many of his criticisms are valid, he overstretches them, much as Armstrong probably overstretches the virtues of the humanities.

Maybe Armstrong is suggesting the second great purpose of art, as described by D.H. Lawrence in Studies in Classic American Literature:

Art has two great functions. First, it provides an emotional experience. And then, if we have the courage of our own feelings, it becomes a mine of practical truth. We have had the feelings ad nauseam. But we’ve never dared dig the actual truth out of them, the truth that concerns us…

I’m not sure art has any practical truths to offer: like Nabokov, I suspect art’s chief purpose is itself and aesthetic bliss, and as such, any practical truths are at best secondary. Or maybe art is whatever we make it to be, and Armstrong’s effort to make the humanities—of which art is a large part—into a helper of the SEC is as valid as Nabokov’s belief in art as itself. The challenge in implementing Armstrong’s view is that convincing banking executives to start reading, say, Dr. Faustus and The Lord of the Rings, seems rather improbable. And even if they did, it’s still an overly large leap to imagine that doing so will tangibly improve the economic situation.

Alas, I’m using what humanities knowledge I have to argue against the importance of the humanities, at least for the reasons stated in the article. Perhaps that’s one of the humanities’ major problems: its own practitioners doubt its utility and have the skills to point out why.

* Mark Sarvas recommends The Gift, a book he praises in unusual terms: “I’m often asked why I persist here at TEV for no financial rewards. The best answer I can offer is to stick a copy of The Gift into your hands, albeit virtually.”

With an endorsement like that, expect a post on The Gift sometime in the not-too-distant future.

* By way of The Elegant Variation once again, read about the power of fiction to portray other worlds in our own world. To use one example from the article:

Yet even if we understand things as narratives, most of us would rather read the traditional story presented by a novel than we would the rather dryer story of a policy report. Best-selling novels such as Khaled Hosseini’s The Kite Runner thus reach a huge audience (especially when helped along by the other great narrative art and made into a blockbuster film) whilst academic research, no matter how insightful, will never be read by millions. Which is why the report’s authors venture that Hosseini’s novel has probably “done more to educate western readers about the realities of daily life in Afghanistan than any government media campaign, advocacy organisation report, or social science research.”

I’ve heard of—who hasn’t?—but never read The Kite Runner and so can’t comment on that in particular, but it’s hard to deny the power of narratives to fiction in general. I’ve begun reading a triple-pack of Henry Green’s novels, Loving; Living; Party Going, and they seem as close to working-class Britain circa World War II as I’m ever going to get. When this mimetic function fails, the novel often fails with it, and here I’m thinking of novels like Waverley and The Other Boleyn Girl.

Consider that article as reinforcement regarding the second of D.H. Lawrence’s propositions regarding art, as already stated above:

Art has two great functions. First, it provides an emotional experience. And then, if we have the courage of our own feelings, it becomes a mine of practical truth. We have had the feelings ad nauseam. But we’ve never dared dig the actual truth out of them, the truth that concerns us…

* More on the maybe-changes in culture being driven by video:

When technology shifts, it bends the culture. Once, long ago, culture revolved around the spoken word. The oral skills of memorization, recitation and rhetoric instilled in societies a reverence for the past, the ambiguous, the ornate and the subjective. Then, about 500 years ago, orality was overthrown by technology. Gutenberg’s invention of metallic movable type elevated writing into a central position in the culture. By the means of cheap and perfect copies, text became the engine of change and the foundation of stability. From printing came journalism, science and the mathematics of libraries and law. The distribution-and-display device that we call printing instilled in society a reverence for precision (of black ink on white paper), an appreciation for linear logic (in a sentence), a passion for objectivity (of printed fact) and an allegiance to authority (via authors), whose truth was as fixed and final as a book.

The passage indicates the questionable grandiosity in tone, but the thinking about what the pervasiveness of video says regarding society is still worthwhile.

* If you’ve read that, you much deserve a break, and Quid plura? offers one:

…and then, once in a while, you’re invited to yak it up at a writers’ event, and you retire to a pizza joint for a late night of unrepeatable stories with smart, funny people, and you begin to understand the value of your 300-page calling card beyond the reviews and royalty statements. Writers like to gripe and whine, but when it comes to this one benefit, don’t let authors tell you otherwise, not even my fellow recluses. The social aspect, unlike the process of writing itself, is even more fun than you think it will be.

* The publishing industry is of less interest to me than actual reading, but nonetheless this insightful bit from the New Yorker’s book blog is fascinating.

The mandatory end-of-year post

December 5, 2008 By in Books, Links, Reviews Tags: , , , , , , , , 1 Comment

In case you’re interested in pointless listmaking, the New York Times offers its 10 best books of 2008. Of them, I’ve read only Netherland, a novel I felt ambiguous about and still haven’t reread. Roberto Bolaño is on the list for 2666 and is highly praised by many good critics, but I didn’t like The Savage Detectives. The nonfiction side looks more worthwhile, especially given the books that delve into the unconstitutional, anti-democratic, and cruel things the United States is doing to people, but those things are already fairly well-known and the books seem more destined to be cited than read.

Last year, I expressed skepticism at the top 10 and 100 lists at the New York Times, and this year I’ll reiterate that (although I’ve read fewer books on the list this time). This year, I’ll link to a post from January 2008 that in turn linked to a number of my favorite (and much recommended) books. To that list I’ll add The Name of the Rose and The Time Paradox.

No novels published this year enraptured me; if you think I missed one that should, send an e-mail. Finally, if you’re going to read novels based on lists, you might try Modern Library’s Top 100 instead, although it has some clunkers (Appointment in Samarra at 22? Someone(s) must be sentimental for his (their?) youth).

Life: Innocence or lack thereof edition

December 2, 2008 By in Books, Critics Tags: , , , , , , , Leave a comment

“One should be no great admirer of innocence, in either narratives, individuals, or cultures. Where it’s genuine, after a certain age it’s unbecoming, off-putting, even freakish and dangerous. Where it’s false, it’s false. To admire it much is patronizing and sentimental; to aspire to it is self-defeating. Let us admire—in cultures, narratives, and people—not innocence, but experience and grace.”

—John Barth, The Friday Book.

(In case it is not already apparent, The Friday Book is highly recommended.)